The past couple of days have been focused on music, and steady progress made. Some skills, I find, are easy to pick up in a flash, and some take years of tiny accretions. My personality and interests are so wide, I have so many personalities, that any accretion must form as a matter of consensus between those personalities and compromise with those skills. After a good day of singing on Tuesday I'm reminded how many years it takes to become a good singer as I make progress, drip by drip.
A sleepless night of stomach twitches last night. I awoke bleary-eyed and in a zombie-like state of irrational annoyance.
A message from my council contact said that the weather looks good for the next week and perhaps it would be a good time to install/paint the mural, this on a Thursday; three days notice! This sent me into a panic of urgent preparation. I asked David if he'd bought the paint. In September he said he'd buy the paint and we could share it, as I only need 2 litres at most, and the tubs are 5 litres. In the intervening five months he has not bought the paint. This meant I had to source it and order it, and had to pay a premium cost to get it within 72 hours. I should have bought it myself earlier; except that I have already bought a £200 high-working platform in advance, in anticipation of work on my amazing first artwork, only to have it rejected and to have wasted the £200. To buy the £50 paint in advance risked wasting that too - and the risk is real, as the recent last minute changes to the design indicate, as well as the stochastic history of this entire 3-year project.
Four days warning is really short notice for any professional, but paint aside I'm ready to go, the timing suits me. I checked the weather; it does not seem good to me. Every day next week has at least a 25% chance of rain, and any rain on the day before, during, or after would ruin it. I really think installation should take place in May or later (or, better still, last August when I'd planned to do it). Still, I am a puppet here.
It's hard to know what lessons to learn from my work on this project. I love my first design, but it was, would have been, hugely hard work, and perhaps for nothing if, as I was told, the wall will be painted over within a year anyway. I developed my second design because it was easy, and more fitting with the decor of the square as it is; which, for the record, I dislike, but at least I know now that the 'artist' may also dislike it, given that I don't really like my design. Who does like it? Probably nobody; but it is inoffensive. In public art, inoffensive is as close one can get to beautiful. Beauty will certainly offend someone, and that won't do. Anything emotional is offensive, but sterility offends every aesthete. Inoffensive art offends civilisation.
I ordered the paint. Everything is prepared.
Then, work on music. I'm reminded how many years some of these tracks have taken. I spent yesterday and today tweaking Style Guru, a song over 4 years in the making. Many of the others have been lingering for years too. American Lawyer was started in May 2020. Yet even today I'm making changes. It's a great album so far, but most of the songs are very short, a few under 2 minutes, and hardly any over 3.
The main tihng I did today was work on the middle section of Cat Parasites. A song which starts oddly, then has an epic power-ballad stlye chorus in the production style of Richard Carpenter. After that though, it seems to remain rather gentle and gentile, when it has the potential for dramatics and theatrics in the mould of Bohemian Rhapsody.
I'm making progress in my skills, but feel a little at sea artistically. What can I represent? I'm loving music at the moment, partly because my skills here are growing and life is about learning, but is 'pop music' too transient, too shallow, too artless? I feel at the height of my creative powers and skills, and could head anywhere successfully; but where should I go? Well, direction or not, I'm fully busy every day. What more can I do than that?
Tomorrow, the Gunstorm EP is to be released on Steam. The game is reasonably popular so far. I've noted a few ideas for Gunstorm 3, which, solely as a quest for money, is a possibility.
