I actually did something creative today.
Yesterday, while surfing a couple of my new favorite productivity/creativity sites, I came across this: http://flickr.com/photos/gr/182329376/in/set-72157594188036656/
The implications are enormous, if you, like me, scatter icons across your desktop and occasionally lose track of what you need to do with them. Here was a pretty intuitive way to keep them all organized.
Sorry, dear conservative readers, but I probably am going to be ranting much of the rest of today.
You who know me know that I oppose(d) the war in Iraq as needless. We were lied to about its necessity and its rationale, and now we have an unholy mess on our hands in every imaginable way. Incredibly, we are still being lied to, which does not surprise me, of course. I am not easily shocked, if you will recall.
However, here’s a familiar photo that shocked me just now:
Don’t recognize it? Sure you do. You saw it over and over and over three years ago.
I love typefaces. I love typefaces. I get an email from this company, and I go all quivery with type-lust. I want to fire up InDesign and make a big poster just to use the font.
Screw Times Roman and Helvetica, and don’t even talk to me about Arial or Comic Sans. Bleagh.
Give me Cyan 
…
or P22 Cezanne 
…
or High Society 
…
or Young Finesse 
…
or Leaf 
or…
You get the picture. When I was in high school, my girl friend actually gave me an ITC catalog for my birthday. It’s that bad.
So it was with great anticipation that for Christmas last year I gave myself a daily calligraphy calendar. Its premise was that every weekend it would give you a new typeface, and then the week would be spent lettering words that were grouped thematically. What fun, eh wot?
I should have been tipped off when the description on the back of the box simpered, “See if you can guess the theme for the week!” The typefaces were not very exciting, some of them required a brush and ink, not the kind of thing one wants to deal with in the bathroom first thing every morning, and some of them contained egregious errors, e.g., their attempt at an uncial font had a majuscule A and H rather than minuscule. (And you thought I couldn’t get worse.)
Not only that, but after six weeks, the typefaces repeated! What a rip-off! So I lost interest mid-February and have only desultorily pulled the looseleaf pages since then.
I was mildly curious this weekend, gazing on the umpteenth repeat of a swash style, as to what the theme would be this week, especially for today, the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. And it was therefore with slackjawed stupefaction this morning that I pulled the weekend’s page and saw today’s word: Airplane.
I am not easily shocked, as most of you know, but that was a weird way to begin the morning. The rest of the week had words like propeller, pilot, that kind of thing, but damn, people, did no one think? I would hate to be their email editor this morning.
I may have to go buy ArDeco 
or Chato Band 
just to get the bad taste out of my mouth.
Go here:
http://blueskystudio.typepad.com/blueskystudio/2006/08/remember_this.html
Take a side trip to the “this” link. Then come back and work your way back through the little series of his non-brush exploration. Very cool.
In many ways I’m jealous of all these artists who are doing the “thing-a-day” thing, because they can scan/photo their results and post them, and then they have pretty colors in their blog. Even if I get something done, it’s all incomprehensible black-and-white marks.
Oh well, I’m off to work , and hopefully finish, sketching out the rest of “Milky Way.” With any luck, we’ll have more incomprehensible black-and-white marks to look at today.
Noon: So close, so close, so close!! I got the rat grumbling, and I have the final stanza sketched out, but the counter-rhythms are all messed up. I want it to be more open, more relaxed than the nervous little figures at the beginning of the journey, but I can’t make them fit. And I’m hungry, so I’m outta here.
5:15ish: Well, after a nice lunch and a visit to Anne Powell for her birthday, that didn’t take long at all to fix. It wasn’t necessarily the rhythms, but the key. It’s all done but the sweeping coda. This is a very strange feeling, to know that by the end of Tuesday night, I’ll be finished with the main composition of A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. (Marc would want to know that I just typed End instead of Inn.)
I traveled to Flowery Branch High School this morning, very early this morning, to teach James Wagoner’s cast of Pride & Prejudice some country dances and the waltz. Great fun, although it made for a tiring day. I haven’t had time today to create a thing myself, just passed along some knowledge.
But I did come across a couple of websites that I really like and want to share. They’re both about using notebooks as repositories for organization and creativity.
They are Moleskinerie and Notebookism. Classy names, eh wot?
I didn’t really do a lot today. I planned out a period dance workshop for this Saturday and created the handout and CD for it.
My friend James Wagoner, GHP teacher, is directing Pride and Prejudice this fall and asked me to come up and teach his cast some English country dance to use in the ball scenes. So I am.
You may not know this about me, but historical social dance is one of my specialties. In college (UGA, 1972-76), I was president and chief researcher of the UGA Period Dance Group, a performing group based in the theatre department. We performed social dances from Shakespeare’s time to the 1940s, and we had a blast. We’d stage them in the round, with audience seated all the way around the space as if they too were attendees at our balls. We had dances, songs, gossip, flirting, just a riproaring time.
You can see it all at http://perioddance.org.
Every summer, at GHP, I teach a weekly seminar on period dance. I start with the waltz, then English country dance, then ragtime dances like the foxtrot and tango, and then we have a grand ball. It is loads of fun. One year I shall have to get pictures.
I guess Sunday’s editorial inspired me. There’s more:
So what possessed
the Georgia Legislature to suggest
this thing? A hoped-for triumph over time,
this place, this culture, or some other kind
of booster shit? I rather think the latter,
but even this cannot explain the sadder,
nagging feeling creeping up as we
zoom through the landscape. Inescapably,
we’re free in ways that go beyond the fact
that we are on vacation, overpacked
for condos, beaches, meals in brasseries,
regenerative sex. It’s more than these
that sets us on a road that’s so much more
than this deserted High Tech Corridor.
You would think that I would have accomplished something on today, the 10% marker, but I didn’t really. I took a stab at adding another line or two to the poem:
What? The image, the idea won’t
clear itself, resolve: these orchards don’t
have anything to do with how we live
in any area but this. I give
my head a little shake. So what possessed
the Georgia Legislature to suggest
this thing? A hoped-for triumph over time,
this place, this culture, or some other kind
of booster shit? I rather think the latter.
But I think that hardly counts. (The next line will probably end with matter, of course.)
In the meantime, I explored some sites that have the same impulse as I, only a little more focused and a lot more successful:
Some are more successful than others, of course. Some are quite nice.
Today I just played with music files I already had, switching from Finale’s internal orchestral sounds to the Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds. Takes up lots more memory, but in general provides better sound. However, parts of “Milky Way” sounded very clunky with strings. Further experimentation with articulation is called for.