All posts need to have the same title: me_irl it is allowed to use an emoji instead of the underscore _
transcript
"Pretty shitty how baseline human activities like singing, dancing, and making art got turned into skills instead of being seen as behaviors, so now it's like 'the point of doing them is to get good at them' and not 'this is a thing humans do, the way birds sing and bees make hives.'"
As someone who loves to sing and make music, as someone who loves to dance and to be crafty, and as someone who inherently sucks at it - especially the music part, I can't tell or hold a rhythm, let alone a note - this post really got me. I often feel like I am not allowed to sing or join or like I have to hide that I used to play guitar and write songs for hours when I was a teen and young adult. Because I was never good at it. Because the chords were just strummed. The chords didn't fit the melody in my head and I could not sing the melody as it was in my head. And I just suck at it. And still, it brought me so much joy. It was such a big part of my life. I loved it.
I now sing songs to my daughter when we are in public. I pretend it is because she wants to hear them. It's a great alibi. (She often doesn't like my singing.) Sometimes she joins in. This is the best. There is no better sound in the world.
I'm ok at writing. But even this - I am a biomedic, not a writer. I didn't study linguistics or literature or politics or journalism, I am absolutely not in the writing world. I can't write professionally, so why should I even write. There are tons of more talented people who actually learned how to write out there. I leaned out of the window and got a side gig while I was on mat leave and wrote for a blog 2-4 times a month for a year. It was the best. I was paid peanuts but these were the tastiest lil' peanuts I've ever devoured.
Everyone can make art, not eve ketone can make GOOD art
If you wanna sing out, sing out. If you wanna be free be free. There’s a million things to be, …. Look this song up, stop complaining and start wffing singing in public! Others will join you.
Before late capitalism forced most everyone to make their art more "commercial", there was this thing in modernity called symbolic capital, and in the artistic fields this brought the cons of competitive spirit, but a pro - in my view, at least - was enabling approaches to art which are more sophisticated, albeit requiring specialization also on the part of the reader (for the pleasure of "writerly" texts see Roland Barthes; for why many people want to passively consume elite art rather than participate in democratic art, "The Weak Universalism" by Boris Groys is some food for thought). More exactly, modern artists placed their bets on getting recognized by critics and historians for their efforts at innovating art without the pressure to always meet halfway the audience.
Downsides included the possibility - in bourgeois capitalist societies, not so much in, say, Yugoslavia - to starve before receiving due recognition, being dependent on the critics' whims or agendas... and being dependent on there being an infrastructure for the art world, gatekeepers - which suffered from more or less systemic biases such as sexism, though sometimes sexually transgressive authors got away with upholding the idea that somehow art is never moral, but instead quintessentially aesthetic - and all... And, of course, in the background should still lie classical education of sorts, in the lack of which today some might end up believing they're reinventing the wheel or that it's nonconformist to be conformist, aka hip to be fash square...
At least these are my (more than) two cents as a writer from Eastern Europe who witnessed the fall of the traditional literary system - which in other circumstances could have been enabled me to secure a modest but content existence through a stable job in one of their state-funded magazines - and read Pierre Bourdieu and Pascale Casanova to make some sense of all this. As a lower middle class person, I was privileged to have been supported by my parents to pursue literature for years without the pressure of making it on the job market - now I work almost 7 days out of 7, leaving me in no mood to read or write books... Alas, I was looking forward to UBI or negative income tax, but it seems like we have to fight a techno-feudal dystopia first.
some people make steel frying pans all day to pay the bills, some people sing at restaurants to entertain them, others people work in the kitchen to fry them both their dinner