Hugging the shore, watching the kettle
Jun. 22nd, 2007 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusWith the termination of my Wired column earlier this month -- and for the last couple of years it's been absurdly easy to make a living just by dashing off 1600 words a month -- I reached a mini-crisis of sorts. There was the possibility that Click Opera -- a kind of daily column I do for free -- would become the main thing I do. And that rang warning bells for several reasons.
First, the main thing you do shouldn't be something you do for free. Second, the main thing you do shouldn't be something essentially trivial and ephemeral.
The energy I've poured into Click Opera over the last three years has certainly paid off. The blog currently has more than 400 inbound links, and last time I checked it was one of the most-read LiveJournals out there. It got me the Wired column in the first place -- therefore, I did get paid for it, indirectly. (And, for the record, I will continue writing for Wired News as a reporter, which actually pays better than being a columnist.)
But I'd noticed a slightly alarming development. People had started coming up to me in public places -- a flight from Paris to Tokyo, for instance -- and saying "Hey Momus, love your blog!" Even, absurdly, "Hey, aren't you that guy from the internet?" I was also getting speaking invitations based on the blog. Here, for instance, is me appearing earlier this year at the Berlin Creative Social meeting. Shuttle to the eight minute mark and you'll see me projecting Click Opera onto the wall and talking about it to a room full of "digital creatives".
[Error: unknown template video]
What on earth am I doing there? Lending the event boho cred? Boasting while trying to self-deprecate? Asking how to monetize my art career while telling a room of commercial creatives that it's really cool not to monetize what you do? It's a confused message. Or should we call it an "interesting dialectic" and add that it's very, very Berlin to be doing something interstitial, something tactical within exactly this conflict in values? Or do I mean it's very, very art world? Well, art world, Berlin, same difference.
There's also a confused, convoluted, dialectical message in my appearance on the Ideal Showroom Berlin video (click NEXT to watch it), where I tell the interviewers that the clothes I'm seeing at their trade fair are more interesting than the art in their gallery, and have perhaps become art. (Actually, I think what I really meant was that last time I loved only Fumiko Imano's photos, which were in the art section, and this time I loved only Makin Jan Ma's clothes, which were in the fashion section. But those butterfly people cross that divide all the time.)
I've also become a "butterfly person" -- blogger, journalist, "emerging artist", musician, performer, writer -- which is fine. But when one of those things comes to dominate over the others -- when pluriculture turns to monoculture -- I get alarmed. Especially if it's at the ephemeral end of the scale -- something here today, gone tomorrow. If I look at the context in which I get mentioned on blogs, it's as a music artist that I've really made my mark. Songs I wrote twenty years ago are still getting mentioned and quoted. If I were rational about how I spent my time, I'd clearly spend it all writing songs.
Blogging isn't like songs in that respect. As an experiment -- and in order to give my quality time to writing The Book of Jokes -- I've been trying over the last week or so to revive old content from Click Opera. Retro Click has attempted to breathe new life into ephemeral dead content. The results basically just confirm that blogging, whilst it may give you the rush of instant worldwide publication, is the most ephemeral thing in the world. Comments are way down and the consensus is that reviving old blog entries is as dull as digging out yesterday's newspapers and reading them: "The Retro mode was so boring that I did stop to read daily Clickopera," notes![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
alvaroceb.
The kind of information Click Opera deals in doesn't date well. Songs, though, do. A good song can still be touching people decades on from its composition. It's a different sort of "information"; deeper, more valuable. We may all have taken on board the postmodernist dogma about a collapse in the hierarchy between "high" and "low" art, but there's still a distinction to be made between things which are temporary and appeal to our sense of novelty, and things which are more profound and permanent.
What's more, whereas the music references come from males and females of all ages and all cultures, the blog tends to be read and enjoyed by American males in their 30s. It's a narrower demographic. And -- unless I radically rejig my sexuality -- much less kissable.
