thekenshow's blog

On TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when Faith was asked how she was doing, she would often reply "Five by five". Thanks to Wikipedia, I was able to figure out where that phrase originated and what it meant . By what about five in the context of Mau's Manifesto?

5. Go deep.
The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

Absolutely. The way to go deeper is to be fully present with what is happening in this moment, letting go of time, of past regrets and future anxieties. Then can you begin to merge with the exploration, eroding the boundary between you and the world you are pondering. As Eckhart Tolle put it, "True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found."

Continuing our perambulations through Le Manifeste Inachevé , we arrive at #4:

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).
Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

Ah, yes! Your best so far, Mr. Mau. For all its gifts, a maddening feature of our modern world is a paralyzing craving for control, order and perfection. The misguided belief that accidents are necessarily bad or wrong gives rise to ever more laws and insurance regulations bent on choking off all things unplanned.

How this Relates to Songwriting

There are no recorded fatalities or even minor injuries incurred while writing a song. Check your inner bureaucrat at the door and make havoc and mayhem part of your process. Take time to acknowledge the beauty of your mistakes. Pause to wonder where that gaffe would lead if you followed. Out, damn'd order!

Item 3 of the Incomplete Manifesto doesn't mince any words:

3. Process is more important than outcome.
When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

I know that shifting our focus to what we are doing (the Now) instead of why we are doing it (the Plan) can be tremendously freeing, and can lead to insights and novel approaches. But what if

• Process and outcome are not separate?
• Processes, like outcomes, can be repeated?
• Insisting that process drive outcome is an outcome?

How this Relates to Songwriting

Take time to play, to write, to compose for no reason. In Zen, this state of being is called mushotoku. If you feel a direction emerging, an impulse to take form, honour that direction all the way to its outcome. If not, no big deal.

In which Ken continues to riff on Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto. Today, #2:

2. Forget about good.
Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.

This is excellent because it broadens the definition of growth; I love the phrase, "an exploration of unlit recesses". Here we discover that growth – becoming more open, more encompassing – requires digging in the dirt even if that produces nothing of apparent value. We grow beyond our preconceptions by digging precisely where they shed no light. That bare, creative act is inherently valuable and it contains the seeds of possibility.

Songwriting Zen reposts Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto as a creative suggestion list for songwriting. I havent' looked at Mau's list recently, so I thought it would be interesting to riff briefly on these one at a time:

1. Allow events to change you.
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

There's a subtle bias in use of the word "growth", because we can grow more loving, but we can also grow more bitter. We can grow more tolerant or we can grow more judgmental. These are all forms of growth. We change continuously by simply being alive, but sometimes we grow away from our dreams, like the trees on Long Beach yearning to taste the ocean but bent away from it by a relentless wind.

Willingness and openness are absolutely required to grow into our ideals, though. We must willing to open ever wider, and willing to stay open when we least want to. Gradually we can discover that, as philosopher Ken Wilber puts it, life "hurts more and bothers you less."

I'm listening to a composition produced by Bang on a Can, a contemporary music project based on San Francisco:

The San Francisco Chronicle has called Bang on a Can "the country's most important vehicle for contemporary music" but is has been a long road getting there. That road began in 1987 with a series of conversations among three friends, Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe, about where music was and where it was going.

I confess I don't listen to much contemporary music. It feels great just now, however, a sort of aural yoga stretching my preconceptions about songwriting and peformance. Refreshing!

Jeffrey Lewis considers how solo songwriting can be constricting and why collaborative experiments are not only enjoyable but fruitful:

Giving in to the unpredictable results of flexible, collaborative immersion, and witnessing others do so, gave me a whole new idea of what creativity in songwriting could be.

Sherri Fisher writes about being awake to our life on PPND:

Absent presence, as this phenomenon is sometimes called, is often attributed to things like cell phone use or eating while driving. The suggestion is that we are actually paying attention to other things. But if we are honest with ourselves, we are just as likely to “zone out” when deep in thought as we are when distracted or overwhelmed with competing thoughts.  The upshot is that we are, as William James said, “only half awake.”

I'd add that being lost in thought is also paying attention to other things. Thoughts are things and as the narrator in one of my pzizz naps observes, "There may be thoughts, but you're not obliged to think them."

From MrG comes the ultimate rebuttal to "I can't because...":

Billy Alexander was born with a birth defect on both hands & feet. Many surgeries...8 years of professional organ lessons.

The following are hereby declared null and void:

• I'm too old
• I'm too young
• I don't have time
• I'm not musical
• I 'm not ready
• I need a better guitar (flute, harpsichord, ukelele)
  

Ira Glass on why you'll have to persevere with a creative endeavour even when it's obvious to you that you're producing, uh, crap (via 43Folders):

Fantastic. This is good news for me because it means I don't have to let my crappy blogging stop me. That, however, makes it bad news for for you since it may be years before I finally get the hang of this