Random Thought

How the act of calling a phrase that is a poorly put together stand in for an original thought a "Ready Made" has now itself become a ready made.

Develop Quirky Writing Habits.

So I am in the really awesome/lucky/blessed position to be teaching three different writing workshops in the next week - 1 book festival and 2 different colleges.  This makes me think I should resharpen those 'ol talking about writing abilities. If I was asked how to become a good/better writer, my gut reaction would be to say "Develop Quirky Writing Habits."  You can borrow some of mine, but really I think developing your own is more fun/sustainable/useful for a continued growing journey as a writer.  Enough blab, here's some of my favorite past and present quirky writing habits in loosely chronological order of development.

Write for Fun.
In 1st grade we had the "blizzard of '96."  My most concrete memory, even more than the giant snow hill the plows had created in our culdesac, was sitting at the kitchen table and drawing the snow.  Specifically, pictures that told stories that hadn't really happened.  I remember asking my parents how to spell a word or two and saying that "for now I'm drawing it" but I'll use words once I know how.  That's how writing stayed for me.  It was something I could do for fun.  Like all my other toys and games, often that I made from random stuff I could find, it was a way to create and explore.  Maybe that's why those two verbs drive my writing now.

If You're Writing in a Notebook, People Assume You're Taking Notes.
This is what got me through junior high.  Bored.  Angsty.  Fidgetty.  Seeking outlets.  Classes rarely challenged me, so I paid as much attention as I needed to and then would write songs and comics.  This habit became more or less not applicable after high school.  However, it taught me the calming, centering effect of writing.  It taught me the importance of doing something because you want to.  Find your way, yuh know?

Writing is Never a Procrastination.
In college there is the work you have to do and the work you want to do.  So far it seems that the first got me my grades and the latter got me to become who I am.  Sometimes the two overlapped or didn't fall neatly into those categories, but largely that was the case.

Write Everyday.
Sometime I'm following this.  Sometime I'm not.  When I do follow it I find that I'm more comfortable following where an idea might go, not stressing out about getting it right, and that my range is a little wider.  When I stop following it is when I feel everything is schlock, writing feels like a chore, and I have no time to edit or think differently about something.  Let's abridge this.  Do something fun, new, and creative everyday.  I think this is why I got back into doodling and cooking more and more since college.

Notebooks are Fun.
They are!  A bunch of writings from a time period stay together.  It feels more organic to write by hand.  While computers allow me to search by titles, especially while early on in the writing phase it is more useful to remember when I wrote something.  Also, I will look through a notebook for poems I forgot writing/didn't finish, but pretty much never look through documents that are unfamiliar.  Also, different notebook layouts encourage different writing techniques.  My latest is nearly square shaped, leading towards usage of the right side as more marginal notes/doodles, but also willingness to have longer lines again.  And there's the excitement of finishing a notebook and writing a poem in a new one.

Carry a Bunch of Pens on You.
Think I've mentioned this one before, haha.  In about 1 in 4 posts.  This is my current reigning writer quirk, but I know the rest are still with me in different ways.


Find your quirks!
-Jason

It's not that Republicans don't like art...

Okay.  So some limited data to make an intuitive claim, but I'm going to go for it.  I think the Republican Party, as institution, mindset, and abstract concept, is not so much against art as against art that can't be quantified or that is perceived as going against right wing values. 

First, let me preface this with a slideshow of specifics I have in mind

• The NEA 4, how because 3 of the 4 artists were queer and dealt with that in their performance art, the Republicans battled to revoke and stop the already awarded funding and how this was a battle over culture, not artistic merits.
• This year's Republican National Convention performance art monologue with a chair by Charlton Heston (I mean Clint Eastwood, but hearing this I keep imagining Charlton Heston in a mash up of NRA conventions and the moment in the Planet of the Apes where you realize "F**k, this is actually our world")
• The use of spectacle and artistic tools by evangelists.
• Bil O'Reilly, or maybe Rush Limbaugh or someone else of that genre (Republican "news" performance art) interviewing/bragging about a painter.  The specific painter's work depicts Obama as either trampling the constitution while others watch or being some other form of appocolpytic/anti-constitution/anti-christ.  Said pundit, and this is the part I can paraphrase most clearly, exclaimed "I have never had art speak to me like this did!"
• How many Republicans want(ed) to use Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" without realizing it is an anti-war song.
• Romney planning to eliminate nearly all arts funding if elected.

