Inspirations: Music, art, writing and unleashing the inner geek

As a writer, I have never regretted chugging through the Royal Schools of Music grade system. Music offers skills that feed directly into writing. Learning how to write a tune to words, for instance, rammed home why it’s important, even in prose, to have rhythm.

The panel of one of my analog synths… dusty, a bit scratched, but still workable. Pop quiz: can anybody identify it from this clipped close-up?

There’s a more subtle side to it, too. Music is about evoking emotion in the recipient – the satisfaction of listening, hope, despair, anger, laughter. So is writing. That’s one reason why rhythm of words is important. For writers, as for musicians, it helps evoke a response.

I still have a small collection of vintage analog synths. They all work – including my Moog, which was old and battered when I bought it in 1987. The fact that it functions 37 years after it left Moog’s Trumansburg factory is testament to the quality.

It is also an expressive instrument, meant to be played like a violin, not a piano. You can do things with pitch-bender, potentiometers and modulation wheels that give the sound life. If you have never heard a Moog 24dBa high-pass ladder filter being overdriven, you’ve missed something. Here’s someone using the filter as a resonator. Here’s Erik Norlander playing the biggest Modular Moog I’ve ever seen.

The worn out ribbon pitch-controller on my Micromoog. Apparently Bob Moog invented that device for Beach Boys keyboard player Brian Wilson.

One of the doyens of the Moog, way back, was Brit prog-rock icon Rick Wakeman. He defined the ‘rock opera’ via such classics as Journey To The Centre Of The Earth (1974), essentially a modern oratorio.

I saw him in concert, here in New Zealand, last year – and @grumpyoldrick didn’t disappoint. He spilled off a flight from the UK and gave a 2 1/2 hour show, using the Wellington City Council’s Steinway Model D, all from memory. He had the audience in stitches – he is a great comedian. Along the way he explained how he had been taught to put feeling into music. You close your eyes and imagine what you want to convey – the feeling of a summer’s day, for instance.

To me, that summed up music as art. Art is about conceptual shapes and patterns that convey feeling and emotion. Notes are flawed tools to express an inexpressible form – idea, which is emotional. The essence of art is conveying that emotion, however imperfectly, by whatever medium, to others. And that is true of writing, too. The medium is words; but the essence is emotion.

Wakeman was taught that about his art from the beginning. Others, including me, had to learn it later. The hard way.

Do you find art in music, in writing? How do you see these things?  is music inspirational for you in these ways? I’d love to hear from you.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Inspirations: Scotland away from Scotland in New Zealand’s deep south

In the late 1840s migrants from Scotland poured into New Zealand’s deep south, looking to build a devout Presbyterian settlement untrammelled by the schism that had ripped the Church of Scotland asunder, unbothered by the social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution.

It didn’t work. When they arrived, they discovered the Anglicans – the ‘little enemy’, as they called them - had got there first. The Scots also brought their social problems with them. And then the gold miners arrived, with their rough and rouse-about life, sending shivers up the spines of the more God-fearing Dunedinites.

Still, there were some compensations. After travelling half way around the world, they found their little corner of New Zealand was altogether familiar. I covered that story in a book I wrote a few years ago for Penguin, Old South. But what I didn’t mention there was just how awesome that landscape is.

Lake Clyde – an artificial ‘hydro’ lake formed in the late 1980s after the huge Clyde Dam and associated hydro plant was completed.

Not surprising in a way; similar latitude, similar geography and similar climate combined to make things – well, similar. Shortly intensified by the settler effort to import every plant and animal they could find. Including deer, rabbits and – if urban legend is anything to go by – at least one puma.

A photo I took of the Kawau gorge, north Otago, 2013. It wasn’t easy, the place was socked in with rain most of the day I was there.

Today, Southland and Otago are the only parts of New Zealand to have any trace of a regional accent – a slightly rounded ‘r’. Nobody outside New Zealand would likely spot it amidst the universal ‘I’ll have sux fush and a scoop of chups, eh’. But that slight ‘Southland burr’ is definitely there – a legacy of that old Scottish heritage. Cool.

Are there any places you know of that are weirdly similar – despite being geographically distant? Is there any landscape you’ve found that’s totally awesome? I’d love to hear from you.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Sixty Second Writing tip: writers hanging out with writers

By definition, writing is a solo adventure. Even journalists sitting in a busy newsroom have to wrap themselves in their thoughts, alone.

It has always seemed to me that socialising gains a deeper dimension on the back of that isolation. Sure, writers have to be comfortable in their own company first off – it’s part of the deal. But solo work can lose direction – and that’s where other writers come in. They keep the art sane.

