MT White
The Artist’s Fortitude
Fame pt II

David Lynch was well-known enough before 1990 but that’s the year his fame peaked with Twin Peaks on television, Wild at Heart in theaters and his directing the commercials for the campaign promoting Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album.

But Twin Peaks was soon cancelled, and by 1992 Lynch’s popularity seemed to have completely reversed. The critics panned his film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, calling him and his American style of surrealism old hat and even his comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World was cancelled. “It was a bad year,” Lynch said. But he kept painting, kept doing photography, and kept making movies in his compulsive obstinance. He just continued what he did before 1990. Retrospectively, did he just spend those years painting, the four years struggling to make Eraserhead while delivering newspapers, followed by ups and downs making films, just to get one year of peak fame? I don’t think so.

BUT!

I also don’t think Lynch wants to be the anonymous guy painting in his studio since he’s embraced the online world of self-promotion more than others. Before ever making films, he traveled to Austria to apprentice under famed expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka (only to come home quickly). He applied to the AFI film program—the premier film school in the US—before ever making Eraserhead (shot in the barn at the AFI premises) and took work at major studios for films like The Elephant Man and Dune. He’s admittedly obsessed with old Hollywood icons like Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth. He played the Hollywood game. None of this happened accidentally. There was at least some intent behind it. To Lynch’s credit, he did retain most of his artistic integrity through the process, refusing major offers (like directing Return of the Jedi) over more personal work.

With Lynch’s example and others, I’d contend that fame is rarely accidental. As poet Czelaw Milosz wrote, “Life rarely takes care of itself unless human beings decide to take care of themselves.” Someone like Solzhenitsyn intended to win a Nobel Prize. He intended it before he ever wrote one word: “I had heard of them (the Nobel ceremonies) from someone, I forget who it was, in the camps. And at once drew a conclusion in the spirit of our country…that this was just what I needed to make my great breakthrough when the time came,” reasoning, “No one, of course, wants to be the author only of ‘posthumous works’; live just long enough to see yourself in print and you can die happy.” It was the same Solzhenitsyn who walked into the offices of Novy Mir, the premiere literature publication in the USSR, to submit his manuscript for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He claimed to be nervous—he probably was!—reluctant—probably was!—even noted he thought he’d never see his work published in his lifetime—probably true! Frustration, and even resignation, mix in the sediment of our goals—especially as we get older and they seem more distant on the horizon. But no matter how much the sun has set, the sun—the prize—is still in our line of sight. The desire for fame or recognition, and the barriers life presents in the way, can lead to frustration and resignation, producing an overwhelming cacophony, and you don’t know where one thing starts and the other begins.

“You know how good CONTENT is, don’t you?” a friend asked me when he read an early manuscript.

Of course I knew. As I wrote it, I thought I had something special. I wanted everyone to know. But there were doubts along the way. It hasn’t sold many copies, so the doubts are even greater after the fact. But I trust my friend’s assessment because he has good literary taste. His praise should be satisfying enough, I suppose. But it isn’t. I want others to know, and at the very least living authors I admire to read and respect it. But that isn’t for me to determine. I can’t control when or what they read. Maybe people aren’t ready for CONTENT. Maybe they never will be.

Remember, fame and everything downstream of it is temporal and however much we intend, like 1990 for Lynch, it’s not so much fame that is fickle but the determinants of said fame, re: the “audience”, something we have little control over. Twin Peaks was a popular show for one year but its ratings fell and the taste for the show waned. Why? Bad writing? The fact it was scheduled on a different night? Audiences found something better to watch? Probably all three.

Audiences lose their taste for something for a variety of reasons. When I was a kid, I recorded the cover of Cat’s in the Cradle by Ugly Kid Joe off the radio. When my cousin visited, he played it over and over again. Listen. Rewind tape. Listen again.  

Rewind tape. Over and over. After that moment, I never listened to Ugly Kid Joe again—and I’m sure my cousin will say the same. The band had no control over it. Another song I recorded: Under the Bridge by Red Hot Chili Peppers. I listened to it daily, over and over. But then I stopped listening…until my little brother bought me the band’s greatest hits album years later. And I listened to them again…for about a month. Thinking about all this 15 years later, I downloaded the same album off Apple Music. Red Hot Chili Peppers had no control over my fickle mood. The only control they had was just consistently playing music, so they can have compilation albums or new material for me and others to discover once we are in the mood to listen and explore. But pop bands have a small window. Their young audiences “grow up” and then head for a new music that is more “adult” and don’t want the artists of their youth to grow up with them. Duran Duran had a more “mature” sound with their 1987 Notorious album, but their now adult fans wanted to listen to the more youthful music of Rio or Seven & the Ragged Tiger of 1983. They wanted to listen to the music of their youth to feel youthful, an audio fountain of youth. It’s only when a younger generation can revisit and appreciate the entire catalogue of a respective artist in perspective, that they get a worthy assessment and possibly greater accolades. In my case, I was a little young for Duran Duran’s prime, but my older brother liked them (in a way, the slightly younger initializing the first comprehensive retrospectives of their elder sibling’s favorite acts is a form of “little brother syndrome”). Sometimes the youth in older age start feeling a nostalgia now that they have some more disposable income, and if the musical act is still around, they can benefit with higher ticket sales and touring. But I digress, a little.

