clickbait experiment

I have a confession to make. I did a little experiment with clickbait on my last post. I had a pretty catchy idea. The post didn't quite fulfill my vision of it, and to be honest I basically gave up on it rather than finishing it, but I went ahead and put up a catchy tweet and got more pageviews than I've ever gotten on this blog--which still isn't any staggeringly high number, but it sure was interesting. I'm sorry if the post itself disappointed. I started this blog as an experiment for a frustrated writer. That was 3-1/2 years ago and I'm even more frustrated now. I'm not happy with most of what I write. I'm working on that, though. Practicing. Trying to find a writer that I swear was once in me but has been lost under a flood of single-idea emails, status updates, and tweets. I used to pride myself on careful writing, even in semi-disposable emails, but those days are gone. For now. I'm trying to rebuild them. There's a long-play experiement going on in the back end of this blog which, if you're patient enough to stick around, you'll see in May 2014. In the meantime, thanks for participating.

art as money laundering

One of the great sources of an instant argument with my wife, Kathleen, is to bring up Henry Rollins' infamous Gap ad. It's a good-natured argument these days, but the crux of it is this: she says there's nothing less punk rock than a Gap ad, whereas I never heard Henry take a vow of poverty. I think we're both right, but it does bring up a serious question about how art is financed--a serious question I hadn't really thought about for a few years until Matt, a musician I met through Kathleen, mentioned the dreaded Gap ad as the way Henry launched his poetry and spoken word career, and thus A Good Thing. A few short days later I got into a conversation with Sam, a voice-over artist I worked with in Portland, about radio theatre. I have since learned Sam is a fellow lover of radio theatre and our recent conversation dealt specifically with whether there's any money in radio theatre. The short story is there isn't, but it brings up the same question. It turns out there are a lot of people who really get into producing radio theatre, but "most [of them] these days use it as an outlet for creative work when doing the commercial/corporate thing gets to be a drag."

Bingo. That's when the image of art as money laundering landed, fully formed, in my brain. Commercial/corporate money is perceived by artists as dirty, hence my wife hating Henry for hawking sweatshop jeans. Unless you do take a vow of poverty, though, it's hard to avoid that money and still, you know, pay bills and eat and stuff. So when an artist makes enough "dirty" money that they have a little extra, they use it to cleanse their souls by financing their "pure" artistic endeavors.

That, of course, brings up all sorts of age-old questions about why our society doesn't value art enough to make it a financial viable career in-and-of-itself for more artists. And I'm just as guilty as anyone else--I never bought Henry's poetry book, but I have shopped at The Gap.

to write

This is a self-indulgent blog post. I just want to write. I'm not sure what I want to write, just that I do. Of course, when I think about it, any post I put on this blog is self-indulgent anyway. Writing can be a very self-indulgent thing, can't it? Especially when the writer doesn't have an established audience. And art in general can be very self-indulgent. In fact, some would argue that great art is self-indulgent because it's done for art's sake, not catered to any particular audience. Trent Reznor said words to that effect on an interview I heard last night.

Art. Now there's a big topic. Maybe too big.

because the written word needs my help

Alright, the title is intended with irony. I kind of thought in my head I would title this post "in defense of the written word," but when I came to type it in, it just seemed hopelessly pretentious, especially since I don't really pretend to have any original thoughts here, hence the ironic title instead.

Anyway, here's what happened to inspire this little missive. I was serving jury duty last week and, like many prospective jurors, brought a book because if you only know one thing about jury duty, it's that you're going to sit around for a good chunk of at least one day so you might as well bring something to read. Or at least, that's what people in my generation know about jury duty. That was before smart phones. I read most of one chapter (a chapter which I still haven't finished), but that was only after I'd spent a good hour, maybe more, on Twitter and Google News--mostly catching up on what I'd missed by not watching the Golden Globes Awards the night before--and at least half as long checking email and texting. It's not as though I thought at the time this was a horrible waste of time, either, and couldn't wait to get to my book. In fact, I even tweeted to that effect:

Last time I had jury duty, I didn't have internet access with me. This way is better, even if I never get around to the book I brought.
— KingTor (@KingTor) January 14, 2013

That wasn't my first tweet of the morning and there were 5 more before I even thought seriously about the book. And that's when I got to thinking about it. It was pretty obvious to me that the time I spent online was less rewarding than the time I spent reading my book, and yet I still chose willfully to tweet instead of read.

And here's the sad thing: I'm not the only one who lost out in that experience. There's a whole society built around the written word, and we humans have been building that society for literally thousands of years. Well, maybe the time before the printing press is different enough that it should be counted as a separate era of society, so say hundreds of years. No matter, it's been going on for awhile. I'm not really worried about ebooks destroying that society, although I've never really read an ebook, so maybe I will be worried about that some day. But not that day. On that day, I started wondering how much reading was lost to "smart" phones every day, and started wondering about the cumulative effect on society--not so much on the publishing business as on the collective knowledge we possess, and our collective capacity for literary truth/beauty.

So I don't know if I'm going to do anything differently because of this mini-epiphany. I'd like to say I will, but it's pretty telling that I still haven't even finished the chapter I started that day, a full week ago, and I only had 2 short paragraphs left.

the mockingbird

I can't quote it from memory, but Tom Robbins refers to the mockingbird as nature's first artist--I think it was in Skinny Legs and All. That's the one with the spoon and the dirty sock and the RV shaped like a giant turkey leg, right? No matter, I got to thinking about the mockingbird earlier tonight when I was thinking about professional chefs--the high end chefs who many consider to be artists. I suspect most of them cook to their own palate because how can you cook to anything else? To translate that to my own experience as an artist (if I really am an artist... but that's a topic for another blog), I have things which I find pleasant to my ear, certain styles and sounds which resonate deeply with me. Sure, I feel more comfortable when I'm working within those sounds, but I really stretch my legs and grow when I step out of that comfort zone and do something different. One of the best ways for me to do that is to imitate someone else; take someone else's style and apply it (to the best of my ability) to the work I'm doing today; be a mockingbird.

Driving me where?

Perhaps this is a case of expectations being too high, because I've been hearing nothing but glowing "you must see" reviews and recommendations for the movie Drive since before it came out and only ended up seeing it the other day. It's hard for any movie to live up to that lengthy a period of increased expectations, and I'm sad to say this one did not succeed completely. I did appreciate the movie very much: the acting is brilliant (Bryan Cranston and his relationship with Albert Brooks struck me as particularly great), the editing was great, the music weird and moody in a perfect kind of way, the sound design and mix downright brilliant--especially in the things we didn't hear and the use of silence. I just couldn't figure out why. In the end, it seemed to me to be a waste of impeccable production values, because the story didn't stand out in any way as being worthy of the polished effort of those involved.

art is a depiction of the gods within us

That title came to me as I was driving this morning. Art shows us god(s) and godly things. It's not always pretty--after all, if you believe the universe was created by some god, you probably believe the same god created the ugly things as well as the beautiful ones. This simple truth about art is why I feel so blessed to work in a creative field and to be able to create art (on the good days) and collaborate with some truly inspirational artists--Kat, Scott, Brooke, Dave, Stuart, Justin, so many others.... I get to spend a lot of my days viewing the divine, both as it exists within me and as others see it. What a treat.