12.09
The Aims Of The Diaries
Public Aims:
To engage the listening community at an earlier stage of the creative process than is commonly available. To inform the listening community of the practicalities of that process. To de-mystify the process which is, essentially, practical.Private Aims:
To encourage the Diarist to recapitulate their experience. To provide the Diarist with a pointed stick. To expose the Diarist to public ridicule.Comments:
1. We continue to have a Romantic notion of the artist: a special creature set apart from common humanity, one favoured by the Muse.
These Diaries indicate the mundane nature of the lives of artists: their simple, human and practical concerns. These Diaries remove the mystification which we project onto the artists, their lives and activities. The creative process is shown as being straightforward, ordinary and practical.
At this point, with the commonplace nature of the artists' work revealed, the creative process may appear more remarkable than before: how can ordinary people like these give rise to work which moves and touches us?
Then, we find a new and deeper respect for the benevolence of the creative impulse: it succeeds despite these people, not because of them.
2. Much commentary on the lives and work of artists is projection: unfounded, uninformed, without data, without direct experience, based on what we believe the lives of artists to be. Most commentary by "fans" is based on ignorance, rooted in personal prejudice, like and dislike. This is commentary from the basement.
The enthusiast is better informed, able to engage with the process in the moment, and suspend the immediate rush to judgement. This is the view from the garden floor.
The connoisseur understands: they know, feel and sense the currents at work in the creative process. They have themselves undergone a training, but in listening and "appreciation" rather than in performance. This is the view from the floor above the garden room.
3. The recapitulation of experience, in the form of diarism, is a way to digest the impressions which life, and our living of it, naturally provides. The Diarist reviews their actions, feeling and thinking, and presents us with an overview of their life process.
Maintaining a diary is itself a process, of engagement with oneself. An ongoing diary presents a challenge which invites the Diarists to move beyond their natural lassitude, to go further than the merely comfortable.
Maintaining a public diary is also a process, and engagement with the listening community is the stage where diarism comes to life: the arrogance, foibles, pretensions, weaknesses and aspirations of Diarists are revealed to public gaze and scrutiny; even the attempt to hide is revealed. At this point, heat enters the process, and repercussions generated beyond the purely personal.
13.28
Los Gauchos Alemanes, in quintet formation, performed at lunch. Now, an online adventure is about to begin.
16.02
Getting online was a significant undertaking. Marcello Monferrato leapt through hoops backwards, all at 9,600 bps, and eventually we got there. Proof of his success is that you are reading this. But what a pain.
Steve Ball called: BTV progresses.
18.56
Tomorrow is April 1st. & accordingly I've put a spoof schedule on the Board.
Who could fall for this good humoured April Fools' Day jape? Well, actually anyone Argentinian. Their equivalent is the day of St. Innocent, the Holy Fool, on December 28th. This is when pranks occur down here. Hernan tells me there are concerned Crafties looking at the notice board.
20.27
The Big Time Trio & The Gauchos played at our first meal together. Over this meal I asked the question: "Why will Guitar Craft not become a cult?". Several answers were suggested by the Team. I proposed four:
1. All meals are vegetarian.
2. Sometimes fruit is served as dessert.
3. Scepticism is encouraged: accept nothing that you don't test in your own experience.
4. The Gauchos Alemanes play at mealtimes.
Then dessert was served: chocolate mousse with whipped cream and dolce de leche. Maybe Guitar Craft will become a cult after all; a cult of fat people, suggested Hernan.
22.51
The inaugural meeting will be continued tomorrow morning: not everyone had time to introduce themselves. I read out the spoof schedule: an Australian Crafty asked if the schedule had anything to do with the date. Latin American visitors had been seen writing down this schedule in notebooks. One suggested it was "discipline". More like cruelty, I replied. So, rising at 07.00 tomorrow.
"A completion is a new beginning."
