Close to The Flame or Whatever

Nice photos I took in the mountains and how I tried to listen to every King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard album in order in one day

I decided I wanted to be creative as something resembling a job on a mountain. 

It technically wasn’t a mountain. To be a mountain you have to be 1,000 feet tall. Ski Roundtop was 600 feet tall.

I decided I wanted to be creative as something resembling a job on a slightly larger than average hill. 

The thing about being the person with a camera is you never have to be the one taking the biggest risk. You can’t. You have the camera. So when my friends who were much better at skiing or snowboarding would hit a jump or a rail that scared me, there was no pressure for me to do it, too. Because I had the camera. They were glad to have me ride alongside it making them look good.

There’s that Cameron Crowe quote about how he got into music journalism because he wanted to be “closer to the flame.” It resonates for me, like I’m sure it does a lot of people who are in my position now. We might be embarrassed to say it now, but we all (journalists who write about music etc.) have that teenager who got all inspired by “Almost Famous” still inside of us.

There were a lot of flames I wanted to get close to in my life. First with a camera, and then, when I accepted that I didn’t have the passion or real skill for a film major, through journalism. I always still got a lot of happiness out of cameras. First the Hi-8 cameras to film my friends and I jumping off of stuff, then mini DV tapes for action sports and more obnoxious suburban teenage shit that comes about when you grow up on Jackass and the like. Eventually we all had high definition cameras on us all the time, and my backpack was lighter and I was no longer the guy with the camera like I used to be.

I haven’t posted on here in a while. The real job that I have, which is still pretty close to the creative life I imagined when I was a kid or majoring in journalism in school, becomes pretty hectic at times. I just haven’t had the juice to interview people or draw inspiration from things like I sometimes do. But I did buy a “new” film camera, so I’ve been taking it on work trips, which I’ve increasingly had to go on to places like Napa, Phoenix, Atlanta and, most recently, Park City, Utah. It’s fun sneaking in some creativity for me while there for work.

The thing with a film camera is that it’s impractical. You have to learn how to make the pictures look good, unlike a digital camera (or your phone) which does it for you. It’s similar to how vinyl is hardly more convenient than the many streaming services, but it’s fun. It’s fun to have big squares that hold big circles that can be turned into music through hundreds of dollars of equipment. In that same vein, these pictures I took cost money to take and develop, and it took days before I saw what they looked like, but having this camera sparked something that I haven’t felt in a while. And at a time where I’ve felt like I was in a creative rut and drained, it gave me an outlet.

I tried everything to get back on track with my writing, though. Like Andre 3000 really wanted to make a rap album but instead made a flute album, I really wanted to write a traditional essay or article, but here I am with a photo collection instead.

When I graduated from Temple in 2014, I was extremely unemployed. Somehow, the “freelance gigs” I was picking up writing ad copy for random jewelry websites feels worse than if I had just been doing literally nothing. It felt like I had been scammed. It was more worthwhile to work for the free music magazine I helped run then.

Like a lot of kids at this time, I was fairly enamored with the “stunt journalism” of Vice’s heyday. Documentaries and written features where journalists in cool clothes of the time would thrust themselves into an interesting or dangerous situation and mumble their way through it as if it were neither interesting nor dangerous. These stories whose headlines started with “I” or “We” were the coolest form of writing, I thought, and I would’ve loved to do something like that. Maybe it was a natural progression from Jackass appreciation.

The problem is that I had no ideas and a bad work ethic. In the absence of a real job or real inspiration, I looked for ways my environment or experience could lend itself to content.

The other day the pressure really felt strong to publish something. I was so aware of everyone else doing so much more than me, and that made me feel worse than I had in a long time about this whole digital publishing thing. So I tried to push through it and force a good idea into fruition.

My idea was that I would listen to the band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, a band I always knew about but never really listened to at all, and is known for their insanely prolific output. They average at least two albums a year, so my idea was that if I listened to them all in order, I’d not only have a greater understanding for a band people seem to enjoy, but had been a blindspot for me, I’d also get “close to the flame” of off-the-wall productivity and creative output. I started in the morning, journaling my endeavor.

Here’s some excerpts:

8:30 AM - 12 Bar Bruise

By the end I felt like I was getting a headache, either by the music or the coffee.

10:07 AM - Float Along – Fill Your Lungs

Before I start listening to it, I see that this is apparently where they start playing with a “psychedelic sound.”

I thought about taking a break, but it seems against the spirit of what I’m doing to take a rest between “output.” This band sure doesn’t.

Ah, white guys using sitars. Original.

This one at least allows me to take a breath a little better. I feel a little slower and calmer. 

I like “Mystery Jack.” This is the first song I think I really feel like I’d put on by choice.

Alright, I like the one after it, too. The last song is a little too Beatles Doing Acid, but still nice.

Fine. Unremarkable.

By the time I got to Oddments, I realized I had 21 albums left, and the whole thing started to feel like torture. Why was I doing this? The odds were better than good that whatever content juice I came up with from this would not be worth the intellectual squeeze.

I decided the moral of the story in the moment was that it’s OK to take breaks. It’s OK to work at your own pace. You don’t have to look at the guys who put out three albums a year for fun to feel like your art is valid. The pressure of trying to “make it” in whatever all of this is felt huge in the moment, and still does often, but I remembered that it shouldn’t be torture.

And I’m sorry to my friends who like them, but it’s still going to take me some time to get into King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, especially after inundating myself with it for about three hours straight. I just don’t think it’s for me. And that’s OK.

It’s OK to do the things that are just for you, like take an old camera out onto a mountain next to where your work event is during a break and snap some photos, praying that you light metered correctly and chose the right settings for the aperture and shutter speed. And when they come back, and you see the email while you’re in the bathroom, you get excited because they turned out even better than expected, and the cool film the guy at the camera store told you to buy turned out to really make those colors pop like he said they would, and you get amped up about being creative again, even if it’s not writing about music or filming snowboarding or becoming a professional skateboarder or whatever else there’s still time to do in your life (though I think the pro skater dream is dead).

It’s absolutely fucking exhausting to go through every day thinking about how something can be spun into content. Your interactions with people, the music you’re listening to, the shows you watch. Everything you ingest can be used for content, sure. But it’s no way to live, man. Jerry Seinfeld has talked about how every conversation he’s having, he’s thinking about how it could be a bit. Seems unhealthy to me, but he’s the guy with the show named after him. I just don’t have the stomach for it I guess.

Sometimes it’s fun to take nice pictures, remove the pressure from yourself to turn everything into a project, listen to the same bands you’ve always listened to, take Henry Rollins’ advice with a grain of salt. Take bad pictures, too.

So, instead of spinning into certain insanity by listening to something like 9,000 more hours of Australian psyche rock, I’m gonna post some pictures today. (That said, if any of my friends at cool publications want to pay me to listen to all of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s albums I am not too proud to try again.)

Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Yeah right.