success (? / . / !)

in

Thanks to a therapy / rubberducking session with Claude the AI (seriously, he works great for that: I appreciate analytical approaches to mental issues, especially when they manage to work in Nick Cave), I've realized that I have no clue of what success looks like to me: I've spent my life living up to my perception of others' expectations and constantly failing. And now that they're all dead (some thankfully, others crushingly) and I'm doing whatever it is that I do, I'm still living up to those perceived expectations. Suppose, then, that my current job is to figure out what success looks like to me. Probably a lot like what I'm doing now but without the soul-sucking striving for the approval of people who don't exist.

glockbox

in

An odd little experiment in metal and (scrap)wood: I’ve had a glockenspiel among my possessed oddities for a number of years, and, as the sound offends me, I never touched it after having to play it in high school. But, since I’ve stumbled into metalwork, I lusted after a purpose for the keys beyond a harbinger of bleeding eardrums. Enter: angle grinder, cut-off wheel, and decades of pent-up instrumental loathing to separate the keys from the frame – pieces of which found new life as part of Snippy and the weird tentacle creature – which culminated in… the keys being unwilling to weld together to form anything.

But I had, over the past month since my failure to create anything from them, been moving the keys about in a sort of hypotonic glitch-art way, attempting to find something to build from them. Yesterday, I figured it out: instead of making one piece, make a way to continue fiddling about in hypnotic glitchy fashion. And lo, from piles of other failed wood projects was birthed Glockbox. Can still remove the keys and reorder them as I please, but I’ve been fiddling with the pattern in the video above for most of the morning. Rather proud of this experimental little oddity, the best solution I’ve come up with so far to a deeply annoying vexation. Having far more fun with the glockenspiel in this form than I ever had with that instrumental monstrosity in my previous life.