my new fifty-two, week three: a study in adaptation

Early this week I decided this week’s new-fifty-two entry would be a photograph. I’m not a photographer by any stretch of the imagination and the best camera I own is my iPhone.⁽¹⁾ The only way I know how to manipulate pictures is digitally. Nevertheless, I thought I’d be able to come up with something pretty good.

I set a couple of rules for myself, though:

The image had to come from real life. No staging. No artificiality. Just something I saw that caught my imagination and my desire to preserve it.
Digital adjustments were okay.
But no filters.
And I limited myself to only using my iPhone for any adjustments.

I took a lot of pictures of a lot of things, but it was something I saw whilst baking yesterday that really caught my eye. After spending some time trying to bring out a certain something in the picture through manipulation, I finally decided to make this week’s entry more of a study in adaptation.⁽²⁾ I simply cannot decide which picture I like best, and they each say something different to me.

So here they are:

The original image.

An adaptation:

Another adaptation:

Like I said, I can’t decide, so I give you all three.

As I’ve mentioned previously, if you’d like to be part of this new-fifty-two thing, feel free. If you’d like to share your creations with others, let me know and I’ll post links if you like.

Which is actually the best camera I’ve ever owned and the previous statement shouldn’t be taken in any way pejoratively against the iPhone. Or Apple. Which everyone knows by now I heart pretty hardcore.
Even though the class I took on Adaptation Theory ended back in December I still think about it all the time. Like all the time all the time.

Jan 15 2012

my new fifty-two, week two

Last week I posted a challenge for the year: to create one new thing every week. This week it was going to be a bit rough to accomplish since this was the first week of the new semester and ergo every student ever actually wanted to use the library to they could save money at the bookstore. I knew I’d be pretty tired in the evenings and I’m also trying to post here every day. So it was a matter of finding the time and energy.

Which, of course, is always the case.

In the end I managed a good first draft of a short story. It’s less than 1,300 words, but it stands up on its own. There might be cause for another section – maybe two – as I revise, but what I have is a solid start.

I’ve noticed that you can really tell how close two people are to each other by the way they string their sentences together. By the words they chose and by how fractured and interwoven their topics can be. My goal was to replicate that, to make something that sounded like real, modern dialogue between two very close people. But not intimate dialogue. Or, I should say, their dialogue is intimate without being out intimate things.

I’m pretty satisfied with the start I’ve made. So I’m counting it for week two of my new fifty-two. Again, if you’d like to participate please feel free. If you’d like to share your creations or share posts about your creations, let me know and I’ll post the links here. But you’re not required to at all. The point is to convert yourself from a consumer to a creator, and you can do that without telling anyone about it. Just have fun!

NB: This isn’t one of my standard footnotes, exactly. It’s really more of an endnote, an addendum. Something lagniappe. I just wanted to mention once again how much I love Scrivener. It solves some of the most basic problems I’ve always had as a writer, vis, organization and reminders, and collecting pieces from the tornado of my s-o-c brain. If you’re a writer of any variety, head over there and avail yourself of the free 30-day trial. If you aren’t willing to drop the $45 on it⁽¹⁾ by the end of that, I’d be surprised.

This is more like one of my standard footnotes that you’ve all come to know and love and ignore. The 45 clams is for the Mac version. The Windows version is $40. I’m not sure why, since I haven’t used the Windows version.

Jan 8 2012

my new fifty-two, week one

Over the past week, I’ve spent a fair amount of my time making a little movie. No, I haven’t been cast in a Kevin Smith bio-pic. I made a little one-minute video for an entry into a wedding contest. Here’s hoping we win, but honestly even if we don’t I’m totally okay. I really enjoyed the process of making it, and I feel an amazing sense of satisfaction that I made something last week. Because life feels better when I make stuff.

I also realized that I have all the tools I need to be able to create the kinds of things I’ve always wanted to create. With my MacBook I can create songs and videos. I can work on writing wherever I am, thanks to iCloud and Pages.

And Scrivener, an amazing writing program, makes working on long pieces easier by giving me one place to keep all the little character- and setting-sketches, all the notes and errata, all the summaries and to-do’s. This has always been my biggest stumbling-block⁽¹⁾ when I work on a novel, losing track of these details. I’m looking forward to reassigning that memory space to something else. Like grocery lists and wedding-planning.

On the iPad I can create 3D models and electronic beats. I can Moog my heart out. I can layer loops like a dubstep master.⁽²⁾ And the iPhone is capable of amazing photography and video.

And so since I have all these tools, and obviously since all these tools weren’t cheap, I have a new challenge for myself: to create something new every week this year.

Last week’s creation was the video, which due to the contest rules I can’t share with you at this point, but here’s a frame just for fun. This week…I don’t know. I’m working on a novel chapter, but since work will be crazy this week I don’t know how much I’ll get done. So it might just be a terrible line-drawing on the iPad or my first foray into the realm of vector graphics. But that counts.

