Making Mistakes

You stand at a crossroads. There are two paths. One will take you to what you believe to be your destination, the other one will lead to a dead end. You cannot tell which one is which. Confused, you think of a way in which you can find out where the paths lead without taking a single step. Quickly, you realize this is not possible. So what do you do?

Well I don't know your life, but I can tell you from my experience I would likely stand there, indecisive. Perhaps I would turn around and not even bother.

Why do I, like so many people, fear making mistakes?

From what I've observed in life, a person isn't afraid of making mistakes per say. After all, a mistake just means something went wrong. Once you figure out what happened, you can make sure it doesn't go wrong again. You may be disappointed by your imperfection, but it's not a big deal.

Fear lies in the consequences of making a mistake.

If you choose the path which ends up being a dead end, you may end up stuck. You know you had the opportunity to take the right path, but you didn't. To no fault of your own, you trap yourself. However, because the situation seemed remotely within your control, you blame yourself.

Mistakes are a healthy part of life. A person has to make mistakes in order to learn how to live. How many times has someone warned you not to do something, but you didn't listen and you end up wishing you did? Words don't penetrate the mind like action does. Read about a slaughterhouse and you don't care. See a slaughterhouse and suddenly you're inspired to make revolutions. Does a person support cancer because they feel extra nice? No, they do it because their cousin died of cancer. We can't conceive how the world works without experiencing it, and we can't experience new things without making mistakes. New experiences mean you lack experience, and it is almost certain you will handle a new situation incorrectly unless you luck out, which isn't going to happen 100% of the time.

If new experiences are awesome and mistakes aren't a big deal, then why is there so much fear?

It can easily be summed up in one word. Regret.

A side effect of failure, regret is a feeling you acquire when you've made a mistake that cannot be undone. Many mistakes cannot be undone. You can't unkill someone. You can't unspoil someone's innocence. The past cannot be undone.

Those who are hopeful have the view that we should ignore the past and move on with our lives. I think you would all agree that's easier said than done. Besides the fact that you have trouble letting a mistake go because you feel as if you chose for things to go wrong, other people often do not let go of the mistakes of others. You can drive safely 99% percent of the time, but the one time you end up in a accident is what matters. If a mother crying because her son got killed by a car, saying "I usually drive pretty well" isn't going to make her feel better. Her son is dead. To quote the movie Juno, "That is one etch-a-sketch that cannot be undid, homeskillet." In the film they were talking about a pregnancy test, but you catch my drift.

I can say I don't have many major regrets in my life. However, many nights when I'm sitting in bed unable to sleep, I review my actions and I think, "Damn that was really stupid." Then I get mad at myself, even though there is nothing I can do to change the situation and my frustration is ultimately futile. I can think about things I did in elementary school that still make me feel like a fool. I'm sure you guys can as well.

With the internet, a whole new layer of complexity has been added to the process of mistake making. In the old days, if you made a mistake, you could pretend it never happened. Now, if you make a stupid post on facebook, or add an embarrassing picture of yourself, or send a message to someone that you probably shouldn't, it is there forever. Sure, you can delete it. But what difference does it make when your shameful moment has already been seen by so many people? Once information has entered the head of another person, it is no longer within your control. They can think about it as much as they want. They can do with it as they like. They can shame you as much as they want. And you can't do anything about it. The film Inception told us, "There's nothing more powerful than an idea." Once Mal had the idea that the world she lived in was not reality, she couldn't let it go. The thought could not be unthought.

There are some people out there who just don't learn from their mistakes. A serial killer won't stop killing people just because someone told him it's not the right thing to do. These people are psychopaths who disregard social norms and live life in a delusion. Others acknowledge their mistakes, but are simply too lazy to fix them. I'm sure my mother is fully aware that she has a hoarding problem, but she chooses not to do anything about. "It's too hard," she tells me. "I've always lived this way." That's giving up.

You shouldn't give up.

Even though our mistakes weigh us down, we must understand that they are simply a part of life. Any effort to avoid mistakes stops you from moving forward. And if you feel really badly about something you have done, try distracting yourself. I read like a monster. The information I learn always gives me plenty to think about, shoving those unwanted regretful thoughts out of my mind. In addition, you may not be able to undo the past, but you can tie up loose ends. Making an effort to fix your mistakes is better than just running away. A scar won't heal, but it sure looks better when you give it stitches.

Artist Habits and Themes

So about thirty seconds ago, I was reading Art and Fear when I came upon the section about habit for an artists. And after I finished reading it, I felt as if this was something that I wanted to speak about immediately.

In the field of art, many things are insecure. You never know when ideas will come, you never know exactly what you're working towards, until these things happen. There are two things you can rely upon. One is mastery of technical skill. This helps you create art that is pleasing to others, and encourages you to work harder when all motivation is gone except for that of "I want to have the ability to do this task."