The same happens in all creative spheres, even among intellectual appreciation. I remember a college professor saying “Henry James was really popular when I was in college”, 100 years removed from his death but he was no longer “hot”. The Abstract Expressionists were a popular artistic movement until they weren’t. The Western was a popular film genre until it wasn’t. Trends, moods and concerns change. As they change, people who claimed to be admirers also change their assessment of their admiration. Walter Kirn, whose review of Infinite Jest helped jumpstart its fame, now thinks he overpraised it. Steppling related a story how he talked with others about Abstract Expressionism and they replied “I don’t think I ever liked it.” Titanic was the top film of all time…but now falls on top of lists like “The Worst Films Ever Made”. It’s akin to someone telling their lover, “I don’t love you anymore. I don’t know if I ever did.” In a way, they’re ashamed they got caught up in the tide of emotion and passion that accompanies love and are now trying to distance from it at low ebb. Or maybe they’ve discovered a new fact: “You’re not the man I thought you were”. When Solzhenitsyn started exploring historical literature, expanding beyond anti-Stalinism, he lost support among those closest to him. At other times, accolades turning to jeers is also a form of trying to justify a new love. Solzhenitsyn’s influence in post-Soviet Russia, after his return there, was minimized due to a Russian public, that formerly logocentric culture, had stopped reading literature. As Solomon Volkov noted, “The public writers were no longer writers and poets but pop musicians, film actors, and television celebrities, as it is everywhere else.”

No wonder artists like to easily portray themselves as martyrs. Tarkovsky enjoyed fame with his first feature film, Ivan’s Childhood, winning the top prize at the Venice Film Festival (having a giant like Jean-Paul Sartre championing his film!), only to meet frustrations with the films proceeding. He called his diary Martyrology, even though he had the full support of Mosfilm to helm his films and eventually European financing. Echoing the Hagiographies chapter, many artists have a tendency to participate and lead their own mythmaking, martyrdom being a recurring feature. But many knew what they were getting into. But, with fickle crowds and patrons, it’s easy to feel like a martyr to circumstance. So, it helps to use said story to propagate your fame. People love a sympathetic hero.

And those who claim to never want fame? Upon some more reflection, it’s more than just a statement of moral superiority. If they didn’t want fame, they’d probably never think about it. “How do you like my chairs?” the barista, also a professional upholsterer, asked me as I sat in a chair at the café. Obviously, she wanted some recognition along with some conversation. The anonymous designers and builders of Chartres Cathedral? Maybe it never entered their mind. Maybe. The lack of authorship adds to its greatness. We never question its authenticity or its stature. Its very existence sits as a testament to it. The one who claims to not want fame? Maybe it’s a fear of fame. A premeditated egotistic statement of avoidance to avert disappointment, like a man who swears fealty to bachelorhood because he doesn’t “need” women or love. Maybe he’s just scared of failure or has been hurt enough. Ego and fear exist together. They originate in fragility, and fame is certainly dangerous for the fragile. Fear dominates the ego, because there’s always the chance you could be revealed as a fraud, not good enough. Failure could damage the fragile ego the most.

I would certainly know.

Troy Francis I Wasted My Twenties. Well, What Of It?

 

 

Troy Francis

 

I Wasted My Twenties. Well, 

What Of It?

 

An all-day rave in the afternoon. On pills and speed, it’s funny how you can mistake the lights in the club - the strobes, the spotlights and so on - for daylight. But daylight still shines brightly - outside, for other people. For those strange people who are living lives that have an aim - getting up early on a Sunday morning to exercise, to spend time with loved ones, or perhaps to work on a business or some other pet project.

 

But here inside, the music - storming house and techno - rages on, and we rage on with it. We. What a strange collection of people. People who would probably never socialise normally, but do so here because they have been brought together by chemical compulsion and anyway, you don’t actually have to speak to anyone because the beats are so loud.

 

It’s a pub that, every Sunday, gets requisitioned for a dance party. A bar in the corner selling cans of Breaker, shots, chasers and mixers and Red Bull. There’s couple of pool tables. They play party house and there are girls. Upstairs there’s another space where it’s dark, hard, banging stuff and it’s mainly lads dancing, serious, in their heads, deep in the narcotic dreamspace. The smell of sweat is everywhere.

 

Time passes erratically. Sometimes a minute seems like an hour, sometimes an hour seems like a minute. You forget where you are, then you regain awareness and you’re talking to some stranger. You don’t remember who you came here with - or if you came with anyone at all - and you have no idea where they are now. Your ‘normal life’ in the ‘outside world’ has become distant and mysterious - a concept unmoored from your current reality, where the kick drums and the basslines and the trancey topline riffs combine with the flashing lights crowd out all rational thought.

