Month: May 2006

For any job one must do, you need to have the right tools to do it. For Piano players it evident, that if there is no piano, they can’t play. For writers, no pen and paper, no typewriter, no computer, there won’t be a story.

I’ve been working on this for a little for myself. Asking, what tools do I need to be creative. What tools do I need that would help. And although on the surface to those who don’t write, or those who don’t play piano, these would be accurate statements. Any pen and any keyboard should do. But as I continue to write, and continue to play piano I’m finding that there is more to that.

When I write, it’s not just any pen or any paper that would do. I need a flavor mini pen with an orange grip and a Moleskine small lined notebook.

When I play the piano, I can no longer use just a simple Casio keyboard I got from radio shack, I need to have weight in the keys from either a high quality electronic piano, or even more preferably a baby grand.

Being creative incorporates all your experiences and all your senses. So it makes sense that you need to incorporate them all in your creative tools. They must smell right, feel right, sound right, look right, and taste right ( perhaps for chef’s or maybe you need to chew the right kind of gum ).

So if you are looking for your right tools, don’t just look for something that will “do”. Look for something that inspires.

Take the aggression of the week out into the spring loaded floors of the Legion Auditorium on Commercial Drive. Sweat and stomp it out by Dancing to Live Jazz with the Blue Morris 6.

Legion Auditorium, Commercial Drive

Brought To you by Jungle Swing Productions

9pm – 12am

$13/$15

I’ve heard a rumour that some people don’t use a news aggregator like Google Reader. RSS might as well sand for “Really it’s Something Strange”. And for those of you who come by once in a while hoping for something new and heart broken to see the same post as before, I send my apologies your way. But I’m not one just to say sorry and forget about it. I like to correct the problem. I’ve added the ability to subscribe to my blog. No longer do you need to pop by and hope. If you sign up, I’ll send you an email and let you know I’ve made a change. Think of it like an invitation for Pie or Coffee.

Come down to Tree’s Organic Cafe, 8pm, 450 Granville, and listen to me with the Blue Morris 6. Great pie; great coffee; great music. All we ask for is tips.

My previous post triggered something. I remembered of all the other poems I’ve written. Some I’ve shared in this blog and others I’ve kept quiet. But the thing it triggered the most was how much I enjoyed poetry. I would write it constantly and endlessly. Maybe it was my adolescence, like the poems of Carmina Burana. But simply, it might have actually been the fact that I’m a poet.

And so I started a sub-project called Nick is a poet. It’s a blog like this, and uses wordpress ( I got to use dreamhosts one button installer, it was pretty cool ). The idea is to get to a poem a day. But I don’t want to push it too much off the bat. If I happen to get a poem out a week, or maybe every other week that would keep me happy.

Now, in my own internal process and re-emergence to things I used to enjoy, what have you given up? How many things did we absolutely love doing as children and yet now we put them aside. Some liked gymnastics, others might have enjoyed the simple act of laying in a field and one by one pulling the grass. I say go back to that. Ask yourself what made you stop? Was it the someone put you down and said you sucked at it? Was it just other priorities? Find out why? Perhaps the thing that we were meant to be, the life or career we should be doing, was the same thing we did when we were 4.