How open are you?

[pattycakes_]

I don't rule out this aspect, I just think the major satisfaction is something else.

Most people do something creative but most of them have no desire for a substantial audience. Artists who optimise for audience contact probably lose personal interest in their own work because they are no longer communicating with themselves e.g. the technically masterful songwriter sausage machines of the hit parade.

Too reductive and absolute. There's a million ways and reasons for it. Some do it just for the doing. Some say they do but secretly also love the admiration. Some initially love the admiration and grow to hate it. And on and on.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Too reductive and absolute. There's a million ways and reasons for it. Some do it just for the doing. Some say they do but secretly also love the admiration. Some initially love the admiration and grow to hate it. And on and on.

The creative process is literally primary and the prerequisite for any of the other things, as long as they are also actually creative.

I could take hundreds of poems from a friend who doesn't share his poetry with anyone and then perform them but I would not be engaged an artistic event from my point of view.

 

[pattycakes_]

Can't be arsed getting into it. It's not something I'd ever want to pin down either.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

My main concerns when performing are being either way worse than the others or way better.

 

[version]

My main concerns when performing are being either way worse than the others or way better.

mixed_sextips

 

[mixed_biscuits]

mixed_sextips

It's morally questionable to give someone their life's peak experience but morally unconscionable to tell them that that's what it's been afterwards.

 

[Clinamenic]

It's morally questionable to give someone their life's peak experience but morally unconscionable to tell them that that's what it's been afterwards.

So you're deliberately underperforming then? Riiiight.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

The kind of reception I like is the audience feeling that they have witnessed greatness despite having understood nothing. That way we get all the right vibes without any damage having been done.

 

[pattycakes_]

You're such a Lynch

 

[WashYourHands]

The kind of reception I like is the audience feeling that they have witnessed greatness despite having understood nothing. That way we get all the right vibes without any damage having been done.

 

[sus]

"I'm pretty much open to anything that comes my way... Romantic, professional, personal"

 

[linebaugh]

I’m a classic strong man type with an iron will who must remain closed lest the world corrupt my pure spirit but I think I’m pretty good at lowering the draw bridge when necessary

 

[yyaldrin]

i was staying in a hostel for six weeks last winter and one thing i noticed was that all of the americans and canadians i met there told me a lot of intimate and detailed stuff about their private lives, as if they were speaking to their therapist. except i wasn't even asking them anything. not that i mind, you know, i like to hear stories of strangers but it did feel like quite the contrast to the other people i met there.

 

[version]

i was staying in a hostel for six weeks last winter and one thing i noticed was that all of the americans and canadians i met there told me a lot of intimate and detailed stuff about their private lives, as if they were speaking to their therapist. except i wasn't even asking them anything. not that i mind, you know, i like to hear stories of strangers but it did feel like quite the contrast to the other people i met there.

This is what happened when I met Gus. I just sat there like "Oh, yeah? Mad," while he confessed to dozens of murders.

 

[yyaldrin]

This is what happened when I met Gus. I just sat there like "Oh, yeah? Mad," while he confessed to dozens of murders.

i kinda envy that sort of attitude. i keep things for myself way too much but i think it's partly cultural, especially northern europe is like that. people open up only when they are drunk and that's a pitty. with the americans i feel like they love to take the stage or maybe it's because they're all on medication?

 

[sus]

On openness & its connection to demonic possession (cf the brilliant meme @Mr. Tea posted upthread)

He saw culture as arrayed on an axis between horizontal and vertical structure. Verticality—associated with McLuhan's hot media—displayed itself in top-down control and rule-based imperative. It was detached and boundaried; it was structure-preserving; it was an elite sensibility, and Catholic. Horizontality, meanwhile, was expressed in memetic transmission and social norms. Horizontal poets and philosophers like Bergson and Rimbaud advocated for a permeable and "cool" (McLuhan) enmeshment, an opening of the self up to the fluxes and flows of the world, a losing of the self in involvement—an easy way, he would note, to find yourself possessed by the devil. The discovery of complexity and emergence were ways for science to name and deal with the excess that rationalist, vertical frames necessarily exclude: Norbert Weiner himself had developed from the "hot" modeling of tic-tac-toe as solved game, to chess, which was computationally intractable to approach by any method other than the cool interaction of "learning games." All of culture had suffered a similar transition, positivism plunging down the rabbit hole with Alice, ceasing to understand its world.

 

[sus]

One thing the text goes into is the way that intelligence agencies, marketing agencies, and the Catholic Church itself, caught onto this "horizontal" inclination in 60s counterculture, and realized it "opened" you up to trend and fad-chasing, towards adopting whatever came along (including metaphorical demons, egregores, infohazards)

Whereas, what I get from the Tea meme, is this walled-off conservativism that says, "The world is a hostile place trying to infect me and I have to keep my guard up or I'll be infected."

One relevant question here is: Are infohazards real? Do they exist? Are there ideas or realizations or truths about the world that can destroy you, drive you mad? I think there are. But perhaps they differ from person to person. I always think of Denethor, destroyed. Or Tom Cruise's character in Eyes Wide Shut, destroyed by this image of his wife and the... sailor? officer? w/e

 

[linebaugh]

i kinda envy that sort of attitude. i keep things for myself way too much but i think it's partly cultural, especially northern europe is like that. people open up only when they are drunk and that's a pitty. with the americans i feel like they love to take the stage or maybe it's because they're all on medication?

I watch a lot of reality tv and at some point every single contestant will say to someone they just met an hour ago ‘wow I’ve never talked to anyone about this stuff before.’ I think we partly crave this moment, and also if Americans are in Europe they probably just enjoy speaking loosely because there are no consequences for them as they are across the ocean, like talking to a taxi driver

 

[sus]

It's interesting tho re all the discussion on boomers and Bobby Dylan (maybe @kid charlemagne has something to say here)

because Dylan's "cool" and "cool" broadly does not seem to me like permeability or openness. It is a preemptive shutting down.

Dylan was incredibly internal, incredibly closed off to the world in many ways. Yes he soaked up the times and is an expert trendchaser (I mean this in the least pejorative way possible—I think he's been very open, e.g., about doing protest songs in the early 60s because "the people wanted them"). He was open to some drug experimentation, became possessed by the spirit of Christianity. I have friends who swear that marijuana works by opening you up, making you "cool" with everything. And yet something about the black-turtleneck-beatnik type broadly strikes me as closed off. I can't articulate or square it yet.

 

[version]

A perfect thread to repost my boy Jean again.