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Archive for the ‘music’ Category

I just used some of my webcam money to subscribe to one of my favorite radio programs ever, Hearts of Space. Nevermind the ill-advised acronym (so typical of nerds to make a hilarious mistake like that, god love ‘em).

Since our porn business operates on a subscription basis, it’s interesting to research other subscription-based internet products, their price points, and comparing the offerings. I loved reading the HOS: WHY PAY? page. Like porn, music is something you can get free online in a million places. Even when people don’t ask you to justify charging for it, many of us feel we MUST explain it (I’ve been criticized by adult webmasters for the times when I’ve disclosed similar information and confronted those questions when maybe I should leave them alone). It’s inspiring to read the way Hearts of Space explains some of their business approach (and costs outsiders don’t comprehend without being taught) because it’s so firmly rooted in a clear vision, one that I know DELIVERS an experience I’ve never gotten from any other radio programming. There is a certain personality, there are seductive, hypnotic voices I’m attached to, and there is a well-planned journey offered by HOS.

HEARTS of SPACE PRODUCER STEPHEN HILL’s CAREER seemed to take a sharp detour in the early 70’s when he abandoned his architectural career and opened a recording studio. . . . In retrospect, Hill realizes he never really left architecture. He simply became a sound architect who learned to build his castles on the air. “Architects create environments with physical materials.
I do it with sound.” - Stephen Hill

It’s also interesting to observe my own thought process in deciding what kind of subscription to get: I chose the $13 a month all-access plan because I don’t feel like I can shell out the money for a year even though I know it would save me money in the long run. Also, The internet radio channel only (no archives or playlists) probably would’ve been good enough for me, but if it wasn’t, I didn’t want to try to figure out how to upgrade mid-month. Out of laziness/a desire to be efficient with my time and not necessarily need or probable usage, I chose the more comprehensive membership. I know people go through similar though processes when deciding which membership plan to get for our sites.

Hearts of Space is an inspiring model of how to create and sustain and love a “product” that’s not personalized for each individual listener but still manages to feel intimate even though it’s mass-delivered and not even live (except maybe one hour a week, I think).  It speaks of a void and manages to fill it –inside of me and outside of me — at the same time. I’m fascinated by people and groups who design and deliver stimuli producing what appears to be a relatively mundane experience (compared to, say, a roller coaster ride in a theme park or a provocative theatre piece, etc.) that manages to infiltrate people’s lives by being constantly accessible in private, demanding little of them but providing addictive stimulation. A little like a favorite diner or coffee shop. Something offering sustenance you could get elsewhere, but elsewhere just wouldn’t be QUITE right. I believe there’s something about the earnestness of the proprietors to deliver an actual EXPERIENCE they’ve envisioned in rich detail and feel in their own bones that makes Hearts of Space , some bookstores, a couple of Indian and Thai restaurants in Tacoma, and some porn sites exceptional.

I love music and I love feeling distant connections to people, but it’s impossible for me to listen to voices or most music and WORK at the same time. “Space music” offers me the kind of escape and transcendence I long for. It’s a spiritual salve for me that allows me to imagine journeying into a meaningful peaceful nothingness of wind and colors and stars and the smell of ozone. It gives me a lot of the feeling I get from imagining my ideal forms of church or prayer or sanctuary or space travel. It’s like having a lucid flying dream. That’s totally worth $13 a month to me. “Greetings, space fans . . . “

There’s a vibe on Hearts of Space that I’d like to infuse my own site with – that I’ve always wanted to be there and have maybe succeeded in transmitting some of the time (not the SAME vibe, but a quality or peculiarity of vibe). I think it will be helpful to listen to HOS on a daily basis to remind myself of the possibilities and how personality and vision and voices (even in very limited doses, more often without words) can combine in powerful, seductive, and soothing ways. How to make transportation out of your aesthetics and values to take people to a place they recognize as one where their belief systems make perfect sense. Or freewheeling careless nonsense. Where you look around and feel yourself and even though nothing has changed, you’re like, “THIS is it, what I was trying to remember that was bothering the tip of my tongue.”

Like, fucking psychic alignment, man!

Click here for an older post about new age music, porn and more.

*****

I know, you’re all like . . . post some porn, woman!! Are you losing your mind?

I can only answer in a predictably crazy way by insisting that no, I’m totally on the verge of genuine SANITY, motherfuckers!! Seriously, like, all is about to be REVEALED!!

