whoisnick.com

Wrote an interesting little piece in creative class the other day. It was a moment when you hear the characters voice crisply, and it’s more dictation. Especially this, which was an odd mix of slang. Wasn’t sure what I was writing until I looked it over again.

My brother, has recently agreed to work as DOP for a friend who is madly working to put the pieces together and direct a cinematic musical.

Galen is a charismatic individual, which is key for directors, and has decided to share the process online with his blog, Sheer Force of Will. Unlike Zach Braff, who did the Garden State Blog, Galen intends to show from conception, where by the time Braff started, the soundtrack for his film was already on pre-sale with amazon.com.

It will be an interesting experiment to watch. I’m expecting to at least read one post that comprises of one may to words like “Tiered” or “Must sleep”. Maybe another will be simple and show the trepidation and doubt like “what have i done?” or “this is all crap”.

Good luck to him and my brother in their venture. Let’s hold tight, and read how it goes.

Like my previous project, Nick is a poet, I’m starting a new sub-blog called Nick Reviews. This blog is designed soley for my opinions on Movies. I do watch a lot of them, and might have a few words to say about them.

It all came about with a writing exercise for my creative class. We were given the task to write a review. I enjoyed the process, plus I also enjoy giving an opinion without spoiling the movie. There is no need to give the plot away. There are so many other things you can review a movie besides the plot. Acting motivations, cinematography ( if anything cool ), and general feeling.

The whole idea is to improve and tweak my writing style, plus to learn more about the industry. I hope you pop by and take a look.

http://www.whoisnick.com/reviews/

Still on the topic of right tools. Another aspect of having the right tools, is to make sure that they are updated. This isn’t to say that you need the newest and coolest. Sometimes the opposite is true. If I stuck with only the newest Piano’s then I couldn’t experience the full richness of an old wood piano.

When I started learning the piano, I could care less about the condition or feel of the keys. I didn’t know any better. The right tool was anything that had the ability to play a one octave scale. But as I got better and learned ( some might say refined ), soon I needed to make sure that I always had 88 keys. I found that if I closed my eyes and couldn’t feel the weight or kickback, It would seem dead to me. No longer was a cheap little Casio going to work. I needed to revise.

For writing, I’ve been finding the more I do it, the more hardcore I get. I don’t want bells and whistles. I don’t want fancy formatting. I don’t want auto correct. WIth the recommendation of my Teach, I’ve even completely turned off all squiggly lines. Its refreshing. Its feeing. My program of choice ( I’m typing in it right now ) is TextEdit. A simple rich text editor on the Mac. Nothing fancy, completely simple. I didn’t even expect I would ever type in it.

I didn’t just wake up one morning and automatically know. Finding tools needs to be an ongoing process of experimentation. Get used to saying “It’s new, I gotta try it”. I like my tools today, but I’m open to the possibility that they might not be my tools tomorrow. Perhaps I might try a classic typewriter. Or maybe I need a keyboard that clicks like a typewriter. Maybe there is another kind of Pen I like. Or maybe a type of paper. If it sticks I’ll try some more. If not, I’ll put it in the pile with the others and solidify my tools today. But I’ll always keep reviewing and revising and asking “Does it still keel right”.

For any job one must do, you need to have the right tools to do it. For Piano players it evident, that if there is no piano, they can’t play. For writers, no pen and paper, no typewriter, no computer, there won’t be a story.

I’ve been working on this for a little for myself. Asking, what tools do I need to be creative. What tools do I need that would help. And although on the surface to those who don’t write, or those who don’t play piano, these would be accurate statements. Any pen and any keyboard should do. But as I continue to write, and continue to play piano I’m finding that there is more to that.

When I write, it’s not just any pen or any paper that would do. I need a flavor mini pen with an orange grip and a Moleskine small lined notebook.

When I play the piano, I can no longer use just a simple Casio keyboard I got from radio shack, I need to have weight in the keys from either a high quality electronic piano, or even more preferably a baby grand.

