A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.
SpiralTruth
Just another post-modern quest for meaning.
Usually it’s my fellow bleeding hearts who go overboard with the whole political correctness thing, but apparently the Republican Rogue herself loves to play that card too. It seems that Family Guy, which makes a point of trying to offend everyone equally, stepped over the line by featuring a character with Down syndrome who’s mother happened to be the Governor of Alaska. A little risqué? Perhaps. But here’s the twist. The actress who played the character with Down syndrome? Well, she also has Down syndrome. And she’s more offended about what she thinks is Mrs. Palin’s exploitation of the condition, carrying “her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes.” I didn’t see the episode myself, but when the executive director of the Down Syndrome Association of Los Angeles figures the character was well rounded enough, well, that’s good enough for me.
Whether or not I’d think it was over the line, it’s my firm belief that an artist’s highest calling is to follow his or her own moral compass. That invariably means that you offend some people. And is it less offensive to pretend like talented folks like Ms. Friedman – who do amazing things despite what the rest of us see as limitations – don’t exist? Or to teach everyone that you must absolutely never find any humour in any situation in which they are involved? Is it less offensive to treat them as if they’ll fall apart the moment some comedian mentions their condition?
Some consolation for poor Trig: We all are forced to suffer embarrassing parents at one point or another. It’s part of growing up.
I remember watching the 2004 U.S. Democratic Primaries and thinking that this Lieberman fellow was so obviously pandering to whatever groups he figured could give him a leg up that even George Bush would be better to have around for another four years if he was the alternative. Thankfully, Joe Lieberman never even got close, placing 7th in the primaries by the time he decided to withdraw. Since then, he’s flailed about like a complete jackass, eventually speaking at the Republican National Convention in support of John McCain, a stunt that seemed more like revenge on the party that shunned him in 2004 than anything resembling independent thought. That seemed to be the peak of the mountain for Joe. It is hard to imagine how one man could do any more to secure his place among the neo-swine. And for a brief time, he was mercifully off our radars, except when he was trying to push his way into a press photo or two (seriously, it’s fascinating to watch the man during these moments). But low and behold, Joe has managed to top himself once again, threatening to filibuster health reform in the States. This Huffington Post article sums it up best:
All in all, there’s no other way to peg Lieberman other than as a desperate hack who will thoughtlessly hurl thousands of Americans overboard for the sake of his unquenchable lust for attention, and his childish, vengeful hobby of tweaking the left.
link: Bob Cesca: Joe Lieberman Filibusters Health Care While Americans Suffer
I’m a huge fan of John Irving. If you happen to not like the stuff I write and wish I’d never gotten the itch to put it out in public, then you can put at least a bit of the responsibility on his shoulders. To me, his work is the perfect blend of literary and popular fiction. You get the brain candy of his absurd plots and loveable characters, and yet, when you’re done, you don’t feel like you’ve just junked out. Your brain has been nourished, you’re a little more understanding of everyone’s eccentricities, and you understand that you can laugh and cry about the world at the same time. I remember reading someone’s review of A Prayer for Owen Meany. They used the book as a test for whether or not a relationship could last. If the person reading it didn’t like it, then they simply didn’t have a soul, and there would be trouble ahead. That’s pretty high praise for a book, but it’s praise that is well earned.
Irving’s writing has soul. If he was a musician, he’d be an old blues player. His writing is very firmly grounded in the world of the average American, and he has a talent for making those lives into epic tales of love and loss. Yes, he seems to have a predisposition towards bears and writing about writers and New England and a number of other things that you come to expect will show up at least once in every couple of novels, but that’s what he knows, and I would argue that it’s a testament to his talent as a writer that he’s made those things vivid enough for us to notice their repetition.
I haven’t read his latest novel, Last Night in Twisted River, yet, but it’s on the bookshelf begging for me to finish off those other books and get to it. I’m looking forward to the moment I can do that.
