I’m about to be a part of something really cool.  Next month, I’m going to New York with Xander and Ben for a sort of tour 2.0-type thing.  We’re calling it Man (hat on).  There’s even a logo (and the likelihood of t-shirts).  No, I’m not a musician.  My misguided adolescent foray into the world of string instruments is likely as far as I’ll ever go, musically.  But it doesn’t matter.  Because–although there will be music involved (provided mainly by Ben, obviously), this is really a tour about freedom, and doing what you like, and creating things.

We’re playing with this idea of “sustainable creativity”, you see.  It’s about using communities and ideas to sustain yourself, so that you’re able to do what you love doing.  It’s simple, on paper: if you’re a writer, you find a way to write.  If you’re a musician, you find the support you need to play gigs and write songs.  If you’re someone without a clearly defined path, someone who just likes to play with ideas—it means finding a way to do that.

It sounds easy, but it isn’t.  Creative output takes a lot of time, energy, love, and support, not only from the creator, but also from his or her community.  The problem is that many of us are saddled with a lot of extra baggage.  We have bills to pay and debts to pay off.  We have social and professional obligations that rigidly divide our days. Very likely we’re burdened with a “real job”—which we may find intellectually dull and emotionally empty, but necessary nonetheless (I mostly babysit photocopiers and answer telephones grumpily, for instance).

And in an era where time is money, how do you justify spending a few hours every day on your craft?  How do you find a few hours every day?  It’s impossible to underestimate the negative power of financial constraints.  If you constantly spend your time thinking, I should be making money, not fucking around, you quickly become creatively impotent.

So suppose we make things easier for ourselves.  Suppose, to start, we surround ourselves with other, similarly minded, creatively charged people, and become a kind of micro-community based on the idea of mutual inspiration.  This removes a number of barriers, and in their places, provides us with a number of opportunities.  It gives us an automatic audience, a built-in sounding-board, a kind of creativity support group.  It allows for collaborative effort and means that even an ordinary trip to the pub can result in a great idea.  In a way, it combines the social aspect of our lives with the creative aspect, thus gaining us time as well as emotional backing.

Well, that’s good.  That’s a source of motivation and stimulation.  But we’re still stuck with that bland job, those pesky bills, all the worries that get us down.  Even if we have a micro-community of like-minded creatives, we’re still not going anywhere. Not yet.

The next thing to do, then, is to give up the rock star dream.  Forget, for a moment, that you want to be the next superstar of the rock n’ roll, or literary, or art, or whatever world.  And remember why you started singing, or writing, or drawing, or playing with ideas, in the first place.  Innovative solo bass player Steve Lawson writes prolifically, and very well, about this: “I no longer need to pretend to be a rock-star.  The mythology of rock ‘n’ roll is nowhere near as interesting as the reality of creativity.”  And, Steve adds, “The 80s dream of everyone becoming Stadium rock stars has faded, and more and more musicians are looking at fun ways to get to play music in a financially sustainable way.”  And what we’re trying to say is: not just musicians.  Anyone who wants to make anything should be listening to Steve on this point.

It sounds cheesy, but this is an idea about survival and satisfaction, not about making a profit, not about constantly striving, clawing your way up the celebrity hierarchy.  This is an idea about how you can do what you love doing—what you would be doing anyway–and earn enough from it to justify doing it as something more than a hobby.  To earn enough from it to recoup your costs, eat a meal or two.  Eventually, to earn enough from it to pay all those bills, to live comfortably, to buy a new pair of boots (or the male equivalent) when you need to.  But to start, it’s only about getting by.

Luckily, that built-in creative community—even if it’s just a group of two or three people—is the key.  Gone are the days when any artist can continue to cling to the alcoholic outcast myth and hope that her lonely genius will be discovered.  There’s just too much stuff out there for that to be a viable tactic.  There are literally thousands of other musicians writing songs and putting them up on the Internet.  Thousands of other filmmakers uploading clips to YouTube.  Thousands of other writers with blogs.  Thousands of other painters with thousands of canvases stacked up in their basement.  And every single one of them can publicize themselves, advertise themselves, with the click of a button.  Passivity and sheer luck may work for some; but the only way to guarantee a sustainable, creative life is to actively seek one out.

So you start with a tiny community.  A few friends.  Maybe you start at the pub, where ideas can flow unchecked by the ordinariness of daily life.  And you realize that actually, there’s a lot of overlooked potential in the world.  You buy some tickets to New York.  You decide that you’re going to prove this theory by living it.