I’m thinking of Tolkien’s Inklings, meeting in The Eagle and Child, and reading each other their latest work. Or Jack Kerouac’s band of beat-era literary greats, immortalised in his (barely) fictionalised On The Road? Kerouac’s writing tips were actually written for Allen Ginsberg – left pinned to the wall of Ginsberg’s hotel room.

For myself, I hang out with mathematicians and computer programmers. When we get together my wife makes comments about being trapped in The Big Bang Theory.

What do you figure? As a writer, are you part of a regular writing group? Who do you usually hang out with?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Inspirations: summer in the middle of Middle Earth

We’re having a heatwave here in New Zealand. Ten days of settled, golden weather, like when I was a kid – and no, that’s not just nostalgia on my part. The climate has changed.

I thought I’d share a few pictures I took over the past few days of the city I live in. For some reason it’s been tagged ‘the middle of Middle Earth’ just now, though I suspect Tolkien never envisaged his world looking like this.

Oriental Bay – named after one of the original colony ships that arrived in 1840 and a popular walk for Wellingtonians today.

Karaka Bay – on the eastern side of the city where Port Nicholson opens out to the sea through a narrow channel.

Crowds heading to the ‘Sevens’ rugby – really, more a chance to dress up and have fun than about the sport. Was the guy in front trying to swim upstream? And no, this is not tilt-shifted. It’s what came out of the camera.

Brick monastery on Mount Victoria with the sandy beach of Oriental Bay below. The sand was imported from Golden Bay, all 30,000 tons of it.

A rather busy photo of the ‘Bucket Fountain’ in Cuba Street. Iconic since the 1970s.

Immortal words from Iris Guiver Wilkinson – journalist and author from the 1930s, better known as Robin Hyde, a woman whose personal story was as tragic as some of the tales she wrote. Part of the Wellington Writers’ Walk.

I find the place inspiring. Do you?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Inspirations: the spirit of deco and the art of the abstract truth

A while ago I spent a delightful few days in Napier, New Zealand, enjoying a weekend celebration of 1930s elite lifestyles, an annual event inspired by the architecture that dominates the centre of town. By design it was more Hollywood fantasy than reality, but that made it all the more fun. An inspiration.

The ‘art deco weekend’ also brought just about every 1930s car in the country into one spot, and that got me thinking. There were hundreds of them, polished, preened and restored. And they were more than just demonstrations of the love their owners had poured into them. Though they were that. They were more than just world automotive history. Though they were that too.

They were art. Art in the sense of abstraction – of the way concepts can be poured into something real, then invoke emotion in the recipient. Perhaps, if the artist is lucky, the intended emotion.

These cars encapsulated the spirit of the early twentieth century, an age of shapes and forms made possible by the wild collision of new thinking, new materials and new demands – particularly the need for genuine streamlining in ever-faster aircraft. That translated into art, it translated back into the everyday on the ground, mingled with infusions of Mayan styling, and lifted everyday objects like cars, tea-cups, buildings, vases, furniture – and everything else it touched – above the mundane. In part it was a product of depression thinking; a rejection of gloom. And ultimately the whole floated on a conscious effort to transcend the nineteenth century – to simplify, to streamline. Literally.

It came out in writing. What is Hemingway, with his sparse style, if not art deco? The styles that emerged in everything from ashtrays to pens to cups to buildings to cars to art were an explicit rejection of art nouveau. Modernism – of which ‘art deco’ was a part – took the new and exalted it.

To me it came together in the cars, because they were art for everyman, art in a real sense; an ultimate expression of the materials of the twentieth century – metal, chrome, glass, rubber and bakelite. Conceptually they carried a vision – accessible to everyday people, even if only as a drive-past glimpse – of hope in an age beset by war and depression.

Suddenly it was 1940…

And isn’t that inspiring?

That relationship between time, society and art hasn’t gone away. And art is an expression of human abstract endeavour - encompassing not just painting, drawing or sculpture, but all the ways in which we can communicate through the abstract. Writing, for instance.

What do you figure?

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I’ll be back blogging full-strength from 14 January. Here’s what’s coming in 2013:

- posts on kindness and the positive side of the human condition…with
- some posts on my favourite writers
- some posts on New Zealand scenery and photography
- a systematic how-to series on writing
- some science geek posts
- a short series on history mysteries
- and more

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Summer skies, blue waters and a promise for the year

There is a pleasure about summer that seems to blow away the cobwebs of a busy year and the gloom of winter. Today I thought I’d share a few pictures I took recently in Napier, New Zealand.

