on audiences, business models, originality and the nonexistence of comfort, safety and security :)
let’s start this workday with a sketch:
audiences
- an audience is a mental construct — a thing that will rescue you from loneliness; i think Art is about going deep into your loneliness, solitude, memory
- audiences (the larger, the more powerful the thrum…also, anyone of experience online knows 1K and 100K are the only places to be follower-wise; 10K is jail, because you want 3x as much—same with money; like Miles Davis, be obsessed with music; a writer is obsessed with silence and conflict, incoherence, silence, and somehow turning it into sense; but the world is insane now, everyone vomiting up anguish online all the time, every spurt becoming content, so it’s a terrible time to be seen, marketed, appreciated, digested; this moment in time is just a big hot white dot of trash and vomit, so it’s a good time to be alone and keep working on your craft and voice
the presence of the others is a mirror; an invitation to go inward again — but there is no selling this; i may be looking at an unbridgeable abyss,
“…the authentic and old problem”
so conversations about business models are really conversations about love and fear of lack of love; how to preserve and make permanent my being OK, in a world and in a reality where it is not possible, where safety does not exist; how does one endure the mind and the aging body, the senselessness of existence, the hundreds of people striving—
“My life had grown slow and small but everyone else was still in a tremendous hurry; I half-remembered that kind of hurry but now felt speed was pointless; I found I was unable to re-enter the world of normal, productive adults; I could not seem to take any of it seriously: the deadlines and dinner parties, the dull work of replying to emails and keeping up appearances.”
— Faith Shearin, “Winter”, New Ohio Review Issue 30 (Winter 2022)
being no one again
might be the ultimate
work of art; publishing it, entering the gurgling fields of
millions of so-called artists talking in public
may be no home for what you are (I am) doing; is mine
more important? No; I embrace the ecstasy of being forgotten
is fear of death the whole reason for the creator economy? Are the boys just terrorized by the separation via their bully buttons from their mother, and longing to return? to close the gap? to reunite? but there is no unconditional love to be found in this realm; a friend/mentor said, “We’re not made for here”, that’s powerful if anyone ever reads this; another URL, another blurt stranded and floating in the cosmology of rocks, time a useful fiction;
i wonder what we want
i know what we want: flow
maybe i keep being interested in the space between us
and the impossibility of satisfaction
and there being nothing but endurance,
acquiescence to banality, order, the known, habit, ritual, checklist,
known ways of living—school, house, family;
maybe that order has forsaken me (don’t I enlist every work of mine as a place to pour my latest
settling down in the muck of seeing and knowing too much, running out of energy to make a life, put myself on the rails, gain and advance; i know there’s nowhere to get; maybe i belong with the dead who only visited this world briefly; do i really care to order my soul’s breath? how absurd to try to sell it? sales and business development means thinking about fathers and civilization, history and spreadsheets, ideals, how it ought to be; preservation, law and order
*
business models
originality
the nonexistence of comfort, safety and security
*
Who’s going to finance my being human and free? Who’s gonna finance my childhood? A parent? You can rely on the old man’s money. There’s an old man without courage to grow who needs stories, needs somewhere to direct his eyeballs for meaning; we’re addicted to meaning, anchorage, rest, routine…who will finance our footsteps required for mental health? All this talk begs the question what time is, which is a secret room one enters alone and does battle/dances with his demons…one must learn what solitude and silence are, only then can you emerge onto the playing field of public persona (a game, a dream, weird, fake, an attempt like an essay is; there is no real life that is not an act of creative writing, which is what makes the words of an artist like David Byrne true:
“I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe… I wouldn’t be surprised if poetry…in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes and designs…is how the world works. The world isn’t logical, it’s a song.”
So who will finance the exploratory/experimental practice time? Who will pay the players’ living expenses while they are free to not “be productive” because they are getting to know each other, themselves and their instruments?
Maybe one is only free when they stop looking for an answer or permission, and then it’s clear that the real reward was never money, but a new way of seeing silence, time and people ~ a sense of what is possible; that was the only reward one would ever really receive and be able to embody/live.
And now I’m living it. So what of public life, financing, people, talk, social media?
and this response was killer:
we are all just users, prisoners here of our own device
do we construct the hell we live in? do we love to be in jail? isn’t that why I check LinkedIn? don’t we love seeing where we’re left out? (TK Adam Phillips on being left out, estranged, abandoned, then finding what else is available)
“There can be no life without violence because all violence is the violence of exclusion. Because everyone has had the experience of being left out — everyone, in other words, has been a child — everyone has an imagination (a provocation is also an invitation). You figure out how to get in, or you figure out what else there is.”
