Writers Write

I'm reviving this blog with a thought that passed through my head as I tried to fall asleep - a few thoughts actually:

1. I might enjoy writing words for a living more then I enjoy writing code for a living.
2. I need to practice writing badly. I now compose in twitter-size structures; my conversations and writing are a series of unfunny one-liners. I wrote an honest-to-god letter last month and it was a disgrace.
3. Even if I don't write to feed myself and my work with sound, it would be nice to speak and write like an adult again - I'm not quite sure where that skill began to dissolve, but I was certainly better at it at 17 than I am right now.
4. I now have a hypothesis for my general disinterest with fiction in the face of a brooding love for language: if language is the art of abstracting thought, I suppose that means I'm more interested in the thoughts of my fellow human beings that fence directly with this shared experience we call life rather then those diversions that dick around with some cockamamie fantasy of abstraction and escape. It's strange that I think representation in literature dances much closer to the line of direct experience then abstraction in literature, while I feel the opposite about sound - more or less anyway.

I guess I'll have to write about it.

Packing

I'm packing for my move to Brooklyn, and batting at the cat as I go.  I have to say if there was a camera on me today, it would look like this:

Ellen Fullman and Sean Meehan

Just a quick note to acknowledge Ellen Fullman and Sean Meehan's excellent duo record, which has been caressing the hours of my workday for a week or so now. You can purchase the record here, and for drone fans, I strongly encourage you to do so!

Triphasic Sleep: The Week in Review

Last week I embarked on a little experiment I've been meaning to try for a few years. I was first introduced to the idea of polyphasic sleep sometime during college - I forget the context, but suffice it to say I probably came across it during an exam period. The idea is fairly simple: break your sleep schedule into smaller more frequent chunks, and you will gain more time overall as a result of having to sleep less.

For the exceptionally hardcore, there is the polyphasic method championed by such night-owls as Buckminster Fuller. This involves various and sundry sleeping patterns of say 20 minutes every 4 hours or 30 minutes of sleep every 6 hours, etc. Various polyphasic approaches are detailed on this wiki.

I've always had trouble falling asleep and waking up - and I've certainly never been able to pull off a successful nap. Without fail I'm either twice as groggy afterward as when I went to sleep, or I sleep way too long for it to qualify as a nap. Polyphasic sleep per se was kind of out of the question for me.

Instead, I went with a triphasic model - which is just a fancy way of saying I sleep three times a day - and broke my sleep periods into chunks that mirrored a full and natural REM cycle of 90 minutes.

I started my first waking day last Sunday at 10am after waking from a full eight hours of sleep. My first sleep period actually began on Monday, in order to deprive myself enough that I'd be able to fall asleep right away. That was important since I needed to be able to set my alarm to go off roughly 90 minutes after I actually fell asleep in order to wake again at the end of a natural sleep cycle. So the sooner I was able to fall asleep after setting it, the better.

I won't detail every day journal-style, as I've seen others do, but here's a run-down of my daily schedule and a rough overview of my experience.

Each day I slept three times. Once in the early morning from 5:30am until 7:00am. Again in the afternoon from 1:30pm until 3:00pm. And finally in the evening from 8:30pm until 10:00pm. This seemed like a good and even distribution. I was only out for 90 minutes of the work day, and I wouldn't need to miss any evening events like shows etc. I should mention in case you don't know me, I freelance for a living, and I'm lucky enough my schedule can be flexible enough to accommodate a little modification like this. I did quickly find out however, that while the extra awake hours gave my productivity a serious boost - I missed a sleep cycle at least once because my hours aren't always as flexible as all that.

The first few days were both tougher and easier than I expected them to be. On the one hand, I've never been so regular in my sleep patterns before in my life. As long as I can remember I've taken at least an hour and sometimes two to fall asleep at night, and I tend to be a snooze-button guy, where the wake-up process can last just as long. Since high school I've learned to set my alarm at least an hour and a half earlier than I actually want to get up if it's very important that I get up on time. Sleeping in 90 minute periods seems to be an amazing solution for this. Waking up at the end of a full REM cycle was way easier than I'm used to, and I found that I was consistently tired enough in the half hour or so before my cycles to be able to fall asleep right away. I also began meditating again in the minutes leading up to my cycles, which I think helped me fall asleep easier.

What was tough was I thought at first a simple matter of adjusting to the new pattern and amount of sleep I was getting. I'm not used to getting 4.5 hours a night, so I figured it would take some adjusting. I was a little groggy between cycles during the first two days - but that actually went away surprisingly quickly. The toughest thing for me was losing the psychological sense of a day beginning and ending.

I ended my week of experimentation with a full 8 hours of sleep during the night, and the thing that surprised me the most the following day was that I recalled the events of the entire previous week the same way I would recall the events of one day. Everything ran together like one massive undulating day. I'm sure I wouldn't be able to keep that up any longer than I did.

