Square One

This is the beginning of a new month, a new year, and a new decade.  It's been 50 years since the 1960s came to an end, and the Beatles have been gone for half a century.  These are daunting facts.

Moving on, I will continue making music on my guitar.  And I write songs and lyrics and chords all of my own.

I also draw constantly, and on my artist site, www.lioravnidesginwriter.com I have designs available for purchase, an About page describing my life briefly, and a very interesting blog I post in several times daily.  My mind is always active and I am always posting my thoughts to the internet.  I don't know if this is a good or bad thing.

Besides the music and the art, I want to exercise again.  I feel Judo is too intense an exercise for my age and condition, and Yoga is too light, not competitive enough, and not interesting enough.  And swimming is extremely boring.  I want to study Aikido at an authentic dojo, and even though I already am an expert at takedowns, pin-rides, armlocks, trapping, and flowing, I want to the experience of sharing my training with others.  As long as you stay home and keep it to yourself, you get nowhere.  It is by sharing your hobbies and interests with others that you get some result.

People who stay home all the time are miserable.  I want to share my music and Aikido with others, and save cooking and art for the home.  There is a time and a place for everything.

So it is a new year and I am at square One.  We have the winter, then the spring, then the summer, then the fall, and then another winter will return.  So make the most of the year.  Don't waste another year having mindless fun.  It is only by applying effort into something you care about that you get results. 

So in 2020, I will be writing, training, playing guitar, cooking, and enjoying life.  I don't need that much money.  More money wouldn't necessarily make my life better.  It's just money.

A Brand New Boogie

It is day one of 2020.  I resolve to only improve my position this year.  Part of that is waking up early every day.  Don't cling to comfort.  As soon as your eyes open, jump out of bed.  You can take a leisurely approach to mornings and not actually get on with your day until 7am or 8am, but you should wake up before 6am.  The early bird gets the worm.

My main interests are music, cooking, writing, swimming, and dating.  But to get a woman, you need a certain level of looks and money.  And you must leave the house and get involved in the community.  Also, you must initiate with women or you will get nowhere.  The man gives and the woman receives. 

I don't need to be an Acupuncturist, and I don't need Judo anymore.  Those were things of my youth.  Now that I am no longer an acupuncturist, all I objectively have is a green belt in judo.  But my matwork is Olympic level and I mastered Aikido.  It turns out Aikido is better than judo, and being the master is more important than being the champion.  A good Aikido black belt knows all the classical strikes of Karate, plus how to trap, blend, pin, and submit people.  Judo is the original sport grappling, an exercise with a philosophy of non-aggression and being a good member of society.

So out with the old and in with the new.  Music and food continue to be important to me.  Writing is my job skill.  I must exercise somehow or my body will deteriorate.  One of my new year's resolutions is to exercise more and make it a daily habit.  Hatha Yoga and swimming is good and age appropriate. 

I should do more art as a hobby that can someday be monetized.  I remember the 10,000 hour rule.  I have not yet mastered art.  Below is one of my more recent creations.

Pyramids Recolored

I took an old line art drawing I used on Instagram and recolored it, and cropped it to be square.  It is based on a scene from Mexico, of the pyramids and the surrounding gardens and trees.  It is evocative of Aztec culture and what the Indians were like before the coming of Cortez.

So I have some talent in art and music.  I don't know which will pay off first.  But I know I have a reason to sing the blues, so that is what I do.  This new year, 2020, will not be wasted.   I will play guitar and exercise and do art and interact with people.  It's time to expect less out of life and be more fulfilled.

The best things in life are free.

Getting in Tune with the Straight and Narrow

In life, you have to prioritize.  I often vacillate between my two biggest pursuits right now, art and music.  I like both.  I mastered delta blues and cartooning, and wonder which is more important.  My mind often works in the method of comparison and contrast, and I am constantly doing this.