— Adam Phillips, Monogamy
oh that book is delicious to reread
we carve an idol out of our fear and call it God
so what I write and present in public is just a brainstorm…that used to sound like not enough; now everyone’s tired of success. I loved this tweetstorm by Donald Glover:
saw people on here havin a discussion about how tired they were of reviewing boring stuff (tv & film).
we’re getting boring stuff and not even experimental mistakes(?) because people are afraid of getting cancelled
so they feel like they can only experiment w/ aesthetic.
(also because some of em know theyre not that good)
live where you fear to live ~ go too far…that’s where the good stuff is, the marrow of life…everything else is getting bored, old, the same as other people. Stay illegible. I wonder if it’s true and if I’m living it, the thing I send to others and hope I am living:
creativity is necessarily about leading to an unknowable outcome, it irks those who want to know how things will turn out ~ so creativity leads me away from interest in and connection with people like that, or people who are still on that bandwidth/frequency…yes, I missed the drama of management consulting, owning a house, starting a family, seeing Instagram as anything but artful, chaotic self-actualization ~ to think that lily-white East Coast elite world still checks their social network every Sunday to make sure their little pod is staying in line…well, the world is wide enough for multiple kinds of people. I live to blur my categories and debunk my own certainties
uncertainty will reign ~ so what do you do? Keep going, make stuff, get away from here, go farther and deeper, just GO because there’s no victory or satisfaction standing here. Look!
“But there is no winning. So what’s to be done? Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work, tell someone out there who is lost, who is not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time, it can’t help but be. But more importantly if you’re honest about who you are you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them help and it’s done so for me…give that to the world rather than selling something to the world. Try not to be tricked into thinking that the way things are is the way the world must work and that in the end selling is what everyone must do.” “But there is no winning. So what’s to be done? Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work, tell someone out there who is lost, who is not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time, it can’t help but be. But more importantly if you’re honest about who you are you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them help and it’s done so for me…give that to the world rather than selling something to the world. Try not to be tricked into thinking that the way things are is the way the world must work and that in the end selling is what everyone must do.”
am I at war with sales?
“What the fuck ? People want to be famous NOT good!
It is TOO easy to play ‘pretend pop star’ now. With all the fakery and auto tune-time correction -cut and paste etc.. fuck most young people don’t know how to play a song from top to bottom in a studio in tune and in time and with feeling?? Rare.”
the artist creates because he is uniquely stranded, and no money or status will save him from the voices in his head; he can’t get out, so you have to get INTO it, get inside the madness, sit down in the voice and listen to it…learn to be its steward and shepherd
…
maybe all I can do is write about the artist and this is my art and I ought to just surrender to this fact
the speaker speaks because she is not safe in the silent location where she is; the painter paints because he does not see himself in the world so therefore must put himself there by his own hand; this is the essential scream, which emerges from an intolerable heartbeat and thought: the sinking suspicion of trouble, of despair
online there is always a supposedly accessible and attentive audience for the output of your trashing to be good enough and fit in, for safety’s and a clear identity’s sake (mostly for the ability to tell yourself you’re doing great and to maintain the illusion that others know you and what you’re about…you curate your phone to be a reflection of a world in which you’re adored ~ even if that real world doesn’t really exist on the other side of you thinking about the content, all that matters is that you believe it and don’t act — and keep acting according to the story being run on the phone, which is like a Ouija board and maybe psychology and psychoanalysis are only about where you stop questioning who’s in charge. As Kierkegaard said, none come further than faith, and the faithful are fanatics who will redouble their efforts — American are also Puritan work addicts who just love perfection, and will keep pushing (like Madonna) into her 60s being perfect, working 15-hour days of Deep Work and yoga and journaled reflection, all put into the machine for us, the buzzing, wide-eyed content consumers and creators — though we’ve agreed to this paradigm and being run culturally and emotionally by the computer interfaces and media forms/shapes presented to us on Apple and Android devices…there is a richer history of making one can discover. One can become intergenerational, and go back many generations to old masters. Anyway
I’ve quoted this one before and it’s stuck with me for a year or more — always online there is an audience (supposedly, even though anybody in that audience is just human and we are all human, and perhaps the goal of art and business is to wake up from separateness and revolt against whatever is keeping us separate and fighting for an ever-shrinking pie of money, safety, security…reliable violent power which would protect us, i.e. the justice department, laws, prisons, weapons…these are alluring, because they preserve law and order…painting is about justice, worthiness, gratitude, recalibrating the imperfect human being with the perfection of nature, and painting itself is an act of striving to close the gap…and on a podcast last night, I heard the idea that painting is all about how to load a brush: what you’re putting on your instrument before you turn to the canvas to do something, make a mark, make something someone else can interpret.
