I suppose I should be honest about how this whole “Speed Creating” thing started.  Around November, my girlfriend of roughly 4 years and I broke up.  I’m not trying to turn this into one of the closing scenes of My So Called Life, I just want to be honest about my motivations as opposed to my usual  practice of remaining willfully ignorant of the things that make me do the things I do.

One of the chief concerns I was having as the relationship kind of fell apart was “what makes me happy?”.  A heavy set of circumstances had me feeling pretty terrible about myself and “Who I Am”.  I didn’t really have a good sense of how to make myself happy or how to express myself…I was lost and not only was it a weight on my relationship, it was obviously a huge weight on me.  When I racked my brain to find a way out of the bouts of deep depression I often found myself in, I didn’t have any answers, save for this weird hint that “What Makes Me Happy” is “Creating”.  My whole life I’ve been drawn to making things…doesn’t matter what, just making stuff.  In the moments where my head is down and ideas are flowing, I’m not thinking of anything else and I feel great.

So that is what I set myself up to do.  Chase down my tiny thread of creative DNA, wrestle it to the ground and stare at it to see if it really held what I needed.

Around the time of the breakup I saw what Dominic Wilcox had done, and it immediately clicked with me.  There was no doubt that I was going to follow the same regimented path, to turn my potential happiness into a homework assignment.  I picked January, because the winter out here kind of sucks the soul anyway, and it could double as kind of a New Years Resolution deal.

I’m happy to report that this thing has been extremely eye-opening.  You’ll have to forgive the cheesiness here, but I made a pretty big realization during this thing – that I am on this earth to create.  Apologies for the hyperbole, but as a weapon I’m only pulling it out here because I plan on using it.

Up until this point I struggled to find a box for what I love to do…am I a “writer”?  Am I a “photographer”?  I’m not very good at design, but I love doing it, so could I call myself a “designer”?  I’ve had a Flip Cam duct-taped to my hand for the last 3 years…does that make me a “videographer”?  What the hell AM I?  I always considered myself a writer, but only because I do that more than anything, and it gives me the most crisis-laden stressful high of anything I do.  But I’m not all that great at making a career out of it.

I’m straying.  My point is, I learned (in one of many moments of forehead-slappery) that I am not any of those things.  I’m just a guy who likes to “create”. “Creator”, I suppose, but that is too specific and a little weird.  So I’m more comfortable with “Guy Who Lives To Create”…funny…I just tried to type “Guy Who LIKES To Create” just now, but I slipped on the “k” and put a “v” instead….giving me “lives” instead of “likes”…ha…the K and the V are nowhere near each other on the keyboard.  Even I don’t know what I’m thinking.  Wow.

So, that being said, I LIVE to create I guess.  All of those things I listed above – writing, photography, video, music, design – flick the exact same switch.  The same light goes on and off no matter what triggers it – writing about zombies, making music with Ben, taking light painting photos, shooting in the snowy streets with my Holga, cutting and pasting like a madman in Photoshop, sketching, ironing on letters – all of that provides the same simple impulse that I’ve been chasing my whole life.

I’m not saying I found my life’s purpose.  That would be a little much.  I did find though, that I had been neglecting a massive part of what made Me “Me”, and I’m glad to be reconnected to it.

I also learned more about where my skills are.  I learned that I am pretty good at writing zombie stories, that I am able to edit videos that make me laugh, that I am not a very good musician but I love to make noise and record it, that I can almost execute an idea with a photograph, that I have a basic understanding of design and how to make something look halfway decent, and that when pressed (especially when pressed) I can create at the drop of a hat.

Like I’ve always said, none of the stuff I make has any illusions about being “good”, but that’s not the point.  It is all still an expression.  Good or bad, the switch gets flicked.

With the motivation behind this thing out in the open, I hope I can continue to do this stuff.  I want to just keep doing something every day because it really does make me happy.  Don’t worry though, I wont meticulously blog about it.  I’ll just do it because I love doing it.  I highly recommend it to everyone…whatever your talents are, use them every day, and then do some stuff you are less than talented at.

Day 1 – Optronics 4-1 with Oceans in Space  [VIDEO]

Day 2 – The Lightpainting Mini Booth

Day 3 – Allegedly Hilarious T-Shirt

Day 4 – Disposable Camera Photos

Day 5 – Photoshop Vs. Jandek

Day 6 – Photos From the MiniBooth

Day 7 – Desert Lightpaintings

Day 8 – Noise Tape Layout 1

Day 9 – Noise Tape Layout 2 + Download

Day 10 – Noise Tape Layout 3 (Black Metal?)

