Opinions are like arseholes

This week I have once again been writing aplenty. Things are proceeding well, this blog may become utterly redundant as a result of this productivity. But I promised myself I'd write a blog every week to update myself as to how I was going, and thus I am writing this anyway. I am aware of just how insane that sounds, but it is nevertheless the truth.

I have also spent this week trying very hard to stop having conversations with myself as well. Mostly because I have become so unselfconscious these days that I am doing it in public now. For as long as I can remember I have argued with myself, out loud, as a very useful method of working things through in my head and help with decision making processes, creative ideas and any other aspect of being a human being you can think of. Generally in the privacy of my own home, or while out on the moors with the dog, and utterly alone. I am fully aware that the people engaged in these arguments are aspects of my own personality, and I am not hearing voices or anything as odd or untoward as that, it's just a thing I do, it helps me, and it works. However, as I am now doing it while walking through town, and sat in the open plan office I work in, it is now making me look even more like a drunken tramp than I already do. This cannot be a good thing, however, in my attempts to stop myself I have unfortunately made it worse by shouting “shutupshutupshutup” at myself every time I catch me doing it. Really trying to stop now, as this really looks crazy. Buggrit, millenium hand and shrimp. Anyhow, none of this is relevant to what I was actually going to write about today.

While pondering my blog from last week where I proved that nobody creates anything good any more, I remembered some things. I remembered various times where I have been scathingly critical of music, films and books that I have consumed, and received incredibly emotional responses from fans of them. I am pretty sure that I am emotionally detached enough from things I have had no hand at all in creating, that you can confidently say to me “I think AC/DC are shit, and I have no idea why anyone in their right mind would enjoy their inane screaming” and I would shrug and assume you were entitled to that opinion. I may attempt to engage you in a conversation as to why I personally think that powerage is one of the most sublime pieces of vinyl I have ever listened to, but I would not start raving at you as if you had just punched my mother in the face.

I have received rebuttals like this for my occasional observations of other people's music tastes, and would genuinely like to find out what moves others to identify so strongly with a thing that someone else made. In a similar vein, football supporters appear to have the same problem, does my lack of emotional attachment to things that I have no hand in or influence over make me some kind of sociopath? Possibly. Probably. Oh well.

Equally, saying art you don't like is not art, is not helpful. If someone calls it art, it is. If I draw a smiley face on the back of a stamp and say it is worth 10 million pounds, it is not immediately worth that, but it has been declared as art. If someone is gullible enough to give me 10 million pounds for it, then it's actually much better art than I immediately thought. This may be by the by, and is a point that many people online are never going to concede. I also think that rothko is awful, Martin Creed is a pillock, and that guy who did the slashed canvas (Lucio Fontana, I have google) was a cretin. However, all of them have done pretty well, so somebody is wrong here. It is clearly me.

The web does not help with these problems, as if somebody says “This is a shit thing, I can't see why anyone would like it” they are immediately pulled up for not saying “in my opinion” despite the fact that all art is subjective, there are no facts, and thus anything anybody says about it is de facto their opinion. My personal favourite rebuttal was when I claimed that all music that hadn't been written by me was utterly shite and unlistenable. There were some very entertaining responses, I am entitled to this opinion, although I only held it for about an hour, then I went back to listening to the Russian Futurists, and wishing I could write something that good. Everyone is entitled to hold any opinion they like, and everyone is also entitled to call people up on their opinions as being basically bollocks. But if you genuinely believe that nobody can like a certain thing just because you yourself hate it, then there is actually something wrong with you.

 Just in case you are about to call me up on any of this, all of this is obviously just my opinion. :)

Why no great art is produced anymore (a possible explanation)

Apologies for the lateness of this blog post. The reasons for this are simple, in my spare time at home, I have been writing my book, I have made great progress (by my own meagre standards) and thus, writing a blog post about procrastination would be slightly disingenuous. I am writing this having just finished Chapter 2 (I know, in the 6 weeks since I have been writing this blog about writing a book, I have written very little of the book, and therein lies the very point of the blog) and felt I deserved a little break from the creative process, to write something with less point, and a little more ramble.