I’ll try to post something porny and down-to-earth for you soon, mkay? I’ll TRY.

I am always trying. I don’t know if that’s apparent or not, but it’s true.

I didn’t do it on purpose, but I took some of these pics at exactly 2:28 am in 2/28. Technically, I took them at 2:28 on 3/1 but I don’t switch the day in my head until after I’ve fallen asleep.

Full Moon, February 28th 2010, 2:28 am

I intended to post these images of the crone moon along with a tribute to pianist Martha Argerich and wax on about the furious potency of certain women as they age, and that I have never seen or felt any man hold a candle to a woman like her. Maybe I was going to write about how watching her almost makes me believe in a pantheon of goddesses. I think I might have intended to use her as just one example of why feminism is still relevant to me: that women of talent, of fury, of power, and of age are so invisible to us and when we do notice them, they’re despised and/or part of a fetishized niche: curiosities collected by people with very special interests.

Triple Goddess in the form of YouTubed Martha:

I’m not somebody who believes the only way to celebrate age is to exhibit disgust for those who are enchanted and aroused by youth, I just think think the imbalance of visibility and admiration is grotesquely skewed to a point that pains and mystifies me. I want MOREMOREMORE grey hair and widened wisdom and that patient look of years of practice you can see in Martha’s eyes. Like she could summon up thunderbolts and DESTROY YOU in the blink of an eye and go right back to playing with smoking fingertips except that destroying you would be a waste of her time so maybe she’d just wink and shuffle off to mist her orchids and you’d know that she knows exactly how many pounds of bullshit you’re full of.

The mastery of older women. I want to be surrounded by that and bow before it at least once a week. Towards that end I seem to be in certain kinds of love with a stout greying-haired dyke with twinkling eyes who told me about oxytocin and makes me want to beg her take me golfing. Even with ten other people in the room listening to her I feel like she’s talking directly to me and I’m drifting towards her, ready for our bosoms to melt into each other. You know that feeling like you’re RIGHT ABOUT TO KISS SOMEONE even though she’s halfway across the room? I can imagine breathing our mouths into a soft little seal where she could magically keep talking, ministering to me, reeling me into a quiet place removed from everyone else’s noise where I could even become blissfully deaf to myself. Every time I see her now I can feel it, melting into her at the mouth and the chest and the belly. I don’t think I’ll do anything about it because I’m pretty sure she has cats (or A cat, at least, of course) and I’m too young and scattered to waste her time with my crushing, but a somewhat-younger woman can dream. And melt and drift and submit.

February Full Moon Dancing

I didn’t get around to digitally memorizing the most recent full moon in March, but I was CLOSE with a camcorder in a windstorm at night while clouds raced across her wake of light without losing any speed. And then there were too many of them and only my eyes could appreciate the glimmers of shine that were still visible from down here on the ground.

*****

Note: I hate the words “pics” and “vids”, but those abbreviations work really well and are more popular search terms, so I stick them in my blog entry titles anyway (also to alert folks following my RSS feed that it’s a multimedia entry and maybe worthier of a click-through).

I’ve got a new thing on our spycam and chat schedule: playing piano for half an hour on our spycams the last Sunday night of the month (tonight!) and chatting afterward.

It’s not a “concert” or a “show” and as with everything on our cams that’s not pay-by-the-minute, I won’t be taking requests. I probably won’t expose my genitals or fondle myself in an erotic manner, however it will be intimate. To me.

Members click here and head to SpyOnYou to watch/listen/chat. Stardust Piano Hour starts at 7 pm Pacific.

If you aren’t a member, but want to become one, JOIN HERE.

Note: the audio is via spycam broadcast, so not high fidelity / stereo/cd quality.

*****

We went to a Christmas party last month, new attendants in the middle of an old crowd where it’s traditional to sing The Twelve Days of Christmas and other songs and carols. Our friend was getting fed up with trying to accompany on the hosts’ keyboard, so I stepped in,  sat down and enjoyed it. It’s been SO LONG since I played piano in a room full of people.

I’m no virtuoso at playing piano and am really not good by pianist standards but I realized something at that party: I  am good ENOUGH that I shouldn’t avoid playing just because I know that I could be better or because people are better than I am or because there are so many beautiful and amazing things I *can’t* do or haven’t learned or practiced.