But there is another kind of safety that art gives you. This is the safety of style.

Often, I hear about "realizing yourself as an artist" and I thought, what does this mean? Isn't the idea of art that it is ever changing, and you should never fall into habit?

Now, getting into a habit of habit is not healthy for an artist. If you do the same thing over and over again because you know you're good at it, then you're not accomplishing much on the long run. Think about bands who release their sophomore album, proving inferior to the first. Technically, the music is better written, but it doesn't have the freshness and sincerity of their premiere album. Simply put: something is missing.

But all artists have an underlying theme within their work. When you hear the first few notes of a Beatles song, you know it's a Beatles song. It's easy to point out a Klimt once you've seen past works. Heck, I found one while dashing through halls in the Met to reach the Musical Instruments exhibit. It caught my eye immediately.

We are all unique individuals. As unique individuals, we complete tasks differently, even if they are assigned the same way. If you ask a class to draw a picture of a person, let's say, Abraham Lincoln, each drawing will look slightly different. In fact, not only will each drawing not look entirely like Abraham Lincoln, but each will look a lot like the artist who drew it.

Every artist has a niche; a theme/tendency that they put into their art that makes it different from other art.

This niche is not easy to find. First, an artist begins by replicating the work of others that they admire. Within their inspired works, you can see glimpses of the individual. As they develop more experience overtime, their style becomes prominent, identifiable, and maybe even relatable and admirable.

NYC Project Plans

Basically what Lisa said, the two of us are planning on trying to get some conversations with strangers. I always feel like some of the most magical moments in life happen with those people you speak to briefly who tell you their life stories. Although it's unlikely that we will be able to audio record things, we'll probably try to note down the interesting things around us. Along with that we'll have some general recordings of sounds that we can hopefully make into a song.

Also, for myself, I want to take some quick pictures of posters. Nothing like a big photography project. I just got inspired from the booklet with the Cold War Kid's album "Robbers and Cowards." Each song has corresponding pictures of shredded posters, some of which inspired the songs they are depicted next to.

With the elections in swing and my new interest in art as political activism, it would be to my detriment to ignore the opportunity of capturing the presidential campaign imagewise. Next month, everything will be back to normal again.

Dancing Dreams

I was pretty confused at first while watching this film. The film didn't give any context, so to me, I just saw a bunch of German kids who said they didn't know how to dance learning some modern dance and touching each other. I was kind of put off by the lack of explanation and the fact that I was trying to figure out what was happening the whole time, but I tried to keep an open mind just the same.

The dance piece the teenagers were performing was "Kontakthof", written by Pina Bausch. She actually directed many of the rehearsals. Because this piece deals so much with intimacy, they thought it would be interesting to have it re-enacted by 14-18 year old teens, who often at times are uncomfortable and unused to intimate contact.

It was quite amusing seeing how in the beginning, the kids were so obviously not ok with what they had to do. One kid was supposed to strip down on stage, and when he was told that he looked so uncomfortable. I laughed, probably because I was uncomfortable with the idea. For me personally, I won't even kiss an adult on the cheek because it makes me very uncomfortable. It may seem surprising, but I'm really not a huge fan of physical contact. When I saw how close those kids had to dance together, I got nervous.

After a while though, I realized the reason I felt nervous was because they felt nervous. As the film moved on and the kids became more confident, watching them was more pleasant. Over time, they didn't just become more confident with each other, they became more confident as people.

In terms of the actual theatrics, there were a bunch of things I liked. When the pink dresses girl walked to and fro in a line as the boy tried to hop his chair around and talk to her, I thought it was simple but effective in communicating a lack of communication. In general, a lot of the scenarios were basic concepts, greatly exaggerated.

I also liked the scene where the girl was being comforted/attacked by all the boys. It started with a few helpful hands, and degenerated into almost full on harassment. Not only was it a spectacle to watch, but it was also meaningful. In addition, I happen to like stuff about hands. Don't know why.

What I appreciated the most about the piece was how it was about intimacy and freedom, but it wasn't particularly sexual. Even in the scene were a girl and guy were sitting across from each other and undressing themselves, it didn't seem like 60s rock hippies sex freedom. It was beautiful, because it seemed fresh, like they were unexperienced and they were learning the wonders of contact. This is probably because they were unexperienced, learning the wonders of contact.

In terms of stealing, I really enjoyed the big visual spectacles, like the girl being covered with hands, and the part where the men were hopping in their chairs towards the girls frilling their dresses. It's hard for me to think of what to steal, because I'm not exactly sure what I'm stealing for, and I didn't feel too strongly about any part except for the two I talked about above.

