Archive for the ‘collecting’ tag
Rip rig and panic
SIIGS means Self Induced Information Gluttony Syndrome. I just made that acronym up. And the syndrome too. But I’ve been living it for a while, dosing myself with nuggets of mostly distracting information via my phone and computers. My concentration has been slipping and after a few hours in the torrent of news snippets, I feel stupider and strangely dispairing.
Most likely it is time for an information diet. I’m fond of Feedly, a program that turns all of my google reader rss subscriptions into a page of varied story tidbits. But after all that clicking, I have even less useful information than I did before.
And let’s be clear here: useful information is, from the artist point of view, information that leads to me making art in some form. I can trick myself and say that that I’ll use all of this stuff eventually, but if I am constantly dazed and dopey in the short term, there will be no eventually. Useful information sparks the creative impulse either by providing an inspiring example, or posing a problem I want to resolve. Useless information is just something I file away to make it seem like I’m doing something.
I know all the tools for dealing with this sort of behavior and this type of writing is one of them: I’ve faced this kind of willful distraction many times in the past. I’ve been missing my therapist lately ( now realizing that I’m coming up on the anniversary of ending therapy) and these are the sorts of skills he helped me develop.
Once again I must ask, distracted from what? And why?
One of today’s tasks has been the continuing digitization of my music collection, which is heading towards 300gb at this point, with still quite a few CDs left to rip. A lot of stuff I’m adding now is stuff that I bought for DJ purposes over the past ten years or so. Lots of compilation CDs that I got for one or two songs. I’ve decided to dump the entire CD into iTunes however, just to see what I does to my music mix. There’s going to be a lot of dodgy house music. I’m from the generation that looks at our music collections as some sort of badge of identity. So I can’t help but think that when random play throws up something that I wouldn’t consciously pick I should be somehow embarrassed. This will be a nice exercise in letting that go. At the very least I’m starting to approach that fantasy ideal of having every piece of music I own all in one place, equally available. When that occurs, what will it “say” about me?
Why save anything? There’s a part of me that wants to let it all go. (is it the same part that makes stupid mistakes like misplacing hard drives and cameras?). Collecting is a baffling impulse, self defining and self obscuring all at the same time. If I want to see another picture, I should make it dammit, and not look it up on line. But I’m not there yet.
Tags: browsehole, clutter, collecting, music, online life, self examination, SIIGS
