Spawntang

There's a catch-22 to writing posts about comics, and I write about comics because for reasons I don't understand, I care about them, I love the medium. My leading theory is that it remains the best medium for conveying accurately what we imagine, every other medium is still constrained by budget or the number of collaborators you gotta get involved...

but that's not the catch, the catch is a hell of a catch. See when I write about comics it's for lack of a conversation about comics. The people I would most like to have the conversation with, tend not to care about comics (non-nerds) and the people who would like to have the conversation with me, I don't care about the opinions of (nerds). Which sounds both obvious and hypocritical - but I characterize a 'nerd' as chiefly, somebody lacking imagination. There is an alarming number of comic book fans that have the concrete thought processes of an engineer. Which could explain the high correlation between people who study mechatronics and people who play magic the gathering at food court tables.

Anyway, what I'm saying is, forgive how self-indulgent this particular post is, on a medium that is purely self indulgent anyway. I just wanted to reflect.

So in the 90's if you were a kid, Spawn was on top. Ever so briefly, but the title managed to eclipse any IP being put out by DC or Marvel. Yeah, Spawn beat out Batman just a few years after Tim Burton's 1989 movie had basically captured the imagination of every kid in the world, and while the best cartoon on was Bruce Timm's Batman animated series, and Spawn beat out the X-Men when the other show every kid was watching was the X-Men animated series, I don't think Marvel's succeeded at making another decent cartoon from it's IP since.

And yet, no matter what you watched, Spawn was the comic, the gold standard for a few years there. As vaguely as I can recall it, it sort of fizzled out of the public discourse due to it's own movie adaptation being so lacklustre (but producing a great OST, which is another post for another day). But in summary, it was just a fact of life - Spawn was number one when I was a kid.

At some point, personally I went through a maturation of tastes. I can recall for example when I was younger that I found it almost impossible to read or find interesting a comic that wasn't in colour. It was as repulsive to me as the idea of black and white television. Greg Capullo's OTT pencils and McFarlane's busy inks were like candy to me, I just couldn't get enough of it. Then later on I got into Tim Sale, Mike Mignola style art which was to say low on detail, high on style.

And thus for much decades Spawn, Greg Capullo and the big image comics experiment just dropped out of my focus, quite naturally. The other thing to understand, is Image is something that happened to me as a kid. I wasn't (and still aren't) some man-child that trawls the internet for news and announcements about the comic industry and what is going on within it. I love comics but have not an insatiable appetite for it where I'm looking forward to what happens next. My general approach in adulthood is that the deluge of crap being published on a weekly basis can happen without me paying any attention to it, and the good shit will stay in print, get collected and float up to my attention eventually. The good stuff has the luxury of time to catch my eye, that's pretty much how I got onto the Scott Snyder/Greg Capullo.

Thus thusly, it's actually quite weird, because when I look back on Image comics, it was really an experiment in translating the Japanese system to American comics, which is to say, one writer takes the story from cradle to grave. I read on one of the wikipedia pages, that Image was credited both with the speculator boom in comics in the 1990's (which I can't really recall and wasn't really aware of) and also the shift in marketing emphasis from comics promoting their creative teams to promoting their intellectual property.

This in part could explain my one most general dissatisfaction with western comics today (and for a while) which is to say, whenever any title seems to be getting any traction and going in a cool direction, the comic company switches up the creative team or worse a company wide event starts happening. Not even the main Batman title is immune. So somebody will finally be doing something interesting with the Joker, and suddenly Batman has to be battling the lantern corps or Darkseid or some shit.

I've been rereading Spawn, and finding as an adult exactly what I loved about Capullo's artwork is still there. And as an artist now myself, was immensely reasured by how hacktacular McFarlane was in his early issues of Spawn. What he borrowed from Miller and Moore seemed almost heavy handed in the early issues.

And yeah, the series had a lot of problems. For example, I don't think McFarlane ever got Jason Wynn's character to work. And I haven't read the Violator Mini-series yet, but I also think the Clown/Violator nemesis was truly strong. It's dialogue heavy, feeling like I am reading a novel some times, even though development wise the mentor archetype of Cog keeps having circular conversations with Al Simmons while remaining cryptic and never giving him any information. I feel like somebody could pick up the first hundred issues these days and go back and streamline the shit out of it and fix it up.

But the artwork is so beautiful, it's actually really hard to imagine why you'd do that. And yeah, you get the impressive character design of Cy-Gor who's origin is predicated on humans not being strong enough to withstand the cybernetic enhancements, except that prior to Cy-Gor's appearance, Spawn has fought 1 demon, 1 angel and 3 other cyborg antagonists - Overtkill, Tremor and the Curse, whom have all withstood the cybernetic pain threshold seemingly.

But most of what was wrong with Spawn were the hangovers from the big two companies image was trying to break away from - namely, they employed an 'Image Universe' having characters from other Image titles show up, that were further complicated by the fact that they remained owned by their creator studios. You also got the Neil Gaiman - Angela/Cog ownership dispute happening which was shit too.

Spawn gets shit stylistically these days too, the whole era to be fair, where characters had a million pockets and spikes and chains and guns and bullets and belts and straps adorning them - it was the OTT era, and Bruce Timm perhaps is to blame for the shift to more stylised streamlined animation friendly artwork that dominates western comics today (and anatomy wise dominated Japanese comics since always, in fact very little work has to be done to adapt Japanese comics into animation for the most part). But now with GoT being pretty much the coffin in the nail of nerd's inferiority complex that drives an adaptation dependent film and tv industry, I find myself redrawn to the OTT style of drawing, because it basically can't be translated or adapted. CGI and sell shading will have to advance lightyears to give us a decent 3d rendering if Spawn, The Creech, Clayface or any of Capullo's masterpieces, let alone getting CGI to the point that it is more impressive than Capullo's designs.

Spawn was possibly so hard to adapt because Capullo's art was so much of a selling point, and he isn't alone nor is he without a legacy. We got Jim Lee, Joe Mad, Humberto Ramos... all still killing it and selling product along with Capullo in the present day. And it's contrasted with Cheeks, Skottie Young, Jim Mahfood all doing much simpler geometric construction, as well as the major influence shows like Adventure Time have had on pushing the stylistic spectrum back to early rubber hose style animation/construction with absolutely no rendering.

I'd still argue to those that fetishise Japanese comics that there's less of a gap stylistically between Eichiro Oda and Takehiko Inoue, or Masashi Kishimoto and Hiroaki Samura. Even though they all represent different and unique styles and range on the spectrum of realistic to abstract.

Which brings us to what Spawn did to innovate. It was launched in 1992, and featured at it's center an African American family. It's protagonist was genuinely an anti-hero possessing serious character flaws, which wasn't so original, I think Frank Miller's run on Daredevil had a Matt Murdoch who was similarly a genuine arsehole at times. But in that, McFarlane was genuinely brutal, following Kurt Vonnegut's rule of giving the reader somebody to root for, then pushing them through hell to see what they are really made of. Spawn tried to help these Alabama kids who were being abused by their father, only to inadvertently make shit worse. Or deny help to somebody only to have them resort to suicide when all hope was lost.

And Spawn lived in an alley and for much of the first 25 issues, was homeless and helped primarily the homeless, characters dealing with substance abuse, mental illness and a broken system. To my limited knowledge that had never been done before and possibly not since (though The Maxx also lived in a box in an alley). McFarlane actually dealt with real social issues in Spawn, and genuine moral dilemmas and most of the time Spawn fucked up.

There are some famous rogues gallary's too, but if you wikipedia search 'The Abomination' or 'The Absorbing Man' or even 'Mysterio' and try reading the fictional character biography, what you'll notice is that it can actually be years between appearances for these seemingly high profile villains, not only that but they'll wander all around the Marvel Universe appearing in different titles here and there, and thus somebody has to keep track of that shit and every creative team that wants to use them has to figure out a way for them 'to get here from there'. How do you get the Sandman from being dissolved by a Tsunami at Spring Break in Florida to New York City? How do you get the Red Skull from being stuck in a nightmare dimension from his battle with S.W.O.R.D. to Washington so he can show down with whoever the fuck cares?

