Springtime, Please

Now that it's spring and cresting summer even, I thought I'd share some of my springtime photographs. I find a great deal of inspiration from them, to be perfectly honest, and there's also just something about tree branches set up against the sky that really gets me. Here's a few! Check out the rest on my reader.

There was amazing fog this one morning in March

I found this fungus growing on an ancient fossil rock face while hiking in central Texas

These are at least indicative of this spring for me. There's some more and not all are of those are from this spring but they are from a spring, at least. Take a look!

http://ryansshorereader.blogspot.com/2008/04/springtime-please.html

Austin Poem #1

Here's a little diddy I wrote while I was visiting Austin, Texas a while back. I was reading a bunch of early Jack Kerouac at the time, so I think the poem emulates his style a bit, especially in its informal, loosely conversational style. Check out this snippet:


Tonight: Feel the jive
Feel the pulse
Feel the human force!

The music there
was: sexy, vibrant, funky-
raucous, loud, full-


Read the rest at my reader!
http://ryansshorereader.blogspot.com/2008/04/austin-poem-1.html
Enjoy!

Just a Glance

Do you ever wish you had a camera with you that you could instantly use when the perfect thing happens right in front of you, sort of like a "print screen" button for your life? I mean, I do.

Tonight was a perfect example. It was all about composition, really. I was walking back home from a trip to the Meadows building and I had with me an empty cardboard cup of coffee. Nonchalantly, as is a habit of mine, I was flipping the cup into the air, giving it a really nice spin. It's an activity I do when I'm walking places. Well, at any rate, I was tossing the cup pretty high up and so I was required to look up to ensure that I could catch it. On one toss, I looked up and saw a lovely compositional photograph! I'll attempt to describe it:

So we've got a backdrop of dark indigo night sky accented by thin cloud cover and five or so dots of starlight. A light cyan glow creates the left side and a sharp angled line of brick colored a warm red dominates the right side. At the bottom left a fresh, green branch shoots up vertically, and at the middle left is the blurry form of my spinning cup. Finally, right above the cup a moth zips by, catching the light with his white wings and creating a delicate horizontal streak through the sky.

It sounds nice, right? I thought so. All of those elements just came together for a split second to create that image and I say it and immediately regretted that I couldn't capture it right then and there. It was pleasantly startling because of the moth, which I first took to be a shooting star. If anything, it just corroborated the desire I often have to carry my camera with me always. But even then, you've gotta drag the thing out and turn it on and get it ready, and then focus and take the picture. I mean, by then the unscripted, beautiful life moment has long since passed by (usually). I'll just have to remember those glimpses of beautiful composition in my mind only. Until a mind-controlled optical camera is invented, that is.

Self-Trust...?

I have many things to say about my creative process lately, it seems. I guess it's all those creative things I'm doing nowadays or something. So I was thinking about the decision making process I discussed at some length last time and I came to some sort of new conclusion about my sense of trust in my ideas.

We always learn now (we used to learn the opposite) that you shouldn't go with your gut instinct first idea but you should keep creating and trying new things, both good and bad , the shamefully poor and the brilliantly gleaming. But then what? So I've got this page or this head full of these good, bad, and ugly ideas staring at me/rolling around upstairs. Which one do I choose? Which one!?

Lately here's what I do: I pick the idea that makes me the most nervous. The one that kinda makes me squirm a bit inside, that makes me shift uneasily. It's a feeling that says, "I'm really unsure about this" followed by a faint voice that says excitedly "But this could be amazing!". And then another voice says, "Ryan, it's terrible. And it's too risky. And you need to stop talking to yourself." But it's the idea that I can't sit well with but that I know somewhere in my heart that it's a good thing. I don't know if it's the thing to solve the problem I'm trying to solve but I know it's a good thing and it could very well be a fantastic thing. It's that drop of glorious hope that pursuades me to choose the ocean of queasy, possibly wonderful risk over the puddle of safe, "this works", ease.

Just Frustrated: The Creative Decision

I've been doing several creative projects as of late, and in hindsight I got to thinking about my process. What I mean is, how do I arrive at my decisions for what to finally end up creating? What impacts that decision more: my time frame or my creative satiation? Am I impulsive or careful? (the questions stretch onward)

But looking back on it, I've generally gone with my first "good idea" on all of them. I sit and think about the project for a couple minutes and then have one good idea and think, yeah, that's a good one. But here I stop myself from just going with it: I tell myself to stop and explore other ideas in the name of true creativity (because we all know our first impulse is not actually our best idea). But secretly, I'm telling myself that I'm really just going to end up doing my first idea and that I'm only thinking of these other ones to satisfy some unseen creative taskmaster. I'll leave this alone now because I guess what I'm more interested in is that decision time when I've chosen the one idea I'll do from the infinite universe of ideas there are.