I have focused so much energy on cringing with shame over the things I can’t do that I *should* be able to do; I should be able to play by ear better, I should be able to sit down with a band and jam, I should have a whole repertoire of songs that I know by heart (actually, I should be embarrassed that I actually have never learned one. SINGLE. song by heart), all of my fingers should be equally strong and skilled, I should stop using the pedal so much to compensate for having small hands,  I make mistakes that hurt my ears, blah blah fucking blah. Oh god I would suck as a piano duelist!!

Here’s the thing, though. I was still the best piano player at that party. And unless every party I went to was a party for musicians only, that would frequently be the case.

How many people really know how to play piano? How many people in the world can actually play *better* than I can? What percentage of humans do I actually play *better* than? Why do I focus on the wrong things?

I don’t think the problem is that I really that I want to be the best at anything (I believe in the healing power of crystals and that Jesus Christ rose from the dead more than I believe it’s possible for me to come within sight of being the best at anything), but when I compare myself to people who do things excellently, what I can do with mediocrity seems useless. If there are lots of people doing something better than I do it, what’s the point of me wasting time on it? What can I contribute with my half-assedness? I guess the answer has always felt obvious to me: NOTHING. All that can be accomplished is embarrassment and time wasted on me that would’ve been better spent listening to someone do it better.

What a crock of negative shit!

I’m practicing to undo that crappy mindset of mine that’s plagued me with pretty much everything I do, that feeling that if I can’t excel at something and be in the top 5% at it, that I’m only be humiliating myself to spend time on it. As I get older I realize it’s asinine to think that *ANYthing* a person does can be more than mediocre. The only thing most of us can excel at is being ourselves, which is really only unique in a small very random sample so even “being myself” is a field with competition because we really are not so individually special. Except to ourselves. And our loved ones. And our communities that need our work and for us to try and to be where we’re at so maybe someone else can be the best in your own small circle.  So yeah. I’m going to let myself be special to myself. I want to tell my stories and use my voice and play songs and dance and stuff. And not throw away what I already know which is more than a whole lot of other people, even if it’s less than others. I want to stop thinking about who is better and who is worse. Instead I want to care about what I want, what makes me happy, what resources I have in the form of skills and interest and love. I want to care about what I what I want to get lost in and what is important. Music is one of those things.

So I’m going to play piano more, and even dare to let people hear me do it.

I need to stop thinking I should pick up the theremin so I don’t have to worry about the millions of people who are better at theramin playing than I am. I already know a lot about how to play the piano! If I want to play the theremin it should be because it’s totally fucking cool (and I want to make people fall in love with my hands), not because I’m afraid what I can already do (play piano) isn’t good enough.

If you’ve never seen the movie Salmonberries you may not have heard of this FUCKING BEAUTIFUL song, so OH MY GOD — here you go:

Is it possible to watch that with a morsel of chick hormones and not be like, “PICK ME, KD — PICK ME!!! I WILL OPEN MY DOOR AND EVERYTHING ELSE GAHHHHHH-hahahaha-CRYING HYSTERICAL TEARS OF INFATUATED DESIRE!!!” ??

Anyway, if I remember correctly the film was incredible, too. Not in a high-production kind of way, but yeah. I miss the days of indie lesbian films. So compelling and awkward.

Last night I dreamt I was singing. Like a bird. Like motherfucking Celtic Woman on PBS (but without the prom dresses or fiendishly exaggerated blonde fiddle player – only the sound, but without drummers or anything in the background).

It felt like silvered water flowing through my throat and coming out it sounded good. My voice trilled, turning corners up and down and up and UP. I was so excited to discover I could do this. It wasn’t just sound, it was the feeling of it in my torso, streaming through my throat and out of my mouth.

Someone was there, teaching me how to do it, telling me I could but I can’t see her now or remember who she was. But I have a pretty good idea. And I’m not even sure she knows how to sing in real life either.

We were outside in an apple orchard.

Last night one of our long-time voyeurs emailed me about how hot Lady Gaga is and how he can’t stop watching her Poker Face video and oh yeah, did you know “she has a pussy and a cock”?

No, actually I didn’t know that Lady Gaga has a pussy and a cock. And I assumed the guy who told me that had just taking those hideous YouTube comments too seriously (the ones that say “she’s a man”, “she’s a nigger”, “she’s ugly”, “she has no talent” and/or “she’s an ugly talentless nigger man”). Note: I don’t understand why these record companies WON’T allow you to embed their videos but they’ll let any jackass post whatever horrifying, distorted, insulting, ignorant shit they want in comments.