I raise this because Spawn actually has a real good rogues gallary, it's seriously up there behind Batman and Spider Man. Surprisingly, most of the clumsy stuff comes out of the early days, where McFarlane had other high profile writers come in and contribute to the title - Neil Gaiman created Angela, and in her first appearance was very Neil Gaiman stylistically and he perhaps was able to flavor Angela's surrounding world too much. Then you had the first incarnation of the Redeemer as 'Anti-Spawn' who was pretty well designed, but improved with each new incarnation from a clumsy start using a still ill-defined Jason Wynn. But that aside, the Curse, Violator, Tremor, Overt-Kill, Redeemer 2 and Redeemer 3, Cy-Gor, The Heap ... all solid designs and back stories. What set them apart though was that Spawn was sufficiently self contained that they were generally used once, twice and done. Spawn could actually kill them, and kill them off or move them on in the case of Angela and some others. This gave much of the Spawn rogues gallery something most titles lack - each character had a beginning middle and end. None of them devolved into thematic enemy's like Batman's (the gold standard of Rogue's galleries) where you wind up with 8 decent characters and a subsequent 8 stories that get told again and again and again.

I guess revisiting Spawn, you realise that it's unfair to compare it really to anything in the two monoliths IP vaults. It is actually better to compare it to a title like Naruto, or other Japanese comics. It's similar to Naruto in that you get the feeling that while McFarlane was a smart plotter, he hadn't meticulously thought things through like Masashi Kishimoto doesn't and it starts to show with circular conversations or sudden retconning or redundant confrontations (eg. the numerous times Cog has essentially the same conversation with Al about how he is playing into Hell's hands, or the numerous times Sam and Twitch go over the Billy Cincaid case, revisiting the exact same details). But compared to Naruto, Spawn never got anywhere near as messy even though it also in my opinion introduced far too many characters and concepts in the end that had to be tied up. Both series suffered from introducing a primary nemesis (Orochimaru and Malebolgia) whom both out of necessity needed to be killed off, but then necessarily had to be replaced by bigger badder dudes that never managed to ever be as interesting, and in both climaxes we were it with multiple revelations in quick succession about who the 'real' villain was, to the point of no longer caring.

But nobody does generally achieve these things, Batman will never end, Spider Man will never end, they never held any more promise of anything but a continuous story arc that will occassionally appear to head somewhere and most likely will be clumsily corrected with magic or some shit later. Creators do tighter, shorter stories that expand in their worlds and contract quickly. But nobody does decade long work and really manages to hold either the primary antagonist constant and our interest constant at the same time. Spawn was able to build a rich world and give us that epic feel, but also held the promise that it was going somewhere. In that regard it probably needs to be held up for comparison against fantasy titles like the Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice And Fire, not Batman and Spider Man.

To reduce all this to one sentiment: Spawn was good. It was actually a really good comic title. Peppered with mistakes, but really nothing near the insulting shit any devotee of Batman, Spider Man, the Hulk, Superman, X-Men etc. has to put up with due to the way Marvel and DC are run. Furthermore I have no comprehension of the logistical and artistic challenges of producing 20 pages of story a month for over a decade. I spend 3 months planning one of my art exhibitions, and only about 6 of those weeks doing the works for one, and even in that short a time frame I'm often very aware that having done it (or as I'm doing it) I would have made very different decisions.

It's possible the great Image comics experiment had the unintended effect of making Marvel and DC worse, but I think personally I'm glad it happened. There will be a good legacy we are probably experiencing in myriad ways without really knowing it right now and onwards into the future. If it's been almost half your life since you last looked at a Spawn comic, I'd highly recommend revisiting it.

Famous Last Words

I think my recovery is complete. And I do mean recovery, I'm always growing, changing and hopefully improving. But a part of me was lost, that I had - like the 'child mind' zen texts talk about. Something I did naturally all along got disloged. Now I've recovered it. It's a good feeling.

Specifically what I've recovered is trust, trust in myself - my instincts are good. For a good period I had a crippling paranoia that they couldn't be trusted. I was getting tripped up on my instincts. It was a mess and more than anything else, that's why I was in psychotherapy. I'd begun to doubt my ability to intuitively read situations.

I trust my cognitive mind, it's good. I trust my instinctive/intuitive mind, it's good too. They just got messed up in a situation that didn't add up, and it took a lot of talk and a lot of introspection to sort one from the other.

It was the kind of handicap that forced me to grow though. Like an AFL player learning to kick with both feet, or a training exercise where they are told only to handball - the restrictions force you to adjust your game and you become more versatile. So while I learned a lot in the time where I could no longer hear my intuition for the noise in my head, I can hear it again now, act on it (or take it's direction not to act) and I trust it.

I left therapy almost 6 months ago, and my last session was really just a check out-debrief, I was on the right path from Christmas - but specific with issues to your intuition - your intuition pays off long run, not in the moment so you can start taking the right actions with it, but you have to wait around for cognitive evidence that that was correct.

And that's because intuition is not a spooky 6th sense, it's a rapid fire quick and dirty heuristic calculator, telling you in broad strokes when things add up and when they don't. In the short run it can be right or wrong, because it's rule of thumb - broadly right but not infallible. Think of it if you will as a roulette table. Your intuition says that in the long run the house always wins, or with just a coin toss that in the long run the odds will be 50/50. So a gambler might come in and win big off the first couple of spins on a roulette table, or your friend may toss 3 heads in a row on a 'fair' coin. You look stupid, your intuition looks stupid. But the more tosses of the coin your friend makes, or the longer the gambler stays at the table - the more the results conform to intuitions rule of thumb.

I have seen something else under the sun:

The race is not to the swift
    or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
    or wealth to the brilliant
    or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.

So under my sun, I've had 6 months to observe that when my gut has told me something was a bad idea, and I've been given pause to say 'well maybe that wasn't a bad idea' when time was applied it does indeed wash out that way. And that's what has given my intuition the all clear. Something I can trust. I'm sorted now to listen to my intuition and then get my slower cogitating mind to catch the fuck up, rather than employ it's efforts to talk me out of my intuition, or paralyze me with doubts.

Rumi says: "Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition." and "If you are wholly perplexed and in straits, have patience, for patience is the key to joy"

Intuition got us thus far, and further than the writers of Ecclesiasties 9:11, and Rumi the poet. I'm glad to have recovered mine.

Things be looking up.

Portable

I imagine it's a common escapist fantasy people have, a regular daydream where some tv interviewer is asking for their actual opinion. The same base desires that drive one to start a blog mayhaps.

Anyway today while running I was imagining a recurring scenario where I was being asked my advice for aspiring artists in some successful future of mine. And my advice was 'return emails' which is actually just a peeve disguised as advice. But being that I was running I had time to think why this peeved me so muchmost, that it has become something I would give advice on.

Straight up, there's a disparity between how much we notice emails sent that were never returned vs emails we receive that we don't return. For the past four years my mother has been sending me emails with attached photos each week that I virtually never respond to.

But I noticed recently something peculiar about my friends that seems too consistent to be mere coincidence. It was this phenomena of my sending emails, and then running into the person I sent it to who would then say to me 'hey I got your email...' the first couple of times I put it down to a personality quirk on the part of the recipient, now I'm not so sure.

Here's my current theory. It's the smart phones. People recieve emails on portable devices now. And these portable devices that are putting them in touch and keeping them connected are also driving the non-response phenomenology.

I assert this by projecting my own behaviour. If somebody sends me that quasi-half-email thing called a 'pm' on facebook I can read it on my phone and will almost never respond on the spot. Because I hate the touch interface and predictive text feature on my phone. And I have swipe which is much friendlier to the fat fingered than the iphone's non-swipe set up. But at any rate it's annoying to type anything of substantive length on my phone to respond. So if a message requires a response it goes on my mental 'to do' list for next time I'm at my desktop to use an actual keyboard and exert actual control over what I say.

I'd never type an email on my phone. Let alone a blog post.

And I know Plato or Socrates or some greek asshole said long ago that reading was ruining people for memorising shit, but the fact is that just because technologies ability to degrade our independence isn't a new observation, doesn't make it untrue. Frank Zappa's 'I'm the Slime' was a diss at TV, yet most of the great art is still made by people who don't sit around watching heaps of TV or consuming vast amounts of entertainment. They are people getting good at producing entertainment by spending their time producing entertainment.

