Liberties, Vol 13

A fun part of the early days of Beat Noir was that we didn't have enough songs to fill a set and would play covers. Covers are great as a musician because it gives you the chance to kind of cosplay another band for a little bit. You can play songs that you'll never write and have a chance to live inside them for the brief period you play them. Covers are fun as a fan to because they're a song you would never expect the band you're seeing to play. You come to a concert making a mental setlist from their back catalogue and then the band throws you a curveball by drawing from somewhere else.

I was never a had honcho in Beat Noir, so I never got final say in the songs we would cover. What did we end up playing?

Against Me! - "The Disco Before the Breakdown"
Attack in Black - "Inches and Ages"
The Weakerthans - "Plea From a Cat Named Virtute"
Hot Water Music - "Jack of All Trades"
Sloan - "The Good in Everyone"

Below are a selection of ones that I always wanted to, and always suggested, but we never got to play:

Dissed and Dismissed

After I got the clothes going at the laundromat and took care of our library needs, I spent about an hour going through my Bullet Journal and entering stuff for the next six-ish months. I have a completely open schedule and a pretty light working schedule, so the direction that everything takes will be up to me. I think that the last time I even approached this was when I moved back to Toronto in September 2015 and the only thing I had to do was finish my thesis.

While I was entering dates in my bullet journal and drawing lines and organizing the way the dates would look, I found myself a little light on actual content. I can add "10 push ups and 20 sit-ups" or "750 words" to every day, but I had to think hard about what I am going to focus my energy on right now. That particular part of my brain needs to be working overtime. I need to come up with a new writing project each week. I need to make moves on completing those projects right away. I have the opportunity to make significant strides as a writer, and I believe that accomplishing that goal lies in working hard on my craft and doing as much as I can.

Once I get going, other gears will turn and I can hopefully start to come up with better story ideas. I think that I've gotten to the bottom of the well in terms of turning some of my more interesting memories into story and I think that most people don't care about reading thinly-veiled anecdotes from my mind anymore. This will be an important leap for me to take. You have already been able to turn your ideas into things that are readable, but next you need to start crafting actual stories.

I think that it was helpful to do all this planning today while listening to the return of Sportsfeld. The podcast came back after a huge hiatus and I was a little hesitant about how it would be. It wound up being great, emphasizing my favourite parts of the show, while diminishing the parts that weren't as great in hindsight. Hearing the guests discuss aging and figuring themselves out while I was doing just that was pretty serendipitous.

So far, I have three major projects to work on for February, which is okay for now. As much as I think it's important to work on my fiction writing, so that I can one day work towards a book, I think it will be refreshing to get some things about music and baseball up on the site and keep those skills sharp. Fiction is the big skill I need to develop, but it's also important to remember that what I'm currently best at is sports and culture stuff. Even though I might think fiction is this beast I need to tame, people are more interested in reading my other stuff and that's important. It's not that I should cave to what the audience wants, versus what I want, but that it's a way to keep readers engaged with the work that I am producing.

I feel a little lost. I know that I'm doing okay in the grand scheme of things, but the anxiety that comes with the feeling of "not doing enough" is gradually gaining strength in my stomach. Whenever I describe that feeling to Rebecca, she asks if it ever goes away and if me doing things actually helps. In short they do. The feeling never really does go away, but accomplishing things, putting them out and being halfway happy with them does more to make them subside than anything else. That's what I've found in my life so far.

I recently finished a bunch of stuff. Now it's time to get back on the horse and start the cycle again.

Gasoline Dreams

I recently started using a site called 750Words, which is a platform designed to help you in free writing, with the goal of writing 750 words each day, no matter what the content is. I hope that it is helpful in guiding me towards more output.

A positive for IMU? It forces me to reflect on myself a bunch, so I think it would be valuable to grab certain parts of what I write there to make cut-and-pastey posts her. Looks like we'll be returning to slightly more confessional, 2009-vibe, posts her for a little. I hope that both of my readers enjoy this.

Anyways, here you go.

It will be interesting to go back to work without the spectre of school applications hanging over my head. It's been in the back of my mind since the last ones were rejected and I think I always knew that this was something I was going to have to complete while I was GAing. Now they're done. So what do I keep myself busy with at the gallery?

I definitely need to read. I haven't checked my Goodreads in a little while, but I assume that my rush through Saga has still left me a little behind schedule. I'll have to buckle down and get through some books and never look at my phone. I also want to make sure that I read things I enjoy this year. Last year was great for clearing through my reading shelf, but it's important to consider books that I know I'll get a lot out of. Nobody is going to kill you for reading more Robertson Davies. New personal goal for the season: Try to leave work with at least 70% left on your phone every day.

Another thing to pursue: writing, of course. I'm going to need to brainstorm new ideas for stories to work on, but that's also a great thing to work through during downtime in the gallery. I have, I think, two potential things, but other than that, just nothing. It kind of feels like I've worked through all of my overstock of ideas and now need to do a big shopping trip to restock my intellectual pantry.

I'm going to force myself to publish a short story today, even though I feel super vulnerable putting it out there. The story is informed by my own experience and I'm worried that people will read too much of myself into it. But I need to remember that nobody will have the same reading of it that I will and they'll maybe event think it's good.

Liberties, Vol 12

A true deep cut has to have the following qualities:

• It must be from a well-known artist. If it's obscure, then every song is a deep cut.
• It must not be a single. Singles can only be deep cuts if they are by an old one-hit wonder who are no longer popular.
• It must not be a song that is commonly played live (full album sets exempted).

Here's a volume of Liberties dedicated to some of my favourite deep cuts:

Liberties? Who knows?

I've had an edition of Liberties sitting and waiting to be finished for about two months or so, but every time I go to add tracks to it, my mind draws a blank on other songs that fit the theme. Rather than continuing to open it and hit a wall, I thought I would instead share this playlist, which is a collection of my favourite songs of 2018. It has something from all of my 2018 album list entries, as well as some others which stood out to me along the way: