Ending

When you bring up the relationship between fun and art, I can’t help but wonder exactly what that relationship is. It may certainly be true that some art is not fun. There is art that is stark and hurtful and bleak. Nothing about this, for instance, is fun. It certainly isn’t funny. But then again certainly some art is fun. And the art that is not “fun” is on some level enjoyable. On some level we enjoy having emotions and we enjoy responding to creations. That does not mean that making art is fun or enjoyable. Here is the thing, when you say that writers “hole up in a little studio and solemnly convey those experiences in a compelling way,” I can’t help but wonder whether an artist can have fun at all.

Of course that seems a bit silly but I think that examining exactly what kind of person decides to spend any amount of time working on something for other people is a worthwhile thing to look at. These other people are some that the artist will never meet, or know, or get anything from in any way. Except maybe sex. All people hold out hope that maybe what they do will get them sex somehow. But otherwise what a peculiar form of communication art is then. You sit alone and figure something out and you carve it and shape it and remold it until it is just right and you send it out. The hours and the suffering you go through to make something for someone else to experience. It is a odd thing we do. And we all do it. But is it fun? I am unsure. I don’t even know if it is fun on the other end. I don’t even know that when I consume art, I can properly call that fun.

Let’s say I can. Let’s call the consumption of all art fun. But there is still the issue of the artist. Does she ever enjoy her work? I would say yes they do. But do they have fun? I guess it depends. I think that the amount of work put into something can be really hard. Does it have to be a big uncomfortable hassle all the time? Certainly not but doesn’t it make it seem more mysterious and lofty to pretend that there is a constant burden on the artist? And that must not be demystified or pretty soon everyone will think they can write or draw or play music. Who wants that.

Writing, or painting, is not a hassle but it is hard. It is frustrating. But then again maybe that is fun. Who knows? The frustration of writing a song and getting it just right, yeah that is all there. But then you see a band playing together who have been playing together for years. They have had fights and struggled to make everything the way they wanted it. And now here they are on stage playing the song loosely and having a great fucking time doing it. And so are you. You are having all the more fun with them because they are having a blast. You can kind of always tell when someone is having fun and you want to have fun too. Even in writing, which is the solitary effort of lonely souls, a reader can tell when someone is enjoying their own writing as if they didn’t write it.

Jen I get what you are saying about fun catalyzing art. It is the beginning. But it is the end too.

-James

Experience

James, as I'm sure you have gathered by now, I am a worst-case-scenario kind of gal. My mind will always seek out the worst possible thing that could happen and how I might have to deal with the consequences. Don't ask me why I am this way (although I'm sure being an oldest child has something to do with it). What I can say for certain is that I am ill qualified to speak with any real certainty on the topic of "fun". I mean, I love fun as much as the next guy, but I don't get quite as caught up in it. I immediate fast forward to the lands beyond fun. You know, when shit gets real.

So, what does fun mean to me? It's the beginning. It's where we all start off. Children have fun all the time. Because they're at the beginning. We think college is going to be tons of fun, and when we first get there, it is. But a few weeks in and we realize what we've signed up for. Falling in love is so much fun, some people do it more often than they change the sheets on their beds. But you know what falling in love eventually leads to? Herpes. Or marriage. Or being dumped. And if you play your cards right, you might get all three.

See what I mean about worst case scenarios? But I digress.

I guess the most important thing to remember about fun is that it will always lead you somewhere. Whether that place changes your life for the better (ex. having children), or for the very very worst (ex. an unintended dip with crocodiles), it's going to lead you somewhere. Because fun is only the beginning.

Fun is an excellent catalyst. That's the role it plays in my life. Fun always becomes something else. It's a transitive state. And when my worst-case-scenario brain gets way too caught up in all the "what if"s and "what now"s, I like to listen to a song that I think lays things out very simply.

The Remedy

Now, I know you're tempted to listen to the first few seconds and then turn it off. But really listen to this song. Listen to the lyrics. It touches on some important things. Like inevitability and futility and where fun takes us. And why we should just dive into fun in spite of it all.

