dispatch from a dead man

So I just read this essay written by a terminally ill advertising executive. Wow. Stunned would be a pretty good description of my feelings at the moment. It's a truly sobering feeling to watch someone wretch out their feelings on the realization that they, by their standards anyway, had wasted their life.

The other thing I did, I now discover, was to convince myself that there was nothing else, absolutely nothing, I would rather be doing. That I had found my true calling in life, and that I was unbelievably lucky to be getting paid – most of the time – for something that I was passionate about, and would probably be doing in some form or other anyway. It turns out that my training and experience had equipped me perfectly for this epic act of self-deceit.

This hits far too close to home for me, and I suspect it will for some of you as well. Read the whole damn thing.

on self-concept and change

Fixed...

Around about twenty-four or so years ago, when I first started to have fully formed thoughts and memories, I began to develop an idea in my head of what my future would look like. At some point, I stopped conceiving of it as a disconnected set of attributes and started envisioning a complete person. Psychologists call this an Ideal Self-concept, the person you imagine when you imagine your most successful, most actualized self. For me at least, this concept has been pretty resistant to change, even in it's most superficial elements.

I was a writer in this fantasy, and always a successful one. I had achieved enough success that I could engage with writing fiction as my full-time job. Oddly, the actual act of writing featured very little; usually I saw myself giving a speech to a small group of fans or doing a book signing. I almost always lived in New York City, and in the few instances when I did not, I lived in downtown Minneapolis. I traveled often. I wasn't overly wealthy, but had enough money in the bank and lived a spartan enough lifestyle that I never, ever had to be concerned about running out of money or not being able to make monthly expenses. I was intelligent, theoretical and academic, but could also abandon those attributes when I wanted to so I could play beer pong with people who didn't have them.

What surprises me is that the oddly specific superficial elements have been the ones that I've clung most closely to and resisted questioning, especially when I was willing to consider alternative possibilities for myself. For example, in every version of the fantasy—whether I am a writer or a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher—I am always wearing an overcoat like this one. Always. Occasionally it's black; usually it's a foot longer than the one in the photo, and if I am not wearing it, then it's close at hand. That this sartorial element refuses to leave is highly curious. In all of the potential futures in which I am successful, my vision of success always includes that minuscule detail as what is essentially a uniform of success. Even now, to attempt to construct a future without it feels, on some level, fundamentally wrong. Why? Am I the Barney Stinson of the overcoat?

I have a similar relationship to cities. Although for school I moved out to what, to me, is a small town, I can't remember any imagined version of myself that was happy and successful and lived further out than a second-ring suburb. I've never seriously considered staying in St. Cloud longer than I have to, and I have an inkling that it has less to do with the town itself than with it not fitting my self-concept. I don't know why I cling to these superficialities, and I don't know whether or not I should. After all, isn't it the more holistic parts of yourself that you ought to draw strength from and anchor other things to?

It took an enormous effort of will to permit myself to change majors from creative writing to fine art. I had to convince myself that I could do the same sorts of things with drawing and painting that I could do with fiction writing, and that the world of art was broader than Duchamp and Pollock, who I couldn't imagine emulating. The resistance to doing something else was and is so strong that just now I had to exert some willpower to change "art" to "fine art" in that first sentence, probably because I conceive of the more specific field as too different from the writerly self-concept I still have. Even in changing majors, I had to prove I wasn't changing my self-concept.

...and Fluid. 

For as long as I have had a self-concept, it has included the idea that the successful me will have found the One True Calling, the thing that keeps a person awake at 3 AM thinking about it and that makes them excited to begin work on Monday morning. The job from which they do not wish to retire.[1]  I've always believed that once I found this thing, doing it would never be hard. If it was writing, I would never resist sitting down in front of the page. If it was art, I would draw constantly. If it was being a teacher, I would stay with students until 10 PM to help them get the most out of their education. And that I would want to do those things.

This is why I would harangue myself about not finishing projects. I viewed my inability to finish a complete novel as a wound to my self-concept of the successful author persona. I wasn't just failing to complete a goal, I was failing to live up to my ideal self.

As I've grown up and matured I've realized that even the most prolific and voluminous writers feel lazy and don't want to write a lot of the time, and even great teachers get frustrated and need to go home. One of the greatest things I've done for my mental health was to stop attributing a kind of legendary willpower to people who have found their calling and started to view "not wanting to write" or "not wanting to draw" as a natural human impulse instead of a moral failing.

But now I'm starting to take that revelation a step further. Maybe that calling doesn't exist as one thing. Maybe the thing that I'm supposed to do in life is to constantly discover new things. If that's the case, it makes sense that I'm not the kind of person who can see a long, arduous project through to completion. "Getting bored with something" isn't about a lack of willpower and isn't a form of giving up, but is my natural impulse to discover as much as I can.

