Note: Due to
its introductory role, this post is longer and way more self-indulgent
than I plan others to be. Thank you for
being interested, and please leave any comments you would like!
I have written
a thing about Pee-wee’s Big Adventure that
I’m going to post after the ensuing reflective paragraphs. Actually, I sort of
wrote a thing about Pee-wee’s Big
Adventure a month ago that I filed away but have continued to think about
but be afraid of, and that I’m going
to continue to fiddle with and then post after the ensuing reflective
paragraphs, which themselves are the product of a month of scared thinking, and
with which I am going to fiddle after writing this paragraph and before I
fiddle with Pee-wee. And this
addiction to revision and careful self-censorship is why I have started Down in the Jungle Room. I’m going to test myself to see if I can
leave this paragraph alone. As soon as I
wrote that sentence I changed “anxiety-filled paragraphs” to “reflective
paragraphs,” and then had to change the phrase again later, and I did that without even thinking about it
until after it was done.
I, like many
people, fear putting ideas, especially in written form, in front of others, though we almost always benefit most from input outside our own brains. When words are on the
page it’s somehow evidence of how you think, of what you know, of what you can
do. When words are in your head they’re
safe because they’re yours because they’re secret.
When I was
in early years of college, I was told that my work wasn’t about me, that the
subject was the most important thing, though simultaneously my voice was
important. There is, however, no easy directive for balancing voice and work.
At the time, I needed to hear this lesson to keep my own ego and carelessness
from getting in the way of learning skills and of producing a good product. It
was an excellent message, especially for a young person. It was very true that these works or ideas were bigger than me, more impressive
and powerful than me, and it was liberating to understand that I was
subservient to them, that I was a vessel to share them with other people.
However, in the spirit of all overachieving students, I have taken it too far,
to the point at which I am afraid to reveal myself in my words or my actions, a
step that was never the point of the lesson. The lesson is not the source of my current anxieties, but rather a tool caught up in their machinations. I’ve twisted this approach into a
crutch, my excuse for not producing, for not putting myself out into the world
for others to critique and engage with. I don’t write enough, I don’t talk enough, but
rather just read more, watch more, listen to others more, or give up and play games on my iPad more, hoping
that if I absorb enough one day I’ll speak and these lovely thoughts, perfectly
assimilated, will dance from my mouth and everybody will join in a floppy orgy
of happy beautiful conversation. Exercising
my brain and my spirit without fear and with joy is a fantasy I have sometimes
at night before I go to sleep. The fantasy is itself an exercise in fearlessness and
joy.
Also, um, I
need to be successful, because I’ve chosen this path and I need to make a
living doing it. I worry every day about the future of the field of musicology and my role in
it. Will I be able to make enough money to support myself? How do people have
families on these salaries? Every time I walk into a house that someone owns,
no matter how large or small or clean, I marvel. HOW DO PEOPLE OWN HOUSES? Really. How does
this belong to you? So, I need to practice my
writing and thinking and synthesizing and communicating, and maybe something
helpful and lucrative will come of it, even if it’s just the habit of sitting
down to reflect in external verbiage every day.
There’s also
the fear of professionalism to consider. Academia of the arts has too much
stuff, to the point at which it’s overwhelming to try to either engage with it
or contribute to it. There is so much information available—and yes, yet so
little, I know, I know, I know—that I feel the next wave needs to embrace writers’
voices. People have so many options to choose from that they don’t always
choose what they read or listen to or watch based on subject but rather because
of who was involved in its production. Most people don’t see the next Tim Burton
movie just because it’s about stop-motion Emo dinosaurs with big eyes—they also
go because it was made by Tim Burton and because Johnny Depp is playing a sad
pterodactyl.
This is my
attempt to simultaneously do something for myself and to practice doing
something for other people, and for the objects that I love. Constant fear of
being unoriginal, reductive, and poorly read is paralyzing and makes me not
even want to try. I want to be rigorous. I want to be well-informed. But I can’t
just keep absorbing information and keeping it to myself and my small circle of
friends and cats and boyfriend willing to listen to me and then occasionally to my professors in term papers that don't really sound like me. Repeat to self: who
CARES if someone has had the thought before? Yes, innovative thoughts are
important, but in the history of the world, it’s the communal thoughts that have
made the most impact. A new thought is
only important if it has the potential for others to share in it. Not everything about every post is going to be
good. In fact, an entire post may be
kind of crappy. I might—gasp—say something that’s just outright wrong. But
it’ll be better than keeping the thoughts to myself and not receiving
a corrective, or of having that crappy post exist in some floating unrealized
form in the folds of my brain.