It’s my home town, though I don’t live there these days; and it underscores the fact that there is a lot more to New Zealand scenery than Tolkien landscapes. Especially in summer when the blue skies stretch huge from horizon to horizon and the water laps against beaches lined with pohutukawa. These pictures are unedited apart from some minor cropping, adding my copyright notice, and re-sizing to fit the blog. I was playing with a polarising filter and new lens – looking to capture the feel of the day in a place deep in the South Pacific where the summers are Californian and the architecture pure Hollywood.. What do you reckon?

Ocean going waka moored against East Quay, Ahuriri harbour, Napier New Zealand. Earlier in 2012, I spent hours standing in Awarua harbour, Rarotonga, trying to photograph this one.

Greywacke brought down to the sea by the rivers that cross the Heretaunga plains give Napier’s beaches their shingled look – and tint the summer sea azure.I went for full polarisation with this one to bring out the clouds, which the hills inevitably sweep into interesting shapes.

The Tom Parker Fountain, on Napier’s town centre foreshore, was donated by local identity Tom Parker in 1936. Though modelled on an English example, it is pure deco, a Hollywood fantasy in a townscape that was once going to be rebuilt along the lines of Santa Barbara. At night the water is lit in rainbow colours from beneath. I’ve been photographing it for years in many weathers and seasons.

Coming up this year:

The response to my last post, making 2013 a year of kindness, has been just fantastic – and everybody agrees. Thank you so much for your support! And let’s do it.  The year of kindness. So – on this blog, this year, we’ll have:
- posts on kindness and the positive side of the human condition…with
- some posts on my favourite writers
- some posts on New Zealand scenery and photography
- a systematic how-to series on writing
- some science geek posts
- a short series on history mysteries
- and more

Copyright Matthew Wright © 2013

Inspirations: Secret Gotham in Hobbit Land

The MLC building. It’s not really these colours…

 Amidst all the Hobbit hoopla with its seven-story promo posters and street-light banners and tie-in toys and movie ticket lines and book and all the rest, New Zealand’s capital city – Wellington’s – got a secret.

Like most secrets it’s in plain sight. Wellington Gotham. Streamline moderne buildings from the early 1940s.

Across the road from the MLC, the Prudential building. I didn’t filter this image, it’s natural colour (insofar as the CCD in my Canon captures it).

Two of them date to the early 1940s and that classic age of streamline moderne, quintessential Deco - the age when Flash Gordon conquered the universe. It was the pinnacle of step-Mayan, chrome-curve streamline architecture. It was ultimate Modernism in that breathless moment of triumph before the joy of it was cut short by the horrors of the Second World War, and changed forever.

They’re just part of the scenery. Nobody pays them any attention. And that’s a pity, because they’re magnificent examples of the art.

The other week I went for a wander down Lambton Quay armed with the camera and a notion of capturing the abstraction, the shape as idea; the feel of the buildings as Gotham; the sense of the late 1930s. Some of these pictures are exactly as they emerged. Others…well, I’ve been a bit adventurous with filters. Other than some minor cropping, though, they’re exactly what I saw through the lens.

This building used to house the Defence headquarters – wonderful example of art deco. They moved a few years ago; it’s under renovation. Another natural colour image; I had to wait for clouds to clear to get that blue sky.

What I was interested in was the interplay of shape and colour, the way that these conveyed the essential feel of a bygone age. Did it work? I don’t know. But it was fun to do.

The State Insurance building of 1940. Not Middle Earth, but from the sky colour, possibly one of those new super-earths they’ve found, with thick air and maybe a touch of iodine in the atmosphere.

I find it amazing that these slices of style can be found in the city. To me they’re inspiring – inspiring to me as a writer, inspiring to me as a photographer. A prompt for thought, a prompt for the imagination. And definitely not Middle Earth.

Is there a place you know that is a little slice of Gotham?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Writing inspirations: Wellington’s Tracy Island – er – waterfront museum

New Zealand’s national museum Te Papa – ‘our place’ – is one of the largest single structures in the southern hemisphere, replacing a Stalinesque museum from the 1940s.

The entire Te Papa complex in all its collision of styles.

From an engineering perspective it is a fantastic tour de force. It was designed for a 150-year life, meaning it had to withstand a rupture of the Wairarapa fault, the ‘big one’ that is expected to flatten Wellington. Yet it had to be built on reclaimed land. The answer was a unique base isolation system designed to float the building on lead-rubber bearings - an awesome blend of science and engineering, created right here in New Zealand by Bill Robinson.

My first effort to abstract ugly, at 24 mm focal length.

Architecturally, though, people either love it or hate it. I’m in the latter camp. It’s ugly.

Another abstraction, of sorts. Pseudo-industrial chic, or not.