Anyway I digress. Portable technology is shit. I had a very salient thought as a child when my dad got issued his first ever work mobile phone - 'now dad can be at work all the time' his fellow executives could call him weeknights and weekdays. Time stopped being partitioned and scheduled and Ricardo Semler wrote a very good book on it called 'The Seven Day Weekend' about how we'd learned to open work emails on a Sunday but not watch a movie on a monday afternoon.

So too heaps of people actually struggle with their facebook usage and other social media, I have friends that have quit facebook outright to get away from it. For me the answer is simple - you open up facebook once in the morning, write your birthday messages, check your notifications, post something (but don't force it) and log out. Manager tools have for years recommend that you actually schedule your email at work, so that you check and respond to email 3 times a day, instead of any time of day.

All this got me to thinking, portable technology is actually just plain and simple - pretty shit. The times in my life where I've been like 'damn I wish I had a laptop with wifi' I can count on one hand - the three 8 hour plus stop-overs I've had in airports. Even then it's probably a misnomer, it would have been good to have that shit then and then only, had I been lugging around a laptop in my travels chances are I would have exhausted all my entertainment before I actually needed it. I am often bored by everything the internet has to offer.

I haven't had a portable sound device for almost two years. I can remember because I was given a good set of headphones for my birthday one year that I still haven't used. And I don't really notice. I don't get music withdrawal like I expected.

Back to laptops, I don't know how so many peoples got so convinced that laptops were so great. They are virtually all ergonomically really bad, I find they run like shit within an alarmingly short period of time and they are just amazingly low quality, expensive and fragile. I think the notion of a work station - a physical place you go to do work is now a best kept secret. I feel I get so much work done from being a primary desktop PC user over my competition. I somehow think that junior sales rep or consultant travelling for work is secretly not thrilled that they can unfold the laptop computer and do work wherever they can. A shitty job gets shittier.

Plus like music that plays a note every beat, our lives increasingly lack rest, lack punctuation. Lack an absence to drive appreciation. It's all sugar, all the time baby.

Just look at this blog, and realise, the internet is actually pretty shit. You can do without it for awhile.

I quit.

Strange Attachment, Newton's 1st Law

My ex, who is now so ex in time passed that it's a sign of my dating incompetence to still be calling her that has recently taken to facebook usage. And in a bizarre demonstration of attachment theory, she, a Japanese national posts content about her life in a manner almost identical to my Japanese host mother.

Which I find weird and delightful, I love both women. But currently I see attachment theory everywhere, and it kind of freaks me out. But it also kind of makes sense without me being able to wrap my head around it.

For my own part, I left psychotherapy once I basically accepted that attachment theory applied to me. And generally in the folksy way it is expressed attachment theory is ye old 'girls marry their father' and I guess the inverse 'boys marry their mother' though it's said less and I'm not sure if it is a folk saying, or if it isn't said much it's because the western culture obsesses over the bride in our wedding tradition and hence it is there but nobody really gives a shit about the groom.

I feel it's more accurate though to say that I tried to play the role of my father. A powerful unconscious drive, a given. And from my observations, I actually believe children can probably pick one of their parents to emulate. There are many strong women in my life, most of my closest friends in fact, and sometimes that strength has been passed on from a strong matriarchal mother, and sometimes it's the father as patriarch passed onto their daughter. In which case, what I think I see is 'girls marrying their mother' to the play the role of their father.

It all sounds so incestuous, and I think it's one of the things your friends rarely point out to you because of the implied incestuous drivers. But I think about attachment theory in terms of Newton's first law, that's how I try to make sense of something so obviously undesirable yet so prevalent.

Newton's First Law of Motion basically says that a body will stay at rest or continue on in it's trajectory unless some other force acts upon it.

In a deterministic (yet unpredictable) universe where there is no free will (as I believe) this applies to the development and thought processes of a child. A child is typically (and increasingly) given one example of what a relationship is, and how that relationship works and how attachment is formed. Children are in fact not so much raised as aimed and released into adulthood, and in accordance with Newton's 1st law, stuck on that trajectory unless they are just dumb lucky enough to have that journey interrupted.

Even though each of us is in a position to observe that their are many kinds of relationships between adults, and that our best friends parents have a different relationship to our own. It's to be expected that all our 'norms' or 'relationship givens' will come from how our parents interacted.

We are copying a solution to a problem of many solutions. And some of us are copying answers that are wrong.

And I feel this post now splitting (divorcing if you will) down two very different paths.

1. The first is why I think attachment theory needs to be a meme that takes off and gets annoying as intellectual nobodies discuss it pretentiously while updating their 'goodreads' profile on facebook. Yes that saturated in public discourse. I think it's important because of the advent of divorce.

Here I think many Family-First or Christian Conservatives are precisely right for precisely wrong reasons. The deterioration of family's in our society can be laid at the feet of divorce. But I feel they are naive, and just plain wrong to think the solution is to deprive people of the choice of divorce so they will work on their marriages into some ideal solution.

Divorce has been around since Henry the 8th at least in Christendom, but really not an option for the vast majority of people until a matter of decades ago. Even then, the stigma of divorce has taken much longer to make it a real option than the legal system has.

Church and state sanctioned marriages set up monogomy as a solution to the problem of the traditional romantic arrangement - the harem system. Where a dominant male monopolises all the reproductive rights. This reduces biodiversity and increases sexual jealousy related violence. So having the state or church impose restrictions was kind of a good social manipulation.

But imperfect, because it also deprived people for centuries of the ability to recognise they made a mistake and get divorced. I'm firmly of the mind that your relationship fucks up when you choose your partner if it is going to fuck up at all. And staying together is not a measure of success. You get fucked couples that split - at least giving one the prospect that you might learn and make better choices. But you have fucked couples that stay together.

Not having divorce meant that among married couples - the second situation had to be true on mass. Compounded by the fetishisation of virgin brides in virgin white, or 'making an honest women' meaning that for much of the last 10 centuries, most married couples hadn't even experimented to learn which partner to choose.

There were only two mitigating factors - a) arranged marriage, where in a matchmaker tradition you had the prospect of a competent expert being able to recognise patterns of behaviour, learn from the legacy and possibly correct for it. However I personally believe competence to be rare. and b) restricted choice, which I really don't know how it effects attachment theory, but basically we are far more mobile and able to find partners that recreate the disfunction of our parents relationship than perhaps was the case when you lived in a small farming community of 100. However, the numbers game I guess could have possibly exacerbated the feedback effect of children acting out their parents relationships again and again.

Perhaps the scariest prospect of attachment theory, is the possibility that when we play the role of one of our parents in our relationship we actually make our partner play the other role, where they otherwise would not be that person. A scary scary thought.

In summarium of divorce though, basically what it has done is populate our world with a multitude of 'solutions' to the problem of relationships (how two adults relate to eachother) that were only solutions when divorce was not allowed. Basically without the threat of being left and deprived access to reproduction or raising your children, a bunch of highly dysfunctional, toxic and relationship killing behavior could fly. And it seems some kids can run the differential and realise they can divorce their partner rather than tolerate what their parents lived with, others can't and assume it's natural.

2. Which brings me to the deterministic line of thought I will ominiously call 'the filter'. You can look at couples and observe that on occasion two people highly compatible seemed to be able to find eachother and marvel at the luck of it. And sometimes you look at couples so toxic for each other, or so asymmetrical that you marvel at just how lucky that person was to wind up dating exactly the worst kind of person for them. (and sometimes given time, your first observation turns into your second observation, but curiously almost never the reverse).

Attachment theory and 'the filter' though kind of take luck out of it. I got a friend whom when presented with a stranger rushes straight to what they don't like about them, generally what comes to the fore are their reasons to reject. You take this one undesirable and innocuous trait, and repeat it enough, it is going to sift through their all the people they could be friends with and filter it to consistent behavioural traits.

Their friends are going to consist of the kind of people that enjoy sitting down to a good old 'bitching session' and I project, will be characterized by low self-esteem, pessimism and risk aversion.

