Anyway here's not Wonderwall

For about a month and a half, I took a songwriting class from the Berklee College of Music on Coursera. I was actually looking for some media studies / journalism classes I could take as refreshers for work and (possibly) school when I saw that a songwriting class was starting soon.

Why not? I wanted to write but didn't like the idea of my own writing — what little I'd done, what I'd failed to finish, what I felt too inadequate to start. There were some issues I wanted to process into some tidy paragraphs, but diary entries and a dozen drafted posts couldn't help me, for some reason. It got to the point that I looked at my diary and my blog URL with dread. Maybe what I needed was to try writing something else.

I had written lyrics before: the words to my high school class's cheesy graduation song, and two or three just-as-cheesy love songs as a college freshman, before actual schoolwork took over. I think I never tried songwriting again, partly because I didn't know piano or guitar chords, but mostly because college life — and later, post-college life — was just so full of things to do.

So, anyway, here was this class on the Coursera lineup, with the description claiming I wouldn't have to have any great musical background to be able to take it. And here was I, in a rut and casting about for something creative to do. Again, why not?

The songwriting process ended up fixing the emotional leaks I'd been trying to plug. Just in the first week, we were shown how to take a song idea through three stages, making sure that the chorus or refrain gains weight at each stage so that the repetition at the end of the song has the most weight.

I soon found that my tendency to repeat myself in my personal writing has its uses in song. More importantly, though, while taking my own song ideas — all based on issues I'd been carrying around — through those three stages, I ended up resolving stuff that had been bothering me for months:

Idea 1: My life is great, but it doesn't feel secure. It doesn't help that my friends are complaining about how everyone on Facebook is getting married.

Idea 2: I'm no longer mad at this person, but I don't want to be friends. I wish I could stop feeling bad about not wanting to be friends.

Idea 3: There are all these little, ordinary-seeming things about being with Cris that make life awesome. How can I tell him that in a way I haven't already, and without dulling the secret magic of those little things?

Here is the song I wrote for Idea 1. Like all great songs, it was recorded on my phone in the bathroom, with an exhaust fan going in the background. It was the first song I completed, early in the class, and so is the simplest; it doesn't incorporate any of the stuff I learned in the later weeks — phrasing, language shaping, rhyme schemes, the use of bridges, etc. But, it's the one I feel least shy about sharing.



Here's to more projects for happiness. Here's a link to the class, in case anyone's interested. And, here's an old video of the teacher.

Dan's Rubik's Cube Solution

If you were one of my college blockmates in freshman and sophomore year, chances are, you would have seen me messing around with a Rubik's cube.

For posterity, I've rehosted the guide I was using at the time.

Cut, cut, cut

Some of you might have guessed from this post (not that I was terrifically discreet) that something big was coming for me in the arts and crafts department. Well, yesterday, everything finally came together.

What happened was, the creative director of our newspaper's luxury magazine saw one of my popup buildings and asked me if I could make some for the Christmas issue, which would feature some really, really, really pricey fountain pens. In a moment of hubris, I said yes.

After the meeting with the photographer, I spent most of my spare time drawing buildings and cutting models. I also sat through three howtoarchitect playlists (1, 2, and 3) in one day for tips and ideas.

I also spent a day with Highlife's production assistant, Nina, going to stores and picking out pens to feature. It is a little ridiculous to walk into one of those stores, ask for the most expensive thing they have, and be taken seriously.

There are more photos from the shoot here, and I'll be posting the actual shots in a week or so. It depends on whether I can sit on them till the magazine actually comes out.

I am trying to play it cool at the office, but inside, I am kind of panicky about the whole thing. None of the work is as great as I'd like it to be. On the other hand, it was nice to be asked to spend a day on something that I really, really love to do.

Baby steps, I guess.

In this picture, you can see the backs of Kathy Chua, photographer, and her assistant Eric. They are cool people, and Adphoto is a cool agency.

Whiteout-popup Quality of Life Report

Two months ago, I saw this post by Adam David (possibly NSFW) calling for blackout poem / "visual erasure" contributions. I thought it might be a good exercise for my popup buildings, as well as to maybe work out my love-hate relationship with the city while telling a story.

I missed the "Erase Erase" deadline, though, so I decided to just post the work here. Click on each thumbnail to enlarge (they're arranged in order from left to right, like a regular book; filenames are numbered if you're confused).

Just some notes, which you don't have to read.

It was harder than I thought, to pick something that was inexpensive even for Booksale (P45), had the right title, at first glance held the kinds of words I was seeking, and, most importantly, wouldn't feel like a huge loss once I started cutting out pages. Meghan Daum's "The Quality of Life Report" fit the bill more than anything else I saw (I ended up buying more than one book that day) because the blurb on the back made it sound like the kind of sweetly cheesy, "I'm Reed Fish"-type of story that I'd probably catch on Star Movies during off seasons.

This is probably blasphemy to any book-lover, but I didn't even read the book before cutting into it. The deadline was pretty close, and I haven't had a lot of time to read; the last thing I read, I finished last week but bought in late February. I did end up reading the cut pages, though, and I felt bad afterward. It did sound like an interesting and well-written story after all. So, if you ever read this, Ms. Daum, please accept my sincerest apologies, as well as a promise to buy your book if I ever see another copy in a local store. Your other book sounds interesting as well.

How I made it: I chose the words first, sliced out those pages, and sketched the buildings and skylines I wanted to put over/under them. The buildings themselves didn't take more than two or three hours to plot and cut for each spread, if you don't count the spreads discarded for wrong measurements or cuts. I used black crayon on the parts of the book page that would show up behind the buildings, then glued the pages onto the back while trying to get the words to line up with the windows before the glue* dried.

In the end, though, work and other things took up my time, and I finished the last spread just on Sunday. The photos and layout (if you can call it that) were done this morning after I woke up. I desaturated everything on my computer because my camera's white balance was acting funny.

The whole project was fun but also tiring in that I kept coming up against my own lack of imagination for these buildings. Now that I'm aware of it, though, I'll keep trying to come up with more interesting things in the future.

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*Boring notes about glue: Elmer's white glue comes in the easiest bottle to work with, but God help you if your paper's not perfectly aligned when you stick it on; this stuff dries fast. Elmer's "school" blue glue gives you time to push the paper into place before it dries, but if you use too much, some parts of the paper will look permanently wet and dark. Locally made Sti-Kee (?) glue works the same way without the wet look, but the bottle is a pain to work with because some idiot thought a glue "spreader" next to the nozzle was a good idea, when really, it just gets in the way of everything. The glue's also so thick that it comes out of the bottle in globs instead of a neat line.

Introducing Impassioned Fruit

Let me introduce my latest Web project, Impassioned Fruit. Like Dispatches From Dad--and unlike Starfish Drive--it's a blog with a focus, this time pushing myself to make more stuff while paying albeit unworthy tribute to some of the passionate people I've met on the job. :)

It's got just one post so far, but if I manage to pull off my post-Agatep project this weekend, there should be a new one next week.

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I've been sick for the past two days, but thanks to medicine, people's good wishes and prayers, a long sleep, and hey, maybe even that bland chicken noodle soup I picked up from a fast food joint, I am better now. Except for the cough and the nasal voice and the slight headache. But no more can't-get-out-of-bed-urgh-chills-pain, so I'm better now, really.