To me, the building looks like a jumble of styles, thrown together in rough approximation of Tracy Island - the secret headquarters in Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds. There’s a giant round window off the main entrance for Thunderbird 3. And around the corner is the Thunderbird 2 launch ramp, complete with door.

Why have I called this a writing inspiration? Inspiration to write comes from anywhere. Inspiration is about an emotional reaction – about exploring that emotion, about translating it into your own expression.

For me, with Te Papa, it triggered a burst of photography. I thought, ‘I can make this building look attractive.’ Prowling around produced another thought. ‘No I can’t.’

The only real way to do it was abstract the whole thing – take the shapes out of the context and turn them into something else. A trick that writers use too. I thought I’d publish a selection.

Is there anything in your area you find inspiring because of the way you respond to it?

Not trying to be artistic here. This is the ‘Thunderbird 2′ ramp and rising door.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Writing inspirations: cathedrals of light, part 2

A while ago my wife and I visited Notre Dame. Evensong began after we entered, and I remembered that for all its standing as the medieval cathedral, it is also a working church.

I took this photo by guesswork after my camera’s light meter broke. I was using 200 asa Fujicolor film which I figured was going to be pretty forgiving – and so it turned out.

We sat in the area roped off for us, in the golden light, while the voices of the singers soared into the vaulted ceiling. It was a solemn moment. An inspiring moment.

Afterwards, I foolishly thought I might take a photo. Bad move. The metering system failed, then and there. It was a manual camera with sprung shutter, so it still took photos, and I could guess the likely settings. I figured I could push the film by up to four stops, and the pictures would still be OK. They were. I’ve published one of the photos here. Exposure time of about half a second, I think, at f.8. Note the blur of the audience moving in the middle.

I posted the other week on the way that cathedrals can inspire writers to think – to imagine, to wonder how others feel, looking at these great vaulting traceries of stone that soar skywards on wings of stained glass. And of all Europe’s cathedrals, Notre Dame has been the inspiration for one of the most iconic stories of nineteenth century France – Victor Hugo’s story of medieval tragedy, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Published in 1831, it is almost as iconic to us now as Notre Dame itself. It has been made into a movie many times – the first as early as 1905.

My wife and I were thinking of Victor Hugo when we left, because we wandered the grounds looking up at the gargoyles and calling ‘Esmerelda’. And were promptly caught in a rainstorm.

Have you ever been to Notre Dame? Or read Hugo’s story? Or been inspired yourself to write, from experiences in a cathedral? Do share!

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Writing inspirations: a visit to Monet’s garden at Giverny

A photo I took of Monet’s bridge using 35mm Fujicolor Superia film, 200 asa, 1/125 at f.8. Scanned from the print, watermarked and reduced to upload but otherwise untouched digitally.  This is how it came out of the camera. Monet wasn’t an artist…he was a photographer.

Some years ago I spent an afternoon in the garden of impressionist painter Claude Monet, at Giverny, northwest of Paris. Since his death in 1926 it has been made into a museum – and, apart from the road slashing between house and lily pond - is pretty much as it was when he lived there.

Monet loved this garden because of the way the light played through it, and he was interested in light. That was what impressionism was all about; light. They broke the rules of classical painting to capture something more than a literal image of the scene. And when it came down to it, what they were really capturing wasn’t the light – it was the way the light made us feel, the ‘impression’ it gave the viewer. I have his painting Ete on the wall, and I can certainly feel what it would have been like to stand in that golden field on that windy day with sun dappling across waving grasses.

Another photo I took of Giverny, same specifications. Film is massively more sensitive than CCD’s when it comes to capturing the subtleties of light.

I am a huge, huge fan of impressionism, because of that emotional content. Impressionist paintings are inspirational to look at. And their ideas shortly flowed into other art. Claude Debussy, the French composer (1862-1918), wrote what has been called ‘impressionist’ music, deliberately following the painters in their quest to elicit a specific emotion. Debussy took that a step further, hoping to evince a particular sense of colour in the mind of the listener.

Claude Monet: Ete (1874). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The colours in the print I own are considerably richer and deeper.

To me, that is what writing is about, too. It isn’t so much about the words or the content – it’s about how those words, and that content, make the reader feel. It is about the author trying to control what that feeling is - using words, structure and control of phrasing and content to create explicit and specific emotions in the reader. That’s true for non-fiction as much as for fiction. And that, to me, is the essence of ‘art’. It is a creation by one individual that elicits emotion in another. Ideally, a specific and intended emotion. And it is defined, as Frank Zappa once put it, by whatever frame we put around it – and by what we decide to fill that frame with.

Writers are artists, just as much as Debussy was – or Monet. And we can draw inspiration for ourselves, as writers in our own medium, from their art in theirs.

What do you figure? I’d love to hear from you.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012