Similarly take somebody with the seemingly admirable trait of being endlessly emotionally available for their friends and endlessly generous and a filter is going to sift through their friends as well. Their self-soothing, independent and self reliant friends are going to manage the distance, and their needy, anxious and insecure friends are going to lap up their attention and time.

Converse to douches who shoot people complaining about 'the friend zone' in a world where most romantic partners are drawn from our friends or met through our friends, some luck plays a role but your identity and conduct derived from your parents will naturally attract either precisely the wrong person or precisely the right person.

And that's the crux of attachment theory, success compounds as does failure. And after centuries of failed relationships forced to endure - millions of women victims of physical abuse, millions of people reverting to the same self-medicating habits, millions of children raised by cold non-present parents - many people can't recognise the flaws in their working models of relationships. They may even admire a parents 'ability to endure hardship' and try and emulate that rather than avoid the hardship.

External bodies or influences are probably the only aspect of luck, events and other people can act on us to break the destiny. In my own case, the advent of the global citizen. It allowed one of my most significant relationships to be disrupted by geography and that forced me into psychotherapy for the first time. As such two wonderful people that together formed a mediocre love were able to both move on and find much more compatible partners, much more stable foundations to build a relationship on.

And probably, there for me at least all good things stem. That set me down the path of psychotherapy, which eventually made me conscious of my own inherited model of a relationship and that model's pitfalls and at least aware of it, I have a choice for the first time in what I filter for.

Another body I hope, disrupted my path.

A Simple Concept

For the past I dunno, 5 days, I've been making my bed.

It's a huge turn-around for me. Prior to this almost-week-long stint, I really only made my bed when I changed the sheets. In between (and almost certainly, too far in between) it was really just this crumpled thing I got in and out of. And it's been that way for years. I can't remember the last time I made my bed for a reason other than to make sure my doona was properly in it's cover.

I basically just viewed it as a waste of time, time I never get back.

Then last week at work and bored, I read this Navy Admiral's speech to new recruits where he said 'if you want to change the world, start by making your bed. You will have accomplished the first task of the day.' and being highly suggestible, I basically started doing it.

The productivity gains I am yet to see, but that is probably more explained by my post exhibition strong desire to productively rest up. Which I'm not achieving either.

But it's strange. I sleep better, or have been. Not just because all is right in my world, but because my covers don't stray far. My comfort level sleeping has increased and become more consistent. 

Buddy Buddy Cozy Chronies

By my calculations, I may have up to 4 regular readers of my blog, and if you are one of these 4 people, you may recall a post I did on Special vs Ordinary causes.

Anyway, that post has something to do with this one.

So log onto facebook these past few weeks and your newsfeed would have been populated by a steady stream of outrage posts about Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey a few others and the federal budget.

What I don't understand, is the impulse to go publicise these views, there. On facebook in particular. I don't suspect in my friendship network I even know too many liberal voters that turned out to be surprised and disgusted as to what their party actually stood for. I also suspect that not too many of my friends have many friends that are surprised and disgusted. In the most part I assume that everyone I know knew what a turd Tony Abbott is for a long time before he got elected, and didn't vote for him, suspecting quite accurately what he was capable of.

And Tony Abbott is a turd. The weakness of his character speaks immediately to your intuition. He strikes you as untrustworthy, unintelligent, short sighted, opportunistic, contemptuous and self serving. He is for the most part not a cunning adversary, perhaps not even worthy of the term 'adversary'. A man who supposedly studied the bible and decided to emulate the example of Judas - and will probably having succeeded reach the same conclusions.

My point being, is that Tony Abbott is so clearly ill-suited for leadership, he becomes merely a detail and not the structural problem.

Sure people can get outraged, band together, raise their voices and stamp their feet and throw Abbott out of office and for a huge expenditure of energy and public discourse little would be achieved.

Tony Abbott is Prime Minister of Australia, Joe Hockey its treasurer (a man I am not confident could run a successful milk bar.)

The first question that needs to be asked is not 'what do we do about them?' but 'How did this happen?'

I forget where exactly I read the anecdote but I strongly suspect it was 'Life of Pi' but it was something about when you go to the circus and the Lion Tamer is cracking his whip and there's three lions and the fiercest one is standing up and roaring at him and then the tamer goes and puts his head in it's mouth. The 'fiercest one' is in fact the Omega Male, not the Alpha who capitulates and cooperates because in the heirarchy of lions, the weakest male has the most to gain from the lion tamers favor. The alpha in fact has everything to lose.

And increasingly in politics, we see similar behaviour. There are not sufficient checks and balances in place to maintain a 'lions only' heirarchy in our leadership. Powerful and influential people can step in and fuck up the natural order. Where the one selected to perform the role of Prime Minister is in fact the most ill-suited candidate. Paradoxically, the key criteria for being leader, is your ill-suited-ness to the role.

A former, high performing CEO of Australian company Wesfarmers whom was CEO of the year in some magazine said he felt he'd done a good job because - he was the candidate that didn't really want the job. Perhaps too simple, I feel there is an intelligent but unintelligible general principle that you want duty and not desire to motivate your executives. And inverting it, perhaps the poorest quality you can have in a leader is a burning desire to be leader.

I have far more confidence in that rule of thumb, and I fucking hate that our society rewards that kind of ambition - seeing the hunger for the title as an admirable thing. Ambition alone is not enough, it requires context, motivation.

Because I feel I'm struggling to make my underlying point. Let's look again at ordinary versus special causes. Tony Abbott is not a special cause, an aberation, or even a surprise. He is not a spot fire that needs to be put out. He is a product that has been cranked out by a system. A process.

By analogy, the GFC the 'villains' of the GFC were too many to name such that they became a class of people 'the 1%' which I think is a plural term just as misleading as singling out any person as causing the GFC. I'm with Michael Lewis' analysis - the incentives were fucked up. Increasingly banks had stopped making money off their customers through the direct providing of services. They had started making their money by taking positions against their customers. Betting against the very people they were meant to serve.

Remember Julia Gillard? Perhaps nostalgically? I think her minority government will be judged well by history. But few people are historians and who really will care. One thing that I think everyone quickly forgets is the very problematic way she rose to power.

We had Kevin Rudd, at the height of his popularity attempted to institute a Super Profits Mining Tax to capture some of the revenue generated from selling off irreplaceable mineral resources. Suddenly the Rudd Government had to contend with industry advertising to the tune of $120 million a day claiming that the tax would destroy everyone's lives.

Julia Gillard stepped in and capitulated to the campaign, costing Australian citizens billions and billions of dollars. She seized an opportunity to take power, and that was weak. Unfortunately for her, Tony Abbott turned out to be much much weaker.

The australian political race is a race to the bottom. Our real problem is that none of the leaders we might desire in a system where industry and media are cuddling up to each other. We were always vulnerable to a man so unlikeable, so lacking in merit that he wouldn't ever succeed on them alone that he would promise everything for power.

Now we are seeing what such a system is designed to produce. A fire sale. Clearing out all the assetts in the state's estate. Privatising profits and socializing the risks. Scrapping social programs, and building infrastructure to aid and abet the extraction of Australia's resources. Australia's nest egg for future generations.

Facebook and social media for all it's trending, are not a good indication of the national discourse in Australia. Tony Abbott is a peon, a lackey at best. The protests are futile because he isn't in charge. He secured his title and office with promises better candidates on both sides of the floor were not able to make. He was never about public opinion. He managed upwards to seize power. A process that makes the title he so desperately sought hopefully meaningless to him. And it's true he wasn't alone. A whole party systemically got behind him.

Really, the problem is that people responsible for the media channels where we get our information, like the banks in the GFC, had incentive to take up positions against their customers. They gave the public advice against their own interest - yet are not culpable for negligent misstatement like a financial advisor would be. There's virtually no liability at all for the media to voluntarily engage in propaganda.

The press's incentives are wrong. They make more money keeping advertisers happy than they do from customer subscription. The natural result is that the interests of the few will dominate public opinion. Such that voters vote against their own best interests. Tony Abbott is perhaps victim to the same systemic failure.

Sympathy Window and Sneaky

Anyone who has been through a break up has probably acknowledge that you only get so much credit, so much time, so many back pats and 'there there's before you are on your ownsome to deal with your lonesome.

