philosophy | MORIAH JOVAN

Everything is still biased against the lone artist.

November 4, 2009June 22, 2015Moriah

I didn’t say it. Someone who shall remain nameless said that to me, and it started me thinking about The Lone Artist.

I’ve been to New Orleans, Paris, Venice Beach, New York, London, Amsterdam, and other places where The Lone Artist sets about attempting to earn a living or at least approbation from a crowd of strangers walking by.

Paris, France --- A Street artist draws the face of the Mona Lisa on a sidewalk in front of the Louvre to try to earn money. --- Image by © Owen Franken/CORBIS — In Paris, it was the Ecole des Beaux-Arts students drawing Mona Lisa in pastels on the sidewalk, their hats out for coins.

amsterdam — In Amsterdam, it was the scantily-clad prostitutes in the plate-glass windows along the canal. (Okay, as “artist” and “lone,” that one’s questionable, but it’s vivid, ain’t it?)

london — In London, it was the—what is this guy? Is this classified as pantomime? Definitely performance art. (Shut up. I like mimes.)

newyork — In New York, it was the oddball music played by street musicians.

venice — In Venice Beach, it was a dude who charged $5 to create origami magic with one strand from one palm frond. I knew it was a living sculpture that would die in an hour, but I bought it anyway because it was so different and . . . unexpected. I admired that he could do it in seconds right in front of my eyes, I admired the work itself, and I kept it for the hour it lasted, then threw it away. That $5 was very well spent.

In a lot of ways, I like being a lone artist. When I go to authors’ websites and read about the difficulties they have working with a publisher, I’m glad. When I go to readers’ websites and read about how sad they are when a favorite author gets cut off mid-series, I’m glad. When I sit down to write and realize that I can do anything I want without having to account to a sales staff, I’m glad. When I know that the readership I’m gathering one by one, to whom I am ever so grateful, now has enough faith in me to go where I take them, I’m glad.

There is one respect I really don’t like it. I don’t like the near absence of distribution. But . . . that’s about the only way I can think of that I don’t like it. After all, a street performer can only play to the audience that walks by.

It’s not easy. Some days it’s damned depressing. I count on the readers to talk to me and remind me that there is something of worth in what I do, and believe me, I remember it. I count up those emails and screen shots and snippets of conversation here and there, and I keep them, put them in my hard drive bank like coins in my hat.

So when bedtime comes (if it comes) and I fall in bed exhausted from everything I have to do to be a lone artist, it’s the good kind of exhaustion.

Howard Roark laughed.

The internet before Al Gore

October 20, 2009April 30, 2018Moriah

Yeah, the joke’s tired. Sue me.

Anyway, 3-almost-4-year-old XY Tax Deduction and I went to Hy-Vee for lunch to kill some time. I love Hy-Vee’s salad bar (best grilled chicken EVER!) and XY TD loves their pizza. And canteloupe. On the same plate.

It has been my observation that on weekday mornings at Hy-Vee, there is a large number of post-retirement gentlemen sitting around, eating their farmer’s breakfasts and gossiping shooting the breeze, cussing and discussing. They seem to be mostly together, but because of tables and space, they self-select their table companions.

It has been my observation that on weekends when we go see my in-laws in southern Missouri, and we go to the local cafe for breakfast, there is a gathering of four to 10 post-retirement gentlemen sitting around, eating their farmer’s breakfasts and gossiping shooting the breeze, cussing and discussing.

It has been my observation in re-reading the Little House books for the purpose of writing Stay, Pa Ingalls, in the winter, would head out of the house and across the street to the grocery where he would watch off-season farmers play checkers and, I assume, gossip shoot the breeze, cuss and discuss.

Women have these little conclaves, too, but other than in a church-and-crafts context, I can’t think of anything comparable to men-and-their-morning-cafe-routine.

Every time I witness this, I think, “This is the internet before there was the internet.” And it still seems to be going strong. I love it. I think it’s profound in a lot of different ways, most of which I can’t articulate.

Too bad you have to be retired (or in the off season) to have it and enjoy it.

Stuff tacked to my office wall, part 1

July 30, 2009Moriah

On power:

You have to come to it on your own, through hardship and fear. You have to know who you are and what you believe and you have to take stock of that every day. You have to walk barefoot through fire on broken glass. You have to stand up to people who frighten you under conditions that terrify you. You have to be honest with yourself about what you really want. You have to be willing to fail.

Power is acquired, earned. You’ll have many opportunities in your life to earn bits and pieces of it. You’ll make bad choices; learn from them and do the best you can with them. Do not, under any circumstances, dither over what the right choice might be every single time you’re presented with one. It won’t teach you anything and you’ll be a bore at cocktail parties.

Acquiring power is a never-ending process. Every day you have to wake up and prove to the world all over again that you deserve it. There should never come a day when you wake up and say, ‘Okay, I’m powerful now; I’m done.’ Never.

