Last year I started a secret Twitter account. I can’t even remember the user handle, so it’s hard for me to cultivate many followers, yet miraculously I now have thirty. It’s a truly unhinged stream of consciousness that leans heavily into the mundane—me in dialog with my television set, stoned ruminations on sweets that might please me, or talking shit about people and events of marginal interest to anybody outside of the confines of the Melrose Place-like apartment complex where I live. My joy has been sparked on social media once again. Mary muted me, but I think still intermittently follows me on full blast.
I’m what they call “between projects,” aka underemployed, aside from some remuneration for brainstorming a steady stream of documentary film ideas. A long term project is in purgatory, another film I love is coming out in June, and the inevitable, but long delayed, “fallow period” as my former therapist once called it, is upon me. I was talking to Olivia, who also is in post-book ennui, and she started The Artist’s Way. You may already be familiar… it’s a book that’s been quite popular since the early nineties, and primarily read by Sunday painters and aspiring screenwriters, but also by plenty of “real artists” too. There’s a few too many references to God (in the AA higher power sense), and some grating homework exercises, but its primary instruction and invention is to write three freehand pages each morning, which are called “morning pages.” Ideally you roll out of bed and grab your journal to purge negative thoughts that inhibit your imagination, and then move along with your day… creatively. It actually sort of works, or at the very least is helpful.
I first heard about morning pages from a perceptive essay by the artist Carol Bove. I should reread it, but beyond recommending The Artist’s Way, she insists that artists should stop referring to what they do as “work.” I was resistant to that idea at first because making art is labor, and also the word work signifies some sort of healthy boundary with life, but she’s basically right. All I want to do is work, obsessively. The excess energy and my preoccupation with leaving no stone unturned needs to find focus, and ultimately expression that I hope will be seen and known. I’ve described it as taking a bolder of an idea, blowing it into millions of pieces, and reorganizing the shards into something with a shape and logic of its own. That is the most soothing of all soothing sensations in a chaotic and excitable brain like my own. Yet as I scour trusted blogs, search audiovisual collections in obscure regional archives, or meet steadily with potential collaborators, I don’t feel creative. I’m working too hard, while guilty that I’m not working.
I got stoned because I’m currently the “star reviewer” at an upscale dispensary called Gotham that my friend Rachel works at. Now I have more artisanal weed at my house than I know what to do with, and in the same model as my film brainstorming, I’m relentlessly sampling and submitting my notes to the dispensary so that I don’t “fall behind.” Somehow I’ve turned being a stoner into work (mind you this is a volunteer position). After an afternoon of sampling mediocre organic pot that I reviewed accordingly, I walked to the East Village, while listening to David Sylvian on repeat to meet Lynne Tillman. I sat down and complained about a variety of things, and told Lynne how “uncreative” I feel. She was skeptical of the word creative, maybe because of its Romper Room associations, and she intimated that by merely thinking and observing the world around me, I’m being creative, or at work, or doing something that doesn’t have to be defined by words that suggest a form of uninterrupted joy or relentless suffering. The more we talked, I realized specifically that I feel emotionally disconnected from all of the cultural material that I’m vetting as fodder for a film. I have no personal relationship to it—it’s work.
Later that night, I went home and read Mary Gaitskill’s Substack. I can’t recommend it enough. I’ve always been obsessed with her writing—Veronica is probably my favorite contemporary novel, and I wrote an essay about why once. You can tell that Mary is obsessed with her Substack too because she writes prolifically and seriously, and she responds in detail to readers’ comments. Most recently, she wrote about the escalating violence in her students’ creative writing, and previously she wrote a brilliant post about the act of writing about rape. Her subject matter could be anything really, but in each post she writes with such incisive psychological observations that I find myself relating to the world differently in minor but meaningful ways. I thought to myself while residually high, “Mary Gaitskill’s Substack is what I care about and feel emotionally involved in.” She even responded to my sycophantic comment!
My friend who shall go unnamed had the brilliant idea to write a Substack with a subscription price of tens of thousands of dollars— in other words, a diary just for her, or anybody willing to pay her handsomely. I guess I’m starting this Substack ambivalently as a semi-public way to figure out what I care about in a transitional time. I want to let go of the idea that any cultural material I reflect on is proprietary for the purposes of filmmaking. I’m generally inclined to overshare, gossip, and to talk shit, but I’d rather exercise a modicum of restraint, so that I might speak coherently to somebody who doesn’t already know me. Maybe doing this is more productive than just tweeting to thirty people that my stomach hurts, and I hope it feels like less of a psychic void than morning pages, even though I know that exercise and twenty minutes of meditation might make me a more manageable personality. Nonetheless, here we are. Welcome to Polari for Dummies.
Happy to subscribe! I've long been a fan of your work.
The few times I've tried to get into Morning Pages I've always ended up falling off after a couple days or maybe a week if I'm lucky.
It definitely feels like it works but it also forces me to confront the reality that I only like to write for an audience (even if that audience is just one or two people sometimes!) -- which is maybe true of most writers, but kind of embarrassing to admit!
Either way - I think using the Substack as an outlet and having no expectations other than maybe making a few connections is a good use! Especially now that the writing is on the wall with Twitter and our carefully honed ability to think in 280 or so characters may soon be rendered practically useless.
Looking forward to what's next - Andrew
If our apartment block is Melrose Place, can I please be Kimberly Shaw?