Julia Cameron writes a lot about Artist Dates. If you’re not familiar with Cameron’s books, she proposes two major practices for artistic recovery. The first is “Morning Pages,” where you write 3 stream-of-consciousness longhand pages every morning and then put them aside without re-reading. The second tool is what she calls the “Artist Date” – which basically means you take yourself out of the house to do something you enjoy. (Cameron later added “Take a weekly walk” as the third tool.) The idea is that Morning Pages let all your ideas and anxieties out, and the Artist Date is meant to let inspiration in, and you need both.
I will just admit right now that I don’t do morning pages. I tend to write in my paper journal at night. During the day I put my random thinky-thoughts in my phone’s notes app, from whence they eventually make their way to a 60-page-and-counting “drafts” document on my laptop. Sometimes in desperation I’ll add things in my work laptop’s OneNote, which is probably inadvisable but then again it’s kind of amusing to go looking for one’s notes on the Portuguese health authority approvals and find stray lines from poems about the sky. On weekend mornings I can easily lose 2 hours to writing in my current notebook. But Cameron’s assertion that 3 pages of longhand writing only takes 30 minutes is, in my case, laughable.
Anyway back to Artist Dates. It surprises me to realize that I’ve been a lot more consistent about doing Artist Dates than Morning Pages. Every time I go to my favorite botanical garden is basically an Artist Date, and I do that at least once a week. I was trying to describe to my therapist what exactly I do there and I said you know, a lot of it is sitting and just kind of existing in space. (And I guess all the flower pictures I post on Instagram are really just the side effect of an Artist Date.)
Like a lot of self-help language, “Artist Date” sounds a bit cheesy. Must I date my inner artist, really? Can’t that bitch, like, toughen up and run on willpower alone? But Cameron was definitely onto something here, namely “be nice to yourself” and “follow your bliss.” Creative people need more space than you might think for the creativity to emerge from under the daily nonsense of work emails, housecleaning, submissions managers that all require different passwords, Netflix queues, laundry, and the inescapable fact that a lot of the country seems to be more enamored of a Nazi Germany analogue than of a Weimar Germany analogue. (Yes I watched Babylon Berlin and yes it fucked me up, thanks for asking.)
What I’ve found is that an Artist Date doesn’t necessarily have to mean getting out of the house. You can fill up the inspirational well via (re-)discovering music, or online archives of the occult, or re-reading a book you forgot you loved. Sometimes you just stumble on things that are inspiring while, say, faffing about on the internet.
So in no particular order, here is the weird shit that inspired me this week:
- Shakespears Sister’s video for “Stay.” Circa 1992. It’s the early days of music videos where there’s, like, a painfully clumsy storyline being acted out? But whatever – it’s the aesthetics I love here. I’m pretty sure this video is a gateway drug to dyeing your hair black. The extreme smoky eye on both Marcella Detroit and Siobhan Fahey. Detroit’s haircut and perfect profile. Fahey being an absolute over-the-top weirdo in black sequins, rolling her eyes and, I like to imagine, generally putting the fear of god(dess) into a whole generation of glam/goth boys. Shakespears Sister: where the demons are angelic and the angels are demonic.
2. Similarly sparkly and dire, this necklace and charms from Waxing Poetic. Pyrite is the best – it twinkles but it also keeps its secrets. I will manage not to dye my hair black but this is a good subsitute.
3. This low-fi photo of a rainbow my mom took with her little non-smart-phone. I love how blurry and emotive this picture is and find that I often prefer images like this, that are more felt than precise. This obsession with weird qualities of light/out of focus pictures was already in full swing when I got my first Polaroid camera, but now there are apps you can use to mess with your perfect smart-phone photos (see TinType, Phonto, etc).
4. This NPR interview with Sleater-Kinney where they talk about social media:
<<< Corin, you mentioned the word “despair” as something that runs through the music. On this album, some of that despair relates to technology and how it affects us. The song “Can I Go On” is pretty self-explanatory on how technology can be toxic: “Everyone I know is tired / Everyone I know is wired / To machines, it’s obscene / I’ll just scream till it don’t hurt no more.” But you also have a song called “Hurry On Home,” where the video takes the form of a series of text messages.
Maybe this just exemplifies all of us — how you can, on the one hand, understand what’s bad about the technology in our lives, and at the same time clearly derive creativity and inspiration from it.
Tucker: I really think we’re just on the verge of understanding the consequences of our relationship with technology, with social media, with those little screens that occupy so much of our time. I think there are some really negative aspects of it: It shortens our conversations with each other, and brings out a real antagonistic element. So maybe the album is asking for us to reevaluate our relationship to technology and say, “Is there a better way to do this?”
Brownstein: I think where I feel empty is in the space between hitting send, or posting, and then realizing that I have now set myself up on this very tiny stage and I’m waiting for all of this applause. I just think, “How have we all gotten to this point in our lives where every aspect of it is a performance?” That, to me, feels very dark. And I think there is a loneliness that comes from standing on a stage every day, waiting for applause. How could we not feel empty there? >>>
And that’s all for now. Goodbye from my very tiny stage*!
*Very Tiny Stage is the name of my all-hamster Andrew Lloyd Webber cover band.