Workshop Notes - 02/15/2024
In her recent essay, Lora Mathis shared 21 ways to keep her creative spark alive. I loved this list, because it was honest. It wasn’t some bullshit list you would see fucking spackled all over the holes in our crumbling infosphere. You know what I am talking about, don’t you? I am talking about some weird article you might find published in the harvard business review, written by someone who gave up that spark long ago to write fluff pieces for business and tech magazines.
No, it was real, because it represented little distilled bits of wisdom from an actual person engaged in keeping their creative spark kindled. Instead of listening to people who study creativity, can we please just listen to people who actually have designed their lives around creating things? Is that too much to ask? I certainly don’t think it is, and keeping that spark alive could not be more important today. We need to protect that spark like its the pilot light in our heater that we need to not freeze to death. Yes, it’s that high stakes to me.
Mathis’ second suggestion has been resonating with me these past few weeks.
“Move between mediums. If you are a writer, try working with some material that will cause you to use your hands. Make magnets out of air dry clay. Try candle making. Carve a linoleum block. If you’re a visual artist, try writing a poem, or singing a song. Nothing has to come of this. It does not have to be shared. Practice something that makes you use your body in a different way. When in doubt, dance.”
This has been so helpful for me lately, as I have tried to navigate working on this project in late stage capitalism. Sometimes you just gotta take a different direction, another one of Mathis’ suggestions, in order to get yourself outta that weird “creative content optimization consultant” bullshit. And, before you @ me, it is bullshit, even if we have to play the game sometimes to eat food and shelter ourselves. It’s so patently absurd to me that, as a species, we created wheels, ways to harness fire, and grow food, but we now spend our precious free time listening to some content consultant tell us what is working in the algorithm now. We all deserve to get run over by the first stone wheel ever created that is lit on fire by an ancient funeral pyre light from locally-harvested mugwort. Ok, maybe not bludgeoned, but maybe chased by said historic nightmare fuel until we are good and scared. That might knock some sense into us.
I have been using photography to scare the brand strategy right outta me. Specifically, I agonized for weeks on whether to buy a $1000 Ricoh GRIII, which would be my point and shoot. I decided that I would rather not imperil my financial well being for a point and shoot, so I bought a $65, 8-megapixel, plastic digital camera from Camp Snap. There are two main benefits to this approach. The simplicity of the camera has allowed me to put my phone away. The Camp Snap has a viewfinder, a flash, and no other settings. I can store up to 2,000 shots on its tiny memory card and can connect it to my PC with a USB-C cable. This camera has quickly replaced my phone as what I take photographs with. I can just leave my phone in a bag or my pocket and stay off the darkwebz. It’s also compact enough to fit in my back pocket of my jeans, which enables me to take it any where with me.
These two benefits have allowed me to start writing stories with the regular churn and ephemerality of the city I live in. For those of you who also struggle with anxiety or OCD, you already know the benefit of getting off your phone and burying yourself into the world around you. I have found that the more I am able to fully inhabit the world and get into relationship with everyday reality the easier it is to set my anxiety and OCD on the shelf for a while. That’s when the imagination can run wild and I can create art that tickles my fancy. I like to let my eyes find themes and storylines while I am walking and riding around. Then I just start looking around for opportunities to take shots within those themes. When I am doing this, it feels like I am collaborating with my city. It feels like I am just documenting the glistening dew that presents itself in this space where all these dramatic interconnections play themselves out in a grid of asphalt, brick, and greenery.
A quick note from our sponsor: Who Gives a Fuck If Anyone Sees It (“WOFGAIAS”). WOFGAIAS is your go to source for leaving behind those feelings that you have to make art for anyone but yourself. With WOFGAIAS, you can put the litral middle finger up to the voice inside your head that keeps poking at you when it says, “WELL, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH THAT?” Instead, with the help of WOFGAIAS, you can rest in the glorious anonymity of being an animate meat sack that is interacting with the great web that connects us all by creating little love notes to the universe and ourselves with our art.
My favorite series right now is inspired by my friend Cliff’s art project, Beige on Biege, where he documents the interesting color and shape play that results when folx have haphazardly painted over graffiti. This may be familiar to you if you are one of the 80 people who follow along with my Instagram stories. I frequently post photos of the walls where mismatching shades of beige, white, or grey paint create interesting arts of work themselves. Well, you shoot walls long enough with an imagination like mine, and the walls start talking to you. Recently, as I was shooting photos of two particular walls near me, an interesting idea occurred to me. What if these were the remnants or markers of portals to other dimensions that have fallen out of use or are delipidated.
This ids no doubt influenced by finishing Benson and Moorehead’s film “Something in the Dirt” recently. That story spins a yarn on the thinness of the veil between different dimensions in an unremarkable neighborhood in Los Angeles. It is place-based story, in the vein of Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, of how an everyday neighborhood has a historical, metaphysical, and magical depth to it that spans countless generations. In fact, there is a scene where Aaron Moorhead’s character John Daniel’s takes off the cover of a boarded up window, like in “previous interdimensional travel experiments, 4,” and finds a stone tablet from 1910s Los Angeles that was used to design the city’s grid in the shape of an occult symbol. When I think that about the places that I move around here in Denver, I can feel the heft of the layers of reality that have been transposed onto this place. Denver, itself, is literally a terra-formed world, grafted onto a high-desert plain. Consequently, I live in an ever-evolving, colonial fever dream that tried to stamp out the possibilities of any Indigenous futures in this space where the south platte river flows. And yet, there are still Indigenous, Asian-American, Pacific Islander, Black, and Latinx futures being written here. Any one of these portals I see in the alleys I traverse could be a pathway toward those futures or lead me to an occult tablet containing ancient secrets. Well, at least that’s what I would like to see happen.
Album of the Week - Flying Lotus “Until The Quiet Comes”
I was doing the post-date-night culture crawl with Lily this past weekend, where I force her to go to the book store and record store after our large meal out, when I came across a nice little collector’s moment. I went into Twist & Shout and they put on Flying Lotus’ “Until the Quiet Comes.” I was literally ready to check out when it came on. I did a u-turn, made a b-line for the back of the store, and found the LP for the record. Now, I am sitting here with my headphones off listening to the record in my basement. That’s what I love about record stores. They are bastions of surprise. Sure, you can go into a record store with an agenda. (Full disclosure: I have gone in the last two post-date-night-culture-crawls with a specific record in mind to purchase at T&S and have found it! Think about that! That’s nuts.) However, its much more fun to let the universe pick a record for you. That’s why this record is the album of the week. I would in no way disrespect the almighty, gelatinous glob on high for the gift of this record.
Anyways, as always, I am so grateful you are here. Thanks for being the best pals on the planet and making me feel like I matter.
Best,
James
James, these workshop notes really get me. I do love the meaty Sunday releases but these workshop notes... wow.