/ Music

Music You May Have Missed – dEUS

I have a lot of music and I love sharing new and interesting music with people, so I’m going to start a series that will post on the first of every month called “Music You May Have Missed.” Most of the time I’ll showcase one band each month and will provide links and samples as well as give some of my reactions to songs or albums. Hopefully you’ll discover some music that makes you smile, or think, or cry, or simply rock out.

Enjoy.

~~~

dEUS

Official Sites: Band Site, MySpace, YouTube, Last.fm.

Current Band Members: Tom Barman – Vocals / Guitar, Klaas Janzoons – Violin / Keyboards, Stéphane Misseghers – Drums / Vocals, Mauro Pawlowski – Guitar / Vocals, Alan Gevaert – Bass Guitar / Vocals

Most recent album release: Vantage Point

Lyric of note: She walked into my life

The ridiculous and sublime

Beneath the lowered sky

She fell in love

And passed it on to me


I threw it all away

Like a record that you don’t play

And all the hurt i saved

Well, time had come

I passed it on to her

(“Bad Timing” from Pocket Revolution)


I first came across dEUS when I picked up In a Bar, Under the Sea from a used cd store. This was probably about 10 years ago. I had never heard of them, but liked the cover:

From the first track, the 46 second long “I Don’t Mind Whatever Happens” and the schiziod and hyper, “Fell Off the Floor, Man,” I knew I’d found a band that was on a different wavelength than most:


In a Bar, Under the Sea is probably one of dEUS’ most eclectic albums, and if there is a central theme to the album, it’s a kind of postmodern bricolage of styles and images. Playful and oddly angled, this was an album I liked on an intellectual level, and I appreciated what the band was doing musically, but the album didn’t get under my skin or draw me back again and again. I would occasionally listen to it, enjoy it, and then forget about it for a while.

Then, while living in NYC, I read an article in Time Out and became interested in the band’s more current work. Picking up Pocket Revolution I was soon hooked by the music and lyrics in ways that In a Bar . . . hadn’t quite managed. The tone of the album is captured in the first track, “Bad Timing,” that begins moody, with hypnotic, distant electric guitars and a low, insistent bass line that support the melancholy vocals. As the song progresses, however, everything winds tighter and tighter inward until it explodes in a wash of distortion that surrounds you and brings out the anger that is always implicit within melancholy. While the album has some quiet moments, (namely, “Include Me Out”) the songs that really struck me are rockers like “If You Don’t Get What You Want” and the slow-burn fuse of “Pocket Revolution” that erupts into a desperate gospel-esque chorus backed by a wall of distorted guitars, and the rock-funk of “Nightshopping.”




(The gospel elements aren’t in this video, you’ll have to listen to the album version to hear them.)

At the same time, I also got the earlier album, Worst Case Scenario, which came out in 1994. Less coherent than Pocket Revolution, but not quite as all-over-the-place as In a Bar . . ., it opens with “Suds and Soda,” a song that combines a wall of sound with lyrics and style that remind me of King Missile’s work, with a little early Flaming Lips thrown in as well.

This is then followed by the funky, bass-driven “W.C.S. (First Draft)” that plays jazz sensibilities and a cool, almost spoken delivery against outbreaks of punk noise and energy. Trust me, it works better than you might think. In fact, the album as a whole intertwines a laid-back and cool approach with eruptions of noise and distorted instruments and voices. The lyrics manage to be ironic without being self-involved and if you like your rock on the loud and sometimes chaotic side, this is definitely an album you will enjoy.

Last March, the band released Vantage Point. Quieter than some of their previous album, this is an album that doesn’t grab my attention as insistently as Worst Case Scenario or Pocket Revolution. The band presents a smoother, less experimental sound, with fewer odd angles and jagged edges that I have come to both expect and enjoy. Still, they offer some solid rock songs with “When She Comes Down,” “Is a Robot,” and “Oh Your God.” This last is one of my favorites because you need to have a really good rock song to support lyrics like:

“In the name of something bigger / Your god can only snigger / And the sight of all this rigour / With sex the only trigger / For love… or was it the other way round?”

On the page, these words look inane, but in the song, they carry a power that is surprising and genuine. Overall, however, the album is more introspective than previous ones. “Eternal Woman” is almost a ballad, an invocation of the search for beauty while “Slow” meditates on the nature of time and perception:

