(Hat tip to Denise Doyen, in a comment at the Seven Impossible Things blog.)
“I Can’t Market My Art!”
Oh, Yes You Can
In a recent blog post, loyal friend of RAMH Froog dredged up a name I hadn’t seen or heard for years: “cartoonist” Hugh MacLeod.*
I no longer have any idea where I first encountered MacLeod and his interesting work. At the time, though, he was struggling to forge some sort of business from his creative output while still suffocating in a day job. He’d started up an e-newsletter, and in each issue he included — free of charge — a sample of one of his special projects. That special project was the creation of drawings (“cartoons”? eeehhhh… maybe) which he’d doodled on the backs of business cards. Some of the drawings were quite dark in tone; some were laugh-out-loud funny; some just made me uncomfortable with how much they made me think.
Ultimately, I unsubscribed from the Gaping Void newsletter, as MacLeod called it. Not because it had ceased to be interesting, even valuable or important. No, simply because I was saving every single issue, with all the others, in a separate GapingVoid email folder. The computer I had at the time had begun to wheeze with overload and I started to throw things overboard: MP3s, images, software… Gaping Void.
And then I forgot all about it. Until yesterday, when I read Froog’s post, and shortly learned that MacLeod is making a living doing what he wants to do. Crazy, huh?
If you want, feel free (of course!) to explore what is now MacLeod’s Gaping Void blog. But by all means (as Froog suggested) do stop over at the Lateral Action site for a terrific brief interview with MacLeod, in part on the topic of getting your art — dare I say writing? — in front of people who will want it for themselves.
Excerpt:
“Artists cannot market” is complete crap. Warhol was GREAT at marketing. As was Picasso and countless other “Blue Chips”. Of course, they’d often take the “anti-marketing” stance as a form of marketing themselves. And their patrons lapped it up.
The way artists market themselves is by having a great story, by having a “Myth”. Telling anecdotal stories about Warhol, Pollack, Basquiat, Van Gogh is both (A) fun and (B) has a mythical dimension… if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have had movies made about them. The art feeds the myth. The myth feeds the art.
The worst thing an artist can do is see marketing as “The Other”, i.e. something outside of themselves. It’s not.
So: what’s your myth — your “great story” about your story?
_______________________
* The “cartoonist” is MacLeod’s preferred term, rather than “artist.”
What’s in a Song: Fever (2)
[This is the second of two posts about the popular song “Fever.” Part 1 was a couple days ago, here.]
As I mentioned in Part 1 of this “Fever” mini-series, the song’s lyrics and pulsing rhythm (and reputation!) seem to lead immature and/or lazy performers down sexual pathways they haven’t really earned the privilege of traveling. When a singer purrs the words “Never know how much I love you/Never know how much I care” while humping a microphone stand — well, it’s hard to imagine wanting to jump that performer’s bones. I just want to laugh.
So when you set out to post a handful of covers of “Fever,” from among the gazillion available, you’ve got to exercise some judgment, some restraint:
Say you’re sort of squinting as you run your thumb over the corner of the flip-card animation. Say you stop at random. And say you’ve landed on an MP3 of, I don’t know… say you’ve stopped at the Pussycat Dolls‘ cover. If you just state the obvious — Oooh, pretty girls! — you’re headed for disappointment to then conclude: “I bet they’ll do it justice!”
So anyway, those covers don’t count for me. What’s left ranges from the overly respectful — almost note-for-note, beat-by-beat respectful — to the out-there: covers which take the basic melody and bass line and flip them inside-out, making the song almost (almost) unrecognizable in the process.
Uncomfortable Numbers
From whiskey river:
A Word on Statistics
Out of every hundred people,
those who always know better:
fifty-two.Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four — well, maybe five.Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).Balled up in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.Those who are just:
quite a few, thirty-five.But if it takes effort to understand:
three.Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred —
a figure that has never varied yet.
(Wislawa Szymborska; translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak [source])
…and:
One Hundred and Eighty Degrees
Have you considered the possibility
that everything you believe is wrong,
not merely off a bit, but totally wrong,
nothing like things as they really are?If you’ve done this, you know how durably fragile
those phantoms we hold in our heads are,
those wisps of thought that people die and kill for,
betray lovers for, give up lifelong friendships for.If you’ve not done this, you probably don’t understand this poem,
or think it’s not even a poem, but a bit of opaque nonsense,
occupying too much of your day’s time,
so you probably should stop reading it here, now.But if you’ve arrived at this line,
maybe, just maybe, you’re open to that possibility,
the possibility of being absolutely completely wrong,
about everything that matters.How different the world seems then:
everyone who was your enemy is your friend,
everything you hated, you now love,
and everything you love slips through your fingers like sand.
(Federico Moramarco)
Awards Season
Golden Globes: ha!
