Well, last year I didn’t post my “list of plans and goals for 2011” to the blog, and I don’t think I referred to it here during the year. One reason was that my new year’s resolution (if you can call it that) was something like “Set fewer goals for the year!”

I didn’t want to be beholden to what January 2011 Luke wanted to spend time on when October 2011 Luke had changed his mind about it. On a weekly basis I have a larger creative output than almost anyone I know, so I have nothing to prove to myself or anyone else that I’m wasting my time, or that I’m a failure if I succeeded at only “35.05 out of a possible 50 plans and goals.” And yes, that was my success rate in 2010.

So in 2011 I intentionally didn’t work towards to plans and goals on my list. If I had time free, I’d look over the list, and see if it inspired me, but otherwise I just worked on what I wanted.

And, as it happened, some of the things I most proud of accomplishing weren’t on the list at all. For example:

• The list said “Perform live set of my own music” inspired by spending time in New York with some awesome live performers.
• I started performing at small music open stages in Berlin, and discovered that people really enjoyed my performing. They liked the fun songs, and how I chatted between, but hardly anyone commented about the pop songs and love songs that I’m so proud of.
• I discarded other music plans and concentrated on writing more quirky and clever comedy songs, that I perform with just me at the piano.
• This led to me performing more at comedy shows than music-only shows, and my comedy songs got a great reaction.
• I now have 10-12 “comedy” numbers that I could, if the opportunity arose, put together into an hour-long show.

In January last year I never imagined I’d have the skills and material to do a whole new hour-long show. This is on top of the two hours of juggling material I have, AND on top of the (maybe) two hours of other music I could perform, and all of it original material.

I think that’s pretty cool. Right?

Who knows, maybe this year I’ll actually do a full-length solo music show, rather than just performing sets in longer shows.

All that aside, here are a few things from my list of plans and goals for 2011 that have been fun to track.

Travel

• Visit another 20 new countries.

Partial win! I don’t have much control of this one, as I don’t make most of my travel plans. As it happened I visited 18 new countries in 2011.

I also made sure I got a video of me juggling in every country I visited in 2011 (win), even those I only passed through without leaving the airport.

Juggling

• Berlin and EJC and at least two other conventions (to be confirmed), one in a new country.

Win! Berlin and the EJC, plus the French Convention, Brianza Convention in Italy, Portland in the USA, and Passout in Germany at the end of the year. I’d never been to a convention in Italy before, so that was cool.

• Win Fight Night Combat (against JJ for bonus)

Win! I won in Berlin, but JJ didn’t take part. I lost badly at the EJC. No bonus.

• Run open stages and other events at EJC (with zero stress)

Win! 8 open stages over 8 nights. There was stress in the organization as a whole, but I deflected it all by being more professional and confident than others, and hopefully the stress didn’t leak out too far into the venue I had to control.

• Track and break some personal records.

Win! I broke a few. The most “impressive” record was 5 club backcrosses. I worked on it many hours in the spring, up to an hour day for many days, and smashed my old record. It now stands at 50 catches, though my 5 year plan back in 2001 was to get 100 catches. I’m okay with never reaching that goal, even after 10 years.

• Practice more (log hours per day).

Win? I’m not sure if I did practice more or less than previous years, because this is the first year I’ve tracked how much I juggle. I think I’ll release the nerdy numbers as a separate blog post.

Other juggling and performing goals included working on new material (win), building new props (win), developing routines which don’t need more equipment than I already carry (win), finishing the construction of “The Room” set (progress, but nowhere near finished), writing the show “Powercut” (fail), and working with other jugglers and artist on material for the above shows (win).

Writing

I had some writing goals, but this was tricky. Half way through 2010 I decided to keep a diary, and writing about 1,000 words per day for my private diary took up so much of the energy that would normally be spent writing fiction. I did manage to make progress on various novels. I even completed one novella and recently published it on my website.

Photography

I intentionally left this even more vague than others. Photography is something I’m still getting better at on a monthly basis, and until that stops, I don’t think I need to think about setting myself other goals.

