A very busy day today. I started by updating my website and working on the release of The Ingangible Man, and preparing the Kindle version. This is now in review and will be released this week. Then I recorded a new video of a poetry reading for Nantwich Library and National Poetry day 2020 which is on October 1st.
Then re-stringing my Yamaha acoustic guitar, which still sounds amazing and lovely. It wasn't an expensive guitar but it's amazing how each guitar can sound so very different from each other, and I've been lucky with this one. I hardly ever play it, but it's good to have. It's a strange fact that guitarists, electric guitarists, tend to have lots of guitars. It's easy to think that another new shiny and beautiful guitar will help one play better. Of course, there are often differences in sound between guitars, but this is often very slight; at least, if you find a good one, there's generally little reason to keep an inferior one, yet there seems to be an element of wanting a new guitar every so often, that its grass is greener. Every guitarist I know has about eight guitars.
In the afternoon I listened to an Art and Ideas podcast about the Radiophonic Workshop. I'm reminded that I've programmed all opf my music software, so like those pioneers and too few artists today, I at least create my own sound from my own tools. I also compiled a new video of Radioactive for possible Chinese competitive use, and finalised the Starflight video.
It takes some segments directly from Trax but intermixes these with some footage of rockets and bacteria and Venus, overall adding something a new, and even the borrowed parts do the job of complementing the music. I'm unsure if this is sufficiently good enough, different enough, for me. I'll muse on it a while. I must, at least, analyse and list how anything can be done better next time, how it can be improved. This is an essential part of getting better at anything, and my daily painting diaries were and art essential to learning there. We must be hard on ourselves; inventive, and rigourous, but not so hard that we seize up and stop. Ultimately this is an old tune from my electronic days so the video is less important to the world than it is to me.
I'm feeling newly reborn and energised, full of ideas and the will to create, too much. I'm wrestling with anxieites and over-energy, hardly sleeping. The ressurgent Covid-19 situation is worrying too. The news is best avoided, yet I want to say something on it, surely must, as an artist, but it still feels too strong. Surrealism is certain to become popular when Covid-19 is past; I must be there for it, but people want escapism in bad times, and psychoanalysis in good times.
Onward we roll our rock. On we battle, march, sing, play, with increasing joy and optimism.