Obviously, my music is a lot of fun but won't pay off.  You can get thousands of streams on YouTube and Spotify and still not be rich.  The MP3 and the streaming websites ruined the profitability of music in the modern era.  The business has changed, and if you are not Taylor Swift or Kanye West, you are not going to make a lot of money in music.  It doesn't matter how talented you are.  You need marketing, advertising, to sell out big venues, and to create provocative, new music to be rich.  I like the old sound of the blues from the 1950s and 1960s.  This was the best music ever made, and the 60s will always be known as the climax of western civilization.

But art and design is a different story.  I have a degree in graphic design, I mastered Photoshop, and I like visual storytelling.  The graphic design business is growing as the computer and internet takes a bigger role in people's lives.  Every business needs graphic design, and even copywriters and journalists need images to attach to their articles.  So drawing and designing are huge important skills now.  My education is relevant.

Ultimately, I don't need more money.  I have enough and I am content with my life.  But I want more productivity and more renown, and I can accomplish that by doing a little bit every day.  When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is pick up my guitar and play.  And throughout the day, I use my computer to digitally color drawings, write in my journal or blog, and use the internet to watch my creative career going.  It is a fulfilling life and money is not an issue.

So I know my life is fine and I don't need to accomplish anything.  In addition to delta blues and cartooning, I can practice Judo, cook my own food, and do what I need to do.  So in many ways, I am better off than a millionare stock broker with no free time and no real joy.  I do what I want to do and I do it well.  So who's better?  I never got to work in wholistic medicine and it doesn't even matter.  Nietzsche called this attitude Amor Fati.  The love of fate.  When you realize that everything that happens to you happened for a reason, you naturally become disinterested and amused.  Life is not an accident, it has a guiding hand.  So don't fight back against the system.  Just take it easy.

You Must Diversify In This Economy

One friend I had who was my mentor until he passed away told me, that each person should have multiple income streams or they won't be able to make a living.  I know what I am good at and what I can monetize. 

In my youth, I did guitar, and mastered karate, shootfighting, and wrestling.  Martial arts training is important as self defense, physical education, and moral pedagogy. But most people stop after college age and move on with their lives.  After college age, I mastered nutrition and art.  So between music, martial arts, nutrition, and art, I can figure out how to create my own online business.  I already have several income streams coming in, it's just they are small and I need to scale up.

Music is the most fun thing, but it is the least profitable.  Everybody these days is a musician, and there are fewer people making money from it.  Taylor Swift and John Mayer are rare people with a lot of people behind them. 

Art is growing, and graphic design is a field with a thousand niches, of varying levels of profitability.  Painting is fun but low reward, and desktop publishing is boring but profitable.  And there's a lot in between.  Visuality and color is mental health therapy in a mentally ill, technological world.

And as always, nutrition is big business.  The one thing that unites all humans is that they eat, and they must eat several times a day or they die.  Both saints and sinners eat.  The restaurant business has a 500% markup and some cuisines have even bigger profit margins (like sushi) because they give you smaller quantity for more money.  I like Thai cuisine and Dominican cuisine the best. 

So straddling the line between what is fun to do and what will get me the paycheck is the issue.  Right now, I am working on getting another degree in communications so I can sell more articles as a copywriter and expand my skills as an artist.  But if I had it my way, I would just play the boogie and train matwork.  But we don't live in an ideal world.

Glorious Return

I haven't written in this blog in a long time.  I have decided that art is not my main vocation.  My graphic diploma helps me design art for books and albums, but it is not my main thing.  I am not a graphic designer.  But my education was not a waste.

As time goes on, I will spend more time doing what I've been doing all my life.  I have been playing music for 25 years and grappling for over 20 years.  I could be teaching music and Aikido, and the art just supplements what I already know.

The reality is, you only learn by doing.  Stuff you learn didacticly in a University is not real knowledge.  You are regurtitating what others have said to you.  Anything in life, including judo, is theory and practice. First learn the theory, then get involved in doing, and then put the theory into practice.  It is only after you are tested that you value what the instructors have taught you.