 

You’re talking to a girl with blonde hair. She’s from the South of Ireland. She’s wearing a pretty summer dress with a flowery pattern on it. Her hair is long and she brushes it back from her face when she speaks, which she does a lot, excitedly, probably because she’s on drugs too. Well, everyone is here. Who would come to a party like this at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon otherwise?

 

She smiles, you smoke (you could smoke cigarettes indoors in those days), and then you kiss, and her tongue feels rough and she tastes of nicotine.

 

‘I’ve got some more pills at home’, she says.

 

Well, ‘more’ always sounds like a good idea to you.

 

And so hand-in-hand, single-file, you push through the crush on the dancefloor until you reach the exit, and when someone pulls the door open the searing light of the sun forces its way in rudely,  an unwelcome stranger.

 

Luckily you both have sunglasses - well, this was the 90s, everyone wore sunglasses to clubs then. In the street a few spiky-haired guys in loud tartan trousers and ripped t-shirts, their faces white, their eyes crazed, dance to the beats and sub-bass that booms from within. A man and a woman, a married couple on their morning walk, presumably, look shocked.

 

You take a bus back to her place in a quiet area not too far from the centre. You’re still high and the movement of the bus brings you up higher. You are feeling invincible - as though nothing can harm you and - more crucially - nothing can bring you down either.

 

You get off the bus and thank the driver, who looks professionally nonchalant and ignores your outlandish appearance, and you and the girl roll out into the street. A short walk takes you to her place, a terraced house which she shares with three other girls. Upstairs, across the grubby and worn out carpet, her room.

 

It’s small, just big enough for a double bed and a wardrobe. Mercifully, the curtains are closed. She has some pills here somewhere, she’s sure. She searches in the wardrobe, in the drawers, until you take her by the wrist, pull her close to you, kiss, and then you fall down together on the bed.

 

Several hours later you’re back at the rave. You are alone. Did the girl come back with you or did she stay at home? Is she here somewhere? Did she go off with someone else? You have no idea, but it doesn’t matter because the pill you just took is starting to kick in, and a can of Breaker is bringing you up nicely.

 

The night, as they say, is young.

 

******

 

Most of my twenties were like that. I didn’t ‘do the work’. I didn’t ‘make myself into the best man I could be’. I didn’t accrue digital real estate and currency. Well, to be fair, the internet wasn’t around back then. Instead, I gave a free rein to all my basest instincts and my most urgent compulsions. I chased pleasure, in the form of alcohol, drugs and women. I thought I was having fun.

 

In fact, I was deeply unhappy and I was using these things - these substances and behaviours - to try and escape my past, a past that I wouldn’t come to terms with until many years later.

 

Your twenties is the first decade in which you have a far greater degree of freedom and autonomy than ever before (in most cases, at least). In the UK many people have left home and live with friends or flatmates. Some are still at university. Freedom is a double-edged sword though. On the one hand, it’s great - who wouldn’t want to be free, after all? But on the other, it can be hard.

Because when whatever boundaries you had as a child are removed and you can do whatever you want, then all of a sudden it’s up to you. Now you are steering the ship, but you’re doing so with no prior experience and - in my case at least - a good deal of naivety.

 

I went feral almost immediately, which is strange since we were brought up strictly by my parents. No doubt it was a reaction to the middle class strictures I’d faced, and an expression of my addictive nature. Young adulthood was for me a sweet shop, and I was the proverbial kid walking into it and gorging myself on as many sugary treats as I could get my hands on.

 

It was a time when I was far too focussed on trying to impress others. Emerging, blinking, from childhood, I was filled with a deep sense of insecurity and I wanted to prove everyone wrong about what I thought they thought of me. And so I set about dismantling myself, trying to prove that I was in fact a cool, tough, bad boy and not the bookish, quiet and shy individual I’d really been.

 

And it was this absurd desire to prove a point to people who’d never met me before that was to wreck my life for many years to come. Because everything I did - subtly or otherwise - was a reaction to what I imagined others might consider me. I wore ‘cool’ clothes to show I wasn’t a nerd. I listened to the hardest techno possible to show I wasn’t a fey simp. I drank a lot to be ‘one of the boys’. I took a great many strong drugs to demonstrate that I was a rebel with the constitution of a rhinoceros.

 

It’s common to talk about regrets - as in do you regret the past or not? But the truth is it’s immaterial - my ‘regretting’ my past will have precisely no bearing on it. The past just ‘is’ - like a rock. Regretting it will make no difference either way.

 

If I’d have been a go-getter at twenty and set myself up for life by creating some fantastic business would my life be different now? Probably. But you have to learn to love yourself and that includes loving where you are right now.

 

It is also common to say ‘my past made me who I am today’. But that’s not quite accurate. My past happened in the way it did because of the way I am, the way I always was. My present has unfolded this way because of the way I am too. Yes, cause and effect is real, but character is destiny, and the bloody-mindedness that impelled me to wreck my twenties is the same bloody-mindedness that has impelled me to forge a creative career in my forties. It’s merely a question of focus, and whether that bloody-mindedness is directed towards something generally positive or not.

