Fall Projects / Internet Presence

So far, I've been using this blog as a platform to share things that interest me, but I have been thinking that this is not the best use of the blog format. Or, rather, that there are more efficient tools that I can use for this purpose: Google Reader, Facebook, etc.

The question is, what is a blog good for? I have a bit of a horror of using this format to talk about myself, or about my feelings - I got that out of my system with my geocities page in high school. Still, this form lends itself to the personal and the informal more easily than anything else.

With these things in mind, I have decided to use this blog to write about my projects. Here are the things that I am working on now, or planning to begin:

1. Music - my solo project. Four songs are currently in the works, and I'll post recordings as soon as I feel confident that I won't embarrass myself! This project is all electronic so far (except for vocals), using Ableton Live and Reason. The music that I've performed or otherwise put out into the world has been made collaboratively, so writing songs by myself is very new and challenging.

2. More music - Listing. In January of this year, my brother Joe and our friend Jonathan and I decided to try to write and record 10 new songs in about 3 weeks. We thought that this was an ambitious, if not impossible, task. After weeks shut away in the studio, we walked away with 9 songs. I call that success. However, some of the songs are more finished than others, so there is talk of reconvening this winter to augment and polish the collection. Hopefully we'll have something ready to release out into the wild in early 2010.

3. Writing - the electricity project. I started writing a piece in the spring about the BENT festival (a gathering of circuit-benders and hackers who, generally speaking, make music with their creations). Its becoming a monster, and now I imagine a sprawling piece about DIY culture, the physics of sound, electricity, and the human body. It might turn out to be a series of essays on these topics.

4. Writing - a Twitter project. Why did I start a Twitter account? It's like Facebook status updates, except that hardly anyone I know uses Twitter, while everyone uses Facebook. I've been trying to think of *something* interesting to do there. So, I'm going to try an experiment: a Twitter diary. Here are the rules: I must update every day. I must use exactly 140 characters. I must try to represent what I have actually done that day, and I have to be honest. I must try to make each entry beautiful.

5. More writing - NaNoWriMo! November is National Novel Writing Month. Every year I try, every year I fail. This time, it will be different.

6. Audio project - Soundwalk. This weekend, I'm producing an audio walking tour of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for a class I'm taking. It's an assignment, but I'm kind of falling in love with the idea of using sound to transform our experience of a place...so depending on how this actually turns out, I may try to continue producing these things.

& Other Stuff - Other preoccupations that are probably in the future: making music videos for Listing songs, short fiction projects, and possibly trying to write something in graphic novel form.