Being creative incorporates all your experiences and all your senses. So it makes sense that you need to incorporate them all in your creative tools. They must smell right, feel right, sound right, look right, and taste right ( perhaps for chef’s or maybe you need to chew the right kind of gum ).

So if you are looking for your right tools, don’t just look for something that will “do”. Look for something that inspires.

My previous post triggered something. I remembered of all the other poems I’ve written. Some I’ve shared in this blog and others I’ve kept quiet. But the thing it triggered the most was how much I enjoyed poetry. I would write it constantly and endlessly. Maybe it was my adolescence, like the poems of Carmina Burana. But simply, it might have actually been the fact that I’m a poet.

And so I started a sub-project called Nick is a poet. It’s a blog like this, and uses wordpress ( I got to use dreamhosts one button installer, it was pretty cool ). The idea is to get to a poem a day. But I don’t want to push it too much off the bat. If I happen to get a poem out a week, or maybe every other week that would keep me happy.

Now, in my own internal process and re-emergence to things I used to enjoy, what have you given up? How many things did we absolutely love doing as children and yet now we put them aside. Some liked gymnastics, others might have enjoyed the simple act of laying in a field and one by one pulling the grass. I say go back to that. Ask yourself what made you stop? Was it the someone put you down and said you sucked at it? Was it just other priorities? Find out why? Perhaps the thing that we were meant to be, the life or career we should be doing, was the same thing we did when we were 4.

I don’t post enough poetry. Last night we had an exercise in class called, ode to spring, and here is the poem that came from it.

A landscape of white desert
Nothing but howling of the wind
being torn by sleeping claws of trees
Each wooden stump a tombstone
engraved “2005 A devoted Mother”
But in this time of rest and death
the sun conspires with
the moon, the sky and stars
And with wiccan like chants
and native tribal dance
they splatter the ground with
a concoction of love
so powerful to wake the infinite slumber
And slowly from faded calling
she claws through the soil
With sweat and ache
her joints pop and muscles shake
Finally she peaks just one finger
above the ground
Above her white grave
And on the fingers tip a bud of pink.

Garr over at Presentation Zen has a great article on the Lessons Jazz can give everyday life. These lessons might come from the music world but can be used in any situation where 2 people are connecting.

1. “The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.” (Duke-Ellington)
2. “Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can’t be taught.” (Paul-Desmond)
3. “Don’t bullshit… just play.” (Wynton-Marsalis)
4. “If they act too hip, you know they can’t play shit!” (Louis-Armstrong)
5. “Master your instrument. Master the music. And then forget all that bullshit and just play.” (Charlie-Parker)
6. “It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.” (Dizzy-Gillespie)
7. “You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.” (John-Coltrane)
8. “When people believe in boundaries, they become part of them.” (Don Cherry)
9. “Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.” (Charles Mingus)
10. “I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain’t music…” (Billie-Holiday)
11. “A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.” (Herbie-Hancock)

I have the pleasure of working with an insightful and talented woman. Darylynn Rank entered my life in a weekend of coincidences where I met a man who went to the same high-school as I did, and graduated the same year I started. We never met until about a year ago. This might have been not so strange except for the fact that we were at his creative camp in Caltus Lake BC, and went to high-school in Guelph ON on the other side of the county. Darylynn was a workshop presenter for “finding your creative voice”.

Since then the course title has changed, however I have be privately working with Dari for some time. She is an exquisite navigator of the tides of experience, and is helping me find my own boat and ore to sail mine.

Now to the point….

For those of you living in BC; are willing to travel to Langara College; and have a desire to get through writers block or simply need to find the creative power to start hitting the keyboard, she is open to share her insight with you. Check out langara.bc.ca for her course Discovering The Writer Within.

Could be the sleep deprivation. Could be the crazy gene waking up. Who knows. I decided to modernize an old poem about unlikely poets.

I’m A Poet
I don’t know it
My Feet show it
They’re Longfellows
And they smell like the Dickens.

….Boyd!