Like a window has been shut, and the cool breeze of sympathy no longer blows by.

I am a firm believer in the sympathy window as a social phenomena. And I used to suppose to think that this knowledge was good, empowering. When you understood the window of sympathy, you could avoid making a mistake.

The mistake was to keep seeking/expecting sympathy from your loved ones. And this concept doesn't apply solely to break ups, it probably applies to any persistent problem in ones life.

I once explained it to my brother as he struggled to stop crying over a lost love.

'This is what it sounds like...' says I to he, 'my house burned down. My house has burned down. I really loved my house and then it burned down. It's just ashes. I really wish my house hadn't burned down. That I still had my house. Why won't my house come back?' (and repeat ad nauseum).

'Until people just want to say...' I continued 'yeah. It burned down. It's fucking gone. You gotta learn to live without it. It's not coming back. You have no fucking house. So you need to get a fucking new house, or tent or cave or some shit!'

SO what I had until recently, like very recently, thought you were supposed to do with this knowledge was this - shut the fuck up. Quit whining. Stop going to your friends for moral support. You know that it takes longer to get over shit than people expect of you, so you take that shit private and deal with it on your own.

NOW I realise that was wrong. That's terrible advice. Don't follow it. What I have come to learn is that while our intuition is powerful, our instincts are powerful, and you can be a clever, courage and honest thinker. Certain problems are so much harder to perceive correctly from the inside. Your social network, your support group. Those you look to for sympathy, are like an extra sensory perception organ. You have to tap into that shit.

Let us truly understand why the sympathy window closes.

After a certain point of complaining about a problem, you are expected to actually resolve it. And you always have one resolution on hand - exit the situation. No, no, no, no, no, not suicide. But if someone is causing you grief, you are expected to stop spending time with them. If you hate your job, you are expected to start saving, if you have savings, to quit, and regardless should be applying to new jobs. If your car is a lemon, sell it for scrap and buy a bicycle. If you have a problem with alcohol, you are expected to abstain.

You are not supposed to persist with the problem but merely keep it to yourself. To suck it up and tough out the pain it causes you. When you think your friends will stop giving you sympathy and understanding your desire, that is the time to quit.

In scrabble if you have a bunch of shit letters, you can chuck in all of them and grab a new set for the cost of a single turn. I read this in a newsletter sent to me today and found it a meme worth spreading. It's a valid tactical play.

Perhaps the obligation an alcoholic has to addressing their alcoholism is what hit home with me recently, where I realised my own perception of the window of sympathy was flawed. Because I remember this Oprah interview with Michael J Fox way way back where he was talking about his alcoholism, and how quickly he started to lie - the tricks he used, like drinking a whole wine bottle and then drinking the next wine bottle down to the previous ones starting point so it didn't look like he'd drunk any at all.

It's the sneaky behaviour of somebody who knows what they are doing is wrong. Realising that all your friends are no longer sympathetic to your own lost cause, and then concealing from them your own ongoing struggles with the problem is not bravely, honestly, toughing it out. It's sneaky, and I should have known better and behaved better.

The only real thing I acknowledged, was that when things went poorly, I would have to suffer it alone, because I was the only one who thought I should make the attempt.

SO - when you sense the window of sympathy has closed, it's time to actually look at your situation and admit you have a problem. It's time to step back and take stock of who actually loves you, and who patently doesn't. It's time to reward the people that actually care about your well being, and disregard those who don't. It's time, to try and see all the evidence that has given people who care about you sufficient confidence that the problem is known, as is its outcome. ESPeople.

When Inspiration Hits It Will Be Inconvenient

With now literally just under a week till my next exhibition, inspiration hits and ideas are taking off for the comic I need to do. It's writing itself in my head and yet... I can't work on it, I have a job to finish. I can't even sit down and write because I have to sit down and draw.

Oh well.

I'm sure I will go over and over and refine it into something workable in my head.

Yes

Lacking the time to write myself here is something I can wholeheartedly link to: http://muddycolors.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/ideas-vsskills.html

My Favorite Peoples

Are actually recovering addicts. And one has to be careful here, and by one, I mean me or perhaps it's grammatically correct to say I meant I. Let's not bother pointing out that I could just go back and fix shit.

Anyway, I gotta be careful because people don't become addicts for no reason. And thus despite being my favorite people, they are not ideal housemates, life partners etc. Nor should anybody gather into a social circle of former addicts, that would probably be a bad bio-psycho-social environment.

But to just hang and shoot shit with, I have really come to love former addicts. The why came to me only yesterday. It's because most people will go to extreme lengths not to work on themselves, to avoid confronting themselves or overcoming themselves and gaining control of themselves. It's really rare. But not among recovering addicts.

Because to be in recovery, by default, addicts have to have overcome themselves. It's a survivorship bias thing. There's no way to overcome addiction and not hold yourself responsible (except maybe if you got exiled to some pacific island with no drug dealers). It's impossible I believe.

It also seems to require disassociation from the people in everyone's lives they tend to either blame, or 'fix' the problems of. It's a form of egocentricity, of self focus that actually is an altruistic act toward everyone else.

It's a pity that so many people that have overcome addiction often have residual issues like attachment disorders, mental health issues or mental illness. Thus even though they are in my experience always working on themselves and their recovery, which I love, the tragedy is that they are often working from a starting point emotionally that most people who won't work on becoming their best self are ahead of.

Oh well, they are still incredibly refreshing to talk to. 

Rumi

It was an idea that crept up on me, perhaps inevitably. I mean of course inevitably. We live in a deterministic universe.

But by creep up, I mean I'm not sure where the idea came from. The ideas is, that being a sage is actually a viable thing to do with one's life. I don't know what it is, to be a sage, I'm just thinking that waking up and trying to attain a state of being day in day out is legit.

Perhaps it came from my exercise regime, or just quitting shit this year, or listening to Sam Harris talk about athiest's being too dismissive of spiritual practices, or Nassim Taleb pointing out that just because we don't understand why something works doesn't mean it doesn't work - or rather his synopsis of Nietzsche warning me not to confuse the unintelligible from the unintelligent... or some shit. I don't know.

It befuddles my mind. Why waste time trying to determine the determinants? it's done.

I found Rumi as a quote in an artist blog post about all the quotes they put in their visual diaries. The exact quote was this:

"What you seek is seeking you." - Rumi.

I found it a very comforting thought, something compells me to believe it is true. But as is the case when you have the hunger. I sought more. I had assumed because of the brevity and lack of consonant clusters that Rumi would be some Japanese artist or author. But no, he was a 13th century Persian poet. Ah, Persia is there nothing it can't do?

I would hope my blogging activities and other conduct have established my deep love of dead presidents, the ones that could actually make speeches. I remember when I first went and read those speeches on wikiquote in the idle hours I spent in Takamatsu waiting for the few brief windows in a day that I could spend time with Miki. They really moved me, Rumi's words move me in a different way.

Consider:

"If you are irritated by every rub,how will your mirror be polished?"

That's it. That is it. There is something there. That some people just get, because it is unintelligible, inarticulate but it is most definitely there. It's a place I can put my mind but it becomes disoriented and confused and irritable, yet when I don't try sometimes I feel it. And that's all it is, a feeling. But people like Rumi and probably Yagyu Sekishusai and others have felt it and they can talk around it but not describe it.

Something Rumi himself seemed to observe and comment upon:

"The men of God are like fishes in the ocean; they pop up into view on the surface here and there and everywhere, as they please."

and I'm particularly inclined to listen to Rumi because like most people I listen to, they affirm shit I really struggled to grasp myself. Like a this:

"Many of the faults you see in others, dear reader, are your own nature reflected in them."

A powerful epiphany and piece of psycho-analysis that I'm personally surprised to learn goes back to the 13th century. Makes it strange it took me so long to get onto Gabor Mate's stuff.

Or:

If you wish mercy, show mercy to the weak.

If you dig a pit for others to fall into, you will fall into it yourself.

The lion who breaks the enemy's ranks is a minor hero compared to the lion who overcomes himself.