Blogging has been incredibly useful to me as an aide memoire, a way to note the things that interest and excite me, and anchor them in a public place, make them googlable, and increase their power (they're usually frail, underexposed things) by widening their appeal a tiny bit. (Go buy that Gay Against You album today, people! If we can turn one White Stripes sale into a Gay Against You sale, we have not lived in vain!) What it mustn't become, though, is either the main thing I do, or the main thing I'm known for. Blogging is -- in John Updike's term for journalism -- "hugging the shore".
The book I'm writing now feels vastly more risky, more free, more personal and profound than a Click Opera entry. It's pure livid fun to write, and I think it'll be pure livid fun to read, too (sometime in late 2008, perhaps). But it's so hard to hoarde, to assert copyright, to monetize, to revert to those slow old media models, to prepare something for paper rather than the whizzing instantaneous neuron-world of bits and electrons.
My natural impulse is to share everything immediately, to throw it out into a public arena free, in bite-sized chunks, to incorporate it into people's daily habits. The trouble with that, though, is that you're never alone. And creating art does require a certain aloneness, a certain delay, a removal of the work from immediate judgement and reaction. "The watched kettle never boils", as William Gibson says when he puts his blog on hiatus to write a book. Perhaps a better metaphor for the internet is the Asian denki poto, a kettle that always boils. How can you achieve anything if you're always at boiling point, always ready-to-pour?
It would be incredibly precious to say a writer or an artist shouldn't blog at all, though. Writers have always hacked away at journalism while writing their books, usually for money, just to keep them going. But also to do research, to get their head out of their navel, to be sociable, to be collective, to stay connected to the world and to the reality principle. That's incredibly important. Reality's great. But you shouldn't allow it to become the only thing you do.
First, the main thing you do shouldn't be something you do for free. Second, the main thing you do shouldn't be something essentially trivial and ephemeral.
The energy I've poured into Click Opera over the last three years has certainly paid off. The blog currently has more than 400 inbound links, and last time I checked it was one of the most-read LiveJournals out there. It got me the Wired column in the first place -- therefore, I did get paid for it, indirectly. (And, for the record, I will continue writing for Wired News as a reporter, which actually pays better than being a columnist.)
But I'd noticed a slightly alarming development. People had started coming up to me in public places -- a flight from Paris to Tokyo, for instance -- and saying "Hey Momus, love your blog!" Even, absurdly, "Hey, aren't you that guy from the internet?" I was also getting speaking invitations based on the blog. Here, for instance, is me appearing earlier this year at the Berlin Creative Social meeting. Shuttle to the eight minute mark and you'll see me projecting Click Opera onto the wall and talking about it to a room full of "digital creatives".
[Error: unknown template video]
What on earth am I doing there? Lending the event boho cred? Boasting while trying to self-deprecate? Asking how to monetize my art career while telling a room of commercial creatives that it's really cool not to monetize what you do? It's a confused message. Or should we call it an "interesting dialectic" and add that it's very, very Berlin to be doing something interstitial, something tactical within exactly this conflict in values? Or do I mean it's very, very art world? Well, art world, Berlin, same difference.
There's also a confused, convoluted, dialectical message in my appearance on the Ideal Showroom Berlin video (click NEXT to watch it), where I tell the interviewers that the clothes I'm seeing at their trade fair are more interesting than the art in their gallery, and have perhaps become art. (Actually, I think what I really meant was that last time I loved only Fumiko Imano's photos, which were in the art section, and this time I loved only Makin Jan Ma's clothes, which were in the fashion section. But those butterfly people cross that divide all the time.)
I've also become a "butterfly person" -- blogger, journalist, "emerging artist", musician, performer, writer -- which is fine. But when one of those things comes to dominate over the others -- when pluriculture turns to monoculture -- I get alarmed. Especially if it's at the ephemeral end of the scale -- something here today, gone tomorrow. If I look at the context in which I get mentioned on blogs, it's as a music artist that I've really made my mark. Songs I wrote twenty years ago are still getting mentioned and quoted. If I were rational about how I spent my time, I'd clearly spend it all writing songs.
