I’m getting nowhere fast. Today was Halloween, of course, and not even I will claim that decorating the front porch and costuming myself as Severus Snape was my creative act for the day.
Category: Creativity
Creating something every day for 365 days
A little design (Day 91/365)
Today’s Masterworks, of course, but Ginny asked me also to design a t-shirt for the ladies she has assembled to work backstage at the beauty pageant coming up. Those of you who know Ginny may be wondering exactly why Ginny has assembled anyone to do anything with a beauty pageant, but let that pass. After November 11, invite us to dinner and you’ll get lots of fun stories.
Anyway, she wanted a tiara and the words Pageant Posse in script on the design. I did that and it was lovely, but I felt it needed something. So I added the words “Butt spray makes us stronger” on the bottom. Now it was perfect.
The client, however, rejected that design for the plainer version.
A weekend away (Days 88, 89, 90/365)
It’s Sunday evening, and I haven’t posted since Thursday. This is because Ginny and I went to a bed & breakfast in Marietta on Friday and have been incommunicato since then. This also means my creative output has been minimum, needless to say.
However, the weekend was not a total loss. On Saturday night, we went to the Center for Puppetry Arts to see The Ghastly Dreadfuls’ Compendium of Graveyard Tales and Other Curiosities, by Jon Ludwig and Jason von Hinezmeyer. This was partly because none of the theatres were playing anything I thought would interest us, and partly because I wanted to see what state-of-the-art puppetry looked like these days. In other words, I was looking for ideas to steal for William Blake.
Ha! (Day 87/365)
And again, I say, ha!
After how many days of essentially nothing, I have produced this [an mp3 of the first 20 measures which has been superseded by further development], the orchestration of the opening of 10. Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way. The mp3 is missing some of the subtlety of the original file, and Finale/GPO wouldn’t know a tenuto from its ass, so you’ll have to imagine some finesse here, but boy, this is good. It’s really good. It’s so good I’m afraid to go on.
[note, 11/4/06: this post has attracted beaucoups of spam comments, so I’ve turned comments off for it. If you have a comment, email it to me and I’ll post it for you.]
Nothing (Day 86/365)
Little progress (Day 85/365)
I forced myself to get started orchestrating the four big pieces. I had been dreading it because, as I’ve whined before, my nearly-four-year-old-laptop doesn’t have the power to handle even a small orchestra in Finale using Garritan Personal Orchestra.
I was right to dread it. For some reason, it couldn’t even burp out two horns, a cello, and a double bass plucking two notes. After getting not even four measures of Milky Way done, I gave up.
Which is not to say that I didn’t accomplish anything today. I redesigned a couple more pages of my website, which didn’t take any time of course. The pages that will take time are the ones that use formatting not already covered by my templated css stylesheet. I now have to actually tweak the css myself.
And a new feature of this column: I’ve decided to take paragraphs from Times articles about other places and substitute U.S. names and places in them. Where there are numbers, I’ll do like Juan Cole has done and extrapolate them to U.S. dimensions.
Today’s example, from “Bush, Facing Dissent on Iraq, Jettisons ‘Stay the Course'”:
Mr. Rumsfeld said Monday that the benchmarks under discussion included projections on when the U.S. might be able to take control of more of the country’s 50 states. Only five states are under full U.S. security administration, though officials say they hope the number will rise to sixteen or seventeen by the end of the year.
And they say the media doesn’t report the good news.
CSS results (Day 84/365)
Mondays are always slow, of course, but I did finally get my actual homepage redesigned in CSS and posted. It’s a patch, using a template from DreamWeaver that I’ve adapted, but it’s gotten me used to messing with CSS. Now I can re-do the other pages on the side.
The challenge will be the Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro page, which still uses frames and is icky.
A rant (Day 83/365)
Haven’t really done anything today, but I do have a rant to share.
I’m considering making a bumper sticker that looks like this:
Musings (Day 82/365)
In the white heat of work… or what passes for it… I find that my posts have been simply, “Look, here’s today’s results.” I haven’t been very interesting in my writing, I’m afraid.
It’s not there’s been no struggle in getting William Blake’s Inn orchestrated. There’s been plenty. But it’s nothing to write about. Choosing whether to use the trombone or not is not exactly an existential dilemma. (For the record, I prefer the double bass.)
However, I feel as if I’m at a place where I need to pause for a moment and look about, to see where I need to go next. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Cancer Ward that you had to beware the “final inch,” that point at which you’re nearly finished with a project and you begin dragging your feet in order not to finish it. There is something terrible about being done with a project, and most creative types relish the creative frenzy of starting a project than the tedium and finality of wrapping one up.
Not a lot (Day 81/365)
I didn’t create a lot today. I designed and started a spiffy display in the display case at school for the 100 Book Club, but nothing on William Blake or anything like that.
Since Grayson is home for fall break, we went to the Georgia Aquarium and then to eat at the Pleasant Peasant, so that’s where that time went.
The Georgia Aquarium is quite spectacular, although design-wise I much prefer the Tennessee Aquarium. Georgia’s big show, the whale shark tank, is huge, and I like the fact that you get multiple views of it, and that there are places to sit and just watch, something that Tennessee really could use for its biggie, the Gulf tank. Tennessee has more written material with each exhibit, but Georgia uses staffers (mostly volunteer) to answer questions and to engage the audience.
The main design issue with Georgia Aquarium is the great atrium. It really does look like a food court, and I don’t think the colorful facades of each attraction “pod” are going to age well. It’s also very loud.
Still, it’s worth the trip, because aquariums are always beautiful.