I could cherry pick all day, but just look him up yourself. So finally, on the theme of my life, if not yours (I dunno):

If you are wholly perplexed and in straits, have patience, for patience is the key to joy.

Karmic Retribution

Or poetic justice. I find myself having to look in an ugly mirror and partake in the exercise of finding myself beautiful. I guess understanding in the moment and feeling compassion is consummate with forgiving myself. I guess life does make us pay for our mistakes and I made mistakes. The friends who supported me now spared from me and my obstinate misplaced confidence and esteem (because I got better) I find myself having to be those friends and watch helplessly, knowingly (well as far as I can presume to know anything).

Because much as I could claim to know what should be done, and many people outside a situation can and most people outside a situation are right - a forest tends to look like a fucking forest from the outside rather than a unique and precious cluster of trees. But I know what I did do, I suffer from the paradox of capability, the very fact I feel so capable is what rendered me for years so incapable.

So it's probably high time I used the paradoxical privacy of this blog to do my own autopsy.

It starts, in hindsight with Warren Buffett, who offered perhaps the best relationship advice there is for people like me under the guise of financial advice: 

"Many managers were apparently over-exposed in impressionable childhood years to the
story in which the imprisoned, handsome prince is released from the toad's body by a kiss
from the beautiful princess.  Consequently they are certain that the managerial kiss will
do wonders for the profitability of the target company.  Such optimism is essential.
Absent that rosy view, why else should the shareholders of company A want to own an
interest in B at a takeover cost that is two times the market price they'd pay if they made
direct purchases on their own?  In other words investors can always buy toads at the
going price for toads.  If investors instead bankroll princesses who wish to pay double
for the right to kiss the toad, those kisses better pack some real dynamite. We've observed
many kisses, but very few miracles.  Nevertheless, many managerial princesses remain
serenely confident about the future potency of their kisses, even after their corporate
backyards are knee-deep in unresponsive toads."

Also Drucker, the management guru labored the point quite intensely that you put your resources behind proven strong performers, and you don't invest in the weak or problematic performers.

I knew all this, I knew it all. I read 'Warren Buffett CEO' and Peter Drucker's 'Effective Executive' long before I got into the situation where I couldn't plainly see.

I was an overconfident princess believing in the transformative powers of my kisses. To make matters worse, or at least more damning for me, I'd even had it translated into the relationship context for me by Dr. Gordon Livingstone in 'How To Love' one of my oft-sighted books I actually read in the past 5 years. Many people waste their time and life believing that if they just love somebody enough they will cure their ills.

It seems clear now, and even in retrospect it always seemed clear. I just cherry picked my knowledge and built a narrative to keep me unaccountable. To make me special, exceptional to the rule. 

I made a miscalculation in the concept of risk, one I wrote about in my last post. The very low odds of my success I translated into a highly valuable anticipated payoff of success - hence worth my investment of time, energy and love. I equivocated it to my persistence with art, I was simply being consistent it was my nature to strive for the impossible, and if nobody did then how could we be certain of what was possible or impossible.

Conveniently though, I was ignoring the ongoing and growing body of evidence suggesting that instead of being a high risk endeavor what I was engaged in was in fact, no risk at all. It was, relative to me, just a toad - and always going to be.

And as a caveat, I don't agree at all with the notion 'people don't change'. Anybody who espouses it, has defeated themselves. I just think the best counter argument to engage in is to change yourself, do the work. Not work at changing other people. 

We can certainly change others for the worse, by inflicting trauma on them. We can help and influence others. I just believe that people should only really borrow your esteem to add it to their own, not as a a substitute. 

But what damage did I do? At what cost was my undertaking? What is karma handed to me now?

Here's what I did. I fought for my impossible dream day in day out, if not directly, psychically, going over and over the situation in my head. Attacking this seemingly insurmountable problem every which way I could imagine. So much rehearsal, experimentation. So much energy went into the disciplines I forced myself to maintain.

And almost like clockwork - every 3-6 months my optimism received an insult from reality. A crushing one, I pinned all my hopes and dreams on this endeavor. Invested in this one person (who is not to blame for my own folly). 

And at my lowest, when I was in despair, I would do something actually smart - I would pick up my phone and call somebody who loved me. And I would poor my heart out, and they would listen patiently, reassure me, build me up, invest time in me. We would have fun, I would feel better. I would quickly recharge, regroup my esteem and remember what it was like to feel capable and confident. Amazingly quickly, over one or two weeks max, usually about 2-3 interactions with my loved ones. 

That was the power and energy of their love. It is a massive, potent source of energy. 

And then I would take that energy, and use it to grind myself down to devestation and despair again over 3-6 months. 

Let us do the math - 1-2 weeks to replenish my energy by keeping good* company. 3-6 months expending that energy on bad* company.

*here I use 'good' and 'bad' not as absolute judgement of character, but in the specific effect they had on me. The people who are good for me are able to translate their love of me into consistent behavior, but for all you know they could sell poison milk to children.

Or in graph form, my energy/well-being etc could be plotted thusly:

Quick recovery, slow discharge into despair. Repeated too many times to reflect well on my character.

This is the real thing I fucked up in my life. What took me longest to figure out. It was where I was putting my time. I even drew up a list using that heuristic of 'how do they make me feel' and I knew who I should be spending my time with. I had a concrete behavioral selection criteria for who I should invest my time in.

And I just didn't do it. I didn't put the energy back into them. I took their energy and used it to push shit uphill. Again and again.

...

Here is what I have come to realise, it's not that there's no value in undertaking the impossible. There's the usual journey/destination disparity. It's that building a mediocre structure that is 'miraculous' because it's foundations are so poor is not the best use of any persons capabilities. Impossible things can be built on really great foundations, the better the foundations the further our efforts can extend to what is possible.

Since I broke my own cycle of despair, and while I don't believe in accidents I have to attribute the cycle being broken mostly to luck rather than my design, I find myself with an abundance of time and energy, that I now put into really, really good people for me. It happened so quickly, and aside from a few painful frustrations decoupling myself from the person most bad for me, on the whole I just get stronger and stronger, and feel better and better.

I am becoming my best self, and having to watch somebody now remind me so much of myself when trapped by my own hubris, even that is making me better, though I have no idea what the fuck to do as a spectator.

Flip World

As many of my friends tie nuptial knots, others pump out children and others too break up, get divorced change facebook relationship statusi to 'It's complicated' and it gets me thinking.

Firstly, I'm almost inclined like a sucker to say that in the breakup the thought of being single is one of those situations where your intuition is wrong. Except that intuition is actually easily ignored, and it's hard for me to go the way back in hindsight necessary to do anything more than speculate on whether it's intuition or cognition that screws us.

Here's what I see, a flipped out paradox:

The thought of being single terrifies us, but paradoxically there's nobody there to hurt us. By contrast the thought of being back with our partner is comforting, yet they are the precise person that has hurt us. (hopefully unwittingly).

And let me be clear, even with my long standing singledom I think risking heartbreak is a risk worth taking. But at the end of a relationship, the conclusion that needs not just to be comprehended but felt, is that you are broken up because that person is no longer the person to bet on. The 'risk' is diminishing as how they treat you becomes more predictable, more certain.

One thing that I found hard to accept, even though I knew it cognitively was when a person just isn't the best building blocks for a relationship. 

Happiness requires risk, I believe that shit. But risk is one of the most misunderstood concepts out there. There's no risk being taken when we are doomed to fail. There's even dumb risks to take when the odds are low and the payoffs actually mediocre. 

When we break up we grieve. And grief demands relief. We don't want our ex's back in truth, we want our ex's to be different people, to be who we want them to be, immediately. But if our personalities, our character consist of our predictable behaviour patterns - hence expressions like 'that is so out of character' - we aren't likely to become a person we aren't just from the trauma of a break up. 

Sure there is such a thing as post traumatic growth, but generally a relationship is ground down to breaking point by incompatibilities in our sub-conscious preferences. Reprogramming those is a LOT of work, perhaps worth doing, but that work takes time and space and should be undertaken genuinely, that is under the presumption that there is no guarantee the relationship will resume. It's work each has to do for oneself. Over time.