Just the word “collective” makes me shudder. Every time I hear one described, I can’t help but think about the failed experiments of communism and hippy communes. Just mention the former and you’ll get any serious right-wing American frothing at the mouth, and the latter has been a punchline almost since it was conceived. At the centre of our distrust seems to be a fundamental rule: people tend to look out for themselves.
Yes, there are and always will be plenty examples of altruism out there. But the only ones we can really be sure about require someone to toss a grenade and someone else to jump on it. If the threat is not immediate, we just have too much time to wonder about the players and the game they may or may not be playing.
So when bloggers talk about the evils of the more established media industry and band together, guest-blogging, re-blogging, etc., are we really doing it because we truly believe in the cause? Or do we believe that the established media has no place for us while new media does? Are the loudest, most eloquent spokespeople for new media talking about it because they believe it to be better, or because it’s been better for them?
Perhaps the generations that follow mine won’t have to grapple with this particular question because new media will then be the status quo. But for my generation, whose artists grew up with the notion of getting signed by a record label or picked up by a publisher as the one road to making a living doing what you love, new media ventures represent a scary new world. We see the old world crumbling around us while the new one hasn’t even fully formed and we sometimes wonder if we’re crazy to bother. Wouldn’t it be a lot more enjoyable to just sit back and watch the show?
Well Transition Generation, I’m going to make a humble suggestion that may or may not work for us. I haven’t even tried it out myself, but in the spirit of the New World, I’m going to publish it anyway. Here’s the suggestion: We should embrace collectives for what they are – a low overhead and potentially more equitable alternative to corporations. The goal of each: to reach a critical mass through which the ideas of individual members can be promoted more effectively than on their own.
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Yes, despite his tough stance on marijuana and other drugs, Slick Steve Harper really just wants to get high with a little help from his friends. Congrats to the guy for getting up on stage and singing a song. That ain’t the easiest thing to do. But could he have picked something more contradictory? Hopefully he made sure to secure all the rights for performing the song and posting it up on YouTube. Wouldn’t want to piss off any of those record companies that he’s helping to impose draconian copyright laws on everyone.
The thing that bothers me the most about this performance, though, was that Rahim Jaffer was nowhere to be seen. That guy knows how to party, and I bet he could have helped on the harmonies.
Wow. Copyblogger’s How Your Emotions Are Strangling the Life Out of Your Copy is right on the money. I struggle with this all the time.
Whenever you feel like you’re taking a risk, an emotional response is triggered. Your emotional needs feel threatened. The filter is engaged, and your bold copy turns into a big puddle of boringness.
Yep. Been there, done that. And I know that this article is directed more towards editorial style blogging articles, but it is also true for prose and poetry. In fact, the problem is especially pernicious in prose and poetry because you can hide the fact that you just censored yourself behind a bunch of metaphors and neat literary devices.
I don’t worry about random people judging me so much as friends and family. You get this awesome idea or insight, and maybe it’s a bit weird or a bit dark. Even if you’re exploring the idea with a completely fictional character, you’re the one who’s thinking about it, who’s putting it on the page. It’s in your brain. Somewhere. And what does this say about you? I wonder if a guy like Stephen King worries about this stuff. He manages to write some of the most fucked up characters imaginable and I’ve often heard people say, “Thank God he’s a writer,” even after praising his imagination. The suggestion, of course, is that if he wasn’t a writer, he’d be one of those fucked up characters. And, when you look at it that way, what a nasty thing to say about a writer…
I’ve noticed in myself and humanity as a whole that even the best of us feel this need to undercut anyone who’s successful. We have to find the faults. We have to take them down. That’s one way of bringing them to our level. The other way would be empathy – realizing that no matter the talent or success of somebody, they still love, hate, fear, and worry about what people think of them, just like we do. It’s hard, when someone like Stephen King makes it look so easy. But next time, instead of saying, “Thank God he’s a writer,” I’m going to simply thank him for doing what he’s doing, which is paving the way for other writers to think strange thoughts and write about the possibilities those thoughts open up… and not feel guilty about it.