Okay.  That ended up as a longer list than I had planned on and I'm trying to get away from this blog being short essays and bring it back to the paragraph form, but well... we'll see what happens.   My thesis is this: the history of the Republican anti-art movement is caused by a) not understanding art OR b) not liking the perceived messages.

On Not Understanding Art

If the current Republican Presidential candidate can be seen as a representative of the party, if for no other reason than based on the fact that he is their candidate for the highest office in the nation, the Republican mind is run by the rules of business.  Specifically, profits-first-things-only-matter-if-directly-related-to-money-business.  In that world, how can you understand or appreciate art that is no blatant?  What is the need for art that captures an emotion, provides a feeling of shelter, or explores a beauty?  What is the need for art that challenges or shows hidden uglinesses? 

There has been much said about how art has been important since before the days of cave paintings to helping humans see/understand/explore/challenge/develop the world around them.  But to a mindset of bottom line and what is best now, what does that matter?

On Not Liking What is Understood

So when an art piece is understood, or at least certain things about it can be picked up on, chances are it will have a liberal leaning.  Chances are that leaning won't be appreciated by Republican policy makers.

The Awkward Moment when Street Evangelists Mistake Counter-Trolling for Sincere Interest, or, a Street Performance Art Critique

 So If you've ever hung out with me in a city, you know how much I enjoy talking to random strangers and getting distracted by anything that might be interesting and future writing/thinking/performing fodder. So you won't be surprised that walking through downtown Boston on a surprise day off, I couldn't resist watching a man doing what I will refer to as “performance art.”

The brief synopsis is a man was standing in front of a simple enough easel that had a poster broken into 4 quarters, each with an unfinished picture and some type of rebus puzzle (you've probably seen them before, click here for examples of this type of puzzle). Anyway, when I entered the circle around his performance, there was large painted letters across the top that said “Can you solve the riddle?” More details about the plot under “Loose Usage of Linear Narrative.” It was interactive, involved live painting, writing, discussion, the unraveling of a story, spectacle, props, costume, and at first glance looked like some form of guerrilla art.

What follows is a critique of it as performance art, and then some random quips at the end that I couldn't resist sharing.

Loose Usage of Linear Narrative

In a structure very similar to “Blues Clues,” the charismatic host wearing simple colors had a tone that was a mixture of teacher, big brother, and theatrical monologue. The title across the top of the painting introduced one big idea, overriding question (“Can You Solve the Riddle?”) and then the audience was taken through a set of smaller puzzles, that when their answers were all put together would answer the big question. This is the structure of every Blues Clues episode. Ever. The riddle became “What happened to Harvey?” The answer, which by the 4^th panel (when you had already become invested in finding out the puzzle regarding how he lived and died by the first three) was blatantly religious. The first three are a mixture of rebus puzzles and “guess-what-I'm-drawing” type puzzles. I had fun calling out the answers while the rest of the audience stared somewhat blankly. They were about how someone died pretty simply by falling off a boat into below 0 degrees water and dying. But then the final panel was about how before he died he had read his bible so he knew there would be “Life After Death,” (or as the rebus wrote it Death/Life) and was therefore not afraif. And then he proceeds to write sin in the middle of that as a barrier which he paints over in black and turns the black line into a cross on a hill. Cutting edge imagery, right? Still, his overall use of spectacle and ability to pull in the interest of people who were mainly walking from somewhere to another point or grabbing lunch was pretty strong. A big part of that stemmed from wrapping you up in the concept of a plot and a truth to be discovered that was hidden subtly in front of you.

Building Off Childhood Memories

Besides the “Blues Clues” like structure, a structure designed to be the most educational and useful for pre-school age children (read “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell for a chapter on this) it was circle time, it was painting in simple colors on an easel, it was interactive story telling to try and teach a moral/lesson, it was the joy of finding an answer to a question. He distilled many of the best parts of pre-school, the first form of education many Americans experience, into an eye catching street performance that made you stop and watch what you might otherwise avoid.

Usage of Found Space

If you've walked down Boylston Street, Boston, on a nice day, you are used to random people asking you for things: money for the homeless, donations for random charities, to read their pamphlet and save your immortal soul, etc. About halfway through watching, when my skeptic side overrode my watcher side, I noticed the performer had pamphlets tucked in a box at his feet, but until then he was presenting himself as the mixture of pre-school teacher, big brother, and monologist. By presenting himself as something to watch, like human statues, break dancers, and other Coney Islandesque types might, the apprehensiveness that an audience (i.e. people walking down the street) might have to pamphlet wielders was bypassed. He could sneak his message in by recontextualizing the delivery.

