Creative endeavours, pretentious and otherwise.

blissed · 26-10-06 11:13:17

max wrote:

but Richard looks more like Burlesque but without the smoke, maybe your psychic lines got intermingled.

It just occurred to me this morning. Burlesque, you look like a porn king, get your Mojo back quick!!

.

Burlesque · 26-10-06 11:14:43

blissed wrote:

max wrote:
Richard looks more like Burlesque but without the smoke, maybe your psychic lines got intermingled.
Ahh so it's actually Richard that squints when he's in the throws of ecstasy.
I'm glad we've got that sorted out.
.

I'm glad too. Now I can finally come out of the closet and admit that I'm really the butch guy with the shaved head in Blissed's other drawing. No ear-ring, though. That wouldn't be butch enough for butch old me.

Burlesque.

Last edited by Burlesque (27-10-06 21:57:21)

The_West_Wind · 26-10-06 12:38:01

C'mon Nowaysis,

Get that thinking cap on and put something in the writing thread.
It's looking pretty bare with just my submission.

Burlesque · 26-10-06 13:01:02

Nowaysis appears to be a tad miffed at present, but no doubt he shall be back soon and post in your thread, West Wind.

Now, how about you, Elf? After that lovely poem for Max's birthday (a momentous occasion which should of course be turned into a global holiday) it is clear that you do a spot of quality writing ... so why don't you get some of dat quenya rhymin' down and post it in the "Write-off" thread, huh?

Burlesque.

Nowaysis · 26-10-06 13:54:17

TWW: Done and done. Unfortunately, my boundless genius knows one eternal foe -- sleep. I saw your thread for the first time this morning, but didn't have time to dig up anything post worthy (or to read your piece). Now that Im done with todays tasks though, I've dutifully indulged you, and anyone else who'll care to listen to my tales of pain and woe.

Burlesque: Why, whatever do you mean?

blissed · 27-10-06 02:37:47

Hey Burlesque you've been deleting posts again

http://www.jlara.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Novelist.html

Mind, so have I.

http://www.jlara.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/wine.html

.

Last edited by blissed (27-10-06 03:01:28)

Burlesque · 27-10-06 09:59:43

You're lying, Blissed! You don't drink wine.

Burlesque.

dyslexius · 27-10-06 19:06:27

Journeyfan wrote:

...Sorry Dyslexius, the above comment is not meant to be reflective of your music not being the "right choice", as I too have yet to find a suitable time to listen without interruption...

Not at all, dude. I'm yet another bloke looking for a suitable time (or maybe more correctly, "mood") to read some of the literary postings on another thread by TWW.

--dyslexius.

dyslexius · 27-10-06 19:11:44

bodyhead wrote:

Sorry, just caught up with this. That's an extraordinary sound, and your voice reminds me of the broadcaster Peter Gzowski (a friend gave me a couple of tapes of his remembrance programme).

I actually do radio (not my career -- I produce a weekly program on a college station, and occasionally host it). What you heard was not the radio voice because, on that Tibetan Prayer Cymbal thing you heard, I was not much above a whisper (I set the gains for the cymbals, and because my head was so close to the mic, I had to be careful to avoid overdrive). Peter Gzowski appears to have been quite the beloved character on CBC.

--dyslexius

Burlesque · 27-10-06 21:59:21

Well, Dyslexius, some of us quote dusty old hacks, but you know real, fresh literature when you see it!

Burlesque.

dyslexius · 28-10-06 00:59:57

Burlesque, who had just listened to my music, wrote:

And here's Brutally Honest Burlesque with today's review (don't worry, Dyslexius, after the first blow from the sledgehammer you won't feel a thing)...
Torrid Bloom: Interesting, but you must forgive me for saying that it sounds a little unfinished, sent before its time; it should probably be seen in performance...Apricot Pit: Now this is more like it! The A-B-A structure of the thing really works, making it sound (if you'll pardon the comparison) like the Abstract Pure Electronics equivalent to heavy metal. In my always non-humble opinion the best piece of the bunch...Soft is Not Like Hard: Good, solid atmosphere. The whole thing has an unsettling, atonal quality to it that I like (unsettling is good). Could probably use some work, but I like it...Hard Won: This is fun. It took a long time for me to start enjoying freeform jazz, and I still have to be in the right mood to appreciate it, but this is good, bawdy entertainment, no doubt there...The Outsider: This piece gives the impression of a fragmented, disjointed narrative, so I can understand the comments you've had about composing for films. "The Outsider" is very varied and often surprising, so I found myself wondering what would happen next - one of the marks of good storytelling.
That wasn't too bad, was it? I could have just said that it was all great, but what would have been the point? (I could also just have shut up, but that is not in my nature.)...
Burlesque.