Originality

I speculate on phases that I think each artist has to pass through, developmental phases like that of an infant to an adult. For example, I think each artist has to reach a stage where they are willing to actually put their work out there for consumption, another usually later stage is learning to ask people to pay for your art.

I'm not sure where it is, but I think an artist needs to free themselves from a yoke of originality. Which isn't particularly fair to label as 'originality' I just lack a better word. But that's perhaps why I feel compelled to write about it. I was watching a certain somewhat popular band play the supporting slot for Erykah Badu when it hit me, the trouble with originality.

As an ideal, it tends to be overstated. I mean, people often treat 'originality' and 'creativity' as synonyms which isn't fair, being creative if merely engaging in the act of creating. It doesn't necessitate being original as well. Many creatives are dedicated to very rigid forms, the beauty of what they create driven by the adherence to the rules of those forms.

But when I say 'originality' is over stated, I think many artists get into their head the pursuit of some holy-grail. Some wholly original work, a quantum creation plucked from the ether that bears no resemblance to any preceding piece of art. An immaculately conceived idea.

Hok sput.

It's bullshit. Hogwash. Quantum breakthroughs do occur. But it's rare. The problem I have with artists caught up in originality, is as near as I can articulate this:

It doesn't produce good art.

Whatever that means, here's what I mean - 'originality' isn't an aesthetic as such. It just means without precedent. You wan't your art not to resemble anything. It doesn't matter how it doesn't resemble anything.

That's a very hard thing to try and imagine. It's a very hard thing to avoid by accident, it would take a lot of research to figure out every form thus far created, and then avoid them all. I don't think anybody does it.

What artists tend to do when aiming for originality is attack the problem in very predictable ways. They attack the foundations, break the forms. A much lighter challenge than taking an existing form or genre and then creating a wholly new iteration of it.

So they attack the underpinning, and create... a mess. Those striving for the original tend to produce shit that hurts the ear drums or waters the eyes. They take existing rules and break them. But it's always the big obvious rules. Not a partial deconstruction, and the original works wind up being predictable and cliched. The contemporary and avant garde tend to resemble each other as much if not more than the works of antiquity.

Those striving for originality so rarely achieve it. Which is to be expected.

I find the pursuit quite juvenile, in the egocentric moody teen years of being an artist. Where one draws or paints or writes or composes to express themselves as unique, special, a rebellious identity. They create in an attempt to create themselves, a self they hope is worthwhile.

Just create because you love creating, that you deal with a subject you are into. If you can't manage that, create because you are getting paid.

I often think about Einstein and just what chain of events lead him to sit around contemplating the curvature of the universe. I mean would it ever occur to you to think about that? The geometric qualities of space and time itself? It never occured to me, and I probably got taught more in year 11 physics than was understood by most physicists of Einsteins age. Admittedly a year 11 student is never going to go deep. But I raise Einstein because that's imagination. Almost an unrivaled imagination, but I don't know. Maybe you mixed in the right circles and curvature of space and time seems a very obvious thing to concern oneself with.

I'm going to postulate that Einsteins are rare, and I imagine it takes that kind of imagination to come up with something truly original. The vast majority of people don't have it. What we see at the cutting edge of art I think, are people who aren't obsessed with being the cutting edge, and never were. They were obsessed with something, something forgotten or overlooked by most, but was commonplace to somebody somewhere. And through their obsession with this overlooked subject they made it new again.

That's not originality, that's love.

Why do artists take drugs?

Which 'why?' are we asking, Dan Dennett may be able to differentiate and explain but I can't. I imagine the 'why' as an explanation eg. 'why artists take drugs' is no different an explanation from why anybody does.

I found this question hard to answer, because there's really less compelling reasons for an artist to do drugs than, as per the Jerry Seinfeld bit, an accountant. Yet the acceptability, indeed the expectation of artists taking drugs is categorically different from non-artistic vocations.

A career in the arts, specifically as a content creator - an artist as such, and not any of the peripheral para-artistic careers (gallery curator, record executive, talent scout etc.) - you are pursuing a profession I would characterize thusly:

low odds of success, high potential payoff.

Which is to say, if you were to compare being an artist to opening a milk bar, what you would find is that in the history of milk bar owners, you would find a lot of financially comfortable and secure small business owners achieving pretty consistent standards of living, with a peppering of failures. The reverse would be true in the history of artists, you would find a vast nameless diaspora of failure, people who slowly bled to death or simply gave up trying to eek out a living from their art, peppered with a few well success stories.

But what you will find, is that the best day of being a milkbar owner ever, wouldn't even rate compared to the best day of the successful artist. The potential upside of owning a milk bar, is kind of capped. Can you for example, imagine a milk bar owner's work leading to an email inbox flooded with thousands of messages from strangers telling them how much their work meant to them? Tricky right, you are already imagining heroic acts that have little to nothing to do with the operation of a milk bar, like rescuing a child from a burning building. But I put it to you that it's pretty easy to imagine this happening to an artist, because of their artwork.

Gee, tohm, you wrote a long two paragraphs, but what is your point? My point is, that if you are in the business of being an artist, you are going for such a reward, such an achievement. The feeling of being inundated with the validation of strangers as to just how great your work is. A level of recognition unobtainable to most. You want it, even though it may well be unobtainable to you. You are looking to overload your neural reward systems, reserved for exactly such achievements.

Now take a fairly innocuous drug like XTC, successfully re branded to MDMA. A drug I looked pretty hard at taking. I should say in due dilligence, that I never took it, nor any other restricted substance, probably because by and large my motivations were poor for raising the question in the first place and also because ultimately it breaks one of my ruling rule of thumbs - risking something important to gain something unimportant.

Anyway, the thing about drugs, is that they work and in the short-term they can 'solve' problems. But consider my risks as an artist myself - I have these dormant, latent reward systems waiting for some event in my environment to trigger - kissing my soul mate, having a successful exhibition, running faster than I've ever run before etc. One of these events causes dope to release in my brain hit all those receptors and let me know that I am doing something right.

Or I can take a drug, that hits all those receptors anyway regardless of my external reality. What could be more damaging to your career as an artist?

I'm told, MDMA feels great. And anybody who ingests it, is going to feel something.

But this is also true of running a marathon. The difference being that people who run marathons are less inhibited about broadcasting that they do and they feel people should in the public domain, more so than recreational drug addicts. But in contrast somebody who pushes marathon running, is often regarded as self-righteous, and the idea of spending a year training for a marathon to obtain that high is seen as justifiably dismissable - no doubt because of the time commitment, the difficulty of starting, the demands for lifestyle change etc.

But among artists particularly, despite the demonstrable damage and risks of drug use (legal or illicit) EVEN AFTER discounting damage caused by ineffective anti-drug legislation (eg. when weed possession was still criminal) cannot shake the stigma of somebody who declines the experiment with being 'closed minded'.

Which perhaps is the hook that gets most aspiring artists. they should be open to altered states of consciousness. But before moving too far away from the 'fucking with the reward system' counterargument, let me draw this one last line between running and being an artist (of which I am both) is that it is hard to imagine, and I imagine incredibly rare to find a runner that before/after a run shoots some morphine or other opiate to stimulate the exact same reward response that they get from running.

Yet for some reason, for an artist, in between actually completing and releasing works of art that they should stimulate the exact same reward centers through cocaine or MDMA. I can imagine, because running is addictive, injured runners getting hooked on painkillers, certainly, but I don't hear of runners taking painkillers in the off season.

Believe it or not, I often actually argue with myself. A lot, and most of this is done before writing a blog or conversing with a friend. And the best counter argument I could come up with is that the analogy is a poor one. One could argue, that recreational drug use is to an artist, what training is to a runner when compared to the actual marathon.

There's even that Bill Hicks bit that featured on the Aenema recording of Tool:

“You see, I think drugs have done some good things for us. I really do. And if you don't believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor. Go home tonight. Take all your albums, all your tapes and all your CDs and burn them. 'Cause you know what, the musicians that made all that great music that's enhanced your lives throughout the years were rrreal fucking high on drugs. The Beatles were so fucking high they let Ringo sing a few tunes.”

The thing is, this characterisation has always stuck in my craw, much as I love Bill Hicks. 

Read this:

Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does?... The only time it isn't good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.

