Collaboration Is a Minefield

How much of your hand should you show?  Once you have worked to find your voice, how afraid are you that it will be duplicated?  What if the person you want to collaborate with, the person who has the ends in hand, can duplicate your means if you have to go through them to gain exposure?

Eventually you can cut them out.  Eventually you will not have to worry about intellectual theft.  You'll always be one step ahead by default.  What if the person you have chosen to work with is capable of pirating everything you have created prior and your only proof is a series of time stamps?  What if you have the capabilities and where-with-all and all out gall and disregard to forge time stamps too?  What if the skillsets you have used to survive for so long, all thirty years of you, forced you to develop the skills you needed to make any claim of origin moot?  You can design locks and you also have a very fine set of lock picks.  The line between used and new blurs to infinity.

Collaboration is a minefield.  When an artist opens their book to you, enjoy it.  Do not see it as a requisite.  See it as a privilege.  See it as a pact of ultimate trust.  Closer than sex.  Closer than that bullshit conversation heart to heart over a beer or nine.  Closer than that time they drove you home drunk when you were too drunk to drive and they almost crashed, killing the two people in the backseat not buckled up.  Closer than that girl you've been talking to and haven't closed the deal on.  Closer than that friend that dropped you off at the emergency room when you died for twenty seconds and had to be resuscitated with a balled up fist to your chest.  Closer than that secret your dad told you when you finally got a couple drinks in him when he hit fifty and waxed nostalgic.  Closer than that blank spot in your memory everyone else knows.  It's a minefield.

If I show you how the sausage is made, do you see dollars or do you see a way to be a better you?  Do you see a way out or do you see a way in?  Will you steal or will you harmonize and create?

Every creator has the hang up of collaboration.  How many collaborations have started and failed?  How many flash in the pan, in the searing oil, spill over for an instant, lick the flame and light the entire venture ablaze?  Every time someone asks me to collaborate, I am reluctant.  It never ends well.  It never ends well!   IT NEVER ENDS WELL!  It is to a point that I know it is me.  I know I am at fault.  I go on tears.  I have vision.  I am the spark.  I am the fire.  I am the galaxy.  I am the clouds.  I am the sky.  I am the grass.  I am the atom.  I am the brick.  I am the pipe.  I am the fist.  I am the womb.  I am the rain and the sword.  The broom and the dust.  The wall and the fist.  The string and the mattress.   The thimble and the apple crushed during lunch breaks.  I am the napkin and the grease.  The spear and the beast.  The insect eaten bone and the loam.

There is never any commitment.  No real sticktoitiveness.  I churn and it burns and they push thumb to index and make empty promises and break appointments that actually matter and it goes round and round until it hits the drain.  That's not the end.  I go into the waste lines, shrink myself down and dive in, like that mini sub movie we all know that I can't remember.  Sealab?  Fantastic Voyage!  And I dive through the septic system after I get no response long enough and search it out and try to revive it and report back and the reports come thinner from the surface until it's a science fiction movie with a starship in The Dark Between the Stars and I'm hoping I can land somewhere and I do not want to do it again.

Forgive my apprehension because I will not forgive your abandonment.  Not again.  You say you want to collaborate.  I say prove it.  You say you want to work with me, show me something I have not seen.  Give me a reason to believe in you because your word is worth dog ____.  Hell, help me be a person better than myself right now and I will trade you.  If you call yourself an asshole and behave like one, the book of life will not open for you.  Fear is not stopping me, hate is not stopping me.  Waste is.  Time is.  Trust is.  Anyone can shout into a hole in the ground.  Anyone can shout into a knot in a tree.  Anyone can program a machine.  Anyone can build one.  Craft is another being altogether.

Another state. If you are searching for your voice, say so.  If you are searching for your base, say so.  If you need guidance, say so.  Make it clear.  As it stands, you have nothing to offer me.  Nothing within your catalog will help me refine, reinvent, understand, or see myself anew.  What you ask of me is to help you.  Help you do what?  Why should I care?  Why should I turn myself on the spit so you can eat while I listen to what a self starter and go getter you are on and on through the nights?  Show me something.  Show me you have learned something.  If you show me that you have learned something beyond your current state, I will engage you like you have a soul.  I will answer your questions and accept your challenges.  Keep coasting.  I will leave you behind.  Challenge me and I will fight.  Challenge me hollow and I will go through the motions right along with you and play down.

Hell, I'll help you bury it.  Our collaboration.  I don't take it lightly.  I do not like feeling used.  I know I am not disposable.  It is fun to feel like or be an inspiration or muse or riff target or mirror or foundry, however in collaboration I demand more, expect more, I want to be inspired, mused, riff against, see a reflection in you, and forge new alloys and atoms through you.  As I gift you, give me something to work with.  Turn my gears.  Blow my turbines.  Feed my generator, as I shovel coal into your own.

Do not make me regret this.  Not again.  Never again.  Do not waste my time.




///Mazzy Star - "Look On Down From The Bridge"  rainy winter.  the river never froze.  it is strange to be disappointed in the spring.  it is immensely frustrating when i can't talk art with you; when everything turns toward monetization and consumers.  screw that, can we look at a sky and say it's nice without you turning it into coin?

That Instant

you realize you are either seeing up from the bottom of a well or lying on your back on solid ground gazing up at the sky after a tsunamic swell.

That Instant

you can sense the coming out of depression, but it may be the eye of the hurricane, and you look around for what has changed and most everything was where it left off and you wish there was something agent to proclaim.