Already, as I listen closer to Vantage Point for the purposes of this post, I’m finding levels and depths that were not apparent on my first couple of listens. I’d still recommend Pocket Revolution and Worst Case Scenario to anyone who likes their music on the jarring side of things, but if you don’t like those, give Vantage Point a try. You can listen to all of the albums I’ve talked about on Last.fm (as well as dEUS’ album The Ideal Crash, which I don’t have, but am currently listening to for the first time as I write this sentence).

Ultimately, dEUS provide a unique combination of hard-rocking sensibilities with an eclectic mixture of musical styles in support of lyrics that range from ironic and post-modern, to smart and subtle, and with some poetry thrown into the mix as well. Plus, ya know, they totally rock.

Let me know what you think.

/ Films

Neat Videos to Watch

Sharing some fun videos. Enjoy!

An amazing film that creates an entire world, offers compelling characters, and scary action scenes and does it in a few minutes and with no dialogue:

9 Nine Shane Acker Short Animation
by FrFKmeron

A lovely rendition of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” on a ukelele:
If you never watched Ze Frank’s daily videocast when it was on, you missed out on something special. This is the first I’ve seen of him as an actor in a quirky and low-budget project that was put together during the Writer’s strike last year. While not in development, the project has some tantalizing elements that make me hope for a future incarnation:
The Remnants from John August on Vimeo.

A brief interview with one of my favorite writers. There are two parts, check out MIT TechTV’s site for the second half:

And finally, the trailer for Coraline, based on Neil Gaiman’s book. This looks beautiful and scary and so much fun:

/ Ruminations

Robot Sex (and other Signs of the Future)

200901132009.jpg I don’t know about you, but I am starting to feel like we are living in the future. Maybe it’s my age (40 years is stalking me like a lion stalking a goat), or maybe it’s because 2010 just seemed so far away and futurey when I was a child, but 2010 signifies the future to me, even though it’s less than a year away. Here are some links that prove the future has just about caught up with us.

Carbon Nanotubes

How would you like to wear your Facebook connection on your skin, or have a tattoo that moves and changes color? “E-skin” is on the way and how cool is that? Check out this article on IO9 about research into transparent circuits. (Link)

Also from IO9:

A group of researchers in France and Italy have published a paper today in Nature Nanotechnology that carbon nanotubes can act as neural workarounds in the brain, forming tight contacts with the already-existing nerve cells and conducting electricity between them exactly the way neurons do with each other. (Link)

True, nanotechnology lags far behind our imagination of what such technology might someday do, but stories like these show that we are definitely making progress toward a world where we build ourselves and our materials in ways radically different than what we have ever known.

The End is Nigh

Of course, one of the signs that the future is upon us is the end of civilization as we know it, so we may not reach our nanotech potential if the sun knocks out our electrical systems and sends the world spiraling back into the (literal) dark ages. Even our iPhones will be useless. *shudder* (Link)

Bodies Fabricated & Altered

This is a still from a new animated movie called Metropia that looks amazing. You can see a gallery of stills at Twitch. The bodies in the movie, while not proportioned the same as a “natural” body, are uncannily real. How soon will we have avatars that are visually indistinguishable from life? Based on this work, not very long at all.

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The trope of body modification has a long history in science fiction literature and while we aren’t quite at the level of designing our skin to change color with our moods, or interfacing with computers directly, or altering our bodies to survive environments without protection (like the deep sea or extreme cold or the vacuum of space), the body mod sub-culture is certainly pushes the boundaries of what we consider “human.” The video might actually be disturbing to some, but I think it’s fascinating and a clear sign that we are living in a future that allows us to sculpt our bodies in interesting ways.


Replicators

How cool was replicator technology in Star Trek? Nearly as cool as transporter technology. We may not be able to order an Earl Grey tea alongside Jean Luc Picard quite yet, but the beginnings of being able to simply fabricate objects instead of buying them. Need a coffee table—which I happen to need at the moment—just plug in a pre-loaded design or modify it to your specifications on your computer, send it to your in-house, 3-d printer and you’ve got yourself a piece of furniture to set you feet up on and write blog posts. Boing Boing links to a talk given at the Chaos Computer Congress that will get you up to speed on where we are and where we are heading with this technology. (Link)

Robot Sex

Then there is robot sex. Need I say more? (Link)