The Fall

Although I don't think The Fall was executed perfectly, I really liked the concept of having a magnificent adventure story paralleled to the not so grandiose emotional breakdown of the man who shared the story.

When Roy killed off every character in the end, it was a metaphorical representation of his utter emotional collapse. I feel like in our lives we make our emotions feel much grander than they actually are. For those recovering from depression, they always make it sound like they escaped a war. They talk about how they were "saved", how they're "a survivor", and they're "ok now." I'm not trying to insult those with serious depression in anyway. What I am saying is that we, as human being, always exaggerate what we feel. Why? Because we don't know of any other feelings but our own emotions. Everyone has an emotional scale, and when something painful reaches above the scale, we shatter. If we build ourselves back up, the scale extends. If not, we get stuck.

Also, when all the main characters were unfairly annihilated, to me it represented how you don't always win. In real life, the bad guys often get what they want, and efforts to be good and wholesome are ignored and unappreciated. In real life, you lose a lot more than you win, and you don't get something even if you deserve it. Even though the story ended with the mask man still alive and Odious finally dead, he never got the satisfaction of killing the enemy and he never got the girl, just like his real life. The world's never going to do your justice. You just have to accept your fate.

If I were to take these things into account on an artistic scale, the movie sends me one clear message. Art is the grandiose demonstration of ordinary life. In art we explore a world of fantasy that's so much more appealing than the world we currently live in, but everything in this fantasy world is based off of real life. Even though we can't take big adventures to kill our arch nemeses in real life, we can always imagine doing so through art. For the most part, we can't murder people, or run away from home, or force people to fall in love with us, or bring people back from the dead, but in art we sure can.

That is to a certain extent. Even in Roy's story, he didn't get everything he wanted. When we make art, we can only perceive a world based on our world of emotions. The action of creating art is honest. You can't lie about being happy when you're not. You can't pretend to be sad when you've never experienced sadness. If you're not being real with yourself making art, then you're not being yourself. Sure, you can make complex songs, pretty pictures, and visually stunning films. But it won't be long before you drive yourself crazy from all the lies you tell yourself. That is, unless you're not emotionally invested in your life. If that's the case, you probably wouldn't be much interested making art in the first place.

In a lot of ways, real life is boring, filled with a few good moments and a lot of garbage in between them. As an artist, you control your perception of the world, altering it into what ideal you want it to be. If you want to kill yourself, that's the world you make. That's what Roy chose, until Alexandria changed his mind.

Dance Mix ABC: Big Week Questions 1 and 2

Questions 1

1) You've worked on a group film and on your own. In which situation are you most comfortable - group or solo? Which do you work best in?

Although I work generally well in both group and solo environments, I think I that work better in solo environments. Without a group around me, I don't feel pressured to appeal to everyone's needs and I don't feel dragged down. My Be Kind Rewind group worked well, and we were generally on the same page. However a lot of times groups seem like a burden to me, and when I work independently I can invest more into my work because I don't have to drag other people along.

 2) What did you learn that you expected to learn?

I learned that creating multi-layered music is a complex process, and you must be conscious of every piece of your work in order to make sure it stays interesting and sounds appealing.

3) What did you learn that you didn't expect to learn?  

I learned that there's a lot to admire about digital musicians (is that a good way to describe them?). They essentially create a symphony of sounds, and although their compositions aren't John Williams material, they can be quite great. Although using Garageband loops to make a song wasn't difficult, it opened me up to a world that I didn't much acknowledge, nor respect. I still wouldn't ditch all my exotic instruments for synthesizers, but the simplicity of creating such a prodigious piece of music is a concept that appeals to me, considering that I prefer doing most of my work alone.

Also, it opened me up to the world of audio engineering, since I had to mix the song by myself. I wasn't expecting to look into that at first, but now I'm starting to become fascinated with it.

4) What didn't you learn that you expected to learn?

New techniques. A lot of what I did felt like stuff I did before, to be totally honest.

5) Praise your amazing achievement and explain your brilliant plan for pulling it off.

My brilliant plan for pulling this off consisted first with experimentation, in order to learn the tools. I observed what I had to work with. After pulling together some random loops, I listened to some music for inspiration. I created the whole song, but because I viewed the music alone as a little dull, I decided to add a vocal part on top.

I found a ghost story, and I revised the words in order to make them more lyrical. This is what I like to call artistic recycling. I compiled all the parts together, and then I mixed the parts, working with panning and trying to adjust the sounds; specifically trying to dim down the vocal part.

