Dark On The Rock

The title of this blogpost is inspired by a comment in Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

“A solemn voice declares, “We were once a peaceful race of intelligent mechanical beings.” Not, as you might hope, a trailer for the Second Republican Presidential Debate but a prologue to “Transformers: Dark of the Moon”, a much less homely event. Welcome to the third phase of the franchise, and to the bizarre news that the first ten or fifteen minutes of Michael Bay’s movie tremble, unaccountably, on the verge of being fun. We are plunged back into the Apollo space program, which, it turns out, was inspired less by the urge to trounce the Russians, than by an alien ship that had crashed on the lunar surface. Armstrong and Aldrin were sent to check it out. “Neil, you are dark on the rock,” one controller says. I wish I had a reason to say lines like that.”

Inspired by that I’m going to describe my next two weeks as being “dark on the rock.” I haven’t had a good break in well close to two years now. A lot of my recent travel has either been work related, physically challenging, or hampered by illness (or some other interference).

So, starting tonight, I’m going “dark on the rock.” I wanted to go completely offline for this trip. But, to do that responsibly I would have not only needed to be at inbox zero before leaving Singapore, but also have premptively addressed projects that will be coming up in the next months (including purchases for the Studio).

And, with everything that was going on during the move from Hong Kong I didn’t get there.

So, I will be doing some email and some online stuff, but I’ll be totally offline when it comes to public communication – writing on this blog, Twitter and so on. In other words, it will look to the world like I’ve closed down communication, even if I am sitting on a porch, in the winter sun, working on various secret projects.

Or, I’m going dark on the rock.

My goal isn’t just to cleanup or do maintenance, but to switch off the inputs and do a lot of creative thinking. So, I’ll spend 45 minutes a day on email until the backlog is cleared and I’ve completed all the communications to make sure I can hit the ground running when I get back to Singapore.

As much as I love electronic communications, these past few months it’s been clear to me that I need a break. I loved the feeling, when I came back from India, of feeling detached from my devices. Going without internet while in Ladakh was a bit of a revelation. I came back to Hong Kong so aware of how glued people were to their electronic life-prompts, even to the point of walking into people and inanimate objects.

While I’m dark on the rock, I’ll also be thinking about some long term “dreams.” Unpacking my belongings from India has made me aware of how many projects I’ve failed to finish over the past few years. I guess every “creative” person goes through the same process, having to close doors and decide which new ones to open.

So, the blog will be quite for a couple of weeks while things secretly bubble away here. Come mid-August I’ll be back on line and sharing a little of what I’ll be doing during these days – photos, music and writing. Till then – greetings from the “dark-side.”