burrowing (slight return)

a common way of framing creative pursuits in our culture goes like this: whether or not anyone else likes what you’re doing is ultimately irrelevant. the process is its own reward. just follow your inner muse and you’ll be satisfied. increasingly, i think this is bullshit. not in the harry frankfurt sense that it has no connection to the truth - but in the sense that it omits something crucial. it's a half-truth, and one that can be a massive headache if you bank on it too hard. 

obviously, yes, getting high on your own inner world is the best feeling ever and has great spiritual value. but there’s a cost. in pursuing an idiosyncratic creative vision, in researching esoteric subjects, in aiming for a target no else can see, you’re digging a ditch between you and your community. suddenly, you look back and it's a chasm.   

but that’s not the problem, really. because there are a lot of ways to deal with that. the simplest is to be such a psychopath that you don’t give a damn, don’t have any nagging sense you should’ve spent all this time out working as an emt or volunteering at a food shelf. most famous artists are like that. another solution is to build up prodigious mental dexterity, enough to make constant jumps back and forth between your island and common land. however, keeping up such athleticism for a lifetime is very demanding. (james tenney rather pessimistically warned that this approach will break you eventually, citing the legendary charles ives.) and of course, there are the permanent solutions: ruefully shoveling the soil back into the mote and merging back into the commons, or holding out for the minuscule possibility that they’ll realize you’re a genius and start building towards you. but perhaps the best solution is to find a sub-community of people who will either make the jump with you or are able to shout across the rift.

what’s funny is that so often, in my experience, the same people reassuring you that the creation process is its own reward one day can be found bemoaning their own lack of worldly recognition a few days later. (many of these people i respect a lot!) so what’s going on? if you take the frame of noble self sufficiency and toil for its own sake as the whole truth, then the answer is simple: feelings of frustration are surfacings of inner impurity, personal character failings that need to either be stamped out or ignored. “oh, you’re actually wondering if all this time invested in something only you care about was worth it? how embarrassing!” it’s a mental loop i’ve already been through many times, in just a few minor undertakings. 

so that’s the deeper problem: the half truth of the creation process being its own reward gaslights you by ignoring its inherently isolating nature - ignores that the dark side is built in. no, the feeling of unease you get when you're off on your own and look back over your shoulder isn’t a failing. it just means you have some semblance of a conscience about how you spend your extremely limited time on earth. it’s an inevitable part of the journey, a force as primal as hunger and thirst. something not to be transcended but planned and accounted for. 

(don't remember where i read this, but in old age, eliane radigue apparently had the epiphany that she found collaborating on music more rewarding than working in complete solitude. i used to think that was stupid, changing your mind on that so late into the game, but i don't anymore.) 

elm street tangents

feel like having sus around for commentary drastically changed how i watched this film. movie night at my apartment became a less braindead affair than usual. if he’d been there when i watched tremors, for example, maybe i’d have gotten more out of it than “wow, a giant worm that kills people... cool!” but who knows.

"saturn exiled to the underworld"

in znore’s essay on mcluhan, he mentions that sound, in a vision-focused culture, is connected to the unconscious. it becomes entwined with repressed emotions. that thought goes through my mind a lot when listening to the soundscapes of my suburban environment. as safe and saccharine as it all looks, its sounds tend to be eerie: drones emanating from buildings, the sighs, wails, and growls of cars, and various other machine-sounds.* the grocery store where i work has a bright pseudo-california visual environment (kind of a tiki aesthetic, really) but a gloomy aural environment dominated by the refrigeration system - weird hums spanning the audible frequency range, and sudden deep rumbling and gurgling. there's cheery music plastered over it, but it does little to mask this unsettling aural atmosphere if you actually listen. so ofc we all usually block it out.

it’s not difficult to extend this association with the unconscious to what produces these sounds: all these unseen utility inner-workings running through the walls/floor/ceiling/backrooms keeping the visible world running beyond our knowledge. so where is the underworld? in the other movie we watched, friday the 13th, which is set out in the forest, it’s in the lake - classical mythological stuff. an americana lake avernus. but in the suburban imagination it can be in these dark closed off utility spaces - the boiler room of a power plant in a nightmare on elm street (also a boiler room in the shining), or the storm drains in it.** afx famously described SAW II as being like “standing in a power station on acid”… 

(you might argue that this stuff isn’t really that secret or mysterious: there are plenty of very normal people who work in these environments for whom it's all fully transparent and logical. but is the second part true? the other day there was a power outage at work, and i heard the electrician who was called in say to the manager that even he didn’t know why some things were still running and others weren’t. he wondered if the still-running electricity could be coming from the place next door, but that space is empty, unused. my guess is that a lot of this utility stuff is done in a very ad hoc, palimpsest type way. and of course is very complex even if well organized. so even in a mundane context this hidden world is deep and murky, no individual person sees entirely through it.) 

"magic teens"

lately (mainly from reading classic-in-the-making dandadan) one of other_life's old pseudonyms has been circling my mind. i don’t know exactly what it means to her (to start, it may be referencing a boards of canada track?) but it’s just one of those phrases that’s instantly familiar because it's so evocative. escaping obligations to hold secret meetings - "don’t go to sleep" - accidentally stepping into another world - "oh shit it’s happening again"…

what makes dandadan, for the most part, a cozy read is that the gang is in place. a ragtag group of young people attuned to forces others can’t sense, helped by a mentor, an adult living on the outskirts of society who's stayed touch with those forces and learned about them. what makes elm street so stressful, in contrast, is that the group, the sense of solidarity in the face of the unknown, never falls into place. they have the common dream, but they deny it, fall asleep, and suffer for it.  

romance and horror - that’s the key thing in magic teens stories, that these two forces are awakened together. i gravitate to a horseshoe understanding of emotion - the opposite extremes are close together. it was the best of times it was the worst of times. there’s a sense in which romance dawn opens up a pandora’s box of previously unknown dark experiences. this mixed truth of emotional extremes can traced, as always, in music. my bloody valentine, for example, were pushing the limits of how crushing / abrasive and how intimate / whispery rock could be. yet the surface level contradictions coalesce into what anyone with aesthetic sense instantly recognizes to be a unified and emotionally true fever-vision.*** the same sensate vision goes back to the earliest magician of the electric guitar: hendrix described bombs as lipstick tubes, and compare "crosstown traffic" to mbv's "drive it all over me". my bloody valentine was (of course, inevitably) also the name of an old slasher movie.

* “the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz”… plus suicide’s “rocket usa” and really the whole album being another previously mentioned instance of fluorescent light sound, and that album, particularly “frankie teardrop” is very much trying to explore the emotional underworld

 ** important to note that just as i was typing this my fridge abruptly starting making noise, i almost had a heart attack

*** to connect all this back to the first point, maybe the jokes about loveless being normal songs obscured by vacuum noise are relevant…

(apparently the house in elm street is a dutch colonial... had to look up the exact term since that style is so burned into our imaginations from movies of the era.)