Tonys, Academy Awards: don’t make me laugh!
The People’s Choice: huh? wasn’t that a 1950s sitcom featuring Jackie Cooper and a talking Basset hound named Cleo?
Hint: yes.
You can have all of them. Roz Morris, of the imperatively named Nail Your Novel blog, has offered Running After My Hat not one but two awards. I accept them happily, on the blog’s behalf. (It couldn’t be here tonight itself.) Here are the trophies:
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Spiffy, eh?
Of course, with great rewards come great responsibilities. And because this actually combines two awards into one, it comes with a double burden treat:
- pass the Sunshine Award on to 12 other deserving folks; and
- for the Fabulous Sugar Doll Blogger Award, tell your readers 10 interesting things about myself.
I’ll follow Roz’s lead and hook the two awards together. My Sunshine-Award notes will follow my ten-interesting-things list, with the caveat that one man’s interesting is another woman’s bemusing (a caveat particularly useful in our household).
In no particular order:
Question? Authority!
Via agent Janet Reid, whose taste in videos (even when she’s not sure what to call the thing video’d) is impeccable:
The poem, and I guess the performance, is by the poet (Taylor Mali) himself, although the video was put together by “student Robert Bruce.” As Mali’s site says:
I have no idea who he is (and he didn’t ask for permission), but what would you do when the result is so good?
Administrivia
I’ve activated a feature here at the site to let you subscribe via email to follow-up comments on a post. To do so, you’ve actually got to leave a comment yourself — including (duh) an email address; then check the little box labeled “Notify me of followup comments…,” which appears just above the reCaptcha form.
Background: Why do this? Because I’m posting less often, I (and other regulars!) are actually visiting RAMH less often. This means that conversations via comments tend to sprawl over the course of days, even weeks.
Also, I’ve been using my “smart phone” more often these days to access blogs blocked (for whatever reason) by my employer. Because the phone loads Web pages much more slowly than a real wired Web browser, constantly returning to a blog just to see if there have been more comments is a constant drain on my patience. Thus, I’ve come to appreciate the “subscribe to comments” feature on other people’s blogs: I need return to an earlier post only when I see a follow-up comment to which I want to reply.
We return you now to our regularly scheduled broadcast.
“What did you do on Sunday, John?”
“Twiddled my thumbs. You?”
Chauncey Totman, the children’s-book author whose name I would least like to share, has done it again in his latest, Margarita, The Bearded Fox. The question for us to ponder, of course, remains (as always with Totman): What is it, exactly?
[Caution: spoiler alert! Do not read the rest of this review if you’d prefer being surprised! And/Or if you don’t know what a “spoiler” is!]
Margarita the fox lived — or so Totman would have his readers believe — deep in the wilds of New York City’s Central Park. She was a lonely sort of fox, and no surprise there, because her eyeballs bulged alarmingly, disproportionately large, at the center of apparently psychedelically-induced spirals. (A handful of mushrooms are growing under her in the cover, as if we needed the hint.) Or perhaps she’s just been spending too much time staring at the Sunday crossword, or sitting in an IMAX theater watching Avatar without the 3D glasses; it’s never made clear, exactly. (Totman has never been one for clarity.)
Anyway, she’s lonely, and she’s a fox. A fox of a fox, indeed, or so she believes. Yes, Margarita is a very vain little creature, proud of her tail, proud of her ears, her paws (at the end of those stumpy little pencil-stub legs), her pert little button nose, her nightmare eyeballs. Proud, even, of her pride:
It was such a good-looking sort of pride! A pride like no other fox’s!
But she forgets all about herself when she encounters the other fox, the fox of her dreams.
She first beholds him late one spring afternoon when she is standing on a rock looking out over a pond. She has never stood on this particular rock before. It is right at the water’s edge, and she spies him by — get a grip on the armrests of your chair — by looking straight down! How marvelous! She mistakes her own reflection for another fox! She thinks the mossy underside of the rock she’s standing on is the other fox’s beard! *giggle!*
Yes, gentle reader. I know, I know. You are not a child. You are sick unto death of authors plundering familiar mythology — like the Narcissus story, in this case — and tarting it up in cheap fabric for their own misbegotten ends. So am I. So am I.
But children will perhaps fall for it, especially very young children, especially if read to in that special tone of cloying adult condescension which, you know, children just love.
The crude illustrations are uncredited. My guess is that the illustrator requested anonymity once s/he found out with which author s/he’d been paired by the cruel machinery of kidlit publishing.
Careful readers will recognize in the tale of Margarita the plot — I nearly said the plight — of Totman’s previous title, Martini, The Mustachioed Owl. Curious readers, especially those who are themselves authors, may wonder how such a prodigiously unimaginative jackass as Totman keeps getting offered book contracts (not that I know anyone who wonders such a thing in so many words). Perhaps it was for just such circumstances that the cruel gods invented the notion of coincidence.
