Maybe not hugely creative but necessary knowledge anyway. And with the immininent departure of our resident command-line guru, it’s sort of a self-preservation measure too. Should know it anyway though…
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OK, so maybe that doesn’t seem so very creative, but anything that helps me get the work I need to done is a good thing. And then I wrote about it (tried to blog it but Blogger crashed. What a surprise) which is both creative and helpful to others who may be struggling.
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I’m still exploring the new box set I bought last week – well, with 22 CDs, odds are I’ll be exploring it for a good long while to come! – and today I listened again to the disc of Poulenc and Britten songs (composers accompanying), and had my first listen to the Khachaturian disc (composer conducting), which has the Violin Concerto on it. I heard this piece on the radio the other day and was so taken by it that I had to switch it over from clock-radio to real radio to read the track info – so I was very glad to find I already had a recording of it. I’ve also been reacquainting myself with Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird which I have loved ever since I first heard it sung by Gerald English at a composer conference in Melbourne back when I was at uni. It’s a really intriguing work, and relevant to me especially now because of the Whitman songs being similarly fragmentary and miniature.
I’ve also listened to an incredible piano piece – most definitely NOT miniature – by Carolyn Yarnell, called The Same Sky – you can hear it from a link in about the 6th paragraph down in Kyle Gann’s post ‘Aiming My File Cabinets into the Right Student’s Ears’. I’d link to it directly, except that Gann’s post also includes a chunk of very beautiful and daunting-looking score, which is worth seeing. And also because if you don’t know Gann’s work, you should get to his site and have a listen. I highly recommend, in particular, Custer and Sitting Bull, which truly shows how beautiful and emotive microtonal music can be.
And to celebrate djeli’s safe arrival home from the snow, I cooked another new recipe from my big Greek cookbook – ‘Drunken Pork’ – fantastically delicious and easy. Will have to pull this one out for guests sometime, I think!
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For consideration for the Borealis Festival in Norway in March – they wanted solo pieces of less than a minute long, and as I almost seem to specialise in the miniature, it wasn’t too hard to find something – even though I only found the call at about 10pm and the deadline was today. Thank heavens for email submission! So I’ve sent Egg the Eighth (one of the 2 by 4 two-part inventions) and the second Whitman song off to them – with the Festival so soon, I guess I won’t have long to wait to see if they like them!
A bonus with this is that I get to strike another thing off my 2010 goals list. Woot!
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on creative types’ daily routines – writers, painters, composers, etc. – some interesting stories there: http://dailyroutines.typepad.com/daily_routines/
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This may not sound like much, but I’m not really a JS guru, but I’m working with a bunch of them at the moment, so when I work something out and save a nanosecond with a code streamline, I think I ought to note it down.
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It was driving me mad, constantly typing in new bits of text to convert one site’s URL into another’s – so I wrote a bit of code to do it for me!
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Made a hefty start on the first forms for the super-secret web project djeli and I are working on. Once the form was done, I pulled out my jQuery reference and tinkered until I had a field that auto-filled in as you fill in another field and which cuts off the auto-fill once you edit it so it doesn’t match any more. A little complicated to explain, but huge fun to get working, and will be useful, I think.
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Alas, yes. For many I suspect this wouldn’t count as creative activity, however it was all a learning experience, and quite aside from learning what I want in an accounting programme (multiple currency support, budgeting, loan tracking, import of bank statements and export of proper accountant reports), I learnt a lot about website design for software and the sorts of first impressions that totally put me off. Very valuable experience for the super-secret project, I suspect!
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