Ambition and bastions
Jan. 7th, 2005 02:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusIt seems to me that my life and work have always been tied up with my ambition and my vision of 'the good life', and that in turn has involved the storming of bastions. A bastion is like a treasure house, an idyll, a utopia, a woman. If you actually get inside, you're likely to be disappointed and to stop obsessing over it. The important thing is what you imagine it's like in there, and how you tie all your dreams up with the attempt to topple the walls and lower the drawbridge.
To schematize somewhat, I could lay out my various 'bastions' like this:
1980-85: Poured all my energy into attacking the dreaming spires of university, and also targeted indie labels. A good degree and a record contract: success!
1985-90: Tried to conquer the British weekly music press and then the Top 40. Some good press, but no UK hit single.
1990-95: Concenrated on 'being Serge Gainsbourg'. Got laid, got married, got out of Britain. The big bastion was Japan, and I got all the way inside! Success!
1996-2001: America became the bastion. The America of Clinton and the dot com boom. I ended up moving there. Some limited American fame. Forays into digital art.
2001-2005: Living in Japan became the goal, but I found that it was better to stay an eternal visitor. From my new base in Berlin I tried to establish myself as a more experimental musician, but those bastions at The Wire didn't fall for it. I turned increasingly to visual culture, becoming, bizarrely enough, a design commentator.
So what are the bastions I'll be besieging from 2005 to 2010? China, perhaps? Will I discover a spiritual path and follow it to some mountain in India? Will I concentrate my firepower on the bastions of contemporary dance or theatre? Will I do more stints as an artist in residence and give Scanner a run for his Arts Council money? Will I snipe the 'post' off my 'post-literary' tag and become bookish?
I really have no idea. What I do know is that there's no ambition without appetite. As usual, I'll be paying a lot of attention to glamour and desire, because those are the beacons that'll lead me to the next bastion. But what I'm realising, as I get older, is that glamour and desire are both in the eye of the holder. The bastions are all in the mind. I hope this realisation itself doesn't make them collapse into a heap of boring rubble.
To schematize somewhat, I could lay out my various 'bastions' like this:
1980-85: Poured all my energy into attacking the dreaming spires of university, and also targeted indie labels. A good degree and a record contract: success!
1985-90: Tried to conquer the British weekly music press and then the Top 40. Some good press, but no UK hit single.
1990-95: Concenrated on 'being Serge Gainsbourg'. Got laid, got married, got out of Britain. The big bastion was Japan, and I got all the way inside! Success!
1996-2001: America became the bastion. The America of Clinton and the dot com boom. I ended up moving there. Some limited American fame. Forays into digital art.
2001-2005: Living in Japan became the goal, but I found that it was better to stay an eternal visitor. From my new base in Berlin I tried to establish myself as a more experimental musician, but those bastions at The Wire didn't fall for it. I turned increasingly to visual culture, becoming, bizarrely enough, a design commentator.
So what are the bastions I'll be besieging from 2005 to 2010? China, perhaps? Will I discover a spiritual path and follow it to some mountain in India? Will I concentrate my firepower on the bastions of contemporary dance or theatre? Will I do more stints as an artist in residence and give Scanner a run for his Arts Council money? Will I snipe the 'post' off my 'post-literary' tag and become bookish?
I really have no idea. What I do know is that there's no ambition without appetite. As usual, I'll be paying a lot of attention to glamour and desire, because those are the beacons that'll lead me to the next bastion. But what I'm realising, as I get older, is that glamour and desire are both in the eye of the holder. The bastions are all in the mind. I hope this realisation itself doesn't make them collapse into a heap of boring rubble.
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momus you magnificent bastard
Date: 2005-01-14 05:28 am (UTC)I hope your bunny is doing well, it certainly is fucking hilariously cute, in a woodsy curled oak-and-acanthus-leaves sort of way. I haven't been on the internet in months (don't make that disgusted face), nevertheless every few months I'll check your site for your posts, knowing that they'll "uncannily" earmark everything that's been floating around in my cerebrum recently. Its sort of like reading some sort of oracle where my conscience will recognize what should be validated. I guess that must mean that my conscience is design oriented. Because what is beautiful must be useful, correct?
Anyway, I'm terribly sorry for my unmistakeably American, Oxford uneducated grammar and reasoning. I just keep staying here in Ohio, wishing I was in Japan, and you keep traveling all over. It at least comforts me to thing that the climate in Ohio, according to the latitude, may be similar to that of Japan. In the summer I try to wear blue and white. I see fish wind socks and think of boys' day. My Japanese aquaintance Mayu says I like things her grandmother likes, I assume because all Americans think Japan is either Japanimation or in the Edo period, I prefer the latter. My boyfriend tells me it is unlikely I may have been Japanese in a past life, but I'm blood type B-, and apparently that's mostly found in Asians and Jewish people, so...
Nice work, as usual. Keep breaking down your bastions. I'm doing the same, its the only thing. Sometimes it feels really ungrounded, but what else is there anymore? Oh, what am I saying? I'm Philosophy 201, and you're like not even in Philosophy anymore. You're like Post-Post-Graduate. Plus I'm not even an extremely hot Japanese girl. In your lexicon, I'm not even a girl probably, just a Middle American. Especially after my state got the Anti-Christ elected again.
Anyway, once again I just wanted to write you to say that I appreciate what you are doing. I don't even think you care about that, but I do. You always bring a smile to my face.
Manatee.