There's No Other Time in History Like Right Now

Patti Smith offers advice to artists:

Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned about doing good work. Protect your work and if you build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency. Life is like a roller coaster ride, it is never going to be perfect. It is going to have perfect moments and rough spots, but it’s all worth it.

It's a new technological age and we're all pioneers. No one knows where it's going and the internet media era is still in its infancy. It's a Brave New World, y'all.

See her speak the words herself.

Ono Optimism

All bad things are a mirror of your mind.

Everything has its reason to be here––prejudices, hatred, lies and violence––to maybe finally wake us up.

And artists, take special heed here––a little self-directed kindness may just be what you need to get you through whatever is blocking you:

Be kind once a day––even if it's just in your mind.


Experience is an artist's fuel. The more difficult the experience the higher the octane. Making art from pain allows for squeezing the diamonds out of the coal, coal that might otherwise burn into toxic clouds within. In that way, artmaking is green energy for the soul.

Yoko's extreme hope is especially interesting once you know her story. It's a story that makes experiencing her work as an artist all the more interesting. Lennon saw it immediately. Through artmaking we take ownership of our stories and keep the stories from owning us.

Diamonds, not coal: Try it. It works.

The above taken from Yoko's Twitter feed.

Joseph Campbell knows

If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.

Amen

A Laxitive for Writing Constipation

 I don't remember where I found this but thought it was worth repeating.

So, it's not just me.

Cartoon by Shannon Wheeler.

I Love Life

David Bowie from a television interview ca. 1973:

"Do you believe in God?"
"I believe in an energy form, I wouldn't put a––I wouldn't like to––put a name to it."
"Do you indulge in any form of worship?"
"Life. I love life very much indeed."

The (Sometimes Tedious) Committed Relationship

I saw this posted today: 

Love first. Sex second. 

I was thinking how apropos this statement could be for our artistic lives (as for our love lives, that's debatable). With art, sex (let's call it psychological sex, not physical) is the goal we often throw up before we even dedicate ourselves to doing the work. It's fighting the inglorious small battles––creating a sketch, a new character or few paragraphs, etc, etc, and none of it even having to be very good–– that requires the true love, and love is the battle weapon. To create for ourselves and not for the ages, that should be the primary directive. There's nothing erotic about that. Looking for sex too soon in the artistic relationship only leads to all kinds of grief––disappointment, resistance, and worst of all, surrender. 

In creating for ourselves, first and foremost, just getting the work is a success. All that other stuff is just ego propaganda. This is something I have to keep telling myself as I undertake projects that lead me farther out of my comfort zone. It's been said that life doesn't begin until you're outside of the comfort zone, but like any adventure, it can be a scary place to be. The natural tendency––well, mine anyway––is to stay snuggled in the comfort zone's cottony safety.

But back to the love and sex: Any long term relationship with the creative process is often going to feel, often, like a frigid lover. Something you're having to love more than it loves you. In my experience, comfort zone relationships with art will always prove to be utterly dysfunctional and toxic to creativity. The comfort zone is a botoxed and collagened mistress we're better off leaving to stand at the platform.

Besides, art isn't a mistress, really. It's more like a long suffering spouse. Be faithful to it and it'll be faithful to you, even if it's in ways you never expected.

Success, recognition, and money––the sex part––will have to wait. (The creative should learn to be intimate with waiting, you're going to be spending a lot of time together.) When and if the glory comes at last, then you can be as promiscuous as you want to be. 

But first: The hard work of love. 

More Portable Eno

What you need are fewer possibilities that are more interesting.... It's not more options that you want, it's more useful options. Brian Eno

Artist Be Aware

Comparison is an act of violence against the self. Iyanla Vanzant

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again. André Gide

Art and Dancing

The accompanying text with this vid was the predictable You've got to dance like there's nobody watching/Love like you'll never be hurt/Sing like there's nobody listening/And live like it's heaven on earth. Sure, that's all good too but I was thinking there was even a better metaphor in here for writing (or whatever your art):



You've got to write (or whatever) like it's your reason for living. Write like it's your celestial mandate. But most of all, write for yourself. The woman at the bus stop was likely on her way to her drudge job (judging by her attire) and yet somehow found a space in those last moments that were hers before boarding the bus to find herself in the music.

As I'm still recovering from the beat down of my last critique (which was justified, I'm afraid), it's easy to surrender to my disappointment (and pain) and take myself somewhere far away from it all. (Heaven knows I've done it before.) The impulse is to let myself go somewhere where there's no writing, where no part of myself is available for others to tear apart. But ultimately that kind of somewhere is nowhere, and nowhere only multiplies more nowhere.