Usage of Color

The painting was big, bold and simple, with no crossing or mixing of colors. The use of only yellow, black, blue, red, yellow, and green, avoided showing colors that were mixtures and hard to define. Everything was simple and what you thought you saw once it was unraveled. The world visualized was one of precise and visible truths. His aesthetic rule was carried on into his outfit, as well as into the clothes of his young disciples (more on them later).

Audience participation

While elements of this have been discussed already, I feel it important to point out that this approach allowed for a welcoming environment, a sense of audience validation, and let a monologue appear to be a dialogue.

Built in audience

Ever go to a show with no one in the audience and the whole vibe is off? Of the maybe ten or so people already enthralled and involved when I got there, at least half were high school age followers of his. I know because whenever people left or walked by after the religious nature of his performance was clear, the teens would try and give them business sized cards to connect and spread the message that we are all sinners and must read our bibles daily.

Combination of Image, Text, and Spectacle

I don't think they could have worked alone. The image of the crowd and the paintings caught our eyes. The text relates to reading, the basis of the bible related message he was trying to pass on, and a way to catch random passersby up with what was happening, and it drove home certain points while giving the feeling of reading a story book. The spectacle made it seem like just another street artist initially and held our attention throughout.

And When Blatancy Ruins Art

If you're going to be blatant in an art without saying something new, what is the point? Besides the fact that passersby who had been giving interesting peeks switched to guffaws and eye rolls (rarely a desired audience response) it pushed others away. The charm, the childhood comfort that was invoked, the sense of a puzzle being explored, became the rehashing of a cliché and the pushing of an agenda.

Conclusion

Overall, it was effective at gaining interest, developing conversation, and catching people with their guards down. But then it became blatant cliché and agenda and all the fun/joy/puzzlement was ruined.

Quips, in Bullet Point Form! 

• The high school students who seemed to be just avid listeners but then turned out to be his helpers felt like a mixture of Manson family meets 90's girl scouts on tye-dye day.
• Really enjoyed counter trolling. Like I used to do in high school with recruiters, I built my responses to his questions around taking away attention, diluting/limiting the message. For example, when he was building up “sin” as this great barrier to eternal life and asked what it means, I replied “according to the old testament, missing the mark.” He responded yes and continued on, but I feel giving it that meaning made it seem less terrible and diluted his case.
• When showing the ten commandments (a sudden prop tucked away, and arguably a mixture of graven image and text) only showed the second tablet. Interestingly did not include the 2^nd commandment against making image.
•  As I was leaving one of the teens was very insistent on giving me the form.  Apparently she thought that because I was answering questions and involved in the conversation I was "hanging off every word of his message."  Nope.  Definitely just being inquisitive and trolling.  Sorry.

Tomorrow: The Alpha and the Megatron.

The battle between pen and keyboard: writing tools as influencing writing

One of the best things to happen during my senior thesis of trying to write a manuscript was the first time a computer died on me.  As such, I had to do my drafting and redrafting by hand.  (More info on how this effected my writing here.)

Writing by hand was much more organic.  It is more free.  While the final product will still be prepared to fit into a linear, textual form, the act of creation was not forced artificially to be tidy.  This practice of freedom and possibility opened up new ways of thinking and visualizing the text.  The constant possible distractions of the computer were voided.  There was a bond between creator and creation that was not cast through a vast network of layers.  What I put on the page was seen as coming from me, not a screen.

The early computers were basically giant calculators.  While capable of much more than that now, it is still a world of logics where everything can be written in mathematical codes.  The mathematical nature of computers implies an answer, implies conclusion, implies searching for what is right.  While at times complimentary to the brain that creates art, it is also contradictory.

One of the shifts in my writing since switching from primarily working on computer to primarily working on paper is that I no longer try and find "good" endings.  Things don't have to wrap up.  Some of the best endings to art are the ones that leave you hanging in that world, that give you just enough.  While the mathematical world of the computer suggests one to seek an answer,* one of the many purposes of art is to ask the questions that will lead to continual discovery.  When writing by computer I felt poems needed to build, needed to change, needed to reach some new idea or point.  Now I know they can.  They can also stop in one space and stare into all its hallways.  They can show what all the 99 eyes of Rumor are seeing instead of trying to tell who Rumor is, where it is, where it is going, what will happen, and why that matters.  They can also just be in a moment and a place.

