Most people do. So I got this for you (Victoria got this for you):
WPA Posters of the Depression (a flickr set):
Posters created by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression and World War II
Also, Victoria points me to this awesome book. Thank your auntie V, kids.
Upon finishing The Physiognomy, I was suddenly filled with an unexpected and unshakeable need to re-read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I immediately called the Borders on Ponce and checked to see if they had it in stock, and then drove there while listening to this song (World’s End Girlfriend – Satan Veludo Children). I arrived exactly four minutes and twenty seconds after I left—coincidentally where a lull appears in the song after an early crescendo—and walked inside to find my book.
After picking it up I decided to meander around, and I happened to stumble into a collection of Borges’ fiction, misfiled far away from its alphabetical port of call. I’ve never read Borges but have always wanted to, and accidentally finding it amid thousands of other books seemed like way Borges was meant to be discovered. So I purchased The Book of Imaginary Beings too. It seems to me like they should make a pretty good couple, at least in theory.
Then I glanced at the magazines and picked up the latest issue of Hi-Fructose, where I flipped open to an article on the art of Thomas Doyle. Doyle’s work felt like something out of a Kelly Link story or Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves:
See what I mean? It’s incredible stuff. Check out his site here (I’m linking it twice so you’ll actually go.)
Then I drove home through a sea of green lights, picking up where I left off in the song, and arrived home exactly four minutes and twenty seconds later, which is again, coincidentally, exactly the point at which the song ends.
Life is strange, sometimes, in its symmetry.
A great, long-form interview with Alan Moore in Wired, definitely worth a lunchtime read:
At the time I thought that a book like Watchmen would perhaps unlock a lot of potential creativity, that perhaps other writers and artists in the industry would see it and would think, “This is great, this shows what comics can do. We can now take our own ideas and thanks to the success of Watchmen we’ll have a better chance of editors giving us a shot at them.” I was hoping naively for a great rash of individual comic books that were exploring different storytelling ideas and trying to break new ground.
That isn’t really what happened. Instead it seemed that the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about 20 years of very grim and often pretentious stories that seemed to be unable to get around the massive psychological stumbling block that Watchmen had turned out to be, although that had never been my intention with the work.
(via Casual Optimist)
It’s about that time in my life when I look around and see that people of my generation are finally becoming the artists that will shape the landscape of this country, and of this world. People that I have known, been close to, to varying degrees; others that I’ve never met and never will. These people, all of them, are artists. And it inspires a strange and cruel mixture of jealousy and inspiration, the simultaneous imperative to join the ranks and create and also the knowledge that I’m already too behind to catch up to where these people are. Many of them already know what it is that they want to do. Some of them have always known. There’s something incriminating even in contemplating that – you already feel like you’re letting yourself down simply by not living up to the standards set by other people. This is why I feel driven to create, but I’m lost as to what direction I actually want to pursue. I want to experiment with music – electronic music, since as a kid I never had an interest in learning a single musical instrument besides the recorder, and even that was kind of a struggle; I want to learn how to produce great motion and 3d graphics and work on developing content – for games, movies, more?; I want to write, which is why I started this blog – but about what, again, I am unclear, as I am sure is obvious if you’ve been reading along.
The trouble with creation is that without motivation, you quickly come to a standstill. And I think that ties into the general problem of being an artist: your artistic motivation becomes your singular reason to live. Your art becomes your life. Without it, you wither and die – it is that integral to your personality. This is, of course, descriptive only of a certain kind of artistic personality – the one who goes “all the way,” so to speak, and necessarily must do so at the cost of those around them. Artists share in common with all creative people a general desire to make things better, so I doubt it is ever their intent to hurt those in their path. But inevitably the debt the ‘true’ artist owes is to him or herself, and so regardless of the distractions it always comes back to the self in the end.
This is what makes me nervous – this tension between art and life. Because they mirror each other, but you can’t commit to both. So the creative person, uh, me in this case, eventually has to make a decision between pursuing art, hardcore, at the cost of meaningful, intimate future personal relationships (that’s a lot of qualifiers, isn’t it?), and doing it half-assed, because I’d like to create, you know, but it’s not the most important thing in life. The second way is the destiny of the majority of artists, I think, and they don’t last too long because they find themselves in the middle of something that eventually becomes more important to them than their vision, which was probably hazily defined to begin with. They create, they retire, and if they’re lucky they have no regrets. I wonder how many are that lucky.
Of course this is pretty optimistic in my case – I think, pragmatically, that I will never be a ‘true’ artist (feel free to debate me on the legitimacy of this distinction I’m drawing), because if I was to be one I would have found motivation by now. But I’m not particularly upset by this – I think in the grand scheme of things developing and maintaining meaningful relationships is the metric by which we are measured. I’m sure this is biased toward the experience of an extrovert, so take it with a grain of salt. This is why I also feel a pang of regret when I consider being an artist – I know that it’s a dream, never to be enacted. Of course, I also know the unfortunate flip side of that commitment, so the sighs retire as quickly as they come.
So it goes.
Edit: Of course there are a great deal of artists who negotiate their creative work with the demands of meaningful personal relationships, and I don’t mean to belittle their work. But I do think it’s a zero sum equation, and you get out what you put in. A recent Zadie Smith essay (which is awesome, by the way, and worthy of its own post) in the New York Review of Books opened my eyes to the fallacy of the ‘additive personality’, which I’ll explain in another entry soon. But basically: you make choices in life, and they define you. That’s the whole point.
