Missed opportunity

The New Yorker: David Bowie and the Return of the Music Video. Good article that stops short of what it could have done, which is to point to the role that YouTube videos for ★ and “Lazarus” played in building anticipation for Bowie’s final album.

Or, put another way, just watch these. After watching the video for the lead single, “Blackstar,” how could you not want more? And the video for “Lazarus” became, posthumously, the key piece in Bowie’s in-plain-sight revelation of his fatal illness.

On rebuilding old habits

 

Honoring my New Year’s resolution—to get back on the daily blogging train—is hard.

About eighteen months ago, I shifted roles at my day job from a position where I had a lot of daily/weekly meetings, a lot of realtime decisions that needed to be made, a position of high blood pressure and email overload, to a new role where I had to produce creatively. As in, write.

I quickly learned that in the years in my old role, I had developed a sort of hyper-evolved ADD. The instinct to stay alert and always be on top of the latest thing that crossed my path served me very well in the old role, but it was a serious roadblock to getting any substantial work done. I practically had to isolate myself and make myself put on blinders so that I could get anything done at all.

Getting back to daily blogging feels a little like undoing the work that I did to focus my attention. It’s not really that, but it does require some thought about when. I used to be able to cook along, have a thought, stop and blog it, and go on my business. Now if I don’t do it first thing in the morning it eats at my attention all day until I have to stop and get it done so I can get anything else done.

This is very strange, and not at all what I thought would happen when I got back to daily blogging.

Maybe it’s just what happens when I don’t have anything to write about? Writing yesterday was a lot easier….