Meet me in the dark places

Poetry and I do not have a healthy relationship. There is a lot of disrespect and outspoken derision when I talk about her to the fellas, and I’ll pass by each and every book of poems that some poor writer has slaved over, but in the darkest of nights, in seclusion and out of eyeshot, we meet up and intertwine. I tell myself that it’s just song lyrics, I’m not like them, but if there’s no tune to hook the words to, let’s be honest and call it for what it is. The compact format, the rhythm buried in each line, the love of the sound of words and words alone, these things are what bring me to the paper to write, in the rare times where these connections happen.

It would be better to hide the words in plain sight, as knotted and dense layers tied within a bigger narrative, and I hope to christ that I manage that from time to time. But too much worry about the where and when will eat away from the act of just doing it. Even now, I can feel the leaden and dull presence of self-criticism and over thinking edge towards my fingers and my thoughts and slowly ebb away my enthusiasm. It’s almost as if I need to write somewhere where I can’t see what I’m doing.

That must the point of the rituals and superstitions, the habits and proclivities of creativity. If you can craft an environment where you feel absolutely free to write in any style or fashion, a place where you can divorce yourself from the normal human baggage of fear, insecurity, resentment, self-pity, worry, anger, and float above all of that detached and amused, then you can lose yourself within your art. The trappings of your workspace have value and meaning. I used to think it was inconsequential, but each unpleasantness is another potential distraction. Your workspace is a type of temple, dedicated to yourself. I suspect there’s an inherent arrogance needed to continually produce work, because that sense of self-satisfaction fuels you when there’s no external feedback coming in.

Expanding on Cory’s Wrongness

Actually, that’s a little misleading. I don’t intend to take a full-blown run at Cory Doctorow’s logic (this time) but my topic is connected to his ongoing crusades. There is a definite change in the way artistic products are sold to the consumer, and it’s a reluctance to abandon the archaic idea of property ownership that fuels the cries against DRM.  At the heart of the matter, I don’t think you are buying ‘things’ anymore, when it comes to electronic media.  Instead, the consumer is purchasing a certain experience, and there is a lot of flexibility to the boundaries and limitations of this transaction. When you buy an e-book from Amazon for your Kindle, you are purchasing the experience of interacting with that e-book on your device. You’re not buying a stand-alone copy of the book to be used anywhere at any time.

It’s perfectly reasonable that a company would restrict the openness of the media it sells to keep the media on their branded reader. Open format files end up on the cheapest hardware available, and traded freely between users. And there is merit to the DRM defense that it improves quality, since the media is used on a device in the way that the creator of the device intended. All of the design and testing went towards the specific combination of media and device, to providing a consistent, enjoyable experience to the consumer.

Every DRM will be cracked eventually, but an initial barrier to unfettered file swapping will deter the general population enough that the market will tolerate the hackers on the periphery.  It’s only when all control of content is lost, like the hey day of Napster, that the content providers will become overprotective and aggressive in their counter measures. That said,  neither  suing tens of thousands of users, or cutting off their internet access  are acceptable ways of addressing the situation.

A Cheap way to win an argument

Roger Ebert has once again made a pronouncement that video games cannot ever be art. He is wrong, and his manner of defending his contentious belief is extremely irritating. Essentially, he relies on dismissing his opponent’s definitions of ‘art’, while doggedly using his very narrow criteria to label games as not-art. It’s really perplexing that he can disqualify a whole medium because of its interactivity. The ability to become immersed in a story and feel the emotions that the protagonist and the other characters are experiencing is a hallmark of art.

It is really a stupid argument at the end of it, because there can never be a cut and dry, point by point definition of ‘art’. If it moves you, if it affects you, and you want to call it art,  it is art. Why waste time bickering? Go do something that makes you feel like a part of something bigger.