A character in one of Tom Robbins’s novels says that the point of art is simply to create something that didn’t exist before.⁽³⁾ That’s what I intend to do, at least once per week, and to think of it in those terms lest I set the bar too high for myself. The point is to create, not create perfection.

If you want to join me, let me know. I’d be happy to link to your creations, if you want to share them. I’ll update you on mine as each week passes. This should be fun!

Well, second-biggest. The first is actually sitting down to write.
Not really clear what dubstep is, which is probably obvious from that statement.
This character’s particular artistic endeavor was to turn an old Airstream RV into a giant, metal turkey on wheels.

Feb 18 2011

morgan and destiny’s eleventeeth date – the zeppelin zoo

You have seven minutes to spare, right?

Okay, yes I know. If we calculate for inflation, today’s seven minutes is like 2.758 years back in 1950. I get it.

But here’s the thing: you’re going to spend seven minutes on the internet today. You can stop in at all the sites you stop in at every day.

Or you can watch something awesome.

I vote for awesome.

http://www.viddler.com/player/6abb602b/

Now. If you have more than seven minutes, hope on over to hitRECord.org and learn about how this was made.1

It’s pretty much the best thing about the internet since…well maybe ever.

The intro video on the homepage will tell you.

Feb 16 2011

weekly photo challenge: curiosity

Feb 10 2011

weekly photo challenge: boundaries

So I’ve committed to this posting-every-day-in-2011 thing and even though I’m usually not desperate for topics, I check out WordPress’s The Daily Post for ideas and/or inspiration and earlier this week I saw that they’ve introduced weekly photo challenges and the challenge reminds me of someone’s blog – one of the best bloggers who ever quit blogging I might add – that I used to read and she and someone else would do exactly this challenge: take a word, make an image – it was fun comparing the different images they’d come up with for the same word. This is like that, but on a larger scale.

Jan 24 2011

things i’d think i’d be good at but i’m really most egregiously not

Drawing and painting

I’m a very creative person. I can write creatively¹ and I can make music. I play several different instruments. I can craft some scary-ass pumpkins. I’d think then that I’d be able to draw and to paint. But I can’t. I can make abstract paintings, but they look like someone who didn’t know what they were doing found a bunch of paint and brushes and canvas and then ate all the paint and vomited on the canvas, brushed be damned. But I can’ draw. At all. My drawings look like those of a three-year-old with aspirations of living in an insane asylum.

Book clubs

Man, do I love to read. I read widely and I read well. I read ‘genre’ fiction and ‘literature.’² I read plays and poetry. I still read the newspaper. But I’m horrible – just horrible – about being in a book club. Every time one of my friends suggests I be part of one I agree to it…and then never read a single book. I guess I just want to read what I want to read when I want to read it. I can’t say. But I apologize to those of you who’ve invited me into book clubs that I’ve then ignored.^{3, 4}

Being patient with people

I’ve learned that being a very understanding and accepting person does not at all help me be patient with people. In fact, sometimes understanding why a person is behaving the way they’re behaving makes me more impatient because I can see how stupid they’re being. Furthermore, understanding how people work, on an individual basis, helps me predict what they’re going to do and how they’ll behave. Yet in some cases this foreknowledge only drives me to be more irritated with the person for doing exactly what I knew they were going to do, especially if they seem surprised at the way they’re behaving.

Being a people-person

I like people. I really do. Without human interaction I would starve. I would have little to think about and little to write about. But all the same, people annoy me. I hate crowds, even small crowds. I hate any situation that involves a lot of people in a small space, especially if they’re making a bunch of noise. Ashley has suggested that this may have something to do with some of the physical abuse I endured as a child⁵and maybe that’s the case. But people, in general, bug me. Freak me out. Give me a severe case of the howlers. But I can’t avoid them, and can’t avoid being fascinated by them. I think what I want to watch them without interacting with them. I think I very much so want to be alone in a crowd.

Fairly well.
Fake distinctions made by the Academy. The only difference, really, is fiction that everyone reads and fiction that people get PhD’s in so they can spend a life writing about it.
I was once in a book club of two members. Even then I didn’t keep up.
Sorry Michelle.
She likens dealing with abuse to dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve seen this likening elsewhere and there does seem to be something to it.

Jan 16 2011

something worth keeping in your mind

“It is much easier to decide outright that everything about the garb of an age is absolutely ugly than to devote oneself to the task of distilling from it the mysterious element of beauty that it may contain, however light or minimal that element might be.”¹

- Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life.

I came across this in a reading for my theory class. It very easily explains why I love some many of the writers I love, especially the American writers of the latter 20th century. It’s a shitty, shitty world out there. It really is. To actively seek out and encounter beauty in it is nothing short of angelic.