Fetish For The Amateur.

March 2009.

"When you make a thing, a thing that is new, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly. But those that make it after you, they don't have to worry about making it. And they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when others make it after you." - Pablo Picasso

I'm at the thrift store, in the pants aisle, and I happen upon a pair of khakis with a series of ones and zeroes, scrawled in sharpie, spiraling from the belt loops down to the cuffs of the legs.

And I'm looking at the binary pants, wondering (and marveling more than a little) at how and why these even came into being and how they even managed to cross my path. And it seems, suddenly, like a very dramatic symbol, maybe even an indictment, of my existence.

It's not even a matter of keeping an eye out for the strange. These otherworldly, inexplicable orphans of aesthetic just seem to find me; whether it's what was obviously some parent's home-brew attempt to knock-off a popular toy for their kid, an angry, spastic cassette tape recorded in a den 20 years ago, a floppy disk of some hobbyist's fanfic dungeon crawler that never left the basement, a bizarre home-made fashion statement, or a zine found under a shelf at a bookstore. There's is not even enough information available to trace the path of this thing from it's place of origin.

I'm fascinated by the amateur. I'd even say I have a fetish for it. Happy accidents, unreproducible coincidences. Bands who were doomed from the beginning, writers and artists whose undocumented life story trailed off into god-knows-where after they had left their dreams behind. These professionally-clueless stabs at a brutal, unforgiving universe. Discovering the gems amongst these has provided many of my most rewarding and enjoyable experiences.

And I think of the things I do, my strange and arcane obsessions and influences, and the effects on my artistic output. I mean, simple logic infers that if all of your main influences have severely limited appeal, then the appeal of your output would be even smaller... the "shrugs and shaking heads", as NeonEmu used to describe her observed audience reaction to my performances. Even positive reviews of my art include the disclaimer that I need to hire someone to "explain why what I do is good", which isn't terribly reassuring on reflection.

It's not like I don't appreciate craftsmanship, and I'd hate to think that anyone would step away from something I created and not understand how much work and how much thought went into it. Just because I allow chaos a lot of breathing room in my finished products shouldn't detract from the premeditation and structure of the composition.

But any trip down the aisle of a department store or a scan of the radio dial will betray that "craftsmanship" isn't exactly what most people are seeking out, at least "craftsmanship" by any definition I recognize.

Originally, Chicken McNuggets were fried in beef fat. In later years, they switched to vegetable oil, and sales suddenly plummeted. Soon they figured out that adding artificial beef flavoring to the Chicken McNuggets brought sales back up to previous expectations. I wonder sometimes if that is the "craftsmanship" I'm expected to utilize.

You'd think at this point in my career, I'd at least be enough of a failure to be interesting.

And no, I didn't buy the stupid pants.