Hey Burlesque, I'm tempted to a tedious digression explaining why I think honesty and brutality are mutually exclusive, but I guess it'll be better to just gab a bit about why I put myself through the pain of making music, or, at least, what it was like to make those five pieces I put up before the forum, every one of which you took the trouble to listen to and comment on.

But first, I'd again like to thank you for launching this thread, and as it's grown to over eighty postings, I've come to know you to be witty and congenial and as the kind of person who, through humorous banter, well-placed phrases, and just plain ol' thoughtfulness, "normalizes" a discussion-thread. And every time I read one of your reactions* to someone's submission -- particularly the literary ones over at that other "creativity" thread, The Official IFM write-off (MkII) -- I wonder how you cultivated such a broad and deep understanding, and I further wonder what creative writing of your own you may have hidden in some closet.

About subjecting myself to pain in order to compose music: I love having composed music, but not composing music. The composition process for a few of my pieces -- and Torrid Bloom is one of them -- was a monumental struggle. Torrid Bloom was not a commission, I was not asked to write it. The inspiration to write it began at a party organized by a gregarious and erudite friend of mine, who, early on, before we all plateaued-out on a more or less tipsy state, suggested we play the game of Exquisite Corpse. Before that, he revealed his excitement about a book he'd just discovered ("...the first book written by a computer"**) by reading from its preface:

"At all events my own essays and dissertations about love
and its endless pain and perpetual pleasure will be
known and understood by all of you who read this and
talk or sing or chant about it to your worried friends
or nervous enemies. Love is the question and the subject
of this essay. We will commence with a question: does
steak love lettuce? This question is implacably
hard and inevitably difficult to answer. Here is
a question: does an electron love a proton,
or does it love a neutron? Here is a question: does
a man love a woman, or to be specific and to be
precise, "does Bill love Diane?" The interesting
and critical response to this question is: no! He
is obsessed and infatuated with her. He is loony
and crazy about her. That is not the love
of steak and lettuce, of electron and proton and
neutron. This dissertation will show that the
love of a man and woman is not the love of
steak and lettuce. Love is interesting to me
and fascinating to you but it is painful to
Bill and Diane. That is love!"

I was enthralled (and I was still sober). I borrowed the book and learnt that I'm totally bonkers for non-sequitur and I began a quest to use nonsense verse in my musical compositions. Text from this book then appeared in three of my pieces, Torrid Bloom being the first of them, and then, later, "Soft is Not Like Hard." The musical motive for Torrid Bloom was a twelve tone row that I love and which I treated like a tune, rather than as a pitch set to be operated on rigorously via set matrixes, etc. I didn't even know, back then, what value my tune had as a "pitch-set" -- I just went ahead trying to maintain my overall formal structure (which was dictated by my arrangement of text fragments I extracted from the book**), and went looking for harmony and counterpoint, and bent this pitch and that pitch to suit my sense of what sounded good, all the while trying to leave the set intact as much as possible. Being an autodidact, this was mostly trial-and-error and I spent a couple months struggling with these little pitches and rhythms, loving and hating and loving this piece until I finally declared it "finished."

Happily I can say that my struggle making Torrid Bloom did not diminish my enthusiasm for using non-sequitur in my music. Another piece where my struggle was equally monumental (actually, considerably more so), was a purely instrumental piece, "Quintet for Winds," which was played by five orchestral musicians. In general, any piece that involved traditional composing technique (precise specification of every event via a written notations, and resulting in a printable "score"), was a painful struggle for me. Those pieces, however, are usually the ones I'm personally most proud of and which give me the most pleasure and pride of accomplishment.

"Soft is Not Like Hard" is a kind of anomaly. It has a score, but it's a graphic score. So at performance time, the small events we hear and which make up what we traditionally think of as the atoms of music are chosen by the performers. The composer lays out larger parameters that define phrasing, density, entries, exits, instrumentation, etc. So the recording you heard is like no other performance of "Soft is Not Like Hard". This was the first time my ensemble ever performed that piece and all subsequent performances were very different.

In contrast to the above, Apricot Pit rolled off my pen, so to speak, as if a walk in the park. I didn't have any pre-compositional notion, I was experimenting with some new sounds. Everything I do, however, must have some kind of shape -- it must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It must convey the sense that it is coming from somewhere and going somewhere. Apricot Pit satisfied me in that way, so I decided not to delete the files!

There's not much I'd like to say about Hard Won in terms of composition, because it's not. Or maybe it's instantaneous composition, as some improvisers like to call it. It was freely improvised by two people who were just spewing their lifetimes of musical guts. I love the CD album that resulted.