With posts like “Love in the Time of Layoff: Unemployment Jacked Up My Libido” and “Recession Briefing: Men’s Underwear Sales Dip”, how can you miss? Check out these (and more!) at Recessionwire.
UrbanMonk has an interesting article on how to get to the core of your passion(s) and then pursue them. A lot of it’s just the standard “don’t give up on your dreams” rhetoric (which isn’t exactly a bad thing) designed to give that much needed boost of hope that creative types need more often than most, as we pursue our various quixotic quests and treks up Maslow mountains.
What I found different about this post was how it encourages you to analyze a given passion, to break it up into a core essence, preferred forms of expression, and preferred mediums to communicate it to others. We often make the error of locking into a specific version of a passion (i.e. “I want to be a rock star with a record deal who sells out arenas”) when what we really want is much more fundamental (i.e. “I love to tell stories and explore emotion and thought, especially through music, and I’d like to do it full time. I could get a record deal to help with this, but I could also do it myself. It would be nice to have a big audience, but all I really need is a thousand true fans.”).
Check it out if you think you should be pursuing some of those passions you’ve been denying but don’t know where to start.
I recently stumbled upon Michelle Malkin, someone I had no clue existed but who is apparently quite popular with the far right of the United States. I found myself gritting my teeth as I read attack piece after attack piece, each one held together by questionable links and even more questionable reasoning, and as I continued to read, I tried to figure out what it was about Malkin’s “journalism” that made it so distasteful. After all, my last post was an undisguised bashing of Rahim Jaffer, a politician I find particularly loathsome.
So, what’s the difference between someone like Malkin and someone like me? I fear that the truth is: not much. Both of us believe that we’re one of the good guys and that whoever or whatever we attack constitutes the bad. Our arguments seem rock solid to us and hopelessly contrived to each other.
This isn’t anything new, of course. We’ve all complained about how polarized debate is becoming at one time or another in the last decade. It’s almost as much fun to complain about polarization as it is to be polarized. And as we become more and more aware of this polarization, it’s tempting to blame it on the rise of the Internet – and the rise of blogging, in particular. After all, if we didn’t have all these “amateurs” out there editorializing everything to the point that facts are considered secondary to the narrative they’re trying to convey – and instead left it all to “real journalists” to deliver informed, well researched news – wouldn’t we be better off?
Some might say you can tell a lot about a man by his favourite intoxicants. Marijuana and LSD, for example, have long been associated with idealistic hippies that will never amount to anything in life. Take, for example, Steve Jobs. He’s been quoted as saying that taking LSD was one of the three most important things he’s ever done. What a loser! If he’d only done something more productive – like, say, help invent the personal computer and become CEO of one of the most innovative companies around…
Bill Clinton seemed to like marijuana, even if he didn’t inhale. It’s long been known that pot has a negative affect on ambition, and it obviously affected Mr. Clinton’s. Instead of making a name for America by starting a long term war or two, he wasted his talents on reducing the deficit, boosting the economy, and creating a budget surplus. Thankfully, his successor knew how all that money should really be used. Clinton might be satisfied with balanced budgets and rescuing reporters from North Korea, but George Bush knew that Jesus lovin’ cowboy swagger – and pre-emptively bombing the fuck out of countries – is where it’s at.
And what drug is George Bush famous for taking a spin or two with? That’s right… cocaine.
So, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that Rahim Jaffer, who has long been critical of marijuana and parties like the NDP who advocate decriminalization of the substance, has been caught in possession of cocaine.
Not only in possession of cocaine. Also drunk driving (aren’t the conservatives all about “responsibility”?)… in an SUV (way to help the environment, buddy). And, yes, this is also the guy who got someone to impersonate him on a radio show. If there was a lifetime douchebag award, he would certainly be in the lead to receive it.
