An Evaluation of the Value of Value
You hate the thing, they love the thing—no need to be a dick about it.
Note: Don’t like reading? The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.🫡
There’s this thing. I think this thing is galactically magnificent. Whenever I sit with it, it is as if a cloud of pure energy envelops me, snaking around my skull, curling its smoke around my goose-fleshed skin before being absorbed directly into my soul. I am lit. Warmed from within. This thing, this incredible thing—to have created such a thing as this, WOW! I am in awe. I tingle and am rung like a bell by it. All the energy of the universe is both within and without my body, purely, wholly, and intensely, when I experience the magic of this thing.
You?
You think it stinks.
You have a thing too. It bubbles its lava of emotional ecstasy around your feet and you sink down willingly so that you may drown in its aura. When you sit with your thing, it makes you feel invincible, as though you are part of something bigger that has no physical boundaries, nor scientific explanation. You are lifted from your shoes by its presence. Many times, you have told people that this particular thing saved you. It saved your life—changed your life’s trajectory.
Me?
I think it’s grade A+ garbage. It makes me question our friendship.
This is a plea.
Let’s make peace with value.
Let’s agree that when it comes to the creative fire starters in our hearts, what we value others might not, and vice versa. Remember that book your friend loved and convinced you to read? Remember how you threw it across the room because, holy shit that was bad? Newsflash: that book has value. And what about that band everyone goes nuts over and thinks is God’s gift? That band whose music makes you leave the room if it comes on? Guess what? Valuable. Loving art, or the forms in which it is expressed, is not a matter of black or white, right or wrong, worthy or unworthy. At the risk of repeating myself: Just because something has no value to you—like zero, you want to kick it to the moon, nada value—doesn’t mean it has no value to someone else.1
In the same vein, most things you declare overrated are not. Someone out there right now is naming their child after some ancillary character from that show that ran five seasons even though you couldn’t for the life of you get past the pilot. Them loving that show doesn’t make them an idiot, it just makes them human. One individual in a sea of individuals.
We are complex creatures. Unfathomable in our natures. Unpredictably predictable in our unpredictable predictability. Like, don’t like, love, don’t love. What does it matter to me if you like Coldplay? Will I judge you for it?2 You bet your ass I will! But what I won’t ever question is how important Coldplay is to you. That their music means something to you. That it has value TO YOU, even if you can’t tell me why.
Throughout our lives, we use the books, the stories, the songs, the art, the endless stream of Marvel movies, the whatever creative inputs we interact with, to construct the cultural pagodas of our individual personalities. Just because we’re all using different bricks, doesn’t make them any less effective at building a life.
Value is in the eye of the beholder. Behold what others value and value their beholding. We can argue cultural value and the value to society, and we can argue monetary value and the true value of an invisible sculpture, but what we can’t argue is emotional value to the individual.
A little understanding. A little acceptance. Hearty debate, no hate. And that’s my plea.
Eh, but what would I know? I love Radiohead.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
Love this. Particularly the dinosaurs line and the last stanza.
Back in May, on Bob Moog’s birthday, they made some of the Moog synth apps available free (alas, no more). I’ve been having a lot of totally clueless fun on my iPad making all sorts of beeps and boops. Great apps. Anyhoo, this video shows Wendy Carlos demonstrating an early Moog on the Beeb in 1970 (it’s HUGE!) You know Carlos’ work… hello, The Shinning Theme. A Clockwork Orange. Tron. Wendy Carlos had the first bestselling Moog album. A true pioneer.
The opening of The Shining has always given me the creeps. So good!
Via Open Culture. The article has many more links out to additional info on Wendy Carlos and it’s a delightful rabbit hole to fall into. She’s an absolute badass.
Totally woulda gone if I’d been in that neck of the woods. Well, if it hadn’t been a sold-out show. Read more here >
Via This is Colossal
An oldie (that I’d forgotten about) but a goodie. Who says cats don’t like water? Actually, I’m pretty sure Garfield didn’t.
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
I just want to be 100% clear here. I’m talking purely about art, music, and the creative things that bring people joy. That’s all. You don’t have to respect the politics of people who value those with questionable ideologies or have shitty takes on non-humanist things or fans of autocratic numbskulls or full-on nazi-thinking assholes. Too strong? It does get tricky when the people that make that art that has value to you are one and the same, but that’s a whole ‘separate the art from the artist’ dilemma and well beyond the scope of this issue.
Yes, you will find Coldplay in my mp3s. I wasn’t made of stone in the mid-2000s.