 

The one thing that does displease me now, though, is the degree to which I was focussed on trying to impress other - indifferent - people. And if I were to offer a word of advice to my younger self it would be this: what other people think is irrelevant. Most of them will fall away anyway. 

 

The one thing you must always strive to do is be true to yourself.

PADDINGTON MANSIONS by Ernst Graf

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⦽ PADDINGTON⦽  

⦽ MANSIONS ⦽ 

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Any of you who have had the good fortune to know me for any length of time i.e. more than 2 minutes or more than about one paragraph of my writing, may find what I am about to say next pretty unbelievable but here we go.

Most of the time I hate seeing actresses getting nude in movies or on TV.

I am actually really quite prudish when it comes to this, not because I do not like to see their beautiful nubile young bodies & do not gain sexual arousal out of it, because I do, but rather it just makes me feel prurient, and I FEEL she is being exploited, just to get more people to watch the programme/film in the first place, and then to carry on watching all the way though just with baited breath, cock in hand, hoping she will whip them out again. And usually she does not. They flashed her tits, or her arse, or her pussy, just once, so now they know they have got a captive audience all the way to the end.

And that young actress maybe only had to expose herself for five seconds, long enough to titillate and captivate us, but now for the rest of her life she has to see her naked tits/arse/pussy on the internet, all over the internet. For her family to see, her mum & dad, to see, her kids to see, now or in years to come when they grow up. And all just for a five second quick thrill for us viewers, she has a lifetime of exploitation on the internet for which she will not receive any remuneration at all.

Most of the time it was so unnecessary for her to actually take her top off. We really did not NEED to see her breasts at that point or any other point. I think if directors want to have his actress take their clothes off he should just make a bona fide porn movie, and go all out, and I would no doubt absolutely enjoy it without reservation. There is a time and  a place for everything.

And yes I am hypocritical, for whichever actresses HAVE whipped their clothes off in mainstream TV or cinema, yes I do hunt down those photos/gifs/videos on the internet and enjoy them. But I think it is wrong that they were no doubt pressured into doing it in the first place. It is not that I am being a White Knight, just I hate the directors so cynically exploiting the male lustful gaze and using the girl’s tits in order to make more money for himself.

In a similar vein, I have a deep and abiding love and affection for prostitutes, ‘ladies of the night’, have fallen in love with many of them, but I really do not like these forums where men write up their ‘field reports’ and go into absolutely explicit blow by blow detail of EXACTLY what they did together. I think, even with a prostitute, what happens behind the closed bedroom door should be private between the two of you. It is abusing the girl’s privacy to tell the world exactly what you got up to. You can say she was beautiful, and offer a physical description yes, but it is not gentlemanly to describe the sex acts themselves. 

Like singers, pretty much all songs are about sex, but it is much better even in today’s lurid age to use euphemism, “I want to kiss you” is better in a song than “I want to fuck you”, even though we know kiss is absolutely a euphemism for fuck. Tove Lo had a great song called Habits about a sexually free girl not shy of looking for sex but told in a euphemistic way, but after that she started releasing one song after another whieh absolutely luridly started talking about her body parts & what she was doing with them, and it just came across as cringingly embarrasing and vulgar. If she had sung the same songs but used euphemism in every instance of the vulgar explicitness they would ALL have been better songs to my mind.

Yes, I love pornography, I love prostitution, I love sex dancers. But I also think it is all the sexier if one maintains a discretion about it in most cases. No, I dont always abide by this myself, but I think it is better when I do. I write about these things but I like to do so in a kind of romantic way. Like Marlene Dietrich looks magical in all those von Sternberg films because he blurred the screen. He put a filter over the lens when pointing at her. It is not all mechanical, Slot A/Tab B, even with a prostitute, or even watching a porn film, even watching a stripper, it is better if one brings emotions & affection & tenderness into the description as much as the act itself. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I think American porn is the WORST in the world. It is vicious, it is nasty, it is violent towards the women, the men fuck the girls like they actively want to HURT them. I much prefer European porn, as it seems to me it is so much erotic, the women are worshipped as erotic goddesses and it is all the more arousing for it. Most of the time the men never even take their tuxedos off. In British porn the men just look pathetically grateful to be getting any at all, like they can’t believe their luck.

 

There was some talk recently, some ‘online chatter’, accusing me of faking being a degenerate, and I said I hoped people DO think I am faking it and that I am really a church mouse spinsterish fellow, as that will just cover me even further. Knowledge is power, so if people REALLY know you they have power over you. However, if people THINK they know you but really have got it completely and utterly wrong then they are always going to swing & miss, they are NEVER going to be able to hit their target. If you're rich, dress poor. If you're happy, look worried. Constant misdirection. Always give your enemies false signals so they jump to wrong conclusions & therefore make the wrong moves. Like that 'covert narcissism' article I was reading a while ago. Out & out peacock narcissists are easy to spot & deal with; covert narcissists are much more dangerous. If I am thought of as a great degenerate & then I say, for example, that I hate it when actresses get naked in films, I am accused of being a fake! A phoney! You’re just PRETENDING to be a degenerate on Twitter! But you're looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I'm saying in real life I'm a very happy degenerate, but if you passed me in the street you might take me for a miserable tradcon. I am a covert Borgia rather than a grandiose Borgia. And this is partly from natural morbid shyness and partly deliberate misdirection.

