My Time as a Human

In one of my favorite moments of irrational young angst, my (lesbian) friend Shannon, who was being inundated by suitors, reached such a peak of confusion that she cried out in genuine dismay, “why is this girl sending me flowers?!” At the time, I was the one laughing until it hurt. Now, years later, we laughed together as we talked about the process of aging.

As an artist and highly social being it’s not something I come in contact with all that often. My friends range in age from twenty to forty and I rarely know where they fall in that spectrum because their level of enthusiasm, creativity and experience are much more relevant to me than the number of years they’ve had the option to engage the world. All too often I’ve met people in the their mid twenties who are so much more comfortable with themselves and have explored so much more of the world than others who have never stopped in all of their fifty years on earth to look into a mirror.

Because of this, I was completely unprepared for my first confrontation with the concept of aging. My friend Monkey had a birthday a few years back. He’s about ten years younger than me and swore that nothing could wear him out. His birthday gift of total athletic exhaustion started with a morning of intense martial arts sparring and then he was handed off to me. I set up rounds of squash, wrestling, and swimming which have all done a pretty good job of exhausting me in the past if I do them long enough. I hadn’t actually wrestled since high school, but at the time even a feisty little guy like me could be brought to the point of complete immobility by the drills we did.

After a few games of squash I started going through a series of takedowns with Monkey when suddenly something happened. I stopped. Not because I wanted to. I had his head and shoulders locked up and I was about to flip him over for a Russian Roll when suddenly… I couldn’t go anywhere. I heaved and sputtered and finally had to stop for a second, apologize, and start again. It happened a second time. And a third. It was freaky. My legendary boundless energy had, for the first time in my recent memory, completely run out.

At first I was in a panic about the weird illness I must have picked up. Now it was time for my older friends to laugh at me. Apparently, the ability to spike in energy, that impulse push, was the first thing they noticed fading. I immediately melted down and frantically began listing every activity I could start learning now and still do when I was eighty. Clearly, I was almost incapacitated and needed to study Go, Tango dancing, and bridge ASAP.

The word “age” suddenly meant the slow death of all things precious to me until, during my conversation with Shannon, she used it in a very different way. She talked about how happy she was to no longer be twenty, and sent into emotional overload by the irrelevant details of life. She talked about perspective and self confidence. Perspective is something I grew pretty quickly and is something I am proud of having been able to offer others for a long time. But then I realized what had changed for me in a positive way.

While I’ve always been comfortable and happy with who I am, only recently have I been able to see how much my experience has given me some pretty formidable skills. I woke up one day while on the project in India and realized that I was, in fact, a complete badass of versatility. Out there in the field, after having memorizing several technical manuals on the plane so that I could shoot confidently with new equipment, I was having partial German conversations at midnight with an engineer in Germany so that he would send me a firmware patch for our equipment. I was hacking code. I was setting up backup systems. I was working really well with people, often without the benefit of spoken language. By the end, I was already learning some of the language. I was shooting some great footage from extreme positions and often while running. I could have fixed our jeep if it had broken down. I could have built a house from scratch. In two weeks I’ll be performing Indian music at a wedding. All together it feels really, really good to finally realize the value I can provide. Now I just have to tag this realization with a word, its source, that thing that has caused me so much angst… aging.

Photos are from a photo booth set up by the excellent photographer Steve Noreyko.

Whenever I came downstairs to find my father completely immobilized by tears, I had only to look to the newspaper in his hands for the reason: Mike Royko. Royko was originally a daily columnist for the Chicago Sun Times and when Rupert Murdoc bought the paper he switched to the Chicago Tribune. My parents followed just to keep the tears flowing.

At one point the Tribune advertised a pair of Royko socks for somewhere around two dollars. They were purported to be, “as at home in the office as on the El.” (The El is the elevated public transit system in Chicago.) I eagerly sent away for them and proudly wore the small white socks with the stitched red signature, despite not really having any idea what the man said. Now that’s marketing.

Royko wrote primarily about Chicago politics, which was both ripe for the roasting and totally inscrutable to me. I would beg my parents to explain and, through the tears, they would give me some vague idea of what was happening. I learned to love Dunesbury in much the same way, and with a touch of Blume County that was my introduction to politics and world events.

John Stewart’s Daily Show on Comedy Central seems to be the modern equivalent. Whenever I get a chance to see the show I’m either laughing or furiously searching the internet for enough news to understand the joke. NPR usually keeps me well informed enough to keep up but I wonder how many kids out there are getting their first taste of politics and news from a comedy show now.