So our fan emailed me back with a recent post on Gawker with a video showing what looks like a flaccid unit between her legs. And apparently she’s confirmed the rumors herself. It seems pretty unlikely, but who really knows how many intersex people there are out there? Why would I assume she ISN’T? And on a related note, just because someone looks all-white, doesn’t mean they ARE “all” white. Not that I’m defending people hurling racial slurs at someone because that’s the worst they can come up with in their unimaginative racist minds to disparage a successful young woman (along with being ugly, being man-like, trannyish, or whatever) — I’m not defending that, just pointing out that coming back at those slurs with, “nuh-uh! Like, obviously she’s TOTALLY WHITE!!” might not be the best response to that stupidity.

Whatever the case may be, I have more interest in her than ever before after watching this video. I assumed it was just a fake weiner/publicity stunt, but she sounds totally serious in this quotation (which I can’t help suspecting is fake, too – everyone’s quoting it, but no one is citing an original media source):

“It’s not something that I’m ashamed of, just isn’t something that I go around telling everyone,” she said. “Yes. I have both male and female genitalia, but I consider myself a female. It’s just a little bit of a penis and really doesn’t interfere much with my life.

“The reason I haven’t talked about it is that it’s not a big deal to me. Like come on. It’s not like we all go around talking about our vags. I think this is a great opportunity to make other multiple gendered people feel more comfortable with their bodies. I’m sexy, I’m hot. I have both a poon and a peener. Big fucking deal.”

Of course, Delia has known all about this forever now, I guess, because she’s always surfing the “tranny” boards but it was news to me. Still can’t say I love her music, but after this and her most recent performance on American Idol which indicated she DOES actually have musical talent in addition to being a showman, I guess I have a mini-crush . . . and I hope that she is, in fact, a black hermaphrodite so I can celebrate her breaking boundaries for all the other discofried black hermaphrodites waiting in the wings.

I remember working swing shift as one of the very best times in my life. I’d get off work between midnight and two in the morning and drive home in the dark experiencing the magic of RIGHTNESS, of everything having fallen into place and a lifelong problem being solved. That schedule didn’t make everything perfect, of course, but it was a magical gift that explained part of my life and who I am to me and let me know that things CAN fall into place. It’s one thing to complain vociferously about not being a morning person and another thing to be lucky enough to NOT HAVE TO BE. To experience yourself operating at maximum efficiency and enjoy your favorite parts of the day and night, skipping the parts that have never worked for you. To function so much better that you’ve got PROOF that this “night person” thing is real.

I’m at a point in my life where I need a new swing shift. My gears have been out of sync for years now and I keep looking for some little twinkly adjustment I can make that will fix things. I’ve given myself a bunch of tuneups and they’ve been eye-opening and helpful, but I’m desperate to feel something like the smooth, peaceful rightness of driving home on a nearly-empty freeway with the windows rolled down in the summer, smelling everything asleep and reveling in being awake, ready to go home and make a simple dinner for myself. The answer isn’t making myself work from four to midnight now, either – I don’t live alone anymore and I don’t want to; I want to go to bed WITH Delia (not a night person, so we compromise). I feel like I’ve tried everything and suspect the answer is that I need more time to be completely alone with myself, without the sounds of anybody else, without being seen or heard by anyone watching . . . just totally removed from everybody’s sounds and presence.

Last week I allowed myself the luxury of staying up all night long playing with TrixieRadio – listening to music, downloading new stuff and uploading it to the station . . . amusing myself and accomplishing something that has no monetary pay-off in the near future and is absolutely NOT what I should be spending huge blocks of time doing. But I miss listening to music. REALLY MISS IT. I am not someone who can work AND listen to music with words, so it’s not an option for me to multitask. Besides, I don’t want to. I want to do nothing but listen. NOTHING BUT. So I did, all night long, and organized my .mp3’s and made lists of cd’s I still need to rip and read about music and made a blog entry begging for money to justify doing it more. Being up all night doing that made me feel a little more like myself. And I finally bought an adaptor that provides phantom power for my months-old new microphone so I can personalize things more and potentially make more sales through the “radio” thing and podcasting. If I can figure out the perfect settings for recording with this microphone (one of those detail-oriented time-sucking tasks that annoys the shit out of me that I usually invest a couple of hours in then decide it’s not worth it / I should wait for a better time to do it / I have more important things to do).