Blogging isn't like songs in that respect. As an experiment -- and in order to give my quality time to writing The Book of Jokes -- I've been trying over the last week or so to revive old content from Click Opera. Retro Click has attempted to breathe new life into ephemeral dead content. The results basically just confirm that blogging, whilst it may give you the rush of instant worldwide publication, is the most ephemeral thing in the world. Comments are way down and the consensus is that reviving old blog entries is as dull as digging out yesterday's newspapers and reading them: "The Retro mode was so boring that I did stop to read daily Clickopera," notes
alvaroceb.The kind of information Click Opera deals in doesn't date well. Songs, though, do. A good song can still be touching people decades on from its composition. It's a different sort of "information"; deeper, more valuable. We may all have taken on board the postmodernist dogma about a collapse in the hierarchy between "high" and "low" art, but there's still a distinction to be made between things which are temporary and appeal to our sense of novelty, and things which are more profound and permanent.
What's more, whereas the music references come from males and females of all ages and all cultures, the blog tends to be read and enjoyed by American males in their 30s. It's a narrower demographic. And -- unless I radically rejig my sexuality -- much less kissable.
Blogging has been incredibly useful to me as an aide memoire, a way to note the things that interest and excite me, and anchor them in a public place, make them googlable, and increase their power (they're usually frail, underexposed things) by widening their appeal a tiny bit. (Go buy that Gay Against You album today, people! If we can turn one White Stripes sale into a Gay Against You sale, we have not lived in vain!) What it mustn't become, though, is either the main thing I do, or the main thing I'm known for. Blogging is -- in John Updike's term for journalism -- "hugging the shore".
The book I'm writing now feels vastly more risky, more free, more personal and profound than a Click Opera entry. It's pure livid fun to write, and I think it'll be pure livid fun to read, too (sometime in late 2008, perhaps). But it's so hard to hoarde, to assert copyright, to monetize, to revert to those slow old media models, to prepare something for paper rather than the whizzing instantaneous neuron-world of bits and electrons.
My natural impulse is to share everything immediately, to throw it out into a public arena free, in bite-sized chunks, to incorporate it into people's daily habits. The trouble with that, though, is that you're never alone. And creating art does require a certain aloneness, a certain delay, a removal of the work from immediate judgement and reaction. "The watched kettle never boils", as William Gibson says when he puts his blog on hiatus to write a book. Perhaps a better metaphor for the internet is the Asian denki poto, a kettle that always boils. How can you achieve anything if you're always at boiling point, always ready-to-pour?
It would be incredibly precious to say a writer or an artist shouldn't blog at all, though. Writers have always hacked away at journalism while writing their books, usually for money, just to keep them going. But also to do research, to get their head out of their navel, to be sociable, to be collective, to stay connected to the world and to the reality principle. That's incredibly important. Reality's great. But you shouldn't allow it to become the only thing you do.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 10:11 am (UTC)in fact (ironically), one of your most interesting posts for a long time!
we like our artists self-doubting!!!
so - this is it then?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 10:46 am (UTC)This is a taking-stock-of-blogging moment, but certainly not the end of Click Opera. Or did you mean "Is this it" in the sense that blogging might be the be-all-and-end-all, the ultimate activity? That neither. It can't be, because it clearly doesn't resonate as long as a song or a book.
Ironically, one of the pieces I was planning for the Wired column, before it got pulled and I went off to write a book, was about the idea that paper is more permanent than the internet -- there are actually some people who advocate backing up the internet on paper, because no digital storage medium will last as long. I'd gone so far as to interview people from the Institute for the Future of the Book (http://www.futureofthebook.org/) for it.
But rather than inform the interweb of its own demise, I just quietly went off and wrote a book instead.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-23 10:14 am (UTC)I've had similar blogging dilemmas, actually, not that I'm particularly well known for anything else (or for blogging), but I was a writer before being a blogger, and have found it good (as a writer) to take a break from blogging. Maybe I'm wrong but I still feel like blogging is very much a developing media, and people haven't quite got the measure of it. It's as if everyone in the world is coming to terms with the confessional, exhibitionist nature of being a writer, even writers who previously haven't had much direct contect with their readership.