Does this mean my self-concept has changed from "author" to "author/artist" to "creative person of all stripes/adventurer/discoverer"? I don't know. That's one solution to feeling better about your choices and making them fit with who you are. I think it's more likely, though, that my schema for what a-self concept is has changed, from something that is set in stone and that you build your life around into something that can change and that your goals can change to adapt to.

I'm still never getting rid of the coat, though.

[1] For reasons I can't entirely articulate, the value of the search for this thing has been seared into me at the deepest level. It probably has to do with a combination of the values of the broader culture and growing up with a mother who would come home from work sobbing 50% of the days of the week.

review: and the moon was hungry

Morgan is weird. It's hard to describe in exactly what way her music is weird. I mean, I could say that she sounds like dark symphonic pop-metal mixed with nightmare cabaret mixed with 1950s lounge singers mixed with Amy Winehouse, but that doesn't actually mean anything unless you're intimately familiar with all those genres and performers AND have a good musical imagination. And if that's the case, then you've probably already heard of the Album and are getting some tracks off YouTube as you read. For the rest of us, I'll have to do a whole damn article.

I first discovered "...and the moon was hungry...", her album with The Romanovs (which she fronts), through Pandora. Honestly, I discover most music through Pandora these days, and I'm usually impressed and heartened to discover the degree to which tiny and otherwise totally unknown performers have penetrated the medium. "King" was the song that got me to create a new station based on it, which is always a good sign when that happens. This track sounded a lot like half the tracks on Fallen by Evanescence, and yet despite what you might think that's actually a compliment coming from me. I really liked the album and still do.

I expected more of that kind of heavy and layered harmonic sound from the other tracks, but was pleasantly disappointed on hearing tracks like "China Shop". This is where the piano comes to the front, and her strategic use of expletives and silent spaces speaks to Amy Winehouse. Sometimes that silence can seem a little jarring when it comes in the midst of that heavy layering, like on "Kiss", but maybe that's the point. Kiss is actually the weirdest track, the one that convinced me to write this review rather than a short paragraph as an incitation to listen. I can't place it. At one point it descends into a folk-carnival dance that seems appropriately out of place, as though we've been trained to expect the unexpected. Nevertheless, the album seems to always return to the dark layering reminiscent of the best of Evanescence, but with beautifully obtuse lyrics.

It's no coincidence that the most common artist to come up on my Pandora station inspired by her is Florence + The Machine. This might be the best way to describe The Romanovs. But if Florence is the sun, burning bright in majesty, then Morgan is the moon, covering us in milky shadows. She's the glorious and sickly negative of Florence. Morgan is quiet when Florence is loud, loud when she's quiet; Morgan inspires doubt where Florence gives us confidence. Florence lifts us up; Morgan drags us down to drown in her aural swamp. And what a sweet drowning it is. To borrow a phrase: 10/10; would drown again.

giving up on compromise

(This post assumes a basic amount of familiarity with some of the terms of tabletop role-playing, more commonly known by its most popular variant Dungeons and Dragons. If you've got no experience or knowledge at all, please bear with me! Google or Wiki terms that you don't understand.)

So, I've been reading a fair amount of Deeper in the Game this past little while (thanks, /r/rpg!) and I've found some incisive gems. This section on flag framing, for example, is just about the most useful idea I've ever heard for the setup of a role-playing game, and is basically a formalization of what groups composed of players with a decent amount of experience under their belts tend to do informally. However, I've got to take issue with A Way Out (a post intrinsically connected to The Same Page tool, which Bankuei's blog is probably most known for) because, at least as written, it seems to imply that everyone must have the same goals for the game and want to have the same kinds of experiences at the table.

Bankuei's central thesis seems to be that most problems come from players wanting different things out of the game, which are in some way impossible to merge. That is,

"Most of your 'problem players' are just people who want to play a different game and are either under the illusion that you were playing a different game to begin with, or that different games could be mixed."

This idea relies on GNS Theory [1]. Click that link and read through if you haven't already; it's basically required reading for a person who wants to GM a successful game with new players whose play-styles she isn't familiar with. To give it a woefully inadequate summary, basically, we either want to win, we want to experience a story, or we want to build a world.

I don't see any reason why a single game, or even a single session, can't encompass all these goals. Many different events will happen in an average session. There will be descriptions of the environs. Characters will be attacked. Skill challenges will need to be passed. The characters could be betrayed. The characters could betray an NPC. The characters could betray each other! The 4E DMG does a really, really good job at hitting this point home hard, in a way that should have been front and center when 3E first came out (Onyx Path could take a hint from here too.) There's a "The Players" chapter that further breaks down gamists, narrativists and simulationists into more categories, explaining what they probably want from the game and giving suggestions on how to engage them.

The problem comes—and yes it does come often—when players or the GM can't expressly [2] agree to let some things be in service to some player's goals while letting go of others. And this is where I'm in greatest disagreement with Bankuei. To suggest that different styles of gaming can't be mixed is tantamount to suggesting that, as gamers, we're too narcissistic to brook even a momentary breach of our expectations, even when we know it's in service to someone else's fun. That we're so entrenched in the sacrosanctity of our idea of how the rules of the game should function that it would be impossible to negotiate a compromise.

