Goal Update 002

Progress has been slow.  Like Matthew Perry, I have succumbed to a ravaging Fallout 3 addiction long after I thought I was done with the game.  Thanks, Cormac McCarthy, you jerk, with your words and stuff makin’ me start playing video games.  Something has to change.  Like hiding the power cord of my PS3 in a very inconvenient place so that while I’ll obviously know where it is, I won’t be able to use it.  Luckily my apartment is filled with spaces like this so this may be the best plan.  If I can work up the mental fortitude to do so, that is.  More detail on goals and my shorts phobia inside:

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The 27 laws of Matthew

These are the 27 things I will do this year.  They’re all out of order, or in no particular order at all. They’re all priorities.  Some of them have been redacted for public consumption, but it’s still slightly embarrassing so I think I’m on the right track. And I think making them public makes it harder for me to renege on them.  It should make for a good year, I hope.  Goals after the jump.

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Non-Livejournal Diary Entry 001

1. It’s on now, Sterling.  Let’s see if you fare better than that sackless chump Rudy Rucker. Updates to come.

2. In other news, I’ve discovered video editing is a lot of fun and something I’ll be doing more of in the near future.  Hopefully with some results to post here.  After musical experiments have registered as failures on an exponential level it is nice to find something I can slide into easily, and hopefully I’ll be able to produce something cool.  That is what I have spent my time doing this past week.

3. That, and blowing people up in Team Fortress 2.  It’s fun – you should join in.

4. This week, however, promises to be more generally interesting with (2) concerts – Efterklang tuesday, Asobi Seksu wednesday, – (1) dentist appointment, (1) party to attend, and (1) special reunion meeting event.  I’m glad I have all this time to relax at work since the evenings are going to be pretty draining.

5. I thought of an excellent if perhaps disturbing and very depressing gift idea that depends on unhealthy obsession if not psychosis.  Best of all, it’s only $26.  But it would be a lot of work.  I think it might actually register as a piece of performative art, if I can get it to work right.  Which is a big If.

6. In other news, the sort-of-consensus on the economy seems to be that We Are Fucked, Dr. Jones.  I eagerly await updates on the status of said Fucked-ness while I augment my already healthy ration of survival supplies.

7. Additionally, apparently a gang of five men in dark clothes are breaking into people’s houses on the street behind mine.

8. To deter these thieves, I have considered erecting elaborate traps around my apartment – but further consideration of my cat’s daily activity schedule has led me to believe this may not be the wisest course of action.

Until next time.

Artists

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.