has the ink run dry?

Past two days -- I'd say about five hours of sleep between the two, and those five hours have all been from last night. It's currently 4:40 am. Looks like no sleep tonight. yaaaay. I might have decided to sleep tonight, but I have to be up at 9:00 anyways, so really, what's the point?

Man, I'm pretty sure that tonight, as a six person band and Andrew (our merch guy, i guess), we're probably totaling about 15 hours of sleep. No lies. Matt and Andrew left Washougal, Wa tonight at about 9:00 for some place in Southern Oregon to pick up Eriq. So I bet they're all not sleeping. Dan's mixing the AHFH album right now, so I bet because of the time he goes to bed, he's really not gonna be sleeping all that long anyways. I have no idea what Ian and Nathan are doing, but who really knows what they do anyways? I know that Nathan doesn't really sleep all that much and Ian probably has to wake up for work in the morning. We are one unhealthy band.

By the way, I've been tearing my brain apart the past few days trying to get some album art done because I pretty much have to have it done tomorrow, [By the way, I just realized that the sun's coming up outside] and I finally think I might have something. But anyways, doing the art for our album has definitely proven to be a much harder task than I had originally thought. I've been definitely having the most trouble with finding the right way to personify the concepts brought up in the album. This has been especially difficult because our album is about concepts that are definitely non-physical, so I've been bashing my head against the wall in hopes that some sort of perfect symbol or character or design would fly out and into my hands. Eventually I did find some ways to personify our concepts, but it definitely took more time than I had planned. But this whole "album art" and "personification of conceptual ideas" and whatnot has really got me thinking a lot about what a symbol is.

How do we actually create symbols? My guess is association. Like I said in my last post, we are told one thing, and we as humans can associate that thing with a million others. Such as water. On my last post, the images that came to my mind were splashes of blue and and green colors, and coldness, and darkness. And a tree for some reason. [and I actually just looked back at my last post to see exactly what I had written and I just realized that I had written that, stopped, deleted it all, and just posted what I had. haha, So I apologize for lack of reference. But on again with this whole thing...] So I can see someone creating a symbol for water by putting some of these things together along with the other qualities of water. But what about conceptual ideas? How do we create visual, and/or tangible symbols for things that are not physical in the least bit? I have been looking a lot at symbols that people have used (especially in ancient times) to personify concepts such as these. It amazes me at how the human mind can work -- that we can take simple objects, and display them with the simplest peculiarities and create, vivid, deep, meaningful, and powerful concepts from them. And for some of the symbols that I have seen, although I sometimes may not be able to come up with it immediately, after being shown what the different meanings could be, I could legitimately see almost every single concept that it represented. I am jealous. I want to be able to create vivid symbolism that can embody any idea or concept that I would like. It frustrates me how hard it is to do this, and how simple the best symbols are.

By the way, somebody should buy me a giant book about symbolism. :)


With my ears:
A Hope For Home - The Everlasting Man (rough mixes)
Sigur Rós - Agaetis Byrjun
Explosions In The Sky - The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place
Giants - myspace player
Means - To Keep Me From Sinking

With my eyes:
Arrested Development
Wikipedia

With my tongue:
Lots of Mac n' Cheese

With my hands:
A Hope For Home - The Everlasting Man (album art)

With my nose:
stuffy.