It took about a year, I think.
This is a post inside a post inside a post.
That first line: “It took about a year, I think.” It’s actually the opening of an entry I can’t remember how long ago I started. It was supposed to be about the Sopranos. As evidenced by the following:
We watched the entire series of the Sopranos from beginning to end – all seven seasons.
That’s as far as I got. It was going to be heavy-cream essay. It was about character development and the arc of the storyline and how important it is for us to see through the eyes of people we detest, or love, or whatever.
Instead, it’s about how I am terrified-in-love with where we are on our march to the singularity. Or, that I am in the studio with the gear.
I have spent the bulk of my life talking to anyone who would listen about my feelings and inclinations and opinions. I can predict with great accuracy how long it takes before my mother stops really paying attention and starts counting down until my synapses fire- or misfire -and I wander off to something more pressing.
I look at Instagram a lot. I get a lot of Twitter notifications regarding ancillary characters in the fight against American devolution. I have a subscription to the print edition of the New Yorker that shames me daily. My brother-in-law texts me a steady stream of the day’s news. I take a fire-hose of info to the face and am well hydrated, yet relatively dry. However, I don’t want to transmit my every move to build a brand. I doubt it would work anyway. I actually know the last statement probably isn’t true. I’m at odds, you could say…
David Brooks – if you know who he is, you probably groaned – just wrote a piece about how Americans need to move away from hyper-individualism, and towards each other. Bravo.
I agree, but I’m not sure I want to. If I had finished that piece about the Sopranos it might have resonated with someone. I was totally unaware the 20th anniversary of the show – which has come and gone – was rapidly approaching. To me, that feels like I was in tune – a feeling I have always had – with something. But I hedge my bets and re-draft and procrastinate, and things I am feeling which are prescient, when they finally see the light seem forced, at best – bandwagon, at worst.
So, the mystery I have long adored about the artist, and seclusion and a veiled process, is working against me. It’s fucking hard, or totally disingenuous, to stop your creative process to make a short video about your process to share to IG or YouTube without interrupting your process. Or maybe it isn’t.
Taking my own advice to not take my own advice. Contrary action in defiance of contrary action. Eating my own tail and liking it? Slow down…
I make LPs. That’s my medium. The pieces are the piece, and it takes time. Enough time that if I want to avoid these cycles of stale, I need to work faster – or maybe I need to broadcast the entire process. My new record has a working title. And the title is something I am hearing more and more every day.
Prescient now, old-hat later. Such a fucking paradox.
The paradox is how French academia builds an essay. It must start with a paradox. Not a thesis. Paradox.
My host in Paris, who had been a civil servant in the Ministry of Culture, exclaimed to me one day “”Le cinéma est très important, Jason!”
It is. Using the moving picture to transmit a concept or a story to people, so they may interact with it on their own terms – noble. ‘Their own terms’ has changed, though. I’ll concede that.
So, did you follow me? Help me set up this tripod.
Until next time,
JCW
