scot hacker's foobar blog

For the first time in 20 years, spent some of my winter vacation surfing in Morro Bay. Felt glorious to feel waves crashing over my head on the way out, to smell fresh wax rising up into my nostrils (smell has such an amazing ability to evoke personal history), to drop in on glassy faces I hadn’t seen in decades… like being back in high school, though I won’t pretend it was still second nature.

Note to self: Despite the lies I tell myself in order to not feel old, my body makes its point all-too clearly: I’m not a 17-year-old surfer boy anymore. My lower body is still in shape thanks to biking, but surfing is mostly torso strength, and mine’s gone to seed. Back, shoulders, delts and lats still aching five days later. It would take weeks or months of water hours to return to the comfort level I once had. Still, felt great to not feel like that chapter is closed forever. Small handful of Flickr pix.

For the past couple of years we’ve inscribed our xmas CDs with the words “Merry Festivus.” I knew Festivus was a half-serious, non-denominational “alternative” to Christmas derived somehow from Seinfeld, but had never read up on it. Turns out we’ve been celebrating it all wrong:

An aluminum pole is generally used in lieu of a Christmas tree or other holiday decoration, shedding holiday materialism. Those attending participate in the “Airing of Grievances” in which each person tells each and everyone else all the ways they’ve disappointed him/her over the past year, and after a Festivus dinner, the “Feats of Strength” are performed. Traditionally, Festivus is not over until the head of the household is wrestled to the floor and pinned.

Looks like we’ve got some wrasslin’ to do. Anyway, Merry Festivus everyone.

Back in the day, when I was doing a lot of paper and digital collage work, people would often ask questions like “What inspired this?” or “How do you know where to start?” I never had a good answer for these kinds of questions, because the truth was that I didn’t start anywhere in particular. I started with a scrap of something, and let it guide me to the next piece. Very little method to the madness.

Though I was often happy with the results, sometimes I felt like I was doing some kind of “fake” art. Real artists are inspired from the start, not noodlers, I thought. I appreciate this quote from film critic Roger Ebert: “The muse never shows up at the beginning.” You have to start doing something and trust the muse will follow, not the other way ’round.” On the other hand, total freedom isn’t necessarily a good thing for the artist either. Federico Fellini:

“I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.”

There’s got to be a germ of something at the beginning, and artists use various techniques to find that seed, to make the muse come to them. For me, that technique often amounted to finding a particular scrap of paper that told the beginning of a visual story, or two pieces of paper that fit together in some unexpected and synergetic way. Sometimes the hardest part was trying to get that initial spark to take light. Once it happened, often the whole collage would fall into place, almost build itself.

Man, I miss that feeling.