Against Entertainment
I get wary when artists start talking about themselves as “special people.” You know, the kind with sensitive constitutions, consumed with Serious Life Questions, floating a few feet over the earth, their toes grazing the scalps of normal men and women.
There was one adjunct professor at Columbia, from whom I learned nothing, who’d get all starry-eyed and dreamy-voiced when she talked to our class about Being an Artist. One of her hands would touch the scarf knotted at her throat while the other would play with her hair. I swear that every time she spoke to us, she imagined herself being interviewed by Vanity Fair.
On our last day of class this past spring, she asked us about our writerly aspirations. As per usual, I broke the five-minute silence.
“I’d like to make a living doing what I love,” I offered.
She looked offended. “Don’t you want to explore the human condition? Don’t you want to make a statement with your art?”
“Of course I do…” I began.
She slit her eyes. “Is it really all about money?”
“That’s not what I meant-”
“I would think that an artist-”
“Look,” I said, “I’ve worked a string of shitty, dead-end jobs my whole life, while working on my ‘art.’ It would be nice to pay the rent with writing for a change.” I looked around at my classmates for moral support. Unfortunately they had all given up on the class midway through the semester, and were simply occupying their chairs. My voice got a little tight. “As long as we’re dreaming big.”
She rolled her eyes, glanced down at her watch, and with that my final class at Columbia came to an end.
Afterwards, in the hall, a girl from class pulled me aside. “Of course we all agreed with you,” she said. “Besides, that woman comes from money.”
“She does?” I said.
“Totally. God, that patrician accent! Old money, honey. Plenty of free time to weigh the human condition.”
But then, the opposite argument, that artists are just like everyone else, seems a little false as well. Yesterday I read a profile on Doonsebury creator, Garry Trudeau, in which he muses over his former life as a graphic designer:
‘I had more flow as a designer,’ Trudeau explains. ‘I could just drop down into the zone and stay there for hours. With cartooning, I’m constantly coming up for air, procrastinating, looking for reasons not to be doing it. I spend all day granting myself special dispensation, with “creative process” as my cover story. Carpenters and deli countermen can’t do that, so I think they may feel better about themselves at the end of the day.’
Frankly I found some comfort imagining Trudeau procrastinating before every deadline. If someone so successful still goes through that on a weekly basis, then I’m not alone, pacing my bedroom floor, standing in blank silence at the window.
I confess: I’m not writing the book.
That’s hardly new.
What’s new is that I’ve spent the past four months on a diligent mission to find out why. Over time, chasing down false leads, engaged in a meticulous process of elimination, I finally identified the culprit.
I blame you, the American people. And it’s time you took responsibility for the pain you’re causing me. Nothing in your culture feeds my artistic process. Nothing!
Your television shows murder my imagination. Fuck your “Heroes,” your “Grey’s Anatomy,” your “Law and Order” marathons! Outside of a dream sequence or two on “The Soprano’s,” everything on television thwacks the fragile voice of imagination that whispers words to me, that supplies me with a lovely turn of phrase, a stunning metaphor, a book-length theme.
Damn you, for making me justify Project Runway with But it’s really creative!
Playstation 3, Tomb Raider, Warcraft: all just slow death!
Fuck your hybrid Hondas, your knitting circles, your YouTube! Fuck your animated donkeys that talk like Eddie Murphy! Fuck Anderson Cooper’s tears!
And you gay boys, with your trance music, decline bench presses, and bareback porn; leave me in peace!
Big Muscle Bear contributes nothing to Art!
The Da Vince Code is not literature!
Stop making me worry; Jennifer Aniston is going to be fine!
Please, turn off your computers. Kill your televisions. Buy a book. Talk to me about character development, narrative arcs, and postmodern structure. Tiptoe around me as I engage in my “creative process.” Hold my calls. Fix my coffee. Do my laundry. I’ve got a Master’s degree to finish.
Very nice
Seriously though, good luck with your Muse. Hopes she comes back (and looks like, say… Adriano Marquez.)
October 24th, 2006 at 1:48 pmHey there mate….
Just found your new face lifted blog and I thought I would chime in and offer some of that oft desired validation….
I like to come to your blog about once a week to read your writting. I really like your way with words. I especially love the way you pull me into your moment with your descriptions…..
If you’ll keep writting me lunch hour daydreams…. I’ll be your faithful reader.
All the best
David
October 24th, 2006 at 2:03 pm“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”
Joseph Conrad
October 24th, 2006 at 2:28 pmi think “artists” fall in the “specialy different” category. thinking about it that way helps. and the shortbus.
October 25th, 2006 at 4:23 amPerhaps it’s a good job that Balzac et al didn’t either blog or have television……
October 25th, 2006 at 4:41 ami think about my conditioner all the time.
October 25th, 2006 at 4:50 amJulia Sugarbaker called; she wants her righteous indignation back, and you *know* how she gets….
October 25th, 2006 at 8:18 am“If It Sells, It Ain’t Art…”
That’s the title of a Spokane KPBX NPR program I was invited to participate in several years ago. “Art A La Carte…” or something like that.
I guess the invitation came “By not being commercially sucessful”, which by defalt meant you got an A + in the creative dept.
