Brilliant Corners

I’ve yet to hold a copy of Maya Waldman’s book, to-do list, in my hands, but I can heartily recommend that it be bought. Immediately. I’ve come to know Maya’s work from a friendly online community, and over the years I’ve enjoyed seeing the artwork she has contributed. And now, some of what’s she has drawn (and written?) comes in the form of this neat little book.

Can I really recommend this book without seeing it first? Why, yes I can. If you’re not convinced, here is some of Maya’s other work to get an idea of what you can probably expect from the book:

• Some of Maya’s finely-detailed work from her notebooks
• A weblog of Maya’s letters home during her stay in the Marshall Islands

And just for good measure, here’s the description from the Amazon listing:

To-Do List inspires young and old not to take life too seriously. The “tasks” on Maya’s to-do list range from the everyday-buy milk, be less messy, go on vacation, make friends, and no fighting-to the exceptional-dance like an octopus, hug flowers, star gaze, smile giant, eat sweets, and count clouds.

Each “task” is adorned with an ink drawing that has been painstakingly hand-rendered in astonishing detail. Soon enough, your own to-do list will include enjoying the novelties found on every page.

And please note that although Amazon lists this as an audiobook, it’s not. That should hopefully be corrected soon.

I’m only around halfway through Michael Azerrad’s book Our Band Could Be Your Life and two things are becoming more and more apparent as I complete the book.

One, there are a lot of bands I never gave a true listening to. Of the many bands covered in the book, I have only listened to a few: The Minutemen, Sonic Youth, and Fugazi. I have heard _of_ all or most of the other bands mentioned in the book, but for some reason I never picked up an album of theirs. I now want to own the full catalog of Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Black Flag, Minor Threat, Mission of Burma, and The Butthole Surfers. And I haven’t even finished the book yet.

Second, I’m inspired. Damn inspired. Spending months in a cramped van or car traveling the country, city to city, sometimes playing for an audience of five for one thing only: doing what they love, making and playing music. Yes, bands have been doing this for ages, but the case with many of the bands in this book is that they were playing music that wasn’t popular at all. Punk and hardcore bands faced harassment from the police, the clubs, and by the population at large.

In order to get their music heard, they created their own music labels, booked their own shows, and played the PR game with radio stations and zines. The networked amongst themselves, promoted each other, and worked menial jobs so they could eat, since they often made no money from the music they played. It was all for the music; that was what was most important. They didn’t wait for anything to fall into their laps. They had to work hard for everything.

Oh yeah, and that photo at the top; that’s me from years and years ago playing in a band called Tarlo. I’m rockin’ the Telecaster in the basement of a music store in Wichita Falls, TX. We opened for a band that played Metallica covers. The photo was taken by my good friend Chip Somodevilla, who has since moved on to taking pictures of more famous folks.

I drew this yesterday while sitting outside a local coffee shop. The last dated drawing in my sketchbook is from May 21st. That’s just about three months of nothing. Ridiculous! I think I’m more talk than action when it comes to saying I’m going to draw more.

When we visit Italy in the spring I want to be able to capture what I’m seeing in my sketchbook. At one point we’ll be visiting some distant relatives of my wife’s who live in a tiny, tiny village atop a hill in the middle of the Abruzzo region. I’m sure I’ll be taking plenty of photos, but to be able to have a record of our visit on paper would be extra nice.

I have lots of practicing to do.

I can’t tell you how many weblog posts on motivation that I’ve read, filed away, and then completely ignored any advice they may have had. Just today I came across “Overcoming a Loss of Motivation” at Pick the Brain:

How many times have you started a new activity (such as a personal project or exercise routine) with a burst of enthusiasm, only to see that initial momentum evaporate? This often leads to depression and causes us to give up prematurely.

Well, how about this: how many times have I been lazy and never even reached the point of starting something new? Too many times, believe me. There is some decent advice at that site, but I often think that there’s no hope for me. Well, maybe that’s being a little over-dramatic. Perhaps it’s just that there isn’t any advice out there that truly applies to me, and my quirks.

I think that part of my problem is that I too often get tied up in the implementation of what I’m supposed to do. For one example, while I was reading Getting Things Done I spent more time thinking about how I would approach its organization principles instead of actually Getting Things Done. I eventually just gave up on that process, and I’m still without any decent organization on my tasks. It seems I’d rather waste time surfing about the net than actually hunker down and start–much less finish–some new project.

One of the best motivational quotes I’ve come across in all the books and articles and weblog posts I’ve read on the subject, is this one from William Zinsser in his book On Writing Well:

Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.

It doesn’t get any more direct than that. And to start things off, I just now bought the domain name for the “Web 2.0” application to beat them all. Well, probably not. But I think it’ll rock.

I think I’ve redesigned this weblog more times than I’ve actually posted anything here. If you come to the site you’ll see yet another layout. How long I’ll stick with this one is anyone’s guess.

Although I haven’t been writing anything here, I have been posting elsewhere. I started another weblog (crazy, right?) to help kick start and keep track of my more creative output. You can see it here: http://creative.brilliantcorners.org/. I’m not posting all that much more over there, but for some reason I felt like I need to keep those kinds of posts separate.

Also, to help motivate me to get on my new bike more, I wrote and set up a simple bike-ride tracking app over here: http://biketripper.brilliantcorners.org/. Sadly, I haven’t been riding my bike as much as I like, as you can see from the sporadic entries. As it warms up a little bit here, hopefully that will change.

And thanks to this post, I’ve added in the MetaWeblog API posting ability so I can post something here with MarsEdit instead of using the ugly online posting screens I wrote. Now, if only I can get some decent comment spam protection built, I’ll (probably) finally be happy with this weblog app.