The Outsider is very important to me. Technically it was not a struggle to create, but it was emotionally difficult to face. I know I thought of it as autobiographical at the time of composition, but those thoughts were abstract and more toward the subconscious, and were offset by the intellectual effort and focus on making the piece. Most significantly, it didn't occur to me I'd ever have to face that fact. But when it appeared finished on my desk, I experienced it in a new way and began to struggle with whether I could ever accommodate a creation of mine as having characterized my life, or at least my life up to some earlier, nodal point (I'm all better now!).

So, hmmm, talk about autobiography -- I wonder how many people have withstood my ramble to this point! If you have, Burlesque, you'll know that your review was valuable to me personally. It's not totally new to me that my own opinion may not match the view of another listener, but you had the advantage of not knowing me -- that insulation of the internet, I guess. I get a kick out of the fact you pick as favourite the piece that simply "rolled off my pen like a walk in the park." Just goes to show, there's no accounting for taste. But seriously, your comment inspires me to consider making more pieces like Apricot Pit, and the analogy to heavy metal fits too, because when it comes to listening to pop music forms, metal is my preferred pint-o-brew.

Burlesque wrote:

...You are probably well aware that your music isn't something one absorbs just by listening to it once (which is what I have done), but I have tried to convey my immediate impression. You are a man of talent, and some of your stuff is very good, so I strongly suggest you keep doing what you're doing!

Yes, I agree that my stuff will never be elevator-music and it invites concentrated listening (iow, I'm glad that there's enough muck in some of my music to allow for new discoveries during repeated listening). As for continuing the quest: you betcha -- my life depends on it.

* I had just misspelt reactions as "rections", and the main hint my spell-checker suggested was "erections," which led me to ponder how clever it would be to read an erection.

** Chamberlain, William., and RACTER (1984) The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed New York: Warner Books ISBN 0-446-38051-2

--dyslexius

dyslexius · 28-10-06 01:16:56

Burlesque wrote:

Well, Dyslexius, some of us quote dusty old hacks, but you know real, fresh literature when you see it!

Ha ha! Trick-or-treat! Look again...

--dyslexius (real fresh literature)

Burlesque · 28-10-06 01:38:11

That's what I just told you, Dyslexius: you used a dusty old hack for your signature, and now you've got some nice, fresh literature instead.

Thanks for all the nice things you said about me, especially since they're all true. I am the most wonderful person I know. That's tragic, when you think about it.

I laughed when I saw that "Apricot Pit" was the piece that was the easiest for you to create, since that was the last thing I would have expected, but I suppose that's what's called epiphany - sometimes the circumstances are just right, and the work just flows without any struggle. I won't pretend to understand all the musical phraseology you use, but it is obvious that you are very serious, insightful and intellectually clear about your creative process, and that's something I admire greatly when it's combined with the emotion that must of course be the central factor in a work of art.

The autobiographical aspect of "The Outsider" ties in well with my impression of it as being very narrative in structure, so I guess I wasn't all wrong about it then. Your work is fascinating and original, so please do post more of it!

Burlesque.

P.S. It may or may not be that honesty and brutality are mutually exclusive, but it is often the case that people perceive honesty as brutality when it is directed at themselves. D.S.

Last edited by Burlesque (28-10-06 11:57:29)

Dynamo · 29-10-06 12:26:47

Hmm. I could have sworn I posted a comment to this thread last night but maybe I was wrong. Either that or I did something bad again and its been removed.

Cheers. Dynamo.

The_Elfman · 29-10-06 14:26:26

Dynamo wrote:

Hmm. I could have sworn I posted a comment to this thread last night but maybe I was wrong. Either that or I did something bad again and its been removed.
Cheers. Dynamo.

You posted one on the "Write Off" thread Dynamo. Is that it?

Dynamo · 29-10-06 19:21:35

The_Elfman wrote:

You posted one on the "Write Off" thread Dynamo. Is that it?

Oh. Thats where it went. Serves meself right for posting when I'm drunk I guess. lol. Sorry about that. I guess I got a bit much on me (tiny) mind at the mo.

Cheers. Dynamo.

Cate · 30-10-06 05:54:39

The_West_Wind wrote:

Cate: I used to work for a Bookbinder. Its an ok job as long as you dont stuff up regularly.

I don't really have the skill to do it proffesionaly. I only bind my own artist books which are usually very short due to time constraints. The largest edition I've done yet is of three.

It's great seeing how many creativly minded people there are here. Does porn influence creativity or creativity create a need for porn. Somehow I'm doubting it.

Nowaysis · 30-10-06 09:18:21

Cate wrote:

The_West_Wind wrote:
Cate: I used to work for a Bookbinder. Its an ok job as long as you dont stuff up regularly.
I don't really have the skill to do it proffesionaly. I only bind my own artist books which are usually very short due to time constraints. The largest edition I've done yet is of three.
It's great seeing how many creativly minded people there are here. Does porn influence creativity or creativity create a need for porn. Somehow I'm doubting it.