All of these components came together, and honestly, I think it sounded great. The piano riff in the beginning flowed into the beat beautifully. My voice sounded really cool, and the way I worded the phrases fit the rhythm just how I wanted to. It sounded a lot like LCD Soundsystem, which I'm totally proud of. The break into the chorus was an explosion, and the chorus itself was catchy. In the second verse when the woman was screaming and the crazy synth part came in, the whole thing got lifted to a whole new level. And in the end where the voice described his death to the tune of the lone piano, I almost cried when I hear it. In fact I almost cry every time I listen to it.

On Shiana's blog, she said it sounded professional. Thanks Shiana. That means a lot. 

Questions 2

1) How much time did you spend working?

On the first day I worked for 2 and a half hours in STAC making the basic mix and probably about 3-4 hours at home adding the vocal line and tweaking. The next day I worked for another 2 and a half hours in STAC mixing the song. On the last day I spent 2 hours doing final mixing and trying to adjust the sound levels for the voice. 

2) How much time did you spend thinking about the work - sort of sitting there and staring at it, or listening to it over and over again, etc.?

On the first day a lot of what I did was pounding stuff out without much thought. The next day, I worked straight through mixing, although a majority of that process included listening, interpreting what was needed, and adding it. On the last day, I listening to the song at least 8 times over trying to work out small kinks. Then I listened to it a few more times cause I liked it.

3) How much time did you spend doing other stuff that seems like work to that make you think you're working but you're not?

Personally I'm not the kind of person that pretends to be doing work to feel like I'm working, because when I sense I'm not getting anything done, I usually just stop. But I do admit, a lot of my "constructive listening" was just me mindlessly listening to LCD Soundsystem while I dozed off into la la land. Hey, we all need a break, and at least I was semi-productive.

4) How much time did you spend socializing?

The first day, not a bit. The second day, a little more. The third day, not so much. The fourth day, a lot more.

5) How did you use your community?

I didn't want to include my community so much because I wanted to keep things a surprise. But I did spend most days sitting with Jessica and Anika, and having them as moral support made me happy.

 6) Rip apart your awful project and how did such a disaster happen?

Well, this project is a standard for how my standards have declined. Using musical loops to make a song? That's so easy. That takes no effort. That doesn't take more brainpower than clicking some buttons. The voice was too soft. And my voice doesn't sound good, even in speaking form. The recording lacked 3 dimensionality, and it sounded so flat. It was only in 1 key.

Techno music sucks. It all sounds the same, and it lacks both the complexity and the maturity of music in almost any other genre. It's so easy anyone can do it, so my project really isn't that special, nor is it any sort of accomplishment. The lyrics were weird, and probably unnecessary. All in all, it was a waste of 4 days, because I haven't really learned anything. Essentially, I was using all of the skills that I already knew, and the only reason I felt like I was trying something new was because it wasn't a project I specifically attempted to accomplish before.

7) You've completed a step on your path. What is your next step?

My next project is to work on the music a video game level designed by my brother. In addition, I've found a whole collection of books on world music from all different areas of the world in my basement. I've already read through Carnival Music in Trinidad, and next I'm probably going to read Music in East Africa. Soon, I will know about all music ever. Sort of not really.

I haven't really thought ahead on the rest yet. Maybe I'll try to complete another album this year and fix everything that went wrong last time. 

Dance Mix ABC: Big Week Reflections

I know that we're going to do a reflection on the project in two weeks, but I want to reflect a little here, while my thoughts and feelings are still fresh in my mind.

I'm a bit disappointed in myself. Not because I thought the project came out badly. In my opinion, it sounded great. However, I feel like I didn't put enough effort into it. I chose a project that was too easy. Most of the tools I understood, and I wasn't doing anything particularly out of my comfort zone, like so many of the bold and brave people did today.

You all did a really good job. I mean that. My letdown is purely a product of my own feelings, and not because I felt personally attacked.

While I was reflecting on my disappointment, I realized something. Last year, I made a whole album in 40 days. Of course I feel like I'm falling short. Now that I've achieved something so great, I have to not only rank myself against the world of music, but I have to rank myself against myself. I've created an entirely new standard, and I failed to realize that while setting my goals, and I failed to realize that until now.

One of the biggest motivators in my life is humiliation. When my teacher shames me for not practicing, or my friends insult me for bad behavior, I always make it my goal to do better next time in order to redeem myself. Maybe that's just my ego talking. I like to take advantage of it, so I can keep improving.

Right now, it's time for me to find what to do next. I have a few options. One thing I could try is to make a better album, inspired by something completely different, using tools and techniques I've never done before. Another thing I could do is pursue this interest in audio engineering, or synthesizers.

Or I could take a deeper look into some other genres of music in the world spectrum. On my obnoxiously large hard drive, I've put a plethora of world music. In addition to that I've been really cultivating an interest in world affairs (another obsession of mine).

I suppose this is one of the main difficulties of an artist. How do you reinvent yourself?