If you didn’t read this week’s post “How to find your Jam” I will read it to you now, below, in dramatic fashion. 👇
Enjoy!
Notes from the Captain
Crew, I arrive on deck and salute you most enthusiastically. 🫡
I hope you have not been waiting long. But since we’re on the subject of waiting…
I trust in it. The wait. The block. The JAM.
Does it make me anxious? You bet. Oh boy, I panic. What if that last idea was the LAST IDEA I will ever have? What if I’ve exhausted all the creative juice? Wrung out my sponge? Emptied the well of creative thought? Plucked the last artistic air molecules from my atmosphere? What if?
Hmm. Well. If you throw away three letters in the phrase what if, you get the word hat and I choose to wear a trust one. 🧢 (See how I did that? Effortless.)
I trust in it. I trust in the signal noise, the sitting in it—the waiting.
There’s active waiting (where you’re working and knowing you haven’t got it yet but knowing it is circling ‘round your skull and you’ve just got to wait until it’s ready to land, to be received) and then there’s PROCRASTI-WAITING(!) which is a word I invented during this week’s video shoot and was super-chuffed about.
I talk about it all the time—this thing I will now call Procrastiwaiting for the rest of my life. Doing something else and avoiding the work but knowing that while you’re doing this other thing that you’re doing to avoid the work, it’s all percolating in there. It’s moving furniture around in your brain. It’s stewing preserves on your stove.
It will come.
Trust the wait.
Know the wait may feel stressful.
But trust in it anyway.
It all ties back to my favorite personal philosophy. The NOthing and the SOMEthing. How the NOthing becomes SOMEthing. I am a broken record, yet I continue to play.
Feel free to say something in the comments on the subject of waiting or creative blocks. I know many of you work in creative fields, so let me ask you a question: how do you work through ideas? Is it a combo of “Sit at the desk” and procrastiwaiting? Do you ever get blocked or jammed up creatively? I’d love to hear your methods and if they work.
Have a great weekend, my lovely and loyal crew. I hope you’re finding the rations aboard ample and deliciously nutritious. Keep eating your lemons and limes 🍋 —Captain’s orders. My crew is a scurvy-free crew!
Until next time we meet, love what you love and I’ll see you out there, making stuff.
Your Captain, Janeen 🫡
Thangs from this episode…
👩✈️ Ataskoa
This was the video that hipped me to Ataskoa—gives a nice little summary.
The artist, Maider Lopez, has put the film made about the day on Vimeo. It’s 20 minutes and I can’t embed it, but you can watch it on her site.
Gleaning from some bio pieces, much of her work is about intervening in public spaces. Here’s a quote:
Site-specificity underpins all of Lopez’s work with interventions ranging from the subversive tampering with a space to the complete overturning of its usual operability. These interventions in spaces, situations and architecture temporarily change the meaning of the location and as a consequence change the public’s relationship to it.
Reminds me a bit of Christo. Challenging the use of space and how humans view it.
👩✈️ Music from 2005
I threw in a small sample of the albums I was listening to in the video. Here is the playlist of that sample, in the order of album releases throughout the year.
👩✈️ Speaking of traffic jams in the countryside, Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend”
While editing this week’s video, I was trying to find some traffic jam footage and stumbled upon this excerpt video (below) from Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend”, a film I knew nothing about.
Made in 1967, the film tells the story of a couple, each with a secret lover who conspires to murder the other. Good start! They drive out to the countryside for plotting reasons, and all sorts of chaotic things happen including violence involving motor vehicles (causing the traffic jam I included in my BTS Jam video above). Read the Wikipedia for a plot summary. It gets… weird. HA! This article, which is all about the film and a good read if you’re interested in knowing more about it, hints at the tone—it’s like Alice in Wonderland. Also, the collapse of Western Civilization. Yup.
Here is the trailer for the film
The shot of the traffic jam is lovely (I cut before the bloody bodies). In the short Vimeo description, it says:
They laid 300 meters of track for this dolly shot. At 150 meters they do cut and then carry on very efficiently.
👩✈️ Musicians jamming
A story: Rick Rubin talking about some musicians (you may have heard of them) sitting around drinking tea and smoking. AC/DC and sprints. This is what “waiting in the jam” looks like.
Footage from Get Back is often taken down, but these two pieces—the initial noodling and then when the guys get involved—are still up for now. Paul jamming out Get Back from his brain to his fingers.
👩✈️ Jam recipe
How to make jam from the NYT Cooking section
That’s all for this week. Thanks for listening/watching and sharing. If I missed anything you were curious about from the post—or just in general—feel free to leave a comment for the Captain.
On that note, do something great this weekend. Do something great for your whole life if you can.
Do. Make. Be.
🫡
Shameless Podcast Plug
Listen to audio versions of early issues of The Stream on my podcast, Field of Streams, available on 👉 all major podcasting platforms 👈
Here’s Apple
Behind the Streams, Ep 23: "Jam"