markjgsmith

Not a huge amount to write this morning. I’m still dealing with the aftermath of the last bullying cycle. When everything everywhere in every dimension gets turned into an infiniti no and blamed on you, it can take days to clear. But life goes on.

I appears water and electricity are about to be cut off again. I’ll likely writeup the newsletter early again this week. I get the sense that the world is already front running that, but there isn’t anywhere else to go, because any further back and your back into the previous cycle, so the world is literally blocking itself, and blaming me of course.

I managed amongst all the yes nos yesterday to fix a few small bits of code on the reusable workflow feature, so maybe I’ll get a chance to test that later.

Life goes on. #

Well I got next week’s issue #176 written and scheduled without any major problems, but guess what as soon as I tried to do the tiniest of the tiniest amount of work on my static site generator reusable workflow feature, the world was right back at it doing it’s infiniti yes no thing again. What a suprise. #

Max Richter on infusing context into your work

The folks at Resident Advisor have put out a recent interview with Max Richter, the esteemed neoclassical composer. It’s an interesting conversation that goes into his clasdical background, his love of architecture, how he discovered synthesizors through hearing Kraftwerk on the tele, his creative process, and all sorts of otget intetesting things.

The bit that stood out to me was how he’s been trying to infuse some of the context of his life environment into his music. There are a lot of similarities with how I view blogging. Context was one of the main ideas behind linkblog.io. The ability to share not only links, but the context of other stuff that was going on at the time you posted link. In fact one of the taglines was "Context is everything".

Here’s how Max describes it [8:43]:

Interviewer: So the album contains many snapshots of what of what I assume to be your daily life. So there are field recordings, and found sounds, electronics, I think more than I’ve found in your past work. We are surrounded by electronics in your studio now. Can you tell me more about the role that those little snapshots play?

Max Richter: Yeah, so I’ve called those life studies. They are almost like diaristic little fragments. I wanted to try to bring context that the album came out of into the album itself. So it’s like the landscape that gave rise to the record, the stuff, you know, the world I was inhabiting at the time, is also in the record. So yeah there is a lot of kind of found sounds from here, and other places, travels and bits and bobs of touring and stuff. Stuff from cooking and all kinds of domestic, ordinary life. I’m very interested in that actually. How creativity and the rest of life fit together and how they influence one another, and how creative work is really rooted in our ordinary life.

Needless to say I was kind of fascinated by how a musical artist views this process. It’s much the same, a process of collecting bits and pieces of life as it happens and stitching these into a larger work. Personally I feel like I’ve only explored the surface, that there are tons of interesting and creative ways to explore context. Really enjoyed listening, it gave me several new and different ways to think about this ephemeral and mysterious thing we call context. #

I’ve heard and read mixed reviews of the Olympic Opening Ceremony. I didn’t watch any of it myself but I did hear that they raised the Olympic flag upside down at the ceremony. That’s a bit strange, isn’t it a sign of distress. Seriously, isn’t that what you do when you are in distress out at sea?

Let’s all remember to keep an eye out for those in distress, at all levels, from individuals all the way up to countries. The world is going through difficult times. We are ultimately all in this together.

I know I’ve written recently about France, and perhaps that could be misinterpreted. I do really hope all is well in France. Best wishes for the rest of the event. #