In my heart and in reality I am a grandiose Borgia but in real life I live like a church mouse or at least I like people to think I do. On Twitter and in my books I'm honest. In real life I'm a liar. This is the 'double life'. Just like strippers and whores, they create a boring cover story to hide what they really do. I'm the same. Another reason why I feel so comfortable with strippers & whores.

Like Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Ernst Graf, Zorro, etc. etc etc. Boring tradcon by day to throw people off their tracks, superhero at night. The great Champagne Pup made a jocular comment this week, ‘True autism has never been tried’ and my instinctive reaction to that was ‘That is EXACTLY what my life has become’! I was in therapy on & off from 1996 to 1998, and I discovered it was something called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy which involves basically making you change your thinking so you can fit in with boring normal people again and be JUST LIKE THEM! Imagine. The horror. I chafed against this from day one to day whatever it was I gave up on it. I wanted to be myself to the nth degree and I finally concluded that was the way to rescue myself from my malaise, my despair, my whatever you care to call it. I lost approximately the first 30 years of my life to depression, fear of life. And then in 1999 I went for the first time to Europe, on a Grand Tour which blew my mind, and in that extremest of anomie and solitude and isolation I realised something important, which I now realise can be summed up as “True autism has never been tried”. I decided I would be autistic to the nth degree and exult in it. I would flaunt my autism in the pondlife’s faces. I would provoke provoke provoke them with my rampant autism and autism for me is always synonymous with auto-eroticism. The autistic man who cannot connect with people/girls around him will, surely?, always be drawn to strippers, pornography and prostitutes, won’t he? Or is that just me? To my mind autistic people should always be the biggest sexual freaks. “It’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for!” I have seen little other evidence of it I must admit. Maybe it IS just me. So, yes, from 1999 onwards I have turned myself towards ‘True Autism’ & that is my creed, and I thank Champagne Pup for only now giving me a name for it. I have actually coined another name for it— YELLOW PILL. Novalis wrote to Caroline Schlegel in January, 1799, “You have to create a poetic world around yourself and live in poetry.” I would say you have to create a pornographic world around yourself & live in pornography. This is the essence of my conception of ‘Yellow Pill’. Some 'Yellow Pill' truths: 90% of women you meet in a brothel you will not want to sleep with even if they said it was free. 90% of strippers you see you'd rather pay them to keep their clothes on. 90% of porn films you see in a porn cinema are so bad you won't even get an erection. So why on Earth keep bothering? It's like sifting mud for gold. Every now & again you will find a gold nugget, & that makes it all worthwhile. Then 'Yellow Pill' for one night becomes 'Gold Pill'. Looking back at my first three books I see now I was always depressed, in pain, cut up, feeling completely skinless and naked; things only start to change when I start drinking a lot near the beginning of the 3rd book, and commence a series of three visits to Munich and three visits to Berlin. After that I start to have pleasurable, thrilling, dramatic experiences, I open up like a flower, and start to bloom and blossom and flourish. I have broken hearts and tears and rages, but I am starting to have real experiences; I am really starting to grow, and it was allowing drink into my life that was the catalyst and the fuel for that. It was the combustion engine. If the pressure society put me under was the Bessemer Furnace that produced my writing, then alcohol was the combustion engine that got me moving and going places and doing things, which started to banish depression behind me like shedding a black cloak. I find it interesting to look back and analyse my own books, (of course I do! I love myself. I am completely self obsessed and inward looking) as if reading the books of someone else, and working out what kind of person was he, and how did he change over the years he writes about? The excruciating pain that lacerated my soul screams out of Autismus, Lotta, and the start of The Cold Icy Air of the Mountains. It is only when I start drinking more, and through that find the courage to start doing more naughty, sexual things on my travels in Europe, that the pain starts to be replaced by pleasure, and the incredible large-bosomed floozies of Berlin and Munich, and I start to come into myself. By the end of the third book and start of the fourth I am actually tired and wearied of all this pleasure and want something more real and substantial! The fifth will see me finally, after a long struggle (a 3-year struggle when I wrote not a word), having this something real, but after a year of marriage to a woman deeply loved, perhaps starting to regret this longing, and thinking perhaps be careful what you wish for! And indeed trying to wriggle my way back to the pleasure without substance of the previous few years. The sixth book I think will see me completely free once more and living a life of mindless pleasure once more, and that is where I am really up to now. As I always say, it is the strip clubs and the brothels that taught me how to live. First in Soho in London, then to Munich Schillerstraße and Berlin Stuttgarter Platz. In Vienna I never actually did very much; from 1999 to 2013 I only ever had sex with one lady of the night; it was only in the first months of 2014 that Vienna started to come to life for me, with the discoveries of the Fortuna and WSK kinos. Every day I do not see a stripper dancing naked on a stage feels like a wasted day. Every day I do not drink feels like a wasted day. I've decided I do not want any more wasted days. Yes, it will lead me soon to an early grave. So be it. Let me try to finish what I can. Breathtaking bravura. That is all. The breathtaking bravura of the way I live my life. The breathtaking bravura of a beautiful nubile girl getting up on a stage & starting stripping for the first time, and loving it. Can any man really understand the COURAGE, the GUTS, the BALLS, the BREATHTAKING BRAVURA of a young woman getting up onstage in front of a room full of men (& women) & stripping stark naked for a pound in a pot for the first time, & every time thereafter? Or the exhilaration? I have tried sobriety. For 5, 6 sometimes even 7 days at a time, on a regular basis, & I tell you honestly IT DOES NOT WORK FOR ME. They just feel like 5,6,7 completely wasted days of my life I've just slouched miserably to my grave for no enjoyment in return to show for it. No. I have decided—pretty much now—I will be respectable Dr Jekyll only as long as I have to be in order to earn the income I need to survive, but AT ALL OTHER TIMES I will be Hyde.