We artists bear our crosses ever so pretty, pretending to look down on those engaged in popular culture with their stuffed wallets and we live on hope floats because we only wish we could be satisfied with a diet of Fear Factor, Desperate Housewives and the Price is Right.
At the time I felt honored that not selling shit made me part of the illuminatti…now I just see it as more proof that as the NYTimes reported several years ago, being a writer is nothing more than a trade off for reduced life expectancy.
How Cool Is That?
Several years later the shit jobs remain-translating into 17 years in the trucking industry, 3 in aviation, and more time spent behind a chainsaw than behind a keyboard.
Regardless I don’t think I’d change a thing-and I hope you don’t either. The words I’ve read that you’ve penned are not the stuff for cowards and when you get that book done, I’d willingly stand in line to get your take on the art of living.
October 25th, 2006 at 8:50 amRock on, big guy. If you hadn’t figured it out, we all WANT to give you our cash and buy your tomes. Your loyal fans have been squirreling away our pennies in accounts that might have “Christmas Savings Account” in their title, but that’s only because they won’t allow us to use “The Michael McAllister Good Readin’ Account” nor let Amazon allow us to pre-purchase anything author Michael McAllister has a little sumpin’ sumpin’ in the pipe line.
Let us give you our hard earned dollars and spend wisely on your art.
October 25th, 2006 at 8:51 amSo, you’re saying, if I got a paypal account, you’d pay for my shampoo and conditioner and things?
October 25th, 2006 at 9:37 amOnly if you had pictures of you showering with them.
October 25th, 2006 at 1:32 pmBeau has a point, you know. Even better would be a showercam so we could tell you things like, “Hey, you missed a spot.”
October 25th, 2006 at 7:09 pmReally funny stuff. My favorite line is “Fuck Anderson Cooper’s tears.”
Myself, I fault America for the fact that I watch America’s Next Top Model with a dedication and fervor usually reserved for attendees of a tent revival.
Keep up the good words!
October 26th, 2006 at 7:54 amYeah, who wouldn’t prefer watching “Rome” (in my case) to doing my work. However, my comment won’t be witty, like those of others, because your post set me thinking. I’ve been working on the issue of procrastination as a writer for the better part of a year, maybe more. Whenever I see one of my advisors, he harps on, wondering why I am so slow, offering innumerable and useless theories as to my so-called retrograde status. Beyond his competitiveness with me, what I only realized–and I think you point to this in your post–is how much class can shape the “creative process.” Your professor’s entitlement evoked in her refusal to think art and money in relationship to each other made me think about how much she presumes about creativity. And the utter lack of struggle behind that creative expression (it is, for her, all misty eyed self-expression, freey given without constraints). And to your credit you corrected her. A part (not all) of my procrastination as a writer originates in my own sense of what it means to work (it should be about suffering, if what i saw while growing up shaped my understanding). The work of writing compared to the hard labor the men and women in my rural working-class family perform seem wildly incongruous. Even the kind of confidence required of the writer–setting words on a page, expecting that others should hear what you have to offer–seems easier for those of my colleagues who grew up expecting that they would be in the world I am in. Who, in fact, narrate their personal history as if they knew they would end up where they are. The writing world I am in is unimaginable to my younger self, who lived in a place that others rarely left and those who did, did not engage in “writing.” And, like you, I wonder how I will be able to do what I love and make money, be sustainable–whatever one wants to call it. It is a sad and interesting tussle.
October 26th, 2006 at 9:49 amAnd Shakespeare wrote for the ages, right. Seems to me it was more for the meat on the table and roof over the head. Hang in there, you’ll get to the end and find out nothing really changes once you get the MFA. Your writing will be just as thought provoking as it is now, and just as good. You’ll end up making your own breaks to get ahead, just like the rest of us. Or live in quiet desperation, just like the rest of us. We all would be happy if we could make a living doing something we like.
October 26th, 2006 at 12:18 pmWait, an MFA’s not going to pay the rent? Shit!
October 26th, 2006 at 1:07 pmWell, you know, that sounds like life. Sometimes it’s about receiving, sometimes it’s about giving. How could you have the necessity to write if life were only about writing? Seems like so many of your recent entries have been about all the other neessities that make life necessary to write about. I think it was Diogenes who said, “Every force evolves a form”…or at least that’s the title of that Guy Davenport book; and John Berger’s right there behind him when he says that an image is the affirmation of the apparent, the presence of what the absent have left behind. Good stuff.
October 26th, 2006 at 4:43 pmWho was your writing professor at Columbia?? I was in the writing program there too.
October 29th, 2006 at 9:55 pmYou’ll have to email me on that one.
October 29th, 2006 at 11:03 pmOh Michael, I feel my creative juices flow while reading the almost-poetic profiles on Bigmusclebear-
No fats, no fems,
I’m 42 (really 47),
but 18 to 30 only,
Mild to wild in 60 seconds.*
*not a real profile, but you get the idea.
October 30th, 2006 at 2:04 pmHomer, I totally think we should sponsor a Haiku-Inspired-by-Big-Muscle-Bear Contest.
October 30th, 2006 at 10:40 pm