Day 11 – Optronics 4-2 With Oceans In Space  [VIDEO]

Day 12 – Fuckin “Art”, Brah

Day 13 – Movies That Bugged Me Out as a Kid – Body Parts

Day 14 – Brian Tumors Download

Day 15 – Zombie Fiction – “Cakewalk” Part 1

Day 16 – Recaptured:  L5D – “Advanced Ants Dance”

Day 17 – Lil B @ Highline Ballroom  [VIDEO]

Day 18 – Mirror Lightpainting

Day 19 – The Battle of the Red Dragon  [VIDEO]

Day 20 – Ke$ha Slowed by 800%

Day 21 – Anthony:  A Life (In Three Parts)  [VIDEO]

Day 22 – The Scum Noise Tape Full Download

Day 23 – Cocktail Napkin Zombie Story

Day 24 – Zombie Fiction – “Cakewalk” Part 2

Day 25 – Zombie Fiction – “Untitled” Part 5

Day 26 – Blizzard/Apocalypse Music

Day 27 – Canvas Drawing

Day 28 – Ghostbusters Firehouse Holga Photos

Day 29 – Allegedly Hilarious Lil B T-Shirt

Day 30 – More Holga Photos

Day 31 – Drew is an Art Dealer Now  [VIDEO]

I’ve had this debate a few times with different people.  Well…I don’t know if it could necessarily be called a “debate”.  It usually goes like this… “Why the fuck do you like Lil B?  He’s terrible” and then my answer usually goes something like “Well, I don’t think he is an awesome rapper or anything, but he is definitely an interesting hip hop experiment…”

Or something wanky to that extent.  But really, the dude is an interesting rapper…he makes a video basically every week, he has a fucking ambient rap album, about a thousand myspace profiles with unique songs on each, he’s been wearing the same pair of shitty Vans for about 7 years (which seems minor, but in the footwear-obsessed rap world, I count it as significant), he name checks Antony and the Johnsons as one of his top 5 favorite new MC’s, and his only official release is a self-help book written via email and text message.

Does this always add up to good rap?  No.  But in there, spread thin through all the output is some greatness, and for what its worth, he is not formulaic.  So I think we need him out there pushing the boundaries, no matter how offensive to “rap” sensibility he may be.

Anyway, one of his signature lines is “Hoes on my dick cuz I look like (insert crazy name like “Jesus” “Mel Gibson”, etc.)” and its awesome.  After his first New York show, my friend Jesse and I had a blast running through the streets thinking of new people/things to look like.  “Hoes on my dick cuz I look like MAYONNAISE”  BAHAHAHAHA.  See?  Hilarious.

So the idea hit me to make another (allegedly) hilarious t shirt.  This is a prototype, if you want to buy one, hit me up warnberh at gmail dot com.  I will only charge 25 bucks each.  Custom made!   Hoes on my dick cuz I look like I make iron-on t-shirts!

“Recaptured” is a series of old content – music, recordings, writings, photos I’ve been coming across in random shoeboxes and plastic crates. (Hopefully) by digitizing/writing this stuff up I will keep it from being lost forever.

After that understated and amazing basement performance I wrote about a while back,  my good friend Colin jumped on a plane (or possibly a series of boats) to Norway, to go study music at a school he only called Monkey Island.  The way I understood it was that he would study at this strange place on an island with a bunch of other progressive and young musical freaks.  The school was not easy to get in to, so I also knew he must have been on to something, for them to let him through the door.

While there he had access to a fully equipped studio, a bunch of kids to collaborate with, teachers who helped refine his skills, and in his time there he created this beautiful little album called “Advanced Ants Dance” under the name L5D.  I’m not sure anyone else made anything similar to what he did, but I can say that the album is brilliant, and it should win some award for being an under-appreciated gem.

Its a strange collage of sampled beats, cut and paste melodies, analog warmth, and the first time I ever heard Colin sing.  A few names that I feel comfortable throwing around, for those who like to have something to compare to – Boards of Canada, Radiohead, Mum, even Nine Inch Nails.

Here it is, for you to download, complete with the layout that Joe designed back in 2003…he’ll probably kill me for posting it…sorry Joe, your shit is 10,000x better now.

Download L5D – Advanced Ants Dance

Also, if you like the album, leave some feedback here in the comments…we don’t have enough of that around here.

]]> http://namedropacid.com/2011/01/speed-creating-day-16-recaptured-l5d-advanced-ants-dance/feed/ 2 http://namedropacid.com/2011/01/speed-creating-day-12-art/ http://namedropacid.com/2011/01/speed-creating-day-12-art/#comments Thu, 13 Jan 2011 04:56:20 +0000 C______ http://namedropacid.com/?p=772 Got home today after a particularly shitty day and for some reason I was furious at everything.  I tried to transfer some music to my tape recorder only to find it was broken.  Then I tried to fix my scanner, and I had no luck there either.  It was pretty frustrating and I’m surprised either of those devices made it through the evening alive.