The world already contains too many nowheres as it is.

Through art we find ourselves? Well, let's live like we do.

Crashing Eno

"In art, you can crash your plane and walk away from it" Brian Eno (https://twitter.com/dark_shark)

Artists and the End of Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude is pleasure derived from the misfortune of others, especially those we see as rivals. We feel it when a rival's book deal or gallery show gets drenched in flop sweat because artmaking is a jungle, right? There just aren't enough rewards to go around for everyone and fail-danger waits under every vine. It doesn't have to be. Why can't the success of others make the jungle floor more fertile for all of us, i.e. if we're willing to do the work? Resentment for other's achievement is an act of self-vandalism. It's leeches the precious energy we need to make our own work.

Nature isn't deathly competition but cooperation for the mutual benefit.

And taken a step farther––and at the risk of sounding like Seth Godin––once we understand we exist in cooperation and not as rivals, then maybe we can see our work as the gift it is and should be:

The question is not what can I get from the world, but what can I share with the world that's emerging.

In harsher academic terms:

If a society... strongly identifies with... achievement, resentments will be seen for what they are––the complaints of undisciplined failures...  

Achievers do not act out of a sense of guilt or obligation; they are driven onward by a sense of abundant, overflowing life. They create not merely because they desire to enjoy the fruits of their labor––which they do––but because of an inner fire urging them onward... Every achiever makes a contribution, large or small, to the continuation and advance of civilization. 

Robert Sheaffer

Your good art will do no less than advance civilization. How about that? So then, what're you waiting for? Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. (Picasso––easy for him to say, huh?) Don't go to bed until you've written a paragraph or drawn a sketch or made some music, crafted or concepted, etc, for the world needs you.

The opposite of schadenfreude is mitgefühl. Practice more mindful mitgefühl.

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of working.

John Cleese has some ideas on what we can do to create our best work. We should listen.

You Got to Work

Work ethic eliminates fear. Michael Jordan

Fripp & Eno

Brian Eno
You don't have to act as if you know what you're doing.

Just relax. You're always at the beginning of something and very often you're very close to success.

If your first move is brilliant, you're in trouble. You don't really know how to follow it; you're frightened of ruining it.

I really begin by allowing myself to make a mess, and then seeing if I can get out of it.

Robert Fripp
There are no mistakes, save one: The failure to learn from a mistake. 

When a musician [or writer or artist or...] believes that music [or writing or art or...] is a commodity, music [or writing or art or...] dies in them. 

Abraham Harold Maslow, he the crafter of the oft quoted line, If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. (He also went Jerry Lee Lewis on his first cousin and married her so he wasn't above being a bit creepy too.) He was also the one who came up with that whole hierarchy of needs/self-actualization pyramid you were forced to study in Psych 101.

He also wrote a number of things worth quoting and as someone who was preparing to follow a career into law to satisfy his parents' wishes and not his own he seemed to understand a thing or two about the challenges of the artist. Said he:

• If you deliberately set out to be less than you are capable, you’ll be unhappy for the rest of your life.

• It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

• A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.

• What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

• Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

Stolen in its entirety from the wonderful blog Writer's Write.

St. Leonard canonizes the writer in you

There is a certain power in his book that cannot be denied even though you try to deny it in every word. Deny it here. Am I less disgusting than you are? Am I happier? Near the beginning of the Bible I am told how to build the Altar. It is to be raised with unhewn stones. You are such a sad hewer of stones. And you are an amusing enemy. Especially when you discover for us all your standards of hewn stone. You may worship here. You can rip a heart out of this paragraph.

Leonard Cohen, The Altar

I can't know what Cohen was intending here but what it says to me is this: What if he's speaking to the part of himself that is the writer which may be separate from the part that may sometimes doubt that the writer even exists. When it does acknowledge the writer it may in turn fear the writing? What if he's saying that it's the writer part is the higher self and to deny it is a kind of blasphemy? It's the eye directed inside that never closes. It exists whether you believe in it or not. Instead of denying it you should build it an altar and worship there.

And the final line: You can rip a heart out of this paragraph. Do not call your day's labor of writing done until you there is a heart in each paragraph, a heart that can be ripped out but only by you. Your critique group can't touch it––don't let them. To them and everyone else who would deny you as a writer it is inviolable. Believe only the eye, and the voice, inside.

Remember: Inviolable.