Another day of perfect weather. I spent much of yesterday happily absorbed in editing a video. Which video doesn't matter to me right now. It's the making of it, the process, the iteration, the repetition, the small things I learn each time. It's beginning to have a compounding effect. I can see the improvement. It's still taking time though. I haven't found a way around that.
I continue to love my time at the yurt. I'd love to stay longer. It's just a perfect spot right now. Simple, with everything I need and nothing I don't.
Shannon and I are going into town tomorrow. Since the drive is an adventure, we're only taking one van, hers. We'll load both bikes in the back. I may be designated driver on the way home. I think we'll park in Mountain Village and ride the gondola over the top of the mountain into Telluride. Best way to manage the parking situation for the Bluegrass Festival.
That gives me today to repair the bike tire. Somehow I woke up ready to do it.
Steven told me a fun fact the other day: the mountains you see when you're in Telluride are the mountains used for Coors beer. Wilson Peak, at 14,000 feet, is the most prominent peak featured on the Coors Light logo. I made a Field Guide about it.
My short form video experiment is rolling along. Each video has been posted to four channels for the past five days or so, getting a modest number of views on each. YouTube Shorts seems to be showing them to the most people. I get one or two new followers per channel per day. Seems to be moving in the right direction. By all accounts this takes a while. Nothing happening, nothing happening, then a little something happening, a little something happening, then it begins to take off. I'm somewhere between the first and second stages.
As I observe this process I find myself looking at my videos, and videos in general, trying to understand what gives a video value. It's elusive. It's not like great literature, which traditionally wrestles with the big questions of God, love, and death. There are a seemingly infinite number of variables.
What I've found I like to make are vignettes of little moments of experience. I feel like much of the richest part of life occurs in these brief in-between moments that appear in an instant and quickly disappear into the ether. Like these mornings. Incredible mornings. So real, and then the light shifts and the world moves on.
Or consider something tiny and negligible, like trying to get a fly out of the yurt. That video would communicate on so many levels at once. You'd see the inside of the yurt, what high quality craftsmanship looks like. You'd see how it's furnished, sparingly, with a design flair. You'd see my stuff on the counter surfaces, my desk, my computer setup, everything mid-project. You'd get a glimpse of how I interact with minor adversity. You'd get a sense of my mood, my humor, my disposition toward life. You'd probably have questions: what's this guy doing here, where exactly is he. And on a deeper level you might be comparing yourself or your life to what you're seeing, looking to find yourself reflected in it somehow.
All of that and more is happening at once. That's what I think is magical about video. It communicates a tremendous amount of information in one portable package, and it can live more or less forever. I'm intrigued with video as an art form. You can make up almost all the rules, yet there's a clear art to it, and whatever that art is remains mysterious. I see little sparks of it beginning to emerge in what I'm doing as I get more comfortable with the form. You don't know what it is but you know it when you see it. The process reminds me so much of making music. It's the harmonic convergence of all these different elements, each of which contains immense packets of information that together create the magic. But video brings together many more dimensions than music alone.
Speaking of which, today is the day I set up the music gear. I put the speakers out on the deck last night at sunset and they sounded incredible. After dark I moved them into the yurt. The acoustics in here are great, the music fills the space completely. I've been reluctant to set up the gear because it's going to eat up this fabulous desk space I've been enjoying. But hearing the sound in this room gave me the little push I needed.
Today is also the day for the bike tire. Here we go.