I actually got a chance to meet John Stewart a while back. I was following Bill Bradley, a former basketball star and senator, with a camera at the time and so when John walked in my initial observations were the decidedly mundane, “he’s short!” He was also lively and charismatic and a great representative of the nuttiness of politics and the flow of human drama to the masses. I’d gladly wear his socks and explain his shows to my niece.

Stripes and garter belts spun in every direction as I leapt into the air and bounced joyously with a sea of pink headed little girls, top hatted sad clown boys and assorted tattooed hippies in motion. Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls rippled through the crowd at one point to sing with the fans in the balcony down to the audience below and then moved through the rest of us a she poured it out to an acoustic number. I was so ecstatic I thought my face was going to spontaneously break out in white clown makeup.

After coming home to leap around the house and scream to my housemates, extolling the virtues of this fine performance, I dove into the internets to see how one of my favorite bands was doing and came across an NRR article titled “Band Tries to Make It Big Without Going Broke”.

I think there are two large movements that are changing things for artists. The first is, of course, rampant piracy and that’s been discussed to the point that while it’s no less true, everyone is tired of hearing about it and wants to get back to filling their iPods. The Dresden Dolls and many bands like them are living off of live shows and T-shirts as the concept of paid music becomes rapidly obsolete. The other is perhaps a more interesting phenomenon: art is being retaken by the masses.

Larry Lessig talks about the benefits of this phenomenon. He also gripes about the stranglehold of copyright on creativity and while I agree with him, and the idea of so much open, collaborative creation is a boon for the masses, I also wonder what’s left when it comes to surviving as an artist.

As an independent filmmaker since about 1998 I have watched both opportunities and corresponding competition grow. It suddenly become cheap enough for people like me to get their hands on equipment and make films, which of course made it cheap enough for everyone else too. There was a brief time when you could be seen and heard in the marketplace and now that time is rapidly being swept away in a tidal wave of content created by small independent producers.

My friend the LA music producer tells me that the big old record labels won’t even sign a band unless they’ve already produced one or two albums and have more than X thousand fans on MySpace. In other words, now that it’s possible to record in your basement you have to already have made it entirely on your own before anyone will agree to make money off of you.

As someone who is a huge advocate of DIY and using events like Burning Man and Maker Faire to encourage individuals to make art I love the trend. As someone who’s struggled as a documentary filmmaker in this mess I don’t have a lot of hope left for a career and I gave up on music as a possibility long ago. Of course, I won’t stop doing either of these things. This is what Republicans count on when they refuse to provide any sort of support or funding. Artists become starving artists because, like crackheads, they just can’t stop doing it. Film is the worst because cameras and other gear cost so much more than crack!

Photographs link to photographer’s flickr site.

After storming out of my room, hitting me as she passed and slamming the front door behind her, my high school girlfriend went tearing off in her giant boat of a car. I was sure she’d forgotten her glasses again but it was a little late for that. She had found one of my short stories.

One of the hardest things about being a writer is dealing with the impact of my words on those around me. In order to produce anything meaningful I have to dredge up parts of myself that are the most intense and amplify them. Often this involves blowing things out of the proportion of my experience, like using a microscope to make that little part of myself big enough to share with everyone. While ideally this gives other people a chance to feel, consider, and compare it also gives those close to me a false impression of the intensity of an experience.

When the piece (song, story, etc) discusses an intense emotion of the past, this often also produces the dreaded, “what?! I thought you were over that! How can you keep bringing that up?!” Make that emotion about a past girlfriend and, well… But those stories, about girlfriends and brief affairs and women who might have been are some of the most intense experiences I have. When looking for material this is the garden with the strongest tasting fruits and which continues to grow and produce more over time.

Writing fiction or poetry, in particular, tends to turn idle thoughts and expand them in sweeping “what if” experiments. Here’s where I get into the most trouble. Now I’m talking about things I would never do or thoughts I rarely, if ever, have and yet treating them with the full conviction of real experience. If someone can’t truly get their head around the idea of creative fiction, I’m doomed. While there are loose threads to reality in that I have experienced anger I do not, in fact, want to murder anyone in their sleep. Just because I try to get myself inside the head of someone racist, violent or crazy doesn’t mean that I’ve become them, or that I’ve secretly been them all along.

When Laura, my high school girlfriend, ran out on me she’d found a story about a romance. Her assumption was that I must be dreaming up another relationship because ours wasn’t good enough for me. I was frustrated then about her inability to understand what I was doing, but I sometimes wonder now if she just hadn’t yet spent enough time in other people’s heads, or dreaming, to understand how what I wrote could be something other than the truth of me. Maybe it’s not something someone can be convinced of unless they’ve experienced it themselves.