Tag Archives: Writing

A Sense of Wistfulness

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With Dave Goldberg’s sad passing last night, I’ve been watching the tweets come up over Twitter as those he knew, and those he didn’t express their pain and condolences. It’s surreal that life is something fleeting, and that we go to bed (mostly) never considering the fact that the world could (and does) change drastically around us as we sleep.

It’s a nice sunny day here in Atlanta, and by all accounts was a good day when I awoke this morning. But the realization of the pain that people are in over Goldberg’s passing brings to light (for me, at least) an emotion that I try not to entertain all that often: wistfulness.

I try to keep it at bay because it feels almost like a sense of looking back; a sense of wishing that something was different in the past. Many times it’s in reference to something that was way out of my control, and thus took place as it had to. But the point remains that on days like this where the sense of change is so immediate and stark, I can’t help be entertain just a few wistful thoughts, and reflect on what they mean at their deepest cores. I imagine those closer to Dave than I was are doing and feeling similarly today. Sometimes all one can do is look to one’s support system to reassurance, and try to forge ahead, however painful it might be in the moment.

Writing Just to Write

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It’s been a busy week, and some of the posts I put up over the past few days have been pretty intense. But not every day is a diehard battle, and it’s nice to have a moment to write in what feels like a respite from the storm. It makes the writing feel deeper, and not so urgent. The deadlines can get old after a while, and the “every minute counts” mentality is adrenalizing, but exhausting thereafter.

I love the energy I get from writing a piece that addresses something specific, but I love these more amorphous, ambiguous posts just as much. The specific pieces can create a “mill” feel sometimes, and in the moments when I find myself able and free to write about anything (or nothing), I feel able to recharge for the next focussed piece. It sounds perhaps more poetic, but the benefits of writing just to write greatly outweigh the drawbacks (if there are any). I’ll find more specific topics to cover over the weekend (in fact, I have a list), but for now I’m content to simply sit at my computer and see what flows onto the page.

Rediscovered Appreciations

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I went to see my brother’s semester high school play tonight. The performance was a mix of musical theater numbers and spoken word pieces spanning a number of genres. With only about 12 students participating, I was impressed and intrigued by the amount of work each student had to put in to cover multiple characters.

Yet as I sat in the dark theater, what really started occurring to me between numbers from Rent and Fiddler on the Roof was just how much I knew about the musical theater pieces; and how much I didn’t know.

Though I’ve always loved creative sorts of things, I was never much one for musical theater. I never hated it—but I never loved it. I was always somewhat ambivalent, happy to enjoy the music I liked, and dismiss the parts that bored me. Tonight, however, some of those same pieces that I may have dismissed years earlier came back to me in a different light. And even ones I’d liked before—somehow I found myself rediscovering an appreciation that seems to have been dormant for some time.

I suppose that we never know what exactly we like and don’t like because those things can change so drastically and so rapidly. Appreciation for something is a process just as much as is the production of it. Sometimes—as with that production—that appreciation can take years to develop and catalyze in a way that becomes concretely apparent to us. In that time, many times we pay it no heed. But at the moment that it becomes clear in an instant, it seems to have come out of nowhere. Perhaps it’s not that it came out of nowhere, but that it took more time to realize something’s potential and worth.

Too Much of a “Personal Journal”?

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As I write more and more of these posts, I’m noticing that they’re becoming more personal. Of course there are still those posts which are more hard-hitting news-wise, but still some days I find myself tackling new subject matter like philosophy, history, sociological experiences, and even writing in general. Though I might have resisted this trend in previous years and dismissed it too much as “personal journal” dynamic unfit for a public blog, it seems more appropriate now than ever.

When I zoom out and look at the big picture dynamics at play, I can begin to see trends at play I might have missed upon my previous dismissals. Things begin to play out in new contexts, and as thought processes are laid over one another, they begin to underscore details that otherwise might have gone unnoticed.

We can’t be trained to think like this initially, no matter how much we wish we could be, or how much we try. This thought process and worldview is only something that comes from the experiences that time gives to us, and our motivation to place those experiences over one another and look at the picture which they reveal when we do so. Bigger pictures appear every day, and if we have the right set of lids up to look at them, I’m beginning to understand the broader dynamics and trends which we will be able to discern.