As expected, the refrain from fellow right-wingers in Canada seems to be: pot smokers are still deserving of jail time, but Rahim is only human, and we should forgive him for making a mistake.
Today, on the 8th anniversary of 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security’s Absurdity Level is set to orange, and there is a high risk that the TV drama queens out there will try to milk this thing for yet another year. Yes, you know you’re desperate for news when your own erroneous reporting about a major event becomes your top news story this morning.
Or perhaps this is simply more evidence of the singularity that Kurzweil and others are getting all worked up about. The medium itself is the story. It has become self aware. We’re walking around in a hall of mirrors, and the only question that makes any sense to ask is: how deep do the reflections go?
In any event, it’s amusing to watch a major news network try and save face in real time…
Since seeing Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on creativity, I’ve thought a lot about muses. When we hear someone refer to a muse, we often think of a beautiful woman with whom a poet is deeply in love, writing poem after poem after poem for. I shudder to think of how many poor women have been tormented by moronic attempts at verse because of this personification. Ladies, you have my sympathy.
That’s not to say muses aren’t important. Gilbert’s talk made me realize that, far from simply being an easy source of inspiration, they’re a necessary mechanism an artist uses to keep from becoming too self-absorbed while creating some very personal and subjective things. A muse brings coherence to these personal experiences, making them transcend the person. It simultaneously allows an artist to maintain a comfortable distance from whatever it is that torments him to create and provides a framework in which others can understand those creations.
Alan Watts was one of my favourite philosophers and I think his talks on zen are absolutely essential for anyone in the western world who hopes to understand the discipline. If you listen to enough of his talks, you’ll find that they tend to repeat a few central themes that Watts was obsessed with – the notion of irreducible rascality, buddhism as a dialog, the perils of being too serious about life, and so on. Some may find this repetition annoying – evidence that Watts never had all that much to say. I find it endearing. The man had his issues, but he understood a few things about life very well, and he chose to focus on those things, patiently explaining them in as many ways possible to as many as he could. One of my favourite talks, mainly due to its relevance in today’s very fast paced, technology-driven world is the “Reproduction” talk. And it goes something like this…
From very early on, humans have been obsessed with reproducing reality. First, there were the painters who would try to capture it on canvas. And, depending on how good the artist was, a painting could represent a person, place, or thing very faithfully. Someone who had never met that person, never been there, or never seen that thing could get a pretty good idea of what they were like…
Eventually, we invented the camera. At first, it was blurry and cumbersome, but in terms of being able to capture and store reality, it was a giant leap forward. Blurry as it was, it helped keep that memory of “Grandpa” sharp in our minds…
Add some colour to that photo and you have an even better representation of reality.
But to truly know some people, you had to know how they moved. A static photograph could never capture what it was like to be around them. And so we came up with the motion picture and we could see them move over and over and over again.
You can probably see where this is going. Add sound to the motion picture. And colour again. Add more definition to the picture. All of this in an effort to make it more like you were really there. All in an effort to capture reality and play the good parts over and over again.
Here’s where it gets a little more interesting…
The following is a copy of my hasty letter to the Canadian Copyright consultations going on right now. Please send your own while there’s time.
Dear Ministers,
I put a lot of work into my art and, yes, I would love to one day be able to quit my day job to pursue my artistic endeavours full time. There’s a lot changing in the record industry and the publishing industry, and for the little guy, most of it’s good. My enemy is not piracy, it’s obscurity. Please don’t pretend that you’re helping me realize my dreams by creating harsher copyright laws. You’re not. In fact, I’m hard pressed to figure out what sort of creator extending the length of copyright past what it is now (life + 50 years, I believe) will help. Certainly not the guys just starting out. I’d be happy with a 10-20 year span before the works I create fall into the public domain. In fact, shortening the length of copyright is far more reasonable given the faster pace of the world today.