In my experiences, I have mastered music, judo, and home cooking.  I possess a lot of skill with English and computers.  I could use my knowledge in a more advantageous way to create an income and gain popularity.  Knowing this, I will write more ebooks, publish more albums, and get involved in martial arts again.  My scholastic education in acupuncture and graphic design didn't help me.  Book learnin' doesn't work.

So knowing this, I will draw less and do what I am good at more.  I have made money in the past two years in copywriting, design,and music, and this trend will continue.  But I know my art is limited and I've only been doing it a short time.  If I want to be succesful, I need to do what I am good at and get paid for it.  So I am returning to this blog to inform whoever is out there in internet land that I am not focusing on the design or even the acupuncture but using what I actually know and not what I think I know.

Revisiting the Past

It's all been done before.  There's nothing new under the sun.  When something is new, we attack it with enthusiasm and do it til it's no longer fun.  Soon, the joy wears off and the productivity tapers off.  But real success comes from consistency, and the whole western world is based on the factory line production method.  The daily grind is the secret.  Do a little bit every day.  Day in and day out, do a little bit, and the results will accumulate, and your work will become part of your lifestyle.

I don't create new designs as often as I used to.  Instead, I go back to old line art and recolor it with new color palettes.  Or I take line art I rendered in my grayscale period and apply color to it to see it as something new. 

That is why i'm revisiting the past.  I will attach one design I recolored below.

Red Barn In Color

This was originally a grayscale design based on a replica of a work by Roy Lichtenstein from 1969.  I saw it in a book on his work, and did a drawing which I applied shades of gray to.  This time around, out of boredom, I recolored the work in RGB, and came up with this creation.  It is almost Cubist in it's use of solid blocks of color, heavy black lines, and geometric shapes.  But it makes sense both in grayscale and now in color.

So even if I am not dreaming up new designs for new artworks, I can visit the past and recolor old artworks.  I save every artwork in three forms, as line art, as a PSD file, and as a colored JPG.  With the line art and Photoshop, you can recreate a work with a totally different palette or filter and create something new from the same drawing.  This has become my specialty, coloring line art.  I want to expand in art, but this is my fundamental skill.  The Japanese have been using Photoshop to color hand drawn illustrations for a long time.  That is where Manga comes from.

So I can stay productive even when I am not productive.  The daily grind.  Do a little bit every day, and stay occupied.  That is the secret to a fulfilled life.

Check out my FASO Artist Site.

Over the course of the past five or ten years, I've blogged away a lot of knowledge and information and history.  My Taoist Nutrition blog, nativefitness, lasted three years on Wordpress and with it, I established I have the education of a Phd scholar in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Nutrition.  I gave away a lot of information on that site and got very little in return.

I've also blogged on other subjects, and now I have a FASO artist site at www.lioravnidesignwriter.com which features a portfolio of artworks for sale, a blog within the site where I share my ideas about art and life, and a system of analytics for keeping track of who sees what I am creating.

In addition, I use this site to reach a bigger audience, with no cost to myself.  As well, I am using www.liorandhisblues.com on Wordpress to blog about my music career, my fondness for the delta blues, and to chronicle the history of American pop music, which owes a lot to poor southern blacks who never got rich off their own folk music.

Selling art and blogging can be lucrative in this day and age when the internet has changed the way people do business.  In 2019, half the world population will buy something online with a credit card.  That is 3.5 billion people.  The internet changed everything, and made it possible for creative professionals to make a living, when in older times, most would live and die starving artists.  Very few creative people become rich and famous, and leave behind a household name.

I am not great with business, finance, and law, but I have a growing talent, and I know I can create an extra income with art, blogging, and even album sales.  I am constantly refining and updating my art to be more up to date.  Continuing education is part of being an artist. 

So as the months go by, my art and writing skills grow, and i continue to produce better and better works.  The point of my endeavors is not to create a million dollar sale and die rich and vindicated, that is only the result I want.  The point is to live a harmonious lifestyle where I enjoy what I am doing on a daily basis, and constantly grow and mature as I reach old age.  Dying rich and well known and leaving a legacy is just the icing on the cake.