Great piece. I’ve been reading your writing for awhile & this is near the top.
The 2010s did feel scrappier at least at the beginning until ‘16 & then covid put a cap on it & unfortunately I’m not sure what it left us with
We really need another city to step up if that’s austin, Atlanta, Seattle, Nashville, NOLA creatively & artistically in this moment finding a scene outside of NYC, LA, & SF with lower expenses.
You mentioned this but cost of living $ is so huge when trying something new or creative
Things are bad in ways that won't get better by themselves. Horrible things happen but they get washed into the next news cycle. So people just go quiet and stop trying to make their creative work work professionally, which is the real tragedy, because what they actually want isn't unreasonable at all—to live and create and be part of creative community and spark new and better things.
Some great wave of being able to "do" swept over a certain couple "generations" (that's what we're calling us now) that offered to simply sweep the "can do" population along, giving them opportunity to make distinct and astounding looking, feeling, sounding and smelling things, using up the bubbling contained visions and in fact burning these visions up at such a higher rate than had before been possible. So many ideas that had been bottled up were unleashed then co-opted, then regurgitated and ultimately ingested completely, leaving most simply exhausted and unable to take any time to gurgitate new ideas. This great big creative outpouring used itself up in the name of opportunity. And now these same are walking around like zombies living off the brains of other zombies, made more undead by the continuing need for the ingestible while giving less and less assurance that the meal in return will still be provided. That's a lot of unnecessary and jumbled metaphorizing probably. All just to say whatever this system is has dried us all up like premature raisins, far as I can see.
Great piece. I’ve been reading your writing for awhile & this is near the top.
The 2010s did feel scrappier at least at the beginning until ‘16 & then covid put a cap on it & unfortunately I’m not sure what it left us with
We really need another city to step up if that’s austin, Atlanta, Seattle, Nashville, NOLA creatively & artistically in this moment finding a scene outside of NYC, LA, & SF with lower expenses.
You mentioned this but cost of living $ is so huge when trying something new or creative
Things are bad in ways that won't get better by themselves. Horrible things happen but they get washed into the next news cycle. So people just go quiet and stop trying to make their creative work work professionally, which is the real tragedy, because what they actually want isn't unreasonable at all—to live and create and be part of creative community and spark new and better things.
And we can't forget about what happened to Barton Fink
Some great wave of being able to "do" swept over a certain couple "generations" (that's what we're calling us now) that offered to simply sweep the "can do" population along, giving them opportunity to make distinct and astounding looking, feeling, sounding and smelling things, using up the bubbling contained visions and in fact burning these visions up at such a higher rate than had before been possible. So many ideas that had been bottled up were unleashed then co-opted, then regurgitated and ultimately ingested completely, leaving most simply exhausted and unable to take any time to gurgitate new ideas. This great big creative outpouring used itself up in the name of opportunity. And now these same are walking around like zombies living off the brains of other zombies, made more undead by the continuing need for the ingestible while giving less and less assurance that the meal in return will still be provided. That's a lot of unnecessary and jumbled metaphorizing probably. All just to say whatever this system is has dried us all up like premature raisins, far as I can see.