I’ve been retreating a lot more into our guest room, off cam and alone, which has been helpful but maybe I’m still not committed enough to it to really reap the benefits of it. I feel guilty about it and still can’t get enough. I haven’t figured out how to integrate my need for solitude with work and my relationship with Delia. She’s really tolerant and understanding of my limitations in this area so it’s me that needs to work out the kinks alone along with continuing to figure out how to succeed at being my own boss. You’d think after seven years I’d be an expert, but I’m still an amateur (both at working for myself and being in a relationship). A lot of things have changed for the better in the past year but I’m still struggling to find daily “rightness”. I get glimmers of it, but very inconsistently; for everything I resolve to do better, something else falls by the wayside. It’s like there’s a never-ending rotation of things I do well and things I fuck up — every day, every week, every month, every quarter, every year the same fucking challenges just trade places with each other. I make progress but only temporarily before regressing. I feel like I haven’t CONQUERED anything in years and I’m pretty fucking sick of it. I try to be patient with myself, recognizing I’ve had some really fucked-up health problems and am still fine-tuning “curing” myself. Recognizing the economy sucks so it’s not entirely my fault that we’re on this debt merry-go-round.

The shitty thing is that having a positive attitude means feeling empowered and taking responsibility to fix stuff — believing it’s POSSIBLE to make things better; I’m just really really REALLY tired of the burden. Sometimes I just wish I could drive home and let my boss figure it out in the morning and tell me what to do when I go to work and know that it’s not my fault if that was the wrong thing. Part of me loves how I’ve complicated my life and that I *don’t* have a boss, but JESUS FUCKING CHRIST sometimes I miss having things be simple. I miss having someone else to blame. I miss not really caring about my job. That used to make me feel trapped, having to go to work for a certain number of hours and not doing anything even remotely creative. Now? I feel trapped because I *do* care about my job(s). Because it’s rare that I get to establish a rhythm doing something simple for 6-8 hours. I can’t quit because I love my work, but I have no idea when (if ever) I’ll be able to do my job BETTER and not just feel like I’m running on a treadmill. A treadmill that lurches and changes speeds unpredictably and is just like . . . possessed with multiple personalities. There’s no water-cooler where I can stand around bitching about my boss and how if I ran things I’d do them differently/better. I mean, I can do that, but it’s not really good for my self-esteem. I am my own worst boss/enemy and I’m so. TIRED of it.

I keep slogging along, promising myself that if we just get rid of our debt we’ll be able to AFFORD to establish some rhythms and magic swing shifts but right now we seriously do not have the money to do anything efficiently. Not shooting, not marketing, not exercising . . . not even fucking GROCERY shopping. Every day is a schizo fucking mess and I’m just so sleeeeeeeeeeeeeepy. Not as bad as I was before, but still . . . some days are pretty bad while I’m fine tuning different birth control pills, supplements, figuring out just how much fucking with my blood sugar I can get away with, etc.

Fuck it. I am going to order a pizza.

Sorry for the downer of a post. Things are good, I just needed to whine a little bit.

If you don’t watch it, go ahead and barf on my blog and move along. Otherwise, here are a few brief thoughts/feelings on the season so far.

My mom is so right that girls do NOT get a fair shake in these coed television competitions. The voting audience and judges definitely judge girls and boys by totally different standards. The standards the chicks have to live up to are WAY higher. So yeah, it’s been pretty shitty but hardly a surprise to us watching Allison be in the bottom three so often and kicked off last week. I loved watching and listening to her sing — she’s the one that if *I* were a music mogul I’d want to make a record.

From the beginning we were rooting for Matt, Allison, and Alexis. Matt’s whole piano bar experience and beautiful Elvis cheeks won me over, but when he did that Coldplay song, OMG — I wrote him off as not having a clue what he’s good at and how good at it he is. Still, I felt emotionally attached to him throughout the season and rooted for him to do well. I loved Alexis until she fucked up Jolene (one of my absolute favorite songs). Allison I loved pretty much every week even though I agreed that Cry Baby was a bad choice (and I especially hated her changes and that she smiled as she sang it — that is my biggest Idol pet peeve aside from the lame hand gestures of pointing and come-hereing and counting on their fingers whenever a number is a song lyric, when these kids SMILE inappropriately during sad/pathetic songs like that boy who grinned as he sang Careless Whisper a while back). It was much better the next night when she was actually crying as she sang it. So sad . . . I really wanted her to win.

