I am Writing a Blog now… I guess

I’ve been wanting to give this a shot for a while now, but I’ve had this recurring fear of having nothing to say. Arguably, I feel like for a writer, sometimes just saying whatever might be better than saying nothing at all, even if sloppy, or terrible. So I guess I’m giving it a try.

Some of my friends who are also graduate students at NYU also write, (I mean, I guess mostly everyone writes… we’re doing research after all, right? ; bunch of papers, and other things. A handful of them do blogs). So originally, the plan was to try and publish some of my academic, and (somewhat) more polished philosophical, jargon-filled, meanderings that read as if an art historian was high, drunk or both.

But really I just want something here for now.

I picked up a book from the library the other day: Drifts by Kate Zambreno.

It’s like… a memoir, some meditations on the process of writing said book, and intimate prose that I’ve never experienced before. And, I guess the whole theme of the book is to try and document certain moments where their brain meanders or what they do with their day; I’m telling ya it’s weird but, I haven’t seen anything capture the feeling of being a creative quite like this book does. This somewhat loose collection of thoughts becomes a complete work that is the book.

It got me thinking about how I would attempt to write my own thoughts, and… well, here I am!

My writing is not nice prose or anything like it; I think it’s not any good. Yet, in the last few weeks when I had one of the Profs. at NYU read some of my writing she seemed to enjoy it, and even want more of me to show through it, so, despite the fear of not having anything to say I want to see what I can come up with. Not necessarilly about my work per se, but just anything.

But even more so, part of why I’m doing this is… I’ve been wanting to go into teaching. In a desperate attempt to leave the “Starving Artist” behind and like many others, try to get a tenure job at a small school somewhere, or… something like that.

During my undergrad at Berklee I despised the thought of becoming a teacher (partly because I felt like that meant I had to teach K-6 classes or something), but I taught some of my friends a handful of things about Digital Audio and software which, I’m glad I was able to do. They both thought I was good at it, teaching… I dismissed it.

But, for some reason, now I’m wanting to share (the few) things I know about music, audio, art, or whatever the fuck it is that I do with people. Though I’ve been very Very hesitant about being an artist, a professional artist at that, and I’d feel weird getting a teaching job and roping others into facing my same fate. “scared about being a starving artist, or even just an artist”.

I might need to give a small talk about my work for that composer’s residency i’m participating next year and I want to gather some thoughts, because, sure… I could just deliver some random monologue about the work, talk about process in a very very stupid way (“I did this, and then I did that”) but, that’s not really offering anything of value… personally… because hell, I find with these things it is so SO easy to be generic, and break down process into a series of steps, something that reminds me of all those random courses you get ads for every so often.

“Become an artist in 10 Easy Steps!” “Learn to write a piece of music from Scratch!”

type of thing, when really

I think execution is such a tiny component of being an artist.

Don’t get me wrong, preocupations with execution are fully valid, I even get caught up in them sometimes. But what’s truly interesting in process is… inisght. Or, decision making. Research…

I don’t know what to call it, but all these little things that lead up to execution are most interesting to me. And I feel like that’s what I truly want to talk about if asked. I guess even when I am not asked. I am doing it Right Now!