Thinking Creator

So today was the first phone call with Ben.

He led off with “is this a good time?” (very ironic given that the call has been scheduled for today at 1pm for about 4 weeks.)

Is this a good time?

What some of you don’t know is that Jan. 1 marked the beginning of a new work arrangement with my employer: I moved from full-time (50+hrs a week) to part-time at my own request.  This gives me time (but mostly headspace) to work on other projects and continue to develop my career as a creative. (keep watching the “current projects tab” for updates)

Ben called me out on one thing that I thought I’d hid pretty well: I keep sabotaging my work as a Producer (or underdeveloping it) because I’m still holding on to the idea of being an Artist.  He’s totally right.  This has brought me face to face with my own arrogance and ego in a way that isn’t entirely pleasant.  I keep distracting myself with low-level projects hoping that a win there will catapult me to artistic freedom, but I don’t do that great of work because I’m not in my sweet spot. In the end, they don’t call back and I move on to the next distraction.

This is a dangerous game of artistic roulette, and in the end, I’m not sure it wouldn’t just be better to be struggling on my own projects.  The personas I admire the most are the empire-builders like Alton Brown, Tyler Perry and Seth McFarlane.  Each of them owns all their rights, owns their own organization and produces, essentially, what they want when they want it. They also unfortunately work in the world of video content, and personally produced the first seasons’ worth of content THEMSELVES. I’ve trundled along, trying to do that but I don’t really have the chops. (or the patience to develop them).

Too bad.  Ben pointed out that if I really want to do this Experience Design thing, I’m going to need to put on a experience to prove to the world that I can.

So step one for Baker Experience Group is to stage an experience next December.  I think I’ll even do a ‘foretaste’ at Soundcrawl 2011.  This experience will be multi-sensory (I really want to experiment with double-projection) and if pressed today, I’d try to stage parts of John Adams’ I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky. Technically it’s an opera, but it’s intended to be popish and is written out of a series of essay/monologues, so i think it could work in chunks. (beyond the fact I am in love with the idea that contemporary art can be populist and artistic if done right. don’t burst my bubble)

So, if you’re in Nashville next December and want to be involved, email me at kylejbakermusic at gmail.com