The Importance of Inspiring Creative Friends
The Importance of Inspiring Creative Friends
Here in the US we are fully immersed in the holiday season. With the Thanksgiving holiday behind us, pumpkin spice converts to Christmas music in the blink of an eye.
With the holiday season arrives a sentiment of community, giving and caring that is noticeably felt in contrast to the rest of the year. Yes, the commercialism is out of control, and yes, occasionally the stress from the hustle of finishing projects before a holiday break can eat into the anticipation and joy of the holiday spirit, but the sentiment is still felt and I am appreciative of it.
Living in Los Angeles, you quickly find that most of the people who live here aren’t from here. And with the proximity of Thanksgiving and Christmas, most transplants trying to make their dreams happen here aren’t able to travel back to Iowa, or Minnesota or Michigan for both holidays. Especially when rent for their two bedroom apartment is over $4000 a month.
As a result, adopted families of friends become a big part of the holiday culture for those who remain in the city for any part of the season. Nothing beats holidays with family, if you are lucky enough to have them and have a close relationship with them (as I thankfully do), but absent that option, the season also provides opportunity to cultivate and appreciate deeper connections with our chosen families.
Being from Michigan, I count myself among the masses of transplants that consider LA their adopted homes. And with often staying here for Thanksgiving, opting to travel to see family for the longer break of Christmas, the Friendsgiving tradition has been a big part of my experience out here.
Frankly, this time of year is something I look forward to in the megalopolis of Los Angeles. It slows down just enough to get a glimpse into the softer side of this otherwise gruelingly, competitive and hustle worn city.
LA is also a bit of a transient city, with people arriving and leaving more often than others for a myriad of reasons. As I reflect on that, I consider myself extremely grateful to have always had active friend circles with which to experience the holidays.
I’ve certainly had my share of close friends come and go, for various reasons, but I am thankful to have always had a good circle of friends in my time out here. Even if some of the faces change. That is the nature of life after all, not just that of the big city.
Friendsgiving 2023
Holiday plans for me this year are no different than most, staying in LA and booking a flight to Florida for Christmas to be with my parents for a couple week.
I am currently lucky enough to live in a house in the valley (thankfully due to considerably below market rent, for now…), so with interest among friends growing, I decided to host Friendsgiving this year.
Admittedly, I’m not the best of hosts, especially regarding the cooking, cleaning and overall living space enhancing skills that some so effortlessly exude, but I am more than willing and love the opportunity to contribute to a quality gathering of friends.
Preparing for the day, I felt a little anxiety with trying to make sure I didn’t forget any ingredients for cooking, that there enough tables and chairs, that the house was clean, and that we coordinated everyone bringing the right dishes.
As usual though, my overthinking and excessive worry were nothing more than wasted energy as everyone involved stepped in to fill in the gaps and pick up any slack. A mark of a great group of friends in itself.
Any initial anxiety faded away as we all bounced around the kitchen grabbing ingredients and stirring pots while frequently checking our phones (at least me 😆) for recipe instructions. The more culinarily experienced of guests stepping to put the magical last touches on all the classic dishes for the holiday.
With food prepared and tables set, we all sat down at our folding tables and chairs for the Friendsgiving Feast.
Before diving into the delicious offerings, my friend, Nikki, suggested that we go around the table and say what we are thankful for, and additionally, what everyone has been working on creatively.
Being a creative collective of friends, everyone at the table had something interesting to offer. From new music to video ideas, creature makeup, poetry, short stories and new space enhancing floral arrangements, every single person shared news on the latest progress of their passions.
By the time it was my turn I, without a doubt, knew what I was thankful for: Inspiring Creative Friends.
The Importance of an Inspiring Creative Community
Dinner was great and afterword some of us sat and talked more about creative endeavors while others jammed on their instruments. The whole day was amazing and easily ranks as one of my all time favorite Friendsgivings.
In the days after, gratitude continued to sink in as I reflected on how fortunate I am to have a community that exudes passion and constantly creates, ever pushing their own boundaries and exploring the limits of creative possibility.
An inspiring friend circle is such a valuable thing, especially in this era of life, firmly in the midst of adulthood, weighted down by all the requisite responsibilities that we all carry such as rent, insurance payments and taxes. All of us having to work so hard just to exist, but still reserving time and energy for that ultimate exploration of growth and discovery that is the creative pursuit.
As I continue to reflect, the creative path is so much the life that I want to live; constantly expanding, exploring and creating to discover and connect. And those traits are so well embodied by the people with which I am lucky to associate.
I realize that I have to attribute much of my continued progress down the creative path to my community of inspiring friends. Personal growth and the creative path can be solitary journeys, at least in stretches, but much of the hope in the pursuit is to find connection through your expressions, to share and to receive.
Hearing about cool new projects, ambitious visions and successes from my friends inspires me to continue on. It motivates me to push farther and expand my limits.
The shared path of expression deepens the connection between artists. It gives us something to talk about, something to keep us active and in tune with each other.
I’ve often said that one of my main motives for continuing to pursue creativity is so that I can be a part of the conversation. So that I can have a place at the table. And maybe through my effort, I’ll inspire someone else to join as well.
It is a unique path that artists walk. We all share in similar struggles and feelings of elation when breaking through a new barrier. But it is the path that connects us as we inspire each other with each step.
I encourage all creators and artists to work to cultivate and keep a group of inspiring creative friends, it benefits all of us.
I’m very thankful for my mine.
~ Michael
Exciting Tech of The Week
Stable Video
https://stability.ai/news/stable-video-diffusion-open-ai-video-model
Generative AI Video is really gaining steam! Stability AI has released Stable Video Diffusion, their first foundational model for generative video, based on the image model Stable Diffusion. This state-of-the-art AI video model, now available in a research preview, marks a significant advancement in their aim to develop models for a wide range of applications and adds yet another impressive text-to-video model to the generative AI video race. I expect a version will be released to the public soon.
Stable Diffusion XL Turbo
https://stability.ai/news/stability-ai-sdxl-turbo
A week after my post on SDXL, Stability AI has released SDXL Turbo, a novel real-time text-to-image generation model that is much much faster at generating images. Utilizing a new distillation technique called Adversarial Diffusion Distillation (ADD), SDXL Turbo drastically reduces image generation steps from 50 to just one, maintaining high quality and sampling fidelity. This advancement leads to major improvements in inference speed, enabling the generation of 512x512 images in 207 milliseconds. Although currently under a non-commercial research license, SDXL Turbo represents significant progress in diffusion model technologies, offering benefits like single-step image outputs similar to those in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). This model's capabilities can be explored on Stability AI's image editing platform, Clipdrop, available for free trials.
My Creative Updates
The holiday preparations as well as starting a new client project have taken up some of my creative time over the past week. But I’m continuing to work on tightening up arrangements for the new songs.
Over time I’ve found that listening back to arrangement ideas in demo form before focusing too much on final performances if helpful for me to fully explore ideas, so I’ve been focusing on that. Specifically around drums and bass lately, but will be moving into vocals and harmonies next.
I’ve also started working on an exciting new collaboration in the educational, creative tech space which has been a focus of late as well. It’s still early stages, but I hope to be able to share more soon.