~~~

Those are just a few instances that, when I came across them, I said to myself, “Self, the future is now.” Have you found something that strikes you as utterly futuristic but immanently now? Drop a comment to share with the class.

/ Humor

Links for Edifiyin’ & Intelligensifyin’

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This is an awesome archive of old films. Unfortunately they don’t allow for embedding, but check out the old time erotica, or a science fiction short from 1909 , or watch cowboys take Broadway by storm in one of John Ford’s earliest movies, or (cause you know you want to) check out some more old time erotica.


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The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin has a fabulous archive of Mike Wallace interviews. The level of intelligence on display and the depth of the conversation makes you really appreciate just how smart tv used to be. Some of my favorites include his interview with Frank Lloyd Wright, Salvador Dali, and the stripper Lili St. Cyr. Ex-smoker’s beware, however, he smokes the whole show through!

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I have a total crush on Sarah Haskins from Current TV’s infoMania. You should go there and watch all her videos. But just to get you started, here’s her take on Disney Princesses.




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You likes your Johnny Cash? You likes your Bob Dylan? Aquarium Drunkard has a terrific set of music that finds Cash & Dylan playing together. Two great tastes that taste great together.

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And finally, one of my favorite authors ever has a really fun story that combines HP Lovecraft’s Cthullu mythos with the Sherlock Holmes characters . . . and the audio version, read by Gaiman himself, is FREE! I should warn you though, that once you hear Gaiman reading his own work, you are going to want to hear more. In addition to being a great writer, he is a wonderful reader of stories. I have several of his books as Audiobooks and he’s nearly spoiled me when it comes to audio fiction.

/ Books

And the moon is always gibbous


Lovecraft3.jpgI’ve been reading a bunch of HP Lovecraft’s stories recently, plowing my way through the second of three Omnibus collections but out by Grafton Books in the mid-80s. For teen boys of a certain type—namely geeks those into science fiction and horror—Lovecraft is a name to conjure by. There is something about Lovecraft’s writing that strikes a chord, despite his weaknesses as a writer, and his weaknesses are plentiful. His stories aren’t even particularly horrific. In fact, he often fails to describe exactly what most teenaged boys would want to read: the horrific visions of twisted bodies and vile, disgusting monsters that populate his fiction. More often than not, his narrators will simply state “it was too horrific for words” or “it was beyond description” or something else of that nature. There is a sameness to the structure of many of his stories: Character gets lost in a distant region and/or space slightly askew to our world and then finds himself in a place that is more ancient than history and encounters any number of powerful, to vile to describe gods/demons/presences and either dies or returns with the sure knowledge that there is something beyond our ken, something powerful and dangerous and implacable, but he also knows that nobody will believe him. Time and again, Lovecraft uses slight variations on this structure so that, by the second page of the story, you already know the general outline of what will happen. This isn’t always the case, however, but when he does stray from this template, he quite often writes about a man who finds himself in another, often beautiful world, but loses his connection to that world for one reason or another.

Actually, two of my favorite stories thus far fall roughly into that second pattern. The White Ship and Celaphais both concern characters who long to leave this world and journey/return to a fantastic and enchanting land of unspeakable beauty. Not much happens in these stories beyond the description of various lands, but both end with a sense of melancholy that strikes deep and true to the heart.