A Little Struggle

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The goal to write every day isn’t as enchanting as it was a few weeks ago. On days like today, its become a struggle just to complete a post.

Yet I don’t think this is because of writer’s block, or because writing every day is a burden on my schedule. Rather, I think it’s because writing every day has become so easy that it contributes some days to a feeling a languid procrastination; a thought process of: I’ll write later in the day, and it’ll be fine.

It doesn’t make me lazy to decide to write later in the day; some days it’s been the only time I’ve had a moment to collect my thoughts. But I am realizing that the urgency of putting pen to paper (so to speak) dwindles some days by the evening time. In so many ways, I need “the struggle” to keep pushing words out because the urgency becomes about the goal I’ve set for myself. I’ve become so entrenched in what I’m doing, that I don’t want a day to pass without finding a moment to write.

This struggle isn’t something that I run from, though. It seems to provide just the right amount of flame for me (at least in current moment). I’ll see how things progress, but for now, the struggle aids me in completing my goal every day. Maybe a little struggle is a good thing.

Subjects Too Long for Blog Posts

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I suppose by now it should be normal for me to understand that not every day will bring a super-intense topic to post about. It’s less about laziness or lack of subject matter, I think, than about the time it would take to address certain topics.

Legal stories which I see in the news, for example, always catch my eye. I’m quite fascinated by the practice of law and legal philosophy, by the prospect of writing blog posts about such things simply doesn’t seem practical. The very essence of law resides within the confines of deeply-researched and well-thought out arguments—clearly not fodder for shorter length blog posts.

Philosophy in general, too, is something I think about quite often, but which eludes usefulness as a blogging subject. It’s much too amorphous a concept to be siphoned down to a few short paragraphs, and thus makes little sense to try and tackle. Perhaps there is indeed a good way to conjecture upon these subjects in a cleanly digestible fashion, but up until now, I haven’t been able to identify it.

Today It Was Sunny and Hailing in Atlanta

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It’s funny how some days you plan on writing one thing and then move to another unexpectedly. Perhaps the most intriguing part about it is how you come to the second though process almost as quickly as you remember coming to the first. Today was one of those days for me.

I had originally intended to write my post today on another music-related news piece, but was side-tracked by something a lot more mundane: the weather. While not the most brilliant of subjects to use for smalltalk, I was nonetheless struck by the power with which the weather in Atlanta commanded my attention today.

Atlanta isn’t exactly known for extreme weather; not in the sense that Boston has blizzards of Miami has hurricanes. Today though, the cloudy morning skies turned dark gray around 3:00 PM—right before the downpour of hail started. Needless to say I was caught off guard. Not so much because of the hail (we do have hail in Atlanta from time to time in the spring), but because of the speed with which it suddenly changed to sun after about 20 minutes. The tornado warning I got on my phone was made all the more comical by the light shining through my blinds.

And what side-tracked me the most? It made me miss Amsterdam—and my time there—so much. Anyone who’s ever been to The Netherlands will tell you that Dutch weather is a clusterfuck of indecisive bouts of precipitation and wind. It literally is sunny one minute and hailing ten minutes later—sometimes the hail came down as the sun was bright and out. That’s what today’s hail-and-sunshine mixture made me miss: the time I spent walking along those canals and drinking black coffee. Ironic, isn’t it? The affects that weather can have on us even years after it’s passed. Go figure.

Blogging: One Month In—A Retrospective

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Today marks one month since I started blogging every day, and man has it been a long month. Though long doesn’t necessarily mean bad, and in the last few weeks I’ve found myself able to talk about a number of topics that might not have occurred to me otherwise. True, a lot of my posts have been on topics like music and tech that I continually follow, but the desire to write every day has enabled me to streamline my thoughts into a more digestible format.