And one
final thing: I want to be able to write about objects I love, and I don’t want
to apologize for it. This blog is
designed around the premise of talking about what I LIKE about art objects. That’s my voice. My initial response to lots
of stuff—Maroon 5, Disney movies, Francis Bacon, Annie Clark, Umberto Eco—is almost always
positive. I look for what I like, and sometimes I forget to compare objects to
other objects to see which one accomplishes something better.
I don’t
remember the first time I felt the need to hide, or at least downplay, my
enjoyment of an art object due to others’ judgment of it to be tacky, empty,
shoddy, shameless, derivative, commercial, boring, cannibalistic, mainstream,
not the best example of something, poorly scored, manipulative, whatever. I
don’t remember why I decided my response was less critical, less important, less cultured. I don’t remember why I felt that even if my response was less
critical, important, and cultured that it was an indicator of my inferiority,
some depth of misunderstanding or lack of that elusive ability to “get it.” I
don’t remember that pivotal inevitable first interaction, but I’m trying to own
it, and I’m trying out the reverse impulse.
There are
plenty of people out there happy to cast judgment and rank and aesthetically
order products. We need them. But that doesn’t have to be
what I do. If my typical responses mean I get more pleasure out of the world,
then why not explore what is agreeable to me? It might mean that others are
able to find pleasure in an object when previously for them there was
none. That’s a lot of what artists do
anyway, and I miss being an artist.
So, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is a good place to start both because I
really enjoyed it and because it navigates between adult and child worlds, especially
humor. In so doing the film reminded me
of what was awesome about not only being a kid but being a kid watching movies.
I didn’t have to care about what was good or well-done or comparative. All I had to care about was how I responded
to it, which I suppose was in a somewhat helpless way that usually privileged
things that made me laugh, animals, pretty women, gentle voices, and music I
could sing along to. Burton is also a good figure to muse on these ideas with,
because people often dismiss his films as too cute, whimsical, and commercial
to have value. This movie also is a great place to start my blog because it’s
just like, “do what you want. Jesus.”
And who
knows, maybe I’ll start experimenting with cartoons.
High-proof
and Fiddle Faddle,
Kate
P.S. No one
read this before I posted it. Also, I’ve
revised it a lot more since that initial idea, and a lot more than I want to
for a blog, and I still think it sucks.
Onward and upward!
P.P.S. I fiddled with the first paragraph again after settling on the title of the blog.
P.P.P.S. Here's a list of what I'm trying to doooooo:
What this is
for me:
A motivator
to write frequently and quickly
A motivator
for honesty
A
celebration of individual and collective thought
A
celebration of things that I love, and a place to indulge in an exploration of
why I love them
A place to
work through my desire to apologize for guilty pleasures
An attempt
to reclaim my sense of artistry
Freedom from
the scholastic responsibility to read everything that's already been said on a
subject before saying something about it myself
A repository
for ideas I don’t want to lose (and probably some that I do)
A means of
organizing my thoughts
A
celebration of randomness
A
therapeutic ego trip
An
exploration of alternative modes of thinking
An
alternative to taking pictures of my perfectly normal cats and
anthropomorphizing them until they’re weird and funny
Something
I’m ok with only me reading if it works out that way
For you:
All of the
above, if you wish, and anything you want it to be for yourself
An
invitation to engage with me and others, despite my fear of confrontation and
exposing my ignorance
What this is
not:
A blog to learn about the comprehensive history, most important aspects, or truth of an object
A
demonstration of my mastery of secondary literature
A
demonstration of my mastery of anything
A blog for
deconstructing the problems with an object
A blog where
every post is perfect, or even good, or even eh
A banana
Something
that will look pretty, unless somebody else wants to take charge of that
A closed
conversation
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