So we are three people, with different skills and ambitions but a common goal of creating things and doing cool stuff, taking a week off work.  We’re going to pack up our guitars, our laptops, our brains, and head across the Atlantic, where we’re going to do what what love, and what we’re good at, and find a way to survive.  We’re going to stay cheaply (with friends, on couches).  We’re going to earn just enough to recoup our travel expenses, and hopefully have enough left over for a few beers at the end of the day.

There are, of course, one or two things that anybody sensible might want to ask.  Or maybe not.  Anyway, there are some things that I had to ask myself as I wrote this all down:

But isn’t hunger/poverty/whatever a good creative motivator?

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t (see my post on this here).  But this isn’t about “making it” as an artist, necessarily (though it certainly could be); it’s about literally surviving off your own work.  It’s not about becoming great whilst (or even as a result of) stealing bread and sleeping on the street, but about using whatever greatness you already possess to buy bread, pay your rent, and get by.  It’s simply meant to be proof that you can, if that’s what you want to do.

Okay.  But by making it as much about money as the creative output itself, aren’t you somehow tainting your work?  Aren’t you basically selling out, on a minute scale?

This is really where the word “sustainability” comes in.  This whole idea is fundamentally about sustaining yourself, as a creative-type, so that you can create more.  Ultimately it’s always about the creative output, and the act of creating, not about the money; the money is simply what allows that process of creation to occur unfettered.

This is all very theoretical.  What’s the end result?

The end result is whatever you want it to be.  In theory this is a limitless idea.  That’s the beauty of it.  In practice, it may have more limitations than I currently anticipate.  But we’re going to find out, and we’re going to let you know.  In the meantime, please check out the Man (hat on) site, and follow our progress, and be a participant in this crazy idea.

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In the museum, people move with false reverence. What we’re affected by is not so much the painting, the sculpture, the historical or the avant-garde–it’s the way we’re all here together, but all separated by experience.

In front of my favourite Monet (and why should this be my favourite, this image of a cathedral I have never seen, cast in a light I have never experienced?), two women with their studying faces on. One (short dark hair, glasses, very still), hands crossed at chest; the other (longer dark hair, full of nervous energy), hands placed at the small of her back, bag worn across her chest and in front, as if she’s afraid of something, wants to hold her possesions close. They seem to be looking for something in the painting, something, perhaps, in the cathedral itself. Sharing (or trying to recall) a memory that neither of them actually owns. I want to sit in front of the painting, as I do every time I am here (there is a bench placed before it as if just for me) but they distort my view, they may as well have stepped into the image itself, and I’m too fascinated by watching them watch it to pay any real attention to Rouen Cathedral.

Walker Evans’ collection of postcards. Americana distilled. The streets were wider then; no, that’s not right, they were only emptier. People against a patchwork backdrop: LA, Nashville, church spires, telephone wires. Shiny black automobiles, from the days when they could still be called “automobiles,” still had some dignity.

Gauguin’s Tahiti is enough to make anyone crave a warmer place. I photograph it in black and white to see what, when the image is bled of colour, is left. Still something, I’ll tell you that much.

Irrisistible for the artist to make a sketch. One girl, on the floor, cross-legged, pony-tailed, makes a sketch of a lumpy, pasty female nude. Her breasts uneven (the nude, not the girl). A man, in flat cap and scarf, has brought his own folding chair, sits before a scultpure, balances his pad on his knees. People peer over his shoulder; the rendition is good, exact.

Back on the street, the Upper East Side, the sunlight is almost too much after the shadowed light, the light made for looking at things. We squint our way down Park Avenue. There’s nothing to eat in the Upper East. What, I say, do rich people not need to eat? Do they, I ask, as we pass Gucci, Prada, Christian Dior, get their sustenence from expensive shoes and ugly handbags? Do they get off on knowing that we will find their wide-avenued world unpenetrable?

Probably, the Man says, to shut me up. I’m hungry, therefore irrational.

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Nothing here is as it seems. The museum in black and white; it’s not the paintings we care about, really, it’s the people looking at them, isn’t it? Karl Rove in Federal Hall, touring the Lincoln exhibit. (He has a crushing laugh, loud and ugly). The shop that proclaims to be “your 24 hour pot dealer” is really only an emporium for vases decorated with nipples. A barbershop proudly displays posters of boys wearing perfect bowl-cuts, men in mullets. Another features images of men in tight boxer shorts, dancing with their hair straighteners. Am I in a Dr. Seuss book? (Oh, the places–) Unnecessary quotation marks everywhere. How about this one: “free soup” with any sandwich! A plaque tells of a place called The Highway Leading to the Fortification Called Oyster Pasty. A friend takes us up the steps of a church; look closer, he says, so we lean towards the cathedral pillars and see a baby’s head emerging from a vaginal cornstalk.