___________________
Note: Thanks for the inspiration to Tanita S. Davis, who in a blog post now a few months old introduced me to the general meme:
CREATE YOUR DEBUT PICTURE BOOK COVER
1 — Go to “The Name Generator: at http://www.thenamegenerator.com/
Click GENERATE NEW NAME. The name that appears is your author name.
2 — Go to “Picture Book Title Generator” at http://www.generatorland.com/usergenerator.aspx?id=243
Click CREATE TITLE! This is the title of your picture book.
3 — Go to “FlickrCC” at http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net/index.php
Type the last word from your title into the search box followed by the word “drawing”. Click FIND. The first suitable image is your cover. It will give you the option to go to Picnik.
4 — Use Photoshop, Picnik, or similar to put it all together. Creativity is, of course, encouraged.
5 — Post it to your site along with this text.
The “review” of the “book” so created? Not required. Just my penance, for jumping on the bandwagon so late.
Pushing Through
[Looking back through this post, I see that I’ve used the word “you” a lot in passages manifestly instructional or outright didactic, especially the last section — as though barking orders at
you, the reader. Not so: it’s just me, talking to myself.]
Moonrat, God bless ‘er, last week resurrected the Write Your A** Off idea I had last year. (Not “my” idea, really — I’d sort of ripped it off and just adapted it for outside-NYC writers.) She jumped the gun by a few months, but that’s the sort of spontaneous combustion you get when you mix youth, exuberant personalities, and ideas, and it’s hard to fault her for it.
Several dozen people signed up in the comments to Moonie’s two posts, and we even set up a sort of interactive map so people can log their locations and select a preferred day of the week, and visitors can see who’s participating, on what day, and where. (There’s no real “day” set aside for this: you choose whatever day of the week you want, and do it annually, weekly, monthly, as you will.)
You can see and really interact with the map here, or — if you prefer — here’s a sort of quick-and-dirty read-only view:
[Read more…]
Voice Tech Follies
I’m really not a fan of the telephone: give me good-old when-I-get-to-it email any day, y’know? (People at work long ago got used to the idea that I intentionally sit with my back to the phone — so I never even have to see the red “voicemail message waiting” light. They all email me, even the ones who work in the next cubicle.)
Under the circumstances, it might surprise you that I signed up for Google Voice (even more assumption that I might use the telephone?!?)… at least until you learn that, among its other features, it includes a speech-to-text translator.
Closed captioning for voicemail messages — zowie!
Needless to say, it’s not perfect. So far the only person who’s left messages for me is my brother, whose voice sounds so much like mine that even I myself can’t tell the difference except by checking to see if my lips are moving.
Alas, this also means that his voice is husky — breath-driven rather than vocal-cord-driven — and this seems to confuse Google Voice quite a bit. In the most recent message, giving me a heads-up about videos from Conan O’Brien’s final show, the transcription software kept “hearing” the suddenly-former talk-show host’s name as “calling O’Brien.” Earlier, I was myself confused by a transcript in which he talked about his recent “conversation with Oscar.” Oscar? I kept asking myself. Who the hell is Oscar? I don’t know any Oscars!
Then I listened to the voicemail. Oh. He had a conversation with our sister.
Another cool thing you can do with Google Voice is get the transcript — and the recording itself — forwarded to you as email: invaluable if you get so few voicemail messages that you almost never visit your voicemail Inbox. (Like, oh, say… like me.) Here’s the text of Google Voice’s own welcome message:
Welcome to Google Voice! Google Voice gives you a single phone number that rings all your phones, saves your voicemail online, and transcribes your voicemail to text. Other cool features include the ability to listen in on messages while they are being left and the ability to make low cost international calls. To start enjoying Google Voice, just give out your Google Voice number. You can record custom greetings for your favorite callers or block annoying callers by marking them as SPAM. Just click on the settings link at the top of your inbox. We hope you enjoy Google Voice.
And here’s the message itself (which of course is perfectly accurate for this occasion, cough):
[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is :29 long.]
[audio:googlevoice_welcome.mp3|titles=Google Voice welcome message|artists=Google]
You notice how the voice suddenly switched from that of a”normal” American to a sort of Central European sound over the course of the last couple sentences? I like to think the original transcription was accurate only for one half of the message, so they went back and re-recorded the other half.
For what it’s worth, the “voice of Google Voice” — the one which walks you through the menus, and such — is that of an actress and voiceover artist named Laurie Burke. What a… what a… what an interesting thing to have on one’s résumé. (Although personally, I’d much rather be known as the voice of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Open my Inbox, HAL.” “I’m afraid I can’t do that, David.”)
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