by Adelaide Song on 2024-03-19.
Tags: morning pages
Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages– they are not high art. They are not even “writing.”
The below post basically fails every single criteria listed here:
It still serves the most important purpose, though, which is to purge my internal monologue in a creative fashion. There’s a notable gap in posting thanks to a recent backlog overflow at work; now that it’s taken care of, I’m back to dying of boredom, and writing is one of the only ways to banish it in the office without getting weird looks. Writing in general is also something I’ve been slacking on lately, and it’s been pretty painful.
I’m well-aware of how pernicious the association between art and suffering is, but that doesn’t stop the fact that the creation of art is a fundamentally painful process for me. I sincerely believe I’ve only ever written two really good things in my life: Radio/Carbon was written as an extended, embarrassing outpouring of grief after a breakup; the back half of the unpublished novella Gorgon was slammed out while recovering from surgery on a testicular torsion. (Said torsion didn’t even exist, although a) any nut pain is bad nut pain, and b) preventing future torsion is the best cure for torsion.) Even the mid things I’ve written have generally been catalysed by some kind of stress or discomfort, primarily either sleep-deprivation or procrastinating on something upcoming and extremely urgent.
Writing sucks. Therefore, in order for me to write, it has to be better than not writing- and not writing is crushing. Imagine a kidney stone, but for personhood.
In that framing, my current writing being self-referential, largely unreadable dreck makes perfect sense. Do you think anyone’s going to look attractive passing a kidney stone?
Music! Let’s talk about music.
I don’t think I’ve listened to one where the artist hasn’t put serious thought into living up to the name (and if there are any disappointments, don’t bother telling me about them- I simply would not consume them.) Every time I’ve found a Tiny Desk by an artist I’ve previously enjoyed, I’ve always been deeply validated by how good they are at reconfiguring studio bangers for a live environment.
Vince Staples completely outdoes his studio recordings on his Tiny Desk, which is pretty impressive given his self-titled was probably my favourite rap album from that year. The extra warmth of a more acoustic environment does miracles for Kenny Beats; you can see him nearly break when Remi Wolf performs “Last Words”, and it’s hard to blame him.
Recently, Justin Timberlake of all people got to perform at the Tiny Desk: I was expecting the worst after Man of the Woods hit his reputation like the Tunguska event, so it surprised me as much as anyone that I was grinning uncontrollably when “Senorita” segued into “Rock Your Body”. “Pusher Love Girl” is already a stone classic, and the magic of NPR’s stellar audio engineering and the acoustic setting somehow makes it ten times more magnetic. Even if he’s mostly known for corny soundtrack singles and failing to be cottagecore, JT still has the chops to earn a spot as an elder statesman of pop, and the Desk was a triumphant return to that 20/20 form.
If he had performed “Mirrors” I actually would’ve hands-freed.
They’re also a great showcase for the artists I’ve never listened to before, a chance to see them at the peak of their powers. Tinashe is a name that I was only tangentially aware of, but “Touch and Go” with live strings put me in such a spell that I instantly had to look up the album. This is basically the one recurring downside of Tiny Desks- the best ones are such different beasts to their recorded counterparts that revisiting them can leave you weirdly disappoined, no matter how good the original was.
I have mixed feelings about Laufey’s songwriting, but the Tiny Desk is probably the best case for her work I’ve seen thus far. Chamber pop performed in an actual chamber setting is always a winning formula, and I don’t think it’s possible to have complaints about her vocal performance, both butter-smooth and hummingbird-agile.
My recurring enjoyment of Tiny Desks means I will never beat the ‘secretly a 45-year old white MFA’ allegations, but god dammit sometimes all you want is to Retvrn To MTV Unplugged.
I don’t know who at Google I had to bribe to get this kind of treatment, but YouTube recently started recommending me indie jazz and afro-psych DJ sets made by people with under 100k subscribers. If I’m going to be destroying my ears at work with 8 hours of constant headphone usage I might as well be switching up my listening habits every now and then. Highlights:
Somehow the office is the most quiet environment that I have access to on a regular basis, which is one of the only things I appreciate about it. Having a chance to really do some critical listening in a distraction-free environment is one of the few upsides of having one of Graeber’s bullshit jobs; it’s easier to cope with the fact that I’m tanking my career with every passing day when I’m at least soundtracking that with bangers.
Seriously, I need to have access to a Linux dev environment of some sort or I’ll start going mental. Trying to do anything software-related in Windows is sort of like trying to eat soup using your hands, and that’s before having to deal with all the headaches that come with having to request admin permission to install fucking anything on a company machine. It also gives me a bit more control over hosting and a chance to start putting together some side projects that need some spare compute to keep them alive- anything with a DB, for starters, which happens to be like 95% of all the things I’m interested in. It helps that I’ve been really enjoying doing SQL and am thirsty for any chance to tinker with it, especially if I can excuse that as building tooling for other things like Raze.
This is my transparent attempt to round out the word count to a clean 1500.
We hit the limit, chat. Peace.