so totally sick and rad.com

This isn’t really about what happens when a service disappears…it could be, but instead it’s kind of about the creative process and what happens in the space between the present and the future, in a very non-committal, not fully flushed out, Gen-Y sort of way.
MixWit used to offer a killer service allowing users to create custom “mix tape” widgets that could then be posted around the web. Unfortunately the site / service died back in 2008 and now I have way too many old mixtape posts that are just permanently borked. It feels something akin to when I just moved into my first post-college apartment after dirtbagging around the country for almost a year, only to discover, upon unpacking, that all of my boxes of CDs and mixtapes were lost somewhere along the way. We all survive that great disaster, but something is lost that will never be recovered. A mixtape, or a blog post, or much of what we humans do creatively, for that matter, is a spontaneous act that captures and distills a moment in time. It can’t be recreated…you can try, but it won’t be the same.

A painter acquaintance from NY would always say, “if you can’t do it again, it was never yours in the first place.” I’m never sure I fully agreed with that — I understand where he is coming from, but making –anything — is a mixture of skill, distillation of experience, intuition, and — perhaps the most important element — translation of the immediate. Whether we like it or not, there is always a response to the present condition(s) that gets translated into the canvas upon which we work.