Works of Art
from 
theidiot
We forget that we have majesty attached to the ends of our legs.
What Color
What color will she dip her toes into— sunrise blush or ocean sigh? Will it shimmer with forgiveness, or bloom as memory in springtime light?
Perhaps the hue the moon once wore when she waltzed with the tide, or the secret shade that glows between her breasts.
Whatever she chooses, the world will hush to watch— for beauty bends its knee to witness such small, holy things.
As for Me
As for me—no hand will tread upon these feet. Alas, they are mere stumps for trodding.
I sally forth to build a small respite for an old woman, where she may sip her coffee and gaze upon her kingdom— to reflect on the life she lived and the life still waiting to be lived.
#essay #100daystooffset #writing #sxs
The Deception of Simplicity
from theidiot
“Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.”
Soundtrack:
Pieces of Eight – Styx (1978) The Promise Ring – Jon Anderson 1997
There are so many terrific and enjoyable creative minds in the world. I don't think man was made to function at the intellectual or creative speed we are asked to. And it's mostly a request by the monied, the powerful, the technocrats—they need us more than we need them.
The Machine and the Muse
A creative mind can be just that with nothing more than imagination, a pile of rocks, or a marking tool. But we've been driven to believe that for our creativity to be valid, it must be packaged promoted and sold.
Enter social media.
We make, make, make and the techbro's take our work, which we give FOR FREE, in the hopes of some kind of recognition or validation. But, we can't keep up. There just aren't enough hours in the day to feed the damned algorithm with content, so we're all looking for an edge, the thing to get us just one more post, one more video, one more—thing. Maybe THAT will be the one to move the masses to love us and support what we are doing.
What a joke. What an abomination of a joke.
In desperation, we start looking for tools to help us make faster. You can't speed up creativity, it happens at the speed of thought. It always will. Producing the song, dance, prose or painting is the part that takes time.
No problem! Tech-bros to the rescue: here's A.I.! It will solve the pesky problem of not being able to produce FAST enough by shortening the gap between your idea and clicking upload.
The Digital Demon
It started with spell-check, now it's writing our songs, playing our music, drawing our pictures and making our videos. We just have whisper to the digital demon our invocation of creativity and ZAP: our idea exists. Only slightly bastardized, a bit off. Still very cool looking and if we're honest, better than we'd have done without the electric god.
So faster and faster we go. Years became, months. They became weeks. And now those weeks are days, hours and minutes. Humanity is pumping out creativity faster than we never conceived.
The irony, the rub, the kick in the god damned teeth: Every ITERATION is just more REPETITION.
When was the last time you saw something that didn't remind you of another thing. And not in an easter-egg-I-didn't-notice-it-at-first kind of way (think X-wing battles in Star Wars and the delight you had when you learned they were modeled after WWII dogfights). I mean every 'creative' product is now just reconstituted thing from before.
Oh, there's the occasional spark. But mostly, we're just retreading the same vehicles created in the first three-quarters of the 20th century.
Everything has been said before. Ironic, I know.
In Praise of Simple
The rambling preamble is to comment on the delight of minds like Austin Kleon.
He's written a clutch of books like Show Your Work!, Steal Like an Artist, and the one that put him on the map, Newspaper Blackout.
The thing Mister Kleon nailed was: Simplicity, he was ahead of the people-don't-read-anymore curve and his reconstituted work felt like anyone could do it.
Newspaper Blackout in particular felt like something anyone could achieve. I tried it. Anyone cannot.
And that's the point of this semi-screed: The simple stuff is the hardest, but it's also what we enjoy best. The simple song lyric which hits just right (I Love you drawn to a crescendo), the simple image (a banana taped to a wall). Like Miles Davis said, it's not the notes, it is the space between them.
The Wolf is learning that simplicity isn’t silence — it’s restraint. And restraint is the hardest art of all.
#essay #100daystooffset #writing #rant