Continued from an earlier post: Creative Positive (Part Two)

I continue to remind myself that, as a creative, refraining from posting positive things into social spaces not only is a kind of self-censorship but it leaves gaps that are quickly filled by negative things.

I was more active online in the weeks leading up to the unity referendum that happened here in Alberta, Canada in October.  It was not necessarily about joining into the fray and shouting partisan slogans or reposting dubious information.  I did my share to “get out the vote” and sent numerous reminders to friends and offers of free babysitting (which no one took me up on) but mostly I just posted non-political stuff.

I kept sending links to my running website.

I took dozens of autumn photos and shared them everywhere.

I fired up the frequency of my back posting from this and the other writing project I’m doing about algorithms and technology topics.

I shared positive thoughts and whimsical aphorisms about all sorts of things that popped into my head.

And I just tried to fill the space: not necessarily to interfere with the conversation, but because that’s my role. My job, unpaid and often thankless, is to clutter up your social media feed with the mundane. It is to drop art into your apps, pack your photo scrolling with pics from nature, and remind you that real life is bigger than political bullshit, that it continues even when the mouths of politicians stop aren’t flapping and hucksters of every stripe aren’t trying to needle a bit more power.

Rare moments, but they exist. They need to exist. They need to continue to exist.

Despite the evidence to contrary, life is bigger than all that.

Art. Thought. Story. Music. Colour. Trails. Sunsets. All of it must keep going no matter what. When they stop, when we stop being creative positive, then the negative wins and what is there left worth fighting for.

Plonk right in backish-middle of my topic list I need to surface a challenge that defines much of my creative existence. I am certainly not alone in feeling this way, but it really is the problem of being in the middle of nowhere.

I have a small, loyal audience of friends who seem to enjoy what I make, and for many people who make stuff that would be enough: the ability to share your art with the people you love, the practice of writing for close confidants, or performing for local enthusiasts who smile when you play or act or sing… it is all right.

But nearly every artist would be lying to you if they were to say they don’t feel the indifference of the larger world with every note, every keystroke, every bit of ink scratched onto the page.

Creativity, after all, is an expression of who we are and part of me—as I suspect a part of many who create anything worthy of the thought—crave to express that to a bigger world, to bridge across culture and politics, to link arms right through language barriers, and to muddle our souls with humans living in nowheres on the far other side of the planet.

Being from nowhere forces one to look across the gaps of heart and hands and ask how we can bridge that gap and cure the indifference.

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

Branched · Part Two Continued in Creative Positive (Part Three)

Continued from an earlier post: Creative Positive (Part One)

I need to routinely remind myself that every time I don’t post something positive in my feed it leaves a gap for something negative to slip in and take up the space I left for it.

The darkness is insidious. It is sweet like raw sugar upon the tongue, lighting up our emotions with an ability to draw us in and feast upon our time and energy.

You may be reading these words—all of them, the project and every post and every image and all the adjacent works of public performative creativity that goes on around it—and pondering the purpose. 

I have a hundred reasons to write and create and sketch and make and build and do interesting things. But I have a very short list of reasons to share: it is, yes, about money and brand and fame, of course it is, it always is—but it is also about balance. It’s about holding my little patch of digital ground against the darkness. 

It is about creating human-made ideas and sharing them into the ocean of slop.

It is about being a net-positive in an electronic sea of rage.

It is about finding the good of the world and launching it back into the universe for something bigger than myself.

So long as I have hope that the world still needs something bigger and brighter than the dim shadows of this societal chasm we seem to be traversing I will get up each morning and try my best to find something positive to make …and share.

Ugh. One of those, huh?

My excuse is such: in early February I embraced a few big ideas that manifested as a spoken audio project, which very much looks and acts like a podcast at the moment.

Big ideas, you ask?

First, I have been playing with sound, music, recording, and an array of other tools and toys that are burning a hole in my soul looking for a purpose. 

Second, I looked at the conformity of what I should be doing and making as a so-called commercially viable product and said to hell with that, I just want to make what I want to make.

Third, I realized, and you may have seen me write about this a few times already, that stepping away from posting and participating doesn’t make the terrible stuff go away, it just leaves a gap that is destined to be filled with political, vapid, or algorithmic slop.

In other words, I was motivated to step up and start making more, posting more, and participating, but in a way that suited me. The result so far has been me dabbling in a new podcast-like project, and likely one that will not sound like nor look like the hundred other podcasts in your feed. 