If I'm a narrativist and want to experience a good story, and I'm sitting down on a Friday night with my friends, some of whom are gamists and love the kick-in-the-door and fight to win style, I should know that the story might be derailed by a really good or really bad dice roll, and it's up to me and the GM to get it back on an interesting path. Railroads aren't necessary for a great story. Conversely, if there's something that would make for an exceptionally interesting twist and would make me jump out of my seat and exclaim "No way!", the gamists should know and be prepared for the possibility that the GM might fudge a die roll once in a while to make it happen. Failing once because because the GM needed something to happen doesn't negate the three or four other times you kicked the werewolf so hard he fell off the cliff.

The key is trust and being on the same page [3], though. If I expect that every good plot twist is being thrown out the window because the player on my left has an optimized character that is chewing through everything the GM planned, I'm probably not happy. And if the player on my right assumes that every enemy is unreasonably strong because they need to survive for a plot, she's not happy.

To be fair, I'm probably not giving Bankuei enough credit, considering the quality and depth of analysis found on the rest of his site. He probably understands this well, given his focus on understanding what players want out of a game. But it's way too important a point to be glossed over: we can and should accommodate (and ourselves be accommodating of) multiple reasons for coming to the table, even in the same group. If we can't compromise, how can we game together?

[1] GNS Theory was later expanded into The Big Model, which I'm much less familiar with, so I won't address it here. But yes, I know it exists.
[2] Experienced groups sometimes do this implicitly, but that's a poor substitute.
[3] See what I did there?

quiet minimalism in vogue

(This post was written in 2014, a year before this blog began in earnest. I considered throwing it out, but a lot of the concerns and ideas in it are still accurate to my opinions. Consider it a sample of my less developed writing style.)

A pair of gallery openings sponsored by the SCSU art department happened this week. Each was quite well done, and together they're emblematic of the personality and approach to art that the school promotes.

Night String Story, an exhibition of quiet, formalist works by Tetsuya Yamada, who teaches ceramics at the U of M, opened on Tuesday. As is usually the case, the opening and artist's talk were attended by professors from the department, students who had classes at 4:30 on Tuesday, and a smattering of individuals with some connection to the artist. There's something to be said for this more intimate and close gathering, as it provides each individual more face time with the artist. Still, I had hoped to see the gallery make a stronger effort to reach out to the greater campus community. Nevertheless, I believe the talk was a success, as it helped to illuminate Yamada's process and product a bit more. For example, the works showed dealt primarily with line, and the artist's talk revealed that he was thinking about Ayatori (the Japanese version of the game Cat's Cradle) when developing many of  them, which explained this linear focus.

Yamada's work is difficult to grasp upon first viewing, an attribute common to works in this style. Oftentimes one's first, visceral reaction to minimalism is nothing, which for the informed viewer is a good sign that one should sit and wait with the work, considering it and letting one's mind think "in the background", so to speak. The idea is that eventually, you'll alight on something interesting. The more I sat with Yamada's work, however, the more I was filled with a sense of emptiness, a feeling something like the absence of communication, as though I was looking at nothing at all. Perhaps this is the content of the work. Perhaps the simplicity of a few lines and their unwillingness to communicate anything which does not come from the viewer themselves was what Yamada found interesting.

Whimsey, an open call exhibition curated by the department's own BriAnna Lundquist, opened Thursday evening. Humor is difficult to communicate in art, but a few fine artists have made entire careers attempting to be funny--David Shrigley and Wayne White come to mind. Whimsey seemed to be more about the quiet chuckle than the belly laugh, though. Odd, quirky and fun are all attributes that could very easily be used to describe Lundquist's own work, and this clearly shows through in the pieces selected here. One work, "Brohemian Rhapsody", shows a man cleaning a pool with the lyrics "I'm just a pool boy, nobody loves me / He's just a pool boy from a pool family." Another is a Guy Fawkes eggplant high in the corner of the space titled "V is for Vegetable." Whimsy is the perfect title for this awkward collection, a kind of artistic curiosity shoppe.

It's refreshing to see humor in the gallery space, and I hope to see it pushed further. Both exhibitions come highly recommended. Yet there's a relationship between the minimalism of Night String Story and the quiet chuckles of Whimsey. Both express an art that is small and whispers its ideas. An art that meekly requests attention from the viewer. An art that says "Hey, I'm, um, here and stuff. If you, like, want to look at me."

I'm all for art which requires engagement from the viewer, and quiet and meditative images that don't show too much too early seem to have a resonance with artists and art viewers. My only hope is that we can make space in the world of the modern fine art gallery for art that proposes an opposite view: art that is big and loud and demands to be heard. Art that is raw and emotional and energetic. Art that exudes power and declares "I am here! Contend with me!" I think both statements are necessary.