I am currently sat in my lovely summer house, which has been bathed in sunlight and heat for the last week (and which I have not had time to use for the purposes of writing in any of that time) feeling distinctly cold, and glad of the heat of my laptop preventing me from freezing. That sentence served no purpose at all, sorry, I just wanted to tell somebody, most of the free time for writing I have squeezed in over the last week or so has been indoors, in front of the fire, trying to ignore the television. Which is rather more to my point.

I got to thinking to myself about why it is that I find it so hard to get time to write, when plenty of other authors from the past had full time jobs and numerous other commitments, and they had no trouble at all fitting it in. And I decided to blame television. Well, not just television, also books, the internet, movies and any other mass media you care to think of.

Way back in the dim and distant past, the story tellers could make an honest living travelling from village to village telling tales of heroes and villains, and good versus evil to wide eyed children and adults round the fire in the night times, as few could read, and for those who could, books were pretty hard to come by. Caxton changed that quite nicely with the printing press, but even then, only the educated and wealthy could get hold of a gripping adventure to read to themselves, and I suspect that they told the storied within to the uneducated around them, leaving a huge amount of time for everybody to be utterly bored in.

As this is where the urge to create and make wonderful things comes from, boredom. Faced with huge swathes of time with nothing to do, people will turn to making stuff up, stories, songs, drawing pictures etc. etc. I am fairly sure that had I not been bored out of my mind one afternoon when I was a young lad, I would not have picked up my Dad's guitar and decided to learn how to play it. And me and my friend Tom would not have then started writing terrible songs, and we wouldn't have started a band, and I might have had a proper career and not still been dicking about with guitars 30 years later, but that's beside the point a bit.

Back in the days of Shakespeare et al, the poor and uneducated would probably get out to see a couple of plays a week if they were lucky, by the 19th century similarly most entertainment would still be from the theatre (I'm including the Music Hall, Opera, ballet and Vaudeville in that) though there would now be books and a reader in most homes, and a piano in the corner for a jolly old sing song in the evening. Still a great amount of time to sit around being bored, and thus possibly inspired to make stuff (and not just the poor and uneducated, even the rich are mostly sitting around not being entertained, even more so, as they aren't having to go down mines and up chimneys for 27 hours a day to earn a living). Cue swathes of poets filled with opium creating marvellous strange worlds for all of us. Then came the movies, radio and Television. All marvellous technological innovations (which more than likely did for the revenues previously enjoyed by actors, musicians, and even the printers printing the books).

Even when I was a kid, the TV didn't come on til late, and it turned off relatively early, even when I was a teenager, all you got after 1 in the morning was pages from ceefax. And a great deal of the output on the 4 channels we had by then, would not have been anything you wanted to watch. A shelf full of video tapes was the answer to that particular problem, but again, expensive, and unlikely to fill all your time. Result, I got to be that bored kid who learned to play his Dad's guitar and wrote songs.

However, today, DVDs are cheap and plentiful, the TV is on twenty four hours a day if you want it to be, and if you look hard enough, you can pretty much find something you want to watch on it at any time of day, all day long. This leads the lazy (hello, pleased to meet you, my name is Dave, and I count myself among the lazy) to relax by just turning on the TV, having a cup of tea (bottle of wine, can of lager, line of coke, syringeful of skag, insert your recreational activity of choice here) and zoning out to something somebody else created so you don't have to be bored. I'm sure I don't need to point out here that most of this output is considerably less good than it used to be 30 years ago when there were only 4 channels that weren't on for 24 hours a day, and didn't have to cram the schedules with filler (I just did though). I think there may be a link. Thus the brain gets the stories it craves, and it doesn't need to make any up for itself to satiate the desire to be entertained.

