Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
Use every part to inform your art.
Use your whole buffalo.
Consume yourself, nose to tail, to the brink of your inevitable and glorious extinction. Make yourself a menu. Gobble up the experience of your five-course body until it speaks back its compliments to the chef with a loud and righteous burp. Carve and cut and eat and swallow and devour the imprints of experience writ large upon your carcass until there is nothing left but a human husk—a bag of bones jangling in the leathery suitcase of your body—then use that too. Waste not, want not. With a butcher’s blade, chef’s eye, and artist’s mindset, you will express your purpose.
Consume thyself until you know thy taste as intimately as the feel of your tongue upon the ceiling of your mouth. My tongue, my mouth, my taste.
Start anywhere.
Take your nose. Stick it in the crotch of every little and big thing that interests you—music, people, life, and experience. Sniff out the scent of the interesting, the possible, and the looming failures that will unlock your world. Find pleasing aromas and nose-flaring disgusting ones and inhale them so deeply that your lungs burn with the threat of immolation. Burn, and burn, and burn. Consume every stinky breath—your distressed huffs, your fearful gulps, your ragged cries, and jaded sighs—and absorb them into your complex universe of influences. Turn your nose into a mouth and eat it all. Distribute this high-calorie life nutrition within your work.
Prick up your ears to the chorus crack and snap of your body moving on without you. Skewer those flaps of cartilage and skin and make of them a ghoulish kebab to wave about and catch the sounds of the world. Waves and voices and explosions and songs—funnel these signals throughout your body. Conduct the symphonic arrangement of mankind on a knife’s edge and hit record. Remix the masters and express at will.
Set your dial to flay and fashion from your hide the toughest of skins, capable of rejecting all barbs of jealousy and critique spat in your direction. Don’t skimp on the prep. Use a fleshing blade to work it, salt it, dry and tan it, then stretch and pull and tug all corners as you work to soften all aspects of your existence. A supple soul yields a supple leather—pliant and soft, but tough and durable. Once complete, dress for the slide, not the ride.
Use your fingers like chopsticks and sample every plate, every bowl, and every grain. Poke those fingers everywhere. In pies, in eyes, in flavors unknown, and lick the textures from your digits like a long-tongued dog. Point rudely, gesture wildly, flip and crack and prod. Stick ‘em into all the electrical sockets of the most confusing art, music, and people. Allow these divining rods to lead you to The Source and dig there for inspiration, ideas, and the buried blueprints of brick walls you must scale with your bare and calloused hands. Use every part of your animal, all knuckles, and nails, and thumbs, and fists.
When confronted by the muck of the masses, wade in. Barefoot and naked, feel out obstacles with the pads of your feet. Sharp stakes, jagged rocks, and lego pieces of pain. Avoid broken-glass personalities where possible. Squelch your toes in the evil good and sink your body down to the ankle, the knee, and all the way to the borderline of your buttocks. Feel the tickle and heat of parasites and remora nibbling at the flaky doubt of your shins and thighs. Relax as they eat all fears, implanting the memory in the mine of your mind to be used at your discretion.
Plant your arse in ponderous places to sit and listen and learn. Feel this primal connection to now and purpose as you settle into the saddle of understanding, with the periodical twitch of ye olde gluteus maximus activating clench mode for safety. Hold tight. Use your whole animal to understand this earth. Use the arse!
Heed belly borborygmus and eviscerate the guts of your imagination for a psychic reading of its contents. Examine the rumblings of your post-digestion disembowelment with the detachment of a stranger. These are just guts. You have them. Here they are. Half-digested, half-baked, motivation passing through on the way to the outer limits. Thoughts stripped of color, loaded with acidic feelings, floating in a malodorous atmosphere. Psychic says: Don’t go thinking your shit don’t stink as you hose down your idea kill floor.
Use your whole to become whole.
Pop the top on your animal skull and give it prime-time exposure. Receive the signal of the universe free from obstructions. Message in, message out. Twitching in neuronic ecstasy, bubbling in the good, expose your thinky-box to all available stimuli. All emotion. All experience. All kinds and all things. Let it go stale in the light to take on new molds and fungi and watch them bloom as miraculously as mushrooms in a cow pat. When you eat your brain, your brain eats—this is some Michelin-level ouroboros intellectualism here. Or basic science, you choose.
Release your heart from its cage and let it abseil off the cliffs of uncertainty.
Rub your fats on other people’s plates to enrich the flavors our their meals.
Make your bones into implements of war to defeat the enemies of creation.
Process your muscle memory into a spicy jerky to sustain you through the lean times.
String an instrument with your tendons that, when strummed with bone plectrum whittled from your ribcage, will broadcast your spirit’s tune to the hearts of hitmakers everywhere.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
Blood and skull and tongue and gall, use it all. Draw from it the lessons of the body—your body—broken and beaten, yet levitating with the constancy of disappointment dancing with victory. Write your life. Sing your song. Paint your watercolors while on the banks of dangerous rivers.
Honor your body of work, your body of experience, the instrument of your life, by utilizing every last piece of it in your creative diet. Use your whole buffalo—all the nouns, the verbs, and the adjectives of your life—before someone else decimates life on your prairie for fun and profit.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
Woody Guthrie’s “New Years Rulin’s”, which he wrote on New Year’s day in 1943.
“Write a song a day” “Have company but don’t waste time” “Wake up and fight” 😍
You can read more about this list and its origins, here. (And get it as a greeting card if you want to send it on.)
On Rotation: I’ve been waiting for this one. But Thom… who’s looking after the lighthouse! (Which I assume provides the light mentioned in The Smile’s album title?)
Via The Smile Band Twitter feed
And just so there’s a song on The Stream compilation playlist, here is “The Smoke” by The Smile (which is the second Tiny Desk song on their setlist.)
I have no idea what I just watched, but it looks pretty and you can’t really go wrong with I am the Walrus.
From the description:
“BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is an epic, visually stunning and immersive experience set against the intimate and moving journey of Silverio, a renowned Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker living in Los Angeles, who, after being named the recipient of a prestigious international award, is compelled to return to his native country, unaware that this simple trip will push him to an existential limit. The folly of his memories and fears have decided to pierce through the present, filling his everyday life with a sense of bewilderment and wonder.
Via Boing Boing
The headline of the week:
“Japanese man who spent $16K to become a ‘dog’ says he’s afraid others will think he’s ‘weird’”
But wait, there’s a video!
Via The Futurist