The Worst

The people that have to step in and tattle, the citizen's arrest people, the protectors of the integrity of the "neighborhood I've lived in all my life and I will be damned..." people.  When I'm literally doing nothing to actually hurt you or the community, but you have to take it upon yourself to leave threatening notes about calling the police on my car.  Leave your name and number next time so I can call you and we can talk about what your real problem with me is.  People like you suck the life out of life.  Every single note I rip off my windshield dries life up just a little more, sucks a little more flavor out of life, and I want you to die.  Just die.  Leave the rest of the world alone.  Be miserable on your own terms in your own house, and stop sticking your shit dripping nose into other people's lives.

Conor McGregor Versus An Alarm Clock

"You try to come at me, but you have no idea what you're in for.  I don't sleep like an ocean.  I don't sleep like a stone.  I don't sleep like a mountain.  I sleep like death.  If you want to try and touch me, if you want to try to test me, understand you are coming to death's door and I just might answer.

Come at me as many times as you want.  Five minutes from now, ten minutes from now, 24 hours, a week, or a year from now, the results going to be the same.  You try to get under my skin with your chirping and whining about what should happen and how things should go and complaining for attention.  Well you've got it and trying to push my buttons is about the dumbest thing you could've done.  You jump up and down about how the next minutes should go, so let me tell you how they will go: you're going to scream and shout and dance around with your flash and noise and I am going to reach out with my reaper's fist and put you to death faster than switching off a lamp.

If you want a rematch, I expect it.  I'll be ready.  When you think you're big and strong and start pounding at your own chest, shouting "look at me, hey what about me", I will be there to bury you again, and again, and again until I get tired of your nuisance.  When I do, don't expect me to simply switch you off.  Expect me to break you into bloody pieces and scatter you to the wind so that no one will have to hear you run your sorry mouth ever again."

Year End Playlist 2015

January - MF Doom - Lightworks
February - Beck - Soldier Jane
March - Starkey - New Cities (feat. Hitomi)
April - Big Sean - Paradise (extended)
May - AWOL Nation - Hollowmoon (Bad Wolf)
June - Odesza - Memories That You Call (feat. Monsoonsiren)
July - Dan Deacon - Wham City
August - Dem Gettaway Boyz - Imma G (Memory Tapes remix)
September - Hot Chip - No Fit State
October - Gorillaz - Dracula
November - Drax & Scott - Sublime (Darkstar Mix)
December - JJ Doom - Guv'nor

The honorable mentions in very particular order.  The higher up, the closer to the final cut.

Dirty Projectors & Bjork - When the World Comes to an End
Kodak to Graph - Pleistocene
Deltron 3030 - Stardate (feat. Joseph Gordon Levitt)
Kendrick Lamar - Backseat Freestyle
The Knife - Rock Classics

This was the year of the wolf divining new methods of self governance.  Rewriting it's own rules and amending it's doctrine.  Enjoy.  Honorable mentions tell no tales and get no links.  If you want to talk to them, you can find them in the clink.  A little place where we keep half ideas.  Things we fear.  Say it three times and they'll appear.  The body you thought stayed buried is floating by the pier.  Next time, put more concrete in the socks.  Everyone stopping by is not a bot.

It was, though, one of the roughest and strangest and smoothest to date.  With the year end look and this, the bookend to 2015, the only thing to do is look ahead to two thousand oh one and six.






///the year is written.  let it go.  thank you for loving me.  thank you for being there.  one of these days we may be eating at the big table.  in the meantime, you know you have a place at mine where the reeds are just high enough and the shade just thick enough for no one to notice we're there by their fire too.

Conor McGregor versus A Big Mac

"You're old.  You're done.  You're days are finished.  Look at you, you cannot even stand up straight.  If the king of burgers is what you are, then I am the God who shot you out of his left nostril not thinking people would come across your smear on my universe and take any interest at all.

I'm here to tell you that I am here to clean up this nonsense.  I am here to wipe you out of existence and the mat is my kleenex.  Don't talk to me about longevity.  Finishing you is going to be the saddest ten seconds mankind has known in ages.  When I'm done with you, there'll be nothing but a shell and I'll smash that too.

If you people want to see a fight, come to my locker room and watch me @#$% this thing... this garbage... out of my ass.  Big Mac, when it's over, you're not coming back, because this time I'm going to remember to flush."

Pleasant Misunderstanding

We are familiar with term "clapped."  To get shot, to get fired, the past part of the act of clapping, being ugly in appearance as though you have been shot up or through a war or battle.

The whole thing with it being used as a term for getting fired or canned, let go, is the one I sort of misunderstood because it's really used as an extension of getting shot or shot down.

The way I saw and see it, in terms of getting fired, is this way: a person gets up and goes in to work to punch in or give their daily speech or state of the company address and before they can say anything at their podium or sit down in their chair, everyone around the office or in the audience simply begins clapping.  Non stop.  At maximum volume.  As though the person being fired has accomplished a cure for cancer or orchestrated permanent world peace.  The clapping continues so loud and so violently that the person being fired cannot deliver their speech or continue any more work to the point that their initial jubilation and happiness, as the applause boil over all around them, eventually turns into dismay and confusion, and then utter grief when they finally realize no one wants to hear or see them and that standing ovation is actually their curtain call and they are forced, in a sea of riotous applause, to shuffle into the sunset.

I think that's a much better vision for "clapped" when it comes to someone getting fired.  It's got some comedy and nuance to it that the other definition completely lacks.

Thant Instant

you realize you've been popping off at the mouth about things that you've been digging up from the core and no one gets your tangent.

The Best Thing

about contract work, mercenary work, is that whatever the outcome when it ends well it is for everyone's benefit.  The merc gets their life changing bounty.  The job gets their goal fulfilled.  It is a common symbiosis, but the joy of its moment is rare, difficult to come by, and hard to find, to boot.  When it gets nailed down, you feel it in your bones for days.  It's like infinite gummi bears and christmas light chandeliers all packed in to a handshake.