Hugging the shore, watching the kettle

[imomus]

With 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".

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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.

Comments

[thehakujin.livejournal.com]

Thank you, this is something I need to hear at the moment.

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.