In the last month, I’ve discussed numerous things in the music and tech space, including:

Yet I’ve found myself able to write about things that otherwise would seem unimportant, had I not had a goal to write every day. I’m not sure writing posts on writer’s block, on singing, art, and on concepts of passion would ever have occurred to me without the goal to produce new material:

Perhaps the most intriguing thing that’s happened though is how my desire to write has only become more engrained in me. I’ve always been a writer—essays, journalism, poetry, and research papers always came fairly easily to me, and even provided a sense of enjoyment most times. But now my writing has taken on a whole new dynamic in my life.

In fact, it mirrors what artists tell me when I ask why they choose the tough path of day jobs and long nights on the road: “I do it because just like I wake up every morning and need to breathe, I need to play music.” And that’s how writing is to me now. I wake up ever morning and need to breathe, and then I need to write.

The Typhoon Keeps Coming for Tidal

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It’s not been an easy couple of weeks for new music service Tidal. A slew of bad press and criticism during and immediately after the service’s launch is continuing to be a thorn in the side of the company’s leadership. So much so that a major restructuring was just announced; things aren’t about to get easier any time soon.

I was first a little skeptical of Tidal during its much-hyped launch, then again when it enjoyed a spate of criticism from mainstream band Mumford & Sons, and most recently when producer Steve Albini piled on to the already bruised service. Things have just been really bad for Tidal since it emerged in the last few weeks. Now it seems that the service itself is intent on rubbing salt in its own wounds.

Business Insider broke the news today (as did other sources like Digital Music News) that Tidal was being strongly shaken up; 25+ people on the Tidal team were being fired to make room for a new direction. Of these, the name that surely drew the most attention was And Chen, the now-former CEO of the service. Maybe it’s just me, but firing your CEO just a couple weeks after your very public launch seems to say a lot about a company’s fortunes, at least in the short-term.

Former Tidal CEO, Andy Chen

Former Tidal CEO, Andy Chen

Chen’s removal will make room for Tidal’s former CEO Peter Tonstad (who was the former CEO of Tidal’s parent company Aspiro Group). In an statement to BI, Tidal commented on the impending change:

TIDAL’s new interim [sic] CEO is Peter Tonstad—a former CEO of parent company Aspiro Group. He has a better understanding of the industry and a clear vision for how the company is looking to change the status quo.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but did Tidal just admit that their now-former CEO—Chen—was basically unqualified for the job? Because that’s essentially what I heard. After all the fanfare that Tidal inundated the press with around its launch, I thought for sure that they at least had a concrete plan to try and accomplish their goals. As critical as I was at the time, I at last figured that their leadership had sufficient experience and vision to make the Tidal brand somewhat competitive for a little while. Clearly that’s not the case.

I was critical of Tidal before because I thought (still think) that they’re attempting to sell a product (service) that essentially is very expensive and not wanted by enough people to offset the expenses to provide it. I was critical because the artists who I saw standing up on stage during the launch don’t need any more money in their pockets, and it came across to me as greed.

Now I’m critical of them because changing your CEO and firing 25+ employees ~20 days after your very public launch is not a good way to start the spring. It shows both a lack of preparation for your business market, and frankly a lack of appreciation for your prospective audience and their thoughts. Actually, you come off as socially tone-deaf.

We’ll see how this progresses, but I must say, I am really not impressed with Tidal’s handling of this entire situation. This is not the way to build trust in an industry that is basically overrun with distrust, and filled with people who are used to getting taken advantage of. This is not a good start; not a good start at all.

Writing Every Day

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Some days it’s really hard to sit down and write something not because it’s been a terrible day or there’s nothing to write, but simply because the flow doesn’t come. I wouldn’t even necessarily call it writer’s block because on days like this (for me, at least) there are a number of topics rolling around in my head, but one of which I seem to feel motivated to expand on. The topics themselves are valid and thought-provoking, but perhaps it’s worth noting that some days are meant more for thought than for actual writing.

That said though, I still think that endeavoring to write every day helps the mind (again, it’s at least true for me) explore new concepts even when we’re not focused on them. The importance of writing is more about taking the mass of concepts in one’s head and attempting to unravel them for an outsider’s perspective. Thus I think that even on the hardest days, it’s still important to force anything out and onto the page simply to see what comes of it. Many times that’s really the only way we are able to see something in a more concrete context, rather than leaving it as an amorphous thought left to float inside one’s head.