Slept fine on this New Year's Day. A glance at the news and social media filled me with despair and sadness at Britain leaving the European Union, not so much because the E.U. is a perfect institution, it has many flaws, but it is based on moderation and order, and those who champion and have championed Brexit are, speaking only from those few I've encountered, exactly the nationalistic, selfish, unsympathetic, racists that they are stereotypically portrayed to be.
My sour and unhappy mood stuck with me for too long, but I got to work on something rational and useful.
It's a new year and I realised that I used to be more productive when my website was ordered in sections year by year. The new, blank, year page was like an empty wall in a gallery, waiting to be filled. My website used to order everything by year, but this wasn't ideal because it created a huge quantity of pages and made it hard to find or browse art; the website looked and worked more like a phone book that anything artistic. So I've wondered how to balance these forces.
In 2020 I re-ordered all of my poems and song lyrics so that they use the same filing codes because my poems and song lyrics had started to merge and overlap, so today I've merged both online too, and created a master list of all of them, with a page for each year from 2002 when I started to file everything. In a second section I've created pages for published works; books and albums which include songs, and on those pages, each poem (from the corresponding poetry book) and each song with lyrics is listed, linked to the words.
So poems and song lyrics are, again, shown by date, but also by product. This took many hours.
I could do the same for paintings, as the galleries, at one time sorted by style or general period, have evolved to be broadly based on year once more, and a year-by-year display might encourage me to paint. The books and albums/singles/ep releases are more difficult, as they are generally released only one or two a year (or none!) but sooner or later I'll probably have to divide them up too. The album page is already a little too big.
I went for a walk and had a snowball outside with Deb; the cocktail, that is - I did not create a sphere from ice crystals. I returned and had a good 20 or 30 minutes of vocal training. The key is to really open the back of the throat in a relaxed way, turning the mouth into a sort of floppy gramophone horn, where all of the sound shines from the larynx alone. I felt this truly for the first time today. I really need the time and space to train more often, but any training is better than none. After training daily since mid-November, I aim to record the Sisyphus vocals this month.
My next job is the Jabberwocky video, I have lots of source footage. We've done quite well considering the lockdown and other restrictions on contact. The single is, today, available to pre-order in various places. It's a good single. Far better, for example, than Donovan's version. It will mark a moment of destiny in any account as the poem is so famous and remarked upon. Jabberwocky could be for Fall in Green what Ticket to Ride was for The Carpenters.