The stories of how much a musician actually gets from his own record sales when under a record company contract are well known… so well known that most musicians I know no longer want a record deal and even some of the major players are getting out of their contracts as soon as they can. The creators are busy forging new roads. The best way to help us to do that is to simply stay out of our way. You’re dealing with some powerful lobbyists, I know. They’ll tell you that culture will go down the drain if you don’t step up the laws on copyright. In fact, relaxing the laws may do more to encourage culture than anything. It just won’t help the guys looking to get rich off of my (and other artists’) work.
Look at the Internet today. It has permeated every part of our lives and opened up communication dramatically. When I was a child, I needed access to a set of encyclopedias to find out about something. Now I can get that knowledge instantly, for free… online. Imagine how things might have been different had that knowledge not been so easily accessible over the last few years. We are creating more than we ever have before, enabling more people to create, and despite a huge recession brought about by non-creators looking to make a fast buck, creativity goes on unhindered.
The only thing you can do to stifle creativity is to put more control of it in the hands of corporate types.
I visited my local public library for the first time in years a month or so back. I make enough money these days to buy the books I’m interested in as soon as they come out. And it’s impossible to estimate how much of an edge that gives me on my competition: to be able to read about the newest theories, the newest programming languages, to explore philosophy and science on my own time whenever I need to and without having to wait for someone else to be done with their copy. When I visited the library, I was struck by how many people there were obviously much poorer than I was. Whereas for me, this was a curiosity, a place where I might find a book I wanted to read and didn’t want to buy, for them it was the only place they could afford to get new knowledge. And I realized how much of a disadvantage that put them at. The maddening thing is that at this point in history, the lack of availability of a new book is completely artificial. In reality, all of these people could have the latest and greatest information at no cost to us. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t compensate creators for their work. I’m one of them. But I think that the compensation should be looked at fairly. How much easier is it to create and have a voice than it was 10 years ago? A lot. I don’t have to risk as much to create. Consequently, I don’t have as much claim to higher rewards.
Don’t worry. Creators will find ways to make a living off of what they do, no matter what. They’ll still create as much as they can without that. And every day, thanks to the biggest example of information sharing (the Internet), some of the brightest minds are coming up with new models and ideas to support art and culture without that support coming at the expense of the public.
Three strikes and you’re out? Copyright extension? Fining people outside of the court system? These are all things I’m hearing about in other countries and that I hope Canada will stay away from. How about a three strikes you’re out policy towards companies making spurious copyright claims (make 3 claims against someone that turn out to be false and you get YOUR internet taken away)? How would a record company do business without the Internet? But that would be fair given that they want to take that form of communication away from a citizen without even proper court proceedings.
Please consider this when you’re making your decisions. You were elected by us, not your lobbyists. Don’t make it harder to create so that a few can make way more money than they deserve. Encourage creativity. Get out of our way.
- David
This has been waiting in my queue for a while. It’s a wonderful TED talk from Elizabeth Gilbert on dealing with the elusive nature of creativity – the moments of genius and the grasping at straws that inevitably precedes and follows those moments of brilliance.
What is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each others’ mental health in a way that other careers… don’t do?
A friend emailed me a few days ago to give me props on a song I wrote and recorded a while back, jokingly ending the email with, “You jerk.” He’s been playing guitar for a few years and just started recording and performing at open mike nights. I don’t know if anyone really knows how much comments like that help in giving you that often needed kick in the ass to do more. I’ve really enjoyed showing him all the tricks I’ve learned and like to think that I’m able to help someone else get to where they want to go a little bit faster than it’s taken me. But there’s one really important thing about writing and recording and performing that I haven’t told him about. And maybe that’s because I’ve never really admitted it to myself.
Last night, I did.
