Do It.
So, I dunno-I mean, if someone were to ask me what I do…it wouldn’t be like I’d be rattling off about my profession. If you could even call it a profession. I mean, I work at a restaurant to make money so I can pay bills and support my family. But that’s not what I do. I may do it to make a living, but the other stuff…I mean, I cook, I write books and bloggage, I photograph stuff, I make music-all that shit is what I really do. All the stuff that makes me feel like a secretly important man, even if I’m really just another Notheastern Pennsylvania hayna with a blog and a camera and fucked up stories to tell.
I just place more weight in avocations than outright vocations. Because, there’s like a point when you do stuff out of a love for doing it and it’s more important than money to you. Even, like in my case, if you don’t do it that well and should probably stop in the name of good taste.
I mean, imagine that-doing something for the fuck of it and not because it’s going to get you paid. It even becomes a thing where when there’s money involved it just kind of cheapens things. Maybe I’m fucked up or something, but I’ve always felt like the most important creative expression comes from amateur efforts, rather than some kind of refined professionalism.
Given, motherfuckers need to eat and there’s a wealth of awesome stuff that has been created by people who do it for a living. We live in a world where you can’t just completely divest art or like I said, creative expression, of it’s commercial potential or pricetag. It’s impossible, even going well beyond the tired “sell out” debate. Everything, every last thing on Earth and every aspect of everything anyone does, is potentially, or outright, commodified at this stage. Seriously. Whatever you do, whatever activity, desire or creative passion you might have has it’s place in the market. And sadly, so many people these days are satiated by going out and purchasing such things to experience them vicariously instead of tapping their own endless reserves.
So it’s not to say that shit only counts if you’re making a bankroll off of it. Not at all. As I said before, for me it’s more that the opposite is true.
With that said I figured I’d leave ya’s with this song. I don’t, you know, always listen to hip hop-kind of rarely, in fact, but occasionally I do and sometimes I even find it inspiring. Like this guy, P.O.S.. I just like his stuff, and not only because he name drops Fugazi in one of his songs, and not just because he was in some hardcore punk bands.
One of my favorite songs of 2012 (and don’t tell anyone I’m admitting to this) was “Let ‘em Come” by Scroobius Pip-who I kind of think is a fucking genius, and who’s lyrical skills evidence the fact that the British fucking invented the goddam English language. At any rate, P.O.S. was on that song-him, Sage Francis and Scroobius Pip. So I checked out some of his stuff, and I really like it. Sage Francis is pretty cool I guess, though I’m not totally nutso over his stuff really. Anyway, I was thinking about writing this post tonight about just doing creative stuff, and I remembered this song. Without further adieu (this means I’ll shut the fuck up now), here it is:
I think people seek validation through the marketplace–if other people value what they’re doing, and pay them for it, it means that they are personally worthwhile. I understand your perspective that it should not matter whether you get paid for it or not, it should only matter that you enjoy it, i.e. it should still “count.”
I’m kinda with you on this–but probably not for the same reasons. I long ago realized I’m probably not talented enough to make a creative living, but I still enjoy writing and I don’t seek a lot of exterior validation (mostly because I don’t respect the opinions of most people, to be honest).
Anyway, another good, thoughtful read here. Thanks.
Thanks for the comment Karen.
The funny thing about the market, and the whole marketplace of ideas in general is it’s really a poor gauge of talent, so someone seeking validation through it is really just going to get the skewered result with merit being commercial success, or popularity. Sure there’s a lot of wildly popular and commercially successful stuff that has merit, artistic or whichever way, but too there’s a whole slew of it that is just utter shit in an appealing shiny package.
So much of so called “mass appeal” is completely manufactured to begin with, and the way things are anymore it’s the ability to foist off the shinyest package via whatever hip and slick post-viral or crowdsourced or whatever marketing technique which will bring home more bacon than the content of said package. People, (usually marketers, would-be or otherwize) are always prating about how it’s important to generate quality content on the internet-yet the very medium is antithetical to content and will always favor image over susbstance. People generally aren’t spending hours upon hours at the Gutenberg project site reading literary classics-they’re watching vid clipz of waterskiing squirrels on You Tube, tweeting inanities or looking at goddam cat memes.
So you should probably feel better that you’re MORE talented than to be making a creative living in such a wasteland. Bloggers I think more than anyone on the internut know that some of the best and most engaging stuff to be found out here might be from some random poster who writes a piece and shares photos about walking thier pet goat or something in Uzbekistan (And I’m not picking on Uzbeks, ok, it could be some Brooklyn hipster with a pet goat just as easily. I’m just saying). And the person may only have like two subscribers and absolutely zero commercial potential.
Whereas, you also see like these “pro(fessional) bloggers” and their stuff is just so contrived and lame eventhough they have twenty bijillion followers and have probably even got laid because of their blog. I don’t know, I mean it’s at least theoretically possible that a blogger could be famous enough to pull a shot of ass or two. I’m sure it’s worked for like, Perez Hilton or The Bloggess or whoever, and it was the entire impetus behind my buddy Graz’ locally successful blog. I mean, blog groupie phenomena-that’s capital-V Validation if you really need it I suppose. Thankfully, most of us don’t need that level of validation, but again I’m just saying.
But, you know, yours and so many other blogs I enjoy probably wouldn’t be as funny or thought inspiring or just cool to read if you were having to do it for a living. They’d be compromised for the sake of pulling more hits to generate more revenue so the blogger could buy a new jet ski or afford doing more lines of coke off the asses of supermodels on a yacht in the Mediterranean or whatever top tier commercially successful internet celebrities do-now that rock stars have gone the way of the velociraptor and somebody has to be the modern day debaucherized equivalent.
Holy fuck. I just wrote a whole other goddam post here.