Upon reflection, I think that an appeal of Lovecraft lies in the fact that his stories are always about something that is just under the surface or just out of sight or just around the corner from our reality. In a lot of these stories, the true horror doesn’t lie in what that something is, but that the characters who catch a glimpse of this larger world will not be believed. Nobody will take these narrators seriously. Each one has this great and terrific secret to share, an insight into the true nature of the world and yet they are powerless and impotent. They are unable to do anything but give an ignored account of the truth. I don’t know about you, but I remember my teen years as being a time when I believed that nobody had ever felt feelings so deep as myself, or understood the true meaning of love and pain with the subtlety and despair that I experienced. All my bad poetry, all my bad song lyrics were about sharing the fact that I had the true knowledge and if only people would listen to me, really and truly listen, they would understand what was real and true in this world.

Alternatively, I would also feel, as a boy-in-the-process-of-awkwardly-becoming-a-man, that as Lovecraft puts it in his story “Arthur Jermyn:”

“Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemonical hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.”

You could replace the word “life” with adolescence and I think you’d have an adequate description of a lot of people’s teenage years.

I’m certainly not saying that the pleasures of Lovecraft only appeal to adolescents, but I think being introduced to his work as an adolescent can help you see past his technical weaknesses and into the heart of his horror.

Below is YouTube version of the first part of a BBC radio series about HP Lovecraft. I found it after I had written the bulk of this entry and was amused to hear the narrator basically restating my ideas about adolescence in a much more pithy and thoughtful manner. Give it a listen. There are some really great authors talking about Lovecraft’s work in much more intelligent way than I have. If you have any thoughts on Lovecraft or favorite stories, drop me a comment, I’d love to talk more about his work with other fans. You can also find most of his stories online at either Feedbooks or Wikisource.



/ Academia

Wandering the Tower – An Academic Romance, Part 2

(Link to Part 1)

Today is grey and rainy. I’m up early and listening to Pandora.com’s David Sylvian radio station (thanks to John for the recommendation of Sylvian’s work) and wondering where I should start this next entry regarding my romance with academia and grad schools. Throughout the week, I’ve started and discarded a number of openings. I planned on writing this while at work because I had next to nothing to do at my temp job and spent most of each day trying to keep myself from banging my head against the desk just to break the boredom. I found, however, that I couldn’t really concentrate enough in that environment to be productive, so I spent each day compulsively reading the rss feeds from sites like Daily Kos, Pandagon, Feministing, IO9, BoingBoing and about a dozen other, checking my mail every few minutes to see if someone, anyone had written, and contemplating just what the hell was I doing in a corporate office answering phones and making copies.

So I sit here, a cup of tea, the quiet sound of rain and still I wonder how best to talk about my complex feelings toward grad school and I keep coming back to a larger issue that, perhaps, has some bearing on the issue at hand: desire.

Desire may be experienced in the present, but it is always for something outside of the moment. Something from the past or the future. Once the object of desire is possessed, then desire ceases (at least for that particular object). Desire can be a healthy and productive driving force in a persons life. Without desire (for the mother’s breast, for love, for sex, for pleasure, for justice, etc.), there’s not much point to the whole human experiment. Yet, in religion after religion, philosophy after philosophy, pop psychology book after pop psychology book, we come face to face with the recognition that too much desire can be, like too much Rick Astley, a bad thing. Hell, if you are even vaguely Freudian (and who isn’t), our Id desires and our super-ego is there to say, “no.” So we struggle, day in and day out, trying to balance desire against either getting lost in the wild woods of our desiring or placing our very souls into the objects of desire and thereby hollowing ourselves. It is this hollowing out that helps feed our materialism these days. We put our souls into HDTVs or Bose speakers, or iPods, or Macbook Pros (damn those new models are sexy!!), or a million other things. We then hope, when we get those things in our life, that we will recognize ourselves and that the hollow feeling will go away.

