The Mid-November Total Life Assessment

This fall has been all about the big questions for me. Who do I want to be? What do I want to accomplish? What kind of life do I want to have?

I make a lot of lists. By default I tend to rebel against any method of organization, strategy, or planning, but my mom is a list-maker and when I was young she used to make me write out to-do lists. When I was an adolescent I thought that was a perfectly stupid way to spend my time. After all, I know what I need to do, or want to do, so why waste the time and the paper writing it down? But still, any time I found myself overwhelmed with all of the projects I had taken on - dramachoirmediaworkschoolcrosscountryandsoforth - Mom would sit me down and say let's make a list. Eventually, I had to admit that it felt good to cross off completed items. A few years ago I began listing on my own steam.

I can make lists of my goals, of places I want to go and things I want to do, but right now it doesn't seem to be making things clearer. I think that this is because the goals are really simple, and they don't need to be elaborated or broken down into tasks. Life is short, and I want to enjoy mine. I want to see as much of the world as I can see, and I want to make beautiful things.




My Twitter diary is up and running. I started it November 1, but I accidentally erased the first post. I'm not going to worry about it, though. So far, I have managed to be very disciplined and post every day, usually right before I go to sleep. The most interesting challenge so far - other than trying to hit exactly 140 characters - is negotiating the public nature of Twitter with the desire to document things that I don't necessarily want the entire world to know. One of the goals of this project is to create a document that will help me remember what has been important to me, and when things actually happen. So I've been playing with different ways to code information that I want to remember, but don't want to make public. It's a fun game.

I'm letting NaNoWriMo go this year (again). I was slammed with schoolwork and social obligations at the beginning of the month, and now I'm far too behind to catch up. I'm not beating myself up about it, because I've been pretty happy with some of the other writing projects I've been working on. Yesterday, I submitted a few things to 12th Street, the New School's literary journal. I think that my subject matter might be just a little too strange for 12th Street, but we'll see. My submission last year was rejected, so I'm not terribly optimistic about it. That's okay, though, it just means that there's another home out there somewhere for my stuff.

The soundwalk project I mentioned a while ago has been graded and peer-reviewed, and I was surprised at the positive feedback I received. Maybe my dreams for the project were too ambitious...but the responses made me reconsider abandoning the project. Maybe I will return to it for my final project, and try to make the audio walking tour of my dreams!

I haven't been working on music much. Tried to attack a lyric problem, but my head's not really in songwriting mode lately. BUT, I have been coordinating with Joe and Jonny to finish the Listing album, and we've blocked off studio time in January. The new Close-Far studio is going to be gorgeous. Jonathan lost his old studio space this summer, and at the time it seemed like a tragedy, but now I think that it may have been a stroke of luck. The new place is in a former radio station, so it's already set up for sound, and I think it'll seem a lot more legit to his potential clients. I am also looking forward to recording in a space that is not a basement. I mean, I have fond memories of basements, but last January I spent the better part of the month in the dark, embracing a space heater, and shivering.

The electricity essay is coming along. I wrote a chunk about circuits and hacking, and my professor compared me to Jacques Cousteau. I hardly have to tell you how happy that made me.

The Open Source Outbreak

Wrote some stuff, made some plans.

Here's what I accomplished this week:

The Soundwalk - I'm not exited about the finished product. Voice-over work is hard! I think I'll set this ambition aside and focus on the other bazillion things I want to do.

Wrote a new chunk of the electricity piece. This bit's about hardware hacking and battery licking.

Started the Twitter diary today.

Will start NaNoWriMo tonight, after I do some studying for tomorrow's midterm. Don't ask me what the novel is going to be about. I have no idea. But you know, the last few years I spent a lot of time thinking about stories, and what do I have to show for it? Not much. So maybe winging it will work out better for me.

Didn't have time to work on music, but I did buy my plane tickets to go to Missouri for a month this winter, so I expect to do some intensive music making during that trip if we can wrangle some studio time.

And of course, the most important thing: I put together a great Halloween costume!

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.

Repurpose

Documentary on a community of Montreal hardware hackers, by Jack Oatmon.

Sometimes I make noises.

Composition  by  Meg Kramer

This is a piece I put together recently for an audio documentary class. It's made of several field recordings, which I looped and edited with Ableton Live and Reason. I recorded some of the source material myself, and some of it was recorded by my classmates. It's the sound of our lives in the city, with rhythm found and emphasized.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe

Carl Sagan -'A Glorious Dawn' ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed), by Colorpulse.