8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: [23] Pomp & Popularity

Fitting in, standing out, standing up and the tension in the heart of every artist.

Chapter List

  • Pomp Popularity

    I always have an eye open for interesting unpolished creative stones when I’m wading through the streams of my social feeds.

    There is an urgency in many of us who make stuff to fit in. We work towards a certain grade of production quality. We make to fit into a mould of commercial viability. We try to stand out in a crowded field by following the so-called rules.

    It’s all so much water rushing past our feet.

    It’s the stranger things that capture my attention, the jagged, colourful rock stuck mostly in the muck of the riverbed, just poking out and catching the light in an interesting way, that snags my eye.

    I have explored this theme routinely on this project. There is a gentle conflict between the pursuit of high quality products that build one’s portfolio, represent one’s best work, and meet a threshold of acceptable value—and on the other side, transcend formula, represent something new and interesting, and break the mould.

    In the middle is a tension in the heart of many artists of any field. To ignore the rules completely is to be overlooked for failing to meet expectations, but then to become little more than a photocopier for ideas of others before us is to be shrugged off as uninteresting.

    We all want to be a polished stone. But someone needs to pluck us out of the river of obscurity before that happens. 

    Under the category of Pomp & Popularity I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Polka Truths

    If I was asked to cobble together a top ten list of my deepest and strangest creative influences, leaders of thought and individuality, curiosity and cleverness, people who have evoked the best from my introspective heart, near the very top of that list would surely be “Weird Al” Yankovic.

    My first interaction with the parody artist was when I bought “Dare to be Stupid”[1] on cassette tape while in grade school, the first album I ever bought with my own money, and I wore that darn thing out listening to it and memorizing every song.

    My latest interaction with the musician was just last week when I bought tickets to his touring show, one for me and one for my daughter, which is coming to my city later this year. It’ll be the first time in my forty years as a fan that I’ll see him perform live.

    And that’s the thing, isn’t it. Forty-plus years (nearly fifty, to be more precise) of making music and entertaining a loyal fanbase is nothing to shirk at, but it also represents a span of time lacking scandal or public outrage, all while being something completely unorthodox in time, space, music, and commercially-bankable content.

    And it all really occurred to me as I was walking this morning, having loaded a few classics onto the playlist of my phone: If there was ever a model upon which to look with awe and reverence for what it means to be a truly creative soul, how can we not count Mr. Yankovic as a paragon?

    Dare to be stupid, indeed.

    That’s the real truth some of us are looking for.

  • Monochrome Me

    A month into a photo project that is forcing me to post more black and white photography left me pondering an important question about the niche: what is so great about monochromatic images?

    I tried to wing this to the camera. I turned the camera on my own face (to practice some of that voice work on camera thing I’ve been doing) and attempted to talk about light and shadow and tonality and contrasting subjects, all of it in a meaningful way that didn’t make me sound like a tourist explaining that this thousand year old monument was neat-o, huh?

    It occurred to me half way through filming that while, yeah, I love the vibe of black and white photography, what has been captivating me about it as a photographer lately is that it is a kind of simple constraint.

    As I wander through my fourth decade of photographic hobbyism I find myself wrestling with a paradox: I could go buy more expensive equipment, travel to interesting places, and photograph amazing sights with pixel perfect clarity—like everyone else.

    Or I can find a voice of my own.

    I can try to stand out for my own style.

    Try to tell my own story.

    Try to to turn the camera into something more than a photocopier for the instagram top ten list of popular photo subjects and instead shape it into a mirror for me.

    And it isn’t (just) about the black and white.

    No.

    Rather, it’s about shaping the experience with the camera, locking in the effort to a set theme, or sticking with a single lens for a span of time, or putting the camera into monochrome mode and… and… AND… finding constraints that challenge me to break out of the perfectionism trap.

  • Avant Garde

    For a strange week in April my algorithm feed was full of videos, commentary and analysis about a curious French-Canadian music duo called Angine de poitrine [1] who, it seems, have washed ashore upon the cultural zeitgeist.

    Perhaps it is merely that my endless wanderings through the musicians internet have biased my perception and have only just momentarily shone a light on this thing and I am, as usual, a few steps behind in noticing. And certainly, I am in no good position to comment with meaning on the music itself, a microtonal eruption that has been described by others as noise, dissonance, or unlistenable. 

    I quite like it—and I bought an album and added it to my everyday playlist. I’m listening to it as I write this, in fact…

    Which is all for me to say that what I may be more qualified to comment on is the creative leap that such experimental projects embody. Angine de poitrine is the doing of something that I have merely being writing and thinking about: bending the rules, creating something unique, and experimenting outside of the traditional definition of marketable, sellable, commercial art.

    Succeeding, to boot.

    And while I’ll caveat that some of that aforementioned commentary I’ve seen on the duo has (unfairly, I think) framed the effort as merely a weird marketing gimmick, I would argue that such accusations miss the point entirely: that there is a tension in the heart of every true artist, trying to stand out and do something novel while simultaneously fitting in just enough to survive in a world that values standardization and commercial viability.

    Occasionally someone figures out that balance and it is a glorious cacophony.

  • Routine Reminder

    Make something.

    Just make the damn thing and post it.

    Share it.

    Push it out into the universe.

    Will people judge it, love it, hate it, mock it, share it? With they laugh, cry, ignore, overlook, steal, copy, complain, and all too often respond in a hundred other unpredictable ways? Yeah. Of course they will. Heck, humans are messy and there is always someone out there who will make you question your very participation, let alone the product itself.

    But look what is out there already. Everything! Unabashedly shared, no matter the quality or purpose. And worse:

    Are influencers asking your permission to post to your feeds?

    Are politicians asking for your blessing to push propaganda?

    Are companies asking if its okay if they inundate you with advertising?

    Of course not! No one else is asking, are they? They are making and flooding and just filling every space with their products.

    Meanwhile, you are sitting there wondering if you are good enough, or if that thing that you put your whole soul into will be well-received—or if maybe you will just be laughed at by some random loser in his mom’s basement (who by the way, mocks and laughs at everything because he is incapable of making anything but mockery). 

    So make something. Make it great. Make it how you want. Just make and share and participate in this great creative experiment, and maybe we’ll collectively overwhelm the world with beauty and hope and curiosity instead of all those other things.