I enjoyed all of the contestants this year after a few shows EXCEPT Danny Gokey. I can’t understand why he’s a favorite with his complete lack of humility. He seems totally insincere and sociopathic to me, but maybe he really is just mourning his wife’s death and what I’m reading is just him being shell-shocked. Whatever — I think he’s a total ass. I do think, however, that he was better than Lil who was totally overrated (except when she sang that Fourth of July song everyone ripped her apart for doing – I thought that was the best). Her bowing and scraping drove me apeshit and I do not understand why she didn’t get called out more often for being “pitchy”.

I even enjoyed the blind guy. A LOT, after awhile. He cracked good jokes and made good choices and I hope he makes a wonderful Christian music album. If forced to buy either a Scott MacIntyre album or a Danny Gokey album, I WOULD RELISH BUYING SCOTT’S INSTEAD.

Kris Allen pleasantly surprised me — I get pissed when I hear stupid criticisms of him. He’s by far the most mature contestant with the most diverse array of talents and widest/deepest music appreciation. I feel like he really understands music and loves every aspect of making it even if he’s not the strongest singer. Not that he should win, but I imagine him having the skill to be a long-lasting success in other ways. It seems like he gets the meaning of every word in every song, unlike most American Idol contestants.

Adam? God, I just want to see him on his knees with a big thick cock in his ripe mouth and jizz splashed all over his gorgeous bloated face. And he and his partner both have to be wearing cartoon hair and untied high tops with tight pants. And their thick cocks jutting out like big meat-pink cylinders of gayness. At first I was so not a fan of his Rush-like vocal stylings, but I was won over when he did his Jeff Buckley impression. I’ll be happy when he wins.

There you have it. My obnoxious Idol entry for this year. You can laugh if you want to. I do.

Feel free to ask me any urgent Idol questions you have like, “who is your favorite judge?” or “would you rather have sex with Anoop or Sanjaya?”

I started taking piano lessons when I was about nine years old. My teacher, Joan, didn’t believe in using metronomes and always had long, fancy nails even though pianists aren’t supposed to. At some point during the first year of lessons, she told me that music is really all about MATH.

No math = no music. A huge revelation for me as a kid. It’s a big truth that’s never left me. At first my feelings about it were a little conflicted; it was sort of stressful (”I’m so bad at fractions!”), but realizing that math is the foundation of music (or at least one doorway into building and understanding it) never sucked the romance or beauty out of it. It never made it dry to me. It can be invisible enough that you don’t actually NEED to know it or think about it for it to be in there. That lesson primed me to notice as years went by that math and science are built into nature and art and our insides. That the basics of them are intuitive, like rhythm, but the more you know about the math and science of something, the better your music or art or appreciation of those things can be.

Knowing that art is really science has been a solace to me — art isn’t reserved only for a few people who are divinely inspired. It can be orderly: accessed and created systematically. With simple formulas. With a wide variety of tools mixed with individual perspective, personality and tastes to make it seem unique and magical, disguising the numbers in the craft of it.

*****

I shot a set of pictures of Delia wearing some hot Hello Kitty shorts on Friday night and the photos are all jacked up. I’m a long way from understanding the science of photography; I *like* numbers, but they don’t stick in my head very well so even though I’ve read about how cameras work and how OUR camera works I still don’t have it committed to memory or know how to manipulate light and settings quickly to achieve what I want. I have to just walk around and fiddle with things until I mostly-accidentally happen onto something lovely. Most of the good pictures I take are the product of luck and shooting A LOT without fully comprehending what I’m doing. I recognize what looks good and beautiful and erotic to me (or at least halfway decent) and what looks bad to me and have a few basic practices for making the former (especially in the “halfway decent” category) and avoiding the latter, but my technical skills are pretty basic.

All of the pics looked dark to me so I bumped the ISO up to 1000 or 2500, I forget now (hence the graininess) and the speed down to 25 or 30 — they still looked dark for some reason; I was letting the camera auto-focus (selecting the area to focus on myself with these little movable box thingies; I forget what Nikon calls that function but it didn’t seem to be working well on this particular night) and adjust the aperture itself until I decided to do a closeup and switched everything to manual (because it balks when we ask it to autofocus macros); suddenly everything was WAY TOO BRIGHT and I had to change the shutter speed. The only thing I can think of is that the camera wasn’t doing a good job of automatically adjusting the aperture and when I switched to manual and adjusted it myself then everything changed. It sucked because we wanted these pics to be bright.

