This morning a question popped into my mind. And then I realised that to write it down would result in one of those tedious Summers’ blogs. But I don’t think in this way concerning shortening presentations at times. These long, or even longer, blogs are my journal equivalents. If the sum readership is just the one person, that being myself, then that in itself is an important result. At least one ticket has been sold for this particular long winding and windy journey.
The question.
‘What to do to realise the ongoing recording and finalising Frail Autumn’s songs for this and next year? And what can be considered as inclusions of other art forms to bring to the project in order to create synergy?’.
Overall. It is about enjoying life. Focusing on the whole concept. Therapy found within applying oneself to a variety of the arts is something worth truly considering for expansion from the start of next week. One of those ‘Spider with Bubble Feet’ type diagrams plans that have the central theme, ‘Cloud 9 in the VeeDub Bus’, in the middle within a large cloud shaped bubble and then surrounding ideas borne from leggy lines shooting outwards and ending with attached various sized smaller cloud bubbles to write in to support the central idea. The surrounding cloud bubbles? The more important the idea, it can be coloured in different hues. Representing ‘Must be done soon’, ‘Important to do but can wait’ and ‘If it does get done, then great, but don’t bust a gut to get there’. Cute. I shall call it the Squished Spider Cloud diagram. Little singular drawings of a winged angel sitting on a cloud once each idea is achieved.
How many different designs/formats of a Data Visualisation Project Management Chart (DVPMC) can there be! I bet no Squished Spider Cloud DVPMC exists. So hopefully a unique chart brings new and exciting unique ideas into the world.
A lot of focus and time alone can be put into the singular uptake of isolating the music for capture and presentation. But then a sharing of different artistic mediums can provide a wonderful exploration of whether they can all marry together to create a synergy that feels comfortable to present to others. The blogs would hopefully then bring Worldwide vibrancy too. This vibrancy and avoiding the suffocation of a single songwriting project can exist in use of various formats. The collective art mediums can go across each others’ cultural borders and interact. Dynamics in holistic synergy can be interesting.
Is it important to find project guidance from some logical source? Yes.
And then I remembered, as said in the last blog, a charity shop find. A book called ‘MY DREAM MAP. An Interactive Companion to Put Your Dream to the Test’ by John C Maxwell.
However. The truth is, that having done this type of exercise many times in different formats, I am usually useless at following planned guidance like this. But it may be essential in reality in order to understand the correct way of continuing and to make the right choices this time. I’m getting older, tired of life’s fight to achieve in earnest and can lose my focus often nowadays. Sometimes it would be nice to have days to weeks to months of switching the brain off. Just letting the hours wash over you by adopting simplicity. Bake a cake, read a book, sit in quiet thought and simply breathe. But life isn’t like that in Summersville. Even a beverage choice, like tea, has to have more options than truly necessary.
There always has to be the ‘Central Essential Dream’. Always in life the need to hunt ‘the reason why I exist’ meaning down. Which, over the last few years, is to continue to record the songs I’ve been writing. But how and where? Is the dream to be only that one/singular chosen endeavour? Record a bunch of songs naively and upload them? In this flash moment of writing down ‘blog/journal thoughts’? No, not really’.
On the periphery are the other art forms that can enhance the presentation of the music to an outside world. I can’t afford to pay skilled others to do various contributions themselves concerning artistry and other formats. Artists, penmanship, promotional writers, video makers, technical issues of uploading to Bandcamp, YouTube, etc. or other platforms. So there has been, and still will be so many considerations to learn, as they materialise, over the months on months.
How do you achieve decent quality visual YouTube presentations? How do you effectively set up song/music platforms like Bandcamp, SoundCloud, etc.? How do you allow people to listen to the songs in different ways with quality considerations concerning download MP3 format, CD or cassette tape hard copy, share lyrics to be read? Offer a produced song sound quality that doesn’t embarrass you. Simply questioning, once again, the questions you have already made peace with the answers to.
Then? You just laugh and say to yourself ‘Get a grip’. Going out to record in the ‘open air’ in the Welsh countryside during both days and nights is a beautiful gift. Simply? Just point the iPad camera towards the view I, and others with me, witness. Or the view of myself and others in and around the VeeDub that the viewers look at and get to see the source of musical noise. Those are the two choices.
Yes. These are easy choices. Getting in touch with the simplicity of presenting aspects that a beautiful view of what nature offers exists out there. Or inwards to Summers’ VeeDub Bus world.
Using the VeeDub Bus is an essential central focal point. This determines promotional choice. Why? Who doesn’t love the vibe of found serenity in a camper van with full on enjoyed calm activity resulting in a comfortable experience. And found in such a possible claustrophobic space. Simple living and back to basics. Using the base of four wheels on a lump of metal, with a considered internal and external aesthetic carefully thought out artistically. A visual sculpture of harmonious inclusions that gives others their own purpose to do similar. Get out in the open air and open a thermos flask or grab a few items out of your car, bicycle panniers or hiking back pack, put a kettle on a bottled gas source, brew a coffee or dip a tea bag and look at the vast expanse of ‘World Out There’. A simply achieved result that produces a synergy of perceived creative calm. An artistically edited presentation setting of videos presented to how others want to feel of what it is like to eat, read, listen, witness and find calm in those captures of moments of being outdoors in a beautiful place. I am lucky enough to have the VeeDub and some guitars. A perceived Hippy-ville life vibe and its simplicity.