Today, for the first time in a long while I tried to write by computer because I was reimagining a very performance heavy older poem of mine as a prayer that would work just as well on the page.  Really, I just had to slim the first stanza that it is a mixture of a more regular stanza and stage banter and help it transition into the now recontextualized second stanza that I've had memorized for several years.  And then using the computer resulted in getting distracted and preventing myself from thinking into deeper imagery and being too caught up on trying too find a "right" transition that I didn't just brainstorm a bunch of possibilities and see what felt right.  That's when I decided to put that poem down for a while and right this.

Long live the pen and paper.  Long live not trying to find the road to follow, but exploring the paths that you didn't know could be made.

Naturally,
Jason



* That's one of the many reasons why we have search engines like www.ask.com which tries to answer your questions, or www.bing.com which advertises deciding for you, isn't it?

Note: (As mentioned in recent passages, currently reading "The Alphabet vs. The Goddess," and while I had planned to write something on this topic, I do want to credit the book with heightening my thinking around how our communication methods effect what we communicate.)

Why I haven't written that vegetarian poem

So today* marks the ten year anniversary of me going vegetarian.  Big part of my life that I never have tried to write about.  Or have I?  While I don't think I'll ever write a "go vegetarian" or "save the animals" poem, I think a lot of the same values that have lead to me going and staying vegetarian have also lead to some of what shapes my art.  The summary of what lead me to turn vegetarian when I was thirteen, and what makes me stay the course ten years later, is "it's no longer necessary to kill for survival, so why do it, when we can get all our nutrients and protein through healthier forms that are better for the environment, shared with a belief that all life is valuable."  By looking back at my motivation and not its manifestation, I see that motivation has continued to inspire my thought processes as they develop in art. 

The two biggest examples were my creative writing and theatre theses from senior year.  The Creative writing thesis focussed on using poetry to explore themes of monstrousness with hopes to humanize.  In them, King Kong is a slaughtered would be lover and a cow fears for the life of her son, wishing him to be inspired by the human gouging bulls of Pamplona.  While those are probably the two closest to the "vegetarian poem" in the manuscript, this continued sense of "all life is valuable" inspires the treatment of the humanity in the 'monsters' and the monstrous sides of 'humanity.'  In the theatre thesis I explored the myth of Prometheus, the godlike Titan of Greek mythology who in effect gave his life to care for and save humans, even if they were a helpless life form in comparison.  Interesting how the more we change, the more we stay the same.

To life, L'Chayim!
Jason

* by the time of this posting, yesterday June 21, 2012

The Irony of Limited Jobs for Creative Writing, or, the post formerly known as: I Could Use a New Job in a Month

This blog was going to start as a babble of some sorts on trying to look for a job that allows me time/space/energy to write and is enjoyable enough in and of itself.  Then I continued reading a really great book today, the Alphabet vs. The Goddess, and it got me thinking.  It's known that it's almost impossible to find a job if you're a creative writer that you can actually make money off of.  Being a writer in modern Western culture is more a respected/rarely understood lifestyle that sometimes makes money than a job.  However, money as we know it would not exist without the writing of stories.
The first stories written in an alphabet (defined as 30 letters or less and each letter represents a sound, not a word or image) are myths.  The Illiad and the Torah.  Both set precedence for how a culture works.  What was written as well as the existence of an alphabet lead to the belief in abstract thought.  While the basis of hunter gather societies, cave painters, and writers of image based languages was in the concrete, the very existence of an alphabet meant that letters were stand alone parts that could create any word, thus any phrase, sentence, meaning, imaginable possibility.

In a concrete, image based world, barter makes sense.  I want chickens.  You want a vase.  Let's exchange.  Then as text is developed, the idea of symbols that do not directly correlate to what they represent rises, and the shift is from gold (again, an item given value by a culture believing in abstract thought) to different units of money that for what they were alone were worthless, but were seen as representing gold and therefore value.  This is an abridged version of a lot of things discussed in that book, and of the history of money.  In other words, believing in letters and an alphabet permitted hte belief in money.

However, whenever a text based culture and a non text based culture met, it was almost without fail that no matter the outcome, the textual language would live on, and the ones who wielded written word in a culture would become dominant (i.e. the Brahmin priest rise over the warrior caste in India).  Text continued to dominate the world as a means of communication or as a way of ruling the ones who didn't have it.  (Still true if you look at the correlation of literacy and job rates.) The usage of writing, a tool initially used to cement/record stories, not only created the possibility of money but continues to control who has the money.

In conclusion, money, arguably a form of myth, would not exist without writers who told stories through poetry.  I'm a nice Jewish boy who is hugely into Greek Mythology and writes narrative poems.  Anyone wanna pay me for a job that helps my writing and call it even?

Not-Quite-Starving-Artistly-Yours,
Jason