Hello and welcome to the inaugural LowGenius.Net Podcast. We'll see if I can get this right – I'll need as much feedback as I can get from those of you who listen (if anyone does!) so if I screw this up I can fix it!
Thanks for the time and effort, let's get right to some things starting with 'what's up with JH?'
I sort of have a lot going on, and then I sort of DON'T…mostly, right now, I'm in the final stages of World of Warcraft addiction, which if you've read my blog over the last few days you'll know that I'm finally retiring the legendary -Genius family of characters on the Alexstraza-US server, effective the 18th of this month. It's not that I don't enjoy the game, or that I don't really dig a lot of the folks there, or that I won't miss them.
The problem here…is me. I've an addictive personality and a marked tendency to hyperfocus – a word that I suspect is going to become very trendy soon, like 'ADD' and 'Ausperger's Syndrome' or whatever the buzzword mental defect of the week is.
This is actually a very good thing, in a lot of ways; it makes me a much better musician than I otherwise might be, although I suspect the next time I have a chance to sit behind a drum set I'll probably keel over with a heart attack. It also has a positive impact on the way I form my opinions – when something gets under my skin, I tend to worry it to death and learn as much as I can about it, so that any opinions I may have are informed and meaningful rather than just one more internet hobo running his mouth.
But the down side of it is, when I get into something like a game…I have a hard time breaking out of it to focus on other things. Like…creating podcasts, building websites, trying to improve my life and the lives of those I come in contact with. It's time to face some hard realities here: I'm thirty-eight years old, and I'm not getting any younger. Even assuming I'm in good health, I have perhaps 30 or 40 years left in me, statistically speaking…and I'm really not in good health. I don't mean to sound all doom and gloom, but as I approach forty I realize that a good half or more of the first forty has largely been wasted tilting at windmills. Yes, I have made a difference…but I want to make more. As things stand right now, if I shuffle off this mortal coil tomorrow, there are only a small handful of people who would care one way or another…and honestly, my head's just too big to allow that to happen.
So, a podcast.
Enough of my emo whining, let's talk about a couple of things that are on my nerves this week, starting with…Miley friggin Cyrus.
I'm going to try to be nice here – I don't care much of anything for ol' Miley's tv show or *ahem* 'musical career,' but I caught a bit in the entertainment news yesterday that really struck me, quoting now from the Milester herself:
“I'm like, smarter than you think. You know, I understand what you're trying to do. It's all a mind game and what not.”
She goes on to say that, “It's really important to me that people think of me as a real artist.”
Putting aside my personal tastes, and my unremitting loathing of 99.8% of the prefabricated horse manure that passes for 'culture' these days, I really would like to address Ms. Cyrus in the same way I would my own daughter, were she in this position:
First – If you have to tell people that you are smarter than they think…chances are you're not as smart as you think.
Second, if in the process of this proclamation you manage to type in valley-girl speak, like, you know, maybe you're not quite the antidote to teenage banality that you think you are.
But the last point is the one that worries me, because here's the reality of artists everywhere: What should be really important to you is not what people think of you as, but what you think of you as. A lot of people think I'm pretty cool…but that's not because I wake up in the morning going 'how can I convince people how cool I am today?' It's because I am who I am, without regard to popular opinion or momentary trends, and there's something respectable in that. If you want to be a pop princess, fine. It's not the road I'd take, even if I had the right equipment for it, but fine, if that's what you want to be.
But the minute your primary motivation becomes 'what people think of you,' you have ceased to be an 'artist' and have instead cast yourself as a 'commodity,' a brand, an object to be consumed and forgotten by the fickle masses. When 'what people think of you' becomes your focus, it's not art anymore: it's marketing. That's not to say you shouldn't care – I care, of course I care, what people think of me and what I do. I hope people think of me as a quality drummer, an intelligent guy, a cool person, a good friend, and on a good day maybe even worth listening to. But I don't make music, video, graphic art, or even this podcast in the hope that someone will 'think of me as a real artist.' I do these things, because these are the things I'm wired to do, and if I'm the only one listening…I'll keep on doing them.
That's what art is, you see – musical or otherwise. It's not a means to an end, a way to gain some self-respect through popular opinion or to make money or whatever. It's an end in and of itself. No genuine artist is an artist because they want to make money or be popular, but because that is what they are, just like they might be right-handed or blue-eyed. If you lose sight of that, you've lost the whole ball game.
Maybe ol' Achy Breaky Billy doesn't have the wit or gonads to give his beloved offspring this advice…here's hoping she hears it somewhere. She seems like a nice kid…and from where she's sitting right now, the machine is going to unceremoniously chew her up and spit her out like yesterday's gum. Good luck to you, kid…you're gonna need it.
In the same vein, and tying in with the world of warcraft thing:
In the three-plus years I've been playing, there have been many times that I have despaired for the future of our race. The abject ignorance of some of the things you will see people say in that game is astounding…not the least of which is the rampant inability to spell the word “what.” Instead it's WAT or WUT. Endless insipid conversations about how Barack Obama is really an al-Qaeda sleeper agent sent by the evil muslims to overtake our wonderful country, unrelenting use of perjorative terms for homosexuality as insults.
Please, if you are a parent, or even if you're a reasonably self-aware teenager, and you or your child are guilty of these kinds of crimes against thought, I beg you: turn off the damned game and learn how to read, how to act, how to respect people by default, how to have consideration for the feelings of others, and most of all, how not to be an ignorant, obnoxious douchebag. The parents of these ridge-browed, knuckle-dragging contradictions of Darwinian theory should have their right to reproduce sanctioned until they can manage to construct a sentence of more than three words that doesn't end in a preposition, is spelled properly from beginning to end, and doesn't include the word 'fag' or 'gay' to express disapproval.
I seriously have no idea how people who think and act like this are able to look themselves in the mirror each day, and it needs to stop. You want to complain about the economy, or the state of our country as compared to other developed nations…right there is a root symptom of the real problem; we are perpetuating the glorification of ignorance and obnoxiousness in a world that has largely moved forward and away from those things. I don't want to go off on one of the many tangents that could apply here, but please: demand excellence from your children, your teachers, your parents, and yourself. The time when you could count on that degree mom and dad bought you with four years of beer and pot money appears to be – hopefully! – coming to an end, and with that end comes the end of the entire decaying culture that supports it.
No country in the history of man has had so much potential…and no country in the history of man has managed to squander that potential so completely. We're becoming a nation of janitors and telephone operators…not that there's anything wrong with janitors and telephone operators, but when that's the sum total of your gross national product, you've got a serious problem.
That's my little podcast-slash-rant for now, thanks for 'tuning in,' and hopefully I'll manage to be a little more upbeat next time. Until then I'm John Henry saying if you can't change your mind, you probably should check to ensure you still have one. Take care.