My only goals were to learn more about small strobe photography (win), to learn more about self-portrait photography (win), and to set up a photo studio in my juggling studio at home (partial win).

Conclusion

By the numbers:

• I had 31 plans and goals for 2011.
• I succeeded at 15.9 of them.
• I failed at 11.1 (the decimal is from visiting 18 and not 20 new countries).
• At the end of the year I was still actively working on 4 projects (for example, an audio recording of one of my science fiction stories).

The numbers are nowhere close to last year’s success rate, but last year I put down loads of things that I knew I would succeed at anyway. Things like “continue to record the SFBRP podcast”, and even without trying I put out 32 episodes of science fiction reviews. And a lot of them were really simple too, like “buy a new camera bag”. How much effort does that take? Nothing compared to writing a whole novel!

And, as I said before, I decided to be happy to go on flights of fancy with my plans and goals and dreams.

I’m super happy with 2011, and how much I achieved in terms of life accomplishments and creative output. I even found an awesome girlfriend, and she is going to be included in many of my plans and goals for 2012.

But that will be a whole other blog post.

New for 2012: I’m turning off comments on my blog. Since early 2009, when I started this blog, there have only been about 10 comments really worth my time reading and approving. And for each of those, I responded individually by email, or created a new blog post. All the others were fine, but not worth wading through the spam.

So from now on, I’ll just leave my email address at the bottom of each post. If you have something to tell me, please email me. I’ve done this since 2008 on my SFBRP podcast, and have developed really strong relationships via email with my listeners. I’d love to replicate that here. Just so you know, I reply to every email:

luke@juggler.net

In 2009 I listened to every bit of music in my iTunes library as sorted by track name, and in 2010 I did listened to the entire thing as sorted by by track length, and again in 2010 sorted by play number.

It’s a fun little project, and makes me take notice of the music I have in new ways. Over the past month I’ve listened to every track as sorted by date added.

What did I find out this time?

Of the four ways I’ve listened to all my music in order, it was the one that had the greatest effect. Listening as sorted by track length told me a lot about the kind of music I own, but by date added it told me a lot about me. Changing tastes of music is only the smallest part of it.

Mostly it’s about the triggered memories. This is a great way to relive your life through your memories, in order, as triggered by “Oh shit, I remember buying this!” or “I know where I was the first time I heard this track, and ripped it from that CD!”

If I looked through a diary, that would work, but most people don’t keep diaries. But everyone has a collection of music. Listening by track name is just a whimsical thing that only someone like me would do, someone who has almost unlimited free time, gives in to random impulses, and bloody-minded enough to stick with long term projects.

I think everyone should listen to all their music as sorted by date. Then again, maybe most people aren’t like me, and might not get anything from it at all. Who knows.

Some more notes:

