Love of Camping

 I used to love camping more than anything. My love of being in beautiful places has always been expressed in where I chose to live. Do you lead a lifestyle that expresses itself in where you live?

Dawn

Currently, I'm living in a beautiful place in Hawaii near a stream, under a roof in a "coffee shack." It's been around two years that I've been carrying my drinking and cooking water from a purified source and using ice in coolers for refrigeration. I have a two burner propane stove top that needs to be lit. My water for washing drips off the roof (fortunately, it's not hot water as it is in some places in Hawaii where the plumbing travels over lava rocks and heats up.) On the Big Island, you can pick your temperature by choosing where you live in altitude, and I'm 1450 ft. up from sea level. This means it never gets too cold and rarely gets too hot. Although I don't have hot water at home, I have been able to get regular hot showers at the huge local public pool, which isn't far away. My place is so remote, I don't even have an address. My friend quips it's "third world middle class" because movies and Internet are possible with the generator running. I probably have the lowest carbon footprint of anyone you know personally.

Spiderweb on the front lanai

Previous to this lifestyle, I lived in an RV while it was parked in a beautiful spot, but without movies and only library Internet. So this particular lifestyle has been a slight improvement. But it's been more expensive, mostly because I'm a half hour drive from a food store. I need a car because it's too far for me to walk straight uphill that is a few miles from where the bus stop is located. But I do enjoy the quarter mile "hike" to my shack from where I park my car by the road. The road to is too rough for anything but a four wheel drive vehicle. Keeping the grass short that protects the road from turning to mud is hot work.

Accepting this lifestyle hasn't been so foreign or unacceptable to me, given my previous love of camping. If I add the time up I've been doing some form of "camping," it appears that I've been living in an extended camping situation for over a decade.

Perhaps because of my current situation, it probably shouldn't be surprising that I don't go camping when I go away on vacation anymore...which is what I used to do every time I traveled anywhere. I think that I'm finally getting tired of camping. So now when I go away, I stay with friends in their houses for a little bit of "civilization" for a vacation from camping. When I come home, again I'm happy to be there, away from the B-flat hum of electricity - for awhile longer. Who would not want to come home to something like this?

Evening Rainbow

 

Stories Drive Invention

 Since the art of telling stories is so essential for the articulation of almost anything that is communicated, I thought I'd bring forward the continued inspiration for new creative inventions that I get from the field of screenwriting. What fascinates me about screenwriting is how it is the art of selecting what is relevant to a story that "drives" the plot line forward - and of course, what is left out as extraneous. For this reason, I'm always curious to look at movies that are inspired by much longer and more detailed books to bring forward this selection process, scene by scene.

One point that's not obviously revealed by merely watching movies is how movie viewers have been educated over the years to figure out what is happening in a story. Viewers are shown what has been determined by producers to be relevant to the story in the scene action of the actors, set and events. Of course this also includes indications of time frames, foreshadowing of later events, suspense, drama, character building, etc. Movie watchers are, to a great extent, completely unaware of how much work they are doing to construct the plot, events and characters as a story unfolds - and good storytelling never disturbs the illusion of how a viewer must continue to be tracking these elements to make sense of the illusion that is being created as an experience.

But how to put an ability to observe and analyze into becoming a new invention? Comparing to reveal differences is my favorite means. Then the differences can be used as a model or form, plugging in the different content from an unrelated area that then becomes related.

Recipes are an obvious example of this. You can take the form of a casserole, for instance - which is some sort of grain or starch in a container that is baked, containing some sort of vegetable or meat and a type of topping. Now you can take a genre of food, such as Lasagna which is a baked dish - and switch the contents to another country's food style - and you can make a Mexican food casserole instead of an Italian one and have an original combination that wasn't obviously apparent.

To apply this idea to music and screenwriting, there's a fascinating parallel that imagines a piece of music as if it were a story. This suggested to me how musicians could be playing roles in carrying out what this story will become using their ability to improvise. If you'd like to see the result of this invention that was inspired by this parallel thinking of marrying the genre of screenwriting to musical performance, check out the unique advantages of playing with the arrangement and instrumentation of a musical piece as if it were a story.

http://www.franis.org/out4improv/

Any invention takes a bit of investment to wrap your mind around, and this one is no different. It's unpredictable what happens when you take one genre and use it to inspire unique characteristics in another arena. It often creates a synergy type combination, that is often useful for more functions than could be originally expected. Using and playing with a unique combination of genres will make these characteristics apparent. Projects need to be "born" and brought to maturity by figuring out what they are good for. Any baby is lots of trouble and not really good for much of anything until it grows up into a person who can do stuff - ideas are similar.