…or, so I hope.

Big ideas, small project, and a vast shift towards a new perspective… and if nothing else, you can listen to me now, too.

See, when I was in my teens and twenties I listened to a lot of punk and metal from the 80s and 90s. And I remember finding it odd that most music from these genres still usually followed the rules of popular commercial music design. 

I get it. Musical structure. Chord progression. Hundreds of years of music theory, blah, blah blah, but… think about it from the other perspective: these sounds and songs were supposed to be part of a finger-wagging, pearl-clutching anti-social revolution and a counter-culture apparently designed for angsty teens and rebellious youth to rage against the establishment.

But simultaneously they were entrenched deeply within that same establishment by the basic rule-following and formula-driven style of the music itself. 

There are certainly examples that don’t fit this observation, but from my viewpoint so much of it seemed to follow set standards: It was composed of phrases and verses, with lyrics, mixed into tracks of four to six minutes long that could be played on the radio. 

All of it—in the parlance of capitalism—written, recorded and packaged to be commercially viable.

And, sure, yeah, of course, no kidding, I get capitalism and working with the system and all that, too… but…

…but the real rebellion it seems was making something that was not for sale, and breaking the rules and standards that guide our creativity towards the end goal of becoming just another product that needs to move in lockstep with the rules, too.

There are no popups. There is no paywall. There are no subscriptions or memberships or signups. There are no requests for donations or me begging for money (and no, this is not one of them.) It is not an oversight or a bait-and-switch or a free trial until I get bigger and need revenue. 

It’s purposeful. It’s philosophical. Probably a little privileged, sure, but it’s what I believe is right for at least some of the work I make.

It’s not that I haven’t and don’t elsewhere dabble in trying to earn some side cash from my online projects. I’m not independently wealthy or above paying basic bills. Monetization was my mild obsession for a while, actually, to offset costs. But I can tell you the two big things that side-hustle culture doesn’t easily result in for me: cash flow and happiness.

We have been deceived into believing that everything we make, every word we write, every note we play, every photo we take, every art we create, and every word we utter should be part of a brand, a pitch, our creative time building to some kind of passive income fever dream of pretend financial freedom.

But it doesn’t always need to. Shouldn’t always need to.

And I should not need to explain that. I shouldn’t need to justify creating and sharing a thing like this site for the simple joy of it. I shouldn’t need to make an excuse for giving these words out for free because it makes me happy to write them, record them, and post them.

Making stuff for the sake of simply making it can be an important kind of intrinsic compensation, too.

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.

Branched · Part One Continued in Creative Positive (Part Two)

I need to routinely remind myself that every time I don’t post something positive in my feed it leaves a gap for something negative to slip in and take up the space I left for it.

Our feeds, all of them, are filled to the brim with algorithmically pushed trash.

Some of it is important. Some of if drives awareness of injustice and tragedy. Some of it sparks action and reaction. Some of it is vital to understanding the world, society and the universe.

But creatives have an important role to play too: positive balance. 

It is not our jobs to join the rage.

It is our job to balance it all out, to remind people that there is beauty in the world worth fighting for, and it is our job to maintain the flame of art and story and music and hope in a wasteland of anger and AI slop.

It is so easy as an artist to reject the darkness of these platforms and avoid them, and I have struggled myself, even recently, trying to understand my role there.

The way I see it? Our role is not to repost angry memes, or rant about authoritarian politics, or even rage against the machine. 

Rather, our role, the creative’s role, is to keep playing the music of humanity in all its forms and make sure when the dawn returns there is still a bit of our humanity left to remind us why we were fighting the darkness at all.

I get it. I really get it. No. I really do get it.

You just gotta push publish. You just gotta climb up on that stage and share your voice. You just gotta, gotta, gotta!

It’s February and as I publish this post I have no idea yet if the Groundhog has seen her shadow, but whatever the outcome I suspect I have a couple more months of weather too cold to be outside doing creative outdoor things like sketching or nature photo expeditions. (I mean I could and I will, it’s just uncomfortably chilly.) That is to say, I suspect I have a couple more months of indoor time to write words and play music and dabble in code before the allure of summer tempts me away from those projects.

I need to share something before the end of February. I gotta.

The turning of a calendar page can be a motivator to step over a threshold, to overcome a mental obstacle. Deadlines, are great motivators. 

Perhaps this one will serve to help step over the performance threshold. It oughta.