And that's why I'm going to go back in the house and watch telly for the rest of the evening.

:)

N.B. There are no historical facts whatsoever in this blog, I plucked the whole thing out of my head while out walking the dog. Apologies for any historians now spluttering into their tea at my wild innacuracy, I only have an A level in history and none of it covered any of the areas I have explored in these writings.

Nothing to fear but fear itself

A marvellous quote, from somebody or another, I could google it, but thought it might be more fun to highlight my own ignorance for once. I pulled the wife up for pedantry yesterday, after she derailed my sentence of profound brilliance because I used the word stupider. Which according to this here spell check is in fact a real word. Right that argument shall be resumed later, anyhow, what was the point I was going to make here. Could it be that my own over-inflated opinion of myself is thoroughly undeserved? Probably yes, the fear itself bit is down to why I don't ever write anything.

To elucidate a bit, I am so worried that I will run into writers block at some point in the process, I don't even get started, just in case I spend hours staring at that dreaded blank bit at the end with no idea what to fill it with. I am aware that that is very strange, and more than a little odd. Also that those two phrases amount to exactly the same thing.

Ironically, I just spent 10 minutes staring at this little blank bit I am filling up now, as it may be becoming painfully obvious to anyone following this blog, that there is only so much you can say about procrastination before you end up blabbering on endlessly about nothing in an attempt to avoid the cold hard truth. Which appears to be that I am not doing anything because I am worried about a thing that may not happen anyway.

So, how do I tie all these seperate strands together anyway? What has me being a bit stroppy when Netty pulled me up over my grammar got to do with my fear of writers block? And why is this not the essay on why no real great works of creativity are being made anymore that I had planned to write? Well, I shall tell you, because I started writing this on a different subject than I intended to, possibly I am trying to put off that essay of untold wonders because I am worried that I might not be able to do it justice. So that clears up the last question at least. And for the first two, it is obvious. I do not wish to be exposed as just as stupid as the rest of the world. My fragile ego is based upon my own belief that I am very, very clever. Which I quite probably am not, so when pulled up on it, I react badly. And if I do finally finish something that I think is very good, and it is universally slammed as not very good at all, I suspect I shall react very badly to that as well, thus the fear of my efforts being in vain leads me to not bother making them in the first place.

How very self-aware and clever of me, hoorah, right back up in the happy ego-filled place.

I must apologise for the rather random, disjointed nature of this piece, it is a strange place that I find my mind in at the moment. Hopefully next week will have that afore-mentioned essay on the death of great creative works, and why it is so. By the way, this week I have written nothing at all, but I did have 2 band rehearsals, and started the programming course from future learn. So I don't feel too bad about it. I've also decided never to dep for any bands I don't already know again. It is generally too much work for too little reward, from people with too high an opinion of themselves (just like me in other words).

In the course of not paying much attention while writing this, I googled that quote, turns out it is from Franklin D. Roosevelt, or Batman, or Oingo Boingo, depending on who you prefer.

Addendum: I wrote this blog 4 days ago, and have only just got around to publishing it, as I got very busy with a last minute dep gig (for a band I know very well and used to be in, so sticking to the new rules). I also remembered that I did once create something I am very, very proud of and so far it has been downloaded a total of about 4 times, in the last 7 years since I finished it. It still makes me grin from ear to ear when it comes on shuffle on the mp3 player in my car, so it works for me. Nobody has actually told me it is rubbish, but I feel it's lack of success may be significant in that respect. Do go and download my 27 minute concept album and tell me it is rubbish while you read this blog. It is here....

http://plasticsquirrel.bandcamp.com/album/laughing-at-dogs

Thanks

Dave

Slight Progress

Holy fucking christ I actually did some work this week. Nobody was more shocked than me this Tuesday evening, when I sat down with my laptop, opened up all my many notes on the book, and while once again staring blankly at a load of incoherent babble of clever stuff to try and hide inside a nice little story, I thought “Fuck this, I shall just write some of it”. And so I did, I briefly outlined the second chapter so I had no excuse to stare at the fire and get distracted, and then wrote.

