Re: [-empyre-] rewind the video star

[Chris Ashley <chrisashley@yahoo.com>]

Lots of stuff from Henry in this email, too much to
reply to, much not addressed with me, but continuing
in my special status of "it's all about me" mode:

--- Henry Warwick <henry.warwick@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> but given his statements about "not
> doing" the blog for a 
> few days, and his ambivalent feelings about that
> separation, I found 
> quite illuminating, as it indicates the depth of how
> his ritual has 
> been routinised into his life.

All right, I'm going to come clean.  I was more than a
little annoyed that the wireless at the place I was
staying last weekend, which normally works
beautifully, wouldn't connect for me. I was frustrated
and kind of pissed because I have a long streak of
posting everyday, it's part of my daily mindset, and
there are times when, even though I have this long
standing habit, I worry that if I take a break for
something too long I can't get back to it.  I worry in
the usual sense of how we drift away from things we
don't intend to drift, but less so.  

My main worry, however, is about keeping up chops. 
Anyone who draws or plays an instrument everyday knows
that touch, some kind of body memory, a groove,
becomes part of what one does.  I can't explain it
without demoing, but if I could show you how I make
the drawings, and talk that through, you'd see that
making these HTML drawings has for me a physical,
sensual aspect, and there is also a kind of mental,
puzzle-making, intuitive approach.

There are days when I make a drawing and it's
terrible, I don't have an idea, I don't know what I'm
doing.  The only way to get through that is to work
through it, to keep remaking the drawing, to be in
that process.  My process is really about drawing,
it's not about, for example, planning a piece of
software that will do specific things and then build
it.  I don't envision an image and make it.  I might
imagine parts, but in some ways what I'm doing is not
far from classic Abstract Expressionism or an
improvised guitar solo.

Chris