I wish I thought with more outright creativity, I think. Because I don't let the problem sit for too long in my head before choosing an idea (usually out of the necessity of just having to pick something), I wish the time I do spend ruminating over solutions was more rich. I don't know what I'm asking myself for, really. I just always wonder, "where did that come from?" when I think of a good idea, or "how did I think of that?". You know? What connections did my head put together, what pieces of knowledge and experience were fitted together into the tiny amalgam of mental substance that is an idea? I wish I could record it somehow...but that's rather impossible. It kind of makes you crazy a bit when you wonder about how people have ideas at all, how they know that their idea is the one that really solves the problem. Almost like when you look at a word too long and you take it apart and suddenly it looks alien to you. When you stop and "look" at how you think, it comes to make no sense at all!

So then I haven't answered any of my questions and you have become thoroughly confused because you probably just got done deconstructing some word from my last paragraph. So then that leaves me still wondering, I guess. But I still like my ideas most of the time. I can continue pondering my process in my spare time.

I'm in the Club!: Just Did It

(this is me jogging in Bali. I posed for corbis, too)

Wow! So tonight I went jogging (don't feel ashamed of yourself. I don't do this often). I'm going to be honest, it was about 1:50 am when I went. It's not a safe time and it's really late, etc etc. I know all that. But I had just got done with round one of homework and after several computer cowlicks and other rat's nests in the head of hair that is my homework, I was really uptight and really, not in a good mood. (I don't do this often either, by the way). So I had to go jogging. And my body needed it anyway.

I trudged to my shoes, pulled on my shorts, grabbed my keys, my ID, and my iPOd, and set out on my fitness excursion.



So it wasn't the best run. As soon as I took two steps, my iPod died, for one. I was just getting in to Boston's "More than a Feeling" (you should try jogging to it: you can't help but air guitar that raging chorus) when it shut off, leaving me to hear the silent whoosh of stuffy night air past my slowly bobbing ears. I fit my keys in between my fingers like a claw (in case I get mugged) and took a turn down a new street toward the nicer and hopefully safer houses. It was one of those jogs where when you start, your body feels like Archie's old jalopy and it's just not going to make it. Things are falling off and its chugging like mad just to make 2 mph-that was me, but I told myself to just keep on keeping on-it'd get better. I'd reach that "runners' high" part where you just glide along (I've been there once or twice...) soon enough, I thought. Needless to say, that never happened. It was just a rough time the whole way physically, but luckily the night air smelled wonderful and I was privelaged to see the icy course of a huge shooting star! So it was all in all a rough jog but a great night. But you know, I did it. I needed to, I just went, and I did it.



This is my point then: Later on I was changing clothes and I looked down at my shorts in the process. Now I bought this swimsuit a long time ago because it was grey, nondescript, and covered my knees (I was a teenager, you know?) and they became my everything-physical-plus-occasional-swimming-suit. I didn't and don't now really care about the brand of them. They work, they were cheap and there. But lo and behold, they're Nikes! So looking down, sweat dripping from my face, my muscles burning with gratified aches, I saw that swoosh and felt in the club, the runners' club. You know the Nike's running commercials where the devoted runner is out there jogging, be it the apocalypse or rain or what have you-that's the way I felt. I felt like I was a part of that world. I had done it! I just did it! And I don't even care about owning a brand name but still the power of that swoosh really got me. I smiled to myself and felt quite proud and accomplished: I am a runner now (for tonight, I mean).

First Hand: The Power of the Group

Tonight I was in a meeting with a group for a creative advertising project in which we're building a Rube-Goldbergesque contraption to symbolize the component parts of an advertising concept. To preface this meeting, you gotta understand that I've never understood synergy totally. I had a pretty good idea what I was about from simple deductive inference but you know, I wasn't textbook sure.

So we're working on our project and discussing the designs and thinking of names for parts and materials for this tube and that widget, etc; and it occured to me: our group had created synergy! We were liberally interacting with one another, playing off each other's ideas, asking one another for advice and their input, sharing the limelight throughout. We also had our personalities jiving in harmony. I'm usually the guy who talks wayyy too much and tries to do everything himself and I had to hold myself back-mostly because my group is great and far-passed competent. But my personality was jiving with the more analytical or whimsical or playful tenets of my group members' personalities and they were in harmony, not dischord. Also, we each had our own knowledge regarding the project or peripheral things associated with it. I might know a bunch about the design but this person over there knows all about creative organization while someone over here likens this aspect to Mouse Trap (the game) and creates a cool idea! I mean, there was synergy goin on in that apartment tonight. It was cool to see it working firsthand


Oh-and ironically enough, our project is about synergy, for the record. But that's not the reason it happened. Who knows why, really? It did!

The Power(lessness) of Words

I'm researching lately for a peformance assignment in my theatre history class, and some of my findings have been seriously challenging my notions in the power of language to really power expression. Before I continue, I've got to do a small history lesson first, however.

