artistic identity and laughter

so i gots to thinking the other day... this whole process of gussying up the page to make you read more would be a lot easier if i knew what my artistic identity was. and then i thought: how many artists actually know what their artistic identity is? i mean the simple ones do. im sure jessica simpson never wakes up in the morning and thinks "i wonder if people think im a dumb blonde" or whatever the hell color her hair is. i honestly cant remember and im glad i cant. its one of those things you unconsciously attempt to forget from the moment you see it and now i finally have and it should stay that way. so anyway... yeah... does banksy ever wake up and say to himself "am i an edgy street artist?" or does a blogger wake up and say "i wonder if people know that..." no dumb example. other example: basically what im saying is (scratch other example) does a person who fills role X know how it is that they are expressing role X.



if i coat the page in scrawl will people connect that to my personality and my work. i guess thats what i want on my home page. i want to connect my personality with my work. sure it doesnt encapsulate the whole of my personality and probably encapsulates some things unintentionally that i probably would not count as being a part of me for any reason. but... nevertheless the fact remains that those two phrases should never for any syntactic reason follow each other. the fact remains that my work will largely be my interpretation of things and therefore encase my mouth feel. maybe thats why i write. to preserve my mouth feel. maybe. i dunno.

what i do know or have become more aware of is that the absence of sadness in my life and the presence of disappointment borne more from drawing rage from an empty tank than anything else is an indication of an imbalance. i mean if you dont feel sad then you must not be feeling or able to interpret the sensation that is supposed to counter it. children learn to laugh and have a good time and cut loose but im sure if you really wanted to you could probably teach a child to unlearn those things.

if you never really enjoy yourself you never really can be sad. if sadness is part of your life then maybe as a defense mechanism you stop allowing yourself to enjoy things. you start with little things and work your way up to big things until you hit a point where nothing short of someone dieing, like actually dieing will make you sad, but by the same token nothing short of fireworks, while having sex, while pounding beers, while buzzing off of adrenalin from a street fight you won by almost killing someone will really make you feel joy.



things will blip by and smiles will be appropriate but the real feeling wont register. so then as an adult can you relearn the joy response? maybe not. maybe what you learn as an adult and being conscious of societal expectations is the appropriate response. you dont laugh at anything or you laugh at everything that could possibly be considered funny by someone. you laugh so much that you stop enjoying laughing because you get headaches from the amount of focus, the amount of blood clotting your brain, from trying to figure out if anyone will think something is funny. does that happen?

maybe. probably. definitely makes me want to go to jstor and see if there are papers on just this sort of thing.

remember yesterday when i said i'd put links instead of just my own hijinx. thats probably spelled wrong. well here's a link: JSTOR in case you didnt know what jstor is. its pretty great. i used it at least once a month during classes when i was an undergrad. usually many dozens of times a month.

///aphex twin - "d-scape" lets see... this song is from his selected ambient works... cant remember if its the first or second volume, but its a good song to wonder to. its a song you can dive into and it keeps getting deeper not because it is any deeper than say a 20 second segment looped over and over, but it keeps getting deeper like a treadmill gets longer the more time you spend on it. not always a bad thing. some of us need treadmills. just not always the kind you beat your feet on.