It's by Ernest Hemingway, and I think better sums up the role of drugs in most artists lives. Because when I went searching for it, I found it remarkably difficult to find art produced under the influence of consciousness altering substances, which is to say, it's hard to find evidence that drug use ads much to creative output. 

The role of drugs in most artists lives, is as medication. If it aids or abets the creation of art in any way, it is probably in the alleviation of symptoms of depression and other trauma that render one unable to produce art at all. But Hemingway himself an alcoholic, wrote cold. Just as I find it hard to believe that Pink Floyd when in the studio, tripped on LSD to compose. It does not necessarily mean they didn't, just that with my layman understanding of music and composition, Pink Floyd's music (Gilmour era at least) always struck me as far too deliberate and coherant.

Compare that with every piece of art that accompanies new age spirituality. I am only an expert in what I like, but I find psychadelic art generally as ugly as shit, and if you have to drop a pill to really 'get it' then it's ugliness can be joined by it's unimpressiveness. 

People who have used MDMA have self-reported to me experiencing super enhanced empathy, having been sober around MDMA influenced people, I can assure you their empathy is actually not happening at all. In the same manner, I do have the experience of feeling extra-charming when drunk, and I have enough first and second hand experience to tell me this is not the case.

Thus drugs as training are bogus, alter your consciousness and you alter your ability to track reality. Despite the popularity of the New Age movement, it is a movement most certainly on the fringes, and not the sweeping innovation that Islam was in a time where the spread of ideas was much slower. The reason being that people eating mushrooms and connecting with a higher consciousness, the 'Other' that speaks to them the secrets of the universe, seem incapable of bringing back anything that really makes a compelling case when not tripping on shrooms. 

It is harder for me to deny, particularly speaking from zero experience, that trips can serve as inspiration. I just am living the proof that it is unneccessary, and I suspect the inspirational yield from drug experimentation I would evaluate as quite exceptionally low when compared with dating somebody, travelling, reading books, seeing movies, listening to music or even studying economics. 

Way that up against the risks of ingesting neurotoxins, associating with dealers (who are partaking in criminal activity, bringing with it risks whether the legislation is just or not) associating with drug users, your having undiagnosed mental issues...

which reminds me. My mum bought me this comic book called 'marbles' which was very much on this point, the author being diagnosed with Bipolar or Manic-Depression, the book is in essence a lengthy documentation of her reconciling this with her art. It features much drug use as well. It is well worth reading if you are interested in this stuff, my reason for raising it is because it taps into the question of correlation-causation of mental illness and creativity.

I have a very strong view on this point. I feel to the depths of my bones, this is a correlation-causation error, a myth, that is damaging to art itself. 

I got my view, like all my best stuff from basketball, an article in Slam magazine no less on race. And not even the article - one of those enlarged print excerpts layout people pepper over an article. It said to the best of my recollection 'there is a white Michael Jordan out there somewhere, except life is such that he is a dentist or lawyer or something.'

Not an exact quote, but it will serve. In the same way, allow me to bring in some economics (I am also quite vulgarly, an economist) say you are looking at two prospective careers - being an artist or being an accountant. As an accountant you are guaranteed an income every year of $100,000 for the rest of your career. But you are actually quite brilliant at art, showing so much potential that every year you have a 1 in 10 chance of making $1,000,000. But you have a 9/10 chance of making no money at all.

In economics we would call these two outcomes 'actuarial equivalents' meaning that their probable value is actually identical. After a decade you would expect to make a million dollars.

This scenario is fanciful, and lest I be criticized I know I'm leaving out the time value of money, and even beyond the realm of economics, the gamblers fallacy is actual not fallacious here - if an artist made $1,000,000 one year their chances of making the same amount the next year would sky rocket, because success like interest compounds.

But, let's say in principle, it's close enough - functional if fanciful. Here's the thing, money wise - most people choose to be an accountant. What we know, is that people are bias towards the certain $100k, over an uncertain $1M. (though you may not be persuaded if you watch enough Deal or No Deal) 

Now, add to our scenario Mental Illness, a debilitating one like bipolar, depression, schizophrenia etc. suddenly the choice is drastically altered. Many mental illnesses make being an accountant unfeasible, debilitating and at best much much more difficult than the rest of the playing field.

But not so for art. Ruby Wax in her show at last years comedy festival, pointed out that she was able to hide her depression so long, because her job enabled it. An actress can disappear for weeks at a time in a way that accountants can't. 

Being an artist is very different from other jobs, the uncertainty of outcome is actually justified. For one it is very peak and trough, times of intense (almost manic) productivity, preceded and followed by periods of intense inactivity (that can be quiet depressing). Deadlines tend to be flexible, as does payment.

Enter then a dichotomy of conditions to be an artist: The first is that you are among the minority of people who are risk seekers - the utility of losing a gamble (ie, not making any money for 9 years) doesn't effect you as much as the thrill of winning the gamble (making a million once in a decade). If you are like me, then the thought of making a steady $100k per year means nothing to you at all. Is almost incomprehensible. Winning the long odds is the only thing that gives you meaning.

The second, is that you simply don't have a choice. Art is the only job that offers you equivalent prospects to what your mental state consciously or unconsciously rules you out of. Yes, you can be an undiagnosed bipolar, depressive, schizophrenic and still gravitate towards the arts. Innate in you is the understanding that you aren't cut out for a regular job.

And so you are Ernest Hemingway, John Lennon, Janis Joplin, Karen Carpenter, Vincent Van Gough, Michelangelo ...etc. You are a working artist, with a mental illness or personality disorder, and a subsequent drug addiction. These conditions are far more common than being an entrepreneur - a risk taker. And often people that really had no choice, and subsequently took no risk, are labelled risk takers, even though they were almost certain to fail in the secure career paths available to most.

They medicate their mental illness, do their artistic works when they can, and survived to be remembered.

But just because there's a high correlation, doesn't mean we conclude that there's any truth that drug use is beneficial or necessary for artists, nor can we say the same of mental illness and hardship. 

Thankyou art, for providing some of life's worst treated but most beautiful people with hope, with a livelihood and with meaning. Art is almost certainly a better treatment for suffering than drugs are. 

But if you are an artist, I for one feel there is no reason to take drugs. No good one anyway.

Negatory

Today I saw something really cool, it was an AA 3 month medallion. My friend showed it to me. An object that in his hand I felt was a source of intense pride and intense pain.

There needs to be a word for that specific epiphany you get when you realise something well known is in fact true. It's like a blazing ray of white light illuminating something incredibly obvious. Often a truism.

It's hard to do the right thing.

For me this has finally reconciled the presence of the word 'should' in our vocabulary. I always hated the word, to me it was something always uttered as a wine, by those not wanting to deal with the world as is. Yet much as I felt 'should' was a word I never wanted to hear, there are obviously achievable and desirable states for the world, for your world to be in.

Thus while I still don't want to hear how you feel the world should be to better serve you. I want to see everyone for their own sake do what they should do.

I find it hard to elaborate from here into some examples without it seeming like I'm trying to excuse myself on the historical record. Just that if I were to take a gamble, I would say that life will throw at almost everyone problems for which the solution is unpleasant.

One of the most basic tensions in our life is between short term and long term payoffs. The stuff we should do, tends to always pay off long term, and cost us short term. It requires of us courage and patience. It may even feel bad, and exact a toll on us. When you are dealing with love, it exacts a heavy toll to do what's right.

 When a man needs a woman's love so much
It can be a beautiful love story

But not all love is beautiful 

It's that last line that is the heart of the matter. Sometimes, it seems the best course of action is to stand up to people we love and who love us. Just because that's the way it is. And this is the lasting trouble, the lasting pain and suffering that we can live with, and without.

The guiding rule-of-thumb, how do they (/does it) make you feel? is tricky here, because it's hard to remember pain, and the most painful thing to relinquish is hope. Here, it's the lesser of the shitty feelings. You can feel bad about giving them/it up, but you need to remember that it's not as bad as they made you feel.

Perhaps the saddest thing about having to say no, to take a negative stance, is that it's easier to be made to feel shit, than to be responsible for feeling shit, even if the two don't even compare.

Good luck everybody, life can most definitely be hard.