All the absurdities. A sign that tells us both to cross the street and not to cross the street at the same time; even the signals have become confused, here. The windows of Bergdorf Goodman’s look as rich as any painting in the Met. I find a place outside Trinity Church where the Queen stood in the 1970s; Prince Philip, reads the inscription in the tile, stood nearby. Oh, no photographs, not here, says the woman selling posters at the flea market, and I retreat from her snarls and stumble into a rack of fur coats, brown and white, urban bears. On Madison Avenue, our first night in the city, cold and hungry, we look across the broad street (broad as an ocean) and see the Oxford Café. Seen from a certain angle, the statue of first world war soldiers on the eastern edge of Central Park becomes real; shadowy men pierce a wintry tree with freshly sharpened bayonets (do bayonets need to be sharpened?).

And I have a photograph to prove every single one of these things; but as one placard in the museum points out: “a photograph of an angel is either a miracle or a hoax.” (Even the photograph in this post is merely a reflection).

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The thing about jet lag is this: it doesn’t just mess with your sense of time, it messes with your sense of place. This is a far more serious offense. Time is nebulous enough on its own that when, for a few days, we’ve totally lost track of it, when we’re hours ahead of or behind ourselves, we feel that maybe it is, this secret force we live by, just asserting itself for awhile.

Place is different. There’s nothing so off-putting as falling asleep in the late afternoon, knowing you’re in Oxford, and waking up convinced you’re in New York, and being therefore in a New York state of mind, and realizing only by the voices outside, crawling their way home after an evening at the pub, only by the smell of your house (a nice smell, a specific smell), that your body is still where you left it hours earlier to sleep.

I don’t know how to count the hours, speaking of them. And I never know how to describe the time before a transatlantic flight: is it yesterday that we left, really, truly? I can hardly convince myself that this can be so–that yesterday, whatever that means, we woke up late, we had lattes and bagels, we took the subway to midtown, and then again back uptown, we ate a Korean lunch across the street from Columbia. And I ask this, not to be pedantic or navel-gazing, particularly, but because I genuinely do not know how to answer it: was it yesterday or today or some time in-between that we sat eating croissants at an altitude so high it is usually reserved for our hopes and dreams alone, that I wondered, because my mind had gone numb in the hours of no movement while we sped over an ocean, if the correct way to spell student was s-t-u-d-e-n-t or s-t-u-d-a-n-t? My copy of White Noise now bears proof of this struggle, but I don’t know exactly when the struggle occured. Student. Studant. Student. If I spell it wrong, will they let me back into the country? (In the end, I spelled it right).

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I’m on a bit of a design kick these days. Last week the Man and I went for a lovely dinner with some friends, and then spent the entire ten minute walk home discussing how we would re-do their kitchen if it was ours. We didn’t even get to the rest of the house.

I have also developed a–let’s call it a “healthy interest”–in bookshelves. Anyone who’s been to our house knows that the Man and I don’t seem to believe in any form of decorating except to pile the books a little higher. But if we were a little wealthier, we could have some seriously cool bookshelves, as the following photos illustrate. Who needs art when you have these?

Having said that, the Man and I are cultivating a fondness for big, bold prints like these ones, discovered courtesy of this blog:
The more I think about it, we seem to be literally building a house of words (here I am, a writer, and here he is, a researcher). I think the visual manifestation of this started with this print, which the Man picked up from work (on the other side, it’s actually a promo poster for Penguin):Our most recent acquisition is a fabulous little print from the lovely Badaude, who offered a wonderful books-for-artwork exchange last month. Since we are already the proud owners of the print she was offering, and since we are neighbors, we popped over one chilly evening for a glass of wine and a perusal through some really rather stunning stuff. I’m such a fan of this sort of old-fashioned bartering system, and, as the Man pointed out, there’s something weighty about owning a piece of art that you have a personal tie to. (When he said this I suddenly remembered going to Santa Barbara with my parents as a child, to this artist’s studio, and how my favorite paintings growing up were always the two we’d chosen on that day.)

It was a tough choice, but here’s what we’ve ended up with from Badaude (the photo doesn’t do the incredible green real justice). It’s called “wake-up call” and the man in the middle is, the artist told us, actually Edgar Allen Poe, though she hadn’t realized it at first. How apropriate:

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