Ok, so it was only about 45 minutes, and I only managed a page and a half before I got bored, and started drinking, but hey, progress is progress, and I deserved that drink.

Obviously, the rest of the week was a lot less productive, I only worked two days, and had no band rehearsals, but I did spend two evenings learning very difficult songs for a dep gig, that was then suddenly cancelled. Which is always helpful, in its own marvellous way. I had a couple of lovely days out with the wife, and the dog, and some friends who were down from surrey. I also had a bona fide gig on Thursday night, so all that time was not wasted, and no procrastination was involved.

I also got a new microphone, and a bunch of stands and leads for the studio, and thus spent a fair chunk of time fiddling about with them to see how they work. They work fine, I have tomorrow off work as well, and will be attempting to record some music rather than do any writing.

Rest of the week is interesting, I think I have two rehearsals with two different bands, I am trying to write a bunch of new songs as well for another recording project. Hopefully there will be a bit of time to scrawl some stuff down in the midst of all this. Oh, and I just remembered that app-writing course starts tomorrow as well. I may be screwed here.

My obsessive planning idea was clearly a dumb move, and far too gargantuan an idea to have ever attempted, so I may continue as I did on Tuesday, knocking out the odd page when I have a minute or two to kill, and only lightly planning any of it. There are still a couple of hours to go until it becomes wine o'clock, so I might get some more done today. Course I might just start drinking earlier, seeing as I'm not at work tomorrow.

I am still aware that none of this is of any interest to anyone other than me, but I will continue to document this blindingly dull information every week. Sorry.

I shall quit everything else and be more productive then?

Yes, this week my oldest enemies have returned to me. I have started to persuade myself that I don't need to do any thing useful, as long as I am relatively chirpy and have enough free time to go out and have lovely fun times with my wife, catch up with people in the pub, play a few gigs, go wandering with the dog and sit around watching telly and drinking then everything will be fine. I almost believed myself again. It's an age old attitude of mine, that if something is causing me stress and anxiety, I shall ignore it and hope it goes away. And generally, my creative endeavours do.

 However, I remember it was this attitude that meant the 5th Plastic Squirrel album took me 4 years to finish. And yes it was good and worth the wait, but had I not spent so much time “waiting for inspiration to strike” it would have been finished a lot quicker. Especially since inspiration had bugger all to do with it, and I got most of it done in the last 3 months of working on it when I got sick of having not done it.

I have also started to think that if I left every single band I am involved in, and just played music at home and in the studio for fun, then I could get more work done, be happier, and spend more time with the family, a total win win. Except that I remembered I tend to be really very annoying, and quite miserable if I'm not in any bands. Mind you, the general attitude of "all other people who do music are rubbish, and disorganised slack twats" has also popped back up, and every gig I see advertised, and every song I hear on the radio had me tutting in disgust at how shite they all are these days. Again, the other Dave in the back of my head is kicking me and telling me not to be such a dick over such inconsequential bollocks. He is right, most of it's pretty good stuff. Though I am still tempted to quit playing with other people again.

So, has this launched me into a frenzy of work you ask? No. No it hasn't. I was going to, but I needed to learn a bunch of songs for a dep gig (I haven't done that either) and I had a couple of rehearsals for proper bands as well. Then I bought a new guitar, and spent far too much time playing it and thinking how pretty it sounds. Am wanting to do that again right now in fact. But I realised that I am already 3 days late in writing this blog entry. Irony strikes again.