My current band has had what I think are several radio-worthy tracks for a couple of years and I still haven’t sent a CD into the local radio station. Why? Sure, we’ve just been distributing the tracks online and don’t have an actual CD yet, but even the Amish know how to burn a CD these days. (Actually, I don’t know that, but wikipedia tells me that the Amish actually aren’t quite the luddites we usually assume they are, so I’m betting I could find at least one.) And I’ve bugged plenty of radio station folks in my last band, eventually getting radio play for tracks that I think are far less worthy than these. So what’s the hang up?
It’s hard to explain it to someone who hasn’t done the whole self promotion thing for years, but those of you who have, successful or not, have got to agree that it sucks. If I could scrub toilet bowls in exchange for someone spending the equivalent amount of time promoting me, I’d say, “Sign me up!” And I think I might have to fight more than a few other struggling artists for the privilege.
What’s so bad about it? Do I not believe in myself enough? Not enough self confidence? Well, not really. I’ve seen many a band make it with less talent. And I’ve seen many musicians more talented than me not going anywhere either. Call it low confidence if you will, but there’s more than a little luck involved… and obviously being able to promote yourself can swing the odds in your favor.
Well, the thing is, I just don’t know how to do it without looking like an asshole. Who out there has had to write up a press kit bio for themselves? Does a part of you not cringe at all of the accolades you bestow upon yourself? “I’m really not that vain, but I know anyone who knows me will think I am if they knew I wrote this!” Or the infamous query letter that attempts to convince a publisher that I’m the next Steinbeck. After all, they’d say, why should they waste their time with a mediocre writer?
The artists that I really look up to are the ones who think they’re not that great, the ones who are still trying to live up to their idols. I can’t imagine one of these folks promoting themselves in the way that conventional wisdom seems to suggest. I have a secret suspicion that any humble artist who makes it does so because someone else gets tired of them not promoting themselves and decides to do it for them. Because if you really think you’re the hot shit that people who are going to give you those lucky breaks want to believe you are… then you’re probably just an asshole.
And if you really care about what you’re doing, the last thing you want to do is feel like an asshole about it.
I’ve always been rather serious about art. It’s more about obsession than fun and it often carries the burden and the zeal of a religion. There’s this notion that all the mistakes I’ve ever made, anything I might consider foolish or shameful, is somehow made right by creating something that transcends myself – something that somehow taps into the universal and eternal. I love the way art can turn ugliness into beauty and bring order to what can seem so cruel and random. The flip side of this is a constant dissatisfaction with whatever I create and a feeling of almost frantic discomfort when I don’t feel I’ve created enough.
How much is enough? I don’t know. I’ve written and recorded over sixty songs, finished a novel, designed the websites I use to promote all of this and… that just doesn’t seem like much after having done it. What I do think a lot about is whether I’ll write another song or book and whether they’ll be any good. Or about how I haven’t worked hard enough to market what I have created. Marketing has always seemed like a dark art to me. I’d rather not have to understand it but I know how important it is. Especially now. We’re at this amazing period in human history where everyone has a voice. Never before has the ability to have your ideas reach millions of people been so democratized. The problem now, of course, is how to be heard over the chatter. And anyone looking to do that also has to ask themselves whether or not they deserve to be heard.
When I was in high school, I had an English teacher that was very much against the use of “I” in writing. Perhaps because he seemed so sure of himself and I was so unsure of myself, that advice sort of stuck in my head, and I suppose it’s good advice when you’re writing high school essays. In hindsight, I think another high school English teacher gave me something much more valuable when he taught me to hate clichés. Sometimes I still use them because, overused or not, they’re the best say something, but I still hate them and agonize over them. But the “I” thing did a little more harm than good. It instilled this Catholic-like guilt in me, admonishing me to take myself out of my writing in order for it to be more persuasive. It’s also a very journalistic way of looking at the world. Journalists feel they are doing their job better by taking themselves out of the story. The problem is, it’s never true. No matter how objective a piece of writing sounds, it is always written by someone. I think that’s why I like Hunter S. Thompson so much. He saw through all that and decided to go out of his way to be in the news he was reporting. (more…)