John's Quavering Pencil

I had to complete a formal withdrawal form in connection with my MA and I went down to the university this morning to get that over and done with. I walked into the building and all my fellow students from last year were waiting together in the entrance hall. Today their work was being examined, I think. And I had to tell them that I was not going on to complete the final year as a part-time student. I didn’t feel that I could give them a good reason as to why I wasn’t going ahead, although I do have a good reason. My young friend Shu said “So you are giving up?” I thought for a moment and then said “Yes.” No point in beating around the bush; in theory I could probably have found a way to continue, even though it would have not been very sensible for me to do so. I spoke to my tutors, too. It was an emotional ten minutes or so. I felt as though I needed to gulp down some air as I left the building.

I am sitting in my little studio at home, drinking from the coffee mug I used to have on my desk at the university studio. That mug previously sat on my desk in the various offices at the university when I worked there as a lecturer. I don’t think it spanned all three decades of my teaching service but I think it was with me for most of that time. I enjoyed moderate success as a teacher and researcher, and it is a novel experience to brush up against failure once again. My mood, by way of association, throws me back to the 1960s and my misguided attempts to train first as a chemical engineer and then as a cost accountant. I was a young man then and there was always a tomorrow. Things feel different now.

I have plenty of things to do. I shall have to enlist the help of my good friend Will Power to get me into some of them this afternoon. It might take a day or two before I regain my equilibrium. I can hear my daughter’s radio alarm playing. She needs to get up to go to work. At least I don’t have to do that.

I was reading a book by Danny Gregory on keeping an illustrated journal (which has something in common with keeping a blog, I feel) and I came across a quote from Frederick Franck (no bibliographic details were provided):

Art is neither a profession nor a hobby. Art is a way of being.

Given that Franck was a painter and sculptor, he was probably talking about visual art. I think the sentiment applies equally to music, too. According to Wikipedia, Franck was a dental surgeon by trade, so I can see why he should feel the necessity to make such a statement. I like it a lot.

Current debates in Second Life Music Community Forum seem to focus on music as neither profession nor hobby, but as business. I remember the way a lot of folks at the university where I taught stopped thinking about teaching as education and started to talk about it as a business. It was awful. I do hope the entrepreneurs in Second Life will not put the kiss of death upon the Franckian notion of music as a way of being.

It has been a warm sunny day here in England. I went to Hexham this morning to meet my friend Patrick for a coffee, sandwich and a chinwag. We go to the Arts Centre cafe not far from the old abbey. We meet there about once a month and chat all morning. It is all very relaxing. My friend Costello told me a good word for it the other day: chillax (made from chill out and relax).

I have been thinking about the MA in Animation and Design that I have been working on this past year. I have one more academic year to go. However, with some regret, I have come to the conclusion that I can’t really afford the university tuition fees and also the demands of the course are a little more than I can handle just now. So, on the drive back from Hexham through the beautiful countryside of Northumberland, I made my decision; I have written to my tutors, telling them that I shall be withdrawing. Although I know that I have made the right decision for my current personal circumstances, I do feel sad tonight. My animation tutor, Mel, wrote me such a lovely message in reply and I do feel I made some good friends while I was studying this past year. She said she hoped that one day I might still make my independent animation film, and I would like to do that when I feel the time is right. I want to keep up drawing, sketching and painting. I’m not sure whether I shall illustrate my blog here. But I do like the idea of perhaps keeping an informal journal which includes some drawing.

Be that as it may, I think I shall allow myself to be sad for a day or two.

I am sitting here waiting a tad nervously for all the nines. In about 30 minutes in England it will be 9 minutes past 9 on the 9th of September, 2009. So there is an 09.09 09.09.09 situation approaching. I have decided to make myself a cup of coffee and drink it staring into the middle distance.

It is 01 a.m. in the morning and I have recently been awoken by somebody in my family who shall remain nameless. Whispering in the bedroom can be as potent as the deadliest alarm clock or the slamming of a car door on the street outside. To say that I can normally fall to sleep as soon as my head hits the pillow might be hyperbole but it is not far from the truth. However, once woken I find it incredibly difficult to drift back to sleep again. The only thing to do is to get up for a while and, its seems, blog. When I have finished writing this, I shall go to the kitchen and have a piece of toast or something like that, then go back to bed. Maybe, just maybe I shall be lucky and fall first time. But if I don’t, I shall get up yet again and do something else.

I have found that playing scales on my digital piano will sometimes do the trick (I can listen with mp3 earphones so the sound doesn’t wake up other people). If I was reading a novel, I would read a few chapters of that. However, I seem to have gone off reading at present. Drawing or sketching is another possibility but there is nothing that particularly inspires me at present in my studio room. Having said that, I can see a crumpled shirt and a pair of socks lying on my piano. That might be a challenge. They are rather a long way away. I would like to be sitting in my armchair to do the drawing but I think it should be a close up. At present they occupy only a small area of my visual field. I shall explain to you how much.

If I hold my arm out with my thumb pointing vertically as if I was doing that measuring trick that artists supposedly do, then the crumpled shirt is about two thumbnails high and one whole thumb length across, horizontally. I wonder if binoculars would work. Oh, I wish I had not had that idea. Once a notion like that steals its way into the mind, it can nag away interminably. I can’t remember where they are. So if I am to kill the binoculars thought, I shall have to first launch the FIND-THE-BLOODY-THINGS-FIRST plan. I have to admit that I had not bargained for a binocular hunt when I got out of bed. I had thought a paragraph on the blog would do the trick and then back. And now I am thinking that maybe I should take a photo to put up in the blog here so you get a better idea. This whole project is getting out of hand. It is 01.20 a.m. already!

OK. Here is my progress. I found my binoculars in the third draw down my bureau. I’m not sure why I bought them. My eyesight is not good; I have been wearing spectacles since I was about 2.5 years old. Looking through binoculars, with or without spectacles, has always been deeply problematic. The light in my room is not very bright and I guess binoculars are made with a more distant optimal focal length in mind. I’ll take a look now.

They brought the shirt closer but my subective experience was that of a blue fuzzy shape. I have to say that the magnification was strong, though. To give you some idea: if you imagine a telescope circle as what you see, then the diameter could take in no more than half of the length of my AKG stage microphone.  So, in a nutshell, the binocular experiment did not succeed.

Crumpled shirt on piano

I have moved on from the binoculars failure and have now taken a digital pic which you can see, above. The shirt is light blue and the darker material is an old pair of boxer shorts. The socks are barely visible but are a dark grey in colour. The red book that you see on the music stand of the piano is in fact the book of scales, broken chords and arpeggios that I sometimes use to combat insomnia.

It is now close to 02 a.m. and time for a piece of toast. Wish me luck. If this doesn’t work, I could be back blogging within the hour after a bit of scales practice on the piano. Talk to you later.

Here is my Second Life avatar. I have played just under 350 one hour shows inworld since January 2008. Nowadays I play guitar and sing for the first 30 minutes and then play my digital piano (or sometimes a Roland synthesizer) for the second 30 minutes. It has been an extremely interesting way to develop my music performance.

I have removed the link to the previous version of my blog. Spam had got completely out of control and I was having difficulty in getting the anti-spam software at WordPress to work. I am hoping that this step will resolve the problems I had previously. Only time will tell. I shall try to write a proper blog entry either later today or later this week.

At present, I intend to use the blog flexibly to cover first life matters (as John Lewis Smith) and Second Life matters (as Fyrm Fouroux). The avatar image on the blog is that of Fyrm Fouroux.