Sometimes we invest ourselves in drugs or religions or political parties or other people, setting forth a continual cycle of desire and pursuit that never truly satisfies.1 Desire is like, to switch metaphors, oxygen. Too little and we can’t truly live. Too much and the air explodes around us, the flames burning us down to blackened bones. Which brings me to Star Wars (through Uncle Owen & Aunt Beru’s burned skeletons), to Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back when he said of Luke that:

All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things.” (Link)

And so I circle back to myself and the instant recognition I felt upon hearing Yoda’s pronouncement. I knew, even at eleven years old, that Yoda was talking about me. Writer, Actor, Director, College Professor, Writer (once more), Corporate Consultant, Academic (possibly?): all various careers/goals/plans/futures that I have held in my mind at one point or another. The problem lies not in any of these particular goals, but rather that I have been so busy looking to the horizon that I keep stumbling around the various pot-holes and broken sidewalks of my life. It’s rather difficult to make a long journey if you keep tripping every couple of steps because you refuse to look away from the distance—from your desire—to see what’s around you here and now. Most of my life I have squandered2 considerable emotional and intellectual resources just trying to keep my balance because I refused to look more often and more closely at my present surroundings; to invest myself in the now.

No wonder that I struggled with grad school! No wonder that every time I gained some distance from school I wanted to go back. By leaving the tower, I was able to stop tripping over myself in my pursuit of the faraway horizon of desire and could see just what it was that brought me into that ivory tower in the first place: the fact that I love to learn and read and think and write and teach. Because of my “eyes-on-the-horizon” perspective, however, I kept forgetting just how much joy I ought to take in my surroundings. I forgot to recognize the privilege of being in an environment that supports many of the activities that I love; an environment that encourages and challenges me to do them better and better. I saw all of the various challenges of grad school as obstacles because each one raised a bulky shape in front of my vision and broke my view of the horizon; obscured my view of that distant goal, that desired place of “I’m a Tenured Professor Now.”

So, what are you saying, that you should go back to school? Come on, how many times have you gone back and how many times have you left and what’s to say this time will be any different. (That’s an example of the super-ego right there!)

I’m saying, simply, that I need to find a more balanced viewpoint. I’m saying that I want to work on learning how to appreciate the now and to use the horizon more as a reference point rather than an end goal. If pressed, I would say that being in a university setting suits me in ways that other environments don’t and that the tower of academia gives me a sense of community that I haven’t found in other arenas. What last week’s conference reinforced was just how much I enjoyed being around the people who make up academic and university life. Even if I never became a student again in my life, I think it’s important for me to understand why I’ve had such a contentious relationship with an institution that, for all its faults, offers me a great deal of opportunity and joy and community.

  1. None of these observations are particularly new, having been made countless times over the course of our history. It seems that each of us must find our own way into this particular territory and just hope that our particular route may provide a few hints and tips for others. [↩]
  2. Squandered is probably too strong a word if I am going to be fair to myself, but I can’t help feeling that I’ve misspent some of my youth. [↩]
/ Humor

One Depressing Link and Three Good Videos

First up, the depressing news that America, land of the free and home of the brave, ranks 36th among nations for the freedom of the press:

The United States is ranked 36th in the world in terms of press freedom, up from 48th last year, according to a report released Wednesday by Reporters Sans Frontieres. The US is tied with Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cape Verde, South Africa, Spain, and Taiwan in the 36th spot. Iceland, Luxembourg, and Norway are tied for first. Iran, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea are all featured among the ten lowest-ranked countries. [From United States Ranked 36th In The World For Press Freedom]

Now, the good news is that we have moved up in our ranking from 48 last year. Still, the fact that we aren’t even in the top ten is disconcerting.

~~~

On an entirely different note, check out this Tuvan Throat Singing Hip-Hop song video from Ralph Leighton. If you like, check out the Boing Boing post

[From Tuvan Throat-Singing Rap by Ondar, with the voice of Richard Feynman]

~~~

As much as I love Batman way more than I like Superman, and as much as I enjoyed The Dark Night, this is very funny:

And finally, some sense in a sometimes non-sensical world: Have a good weekend.