Yes! I have seen many YouTube recorded uploads regarding those people who have found that ‘arriving at the perfect time of life’ spot. The parking up and grabbing the sunshine offerings, witnessing the rain or snow tumbling down and finding comfort and safety in a warm shelter. This is escaping the daily grind. Weather matters little. You still cook a well deserved meal on a couple of Calor gas rings or out on the log bonfire embers and show careful consideration in food preparation. The result brings a hearty meal. Simply sitting with food on the plate, looking out at the view……a perfect result. When I watch these videos, they are gifts. They become my YouTube Nirvana. Often screened activities in verbal silence. The soundtrack of the surrounding nature of wind, rain, river dabble or rush; cooking utensils and food being tapped, clacked, poured, eaten with pleasurable sighs and usually with an accompanying bottle of red wine; or a log fire, made from collected surrounding wood, crackling out and showering fiery dancing red ash sprites into the nighttime air. This is calculated filming and is for the viewer to dream that they themselves could be able to do the same. To realise the sound of this simple life in its presentation on the video. Also. They usually start off filming with the camera looking out the windscreen and capturing the journey to Nirvana. From a busy town type scenario and onwards to a forest, a lakeside, riverside or a beach. Psychological manipulation probably. ‘Look what we are doing. Escaping the busy chaos to find new adventures in Nature’s Wonderland’.
Simply turning up at the local beach, riverside, lakeshore over the various weather presented months? This determines the camera points outwards. And then to activities inwards. Who doesn’t love witnessing a Christmas snowfall whilst cooking a meal and listening to seasonal music.
Okay. My own project of simply recording my songs, chatting to others and just capturing where it happens may still be a bit ambitious weird. But I do smile and admire these YouTubers who give others the visual possibilities of an exciting dream of how to escape the status quo of day to day stress. They have to actually consider deeply how to make a film that presents with calm vibes.
My initial idea in reality was to simply record songs and get them onto a music platform or two. And also get a tactile reality result so that friends and family get to own a CD or DVD. But I was considering the time I first arrived here in Wales 30 years ago. I met many new people and many new exciting personalities. After a few conversations came the statements that started surrounding possibilities of my contribution to society. Offering me involvement in community inclusions. Even the VeeDub Bus was often visited by others when they knew I had rocked up at some local beauty spot. Kettle on, biccies or cake on a plate and chilling out.
So my simple idea re: music took on an ‘ethos’ expansion.
‘Ethos. The characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community as manifested in its attitudes and aspirations’.
What did my new found community here in Wales say in those Halcyon Days?
‘Oh! You played in a band. Do you fancy joining, playing, singing with….?. Can you play guitar for the day hospital patients, do some Christmas carols, do a drum workshop…….?
My answers then? ‘Yes of course’. Answers now? Being truthful and accepting realities? I am exhausted and just want to sit, and enjoy an easy option of pottering about. Enjoy the opportunity of achieving music for myself, and recording it for selfish prosperity.
Life, in community, has been like this over the last 30 years of living here.
‘Oh! Photography. Do you fancy doing an exhibition, can you show how to do a darkroom print, run a small demonstration class at the Youth Club, local art centre, ….?’
‘Oh! Your writing is nice. Can you do some wedding invitations, have you considered writing and framing poems and selling them. I have a shop you could supply……’.
‘Oh! Nice use of making Driftwood, with Flotsam and Jetsam beach finds into art. Can you make me a picture, a mirror, a garden bench. Do a workshop presentation.……’.
‘Oh! You make pottery. Can you supply my shop, do a local craft event, make a cat/dog/sheep figure for a birthday present,……..?’
‘Oh! You can use Sign Language. Can you do a local class, can you teach it at the local college……..?’
‘You are making lotions and potions with essential oils; you’re studying aromatherapy. Do you know anything that can help with this, or this? Can you bring some basic oils and give a chat to the group in the such and such centre….?’
Even Angie says. ‘We’re growing too many herbs for our own use, I’ll take some to work for the staff’. She, in owning her shop, still has high community interactions.
And so life went. And then eventually ‘went’ away since retirement four and a bit years ago. Introvert nature dictates isolation from vibrancy in community.
When involved with others, I did actually do most of those things. And very, very willingly to be honest. But kept it all at arm’s length in avoiding long term commitment. Jack of all trades, master of none is my contribution to a life lived. And it has suddenly hit me. To begin thinking that it would be great for the Frail Autumn project to include small additions of some of these past excursions. A culmination of life’s dabbling’s.
A CD requires an arty cover. A filmed video DVD does too. Also, visually, videos of some songs could use Sign Language with signed lyrics included. Johnny Depp and Natalie Portman signed in Paul McCartney’s video for his song ‘My Valentine’. I once taught sign language to a hard of hearing girl, the daughter of one of my nurse colleagues, who wanted her poetry to be presented using Sign Language for her project with the National Deaf Children’s’ Society’. She was amazingly adept and unique at describing her deafness with amazing pieces of poetry. Also, she became pretty awesome in her sign language skills in filmed presentations too. So it does make you inspired to do similar again.
My skills in all these endeavours were, and are, variable. Some of the arts I really lacked confidence in and others I felt were okay. Although it would still be nice to do some ‘naive’, but be brave in giving it a go. Various arty stuff again. Tread softly, be humble and create an ambience of presentations to contribute to the Frail Autumn project. And the DREAM MAP journal may help focus.
Anything to keep me on my toes.
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Gray Summers 