There's an interesting example of internet publishing here:
http://www.ligotti.net
Thomas Ligotti has offered his latest work (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race) online pre-book publication, to gather feedback (and proofreading) before revising for the book publication. I think there's also more than a little of wanting to just get something out there for free and have some interaction about it, too:
http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=1136
http://www.ligotti.net/forumdisplay.php?f=259
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 10:24 am (UTC)By pouring.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 10:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 10:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 10:57 am (UTC)I suppose the reversal of the kettle metaphor is all about the idea that there has to be some sort of incubation, some aloneness, some delay, some indirection, even some of that good old rockist school-of-hard-knocks stuff, paying-yer-dues stuff in every story of art getting made. Or is this just pure Romanticism?
Personally, I never quite understood the "watched kettle never boils" image either. Is it based on Einsteinian physics? The observer is part of the observed? The human mind can influence the fall of a dice? Anyway, no kettle I've ever watched (and I've watched a few!) has ever failed to boil. Unless I forgot to switch it on. D'oh!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 12:02 pm (UTC)If artists flourish because of their distinctiveness, and their distinctions are relatively more or less susceptible to dilution by the currents of human interaction, then (speaking unequivocally) it seems probable that varying periods of quarantine are sometimes advantageous to some artists.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 11:40 am (UTC)Oh, and by the way, some Click Opera entries are very good. It is when you switch over to "essay-mode-momus" where we get these entries that might live for a long time. Especially a couple of those you wrote while working in New York last year.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 12:54 pm (UTC)Am I reading while writing? I'm sort of remembering or misremembering books like The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, La Fontaine's Fables. And watching stuff like Japanese rakugo or Posh Nosh (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22posh+nosh%22&search=) on YouTube. Some of the best writing now is television writing. I'm sure Chaucer and Boccaccio would have been writing for TV if they were around now.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 01:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 01:23 pm (UTC)So you watch funny monologues and faux-cooking shows while working on The book of Jokes?... I am holding my breath(metaphorically speaking)!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 08:45 pm (UTC)And so long as we're on a meta-blog/consider-the-blog note, I've always liked your use of icons. I love "smile" and I wish you'd use "Stonished" more often. Also, thanks for getting me into Jacques Brel. Thanks very much for that!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 10:21 pm (UTC)confessions of an internet It Girl
Date: 2007-06-22 11:41 am (UTC)Also; the internet??? SERIOUS BUSINESS!
comfort
Date: 2007-06-22 11:50 am (UTC)Petra.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 12:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 12:40 pm (UTC)but obviously something therapeutic and complex is going on when one's every quotidian experience gets instantly (automatically! on-the-fly!) transcoded into the next entry. It's tough to get out of that, and tough to want to.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 12:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 01:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 01:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 03:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 08:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 03:26 pm (UTC)Blogging as a medium has been so wildly hyped, but I'm wondering what it really adds to the artistic (rather than the journalistic and informational) enterprise.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 03:50 pm (UTC)What will Momus do to recover from writing his book? Or is the book already the long-awaited holidays from years of blogging?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 03:55 pm (UTC)The answer is "not much", I think. You can't really maintain your artistic mystique as a daily blogger, that's not what the medium's about. Certainly, this blog has demystified Momus for me, whom I listened to with rapt attention as a teenager back in the early 90s. It's an interesting dilemma. I really enjoy reading this blog, but at the same time being privy to Momus's random thoughts about this and that, seeing his party snaps etc., all that has sadly diminished my desire to listen to his music. I think I get that effect from other "celebrity" blogs as well, to differing degrees. The "differing" aspect being how much the artist puts himself/herself into his/her blog, and how much it's impersonal. David Byrne's blog, for instance, hasn't diminished the appeal of his music so much for me, because he doesn't really put much of his personality into his blog, it's mostly about other artists. So he still remains kind of anonymous to me.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 04:04 pm (UTC)He actually mentioned me the other day:
"When Momus does a Japanese gadget post, it's like, Oh, he's so cool. When I do one, it's like, Oh, who does he think he is? The latter effect is more interesting, don't you think?"
On the question of demystification, I think it depends what sort of artist you are. I've always been a diary-keeping sort of artist -- long before the internet, when I got asked my favourite book I'd joke it was "My diary -- read aloud on the top deck of a bus!"
