On Procedure
I watched Apollo 11 the other day. Holy shit! All that pre-launch footage! And rocket interior shots! It’s incredible. Seems like it was heavily cleaned-up, but still, so beautiful, filmed (at the time) and edited (now) with such great taste.
The doc made me think about regimentation. It’s something I don’t think about often, because pretty much everything I do in life can either be improvised (music) or planned with a lot of flexibility (tours, a mini music festival, writing).
Further than that, I’ve deliberately stayed away from strict procedures and planning, because as a teen, I realized I can take it too far. There was a (thankfully brief) time where I wanted—for no reason other than misguided mental gratification—to have everything in my calendar. So I had things like “Brush teeth” in there. A lot of Type A-ish people or semi-diagnosed OCD sufferers can probably relate to that. I came away from those experiences feeling like regimentation is dangerous and too easy to take to extremes.
But there are clearly some things that we can only accomplish with a high degree of procedure.
Landing on the Moon, apparently, is one of them. Planned to the second. Each stage requiring sign-off from a department head (“EECOM go! FIDO go!”). Checklists, tolerances, and instruments. It was enthralling to watch people orchestrate a process like that and succeed. And it made me think, maybe some of the things I want to accomplish with music and writing could withstand a little more regimentation.
One way to look at it is, you plan and you prepare so that spontaneity and improvisation can take place. For Apollo 11 improvisation was a matter of life-or-death problem-solving (e.g. how to deal with those 1202 errors); for music it’s kind of our lifeblood at the center of things. Either way, we set up a structure, we build a rocket, and we put a beating heart inside of it.