I really enjoyed the extra time this schedule gave me though, and so I'm trying a new variation this coming week. I'll be sleeping for three hours (a multiple of 90 minutes) each evening - from 4:00am to 7:00am, with a 90 minute nap at some point throughout the day depending on when my schedule allows. I think this will make my sleep schedule not conflict with my work/life schedule as much (that came up twice last week) and I'm hoping to solve the strange never-ending day phenomenon by going to sleep when it is dark and waking up when it is light for my longest cycle. Last night was my first 4-7 period, and so far so good. I don't feel any more tired than I did last week so far - and definitely no more tired than I would on 8 or more hours of sleep.

More next week!

Let's Keep Writing

Thanks to Myer I've been reading Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror on a regular basis recently. For a web designer turned developer it's a godsend - especially for someone like me who dry-humps the very idea of 'best practices' in every systematic thing I do.

Today I came across a post in which Jeff outlines an extremely simple best practice of sorts for being a blogger: Choose a schedule you can live with, and stick to it. It's moronically simple, which is why it's also utterly useful advice. So, I decided to take it, and use this blog and Lovely Media as my experiments.

When I started this 'dreamlife of letters blog' it was specifically with the intent that nobody would read it. I had just started working on my book (which will be the subject of many future posts, and is the driving motivation to get off my ass and write again) and was looking for an easy and accessible place to catalog my ideas. This was before the days of google documents.

Somewhere along the line I started to occasionally write as though someone were actually reading. I went back and forth this way for a while until my current "somebody might be reading but it's probably just Myer" mentality. If you are reading, thanks Myer! But after reading Jeff's post I've become inspired to make this thing work both as a dumping-ground for research and ideas related to my book and other detritus as well as something a person who does not know me may actually enjoy reading occasionally.

The whole point of Lovely Media on the other hand was to make the common link-email-exchange that happened amongst my friends a community activity. I thought we were all sharing some pretty neat things with each other, and it made sense to also share these neat things with anyone who might be interested.

So I'm going to alternate between the two blogs - three posts a week for each, after Jeff's six post goal. I think it's a good one - gives me a day off, and by splitting time between blogs I have some variety personally. The actual problem of when to post is one I haven't worked out yet. I'm writing this at nearly 1am in the morning, which is probably when most posts will happen, but I'll need to feel out when I'm in the most bloggy mood as I go I suppose. I'm on a new triphasic sleep schedule (more on that soon) and so I have a lot more hours in the day to choose from to designate as blogging / writing time.

No matter who is reading, if anyone, I can already tell it's going to feel good to write again.

I Was So Wrong

Maybe it's just that my blog reading habits have taken another upswing recently, or that I've found more interesting things to read, but Google Reader has become part of my daily routine (most days) and I was so wrong about it. Netvibes may look pretty, but I'm reading more with Google Reader. You win this time, Myer! ;-)

google reader versus netvibes

I recently switched my browser homepage and overall RSS reader solution from netvibes to google's reader. For the most part, I'm happy with the switch, even with netvibes' recent rollout of their 'ginger' version and the social networking capabilities that come with it.

As Myer has heard me admit over and over, my guilty secret is that I often choose design aesthetics over functionality. The two aren't mutually exclusive of course, and I'm sure if you talk to any interface design specialist they'll talk your ear off about the beauty of a well designed functional interface. That said, I'll still sacrifice features for beauty in most cases. I'm guilty! For example, I develop websites in Firefox because it is far and away the best suited for the job: an extension called firebug is most of the reason why this is true, but the whole extension architecture available to firefox just makes it the most functionally robust browser out there. I'm typing this blog in Safari however, and I do most of my browsing here. It just looks so nice, and even though it lacks the huge feature set of Firefox, the interface design is amazingly clean and simple.

So I'm going against my instinct a bit by adopting google reader. I did find a skin for it that makes it look pretty - using it under safari is very nice. Ironically it was made by the guy who designed the logo for Firefox. I miss a few things about Netvibes functionally and interface-wise however:

1. In netvibes, each feed has its own space on the page, so I can see at a glance what has been updated, and I like browsing by source like that. Google reader mashes everything together on one page and provides two options for viewing: the full post, which means you can see at most two or three posts at once; or a squished list with the first few words of the post visible, like gmail. I'm opting for the second view so I can see more of what's new at once, but that brings me to the second thing I miss:


2. In netvibes, I could mouse over the title of a collapsed blog post on the front page and up would pop a lovely little AJAX floating summary near my mouse. All I had to do to quickly skim the first few paragraphs of all the new entries on my page was mouse over new posts. I could quickly get a sense of the things I wanted to read and click in from there to read longer posts. With google reader it's a bit more cumbersome - I do get to see the first few words of a post, but that rarely gives me a good sense of what I'm about to click into. In a perfect world, writers would write functional titles and opening sentences to give me a great idea of what I'm getting into. Course, that's not the case!

