Three Uses of the Knife

an excerpt from David Mamet:

"Mass media, similarly, are created(by what force we cannot say); they spring into existence, if you will, and offer the promise, in many cases the reality, of great wealth to entice talented people who would otherwise be uninterested. They offer, like any other dictator, the promise of freedom if the applicants consign themselves to slavery. [...] They are paid to remove themselves from the ranks of potential artists, to give up the desire to express, confront, connect, mourn, question, decry, unite; they are paid to serve the cause of censorship."

I read somewhere else once, I think it was an essay by Pierre Bourdeau, that artists occupy a dominated position within a dominant class. That the artist must choose to serve (and he was a Frenchman so forgive the melodrama) either society or the bourgeois in his art as patrons. The artist may wield culture as a tool to reinforce existing societal structures, build new ones, or can serve popular culture and receive the financial returns, but to serve art for art's sake requires that the artist already be independent of the power structures that would seek to employ him.

Personally, I think that we're all in the business of compromise as artists. No one with a knack for art aims for anything less than the stuff of transcendence in what they create, not while presuming to call themselves an artist. Yet at the same time, our own view of the world is reinforced in the art we create, we make judgement and on some level we support one cause or defame another either by representation or omission. Finally, we share our art with the world, which, in my mind at least, denotes some sort of desire to be connected to it, accepted by it, rewarded for our effort and insight. Any artist who claims to take joy, as Flaubert did, in not being understood by the masses is a creature completely incomprehensible to me. I live to connect.

Week Recap

It's a little after 1:30 AM on a Saturday morning, haven't written here in a few days so I thought I'd take a look at the list I made and see how many of those items I accomplished. (glances at list) Shit... Well, if intentions were dollar bills I could pay someone to do all that crap, right?

Don't get me wrong, I did a few things right, paid the bills so to speak and secured good grades in all my classes, but ... lately I have trouble motivating myself to do more than just what I have to. I really thought for a while it was some sort of depression, but then I realized I was just being lazy. The Army can do that to a guy: one the one hand I'm extremely efficient, I show up where I'm supposed to and I do everything I said I would--on the other, you can't coerce me into doing an ounce more than that sometimes. I think it's a product of having sold five years of my life, there's a part of me that saw wasting ANY of that time, even my off time, as a victory that brought me closer to the end of my enlistment, the more time I didn't have to feel pass in excruciating detail the best. It's hard to let go of a mentality like that, but I want to learn to love life in moments again.

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about things like 'balance' and the 'middle path'. Excess is a cultural phenomenon here in the US, but that's no excuse for the way I've lived my life up til now. I keep thinking I can make compromises with obsession, and that's not true. On the flip side, a person shouldn't have to entirely give up something that they enjoy just to be productive. Of course I'm talking about gaming right now. Let's see how unplugging for the month of November feels. I hate extremes but there's something crucial on the horizon: Graduate school applications. I need three completed works for my portfolio and thus far I have only one. I've got more than enough pages, probably an excess of a few hundred, but nothing polished and nothing finished. It's time to finish some stuff. I'm going through my portfolio tonight, and I've got peace and quiet tomorrow to work. Let's not waste it!