My tweets of the last week:
Archives for 2012
What I Tweeted, 2012-04-15 Edition
My tweets of the last week:
Fiction in a Flash at SmokeLong
A piece of Flash Fiction from some of my talented colleagues debuted yesterday on SmokeLong, a weekly and quarterly Flash Fiction anthology.
Stephen Gardner’s The Booking of La Gianconda is a noir-ish snapshot from a 1936 jail-house that could easily fit into the fictional universe of Chicago. It’s accompanied by an illustration by Throwaway Horse founding partner Josh Levitas.
Here’s about 5% of the the total tale:“Hey, Glass Eye,” Walters called over to me as I fiddled with the Kodak slide film. At the name, I gritted my teeth hard enough to chip an incisor. Walters never let me forget the war wound. Like I said I’m a camera guy when I’m not riding a bucket and a mop, not even a cop.
Flash Fiction doesn’t have a formal definition, but it’s about brevity and efficiency. SmokeLong’s limit is 1,000 words. While other outlets have much shorter word-count requirements, the common element is that good FF should consist of lithe, streamlined language that puts every word to good use.
I asked Josh if his accompanying flash illustration included any self-imposed restrictions: his finished picture was done in a single sitting with limited tweaks or digital post-production – all completed in less than an hour! It’s worth viewing the larger version at SmokeLong to see some detail that’s lost at the smaller size.
Kudos to Stephen and Josh for being featured, and for their evocative 1,000 words and single-hour image!
#MusicMonday: “Gravel” – Ani DiFranco
Ani DiFranco’s “Gravel” burst from my iPod headphones as I left the house this morning and transported me back to another place and time in my life.
It was 1997, and I was a new Ani DiFranco fan. After borrowing her tapes from my friends Andrea and Nava (yes: TAPES) I snapped up two of her remarkable trio of perfect LPs, Out of Range and Dilate, and waited with bated breath for April 22nd. That was when her new, live, double-CD Living in Clip would be released.
Living in Clip contained a bevy of older songs that were new to me, but one that no one had ever heard before outside of concerts: “Gravel.” It was the third track.
(This live performance is from slightly after the LiC version, but still pretty close in feel.)
While I loved the entire double-CD, it was “Gravel” that I played again and again in wonder. This was long before YouTube and prior to Ani’s major media breakthrough with Little Plastic Castle, so I had never seen a video of her playing guitar. I was already fascinated by the sound of her songs like “Out of Range” and “Shameless.”
How did she make those sounds? I had plenty of friends who played guitar, but none of them made the sounds that came out of “Gravel.” The guitar hopped and skipped, and sometimes barked. How did she do it?
(I would learn her rapid guitar attack emerged from five Nailene brand nails duct-taped to her fingers.)
I played that record into the ground in 1997 – played it so much that both my mother and I had it memorized from front to back. We saw Ani together for the first time that summer, sitting in the rafters of The Mann Music Center, watching her open for Bob Dylan.
“Gravel” also had a more immediate effect. Less than six weeks after I first heard it I begged my mother to buy me an acoustic guitar. I think she was surprised by my sudden vehemence – while I certainly asked for things, they were usually music or books. I didn’t frequently beg for anything, aside from the ability to get online – and I quickly became a whiz at that.
She relented and bought me a guitar. Who knows what she thought I would do with it, but the night we brought it home I learned to play “Dilate” from a guitar tab (a what?), and started to slowly decipher the tab for “Gravel.” By the end of the summer I could play the song all the way through.
That’s where “Gravel” took my brain this morning – fifteen years ago, almost to the week. Half my life – a half completely changed because of my fascination with this single, amazing song.
Thank you, Mr. DiFranco.
tilting at sandcastles
It can be so easy to set aside our own creativity to play in someone else’s sandbox.
You know what I mean. You’re doing it right now! You could be creating something of your own, something that’s been stuck inside your brain for seconds or years, but you are reading my words. You could be creating your own blog, but instead you are consuming someone else’s and forming opinions about it. Substitute any noun for “blog” – song, picture, novel, food.
(For the record, I’m happy that you are reading my blog. Please do it again sometime.)
The act of consumption is a falsely comforting sensation. It makes your time feel full. Maybe you even go beyond consumption, and create within someone else’s space. You leave a comment or write a review. It feels good to attach yourself to an already-established world of creativity. It’s a world that already has structure, character, mythology, and fans. There are people to interact with who care what you have to say. There are ready-made topics to discuss, spires to be built out of grains of sand.
It’s addictive, but is it memorable? What kind of memory does consuming and discussing other peoples’ songs or characters or story-telling or film-editing create?
Is it a good use of your time?
I remember when I loved to use time any way that I could. I’d burn the clock far into the night. I’d make a list of my 100 favorite songs, each meticulously graded across multiple criteria, and update it every day. That’s how I learned to use Excel! I’d write chapters upon chapters of a novel based on someone else’s video game world. People read it!
Ten or fifteen years on, I don’t have those files anymore. Not because I lost them. Because I didn’t care to keep them. They were sandcastles with beautiful, meticulous parapets, but I let them erode away. Hours or days I spent on something that wasn’t meant to last – that was never really mine to begin with.
Now I covet my time. I schedule every second of it, pitting priorities against each other to see what might yield a greater return. It’s no mistake I have recently spent four nights a week rehearsing music, and another one or two meeting with friends and business partners. We’re not meeting in some stranger’s sandbox. We’re meeting together, in a sandbox we share.
I love it. I love that life, but it can be taxing to create so often. Sometimes I fall back on old habits. Sometimes I’d rather spend my time in a universe that already exists, reading stories or discussing movies or covering songs.
It’s not a terrible thing. There has to be a balance. I’m not saying we should never consume or share our opinions about art. What a dull world that would be, deprived of other peoples’ creativity and connections! I’d never turn that down entirely. After all, I need something to crush on.
But, I need to tell you what I’m crushing on, too. I need to be inspired by it and create my own work for other people to crush on, so that they, too, can create art and memories – not from consuming it, but from being inspired by it.
As we head into the second quarter of this year, this gift of time before us, I hope for you and for myself that we spend our time wisely – that we spend it building memories out of something more lasting than sand.