Millennial Ambivalence: Deadlines

I’m someone who needs deadlines, and who for that reason finds the moment itself painful and anti-climactic. I feel acutely the truism that, “You don’t finish a project, you abandon it.” This month has been tremendously fruitful in expanding the reach of this work-in-progress into areas that have become important to me since the last bout of productivity, but at the cost of the work itself being almost uniformly undercooked. This is what Blog Month has always been about: imposing deadlines as a change of pace and M.O. I would like to have done better justice to the issues, but some justice now is better than never. This is the give and take that all creative and intellectual laborers face, whoever it is that they work for and in what capacity. Here, however, there is a socially constructed notion of maturity which I am willing to accept: as we age and our portfolios grow, there is less and less need merely to announce our presence and what we’re all about, and there is an ever greater need to hit the proverbial nail on the head with whatever our next product is to be. I wonder if seeing this issue through the lens of age, and by extension of generations, does not go a ways toward explaining so many conflicts between artworks as capturing essential ideas and artworks as contingent results of a process. The process currently on display here is for me a necessary kick in the pants, but it risks becoming just that with each passing year, so much so that I have started to view blogging more as rough drafting for more formal productions which take the time needed to reach their essential form. Let’s all look forward to that, but without holding our breath.

Scrabble Shop (possibly the first or last in a series)

Just like music, what started as an activity became an obsession.

When I first started playing Scrabble online, I set the racks to display vowels first, consonants second. As a newb this seemed more logical and easier to process than the "alphagram" (alphabetical) order that is more common among tournament players and study materials. Pretty soon I found that a vowel-centered approach also helped me organize and remember words more effectively, so nowadays the vowels are my "stems" and I make comprehensive lists based on them. Above is the second of three cards containing A+I+I and five consonants. Below in rack order:

I found full rote memorization just took too long considering the number of words, so now I make a pass at decoding the rack orders once a day for two or three days in a row. This has greatly accelerated the pace with only a small sacrifice in long-term retention.

Studying this way means setting one's sights high, indeed quite a bit higher than anything I've been able to accomplish in a rated tournament. In this system, MINYANIM takes equal priority to INCASING, which is rather illogical considering one is far less likely than the other to present itself in an actual game. Even some top players don't bother with the very most unlikely words for this reason and are no worse for wear. I have allowed my word knowledge to outpace my strategy rather absurdly at this point, a bit like a soulless technician with no musicality. As Mumford would have it, perhaps owing to the sea of subjectivity that artists are set adrift in, I find it therapeutic to play the technical busy-beaver in my "spare" time, even if the circuitous path I'm taking toward lexical completism has not necessarily bore fruit in tournament play just yet.

The final placeholder of the decade? Or the first of the next?

I have done three posts worth of blog work today, but nothing is quite ready to serve just yet. This is one consequence of using other writers as prompts rather than digging deep for shareable content with a personal perspective. This outcome was unthinkable when I started blogging, so thoroughly had the academic pressure cooker alienated me from books, reading, and learning itself. It seemed odd that almost all music bloggers were more interested in writing about books. Now that I’m one of them, this invites the positing of a maturation or developmental process whereby the ability to focus long enough to read a book emerges only in one’s thirties. I reject this notion, in my case at least, via a claim of self-awareness. When I eat poorly, sleep poorly, and utterly exhaust myself, I feel exactly like I did as an adolescent, and I have the same ability to focus as I had then (basically none). It is one of my great regrets that I waited too long to take my first break from school.

Stand-in for a Placeholder

In a moment of hubris which has become a yearly tradition, a certain white male blogger with pretensions to blog every day for a month recently spat out this gem of a sentiment:

...for a field of endeavor so often and so loudly criticized for representing, literally or figuratively, the interests of male aristocrats and colonists, it is today difficult to locate which upper class privileges, exactly, are being enjoyed by any but the most conventionally successful artists

That none of the many Facebook comments I've managed to elicit so far this month have yet seized on the discussion(s) which an investigation of this claim might open up has been a disappointment, but only a mild one. That's because if pressed I might just unleash a tidal wave of angry white male angst about how my once-a-day project was, inevitably, interrupted by a distinctively underprivileged day, a day which stretched straight from 6am to midnight, a day which involved 7.5 hours of my life being pissed away standing around in front of a gate, a day which incorporated a round trip between LA and San Bernardino, and a day during which I literally had not one spare moment to get up even a generic placeholder post, as I have occasionally done in past years under similar circumstances. Admittedly, it also was a day where, in the final judgment, my work likely will have been more furthered than hindered, perhaps significantly so depending on myriad remaining unknowns. And so when I'm told that every day as a straight white male is a day of privilege, I'm inclined to take the sentiment at face value; when I am told the same thing about being an artist, though, I simply have to chuckle under my breath.

And so, as I write this again having awoken at 5am and again having caught only a fractional quantity of my customary afternoon naptime, I suspect I am by now carrying what the sleep doctor calls "crushing" sleep debt, aka living in "the twilight zone." Under such circumstances I fear posting as much as not posting; but here it is anyway for what it's worth, which is probably not much. Yes, I have a roof over my head; no, I am not particularly privileged at the moment; yes, I could have majored in biochemistry and now be depriving myself of sleep for a more noble, or at least lucrative, cause; and no, I don't have anything more elaborate or well-thought-out to say about all of this, at least not at the moment. For that, I regret to report you'll likely have to catch me on weekends and holidays while contenting yourself with thinner gruel during the week. G'night then.

BM4 Placeholder/"Is anybody actually reading this?" open thread #1

For the musicians reading:

What is your relationship with scores?

Does seeing the score tend to enhance or detract from your enjoyment of the piece in question?

What do you learn from score study that you cannot achieve by listening to recordings or live performances?

How well could you grasp your own scores if they were not yours and you could not hear them played?

How many scores that you have studied or just skimmed of your most favorite pieces would be dismissed sound unheard by most any present-day grant, admissions or programming committee because of the notation, formatting, and/or engraving?

To jump start discussion, I'll share my answer to the last one: "Most, if not all."