‘I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.’

Billy Collins, Introduction to Poetry
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

19 Plays

This a percussion ensemble piece written for eight and is pretty strange. Lots of odd meters and bizarre parts. I played and recorded are the parts, then mixing/editing in ProTools.

At the end, it basically says for players to play chaotically, which is suprisingly more difficult than it sounds when you’re used to playing in order:P At my senior recital, I played live to the recording, muting out the parts in the recording that I played live.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

22 Plays

This is me in a mallet quartet in undergrad (music performance was one of my majors). I’m on the low end, playing Marimba. The last solo is me:) My roomate was a pretty phenomenal percussionist and wrote this piece called, Karyokenisis.

Anoushka Shankar.

Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story but they’re like poison to the filmmaker or artist. They’re like a grip on creativity. If you’re in that grip, you can hardly get out of bed, much less experience the flow of creativity and ideas. You must have clarity to create. You have to catch ideas.
“Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity” - David Lynch.

Various Americans are interviewed about art. Animated by Aardman.

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty.
Henry Miller
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

10 Plays

My little cousin singing/screaming Happy B-Day to me, especially at 16 seconds in:P

David Carson Documentary by Hillman Curtis. First one I clicked on from his “Artist Series”. I dig that it was very succinct. Never heard of David Carson. His views on creativity are refreshing.