But on being an audience member: you must be the one! You must be the one you impress, and then all others (who better not know how to be a better audience member than you) will look to your example of how to attend your own work, which is like what Wordsworth said about every original writer: he must create the taste by which his own work is to be relished, rather than fit an existing model of hunger, or else you will constantly be addicted to the feedback of the tribe, rather than pushing into new models of thinking about time, attention, obedience, form, worship, prayer…those lofty, divine acts we all probably secretly wish to abandon our status games and trying to “win” so we can surrender to the natural power and glory of the thing we keep writing, painting and singing about…but maybe we can’t quit the grid; maybe we love perfection too much
but I meant to say, the metrics will never catch up ~
there’s always gonna be someone with a phone talking about someone doing something unexpected
but/and we love being measured according to the tribe
wherever the source of truth is about beauty standards and being good enough, safe enough and loved enough…a human, like a cow to a salt lick, will go attack that thing and close the gap all day every day, whining and wondering aloud about whether they are doing enough! Fascinating! So this creates a leadership opportunity
and now everyone is lost online looking for their way forward, to win, to think well of themselves, to have a story worth telling…examining where we get our mythology, who we believe when they “here’s where we’re going and here’s what it’ll be like when we get there,” and most people out there trying to lead don’t think it through enough; scratch two layers down and they’re still just working off childhood nausea of being left out and not winning daddy’s approval;
who online is above daddy issues?! Show me one person! Everyone’s trying to impress an absent father, and is looking around their phone and computer for the metrics profile that’s gonna tell them they’re doing great ~ and every day as an artist, one has to remember there is no father but yourself; there is no way to be told you are good; you have to be the ultimate authority on what rings true about being human on this planet from which we will all pass and in an environment of technology and content where anyone could evaporate and we’d all move on, no matter how great — but Kobe Bryant lives forever, as does Miles Davis
and the fact is they just practiced a lot, and didn’t look for the phone to tell them when it’s OK to stop…and I’m skeptical of publishing anything and going into the public arena and acting as if I’ve discovered something, but my own failure is delicious and precious to me, staying unsuccessful in terms of having a paying audience ~ as soon as it gets professionalized and you become known for a thing, to me, it’s time to abandon it — but maybe in my 34th winter coming up I will abandon all these principles and just cling hard to the sword of competence, intelligence and work ethic, easily outlasting and defeating any enemy in my chosen field of competence because no one could have thrown their life away more for the sake of their own work than I did, and now I am ready to get revenge and cut the world and make shit-talkers bleed out of their puny little public mouthpieces, I want their blood on their face and my shit in their mouth! That’s not really true but it was funny, are you still reading? Highlight this line if you are still reading! Highlighting is a fun feature of Medium, it allows you (like highlighting in books on Amazon Kindle — oh my god, see how I’ve outsourced my memories to the companies? and I can’t stop dumping??) to examine your own taste and intrigue…WHICH HONESTLY IS THE WAY TO OBEY THE MESSAGE OF THIS POST!! To become a master of your own taste, to get inside and inhabit your own mechanism of desire and intrigue — to live in your curations, and see others’ curations and attempts to be public about their intrigue with the lens of the heroic nature of yours: a heroic autodidact making an empire out of online content, going all-in with your digital presence, your reputation, and building a life out of nothing ~ which invites one to express gratitude for those who have helped you do what you have done…and maybe this is all an attempt to (again, obey this post and) wake up from the illusion of separateness
maybe we can destroy the game if we keep talking about freedom, and keep insisting on going very deep into our own work alone and while in there, think of others, and how to free us all, and end the slaving competition ~ and now I dangerously open myself up to criticism and correction of my vocabulary and logic by the very tribe I am maybe trying to transcend (then of course I surrender to the inability to transcend, and hope I’m embraced, and when I’m disregarded and benignly neglected because I am not actually important, well, that’s how you learn about the market, and markets rule you until they don’t
now, let me steal from an artist who wrote a book about stealing like an artist and say what he did: I took great care to learn and understand the rules governing the world…and then the rules did not apply to me
when you have a brand and an audience and relationships, you can do what you want; when you don’t have to fear breaking the rules and not fitting in, you are free to take yourself down whatever road you want
but it’s you who has to believe in yourself and commit to being a person who alone, all day and all life long, will be someone who reinvents life from the inside out, through listening to your inner voice and trusting that no one knows better than you. It is an exacting claim upon you but makes you superior and more alive than most others…and makes you lonely
