A nice St Nicholas' Day yesterday. The day that Deb (and now I too) reserve for Christmas preparations; buying and decorating the tree and special Christmas ceremonies. Each tree has a name and this year's is Goethe - strictly pronounced Go-Eth. We ate a home-cooked meal of prawns with ginger and spring onions and I made a simple sauce of Ponzu, Pineapple Juice, and Tomato Puree, thickened with a little cornflour which worked well. Tesco had no cornflour - remarkable. The shops are still struggling with stock levels of even basic items.
I awoke this morning to a room of 12.0 degrees, having slept in my wooly hat. I now know why nightcaps were invented. The day has been very cold. We've spent £10 on heating and no room has reached 19 degrees Celsius, and this room only 18.2 for about 30 minutes just after 4pm, despite a constant (but low) heat from my oil heater. The temperature is set to fall to minus 10 in rural areas, and below zero in most cities.
I feel a bit lost, stuck between projects. I'm just emerging after Salome and the live performance events of the second half of this year. I did revisit the painters album, and have updated Prometheus again, to v2.99, after finding and tracking down a bug which may, just may, have been responsible for the crash a week or so ago. My temporary 'utility' variables can be wiped when playback is silenced. In the old days, when these were a fixed array, they were not wiped, only initialised once when creating the engine. Now that they are wiped routinely I'd forgotten to then initialise them correctly. Some plugins do this themselves via a specific 'prime' call because not all values start at zero, so this is now fixed. It only affected track engines and live-playback. I can't see how this might cause a crash, but the unexplained single crash did occur during live playback, and perhaps after silencing things, so at the right sort of time.
Anyway, I made the change and have filed the new version.
I have three tracks in half complete stages (almost all complete apart from the vocals) and many more on paper but no further. Peter came for his piano lesson in the afternoon, and we did some work on note timing and some initial work on trills.
Everything is packed for the show tomorrow. It will be a very cold day, so the warm library may attract visitors. Libraries have become a hub for those needing warmth. It's cheaper to sit in a café and buy drink than sit at home and pay to warm it.
After this, I'll continue with the painters album, and some Fall in Green tracks perhaps... the main motivation is arts' sake, that these songs need creating... and self-improvement, which is the goal of all art. I can't imagine any of these tracks being hits, but I aim to improve my skills, and will produce a mix of albums. This will be as much my art as my paintings, which have similar goals and motivations. I may not be a major recording artist, but I can produce work that is as good, and, if the muses and gods are willing, create a legacy as good as any in visual art. Still, it would be nice to create something popular enough to fund my life and creative works.
It's been an odd year; a mix of art exhibitions, music, live performance, and a book. A bit fragmented, and my income has all but dried up, but I must remind myself that this is the first year after a pandemic which has paralysed the country and world. Prometheus has been updated well, and I've started a music archive, and to notate my music in preparation for publication. I'm still full of painting ideas but still as lacking in exhibition or sale opportunities as ever. Crewe is a non-place for art. I see hobbyist friends in cities who are in art guilds, art clubs, art groups; but there is nothing and no art here. I may as well live on an island. My motivations must be my own, my goals my own, but such is life, and many city-artists of the past lived for decades in similar situations. There are pros and cons to every situation.
After tomorrow's performance, and perhaps even more-so after the ArtSwarm event on the 17th, I can refocus and charge at the world with my usual vigour. This will, at least, keep me warm. Onward!
