altriciality

[version]

Ah, awesome. Is there anything you enjoy doing outside of making music? Do you have any other hobbies?

Sleeping.

Sleeping? (laughs).

Yes.

 

[version]

You're still young you've still got hope. I'm nearly 30 I'm done for. Toast. It's too late.

Michael Haneke didn't make a feature film until he was pushing 50.

 

[sus]

I have heard novelists never write anything good til theyre 35 so I'm actually very relaxed about it. This is my sandbox era still

 

[sus]

Not sure I'll be able to pivot if I cant pull it off. Maybe Im more flexible than I give myself credit for maybe me an the señorita will have a perfect mexican sunset and memory will be for suckers, as we sip on our margs.

 

[version]

The other day I read an old Paul Auster profile in the NYT and it mentioned he didn't take off as a writer until his life fell apart at 32.

Case of the Brooklyn Symbolist

(August 30, 1992)

"Nineteen seventy-nine. That's when everything changed in my life... That was a crazy year." He was 32 years old, married to Lydia Davis, a writer and translator, with a 2-year-old son, Daniel. "I had run into a wall with my work. I was blocked and miserable, my marriage was falling apart, I had no money. I was finished." And then, in the space of two months, his father died, his marriage collapsed and he found himself alone -- and writing.

 

[version]

I have heard novelists never write anything good til theyre 35 so I'm actually very relaxed about it. This is my sandbox era still

DeLillo made his debut around 35, and didn't break through until he was almost 50 and on his eighth novel.

 

[sus]

And then there's Melville

 

[mvuent]

It would seem as if Lady Gaga just dropped—make that danced—from the disco heavens as a born-ready star on 2008's The Fame. But before the artist born Stefani Germanotta was actually living the lifestyle of the rich and famous, she was getting ready for her close-up in the New York club scene. And you can really hear the blood, sweat, and twirls through many a beer-splattered stage on The Fame. She lived it—and you feel it.

 

[mvuent]

I think about this with my own music sometimes. Moreso than with my writing. I thought I'd do music first, actually. I never wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a composer. But I've never been able to put together a single track that I was happy with. Never managed to have the personnel or the production skills or the patience, whatever it is. So I just have these melodies that I've lived with for upwards of fifteen years. Melodies that haunt me. Sometimes I wake to them. Sometimes melodies I haven't thought of in a decade will worm their way up while I'm walking down the street. They seems to exist independently now. They are like symbiotic organisms that inhabit me. They are like earthworms that surface occasionally for food. They aren't tethered to any songs. I have no songs. I have only melodyorganisms.

I have begun to categorize these melodyorganisms. I have a classification system and have arranged them evolutionarily. There are variations and clades. Sometimes hybrids emerge from cross-clade reproduction. I keep them in jars with taped labels and look at them from time to time. I take them out and rest them on the cartilage of my outer ear, where they can worm their way into the canal. I let them possess me for a time. Then I put them back in a jar. Sometimes they don't want to go. Then I have to really pull and tug.

I don't know what to do with these organisms but I have hope one day they may form a self-sufficient colony. They will reach a critical point where they don't need my meatsuit for symbiosis. They will replicate in the world indepenently.

this was very interesting btw, didn't know this at all. gun to your head, what kind of music would you make?

 

[mvuent]

I have heard novelists never write anything good til theyre 35 so I'm actually very relaxed about it. This is my sandbox era still

for me that's sort of the problem. i've bought in so heavily to this personal narrative that i won't do anything good until i'm like 40 that i've been too relaxed. even if you're altricial you're supposed to spend your formative years up close to the action, not at a grocery store in bloomington.

 

[sus]

Yes there's a very specific half delusional but highly adaptive state required for productive creative work, you need to be able to balance outside views and inside views, chase feeling while understanding its attendant fantasies. You've got to throw yourself into your work as if it's the most important thing in the world while not becoming the toxic person who actually fully believes it is.

 

[sus]

I actually think there's nothing wrong with a Bloomington grocery store. Lots of poets worked similar jobs. I think it's much more destructive to work a cognitively demanding job where your mind can never drift. Where in the shower in the morning and when you fall asleep at night you're thinking about the problems at work. You want as little friction, social and otherwise, as possible. You want simple zen tasks with some novel stimulus. You want to be able to daydream

 

[sus]

You can also learn a lot about people from such jobs

 

[sus]

this was very interesting btw, didn't know this at all. gun to your head, what kind of music would you make?

It's like, a little bit of disco a little bit of classical, so think Arthur Russell, but then lots of sacred music, hymns and stuff, slightly jazzy poppy yet sacred, a sacred pop music, like Alice Coltrane. Yeah the little demos I make and the fragments I collect and the visions I have for them (which will perhaps never be realized) are like Owen Pallett meets Alice Coltrane meets Arthur Russell meets Philip Glass.

 

[other_life]

even if you're altricial you're supposed to spend your formative years up close to the action, not at a grocery store in bloomington.

🥀

 

[version]

I actually think there's nothing wrong with a Bloomington grocery store. Lots of poets worked similar jobs. I think it's much more destructive to work a cognitively demanding job where your mind can never drift. Where in the shower in the morning and when you fall asleep at night you're thinking about the problems at work. You want as little friction, social and otherwise, as possible. You want simple zen tasks with some novel stimulus. You want to be able to daydream

Assuming it pays enough you don't have to spend your time worrying about money instead.

 

[sus]

That's true but if you don't have kids and live like a bachelor all your life then you don't really have expenses. Or need for savings. These are small sacrifices for the true poet.

 

[mvuent]

I actually think there's nothing wrong with a Bloomington grocery store. Lots of poets worked similar jobs. I think it's much more destructive to work a cognitively demanding job where your mind can never drift. Where in the shower in the morning and when you fall asleep at night you're thinking about the problems at work. You want as little friction, social and otherwise, as possible. You want simple zen tasks with some novel stimulus. You want to be able to daydream

that’s been my rationalization for various life choices for years. on the whole, if there’s one thing i’m proud of about my current life, it’s that it’s weird. not in the sense of crazy shit always happening to me, but like, ontologically weird or something.