Love Letters to Inanimate Objects

Day 5: Process notes, love and lightness

30 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment

by Liz Argall in Process

I’ve been brainstorming like a maniac and over the past few days have written a few thousand words about different objects of love. I’m very close to finishing a few of them, but they’re not quite there yet. I promise you, you’ll have many things that are not cutlery.

I didn’t make as much progress as I wanted to today, in part because I was part of the Benefictions reading.  And it rocked! Thanks so much to everyone who came out to see us. We packed the place out and raised money for disaster relief. Hooray! I just got home and am desperately typing something – look ma! I did stuff, I wrote words today, I thought about things, I read stories, I made good progress on stuffs and helped raise money for charity.

Discoveries 2 – love and lightness

Love really is contagious. Working on this project infuses me with so much love. It has been excellent on many levels. An unexpected thing of awesomeness is that I feel more connected to folks back in Australia than I have in a while.

Love is a giddy thing. It is so energizing and I think an under explored way of beating writers block. When approaching a lump of stuff and feeling uninspired it is liberating to think “How can I make this a celebration of this? How can I make something dynamically an expression of love? What makes this thing strange so that I can find a love that is unique and specific.”  This does not mean some artificial kitchery, if anything (for me, in this moment) it means a more openness to the complexity of things. Some of the stuff (and who knows how much will survive my editing knife) is so much more assertive and opinionated because I’m feeling fueled by this love

Italo Calvino writes about delight and lightness in his Six Memos for the Millenium and I think, through this write-a-thon. It’s something I think of often. I have felt heavy of late and it is good to have voice and feel lightness in my bones again.

Italo Calvino’s Memo 1 – Lightness (And you know, I’ve been thinking of Calvino and only just realized that I’m reading another mediation on the weight of things in Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being)

But most of all I wanted to write and say, people are seriously awesome. Seriously seriously amazing. I may have to write love letters to people next year!

Day 4: Love Song to a Fork

29 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment

by Liz Argall in Process

The second fork in the road.

Epilogue

This song was inspired by an article on the Smithsonian website. Right now, June 24 2011, wikipedia indicates that there may be significant inaccuracies in this article. I have not done further research.

Process Afterword

I am not a skilled music editing-type person. This is clear to me and possibly clear to you if you’ve listened to the recording above. I’m starting to understand how different bits of recording music work, although much of it is still completely baffling. There do seem to be a lot of mechanisms to encourage you to spend money very swiftly, but I am resisting them all.

Fork 1004 AD is the second song I recorded on my phone, but without guitar there were fewer things to fiddle with and worry about. The strangeness in the outro is because I needed to turn up the volume a lot to hear my words, and then had to knock the top and the bottom of the sound out to get rid of the horrible static. Goes to show a good original recording is the most important thing and fixing it in edits is not so much fun.

Process:

• e-mailed iRig recording on phone to self (next time I record I might try the vocalive app instead. Vocalive had too many knobs and scared me, so I figured for the first time record straight forward and play with levels later. I don’t know if this was foolish)
• downloaded and installed Reaper (for the Phone Song I think I’ll try Audacity now that I know what I like and don’t like about Reaper)
• tried to open file in Reaper, but Reaper cannot read .m4a files
• tried various strange conversion methods, all of which were time consuming, frustrating or just didn’t work
• briefly considered using mynah (part of aviary). I also explored uploading files to stormcloud
• got frustrated by limited options and returned to original Reaver plan if only I could translate these .m4a files
• asked the internet
• internet to the rescue with a very easy, if somewhat obscure, option
• fiddled around with Reaper trying to get it to do stuff. Succeeded in cutting flabby silences and did my best to remove static cack
• tried to export as mp3
• downloaded LAME project library file so that I could actually export as mp3
• failed to install downloaded library file… possibly because I do not have permissions
• saved song as .wav file
• file is huge and too big to upload
• opened .wav in itunes, saved as mp3
• uploaded to my other website that I can actually host mp3s on so that I can link to here
• wrote blog post
• promised myself I’d do better next time, but at least I’m learning.

The day flees before me and I want to finish off some of my other love letters. My sponsors get a copy of the love letter first, so I need to send stuff out so I can put stuff up!

Day 2: Terror, Telephones and Forks

27 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment

by Liz Argall in Process

I feel this happy - possibly this insane

I finally did it <- the last thing I recorded on this fateful day

Clearly the extra, previously unspoken, theme of this six week project is do creative things that terrify me. Today was busy with many things, exploding with busyness after a busy day yesterday (there’s a reason why my Day 1 post squeaked in at midnight).

Today’s the kind of day where I have eaten a little bit of meat and half a ginger cookie and coffee (twice), because it just hasn’t stopped. And so, in a day that couldn’t fit it all in I had a brief respite at 1pm and so I wrote on facebook:

“Am contemplating walking down to the local Guitar shop to find something to plug into my mac so I can record stuff without whirr of the hard drive’s fan. Part of me is thinking, but money! Part of me is thinking your pie hole has no right to complain if you’ve eaten at a restaurant this month.”

After some pleasant back and forth I suddenly and violently wrote on twitter and facebook:

“This afternoon I’m going to attempt to record a song at Inner Chapters Bookstore & Cafe and on Thursday I’ll be there doing a reading as part of BeneFictions for Earthquake Relief ”

There were some nice responses to that too.

Then I thought, I can’t do that. Recording terrifies me, I have no equipment, no leads, no microphones, nothing. What? What? What? And then I listened to some Molly Lewis when I was adding secret cookies to my sponsor list and I thought what? What? What the hell am I doing when there are so many sensational performers already on the tubies. What?

But Jen had paid $20 to hear my song sometime. And I had said over social media that I would record, not just any time, but today. I walked to the guitar store in a daze – feeling and looking brain damaged. I gazed hollowly at the guys and discussed options – my utter terror exuding from every pore. They told me some things. Not too many things, but enough things. I staggered out, shuffling my feet and scratching my head as I said, I don’t know, I have to think, I need coffee… I… yes… I have… the things… maybe?

I wandered out of the store and perused the internet while e-mailing writers to tell them awesome people had sent them money. Then I researched some more, felt terror ebb and flow through my body. “But I’m crap” “But people I love back in Australia want my songs.” “But…” “But…” And slowly I built my resolve through the combined weight of awesome people I had made a promise to, internet research into the tec and my own internal “Seriously Liz, build a bridge, get over it. Feel the fear, move through it. You just have to do this. And if you are crap, well that’s crap you have to move through to get better, so better start now.”

I think the guys were quite surprised when I returned to the store. I purchased a shiny new iRig Mic and walked with a more confident stride (guitar in hand) to Inner Chapters to figure out how to record on this mysterious device.

I spent quite a while wrestling with the tech, getting software on my iPhone (step 1: being finally registering my phone with iTunes!).

And then… then I recorded stuff… and I don’t think it is the most awful crap you have ever heard. Big thank you to Kristina, owner of Inner Chapters (who also provided the mic stand) and Nicole Feldl who provided audience. Both were invaluable. It felt good, really good.

Then I staggered home, got very confused by editing things. Hastily edited a little bit of audio, got frustrated and confused by this website, editing software, threw myself onto Aviary in case it was a quick solution, mucked it up a few times, uploaded audio onto my own website while desperately writing this blog post and now… now… maybe I can eat… pant pant… and soon I hope to master some other tech, listen properly to what I recorded and will have more to share.

I haven’t made progress on my novel today, sorry about that, but I will endeavor to do better tomorrow. Pressing publish now, apologies for typos but I must put an end to this day!

I finally did it – long