Vacation Message December 2024
Season’s Greetings Our AMAW World Household!
Subsequent yr can be my twenty eighth yr (!) of getting began AMAW. I can’t consider how shortly the time has handed.
After I mirror on life on Terra firma and the way wild it’s to be alive at present, I by no means lose sight of what it additionally means to be an Artist — a custodian of tales. A steward of the planet and its residents. A receptacle of feeling and self-expression. For as we forge which means via our work, we’re additionally connecting to the life-giving supply of our work: nature, the planet, the celebs, the move, the cosmic dance that has sustained and perpetuated life for billions of years.
I’ve been requested many occasions over the course of 28 years how I might outline my “methodology”. I’ve been steadfast in refusing to take action — as defining and labeling issues additionally reduces them. Places them in bins. Categorizes them in simply digestible codecs for a cohort that desires straightforward (and fast) solutions to issues which might be far more nuanced, intricate and ephemeral. (To not point out, a part of the Collective Unconscious and due to this fact probably not quantifiable.)
However years in the past, I learn a quote by sociologist Brené Brown — whose early work influenced mine — and she or he stated that the definition of bravery (which concurrently means vulnerability) is to, “Stay in danger, uncertainty and emotional publicity with out understanding the result.”
Eureka!
After I not too long ago re-read that definition I believed, “Oh my goodness… That’s what we’ve been instructing for nearly 30 years.” It encapsulates the susceptible (and but empowering) situation of putting your self in conflict-driven conditions of storytelling that may naturally ply your emotional publicity and power you to live-moment-to-moment with out enjoying the result. After all as actors, we all know the result of a scene that we’re engaged on as a result of we have now learn it. However the moment-to-moment expertise of it requires that you just virtually (figuratively) lobotomize your understanding and reside riskily within the uncertainty of what the second brings up.
That’s scary and exhilarating; courageous and exposing, dangerous and unsure.
Weak.
And that’s analogous to life. Particularly as 2024 involves an finish.
However we neglect. We go about our days habituated by our day by day routines, data, commitments, and acquainted behaviors. Should you’re like me, you additionally wrestle with the ruinous tendencies of social media and the distortion and adverse impulses it generates.
We lull ourselves into our somnambulistic methods of residing — typically erasing the joy of uncertainty and the true moment-to-moment expertise of being alive.
Our Huge Tech-driven world and corporatization of … nicely… every part is complicit in that sleepwalking. As we traverse our careers, private lives, our artistic growth and non secular journeys, we get seduced by the convenience wherein we succumb to the algorithms, the silo’s, the hyped reputation and the sameness of all of it. The homogeneity of mass-production and data-driven leisure.
Kyle Chayka, in his ebook Filterworld talks about how algorithms flatten tradition and drive tradition towards sameness. It shapes our aesthetics and the way every part is pushed towards an analogous homogeneity: “Suggestion mills like Netflix’s high picks, TikTok’s ‘for you’ web page, and Spotify’s autoplay solutions are the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and maybe least significant items of tradition [that] are promoted.”
However we’re Artists! We aren’t shoppers! We aren’t merchandise of suggestibility. We aren’t the unthinking robots of mass hypnosis, are we?
My good pal Christina and I have been speaking in regards to the rise in Fascism that’s occurring virtually in every single place in at present’s societies. She screamed, “Should you’re going to be a Fascist, be a Fascist for Reality!”
Certainly.
That’s what being an Artist means. Maybe now greater than ever (though that assertion at all times feels vital and I’m certain Artists have been saying that within the tenth Century)!
However you get the inspiration.
It’s in these disturbing and dare I say, dystopian occasions, that we stand for reality. An Artist, of their work, is transferring towards the apotheosis of their self-expression. You apply your work to not change into technician. You apply to change into an important Artist. And in doing so that you, you stand for one thing. You will have one thing to say. You aren’t the regurgitation of every part you’ve got consumed earlier than or what you might be bombarded with. You’re creating your personal interpretation of what it means to me to be alive in 2025.
As a lot because the commodification of just about every part has change into commonplace in our tradition — contradictorily, we live in a time the place, an increasing number of, myriad methods to create and share your work are being generated.
So that you don’t have to attend anymore! And because the urgency of issues appears to accentuate — we don’t have that type of time anyway.
I used to be on the West Hollywood pool not too long ago and one in all my fellow swimmers requested me what I did. After I instructed her, she remarked, “Oh… so that you’re a content material creator!”
I do know she meant nicely and was excited for me, however was unaware that she too has drunk an excessive amount of mass-produced company buzz-word bullshit Kool-Assist: content material.
I dramatically sunk to the underside of the pool and thought to myself… “Content material” is for the within of a cushion! “Content material” is what’s packed in your suitcase! The “Contents” are the substances in a field!
I’m an Artist! You’re an Artist! So is she, for that matter. The best way you reside your whole life is creative.
Content material isn’t what we’re making.
We’re making Artwork. Music. A poem. A dance or a play. We aren’t making “content material” to replenish different folks’s time or house or distract them with their “second screens” in order that they will ignore the “content material” to observe another “content material” to switch the stupefying “content material” that has change into the backdrop of all our lives.
We’re making folks assume. We’re connecting the thread of our humanity with the filaments of others. We’re empathetic and present a world in want of a lot therapeutic how the facility of artwork and empathy can do this. We don’t cover behind technical devices and telephone screens. We really feel. We share our emotions with others. We’re interpreters of the celestial to beat the burdens and pains of our mortal-ness. We use the custom of storytelling to carry gentle to darkness. We give
others hope. We educate. Now we have a ethical and moral obligation to inform tales that may change humanity. And within the pursuit of telling them, we ourselves are modified.
That’s You. That’s Me. That’s what being an Artist means. Maintain onto this. It’s going to preserve you stepping into 2025.
Glad Holidays, All!
Right here’s to a blessed New 12 months.
Love, Tony