I had yesterday afternoon pencilled in to do some proper writing, but then I had to go and do the shopping so we could eat. And on the way home I noticed that the pub in town which had been closed for ages had reopened, so I persuaded Netty to pop down for one and see what it was like. Unfortunately it was pretty good, so we didn't get home for a good 3 hours, and I was in no state for writing by then, and had agreed to cook a marvellous feast for our tea. Managed the cooking (only a bit burnt) but no work done. Which was fine, I knew I had today free to do some anyway. Enter a very long walk with the dog, quick visit to the car boot sale, cleaning up the kitchen after some drunk twat had burnt all the pans in there last night, popping down the road to catch up with some friends, and a few cups of tea, and here we are. Half an hour away from Top Gear and wine o'clock, and nothing doing (still haven't learned those songs either).

Have some time off work this week so might get something done, admittedly, I also have plans with the wife, some friends coming down from london and a couple of gigs to fit in. And that guitar is still new, and still sounds lovely. I suspect that even this blog might get neglected. However, I will not listen to me when I say that it's ok not to bother, and that another year of getting nothing done is ok. Mind you, there's one more track to finish for the next Plastic Squirrel EP, so that might get in the way a bit as well. If only they'd stop putting programmes on the telly, I might fit some stuff in of an evening. We can but hope, particularly as my wife keeps asking me if I'm still writing that book, and if she can have a read of it soon. I don't think Netty reads this, otherwise she'd know the answer to that question.

Right, lets have a go at these songs then.....

An Angry Round Thing Enters The Room

By angry round thing, I mean vicious circle, the usual one, it has returned in its usual guise and posed its constant question. Am I thoroughly miserable because I can't manage to get any writing done, or am I unable to get any writing done because I am thoroughly miserable? Now given that there is really nothing else in my life to make me thoroughly miserable, I am going to plump for the former. This has been going on for years, I decide to do something useful (say record some lovely music, or write a book) and then get hit dead centre with a foul case of writers block. Obviously it has happened again, and when I manage to find half an hour or so to get some work done, I stare blankly at the screen, devoid of ideas before telling the computer to go fuck itself, turning it off and doing something else instead, in the vain hope that inspiration will strike. It invariably doesn't. Hey ho.

Anyhow, for this weeks procrastination, I spent a goodly long time justifying the existence of this blog to myself after it was pointed out to me that there is no good reason for anyone else to give a flying fuck about my inability to write myself out of employment. This is entirely true, but as I seem to remember setting out in the first instalment of this essentially futile gesture, it may serve to ensure I do some work if an entirely fictitious audience is tutting disapprovingly at me online as I document my failures. The dog's scathing looks are no longer enough to push me into working.

So last weekend, I set up in my summerhouse, turned on the laptop, and suddenly discovered I had a really good wifi signal out there, and scrolled through twitter for an hour or so, before remembering why I was out there. I then dug up a load of old short stories I wrote many years ago in another fit of trying to exercise my mental muscles, and read them as well. Then it got cold, so I went inside and watched telly in front of the fire with the dog. Much nicer.

This week, I have been learning a bunch of songs for a dep gig, which is less procrastination, and more productive, so I feel justified in that. I also had 2 rehearsal sessions with 2 bands I am actually in, so that was ok as well. Less easy to balance is the evening I spent with my guitar and a bunch of amusing Nick Drake tunings seeing if I could come up with some interesting musical ideas to play about with and maybe write some new songs. It ended just as badly, not a single idea (well I've got 3 lines of lyrics to play with and no music to go with it) and with the usual listening to records and drinking cider.

Even this blog of procrastination is late this week, as I was finding other ways to do things that were more fun. Yesterday I jumped at the chance to do some modelling for my Wife's photography project, and didn't attempt to hurry her along (as I normally would) even as the 2nd hour of coldness and cramp rolled around. I took on a really, really difficult photoshop project from someone at work who asked me for a favour, and rather than saying “Oh no, I am far too busy to do that” or even doing it at work rather than working, I spent 3 hours carefully stitching pictures of other people's family together in attractive and interesting ways.

