Author: Nick Kempinski

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.

I don’t post enough poetry. Last night we had an exercise in class called, ode to spring, and here is the poem that came from it.

A landscape of white desert
Nothing but howling of the wind
being torn by sleeping claws of trees
Each wooden stump a tombstone
engraved “2005 A devoted Mother”
But in this time of rest and death
the sun conspires with
the moon, the sky and stars
And with wiccan like chants
and native tribal dance
they splatter the ground with
a concoction of love
so powerful to wake the infinite slumber
And slowly from faded calling
she claws through the soil
With sweat and ache
her joints pop and muscles shake
Finally she peaks just one finger
above the ground
Above her white grave
And on the fingers tip a bud of pink.

Garr over at Presentation Zen has a great article on the Lessons Jazz can give everyday life. These lessons might come from the music world but can be used in any situation where 2 people are connecting.

1. “The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.” (Duke Ellington)
2. “Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can’t be taught.” (Paul Desmond)
3. “Don’t bullshit… just play.” (Wynton Marsalis)
4. “If they act too hip, you know they can’t play shit!” (Louis Armstrong)
5. “Master your instrument. Master the music. And then forget all that bullshit and just play.” (Charlie Parker)
6. “It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.” (Dizzy Gillespie)
7. “You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.” (John Coltrane)
8. “When people believe in boundaries, they become part of them.” (Don Cherry)
9. “Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.” (Charles Mingus)
10. “I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain’t music…” (Billie Holiday)
11. “A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.” (Herbie Hancock)

A concept raised for Renaissance Souls is that you don’t need to do everything. Don’t go for a massive ice cream cone with one flavour. Don’t even go for a massive double scoop with a combo. For us Renaissance Souls, the idea is to have a sampler. This allows us to taste a little bit of everything: a bit of Sewing, a bit of Writing, a bit of time on the Car, etc…. Part of this is to keep our always wandering attention. Instead of allotting time to just one activity, only to feel drained when we do it. We do “one of…” something. We don’t plan until we are in the moment.

Bring in a phrase “Energy Management“. I read this from Worthwhile. And while I don’t think we need to “ruthlessly manage” our energy like Anita believes. I do think more then the number of tasks on our plate needs to be in consideration for whether or not we are overwhelmed.

Example: I’ve been working on a project to combine and relaunch a couple of sites into one. The project had some pretty tight timelines. But do you know what I did for the first 3 months? Picture a lot of reading, and a lot of filler. It’s not that my time was poorly managed, it was that people didn’t feel the need to rush. But now the project is getting to the end, people are running around like their hands and hair were on fire. Some people are seriously snapping from the stress. The project could have gone more smoothly simply by taking the amount of panic energy they have, and divide that by the number of months this project has been going.

Solution: Work energy should be managed like diabetes. It’s not always the level of sugar, it’s the spikes that cause the damage. The same goes for energy. We should be able to have a reading maybe twice or 3 times a day that tells us how are energy is doing. And our job is to make sure it’s a steady as possible. Spikes in energy could cause psychological damage like diabetes causes to the body.

I have the pleasure of working with an insightful and talented woman. Darylynn Rank entered my life in a weekend of coincidences where I met a man who went to the same high-school as I did, and graduated the same year I started. We never met until about a year ago. This might have been not so strange except for the fact that we were at his creative camp in Caltus Lake BC, and went to high-school in Guelph ON on the other side of the county. Darylynn was a workshop presenter for “finding your creative voice”.

Since then the course title has changed, however I have be privately working with Dari for some time. She is an exquisite navigator of the tides of experience, and is helping me find my own boat and ore to sail mine.

Now to the point….

For those of you living in BC; are willing to travel to Langara College; and have a desire to get through writer’s block or simply need to find the creative power to start hitting the keyboard, she is open to share her insight with you. Check out langara.bc.ca for her course Discovering The Writer Within.

I love cartoons. I don’t love every cartoon, but there is always at least one or two that peak my curiosity. Lately, the top on my list is Avatar: The Last Airbender.

The premiss is simple. Take a world where there are four nations: Earth, Air, Water Fire. In these nations there are those born who can mould the element or “Bend” it. But there is one, The Avatar, who can Bend all four.

There are loads of great lessons that come out of a 30 minute story. But today I made a connection. The Avatar is a Renaissance Soul ( or for some of you a generalist) . Here is a society that is built on specializing in one element. And here comes a single individual that is looked up in this world to be able to bend several elements.

Unlike the story, I think that we have thousands of Avatars walking our streets and roaming our world. They have in them the ability to bend more than elements. One might bend Music and Math; another Leadership and Sewing. The combinations are endless. What can you bend?