and gives you carte blanche to contradict yourself like I have here, wanting to be superior and also equal with others, wanting no audience but also needing one…but what is better to be than a star who just keeps burning restlessly for impossible, irreconcilable things? There’s always more social media to look at of other people talking about what they might like to do — people who ‘have more’ than you (Ah! and this is really the illusion to wake up from
…and in a tweet I am trying to find which I cannot, it said “if you ain’t enough without it, you definitely ain’t gonna be enough with it”
so I am surrendering to becoming a metaphysician and semiotician (words that sound nice, like I could lean into them and prove “I’m that! Look!” and dump a bunch of good-enough-sounding evidence) of desire, of apprenticing myself to not-having, to not giving up my status as an outsider and underdog; never believe anything I put in a personal website ~ I am fire, water, air. I flow. I am not defined, I am not for sale, I am a feral forager on the digital savannah for anything I can use and add to my art…of course after five hours of hunting and weaving, I become tired, and want nice things, but always the words of wanting these things are out of date…so like a performing artist, the only way to feel alive is to perform. Luckily it’s a great time to be a creator because all people have imagined of their futures is getting old at Apple devices on social media platforms hooked up to American dollars…and so we all wail and thrash and gnash teeth about politicians who never will do a good enough job. You want a spoiler alert for all the news in 2021? Here’s the headline:
INCOMPETENT BUREAUCRAT SHOULD HAVE DONE BETTER
there’s your news that’s fit to print, and it’s arguments about “what’s good?” all the way down
and I’m stuck with you, family! We are here together at the origin and fundament of what will become the future of civilization. I suppose art and literature depend on someone having the gall and audacity to think they are going to be one of the movers and shakers of the world ~ or maybe this is a long road to accepting my role in the revolution, uniquely stranding myself (at least a double entendre) and making it like a Par 5 to get myself into the safe good graces of the place that doesn’t even exist
yes this needs a lot of editing if it’s going to be something different than what it is
it is nice to believe i do not need to be edited; it is brave and boring and scary and slow to be one who is not like the others, and it’s a boring day job to keep plumbing the soul for what I really think, and it is embarrassing to become a writer and speaker in the world and have to be a real person operating on schedule when really you are (I am) fire and water, intergenerational, still back at the Big Bang and looking far ahead to what human attention and communication can be…and I must put all heaving ambition aside and work with people. Maybe my writing is a revolt against working with people, or just a negative of my real true honest voice, or it’s just practice. Anyway, this was fun to write! I like losing myself and going deep, then learning (when I try to tweet it and get one reader) that nobody can care because that audience is all looking for a home for their own unprofitable self-actualization
so there are a lot of gems in here and maybe when I speak it loud later on an app like Clubhouse that promises perfect listening like Sherry Turkle says we want when we are out of control…maybe it will all come out clear and my life will not only be me alone at a screen with a keyboard imagining community…but the real thing
yes, writing is longing for the real but maybe wanting to retain the freedom to stay home and not have to actually go
it is good to not know what i want to do with this post; i will not find some art for it and tweet it, and move on to making coffee and breakfast, and jumping back into the electric currents of the internet, because it is the day after Christmas 2020 and coronavirus is still ruling the human behavior outside the door and so we have gathered here online in the perceptual and reading-voice space to stay warm, tell stories, stay optimistic, keep believing in the future even when the way does not make sense, because there isn’t enough belief, because the thing that needs to happen cannot be funded because the outcome is and must be uncertain — so it will take a leap and a risk, and social media is full of people who want other people to take leaps and risks for them…it’s gossip, it’s tedious, it’s fear on parade, and I struggle to be proud of this community I supposedly want to belong to. Better to be in exile and be glad you stuck to your own voice than be appearing to many other people in a judgment arena and faking it. Nothing’s worse than faking it, and nothing’s better than going for it and vanquishing, flattening, vaporizing all names and pictures of enemies and rivals in your head, doing it well in the content you put out (which is superior to theirs, because yours is honest and theirs is puling, scared, psychodramatic, a stab for self-regard out of the blackness of their own mediocre heart) (I don’t mean that, the hearts of my haters are as divine as my own, and this fact may be my torment, which only goes to show that I was used to being superior, I was well-acclimated to thinking of myself as better than others, and this was my only protection and maybe my only identity.
Today is Boxing Day 2021, a British holiday the day after Christmas…and I am boxing up the gifts I have around me which I no longer want to pay for space for or display to anyone who would see, but most of all myself
yes, I am boxing up what I no longer want to look at…I am writing away these thoughts and observations that do not serve me…and I finish writing, and wonder what I will go tell people ~ just because I needed to write and publish this doesn’t mean it’s what I want you to read. See how I really do care about my audience, even if it’s just a figment of my imagination? I trust you’re real, even though everything above is mostly true!
