Revved up like a deuce

The first draft is crap - where do you go from there?

Janeen McCrae

Sep 13, 2021

Note: Don’t like reading? The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.🫡

It’s shit.

Real talk.

You made shit.

Sit with it.

Smell it.

Accept it.

This is part of the process.

You’re gonna make shit.

Sometimes.

If you’re eating right.

If you’re moving enough cultural fiber through your system.

Dookie.

Turd.

A quality jobbie.

Pure ordure.

Sometimes the shit that comes out of you will astound you.

The smell will take your breath away.

You’ll look at your newly formed creative ca-ca and gape.

“That came out of ME!”

So pleased.

Shut the gape.

Don’t summon a crowd to marvel at the majesty of it.

Don’t point to it and say: “Behold my fantastical feces!”

Trust me.

If you dare let that Bondi Cigar out of your toilet brain and into the social sea, people will find it all on their own.

Your floater will be famous.

Ridiculed shit.

Public pollution from your released ebullition.

Fact.

Shit bombs.

You might be tempted to train yourself to Roomba around it.

Don’t.

Shit is made to be spread throughout your brain’s living room.

To create a rich, fertilizing field of possibility.

To allow other things to sprout.

This is Thinky Stinkiculture 101.

And that’s the trick.

The kernel of the job.

Literally.

To step in that bucket of feculence and track that shit around on your creative carpet.

Rattle the walls of your thunderbox and get to work.

“But I don’t make shit.”

Yes—you precious, naive little jewel—you bloody-well do.

All the time.

“But I don’t smell anything.”

I’m not surprised. I can barely make out the shape of you through that pyroclastic cloud of Ego DeriAirFresh™1

What’s that you’re whispering over there?

“But…that one hurt so much it has to be a diamond.”

Nope.

Trust me.

It’s shit.

In a shit field.

Remember?

Covered in fertilizer.

Thinky Stinkiculture 101 at work.

Warning: Watch out for crafty little plops2.

Sometimes shit’ll strap on a pair of googly eyes, swirl itself up and say: “I’m not shit, look into my googly eyes. You are getting sleepy…”

Hold its googly-eyed gaze.

Sniff the air.

Trust your spidey shit sense.3

Pull out the comparison chart of previous evacuations. (The more casts you take of the twisted turds you make, the easier they’ll be to identify.)

Compare it against the renderings.

Yep.

Shit.

To the fertilizer field you go, Poohgly Googly.

You need more word worms to work you over.

Okay, okay.

Enough.

Writing this has become a strain4—and my Ego DeriAirFresh™ cloud is rapidly dissipating—so I’ll end this on a high note of coprolitic cliché.

The first draft of anything is always shit.

Always.

Don’t kid yourself that it’s anything but a work in progress.

Then progress the work.

In the meantime, tape this to your dunny wall.

The first draft is shit.

The second draft is looking for the sprouts.

Everything after that is harvest.

Now go make some delicious cat scat coffee.5

Yours in tiny thought,

Janeen

This week’s amends…

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
– Chuck Close

Chuck Close passed away recently (while I was out camping for a couple of weeks, so I missed the news). I can still remember the first time I saw one of his paintings in the real. At the Met. Even standing on the other side of the room those paintings are huge. One of the things I miss about living in NY is just kicking around at home and thinking: “I know, I’ll go to MoMA or the Met today.” A half-hour later, and you’re looking at a Van Gogh.

This week’s audio nugget is not a song, but a sound. It’s called Braaam! aka The Inception Sound. You can read all about its current domination of movies here. If you’re into film scores and audience manipulation through audio, this #longread will be right up your EXT: DARK ALLEY.

Click Leo’s head to be taken to the sound and wrap on back into the dream.

Via Longreads

Using a little hammer, this artist makes portraits by purposefully and strategically smashing the glass with it and using the fractures to his advantage. See more, including his portrait of VP Kamala Harris, at this My Modern Met feature piece.

Via Neatorama

I could not stop watching this video, “Jumbo: Marvel, Myth & Mascot”. Makes you wonder how much more impressive he’d have been had they not polled his tusks. Also, I had no idea the word jumbo originated with this magical pachyderm.

The word “jumbo” hadn’t been known or used in the English language before he came along and has since become the byword for anything humongous or supersized. So every time we use the word “jumbo jet” or “jumbotron”, we’re actually referring back to Jumbo the elephant.

Via Kottke

Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?

The Stream

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