MT White
The Artist’s Fortitude
Fame

Who am I to write about this topic?

It’s easy to mistake narcissism for fame.

BUT!

In our modern era, it’s easier than ever to develop a degree of fame with a certain niche. The long tail is one feature of the social media world that is both positive and negative. You can reach an audience, but it can also give you a bloated sense of self-importance while also pigeonholing you at same time. For many, this may be enough. I’m reminded of those in my hometown of Bryan, Texas, who thought their position at the local Texas A&M University, or their monopolistic hold on a certain business in the town (like the artist Benjamin Knox who is kind of the unofficial court artist for the university or the local TV sports anchor), in which they wielded their fame with a disproportionate egotism. A couple of examples: 1) Knox allegedly told a co-worker of mine that his signing a document was a big deal with such a repulsive cockiness, she felt need to note it. 2) The local sports anchor, kind of an institution, tried to get a discount on some electronics at a local store by asking (without irony), “Do you know who I am?” Every small town, especially in the South, has their self-declared barons, a big fish in a small pond. Cyberspace is no different.

But it can give you an idea about fame, even if you haven’t appeared on Page Six or TMZ or been chased by paparazzi.

I think many artists want some fame or at the very least are curious about it. When someone tells me, “I don’t care about being famous,” I sense it’s just a protective statement either to not sound narcissistic or just declare themselves morally superior (a form of narcissism).

In a sphere like the arts, where “purity” is valued, it does make sense for one to be suspicious of fame and the famous, thinking they made some sort of devil’s bargain to attain it or (gulp) produced a work so amazingly generic that it appealed to a large number of people. But on the reverse side, one might want to have prestige, its own form of fame, lacking a monetary reward, as David Foster Wallace noted, “If you write philosophy books, you’re basically worrying a whole lot about what other philosophers think, and that’s just about it.”

It’s natural to want a modicum of recognition for your work because, let’s face it, in order to have any degree of influence you must be known by at least the “right” people, whether it be the powerful few or the masses.

Every artist referenced in this book had some form of fame, whether it be in their lifetime or posthumous. The latter case, like Vincent Van Gogh, or Franz Kafka is actually rarer than the former. Some like Dostoevsky, Braque, Gauguin, Fitzgerald or Herman Melville, were known commodities in their lifetimes, but their work became more appreciated and famous afterwards. Others, like Gore Vidal or Zane Grey, had their fame die with them.

I think many artists were inspired by a mass medium at the very least. I started drawing because of comics and to draw characters like Spider-man or Batman. Movies that awakened my sense of visual aesthetics as a teen, like Nikita, Brazil and Blade Runner, were not independent or experimental films but major releases. Up until recently, even the most avant garde work required some form of distribution and promotion in the biggest cities to gain notice. We know about early David Lynch or Stanley Brakhage or Chantal Akerman because someone found their works important enough to promote and distribute them. We know about the likes of Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock because Peggy Guggenheim gave him patronage and got his work displayed at uptown New York galleries. Niche fame, but fame and favor nonetheless; respect given by a certain set.

Most artists want art to be their sole concern, and today this requires income. This income is usually provided by a patron who feels that by paying you their investment will be returned (a publisher, a movie studio, an art gallery, a record label etc.), or a patron who feels they are nurturing a talent that has yet to be fully appreciated (this can be in the form of a person or an endowment or the same entities listed above). In literature, JD Salinger received carte blanche because his books sold but Cormac McCarthy needed grants from endowments to support his writing until his work alone could support him. Jim Harrison got $50,000 from his friend Jack Nicholson. In film, Steven Spielberg got a mostly blank check. Robert Altman and Woody Allen had the favor of certain studio bosses, regardless of box office performance. Someone with money or influence was aware of and appreciated their talent.

