pretty amusing and meaty; different enough from what else i have illuminated
an old painting to throw away or leave in the drafts; if only 25 hours of work a week could support
post-feminism
radical was a dead end
went back to classicism
is there anything wrong with being a woman? no
it was Madonna’s gay brother who saved her career before she ruined it herself
“Great art is always flanked by its dark sisters, blasphemy and pornography”
fight club
whorehouse
bazaar
silk road trade routes
whoa Arran Rogerson
the only stable structures are triadic
SPLIT PHALLUS
the priest and the chief
admiring each other
pathos-centric
logos and mythos
take care of them
selves
there’s more power in being a polarity in this interdependent circuit with men
the impossible wife
the irresistible wife
relinquish the need to possess
can i just experience her then remember it forever?
some are not in touch with their own impulse to care! DEVOURING MOTHER
sort out their own caring impulses
step into their heroic nature
warlike explosion passion madness
punk rock
thrashing in the mosh pit
to music about darkness and rage
must be heroic at all times, zero victimhood
magic men’s work: admiring their different talents
genuine masculine strength
creative rivalry
find your primary and secondary archetypes
go into the room and be proud of what you are
getting intimate with receiving a man’s aggression, and having a capacity to give it back
in relationship with fucking, fighting and killing
rêne girard on human sacrifice
adult stuff: sex, power, violence, art
logos and mythos avoiding pathos
sit on his pillar
designing society
but the sex and violence are absent
the printing press in Germany
the internet in California
to switch from the ironic to the sexual, you must grow up, you must choose violence…it’s art
affirmative nihilism
don’t try to do mythos and logos without the pathos
pathetique sonata
triads work
dialectics start with triads
“Conditioned to ecstasy, the poet is like a gorgeous unknown bird mired in the ashes of thought. If he succeeds in freeing himself, it is to make a sacrificial flight to the sun. His dreams of a regenerate world are but the reverberations of his own fevered pulse beats. He imagines the world will follow him, but in the blue he finds himself alone. Alone but surrounded by his creations; sustained, therefore, to meet the supreme sacrifice. The impossible has been achieved; the duologue of author with Author is consummated. And now forever through the ages the song expands, warming all hearts, penetrating all minds. At the periphery the world is dying away; at the center it glows like a live coal. In the great solar heart of the universe the golden birds are gathered in unison. There it is forever dawn, forever peace, harmony and communion. Man does not look to the sun in vain; he demands light and warmth not for the corpse which he will one day discard but for his inner being. His greatest desire is to burn with ecstasy, to commerge his little flame with the central fire of the universe. If he accords the angels wings so that they may come to him with messages of peace, harmony and radiance from worlds beyond, it is only to nourish his own dreams of flight, to sustain his own belief that he will one day reach beyond himself, and on wings of gold. One creation matches another; in essence they are all alike. The brotherhood of man consists not in thinking alike, nor in acting alike, but in aspiring to praise creation. The song of creation springs from the ruins of earthly endeavor. The outer man dies away in order to reveal the golden bird which is winging its way toward divinity.”
― Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins: a Study of Rimbaud
there is no grand publish to get to
it’s tuesday, people are working
my peers are acclimated to
the way it is
lost lovers remain lost
getting older is a massacre
yet we keep looking, keep making
the clock matter, dragging the story forward
an easy poem, now
because we all know
all we know the others know
there’s no hiding it now,
we know there’s no magical future coming
it’s just here, just us, just what can be
looked up, worked on
some days inspiration runs dry
when you don’t know what to play, play nothing
curation and editorial are about what to leave out; a sense of what a good symphony would be, an ideal of what someone ought to listen to
the world is banal however real the lovers; so i live in my head, in my own language, a world of my own continual weaving and judging and escaping from and retreating back into as if a haven for the aviary of the birds i have inside me, and i’m another selfish man of arts and letters spinning his doldrums making his certain death OK with him; it’s an amusing set the jazz player plays; i could go to more shows around here, up in Harlem, take the train…are there shows? There must be ~ how to learn where the good stuff is? It’s the same critique I gave of my cousin Matthew when he moved to San Francisco: you can’t just Google, you have to meet people, ask; questions are where answers go — you have to be ready. Thelonious Monk’s rules
American pianist
pianist, painter, poet
it’s an endless road to rediscover and we’re on it
So: begin painting and slashing; the thing is not ready or done until the audience meets it and alchemizes it with their own experience ~ maybe they draw in the margins; my thoughts are a temple or museum to enter and play with — it would take collaboration to maximize what it is I do, the control and command I have over my fastball, curveball, slider, changeup — it is a word, not a typo ~ha h a, it is predicated on deception, my favorite flavor of activity: finding a barn to burn, a structure to tear down, a bullshit hierarchy to infiltrate, cowardice to photograph and show them how stupid they are, how unworthy of my world! Ha ha! I am the unchained only child, libidinal bumper cars
could easily dial up the old insanity
mind is a carnival funhouse mirror game
you can do whatever you want
girls being drunk and beautiful
the art world infiltrates property
and time, at night
funny how it was only six years: fall 2012 to fall 2018 ~ that’s when the weird snapped in and took hold, rooted; now I can enjoy that it can’t and won’t be reversed
we write what sticks
they don’t really read your message when they see it is long
remembering my childhood is not enough, i must let/make another child live it for the first time, and they become the heroic rememberer ~ at 35 i am suspended between fatherhood and childhood
who owns listening? Spotify? do people offline have any power? no
becoming a better listener was the gift the years bestowed
telling Gary I’ve been writing out of necessity for five years now
now this is an interesting angle; remembering VaynerMedia, and again I’m in a coffee shop looking at cute girls—one has a codebase pulled up; I see reliable income, safety and protection for my imagining habit—the life of imagination; which composer was it? He had a wife who stopped composing, because a man who lives his life in imagination … (funny how the same story keeps coming back; was it Erin? That run-in at the restaurant on Lexington Ave.? New York; romantic lump of concrete—the difficult thing is surviving your imagination and memory, “taking a stand,” using the internet to decide what you want to try and believe; belief is a sticky wicket; we are imperfect but we must try, labor and condense, attempt and endure…being ignored, misunderstood, scrolled past in favor (oh, they don’t have affinity! Does it take all this digging to discover what matters, in the raw mire and muck of MY MIND! MY MIND!
// rediscovering this recorded meeting from 07.15.13 is something today 01.31.22 fermentation of the vintage seeing myself as a vintner it was only a matter of time and it’s musical cyclical
ten years ago is a long time; you get only a few decades in this life
now the world is obsessively building equity and brand; everyone hungers to be real, to defeat the demon of their obsolescence and irrelevance
Folks in the status professions (banking, law,..) often tell me they want to become an entrepreneur. I always tell them, you won’t do it. They attended the right school, joined the right firm, attained that corner office. As a founder they would give up all that, and their family and friends will tell them that they’ve made a massive mistake, for years, while it appears that nothing is happening.
Then they sheepishly admit that this is true.
As a bootstrapped founder when I was younger, even dating was awkward. People considered me to be quasi-unemployed, despite working 80 hours a week. It’s really hard to do if you’re thirsty for status.