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 04:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 10:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 10:27 pm (UTC)In response to your second pondering
Date: 2007-06-22 04:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 04:17 pm (UTC)My question, who are you really writing for in Click Opera? And does your motive to write here fit the demands necessary for your honest artistic expression? I see something else in your music, a different kind of direction. So while it appears you are happier as a musician, maybe it takes figuring out what works for you there and apply your approach to music to blogging.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 04:44 pm (UTC)Isn't life trivial, ephemeral, and unpaid?
But other than that, this does tie in to a lot of stuff I've been wondering about how I spend my time, and create my art. Is it worthwhile, or is it all just a flicker that no one will care about in a month? Should I be trying to get paid for it more? Am I shallow? Is money evil? Etc.
(It's also funny that your readers are mostly male, since LJ is mostly female.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 04:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 06:14 pm (UTC)Blogs aren't necessarily "here today, gone tomorrow"--it depends entirely on what you're writing about, who linked to it, and how the information got dispersed.
And there's plenty of completely ephemeral music, too. Maybe not *your* music, but who knows, you might have gravitated towards making progressive house after all these years (if music was all you did)
Songs
Date: 2007-06-22 06:27 pm (UTC)Re: Songs
Date: 2007-06-22 07:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 08:03 pm (UTC)LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL, they´re everywhere.
If you wanna rope in the girls in their teens and twenties, you wanna make it more fandom and slash orientated, Momus.
Or, you know, get rid of the creepy porn posts. Your call.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-23 02:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 08:12 pm (UTC)When blogging (once a week, in my case) I'm deciding how my neuronal connections will be. Like having an external hardware device of my brain. Also a way of accumulating social capital (fixing a net of acquaintances, advertising yourself) and maybe that's why wannabe-somethings need it (that was an interesting idea).
Anyhow, thank you so much for turnig the Present-Mode of Clickopera on again!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 09:03 pm (UTC)That was also the reason why I didn't follow the archives posts as closely. While I'm a reader of Click Opera for only a year I went into my own personal "retro mode" before and scoured CO's backlog of posts, so I remember a lot of them.
What I find intriguing is how fearlessly Momus writes about intimate things when of course he knows that such musings won't be received well by all readers (how could it be otherwise) and even thrives in such situations. I literally shudder just thinking how much time *I* would waste obsessing over every mean-spirited anonymous comment. My point is that there must be -- and in fact I've already heard it from veterans of the trade -- more or less of an emotional toll being inflicted upon long-time bloggers.
FrF
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-22 10:05 pm (UTC)I think Retro Click was a good idea, but a little overdone (in frequency). I don't a few blogs, and it seems like nobody ever reads anything other than the most recent one, so it's a good trick.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-23 04:56 am (UTC)This is where I'm going to post all of my Photoshops, dreams, etc. of you! I think my friends are all getting tired of all of my posts about you, anyway.
And anyone reading this, you can join and post, too!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-23 01:38 pm (UTC)your blog and time
Date: 2007-06-26 11:48 pm (UTC)The problem with blogs is that is so difficult to go through, to see them from "upside", like "turning the pages".
But I do not think the solution is to publish it as a book. We have to find the editing resourses of the web, using tags, meta-tags, digging... With delicious one could create some "presentation" of the blog that isn't so "linear". Even that would be pretty linear, one friend is working in ways of presenting delicious collection of links in a more "non linear" way: http://6pli.com/
The problem is that livejournal could be bought by yahoo (¿not yet?) or they can break the service, or whatever, and then it could all be lost. Definitely this media isn't very "hard". ¿How to keep it? Because you would have to keep the comments, that are also very important, sometimes lot more interesting than the original essay...
Even though I think this blog is a blog because it merges the ordinary with all the reflections, there is no doubt the essays where you take a lot of time in thinking and editing give it the flavour. And I miss that you don't do now large large essays like the ones you did for your web page. And that you don't play and edit the images with so much care. Maybe this format restricts in some way your imagination, and the ease of writing makes you loose that energy of the html.
For a visitor of the future I don't think anything better to recommend than your blog (much more than any of the books or records that have been don in these years, without any doubt).