I’m starting to write again haha.
Like, not to think deeply about what I want to write, or how I’m going to write, or who I’m going to write to, but simply to get words out on “paper”, to feel the sense of my thoughts being forced to align into the placement of characters in sequence, to turn the landscape of the inner mind into the banal form, the written word. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to be honest, but the idea of just sitting down and writing aimlessly for a few hours honestly seemed like a good time. I haven’t taken the time to sit down and stew in my own bullshit in recent times, and I have the urge to do just that.
I’m not sure what it was about the last few months. Maybe it was the surgery, maybe it was the age, maybe it was talking to Eleanor about poetry and literature, even only a handful of times. What was it that got me thinking about poetry? You know, now that I’m writing this out now, I’m actually totally forgetting what initialized that drive to learn what it meant to use language as a tool for artistic expression. I do recall that the first book I purchased on this subject was something about the poets associated with the Black Mountain College. Some of the bigger names in the anthology actually ended up being incredibly boring to read, like that one guy who arranged colors into squares and superimposed them on/within one another. It was the people I had never heard of who really drew me in. Now I’m reading (hallucinating, really) The Dream Songs.
On the subject of color, I guess I really do disagree with folks such as Rasmus A. and Chris B. (mentioned due to recency of posting) fixating on “getting color right” in a digital context. Not everyone owns a beautiful monitor. Color doesn’t meaningfully exist as a formalized artistic-theoretic object when represented on a computer. Have you seen the people accessing the internet through a Thinkpad? On a cracked iPhone screen in the daylight? The sun always seems to grant clarity. At one time in my life, I spent half a day mulling over 14 shades of white to apply to a plastic handle of an OXO product. I carried my arrangement of white plastic tiles around the studio space. I witnessed them in the afternoon sunshine filtering through soda glass windows. I witnessed them in a musty closet. I witnessed them in a narrow hallway cluttered with cardboard, illuminated by an array of fluorescent light bars. Here, I truly learned a lesson about light. I think about the 14 plastic tiles often when I think about the futility of a color-presence shown on-screen. A screen can never meaningfully convey that feeling of beholding an empty HDPE container in a beam of light.
Color is just one of those ineffable things, color changes over time because our eyes physically degrade, become clouded. Autistically going out of one’s way to represent perfect color gamuts on a computer screen isn’t a necessary act of design, it’s a waste of time. Good design is considering the sun. The computer screen won’t capture this green so dark as to be black, but knowingly green regardless. A green so green and simultaneously so black, I know it’s a green even when I’m turned away, even when I’m 2000 miles away. The sentiment I’m trying to grasp for here is the only conception of color I care to address in a serious manner these days. Thinking about color in this way should be relegated to holy objects, things like physical tools or garments, things you arrange around yourself and hold onto for long stretches of your life.
An interface is like water. You pour it into a vessel and it’s consumed. It returns to the earth eventually. It might end up as rain elsewhere, fulfilling a cycle.
Earlier today, I was prompted to talk a little about my musical work. I don’t have much to say on the subject of music production other than “I’m sketching haha” and “oh yeah I’m thinking about threshold music ovens” and “Yeah, you know wind chimes? Thinking about those too” and so on.
Tomorrow a 72” x 24” maple butcher block will be arriving on the doorstep/foyer of 85 Quay Street. This object will be the foundational physical element of my new workspace being erected on the second floor. I’m pretty excited about it, but also wondering what might make for a good set of legs. Adjustable? Wheels? Kneeling? What should go on the desk? A screen? (ugh) An ergonomic keyboard, or a beautiful keyboard? A trackpad, or a vertical mouse? I inevitably get back to thinking about health again, the intertwining concerns of health and beauty, what it means to construct a thing that promotes health, and again I think about the sun.
I took a little time on the walk back home to record some additional thoughts on what I believe to be a compelling (or at the very least, interesting) conception of a new kind of instrument: An instrument that stores inputs over long scales of time, cooks inputs (so to speak), and bakes (so to speak) a unit of musical production, a song, a chord, a verse, etc. When the rough verbal sketch of the instrument was complete, I began to take stock of my surroundings, I listed them off to the recording device I had on the entire time, and I realized I was walking in front of a bar I visited along with an old design team 6 years ago or so.
In the next few days, I’ll be publishing a small scene report that traces over the more memorable moments of a “Tlon Off-site” we scheduled for all of last week. It will be called LA Offsite: Scene Report or something along these lines. I’m sincerely hoping I can capture the feeling of being in a city where I felt as though every moment, I was losing a little more of my sanity.