• When you sort all the tracks by date added, if an album has the same time and date (to the nearest minute) it then lists the tracks alphabetically by name, not by track number. I’m not sure why, but it meant that I listened to albums in an unusual order. Unless, of course, the track names were “Track 1, track 2, track 3, etc.”
• The first track, for the second time, was “5 seconds of almost silence”, a track I use to separate music track on CDs for my show. It’s also the shortest track in my library, as well as the most played.
• Next is a whole load of music that I copied direct from my old PC onto my macbook when I bought it back in February of 2008. This includes 311 songs, 20.2 hours, or 1.5 GB of music. A lot of this is from my collection of CDs from the previous decade, but from CDs I didn’t still have with me physically.
  What did this mean? This batch included a LOT of memories. Stuff I’d downloaded for specific shows, CDs I’d borrowed from friends at university and ripped, some music from Pola’s computer, and lots more.
• The next main batch of music is from a few weeks later, when I wanted to have the titles of every track listed, rather than just “Track 1, track 2, track 3, etc.” Instead of doing anything manually, I just ripped all the CDs I had, let iTunes grab the track titles from the internet automagically, and deleted the previous files.
  This included a lot more music that Pola and I had bought together, or that we both liked so that we’d carry the music with us on road trips in a CD carrying case. Good times!
• Once I had an iTunes account, much of the music I bought was through that, and not CD. A lot of these were impulse buys, or buying new albums from favourite artists. Also there are many EPs and albums that I bought after hearing the music on a YouTube video, and iTunes is usually the easiest way to grab it.
• At the EJC in 2008 I organized the EJC Open Stages, and put in lots of CDs to rip for the artists appearing on stage. Also someone gave me a USB thumb drive with a big collection of ska music and other stuff, and it somehow got imported into my iTunes library. I liked most of it, so kept most of it.
• Some CDs that someone gave to me. Those were ripped.
• Some music from musicians I work with on cruise ships. Well, to be honest the style of music normally isn’t to my taste, so I don’t keep the music in rotation, except for a very few artists.
• Oh look, all of Jonathan Coulton’s Thing A Week music. Mixed memories of my own attempt to make a song a week for a just six weeks, rather than for an entire year.
• And then quite a few albums bought at the suggestion of various girlfriends and friends who are girls over the last two years. Lots of memories there too!
• Albums and EPs by musicians I met on my vacation in New York in September 2010. Those guys were all super talented! I still buy their new music as and when it comes out.
• Various nostalgia trip! Downloading albums I owned on CD, cassette tape or (I’m not kidding here) minidisc when I was 20, but since lost. Groove Armada are still cool, right? Basement Jax? Air’s Moon Safari? Jamiroqui? Love it! That reminds me, I should find some Orbital and Leftfield again some time. This way I can get double memories, of when I first listened to that music, and also when I buy it again 10 (or more) years later.

Whew! A lot of memories. That will do for now.

But what next? Listen to the whole iTunes library as sorted by… release date? That might work, but only three quarters of my library has the year of release. Beats per minute? Only a few dozen tracks have that info attached. Genre? Album? Artist? Those are a bit boring. No matter, I’ll think of something.

Based on my dating life about a year ago, here’s a new song I shared with the KITAC group that met at my place again last night. It’s the first time I’ve played it for a group of people, so decided to video the performance to see if/when/why they laughed. I’m happy with the response!

Here’s a video I play during my stage show, and I play along with piano and sing too. It’s the best footage I’ve got of me juggling around the world from February 2009 to January 2011.

“Three minute hero is the new underground open stage in berlin, right on the platform of the ubahnhof schönleinstrasse.

Songs, breakdance, stand up comedy, performance whatever you want to show you can!! only limitations are the three minutes between trains arriving at the station.

Wanna show? Simply come up and you get a slot in the show. Just passing through? Well, you can always take the next train.”

Hosted by Duo Desolato.

Guitar and singing!

Hint: nobody asked permission to do this! How long could it keep going until security turns up?

Quick! Make it look as though nothing special is happening!

Magic!

Juggling!

I performed some music and juggling, but of course I don’t have photos of me.

Dancing!

Drunken singing!

Party!

Oh shit! Security! Length of show: one hour and 30 minutes.

The BVG security allowed one final act. Andy Snatch closed the show with a club routine.

Later at the Another Country English Bookshop, playing Jenga.

]]> http://www.lukeburrage.com/blog/archives/1292/feed 0 http://www.lukeburrage.com/blog/archives/1234 http://www.lukeburrage.com/blog/archives/1234#comments Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:55:47 +0000 admin http://www.lukeburrage.com/blog/?p=1234 ” Write an album’s-worth of new songs and record them by the end of the year. ”

This was a huge goal, but it worked out really well. I interpreted it as meaning one song per month, and while I always fell behind, by the end of December I wrote over 12 songs.

The concept of recording the songs took on different meanings, as I never intended it to be a single album, with every song properly recorded and packaged as a whole. Instead I recorded some songs with a video camera and shared them on YouTube, other songs I did full pop production, some songs I made music videos for, and some I have on my laptop and have not yet shared on my blog or on YouTube or any other way.

Wonderful.

Memory/Confusion.

Out of Reach and Out of Sight.

This (New Song For May).

