{"id":2014,"date":"2022-03-01T12:52:51","date_gmt":"2022-03-01T17:52:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=2014"},"modified":"2022-03-01T12:53:37","modified_gmt":"2022-03-01T17:53:37","slug":"getting-creative-with-carrie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=2014","title":{"rendered":"Getting Creative With Carrie"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019ll paint you a little picture.\u00a0 There was this little neighborhood in Indianapolis called Broad Ripple.\u00a0 Today, it is a victim of its own success.\u00a0 What made it wonderful is all gone now.\u00a0 There used to be unusual restaurants, art galleries. You name it, it was there.\u00a0 There was plenty of parking, and it was free because it was then a low-rent, depressed area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Broad Ripple Steakhouse. Carrie used to play in the lower left corner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Now it\u2019s a high-rent area with no art and all fancy bars, and 100% paid parking.\u00a0 Developers managed to build lots of apartments to capitalize on an arts district that no longer exists.\u00a0 But for a few brief years, Broad Ripple was a wonderful place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in the late 80s, early 90s I was a struggling college student.  I\u2019m kind of an odd duck.  I was an engineering student, but I liked arts.  The dean told me that I was the only engineering major who took English electives.  Engineers are supposed to be cold and analytical.  I can be that way, but I like arts too.  I like to use both sides of my brain.  Call me crazy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I was being driven slowly crazy in those days.  I consistently seemed to draw a 5:30-7 class.  It was taught by the most boring person who ever lived.  He was so boring that I learned to do an impression of him. I was good: I got requests to do the voice several times a week.  Remember Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller\u2019s Day Off<\/em>?  This guy was a lot worse.  I\u2019m serious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I was always desperate to get out of this guy\u2019s class.  On Wednesdays, Carrie Newcomer used to play at the Broad Ripple Steak House.  It\u2019s now gone.  I had to rush out of the 38th Street campus of IUPUI (now also gone) to make it in time.  I was always in a huge hurry, and most of the time, stupid people would drive slowly in front of me and I would scream at them to move.  In those days, my air conditioning didn\u2019t work, so I always had my windows rolled down.    One time, my friend Sam told me that he and my friend Joe could hear me coming a couple of blocks away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Carrie in her natural habitat<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And it was all to see Carrie Newcomer<\/a>.\u00a0 Carrie is a small woman.\u00a0 I hate to call her frail or waif-like, because I know she eats, although she never eats meat (the irony of her playing at a steak house is not lost on me.)\u00a0 But you\u2019d see Carrie trying to remove speakers from her car that were almost as big as she is.\u00a0 Her car wasn\u2019t very big either, and it looked like her guitar, speakers and amp were just about as much as it would hold.\u00a0 Often we\u2019d help Carrie set up, which got us more music time and helped her out, too. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s difficult to describe Carrie\u2019s music.\u00a0 At times it has a yearning, soulful quality to it not unlike some early Cat Stevens.\u00a0 But Carrie writes about some of the most common things in the world: folding laundry, the length of her arms, facing hardships together.\u00a0 She writes songs that no one else would ever write.\u00a0 I love them.\u00a0 They just hit me in the right place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Remember I said I\u2019m kind of an odd duck?\u00a0 Well, I\u2019m that way about music, too.\u00a0 You know Sturgeon\u2019s Law<\/a>, that 90% of everything is junk?\u00a0 For me, 99% of music is not that great.\u00a0 (Except disco, which is 100% garbage.)\u00a0 A piece of music has to really speak to me before I give it a second listen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But then there\u2019s Carrie\u2019s music. It strikes an emotional chord in me that I can\u2019t explain.  I heard it first at Indianapolis\u2019 The Vogue, when her then-band was fronted by probably the worst opening act I\u2019ve ever seen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it something personal?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 I\u2019ve known Carrie for 30 years, but not very well.\u00a0 I may see her 3-4 times a year and in all that time I\u2019ve probably spoken fewer than 500 words to her.\u00a0 I\u2019ve frankly spoken to her daughter a little more, but she was seven at the time I knew her and was drawing angels (she was quite good actually.) \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think what Carrie\u2019s appeal to me is much more intangible.\u00a0 John Cleese speaks about creativity<\/a> and \u201cthe open mode,\u201d and despite the fact the Cleese is a renowned smartass, his commentary on the way the brain works is some of the most lucid I\u2019ve ever heard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For whatever reason, I find Carrie\u2019s music extremely calming, and it puts me straight into Cleese\u2019s \u201copen mode,\u201d the creative, visualizing part of my brain.  I don\u2019t know why.  There are actually times that I need to hear a Carrie song two or three times before I actually hear it.  The first couple of times, I\u2019ve crawled into my brain and am having conversations with myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As squishy and touchy-feely as that sounds, it\u2019s true.\u00a0 Now, remember, I\u2019m not your average bear.\u00a0 I\u2019ll sit and tell you that there\u2019s not much difference mentally between solving a difficult math problem and doing art or creative work.\u00a0 It\u2019s just that artists are taught that technology is too complex and scientists are taught that art is unstructured and worthless.\u00a0 Neither of these claims is true, but we believe them as facts for some reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I seem to have a particularly strong sense of creative visualization.\u00a0 I was once doing some work on a technical problem at my job, and I was stuck.\u00a0 Suddenly, on my way home, my creative brain had solved the problem: it was a calculus max\/min problem and the definition of a derivative.\u00a0 My conscious brain was unable to do it, but my creative brain figured it out and was forcefully explaining it to my analytical brain.\u00a0 I was so consumed by this solution that I could literally see the graph before me.\u00a0 I had to pull the car off to the side of the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To this day, Glory-June Greiff<\/a> will see me \u201czone out\u201d occasionally and she\u2019ll say I\u2019m \u201cdoing calculus.\u201d\u00a0 That may not be strictly true, but at those times I am tuned into my creative brain and visualizing a solution.\u00a0 It may even be me figuring out the order of my various work sites for that day, but I do get that glassy-eyed stare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carrie sometimes teaches classes on being creative.  I sat in on one once.  It was quite interesting.  I remember telling her that I had always wanted to write novels even though I was in engineering school.  I still remember what she said.  \u201cYou can tell it to go away.  You can do something else.  But it still comes back.  It still calls to you.\u201d  She was right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So my relationship with Carrie\u2019s music really got me creatively motivated, and in a way you wouldn\u2019t suspect.  At the time, I was finishing the third or fourth draft of a time travel novel that I\u2019ve never been able to adequately call \u201cdone.\u201d  But I also worked on another project.  I became fascinated with the idea that vampire stories were all about curses and evil, that they saw sex as a hot metaphor for disease transmission.  I challenged myself to write a story that had completely un-erotic sex and a vampire we could root for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Listening to Carrie\u2019s music could immediately draw me straight into the creative world of my novels while also relaxing me.  I was exercising that creative urge that she warned me would never go away.  I would often write quite a bit after I got home those evenings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Carrie Newcomer, the most peaceful person I\u2019ve ever known, a devout Quaker, inspired me to start a vampire novel<\/a>.\u00a0 It\u2019s true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am kinda weird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ll paint you a little picture.\u00a0 There was this little neighborhood in Indianapolis called Broad Ripple.\u00a0 Today, it is a victim of its own success.\u00a0 What made it wonderful is all gone now.\u00a0 There used to be unusual restaurants, art galleries. You name it, it was there.\u00a0 There was plenty of parking, and it was … Continue reading “Getting Creative With Carrie”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"powered_cache_disable_cache":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[228,229,230],"class_list":["post-2014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","tag-carrie-newcomer","tag-creativity","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2014"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2017,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014\/revisions\/2017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}