Love the Shape You're In

The shape of you is more than what you see in the mirror.

Note: The Podcast audio is at the end of the story. 🫡

We are the seekers of sauce. The lost ones with dog-eared notebooks and blunt Blackwings composing eulogies for our rejected ideas on the daily. Where is our sauce? The aroma of it creeps under doors and straight up the chutes of our attention-starved nostrils. We are chanting “More! Now! On me!”, as we contort our creative bodies into new shapes, inventing irregular mutant forms to attract even the slightest dab of it. Sauce is success and rent paid and love and ego fodder and flipping a fat bird at that one guy who said your ideas were garbage.¹ Sauce is truth. Sauce is validation. Sauce is f**king dangerous. 

I wish I could tell you how to be the right shape to attract success and fulfillment in your creative endeavors. I have no idea. The “Perfect Shape for Praise Sauce” app is not something you can add to your Creative Cloud subscription, and everyone’s shape will be different anyway. Ridges and folds and textures and colors—the identifiers of our perceived artistry. We are terraformed by influences, shaped by the architects of our spiritual development. Confused, we demand to see the site foreman and the blueprints, then wander about as failure girders fall from the sky. No one wears hard hats here—it’s part of the process.      

What shape are you now? Fettuccine? Bucatini? A dapper Farfelle? Or have you gone ahead and invented into a whole-new shape that no one’s seen before², one that ticks all the right boxes? Sauceability? Ladle me, baby. Forkability? Devine for tines. Toothsinkability? Teeth gonna scream when they get a gnaw on you. Check! Check! Check!

This is silly. 

But…

What do we sacrifice when we change our shape in order to make ourselves more palatable, to appeal to tastes, whims, briefs, money, or fame? Is it good to be a creative contortionist? Is there such a thing as too much sauce? Does it all taste the same? These are not easy questions to answer. There is the necessity of shape-shifting that is both beneficial in the learning and evolution process of your creative self, but there is also the absolute tragedy of listening to wrong-headed people and losing the very thing that makes you, well…, you. 

In the sacrifice of our intuitive form, there is the danger that we’ll turn our firm and natural shape into a wet, slimy noodle. I mean you can still eat it, but…blerg. Yes, there is always this hunger for creating efficiencies and newness, but to become who you are as an artist is to commit to the journey of continual self-assessment and adjustment, and that includes knowing that YOU are actually the person behind the curtain. Knowing that the things you read and consume, the people you allow to inspire or mentor you, and even how you interface with the world are all influences, but you control the input. YOU are the architect.

There will always be a war between the shape inside us and the shape others want us to be. A creative battle between commerce and conscience. The capitalistic confluence of. There are ladders to climb (if that’s what you’re into), the constant brutality of the feedback loop (external and internal), and aspirations to be dreamed and chased. Mind your shape, people. Nurture it. Don’t let weirdos lay their sweaty hands on it, wringing it out until it’s a soggy, limp noodle. Take your time to figure out the rough and right shape of you. Tinker with it here and there, sure, but protect your creative fragility. Know the kinds of things your shape is perfect for and work toward solidifying it for that. Above all, don’t get too impatient waiting for the water to boil.  

This is just to say: be careful with sauce. It doesn’t all taste the same, and some of the chefs who dish it out are hacks. 

Yours in tiny thought,

Janeen

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This Week’s Amends…

Excerpt from Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay 

“…it was telling me

in no uncertain terms

to bellow forth the tubas and sousaphones,

the whole rusty brass band of gratitude

not quite dormant in my belly—

it said so in a human voice,

“Bellow forth”—

and who among us could ignore such odd

and precise counsel?”

Read the whole (long) poem here, or have it read to you with Bon Iver accompaniment. Both ways are beautiful.

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Last week I saw a playlist that contained what the compiler thought were better covers than the originals. It sort of made me mad³, but I did get something out of the experience. I found out Bjork’s “It’s oh so quiet” is a cover of a 1951 Betty Hutton song⁴. I had no idea.

Bonus cover: The cover list included Nirvana’s version of “The Man Who Sold the World.” Since you asked, my favorite cover by Nirvana is: “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” So great—not better than Lead Belly’s, just different.

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You don’t need to know anything about skateboarding to appreciate this great portrait of Nick Mullins by filmmaker Nicholas Maher. It really punches in the gut around the 6:30 mark, but then it gets pretty euphoric. Sometimes you love something so much, you just can’t stop doing it.

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Hey, the paint was there, I was ready. When inspiration strikes, you gotta ride the Pantone lightning, man!

Read about this small mishap here.

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Got some tiny thoughts of your own about anything you’ve just read?

1. Some ideas ARE garbage. If your shape is developing nicely, you’ll know. 

2. This guy invented a new pasta shape. It’s called Cascatelli. He also believes that Sauceability, Forkability, and Toothsinkability are the criteria by which all pasta should be judged. Respect. Gotta have a code.

3. Why can’t things just be what they are?

4. More rabbit hole: There’s a 1948 version of the song in German, by Horst Winter, called “Und Jetzt ist es Still”. And on the subject of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”, there’s Lead Belly or Bill Monroe’s “In the Pines.” Now THAT song is a real rabbit hole.