Afloat in the dream song
Creativity, planning, and what finishing a project feels like (answers on a postcard)
Hello! I begin this post on a train along the coast to Portsmouth. This carriage is full of schoolchildren vaping what smells like Lynx Africa, something I don’t think is recommended by the manufacturers.
Before I go any further, a few worthy plugs:
A Brighton comedian of my acquaintance is fighting hard to keep her disabled friend from being made homeless. If you can help, that help would be extremely welcome.
Me and my friends at Next Level Sketch know a lot of wonderful and very strange clowns. This week some of them have been featured in… The New York Times?!?
My friend Lauren is currently making Twitch 8574% more intellectual by reading Virginia Woolf on it.
Unfettered dreams and mutual schemes
My band The Highchurches put on a great show last Friday. We played beautifully, sang beautifully, and made inappropriate jokes about fisting beautifully.
The day after, though, was a struggle, as I write here.
I’ve been thinking about Susan Harrison’s post about the existential ennui of finishing a project.1
I’m different to Susan in several ways. For example: I’m taller, and less good at improv and character comedy (these facts are unrelated).
Also - and this is probably the clincher - I’m not very good at completing projects in the first place.
Starting them: fine. Unfettered dreams and mutual schemes. Bands, stories, attempts to visit every single Wimpy in the UK…
This year, if it’s about anything, is about trying to finish off some stuff. And thinking about what that looks like, and finding out what that feels like.
For the past few months I’ve been enjoying face-to-face creativity counselling sessions with Mr Chris Thorpe-Tracey, formerly the international pop star known as Chris T-T.2
Chris can help with various things, but for me he’s definitely been helping figure out where creativity sits within my wider existence.
A lot of our early sessions were about trying to separate the stuff I do for money, or for wider social usefulness, from the stuff I do because I absolutely have to because it’s in there and it’ll get out one way or another.
Aka, creativity, and what that means.
The first battle was to take seriously the fact that someone as accomplished as Chris was taking me seriously.
I pass, I’m convincing, and I mask well. But I don’t think even Chris realised exactly how much I struggle with imposter syndrome.
It’s probably quite unusual in a white, straight guy with a fairly posh education.
As the first person in my family to go to university - and, even then, with only a very vague idea of what higher education was and what it could be for - I never fully comprehended where the assurance and effortless confidence of my peers came from.
They absolutely knew what they wanted to be. They had templates, and examples, and had never been told “you can’t”.
I hadn’t either, but importantly I hadn’t been told what these things I couldn’t do were.
Fast forward a few decades, past the odd cul de sac, decades-long quasi-journalistic career and embarrassing semi-naked appearance on BBC Choice, I have a great deal more of a sense of who and what I am, and what I’m good at.
I also can now grasp that I’ve worked very hard at this, despite my lackadaisical demeanour and occasional tendency to get distracted by something silly. It’s just a lot of it - the reading, the writing, the endless editing - didn’t feel like work at the time.
I am under no illusions about what my version of success looks like, which isn’t anything to do with fame, swimming in a vault of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck, or appearing on Top of the Pops.
All things Susan Harrison has achieved.
I have, though, figured out what the important markers for me are.
And they’re physical manifestations of things. Songs and words with concrete force in the real world, not just having everything adrift on the dream song, no matter how glorious fleeting moments and internet worlds can be.
See you at the album / book / fanzine launch, then. I’ll be the one in the corner drinking room-temperature white wine.
Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted… I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.
Hayao Miyazaki
Lately I’ve been much irked by the widespread adoption of so-called Artificial Intelligence by the lazy, the malevolent, and the people who really should know better. In the past week I have seen supposedly leftie bands (hi bis) and right-on comedians spreading this bullshit across the internet, like cow dung on a Vegemite sandwich.
The New Socialist has published a good polemic on why AI slop has been so enthusiastically embraced by the far right, and this is a good podcast episode in which the hosts read and laugh at the AI “short story” inexplicably published by The Guardian.
But guys, and it is almost always guys: just stop using it. It’s lame, you’re lame. We’ll call you out on it if you do.
That’s it for this sunny Sunday. Have a lovely time, and thanks as always for reading my words!
She didn’t quite put it like that. I’m putting it into my own words, as a depressive soul!
I write this sentence and immediately magic him out of retirement: he’s doing a one-off gig at the 100 Club in November.