take away the water, see what they are
how puling they become
14:20 “how do you get money to do what you love? you don’t” — yes, brilliant, the truth about web3 crypto NFTs etc. is the best teacher is doing without what you think you need and letting making the thing be enough energy and sustenance and nurturing to carry you through: it is an encounter with your shadow and demon, all the wrong reasons for doing the entrepreneur’s journey ~ also worth mentioning Kevin Kelly and his outstanding bits of unsolicited advice he’s published on his birthday over the years including this: friends are better than money. Anything money can do friends can do better. Ultimately what we want is to not be alone while doing the necessities of life: hanging gutters, for example: the dream of a home in the woods is about the community, helping each other, and money is just a way of speaking to each other ~ it isn’t evil; there is darkness in every heart, lots of hurt unaddressed and unrefined, that therapy and art and talking and getting older eventually cures. Wanting money to deal with your trauma is ultimately the illusion to awaken from: no one can support your me-search, you have to do it and find a way, and simply endure and survive without it being made easy for you from the outside, and with luck you’ll be spit up as a 35-year-old and be ready to really accept the lifelong surrender and apprenticeship of the long days and nights, every little act being part of the vision and the dream, and you become its representative and also its unbelievable, passionate barking dog at the center — the dog and its owner, the jester and its handler, until those magical others like editors, publishers and agents are welcome at your inner table, in the inner sanctum — but only when fame and success are seen as tiresome distractions and formalities, or like how the poet Ocean Vuong said it in an interview on The Creative Independent ~ fame, success and money are like public transit: you get on the bus, you get off at your destination, you don’t want to stay on the bus and certainly don’t want to be trapped there or live there. So one is ready for success when it means nothing and changes nothing, when it’s a foregone conclusion and doesn’t change the work ethic or the vision; when the student is ready, the student posts content and doesn’t need an audience to appear because he knows it will, because we are human, and the bad dream of being excluded was never real — you belonged and were succeeding the whole time.
9:36 “the only way to succeed now is to be completely transparent, completely, everything is exposed, everything you do” — this idea was influential to me; shame and fear are the things to run into the center of and open up; the glory of the human soul is the ultimate alchemy and work of art. Memory is a deep hatch, a deep chasm and crevasse, and one must become a spelunker, an archaeologist of one’s own hangups; eventually one must get in tune with death, for every tick of the clock reminds us of impermanence and infinity; perhaps my or one’s legacy (see how the creative artist insists the personal and universal are one? a life is an R&D lab where ‘being human’ can take root and shape) is to be a good shepherd of the passage of time ~ culture is ‘what to do when’, as Brian Chesky of Airbnb said: culture is simply a shared way of doing things with passion. So who orders it? Who leads? Who is the patriarch? The deeper I go into my art and voice, the harder and more bristling it is to read other men, for I know intuitively and immediately they are just making it up, too ~ they are cosplaying as a leader worth following; I may have given up on that kind of loud leadership — poetry and philosophy are different kinds of callings…the philosopher is the furthest away from the tribe with the widest possible perspective. I like that I fly under the radar like you did too ~ in your “rant from the hip, head and heart” which inspired me to come to New York and work for your agency, you explain and admit to being a little low-key and off the radar, not doing as many talks and TV appearances, operating. I love how I have disappeared from the social media game yet have been consistently putting out authentic content ~ truly, bleeding and breathing my life into content and the performance I do online for the handful of people who have been with me for years…
4:48 “your great-great-great grandchildren are gonna watch and see everything you’ve ever done” — maybe, if they care; if they have the patience (did I have the patience? Would I obsessively explore that trove of data if it was there? every single move he made, even if he was a surgeon? Eventually it’s revealed he was ordinary, as we all are: following the rules, … his life would be an expression of what was in the medical textbook; though my grandfather did something you’d appreciate — he took care of the enemy against Mussolini’s wishes — he was a spiritual badass, a visionary, a man whose life informed my mother’s words for me: she explained the difference between a calling and a job ~ ‘found fathers’ has been a theme of my writing and you have been a found father to me ~ I rediscovered this talk today because I rediscovered some voice notes from my time at VaynerMedia, including a chat we had where you told me about this talk and when you got home, you had four major publishers asking if you’d write a book. Here I am again, in New York; I came here in 2013 for a job with you, now it’s 2022 and I stuck with writing and here I am in a 1BR on the Upper West Side with all the time in the world for my passion to unfold in real-time and like your discipline Nick Diodato, I am excited to share every little sliver of the process with anyone who wants to listen ~ that’s gratitude, that’s generosity; I have no fears about fame and not being seen enough; witnessing myself is enough; I have become my audience, and any great and original writer must indeed create the taste by which she is relished by being the living example of one who appreciates her; I become the public I want and need to form around me. Sincerely, Geoff Lewis, 1/31/22, former Community Manager, Contributing Photographer and Micro-Content Producer, link in bio and LinkedIn be proof!
