Adam Keys is Thinking

• “Unchained”
• “Everybody Wants Some”
• “Hot for Teacher”

Television: Severance (Apple TV), Andor (Disney+)

Movie: Everything Everywhere All At Once

Music: deep dives into Carly Simon, Nina Simone, J Dilla

Book: Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut

Blog: Pain Don’t Hurt (a 365 day series of short essays on Roadhouse)

By my calculations, I managed to write about fifty pages between my blogs this year. That’s about double what I wrote in 2021, so I’m pretty happy with where I ended up here! 💪

My best writing this year, in my opinion:

• An ideal weekend
• The paradox of process
• Leadership keywords
• Perspective, you want it
• Think your thoughts

• “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, Richard Strauss, the opening
• “Symphony No. 6”, Beethoven
• the rest of the Western classical music canon

Nothing, nothing, nothing makеs me happy

Nothing brings me nothing but joy

So if you haven’t tried nada

I really think you oughta

— C. Fischoeder, Bob’s Burgers

On minor funks, needing a reset, and indeed doing nothing.

The Reset. Occasionally, the things I do stop doing it for me. Games, shows, books, magazines, etc. I pick them up and realize I’m bored with all of them. I require a break from my breaks.

Oddly enough, taking a vacation or extended weekend with too little purpose or purpose too close to routine seems to generate the same response.

The Reset almost always involves going offline, to some extent. Not like Craig Mod hiking through rural Japan¹. It sometimes involves catching up on chores, tidying up the house, or extremely low-key home improvement².

Related: YouTube could use a function for this. “All my subscriptions & recommendations aren’t doing it, we need to go weirder/normal-er”.

Doing absolutely nothing is an option, but ends up feeling a little more hollow than free-ing.

More often, rebelling against my routines and script-following tendencies works. Binge-watching, grinding a game, ignoring diet, etc. sometimes get me clear.

The trickiest bit is when I’m in An Indefinite Funk. Hobbies seem shallow or meant to impress others or not fulfilling anymore or too much like work or too expensive/intensive to maintain.

So far, I don’t have a great antidote for that. Last time it happened to me, I reverted two decades to making music, decided it still wasn’t for me, and went back to enjoying and sometimes studying/pontificating on music.

Going offline is in some ways a luxurious and nice way to reset. We so rarely allow ourselves a moment or location of offline-ness. If you have to book a flight or outfit your Porsche 911 for camping, so be it. It’s fine to just put your online devices in another room, too.

Recommended: do yourself an Ideal Weekend ³:

• Get coffee
• Go for a walk in a nice park
• Take a nap
• Read a book
• Go for a swim
• Stroll through the vibrant part of your town

Any weekend that includes most of those is likely to give me a reset such that any funk that is imminent or currently occurring goes away.

Were I faced with an intelligence not of this earth, but one that shares our understanding of what music is/for, these are the exemplars I would hold up for them to understand our cultures through my favorites:

• Hip-hop: “So whatcha want”, The Beastie Boys
• Rock and roll: “Highway to Hell”, AC/DC
• Symphonies: “Symphony No. 7”, Beethoven
• Pop: “Walkin' on Sunshine”, Katrina and the Waves
• Jazz: “Giant Steps”, John Coltrane
• Funk: “Mothership Connection”, Parliament

Listening: Afrobeat, e.g. Fela Kuti

Best musical discovery this week: an excellent Apple Music playlist Shapeshifting, catalogs jazz fusion with indie, hip-hop, electronic; all the modern genres

Watching: Jon Hamm easily steps into the title character of an apparent Fletch reboot in Confess, Fletch; sharp humor, well written, way better than I expected!

Playing: Marvel SNAP - every few years, I end up playing a card game for a few months 🤷🏻‍♂️

Reading: Rhodes/The Making of the Atomic Bomb + Gleick/Genius + Wellerstein/Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States - I’m trying reading in clusters. It’s slow going, but I’ve wanted to go deeper on the Manhattan Project for years. Now’s the time!

Last Bob’s episode watched: “Full bars”

I’m rapper slash actor Queen Latifah in her U.N.I.T.Y. phase.

– Gene in Halloween costume

A few years ago, I set up a Mastodon account on a now-defunct instance. It didn’t scare me away, is kinda neat in some ways, the Bird has gone chaotic, and so I’m at it again. Like many folks the past few days, I’m setting up a Mastodon presence mostly from scratch.

If you’re on the fence about Mastodon, here’s how to speed-run it:

• skim Simon Willison’s post and follow as many links as you like
• find an instance (i.e. a community/home-room) that suits you and join it
• use Debirdify to find and follow folks who have advertised a Mastodon presence
• start posting to Mastodon; ideally, get as weird as your web presence was before global social networks were a thing

This brings my web presence to at least four interesting locales. Which raises the question, “hey Adam, why do you have so many websites”. Herein, I will answer that with the question they’re intended to answer 🧠 👴🏻:

• My original-ish blog (RSS), answering “hey Adam, what are you thinking about or building?”
• This blog (RSS, @adam@short.therealadam.com), answering “hey Adam, what’s currently intriguing you?”
• Mastodon (RSS, @therealadam@ruby.social), answering “hey Adam, tell me your best one-liners and weirdest hot-takes?”
• Twitter, answering “hey Adam, what are you thinking about, but in a punchier format?”

The Art of Sketching: Strategies for Getting Started:

Edouard Manet, the French modernist painter, once gave a still-life painting lesson to another French impressionist, Eva Gonzales. His directions for capturing the moment could be taken as instruction for sketching in any creative discipline; “Get it down quickly. Don’t worry about the background. Just go for the tonal values. See?”

It’s about making music (ostensibly with Ableton), but applies to any creative endeavor. Coding, writing, whatever!

Sketching with regularity can help you let go of the pressure of perfectionism, and arrive at a place of more casual creativity. Simply start, then sift through your sketches to find the gems later. Raúl Sotomayor has found that aiming for quantity tends to result in quality ideas to build from; “I used to make a beat every morning, spending 10 minutes to an hour, and then go on with my day. That was really helpful, because at the end of a week, I’ll have seven beats and most of the time, at least one of them would be useful.”

As a creative principle, “quantity creates quality” has served me well over the past several years. You can’t create quality if you don’t have 1) a starting point and 2) freedom to throw away the lowest quality 90% of the work!

• “Rhythm Nation”, Janet Jackson
• “Holding Out For a Hero”, Bonnie Tyler
• “Footloose”, Kenny Loggins
• “Partyman”, Prince

Obsession: Ferraris - they’re at a whole other level.

Listening: Ramsey Lewis, “Japanese ambient”

Watching: Andor, She-Hulk

Reading: Welcome to the Monkey House - Vonnegut short stories.

I wonder now what Ernest Hemingway’s dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that everyone can spell and truly understand.

Last episode of Bob’s Burgers watched (again): “Bad Tina”.

Mommy doesn’t get drunk, she just has fun.