In this case, what started out as a convenient way to combine the differing abilities and involvement level of a large group of performers turned out to have other uses. As I used this newly invented system to describe existing characteristics of musical styles that already existed to see if it was relevant to them, I realized it could be used as a way to invent a completely new musical style that could be infinitely varied. It can also be used for one person to compose arrangements of a performance piece...as a way for a music teacher to have all of their students to improvise together, as a way to discuss musical arrangement in general...how to give form to generalized "jamming" among musicians who do not know each others songs. Possibly it could be crafted into a composer's game with some programming - but I would think that the experience of making music together with other people would be it's most interesting and fun application. Of course, that means you would need a "troupe" of people who played music on instruments or performed and were interested in playing together with each other, which may be a unique situation to find in this day of virtual reality.

For instance, a business application of such descriptive function in common with the A-Game I invented is apparent in the "music genome" of Pandora.com. Musicians working with Pandora listen to music and describe the characteristics of common factors such as instrumentation, style, use of harmony and rhythm and these descriptions are correlated to other "similar" songs. These commonalities are now organized into a database, so now any user of the site can specify a type of music they like and a whole radio station is generated from these descriptions, containing songs that the user would not normally become exposed to knowing about.

I'd love to know how you think the field of screenwriting could be applied to your favorite project.

Gearing Up For Window Painting

Got my markers and paint smearing equipment together. Now I'm on a mission to mess up people's windows for this year's holiday season. Yesterday did a really fun Santa on a bike for the Fairfax Cyclery. The guy who owned the store had the novel idea of trying to get more in trade for the cost of his window. So far, nobody has taken the bite, but he got a really nice Santa on the BMX. My apprentice Denise held up the bike while I drew it on the window.

Tomorrow on Friday I'll be taking her to the biggest job I do - the Marina shopping center in San Mateo. There are all kinds of businesses there - mostly small "Mom & Pop" stores such as a bakery, liquor, pharmacy, restaurants and even a barbershop. The place has a decidedly Asian theme, which makes for great lunch breaks. We'll have a great time, and we may even take a few more pictures of how the time got spent that we'll post here.

The hardest job on my plate these days seems to be cleaning out my RV. Unfortunately, somehow I aquired a pet rat who took up residence in the RV while I was gone. The challenge of finding a spot to schlep the stuff in the RV to is being solved by two friends of mine who have given me a place to stay. Thanks Martine and Gino!

Seeing Order in Chaos

We notice order by giving attention to chaos, without leaving it — by staying with it, laying with it, as long as it takes, until a new order emerges. Regina Bensch-Coe

Yes, seems that creativity is involved, and also patience. As an example of this, I'm reminded of the my childhood fascination with listening to a repeating skip in an old recording of my mother's voice on a phonograph record as it had run out at the end. She had been saying a partial phrase that was repeated by the loop. As I listened, my ear transferred the emphasis to another syllable in the phrase, and suddenly, I could hear her saying a completely different meaning. The most amazing thing was, that as I transferred my attention to a different sound in the sequence, it changed again - and even a third time! Later I read something about this phenomena, (which I'm sure has a term but I do not remember what it had been named. Anybody here know what that's called?) Evidently, the younger a person is, the more variations of meaning they can hear in the tape loop of a human voice.

Once had some roommates who encouraged many of their musical cohorts to come over every day and play at our house. This led me one day to stop as I came out of the bathroom. There, and only there, I could hear the sound of one person practicing in the bedroom equally with the other two people who were playing in the front room. I stood there for quite a long time listening for the commonalities between the two entirely different things going on, fascinated by my knowledge that they couldn't hear each other and yet I could hear their "accidental" correlations. So, in my case the "how" was to notice that something interesting could be going on.

I'm also reminded how a movie scene will pick and choose what scenes are relevant to the storyline. There are many running "storylines" in my long term curiousity about what may happen far apart time time, but are related as I regard their inter-relatedness over very long periods of time. So, I would also say that in making order out of chaos, sometimes you must compensate for time of arrival for making these seemingly unrelated correlations of order from what appears to be chaotic happenstance.