Procrastination is still very much alive, and in case any of you have not been following this properly, I have not written a word, or even managed to come up with the extra sub-plots I need to finish the full plotting of the thing, since I first started this blog 3 weeks ago. Fairly impressive isn't it? I am now about to open my notes and try and finish some of it ready to get some work done. I fully expect that in less than half an hour, I will have wandered off to my temporary studio, and will be playing Angus Young riffs on my SG and claiming that this is a useful way to spend my sunday afternoon. Let it be known that it is not, and never will be. Though it is fun.

Welcome to the Procrastination Station

Hello again, I am rigidly sticking to my resolve to update this blog once a week. Which is more then can be said for my resolve to work hard and write this book. Still, here is the tale of how well I have done in my attempts to beat the procrastination fairies this week.

I realised that all help is going to be good help, and signed up for a future learn course in beginning creative writing after receiving an email from them. I had already signed up to one of their courses in programming apps for february, in another fit of “oh woe is me, what can I do with my life that will be fun and slightly profitable?” The writing one starts immediately off the back of that one, so I shall be busy in the springtime. This will afford all new excuses for not writing what I am supposed to. It is of course a stretch for someone with such a massive superiority complex as myself to admit that a “beginning” course is something I should ever need, my ego tells me I have been doing this for over 25 years. Luckily the other half of my brain has pointed out to me that “beginning” is the only part of it I can ever do, but sadly they don't do a “Getting on with it and finishing the bloody thing” creative writing course, so there you go, I'll have to do this one instead.

I also managed, straight off the back of my last blog, to agree to a dep gig with a band I saw a month or so ago, which will involve me learning an entire set of original material that I have never heard, from scratchy mp3 recordings that you can't hear the bass on. This is on top of the dep gigs I already have lined up this month which I have not yet learned the new songs for, and the new band I'm putting together, and the band I'm already in, and of course my burgeoning lack of career with PlasticSquirrel.

I did indeed manage to clear out the summer house into the old leaky studio shed. I also ripped out the sodden carpets from said shed, and snapped the legs off my sideboard in the process. Still, managed to prop it up again, so it'll be fine. Had I bothered to empty it and take the draws out before trying to single-handedly throw it around over the carpet as it came out, it would still be in one piece. As it is, I had to do some clever stuff with a car jack, and ask Netty to come out and help me to sort that one out.

Having cleared it out, I then decided it needed some road-testing, unfortunately that involved a 4-pack of Guinness and my Grandfather's old copy of The Screwtape Letters that I didn't know I had. That was an enjoyable hour or so, though not so productive. Obviously I then had to put the studio together in its new temporary home in my neighbour's barn conversion. Which took care of Sunday afternoon fairly nicely. And Friday night and Saturday night, are Friday night and Saturday night, and therefore sacred, no work, plenty of drinks.

Last Thursday I came close to getting some work done, but I wrote the first part of this blog instead, and then listened to Zoot Allures by Frank Zappa for inspiration. There's been a lot of that. I've always been a firm believer that to write interesting stories you need to do your research, which helpfully involves reading other peoples stories while listening to records and drinking wine. Other lovely methods include watching movies and TV shows while drinking wine (or cider). I have been doing a lot of research over the last week, it has been good.

This research involved 2 J.K. Rowling books this week, and I came to the conclusion (when I was about 3 quarters of the way through The Cuckoo's Calling) that she had clearly written The Casual Vacancy as a smokescreen to keep people off the scent of Robert Galbraith. What with it being a bit humdrum run of the mill and riddled with stereotypes I figured that she just chucked any old thing out there so people wouldn't be nosing after her next good book. Sadly, by the end of The Cuckoo's Calling I realised that she had in fact lost it a bit. It is a really good book up until the explanations of what happened come out, and then it's predictably unpredictable bollocks.

Anyhow, the long and the short of it is I have not plotted any more of this book in the last week, and tonight is the first bit of time I have had to sit down and do any work. But I am writing this instead. I remain lord high procrastinator of the Shires of Devon, and I challenge anyone to steal this title from me.

(I have also resolved to use italics more, I hope you enjoyed them).