Clearly, technology wasn’t working out for me.  So when I was the most frustrated, I went “analog” and grabbed a pen and some graph paper and started to just draw.  The image I was chasing in my head was similar to the cover of Flying Lotus’ Cosmogramma in that it was just a bunch of lines converging and doing strange things.

It came out as a glorified doodle, and I wont say its any good, nor is it particularly moving, but it did accomplish something.  It calmed me down.  Afterward I felt considerably more relaxed and creative.  So I brewed some coffee (in a stock pot because my coffee maker recently became a cockroach tenement) and dropped my “piece” into it to dye it a little, and then to “mount” my “art” I cut out a piece of a pizza box and wrote “LETS GET REALLY HIGH AND LISTEN TO METAL”  on it.

Boom.  Art.  Done.

So if you are ever stressed and need to clear some fury from your brain, grab a pen and paper or better yet, grab anything that you feel semi-confident “creating” with and don’t think, just start working.  Its better for stress relief than drinking or yelling or throwing a 90’s tape recorder at a wall as hard as you can.

Tonight I went with another tape layout.  Initially, I thought all three tapes would have the same “graph paper” style layout, but once I got started on this one, I realized I wanted something totally different.  Its simple, and really, it was easy to make.  I mean…its Sunday.

This time though, I’ve included a download of a track I made somewhere around 2006…pretty much the last complete thing I’ve recorded on my own.  It will be on the tape for sure.  It was made with a desk fan, a casio keyboard, a DJX keyboard, a Roland SH, a microphone, some trucks passing my house in Eau Claire, and a shit ton of reverb.  Its called “Organ Amp” in the filename…dont know why.

Anyway, enjoy the track while I close my night out watching Aqua Teen and hopefully finishing Crank 2:  High Voltage.  Have you seen that shit?  Amazing.

Download:  Scum – Organ Amp

Jeff is a musician on tour right now in Europe.  I think he is in Holland and Belgium, specifically.  I help him run his website, and as we checked out the venues he was playing online, we came across one that described him as a “Gitarist-Zanger”…in Dutch, I think.  No disrespect to the Dutch, but we found that hilarious (it was the “zanger” that did it) and joked about making tour t-shirts that announced his profession in his audience’s native language.  It would be like me wearing a shirt to this site that says “Half Assed Ideas and Shitty Punctuation Guy”….or something.  Anyway, I’m laughin over here…fuck you.

So I went to the craft store and bought some iron on letters and a t-shirt and put the thing together tonight.  Two of the letters are purple because I ran out of white ones.  I think it looks pretty cool.  I’m going to throw this in a package with some Tom Waits CD’s and mail it to Jeff in Belgium.  Hopefully he laughs as hard as I did.  And hopefully he wears it on stage.

And I think that little period on the bottom left will be the trademark of my clothing line going forward…

So far, this is already a weird experiment, and I’m only three days in.  The ideas I’ve had so far, I’ve kind of already had knocking around in my brain…but I’m looking forward to the nights/days when I have NO clue what I’m going to make.  I’m looking forward to that crisis, but on the other hand I think as I train myself to do this the ideas will start to kind of just come out naturally and at random.

I’ll do my best to document my descent into madness as we go along.

Also, if I come up with something ACTUALLY genius (like the cure for cancer or a real-life Predator Spear) in the course of this thing, I’m putting a blanket “dibs” on these ideas for mass-production.  That shit’s legally binding.

I fucking hate the papyrus font.  Its hideous.  I’ve hated it for years, and I’ve ranted about my hatred into many an uncaring ear.  It’s a Microsoft Word font that looks dated the second you type a letter.  It is supposedly elegant, but using a Microsoft Word default font to define your “elegance” is like putting on one of those “hot body in a bikini” shirts then telling everyone that you actually DO have a hot body.

My first time coming across the font, I was around 16 years old, and I was looking for something to use on the cover of a CD-R I was burning of a Camel album.  Camel is a faux Pink Floyd shitty band and burning CD’s of their music will inevitably land you in Papyrus territory, the domain of shitty bands, christian bookmarks, organic groceries/perfumeries/drycleaners, and uhh…things like this:

via Papyrus Watch

Anyway, as I made my awful Camel CD-R packaging, I came across the font and thought, wow!  What a great font to use for the COVER I’m DESIGNING for this awesome PROG-ROCK CD-R I’m burning!  Are you starting to see the mindset of a Papyrus user?  So I finished the cover, looked at what I had done, marveled at my genius, then (thankfully) caught myself, realized how fucking stupid the whole thing was, cancelled the CD in Nero and put on Formulas Fatal to the Flesh by Morbid Angel.