I'm sure this all sounds incredibly picky - but having a good interface to work with can be the difference between getting use out of a tool, and throwing the tool to the wayside. I have a feeling I'll be sticking with google - if only for the really fun 'share' feature. Also they pretty much own my life these days, so you know.

be kind, rewind

Tonight I saw Michel Gondry's new film 'Be Kind, Rewind.' Going in to the film I was expecting a certain level of artfulness and humor that had been hinted at in the trailers and from what I knew of his previous work. What I didn't expect - what I was happy to find - was a social film with activism and community at its core; a vitality and humanity I've only seen in films close (in both history and ideology) to the events of May 1968, in particular Truffaut's 'Stolen Kisses.'

Stolen Kisses is a special product of a time just after student uprisings in France and all over the world had in some cases come close to toppling whole governments. You can feel a sense of an excited "what's next?" being collectively whispered throughout the film, and particularly represented in the young Antoine Doinel. It's an incredibly optimistic film, just on the edge of an emerging era and culture.

Be Kind Rewind gave me this same impression - but rather than simply attempting to recycle a forced agenda of revolution and optimism, the film seems as though it simply has no choice. It articulates itself essentially in the language and grammar of now: the trailing edge of globalized culture, which is no longer an impending and dreaded model trickling its way through our lives, but a critical and essential matter of the way we live. What is really interesting to me is that the way the film (and I would argue, culture on the whole) reclaims the conditions of globalized culture for the people is by the acute territorialization of culture. It's very important that we're witnessing the interactions of a specific small town in New Jersey, that we're seeing a microculture interacting with itself, but also and I think very critically, that we see it interacting with global culture.

Throughout the film we are constantly aware of a shared media reality - this small community acts it out by staging 'ghostbusters' or 'driving miss daisey' etc. This community takes ownership of the culture that has been disseminated from Empire, and which in this film is represented by the empire state: New York. Gondry does a wonderful and effective job in telling what is a recent story, and what stands to characterize this emerging century: the decentralization of cultural power and ideology. It sounds terribly cliche to speak of the 'youtube generation' for example, but it's worth pointing out that we're at a unique point in cultural history that is putting notions of authorship and authority that are really fairly young into question.

I had a short conversation with someone at the SPARK festival recently about how their students apparently had no qualms about drawing from a 'democratized pool' of sound bits and software tools, with absolutely no regard to authorship. He was lamenting the fact that he'd hear the breakbeat from 'funky drummer' in his student's music, and that they had no knowledge of its origin. My response was that I find this kind of loss of authorship extremely exciting, and I think it's representative of a potential for the creative act to re-emerge as a fundamentally community activity. Rather than looking at art and artwork as a product of individual genius, we are learning to understand it as a cultural communication. Be kind rewind understands this, and I was incredibly happy to see it articulated in such an ecstatic way. The film says "do" - and that's what we're doing.

Drone Again

I'm so back onto drones. Was I ever off drones? I'm feeling that wave of "why would I ever listen to or make any other kind of music" again. Here's a short list of great drones:

1. ghosting - their current myspace song.


2. the dream syndicate (lamonte young, tony conrad, et al) - 2 iv 64


3. lamonte young - dreamhouse 78'17


4. lamonte young - the melodic version (1984) of the second dream of the high-tension line stepdown transformer from the four dreams of china (1962)


5. tony conrad - pythagoras, refusing to cross the bean field at his back, is dispatched...

I also got a copy of Sun Circle, which is pretty much a cover album of Lamonte Young's rare Black Album by Greg Davis and Zach Wallace. I was SO excited about it when I ordered it. I need to listen to it again, but I wasn't super impressed on the first listen. There's a glacial-speed development that happens in lamonte young's best stuff, it almost becomes vertical - time stands on one end and begins to move straight upward. Sun Circle on first listen does a great job of apeing the aesthetic of the Dreamhouse stuff, but it just felt flat to me. I was in a terrible mood when I put it on though, so that might be it.

jog he can

I came across this poem dedicated to John Cage today. I guess i'm not in the mood for fluxus poetry today, but it was nice to see I'm not the first to anagram Mr. Cage.

I was in the mood to play the trombone today, which was the first time I sat down and practiced in months and months. I'm incredibly rusty, but working my chops back up to a passable quality was a lot of fun. I'm sure it annoyed the neighbors though.

What's annoying me right now is whether it's okay for me to sing a song about Jesus at my show on Saturday. I'm not religious, but tasteful devotional songs have recently been very comforting to me. I can't decide if my song would be insulting to a hypothetical Christian audience, despite the respect I intend in performing it. I may chicken out and just sing a love song instead... Those are always offensive to someone regardless.