Maybe it's because this song released around the same time that I first started realizing how fleeting fun can be. Or maybe Jason Mraz always seems to have the right words to fit my circumstances. He originally wrote this song after finding out that a close friend had cancer. He explains that the remedy to his friend's circumstance is the experience of having it. That's all that really matters: your experiences. Because it all amounts to nothing in the end. None of us get out of this world alive. The only way to get through life (or the only way that seems to be worth anything) is to experience it. And that's what fun is - a way to get at experience.

So here is the final point I want to make: fun begets experience and experience begets art. We create art to convey an experience that we've had or that we want to have. Or at least that's how I approach it. Writers go out into the world and do fun and often stupid things in order to experience a moment or an emotion or a state of being. And then they hole up in a little studio and solemnly convey those experiences in a compelling way. Fun is fuel! It gets us to the good stuff. To the hard stuff. To what makes life a shared and universal experience. The best art conveys what fun can't. The best art shows us what comes after fun. Because after fun, we find out what we're made of.

-Jen

Fun

So I have been thinking about what the topic for this week was going to be and I wasn’t sure. At first I thought I would go off of potential and talk about paralysis. But I don’t know, that seems a little too close. But your idea of going out to do some base jumping reminded me of this news story:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/video-australian-woman-bungee-cord-snaps-african-river-article-1.1002492

I wanted to talk about that in a broad way. Why is it that people want to go out and do things? What is the deal with fun anyway?

Look at what happened in that video. Bungee Jumping works, or is fun, because it is dangerous. It is thrilling because it is scary. But what could be scarier than swimming through crocodile invested water with your legs tied together? Clowns or spiders. But besides that? Not much. Yet we have bungee jumping firmly in the fun category while swimming with crocodiles is so far outside of the realm of fun that you have to drive a full day just to get there. Why should that be?

Everything fun is stupid. And I mean that in the least teenager way possible. Everything that can be classified as fun, if you look at it, is pointless and more than likely dangerous. And yet we are drawn to it. More than that, we are called by others to live this kind of romantic lifestyle. Going out and traveling and doing things like sky diving are regarded as things that everyone should do at least once. What a crock of shit. Why go to Spain to run with the bulls? What kind of empty stupid gesture is that? There is nothing to be gained from that experience other than telling the same boring story to your friends later. You aren’t made better by fun. In fact, fun can often make you a worse more condescending person.

It wouldn’t be worth talking about if fun made you happier. It doesn’t. Fun and happiness are too completely different things. Some of the most worthwhile things in this world are not fun. Raising children is not fun. It can be enjoyable from time to time but it really is usually awful, I would think. Being so wrapped up in another things safety and happiness that you suffer sleepless nights and financial hardships. Not to mention cleaning up bodily fluids and what not. Love in general is not fun. Infatuation is. Lust is. Sex is. But loving someone is not wholly fun. There is too much pain involved.

I am not anti-fun. But I think fun is a large reason we do things. It is the inspiration for so many things. We build theme parks and we come up with new ways to thrill and delight ourselves. And all of that is good and interesting. My question to you Jen is what do you think fun is? What role does fun play in your life? And do you think that fun helps us create art?

Anyway, try and have some fun today.

-James

Power

I love your example from The Graduate. Potential is such a dynamic force, driving us to experiences life and all of the surprises and failures that it brings us. But potential can be a cruel, dangerous mistress, as young Ben discovers. Because it is nearly impossible to parse out the energy of potential from the emotions of our silly human minds and hearts. It often isn't the destination that rewards us, but the journey we took to reach it. Like I said yesterday, Ben's greatest joy is in the running - I wish he could run forever.

So, coming back around to the Blog and our task at hand. I want to talk about "Potential" as a muse. Potential makes us daydream. It leads us to fantasize about all we could be. But it doesn't give us any answers. Potential is far too easily contaminated by our willingness to justify poor decisions or cheat our way to the life we think we deserve. As ingrained as potential is in our American blood, I think there are plenty of examples from the past decade that show how dangerous potential makes us to ourselves and one another.