So there was a tortured and brilliant French artist named Antonin Artaud who explored words and irrevocably shaped the face of modern theatre today. Born in 1896, he then had a deadly disease at a young age, leaving his mind weakened and prone to depression and other neurological defects. This led to a rocky youth and rebellious adolesence which forced his parents to place him in a sanitorium at the age of 19. His doctors there gave him an opiate for treatment, effectively addicting him to the drugs for the rest of his short life.
To make a long story short, Artaud, a poet, playwright, visual artist, writer, was in a constant mental anguish because of the sheer pain of mental cognizance and his innability to accurately portray his thinking in his words. He wrote volumes and volumes of electric, painful, cyclical pieces of texts describing his mental condition, his prison of a mind. Words were painful to him because they really are a poor means of communication and he couldn't accept that. Throughout his life he explored every art form and paradigm of philosophy and myth and was never satisfied; however, theatre was the form in which he found the most answers, or at the very least, a vain satisfaction. I'll not go into is contribution to theatre, although know it is huge and quite a formidable chunk of research and reading. Just remember the name, Artaud (pronounced Are-toe). And if you're an Artaud scholar reading this, just shake your head and give me a break?

So think about this, then-words really are quite poor at conveying our thoughts. Try it if you don't believe me: try and describe, for instance, a flower-easy? But wait-try and do so with words that convey the same detail and understanding that our mind percieves when we look at flower. I mean, really describe that flower: you can't, can you? Or how about describing something non-concrete: happiness, grief-or something even harder, like the concept of liberty, lunacy, or pain. How do words even begin to make sense of these things in terms explicit and understandable? This is the basis of the conundrum that drove Artaud so crazy and if you really think about this, it doesn't feel to pleasant for your own mind, either.

And finally, I feel that this can be connected to advertising, especially to copywriting. Thinking about the power of words to convey not only what you see in your head when you think of those words but what does the mind of the millionth reader see when they read it too? What, if anything, is truly universal in the world of linguistics? Can any slogan or tagline really describe the thing discretely and powerfully? I'm not answering these questions, nor are their answers cut and dry. There's plenty of grey and smudges here associated with the power (or lack thereof) with words. Maybe I'm not so surprised we've moved to visual cues nowadays...

It's Hard To Say You're Proud..

Do you ever really realize how hard it can be to say a touching, heartfelt thing to someone, even if you mean it from the absolute bottom of your heart? You think of the words, conjure them to mind, prepare the thing to say, but then you stop as the words are bunched up right behind your lips. It's hard to let those out! Because they really mean something! They carry weight, emotion, vulnerability.

I was eating out with my parents this evening and my mom recently won a really cool award. After winning, she was put in a larger competition for the next tier of competitors, and I am really proud of her for winning! She's done a great thing and I'm so happy for her! But I had trouble saying so to her. Saying, "I'm really proud of you, mom." Think of saying this to your own mother. It's hard, right?

So then I think about all of the things I say that aren't hard on a given day-am I saying enough things that have merit/weight/meaning? I generally don't dig on small talk and useless conversation, but still I (we) tread on easy territory with things there are to say. And I'm not saying we don't have to be uncomfortable every time we say something or some crazy non-sense. What I'm saying is...

we ought to be more aware of what is coming out of our mouths-and let those vulnerable, good things come out if they need to. We all need to open up sometimes and we all need to encourage someone else!

And what's creative about that, you ask? Well, for one thing, think of how lazy conversation is nowadays. It takes mental focus and creativity to really think about something to say to someone that is truly honest and engaging. Another thing I think happens is the presense of vulnerability is that some boundries we always put up get taken down and some real mind melding can take place! Some sharing of mental properties and relations, out of whice creativity can arise! Like mutually tilled mind soil-the vulnerability is the tilling of the soil.

So think about that mind soil. There's a metaphor we could diverge on for a long time.

Kreative Kats

Yeah..I went the way of Kwik Kopy with the title of this post...but it fits what I'm talking about.

I'm sure many people have heard of this already-but I'm not new to it either. It's a current internet trend for all you people in the dark out there-you take pictures of cats and add (hopefully) hilarious captions spelled childishly wrong. It sounds simple but it really isn't quite so.

It all started way back with this picture below: This picture started a huge trend all over internet meme sites like "You're the Man Now Dog".com and the like as well as spawning two major archives of daily updated images inspired by the original:

Icanhascheezburger.com and lolcats.com

Go and check them out if you're not aquainted with this trend. Sometimes the dividends are hilarious! and sometimes they are simply lame. However, I have sympathy for the creativity of these pictures! I mean, it's not easy to look at a picture of a cat and come up with such a funny and effective caption that perfectly fits that picture. I tried myself and my results were poor. It reminded me of the job of the copywriter who must sit and type and try out words and phrases until he has just the write combination. It's not an easy task at all! Granted sometimes cats are embellished a bit with photoshop, which I think cheapens the effect. The talent is not in the photo-editing technique but in how perfectly the caption fits! Even if you don't find these pictures funny (you must have no sense of humor at all) you still have to see the clever factor of the best of these photos. And when one hits the nail on the head, the result is just plain funny. Here are some of my favorites:

enjoy them and find your own favorites! Or try and make your own! It's not as easy as it looks.