/ Mental Habits

Entropy is Easy

I waste time. Lots of it. I waste time by surfing the web, making sure I am caught up on the latest status updates on Facebook, reading blogs, watching shows on Hulu, tinkering with my computer’s desktop and settings. If there’s a television around, I am good at wasting time by channel surfing and watching nothing in particular. All in all, given that I’m not working right now and have my days free, I should be making better use of my time than I have been. Significantly better use of my time, damn it!

I have always had a great deal of trouble focusing as a writer when I don’t have my very own space to hole up inside. Even as a child, I used to love taking a large cardboard box and moving all my toys and books inside of it. My mom tells me that when I made a “den” like that I didn’t want to leave it, and that, if left to my own, I probably would have slept inside the box rather than my bed. So yeah, doing the basement living thing and not having my own space doesn’t help.

As much as that might be a valid reason for my lack of focus and productivity, it doesn’t even come close to being a good excuse. Additionally, my proclivity toward procrastination doesn’t disappear when I have my own place, my own “room with a view,” so to speak. I am trying to be more mindful of the ways in which I waste time and attempting to change my habits, especially while sitting at my computer, in order to make better use of my time. The following are a few ideas that I’m trying out or planning on implementing in the near future.

Offloading content to my iPhone

Because I want my computer to become more of a tool rather than a time-waste, I am shifting some of my daily digital consumption to my phone. To start, I’m changing my rss feed reader. While I’ve been using Newsfire (and quite liked it), there is no way to sync it with the iPhone. So last night I switched to NetNewsWire and signed up for the free account on Newsgator. This way, all my rss feeds are synced to my phone. What if I see something in my news feeds while on my phone that I want to blog about or send to someone? The app allows you to “clip” a post or email a post. If you clip it, the next time you open NetNewsReader on your phone, that post will show up in a folder called, oddly enough, “clippings.” Too often I find myself using the mental excuse that reading my news feeds is important and so I should do it whenever I have the slightest mental pause or block regarding what I’m currently working on. I hope that by shifting my news to my iPhone, I won’t give in to the digression of constantly updating news feeds.

Related to this strategy is to make sure that I have subscribed to all of my friend’s rss feeds and then deleting the bookmarks to their blogs on my Safari bookmark bar.

I just opened up Safari and deleted my Facebook bookmark. Sure, accessing it is as simple as typing “facebook” in the address bar, but I also logged out and the next time I log in will not check off the “keep me logged in box.” While I will still have to log in to create notes or post links, I can simply use my phone to keep up on my friends status and postings. The iPhone app is quite good and allows me to perform most of the functions I use on Facebook (status updates, posting photos, sending messages, chatting, reading posts) on a regular basis. Of course it remains relatively easy for me to pull up Facebook and log in and waste time, but I think that by adding some steps into the process I will become more mindful of when and why I’m going to the site. Mindful is good. the iPhone app is quite good and allows me to perform most of the functions I use on Facebook (status updates, posting photos, sending messages, chatting, reading posts) on a regular basis

Desktop Strategies

Really, if you are a Mac user and want to increase your productivity or streamline your workflow, you should take a close look at Quicksilver. I have just set up QS to act as my portal into web searches. So now, instead of opening up Safari and entering search terms, I simply invoke QS, type “goog” hit the tab key twice and enter my search terms. This isn’t about saving massive amounts of time (although it probably shaves a second or two off searching the web), but keeping my focus on task so that when the internet appears before me, it does so for a specific reason. For info on how to set this up, go here.

For several months now, I have been cultivating the habit of closing Mail and iChat in order to mitigate against random distractions. Overall, it has been helpful, but I’ve just decided—literally as I write this sentence—to move Mail off my dock. Seeing as I have Quicksilver, I can open the program just as quickly (if not more so) than using the dock icon, but I find that if I have a momentary pause in my work flow and the Mail icon is right there, staring at me as if to say “open me, open me now to see if you have new mail so you can be reassured that people like you, they really really like you.” Out of sight doesn’t really equal out of mind when it comes to checking email, but maybe it will help me check my mail less obsessively often.