So I say - Deconstruct Her! Pull her a part to her core elements and find what is really there. What truly drives us? Because the possibility of the future will be there until we die and it seems selfish to me to use that as an excuse to take more than we deserve. Especially if all that potential doesn't actually lead to happiness.

Here's how I think potential wants to be used: to create. There is an infinite amount of potential out there. You could become a ranch hand in Montana and I could try base jumping in the grand canyon. Or you could take whatever potential that has meandered into your head and generate something new and far more valuable with it. You can create that reality as a writer and explore all of its possibilities and facets. I say capture potential. Hogtie that crazy bitch and get her on the page. We have the power.

Jen on 1/5/12

Drive

What a delightful and appropriate choice for the first topic. I think that potential is the most appropriate topic there is for a blog. And a blog about creativity no less? Why potential, if you excuse the redundancy, is the only place to start.

I love potential. But then again, I am an American. Love of potential is engrained in our national DNA. For all the homeliness that Americans purport to desire, there is a constant longing in all our hearts for something different. Something better. We were born of discovery, of invention, of creation. America is the land of the self-made man and of unspoiled land. It is the uncharted possibility of cities of gold, second chances and change that people seem to need to believe in. Even the conservative nostalgia of a better and simpler time is, at its core, a desire for pure unspoiled potential. There is a perfect world out there and somehow we can get to it and, whether or not we admit, it is very attractive.

I don’t mean to say that America is has a special quality in this love of potential. Of course it is felt among any number of people. I do however think that because we are on this half of the globe we have the idea of utopia in the firm back of our mind. We live where they came looking for all those things. And we are still looking, even if we can’t remember what we were looking for in the first place. But potential and hope are so closely related, that I wonder if we need the promise of jet packs, or people loving their neighbor, or the good old days like we need air. Do we need potential, whatever that means to us, to keep us moving?

Because it certainly is not the destination that we want. Not really. It almost never is preferable to have the actual thing to the potential of that thing. Jen, when you say it is the worst kind of life to have reaching your potential, I get was you mean. It is like peaking in highschool and spending the rest of your life thinking of going back. It is always about the fantasy of how great it will be. Because far too often the realization of potential looks like this:

There are too kinds of energies at work right there. The potential energy that has been building up in the movie between Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross and the release of that energy when Ben bangs on the window and shouts to Elaine into pure kinetics. They run until they are at rest on the back of the bus. Once stopped and stationary, reality sets in. And the dread and uncertainty of it flashes across their faces as they continue to try to manage a smile. That bus is going nowhere.

When you ask what I want this blog to be shaped like, I am unsure what to answer. If it is a living breathing thing than surely we would only kill it, at least a little, to tie it down. I think thought the structure of a conversation works nicely to keep us meandering for a good long while. What do you think?

-James

Potential

"You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'" -- George Bernard Shaw

Considering the vague beginnings of this space, I think a topic such as "potential" is a great place for us to start. What an incredible phenomenon potential is! There is nothing quite like it because it suggests a future that is better and the possibility for unknown achievements. It's being in grade school and reaching desperately for all of the new experiences that are ahead of you. It's those breath-taking moments immediately before and sometimes after (if you're lucky) a first kiss. It's watching a nugget of an idea build up into something you can use in a story, poem or song that has yet to be written.

Potential is exciting, terrifying and what life is meant for.

We come into this world with an infinite amount of potential and if we're lucky, we leave with slightly less. But only slightly. What a tragedy - achieving your full potential. I wouldn't wish that existence on anyone. Potential is where the fun lies. It's where we face our fears and find out who we really are.

Here we are at our very first post. We will never have more potential that we have right here James, right in this moment. I don't know what this blog will be or how it will be structured. But that's what makes the whole thing so grand! We're in unknown waters, stranger tides.

So tell me your thoughts on potential, James. Tell me about something that uses potential well. Tell me about the disappointments that come along with failed potential. Tell me what you think our potential is here, with this space. What do you hope for it? How do you see it structured? Then throw some questions back my way. This is a living, breathing space right now. Let's give it some love and attention and hope it grows up into something we can be proud of.

Jen on 1/2/12