Work It Out Yourself.

All Your Time.

Future Luke.

Still Hurting Me.

Light Side (Dark Side).

Written but not yet released:
I Like You.
Take Me To Zanzibar.
Speed of Dark.

A win, by the way.

” Write the music for Room.”

This tied in with my big theatre project for the year, and that was largely fail, this part would be too. But I did actually work quite a bit on the music this project, and for the video I released, I made sure the music was a large part of it. Win.

” Buy a five string bass guitar and learn to rock.”

Fail. Maybe one day. Now I want to buy a piano, after playing them a lot more on cruise ships while writing songs per month.

Wins for this section: two out of three. I’m happy with that.

Happy Halloween! Check out this song I wrote and recorded for Halloween back in 1999.

Light Side – a twisted take on Dark Side by Tim Minchin. Jamming with my guitar, this idea got stuck in my head, so I wrote and recorded it as quick as I could. It’s not perfect, but then I hadn’t written down all the words. It might make more sense if you watch the original by Tim Minchin, which is way better than this “cover”.

In my list of 50 goals and plans for 2010 I wrote “6.1 Write an album’s-worth of new songs and record them by the end of the year” which I’m interpreting as one song per month. This is song number nine, which might make it the song for September, but “Future Luke”, which I wrote in September, specifically about my life in September, takes that slot.

Nine songs is a short album’s worth of music, so I’ll write 3 more by the end of the year.

The first time I listened to all the tracks sorted by track name.

The second time I listened sorted by track length.

In October I listened to all the tracks by play number. I started with tracks I’ve only listened to two or three times, and ended with tracks I’ve listened to over a hundred times. This is since February 2008.

My most listened-to track is actually the shortest track, so was the first one I listened to when I sorted by track length. It’s a 5 second piece of almost silence which I use to separate tracks on my show music playlists and CDs for performing. Number of listens? 902.

The most listened-to piece of music which isn’t something I use in my show, and I play repeatedly when practicing, is By My Side by Kasabian, from the album Empire. This is one of my favorite “writing” albums, and listen to it on repeat when plugging away on a novel. Play count? 87.

Some other notes:
- If two tracks from the same album had the same play number, for some reason the later track number was listed first. This lead to me listening to quite a few albums in reverse.
- The least-listened albums were, of course, those I’ve only bought or otherwise acquired most recently.
- Next up came albums that I don’t actively listen to. As in, when I flick though my iTunes Library, I never thing “Oh man, I’ve got to hear this band again!” I normally listen to these if they come up randomly, or when the album I wanted to listen to ends, and these play next.
- Tracks that aren’t part of albums are listened to less, as I don’t actively select them either.
- Earlier tracks in albums have more listens than later tracks. This is due to me starting an album, but not reaching the end.
- If a track is part of a playlist, it gets more plays, of course.
- The most listened to albums are quite varied, but each reflects a different mood. I guess whenever I feel like putting on music, I subconsciously return over and over to the same few albums.
- It doesn’t matter if an album is quite new, if I like it, and it fits a mood, it moves up the play count rankings pretty quickly.
- Shorter albums and EPs get more plays.

I think that’s it for this time.

Next time I’m going to listen to my entire iTunes library as sorted by “date added”, so chronologically by when I first listened to the track on this or my previous laptop.

A quick glance at that sorting option shows that the very first track is… you guessed it… 5 seconds of almost silence!

So, last month I was chatting to someone about relationships, and they said something like “You only finally deal with all the issues of a relationship once the NEXT serious relationship has ended.” Comparing our lives, it seemed as if that had more than a grain of truth.

Like my song for January, this is an old song that I started but never finished. I started writing it in February of 2004. Yeah, and I’ve now “finished” it six and a half years later! There was a break of about 5 years when I didn’t play it at all though.

The reason I went so long without playing or working on this song is that it was just too painful. I was too close to a very bad breakup, and even a year later it WAS still hurting me. Now it just sounds like a typical breakup pop song, even to me, as 2004 Luke and 2010 Luke are two totally different people.