You're probably right in your doubt, but perhaps a creative disposition and the ability to appreciate a slightly more cerebral form of porn, not unlike appreciating "difficult" films, go hand in hand.

That's not to say people who aren't creative are less intelligent, or that they can't appreciate "clever" porn and difficult films, just that people who are creative tend to appreciate creative work themselves.

Burlesque · 30-10-06 10:52:44

Cate wrote:

The_West_Wind wrote:
Cate: I used to work for a Bookbinder. Its an ok job as long as you dont stuff up regularly.
I don't really have the skill to do it proffesionaly. I only bind my own artist books which are usually very short due to time constraints. The largest edition I've done yet is of three.
It's great seeing how many creativly minded people there are here. Does porn influence creativity or creativity create a need for porn. Somehow I'm doubting it.

Perhaps really creative people often find that they don't have time for actual sex? Or perhaps they channel their sexuality into creativity? (That last thought has been around as long as sex, or at least as long as creativity.)

Burlesque.

dyslexius · 01-11-06 08:27:02

Speaking about "creative" contributions from Feelettes, since de-lurking I can't recall a single post by Lia (whose every post is a language of formal power and humour, and based on her stunning lucubrations, is truly the real deal -- that language is her language).

I must admit one of the reasons it took me so long to delurk was my fear Lia would utter something so summarily brilliant I'd shrivel up in fear and self-loathing of my own inadequacy, henceforth to be relegated to cowering in some dark corner in the back.

Her movies are also of the same whole cloth, and, come to think of it, her videos and posts are way-creative, what sense does it make to expect anything more?

Okay, never mind...

--dyslexius

Lia · 06-11-06 10:21:39

dyslexius wrote:

Speaking about "creative" contributions from Feelettes, since de-lurking I can't recall a single post by Lia (whose every post is a language of formal power and humour, and based on her stunning lucubrations, is truly the real deal -- that language is her language).
I must admit one of the reasons it took me so long to delurk was my fear Lia would utter something so summarily brilliant I'd shrivel up in fear and self-loathing of my own inadequacy, henceforth to be relegated to cowering in some dark corner in the back.
Her movies are also of the same whole cloth, and, come to think of it, her videos and posts are way-creative, what sense does it make to expect anything more?
Okay, never mind...
--dyslexius

Aww, danke; you make me blush like a wee giggling lass, you do. I always said I wanted to create Lynchian or Dadaist porn; I'm delighted in apparently being successful.

But honestly, I'm actually a linguistic bigot - that is, whilst some people become anal and pathological and completely obsessive-compulsive about cleanliness, or the alphabeticisation of their McGyver videos, I'm an utter language Nazi, friend only to the laws of syntax and the taxonomy of grammar. Typos make me twitch and spelling errors fill me with bile thick enough to submerge Linda Blair. That being said, fear not of shriveling and self-loathing in the shadow of my polysyllabic wrath - my brain appears to have gone into hybernation and I haven't come out with anything remotely brilliant in years (and I'm cunningly going to link the problem to another thread and blame it on my smoking, and its intrinsic link to my wanking ), and you seem more than capable of mustering up your own adequate share of wit.

Burlesque · 06-11-06 10:29:49

What you're really trying to say, Lia, is that you're just the girl next door, give or take a major eccentricity or two.

Burlesque.

Lia · 06-11-06 11:13:44

Yes, that's exactly what I am. Nail on the head, I say. I'm a wholesome, healthy apple pie of a young lass whose just watched too much House.

Burlesque · 06-11-06 19:52:49

... and down the drain you went.

Burlesque.

annoula · 04-01-07 00:19:15

I wish i could write
I wish i could sing
I wish i could dive
I wish i could dream.

I can make things with my hands.

With driftwood and metal that get lit with candles,
With beads and wire that get worn by women,
With pencils and paint that get hang on my walls.

I can also make things with my mind, that then get built in reality and people live in them.

#76 26-10-06 11:13:17

Re: Creative endeavours, pretentious and otherwise.

#77 26-10-06 11:14:43

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#78 26-10-06 12:38:01

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#79 26-10-06 13:01:02

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#80 26-10-06 13:54:17

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#81 27-10-06 02:37:47

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#82 27-10-06 09:59:43

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#83 27-10-06 19:06:27

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#84 27-10-06 19:11:44

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#85 27-10-06 21:59:21

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#86 28-10-06 00:59:57

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#87 28-10-06 01:16:56

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#88 28-10-06 01:38:11

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#89 29-10-06 12:26:47

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#90 29-10-06 14:26:26

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#91 29-10-06 19:21:35

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#92 30-10-06 05:54:39

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#93 30-10-06 09:18:21

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#94 30-10-06 10:52:44

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#95 01-11-06 08:27:02

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#96 06-11-06 10:21:39

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#97 06-11-06 10:29:49

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