Summer in Vancouver. Which I dread every year, incidentally.

I have not had much of a chance to post here, because doing so takes up a lot of my time and energy and I don’t like to half-arse anything, but some pieces are in the works, I promise. Aside from life stuff, I’ve got a manuscript that I’m working on, as you might know, but this blog is still my personal haven and simply a terrific means of getting things off my back…not to mention, a liberating forum in which I am not constricted by topic, client, tone, or structure.

I am popping in because I wanted to share a clip that showed up in my YouTube algorithm yesterday, very unexpectedly. Rick Rubin is one of those guys I’ve heard about for decades and about whom I know very little, apart from the fact that he’s considered quite unconventional and eccentric, is a very, very successful music producer, and has been described as a genius every time his name is brought up somewhere.

The first time I ever came across his name, in fact, was over thirty years ago (yes, dears, I am Methuselah) in some magazine interview (remember magazines?) with the repugnant Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Rick had produced their album Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and Anthony had been typically crude in describing Rick’s musical approach as “if the Baron von Munchausen had ejaculated onto a chessboard with the band,” or something to that extent. The phrasing has stuck with me many years later, being so unsavoury. I mean, Anthony did write an entire memoir about his proclivity for teenage girls–now, then, and forevermore!–and that thing continues to sit there and defile my personal bookshelf of celebrity autobiographies, so you’re not going to get anything resembling Percy Bysshe Shelley ruminating on pestilence-stricken multitides, or even an approximation of T.S. Eliot rhapsodizing about claws scuttling across ocean floors.

Anyway, for all of you creative types, please watch this. It’s just a little over ten minutes, and may very well change your entire approach to how you perceive and receive what you do. I really needed to hear him say all of this; he put everything into absolutely logical, reasonable perspective, particularly since I’m working on a writing project and keep doubting myself, keep wondering about reception, keep worrying about achievement. I hope you get something out of it, too.

And what a voice! Good heavens! I mean, he’s no Stephen Hawking (with all due respect, and a serious RIP to you, Stevie), but Rick Rubin could persuade a Vancouverite into actually sticking with their plans, which is just slightly more impossible than convincing J.D. Vance to take a makeup-removal tissue to his eyeliner. If Rick Rubin decided to read Finnegan’s Wake to me out loud, I would be right there for the next four years, dribbling into my bottomless platter of nachos and taking haphazard notes.

I’ll be back soon, as there’s a lot to sort out right now. Until then…

(And yes, my writing here is absolutely abysmal, and I acknowledge this; I deleted and re-wrote most sentences, only for them to remain just as pedestrian and pitiful as the last. I am in a bit of a blogging slump. Honestly, I just scribbled this out in order to post something.)

Love

Nadya