Ahh, with that, we can move forward.

Anyway, In college I used to work at an internet radio station.  The station was staffed by bookish weirdos, date rapists, and kids in back braces.  It was the Garbage Pail Kids (Ryan West excluded) running online shows for their parents and two other mutants in their hometown of Beloit, WI to hear.  I’d like to think I was one of the few “cool” kids involved, but really I was just another variation on the dork/dweeb/spazz theme.  There was one kid, whose name I will change, lets call him (Z)Evan.  I absolutely despised Zevan, partly because he was a smarmy little prick with a face that could fit a thousand fists, partly because he loved ZWAN, and wouldn’t shut up about it.  Ok, it was mainly because he loved Zwan…seriously…who listens to Zwan?  People who like the Papyrus font.

Anyway, there was some kind of design discussion going on, and I pulled out my old routine blah blah blah papyrus, and he looks me straight in the face and says “Oh man, I LOVE the papyrus font”.  Blood filled my eyes, my hands turned to bricks.  If only he knew how close he came to becoming a vessel for my years of misplaced anger.  That close.

Between the Camel incident, the countless awful coffee shop signs and business cards emblazoned with it, and the fact that THIS kid was a supporter, my hatred was eternally sealed.  I would hate the Papyrus font for the rest of my natural born life, and anything written in it would immediately be translated to “This (book/movie/album/organic cous-cous) was created by a Zwan-loving asshole”.

Or so I thought…

Lets switch gears here for a second.  I’ve covered “Things I Despise”, now lets swing to the other end of the spectrum.  If you were to ask me, at any age (from age 8-27), what my favorite film of all time was, my answer would be invariably ALIENS.  On an off-day, it would be Predator, but for 364 days out of every year of my life, Aliens has been my favorite movie.  It’s near perfect in its pacing, characterization, script, story, production design, cinematography blah blah blah.  Simply put, it rules.  Next to Robocop, I think it is one of the greatest action movies of all time, and I will never bump it from my number one spot.  I could go on for hours, but I will spare you.

A little bit further down the list of Awesome Movies I Will Quit Work to Watch on TBS is Terminator 2.  Its SUPER Blockbuster-y, but not because it cheaply plays on our desires to watch stuff blow up, but because it tackles big subjects like time-travel, the end of the world, our perceptions of the word “villain” and comes out at the end with only the tiniest bit of cheese dripping from it.  Then there is the first Terminator, which is way darker and grainier than you remember.  In terms of tone, its the better movie.

Anyway, amateur film analysis should be written in the papyrus font, so I will cool it for a second.  But, to make the connection, all of these films were created by James Cameron.  James Cameron has made some great fucking movies.  Aliens, Terminator (1 and 2), The Abyss, even Titanic has its place.  Now, he’s coming out with Avatar.

And what is that font at the end of the trailer?  BOOM!  PAPYRUS!  JAMES CAMERON JUST KICKED THE WORLD IN THE FACE WITH A SIX BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE (“he spent our entire economic stimulus package on Avatar” – Ogre) WITH A SIX DOLLAR MICROSOFT WORD DEFAULT FONT.  What is this?  Is Avatar a movie or a vegetarian three bean cruelty free lentil chili?

Fuck you James Cameron.  You’ve thrown me into the greatest crisis of my life on earth.  To date.

I can’t lie.  This movie (though the script and plot was obviously written entirely in the Papyrus font as well) looks awesome.  I’m being straight up, drunk-honest here, the trailer gave me chills, especially when the word “ALIENS” came on the screen.  The graphics look sick, the action looks almost too big to comprehend, and no matter how much James Cameron is insulting my intelligence by carelessly packaging his own sentiments about The War into a blue-skinned propaganda film, I will still be seeing this movie.  Probably more than once.  Which brought me to an equation, the mathematical equation at the core of my being that, once solved, will be the agent of my undoing (like a Dan Brown novel, only gay-er and more pointless).

My Love for James Cameron Movies > My Hatred for the Papyrus Font

But not by much.

With that said.  Fuck you James Cameron, you could have picked a better font.  Also, fuck you, guy who invented the papyrus font, because you brought me to this place.  I have now transferred all of my hatred to you sir.  Whoever you are, because you allowed your faux-egyptian bullshit font to infect the mind of a decent man like James Cameron, whom I have sworn allegiance to for most of my life (even if I haven’t seen Dark Angel), I am making it my life’s goal to find you and kill you.   You can have ZEvan, you can have all of the horrible wedding invitations and sweet-corn-exfoliating scrubs in the world, but shame on you for taking James Cameron.  You better be a dead pharaoh or something buried in a pyramid or something.  Actually even if you are, I will find you, dig you up and fuck you up all over again.

Fuck you.  That is all.