Convergence

June 22, 2009Moriah

June 22, 2009

I’ve been pondering a weighty topic for the last week or so, wondering why a couple of Christian concepts seem to be mutually exclusive, and, moreover, how shall *I* reconcile those?

No, I’m not telling you what they are. I ran across a passage in a book that spoke to my questions (although didn’t answer them, precisely). So I’m just going to post the passage. Character names are left out, as I want it to stand on its own without any preconceived notions.

[The man] smiled. “What does this look like to you, Miss [ . . . ]?” He pointed around the room.

“This?” She laughed suddenly, looking at the faces of the men against the golden sunburst of rays filling the great windows. “This looks like . . . You know, I never hoped to see any of you again, I wondered at times how much I’d give for just one more glimpse or one more word—and now—now this is like that dream you imagine in childhood, when you think that some day, in heaven, you will see those great departed whom you had not seen on earth, and you choose, from all the past centuries, the great men you would like to meet.”

[ . . . ]

“Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves—or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.”

“I know,” she whispered.

“And if you met those great men in heaven,” asked [another], “what would you want to say to them?”

“Just . . . just ‘hello,’ I guess.”

“That’s not all,” said [he]. “There’s something you’d want to hear from them. I didn’t know it, either, until I saw him for the first time” —he pointed to [a third man]— “and he said it to me, and then I knew what it was that I had missed all my life. Miss [ . . . ], you’d want them to look at you and to say, ‘Well done.’”

Settling for, settling in, moving up

June 19, 2009Moriah

June 19, 2009

A little while back, I posted on the sentimental value I hold of the 1960s ranch. Today, I’m rethinking 25 to 30 years’ worth of self-indoctrination.

Obviously the reason it holds so much appeal to me is that it was, in my teenage mind, the unattainable. I didn’t live in a house that nice, although I didn’t begrudge what I had. I liked it fine enough that I was proud to show it off to my friends, totally unable to see that what niceness I had was only that way because my mother worked so hard to make it nice with what little she had to work with. And on hindsight, I’m not sure my friends (from more chichi neighborhoods) were terribly impressed.

no images were found

(You can tell my obvious slant toward the steep-roofed “French Provincial” style ranch.) Anyway, what I was doing when I was a teenager was aspiring up. That’s good to do. But somewhere, the adult me got lost in my teenage wants and conflated that to the end-all and be-all of existence.

Lately, Dude and I have been despairing over the state of our house and its issues, almost all structural, almost all of which will suck money right out of our bank account, with nothing aesthetic to show for it. Now, I’m all for infrastructure, but geez, that still doesn’t make my lawn dandelion-less. It also doesn’t account for the innumerable walls covered with crayon drawings that I would have to continually repaint to make the spaces halfway decent.

Thus, I have come to hate my house. This is a very difficult admission to make, especially when one considers how ecstatic I was over it in the beginning, and we moved in with the intention that we weren’t moving again. EVER.

A few days ago, a friend told me about a party she went to in a chichi neighborhood of L.A. and described the splendor to me. It shocked me that my first thought was, “Real people live like that?”

Today I saw a post over at The Red Brick Store about readying a house for sale. It was a gorgeous 4,000 square foot house, and the post led to pictures, which led me to search myself for flaws in my thinking. I didn’t covet the house, but it did make me wonder if I should dare to desire it at all.

Then I went to realtor.com and put in my favorite zip code (not telling which one it is) because it embodies my best childhood memories. Let’s just say it’s a rundown little village-size town in a rundown corner of a rundown state (not Missouri), and for the first time, I saw through my own little bubble of childhood memories and thought, “Am I aspiring to this? It’s 100 times worse than what I’ve got.”

Then I thought about the 1960s ranch across the street from me which inspired that other post. It’s beautiful, with lush lawn, kept immaculate at all times and with great care (care that it takes time and energy to spend, which we don’t have). You know what? Even aspiring to that is aspiring too low at this point in my life.

That gets me to thinking about my mother and what she did with what she had.

Which she hated.

Every day of the 18 years we lived there.

Knowing that we could have had something better if she and my father weren’t sacrificing a good chunk of money every month to send us to a private school.

After I revisited my childhood memories, I looked up properties in my own zip code, and thought, “THAT is what I should be aspiring to.”

We live in a neighborhood that retains its property values no matter what because A) Kansas City seems to weather recessions/depressions fairly well, even without Boss Tom, and B) the elementary school we have is one of the best in the state. People move into this neighborhood and within the school boundaries expressly for their children to attend that school. Believe me, we aren’t going to have to send our kids to private school for an excellent education, so there’s one obstacle conquered.

This has led me to some conclusions.

1) I’m far more happy with what I have right now. (That may wax and wane.)

2) We need to work on making it as good as it can be within our limitations.

3) We need to build a plan to get out of here and move up once we have accomplished #2. And I want a swimming pool.

Whether we attain #3 or not . . . well, I just don’t know. I’m still somewhat dubious of our ability to do that.

However, if we don’t make the attempt, it most assuredly will not happen at all.