There must be other factors too... any thoughts?

Musical Emotions

I'm thinking about using the linguistics of music to reveal the assumptions of how you can put meaning into words. So much of what can be said become fused with the words you use to say it with. Music lets pure emotions be freed from whatever words that were used to describe feelings. The emotional experiences that music brings out can reveal how someone can use the sequences of what is presented for a certain emotional effect. Emotional experiences are filled with meaning only hinted at by words.

In a sense, it's a little like learning the skills for making a movie/a story affect people emotionally. In words, how can you present a sequence of what you choose to talk about, and how you talk about it to have certain emotional effects that you'd like the meaning to carry?

It's not something many people would imagine, but there are some people who already have made the connection that music is really another language, with its own syntax, etc. It helps to know how to play any musical instrument. Just like it helps to know two languages well so you can compare them to reveal their differences.

My instrument designer friend Bill Wesley says that everyone agrees on the qualities of music, so that's why he agrees that music is a language. People differ widely on whether they want to experience any particular quality or not that music can provide. There are many people who are very arrogant of which music is "real music." He says they are really only opinionated about whether they want to feel a certain way or not.

Once you start looking for these qualities of music, then you can begin to notice what they have in common with the way people use language.

Timing, Direction, Sequence & Quality

I've always had the ability to observe. At 16, I was invited into a inventor's problem solving 'club' after I untangled a fisherman's line at Sunset Cliffs in the dark. I carefully observed and then pulled one thread and having the whole mess come apart. My function in that inventor's group was they used me to figure out how to present and explain what they were inventing by answering some of my questions.

From that experience, and others, I realized that articulating properties and describing qualities is the stuff that you want to do when you're problem solving. Too often our assumptions are clumped up into concepts or conclusions that we don't remember ever deciding on. It can be tricky to extract the original observations that led to the assumptions, especially if they were accepted from someone else's conclusion in the distant past. It's tricky to be so caught up in the sequences you followed that you can't abstract or simplify them. Or you can't go in the other direction to analyse and break apart to discover or describe the crucial factors and say what they mean for other people.

Of course, the more flexible you are at discovering what you are leaving out, the more you don't need those other people who are good at other strategies to fill in where you are weak by using your innate assumptions. However, a group of people are invaluable for this reason, because there seems to be always something valuable that you didn't think of yourself. That's also why I love dialogue.

Suspension functions as a precursor to analysis for me and that's why it's so often valuable. Suspension is a sort of subtraction process where I wipe the slate of my mind clean and act "As If" I'm starting over, without some level of my conclusions about results. I imagine suspension as sort of an onion, where I can undo ever more complex levels of assumptions as far down as I want to go. Often it's not useful to start all the way back at square one - I usually need some level of functional assumption to be practical.

Sometimes I use a stepping stone to generate results in problem solving - some sort of way to break up my preconceptions and loosen up my attachment to gaining results - and then put the results together. For instance I find that reversing sequences is strange enough to get me to think about something differently enough. Essentially to mix up my thinking, I often would experiment with what I consider to be direction, qualities, sequences, timing of whatever I was dealing with.

In service of teaching Alexander Technique, I've made up those four categories that are useful for describing observations and I'm often struck with how they can be broadly applied as I so often do.

In AT we're dealing with observing motion - and as the teacher I would try and get someone to use them in a sentence as they described their own motion. (They can be used in any order)

• Qualities, (after describing them, what sort of value of quality do we prefer to apply and why prefer it? This is a sort of making of a hypothesis or question that helps us to have something to pay attention to when it changes.)
  
• Direction, (once we describe where we are, where do we want to go or what to do? Essentially, this helps to describe purposes or relative location.)

• Sequence, (how does priorty-making influence relative value, and how can grouping concepts influence results? This involves suspending expected results and crafting how the act of reasoning, constructing or adding or subtracting influences results.)

• Timing (after we've experimented some, spotting crucial factors that are valuable to pay attention to one after the other. These are our functionally bright ideas and when exactly to use them.)

Anyway, I love creative thinking and articulating how it can work easier. I imagine that the world could also benefit from some articulation of plain old functional thinking also.