The introduction of “stacks” to OS X Leopard, was a mixed bag for many people. In one of the recent updates however, Apple returned an important function that they left out originally: allowing you to “drill down” through folders to find a file. For example, here is my “In Progress” folder using the grid function: Picture 2.png The problem with this is that if I click on one of my folders, it opens in Finder and I still have to continue searching in order to find the file I want. In list view, however, Picture 1.pngI can navigate easily and directly to the file I want to open. The point here is to get to your task directly.

Of course, Spotlight can also be used to open documents directly,1 and there is no longer the need to keep myself locked to the file folder metaphor. In fact, using Spotlight, you don’t even have to remove your fingers from the keyboard to open up the proper file. I should be using it more often than I do and, starting now, will make a concerted effort to do so.

Using and learning keyboard shortcuts can be a big help. They aren’t just about accomplishing tasks faster than using the mouse or trackpad. As a writer, the less I have to take my fingers off the keys, the less distraction I have from accomplishing my immediate goal. I use keyboard shortcuts more than a lot of other people I know, but not nearly as much I as want. To use them effectively, you have practice and actually take the time to lose focus in order to learn the shortcut. In the short term, trying to learn keyboard shortcuts can be frustrating, but once you know them they can really help keep your focus on the task at hand. Focus is good. There’s a cool widget available for Macs called “xCuts” that provides a comprehensive list of shortcuts that you might find helpful.

Other Ideas

Sit up straight. Really, sit up straight. As I’ve been working on this post, I’ve been sitting at a desk, my feet on the ground and my back straight. My focus has been exponentially greater than the past few weeks when using my laptop on a futon, or reclining in a chair with my feet up.

If you find yourself losing focus, take a few deep breaths. Oxygen is good for the brain.

If you are working at a computer and need a break from the task at hand, take a break from the computer itself. Walk, stretch, read an actual book or magazine, write using a pen and paper, do something to clear your mind and refocus your energies. I don’t think reading your email or checking your blogs will be as effective for refocusing your energies as doing something that doesn’t involve a screen.

Don’t give in to distraction when you have a mental pause or block. Close your eyes, or look out the window or walk around for a moment and then work through the block. Basically, don’t let your mind trick you into relaxing instead of focusing. Otherwise you will find yourself distracted on a regular basis when your mind figures out that it can unilaterally call off your concentration with the proverbial “hey look at that shiny, shiny object/weblink/YouTube video/blogpost/LOL Cat.”

Find ways to separate your computer-as-tool from computer-as-entertainment. One idea that I just had is to set up a profile that I switch into when I know that I will be using my computer strictly for entertainment. This profile would highlight the web as well as games and media on my computer. If I could get into the habit of turning to this profile whenever I wanted to watch a movie or surf the web or basically waste time, then I might be able to be more mindful of the tool/entertainment distinction.

There are as many remedies and strategies for addressing distractions and procrastination as there are distractions and ways to procrastinate. As Merlin Mann points out in his post “Time, Attention, and Creative Work:”

Except inasmuch as it can help move aside barriers to finishing the projects that you claim matter to you, “productivity” is often a sprawling ghetto of well-marketed nonsense for people who really just need a ritalin and a hug. So, for myself, random tips and lists that aren’t anchored to solving a real-world problem for a smart but flawed adult with a mind are dead to me.

The ideas and strategies I have proposed here are definitely geared to my productivity, my creative processes. I hope, however, that some of them might be useful in your own battle against the dissipation of your time and energies. Entropy is easy. Making things is hard. I know that I need every advantage I can get in my struggle for the focus and discipline that I need as an artist and so I will try to follow the ideas I have proposed here, but I would also love to hear some of your own ideas about how to avoid wasting your time.

  1. for documents that you know the name of it is, I think, even better than Quicksilver [↩]