Fame, recognition, and the sometimes monetary rewards that follow are very much prerequisites for legitimacy, artistic or otherwise. Example: I gave a female receptionist a copy of an essay I wrote, but she’s yet to read it…and yet, there she is at her desk reading Viktor Frankl because her favorite YouTubers recommended it. Frankl was designated more legitimate and urgent to read than me (someone she personally knows) because of his past and who championed him. Such is life. In the US at least, fame also gives one a form of moral legitimacy, that somehow attaining success legitimizes every other aspect of one’s life, decisions both personal and public (notice how, regardless of respective political or religious belief, when a celebrity expresses their support for said belief, the adherents celebrate it). Actors think their celebrity gives their political views weight. A billionaire like Bill Gates thinks he can lecture about and determine a global vaccination protocol. Billionaires like Ross Perot and Donald Trump thought they should be President. Most self-help and motivational literature is geared towards helping and motivating one to “keep going” in order to achieve their “dreams” (which is success at whatever task). The social media app Cameo features mostly celebrities mostly bequeathing their admonitions to “hang in there”, to respective, unknown individuals, even though they were paid to say it, yet somehow seeing a celebrity mouth the scripted, yet personally directed words, like a cipher, somehow will divine something. As playwright John Steppling observed: “Ambition has replaced curiosity.” And really, that’s why I’ve mainly excluded the platforms of the internet, like self-publishing, streaming, social media etc. These are just mass, electronic extensions of the avenues always available to independent artists. One could always self-publish or self-exhibit, the tools have just become more sophisticated. But it’s rooted mainly in ambition, with success of the respective artist geared on sheer numbers, on volume, the masses determining what is of value (and since when has the crowd been deemed smarter or worthier in determining talent?). It’s all based on ego, meaning it is at the not highest level of engagement and thought but the lowest. Self-publishing used to be called “vanity publishing” for a reason.

Living in the success obsessed results oriented NOW can warp an artist’s work and (excuse the word) motivation to varying degrees. I remember watching a documentary about Karate in Okinawa. During a sparring session, the instructor, a strict, older Okinawan yelled at his British student for concentrating too much on “winning” rather than participating in the natural exchange of Uke (loosely translated as “receiving”), just letting oneself be in the moment of the fight instead of concentrating solely on the knockout blow or winning. Many Japanese arts stress this flow in a sense. In traditional combat sports, like Kyudo, Kendo, or Sumo, there are ceremonial actions that must be performed before the contest. The contest is certainly important but so are the ceremonial rites before. The same with a traditional art like Tea Ceremony. The Maccha prepared is naturally important but so are the rituals performed making it and the rituals of drinking it. It’s an appreciation of the entire flow and unity of things. An artist, purely chasing success, can corrupt this. As novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard noted about his work, “I knew so much about what people liked, I completely lost authenticity in the writing.”

In seeking success, the artist may upset their flow, denying a certain natural course of action, like making something opaque or confrontational (like Abstract Expressionist painting), and persuade themselves to make something easily digestible and “commercial” (like Bob Ross or Thomas Kinkaide). The audience or critics or influencers and their respective opinions will haunt them as they work on their creations. While this is certainly a natural state of affairs regardless—no one exists alone—it can become heightened and all-consuming about pleasing THEM, a (mostly unidentified) mass who the artist will probably never meet or at very most have limited engagement with, and yet, this mass looms like an invisible zombie horde because the artist wants their cash or approval. In our long-tail niche world, it actually might become more warped. The artist might not want to upset their hyper particular audience by going even slightly off-script—you don’t want to anger your core audience. The purity spiral can drain quickly into a struggle session…But we are citizens of this hyper-modern world and therefore are products of its time. We desire fame or at the very least recognition from either those more famous or whom we esteem, seeing it as the gods bestowing us some favor by just looking in our direction. Indie filmmaker and instructor Rick Schmidt, a person very much against the Hollywood system, noted how after all his struggles to make his film 1988: The Musical, he ran into a drunk Dennis Hopper at a film festival and received praise from the famous actor. The climatic reward of going through divorce and financial hardship for a film is a verbal pat on the back from a notorious yet washed-up actor? Whatever helps justify the struggle. To promote Schmidt’s book Feature Filmmaking at Used Car Prices, the copy states how the book is “credited with influencing filmmakers Kevin Smith, Vin Diesel, Tom DiCillo and many others.” The subtext is clear: You read this book, you too could be successful like the aforementioned. Forget the fact the contents of the book betray the back-cover sales copy (the introduction by Ray Carney immediately nukes commonly held notions of commercial filmmaking).

But Schmidt isn’t alone. Whenever I’ve had someone more widely known than myself praise my work, I’m quick to inform family and friends. I have friends who have done the same. It’s just in our nature. If Dennis Hopper said he loved my work, I’d probably say the ends justified the means.

But fame is mostly fleeting. And fickle.

Ire In The Age Of Doom-Posting, Pt. 3

Ire In The Age Of

Doom-Posting, Pt. 3

By Jon Hall

I’m sure at the end of my last entry, some were left questioning what I meant by the “old world” many have fled.

            The “old world”, as vague as it may sound, encompasses a very specific concept. The notion is complex and multi-faceted yet easily represented by the monolithic corporatocracies still standing over U.S. society like undead bastions of a vintage and distant time.