The older I get, the more I see that MOST working artists — writers, photographers, graphic designers, sculptors, painters, musicians, etc. — are just people who’ve chosen to do that kind of work. That the only thing that sets them apart from the rest of us is the amount of time they put into their art and confidence they have in devoting themselves to it without worrying whether or not a jury of peers think they deserve to make money on it. Very few artists are people who actually possess something innate that the rest of us don’t have; most of it is taking the time to learn and apply information that’s available to everyone (or anyone with the resources to do a little research) and then investing money in the right tools and lots of time in practicing. Sometimes I think the most successful artists are the ones who are actually LESS gifted and too stupid/overconfident to recognize that there are other people (usually making zero dollars on their art) who are WAY more talented. Maybe the only way to be a successful “artist” is to NOT be great — to not complicate shit with too much vision, originality, or diverse techniques and just work from simple formulas to make things that are easily recognizable and accessible to the masses. See also Adaptation. If your work brings other people pleasure does it really NEED to be super duper excellent?

The older I get, the happier I am with shooting for mediocrity. Even mediocrity requires a lot of hard work (for me, at least). Mediocrity is attainable without being a given; you can stand out and make a decent living in a field simply by being one of the relative few to 1) choose that field, 2) commit to it for a number of years, and 3) make yourself known. All the better if you’re willing to take emotional and financial risks and make sacrifices for your work/”art”. The happier you are with mediocrity the wider your success. I’ve slowly shifted my focus of “pride” away from “talent” and pinned it on “work”; you can’t be proud of having good taste or being born with certain attributes making you better suited than most to doing one job or another. Those are only things you can be THANKFUL for. The things you can actually be PROUD of are hard work, dedication and defying convention to choose happiness. To call yourself an artist as soon as you choose to be one — to make it your job — rather than waiting until you imagine other people think you are good enough to deserve that label. Those are the people I admire more and more, the ones who are brave & devoted enough to create some form of art (even if it’s just fair to middlin’) and are savvy enough to make it a business.

I used to think having to work hard at something or take a lot of time to make something acceptable was something to be ashamed and embarrassed of. If it wasn’t easy it meant I wasn’t good at it. Now I realize that’s total bullshit (even if I still FEEL that way sometimes). The strategic choices and commitments you make to invest work in things that make you happy, better, more skilled, or even just capable of seeing you should make a different choice (I’ve always believed that quitting is something to be proud of; that whole “quitters never win” line is such a crock of shit). The time you spend allowing yourself to suck ass — IMMERSING yourself in sucking ass and slowly filling in the void of your ignorance with knowledge — just so you can become mediocre at something you love and then keep working to try to improve upon that. Beyond mediocrity there are so few people who are actually able to recognize the difference between mediocrity and greatness, there’s no reason to beat yourself up if you’re not capable of becoming that elite.

Being a “jack of all trades, master of none” ROCKS. It’s fun, it’s challenging, and I don’t love any one thing enough to give up all the other stuff. So I really have to be satisfied with mediocrity, slow progress, and making balanced choices to devoting little bits of time here and there to different things I love. Like making flash cards to learn photography stuff. You’re never too old for flash cards. I’m not, anyway.

I am mediocre at so many things, and have managed to balance (with great mediocrity) such a gigantic shitload of different kinds of work that I deserve to be quite proud of myself and my extrao
rdinary mediocrity. I feel so blessed to be in a position to dabble so widely. Lucky lucky lucky, and proud of myself for creating a notable percentage that luck by my choices. For recognizing my luck and exploiting it to the best of my limited ability.

Some of us are able to do our work just because we’re lucky enough to have the resources to buy tools, to live in an environment filled with inspiration and/or to be close to people who make beautiful subjects and do most of the art/work for you.

*****

I love arranging forkfuls of food. Ones where I have the perfect ratio of one thing to the other(s). Mashed potatoes to gravy to meat. Raisins to flakes. Heavens to Betsy. It doesn’t have to be fancy, the formula just has to be right. Everything pleasingly arranged in relation to each other. I will never be a good cook because I don’t want to practice how to be; that’s Delia’s thing. It’s my job just to love eating, every day, tasting and swallowing over and over and saying thank you, honey.. And to figure out how to arrange camera settings like food on a fork, adjusting hole-sizes, timing mechanisms, and digitally tweaking things in perfect relation to the kind of light shining on my girlfriend.