               

Consider this… we have found the secrets to eternal life and immortality, just not for us. Instead, the mascots and logos of the brands we buy will live forever and on.

               

Many speak of progress, but the “old world” has its name for a reason. For instance, another easy representation of the “old world” is Hollywood.

            Hollywood elite claim to be progressive and pioneering of social change. The reality is, the entertainment industry is a hive of manipulators and abusers hidden in plain sight, right under our noses.

            No true “activist” would have stood complicit and knowingly as such traumatic, gross abuses of powers occurred around them in the business. Someone focused a paycheck? Sure... but no activist with any ounce of integrity ever could have.

            Along with Hollywood, a large portion of “mainstream” media (movies, news, socials, television, video games, music) acts as the most versatile apparatus the “old world” has in their arsenal.

            Such “distractions”, mentioned in prior entries, that will occupy people’s minds and dampen any potential urges to think. After all, where’s the need to?

            The “old world” is all that and more. The “old world” is buying into fear, and hostility, and poison. It is the “Us Vs. Them” mentality baked into the headlines of major outlets like CNN or Fox News.

            An effective way in breaking through any programmed conditioning one’s mind might have fallen prey to is switching perspectives of thinking from a global or national level to an individual, personal one.

Face it, you can only change things you control. Duh, right?

            Going by this logic, what sense does it make to worry and stress your mind with unneeded, arbitrary information? You can’t control what the President is doing. Or what China is doing. You can’t control any violence or chaos, either, but it’s still soul-rending to be subjected to.

What you can control is the betterment of one’s self. Better habits, thoughts, and perspectives. Points-of-view not influenced by emotive-baiting headlines and reactionary social media, instead fostered on critical thinking as well as combating bias.

The ones fleeing from the “old world” understand one universal truth: everything has become arbitrary. Nowadays, we do things because we have to, and because we are told.

Down to how we spend our days, we are told to work to pay our bills so we do it. We buy and pay back into a broken system that benefits no average person (only the rich).

 

Is it any wonder of the exodus from this “modern” way of living?

 Ire In The Age Of 
Doom-Posting, Pt. 2
By Jon Hall

In PENICILLIN No. 3, I wrote that the symptom of a “programmed” (see also: “brainwashed”) mind is someone that still flocks for comfort under blanket terms like “left vs. right”, “democrat vs. republican”, “fox news vs. cnn”, and so on.

Preying on the vulnerable sensibilities of consumers they brainwashed, media companies manufacture hyper-sensationalized headlines hardwired to shape and form the opinions and views that comprise the political beliefs of their audience. 

A feedback loop if you will.

Politics has long been the primary bait media companies utilize to distract and occupy minds with, therefore politics is illusionary. A veil of smoke and mirrors with tantalizing, mesmerizing colors.

Consider this… the voting booth is often attributed as the only passenger any actual potential working-class Americans have in making changes to society.

 

Obviously: this column is meant for beliefs – even entire ideologies – to be questioned and criticized so “what-if’s” and downright absurd-sounding hypotheticals shouldn’t offend nor be met with any narrowminded perspectives.

               

“What if” we posit that voting isn’t any apparatus of change, instead labor.

The working-class controls the physical manpower enlisted in businesses of billion-dollar corporations nationwide. The working-class acts as the middleman between the American elite and their grubby piles of cash.

Yes, shove a copy of Das Kapital in my face and tell me this is nothing ground-breaking. What one might fail to realize is that the act of thinking critically itself may very well be.

            It’s true, there is no new thing under the sun. Men have thought, pondered, and philosophized on, well… everything for millennia prior to this current moment.

            For the thousands and thousands of years that have transpired, along with the discourse that occurred, one must contemplate that no matter what – perceptions or treading old ground be damned – the generations preceding us were not afraid to think.

            Nowadays? People do their best to get out of doing any thinking... Netflix. Hulu. YouTube. TikTok. A veritable endless dirge of content for anyone, anywhere.

            Everyone has willingly numbed their brains to the point of total apathetic calamity with their dopamine of choice.

Whether it be politics, entertainment, music, art, film, fashion (merely skimming the surface of potential areas of interest), there is truly something for everyone to drown themselves in…         

               

Well? Did you notice how I began to speak in blanket terms and absolutes? It’s persuasive, especially so If you don’t even know what to be on the lookout for.

These no-compromise hypotheticals so blasély established as factual reality by media companies are if anything far more dystopic than 1984 or Brave New World contemplated.

We are living amidst a society enraptured in the throes of “Plato’s cave”. So many (but not all, by any stretch of the imagination) have cozied up and mistook the dank and rough cave walls for grass under their feet, transfixed by the orchestrated and theatrical shadows dancing on the wall before them, hypnotic.

Others, dear reader, like me and you – are starting to notice undeniable truths. Others cannot as easily ignore and shove away the bitter reality sentenced to those held prisoner in the artificial society we’ve been chained to.

Some are beginning to leave the “old world”, and its fear-mongering tactics, behind.

▲ Still Just A Rat In A Cage ▲ by Temple ov Saturn (Joan Pope)