Creativity and Courage
Occasionally those Facebook “memories” are really moving.
9 years ago today I shared this photo, with the caption “musical history in the making”. That’s a pretty typical joking-not-joking declaration of my great destiny.
It’s November 18th, 2008. The global financial crisis is just starting to bite, and I lost my first and last real engineering job. I failed the 3-month job trial because of ‘attitude problems’, i.e. a fundamental inability to submit to corporate logic. This was soon after completing an electronic engineering degree that cost me 20x more money than I’ve ever had in my bank account.
I’m lucky to live in a country with welfare, so losing my job wasn’t traumatic, it just meant a reduction in income and a massive increase in options. I spent my last paycheck on a church organ, a banjo, a sweet belt buckle, and a 6-hour tattoo of a thorn in my side. I moved back into my parents’ house an hour from the city. I felt embarrassed, as in: it got much harder to maintain my arrogant self assurance (but I managed).
I stayed in the peculiar little five-sided room at the back of the property (I always assumed the previous owners used that room for occult activity — the only thing that fit well in there was a pentagram). I set up all my music stuff and computer stuff as a temple to creativity. I used my equipment to explore for sounds that matched what I could hear in my imagination. I needed more gear but couldn’t pay for it, so I finally discovered a use for my degree: I started building electronic audio hardware for myself.
I found an online utopia behind the search term “DIY”. Any existing audio device worth having is documented online, and there are enthusiastic volunteers who will teach you how to build it. Everything I learned online, I learned for free, so when I started inventing new stuff, I shared it straight back into the commons.
I hosted DIY synth building workshops in studios and music festivals. A few musicians got excited about my work so soon I was being paid to build weird noise machines for weirdos. Some of the weirdos were famous so they could pay for things. Like, one of my biggest musical heroes asked me to build an interface for controlling a laptop through full-body theatrical gestures instead of the joyless knob twiddling you see on most electronic stages.
10 years after learning how to make friends online, I found physical community that was as creative and energising as the digital spaces I spent most my time in. In that physical, localised, embodied community I started to uncover my voice.
2 years after the first photo, I made this fucking weird exhibition of intergalactic singing robots with my best friend Lance Ravenswood. Probably the easiest way to introduce Lance is to repeat the first words he ever said to me: “I heard you can see the future.” That’s all you need to know about him. He convinced me I’m more like an artist than an engineer. The exhibition sold out in a couple of days.
November 18, 2011: 3 years after that first photo, I played a show with my best friend Ben Knight in our weird noisy improv band The Nervous System. He told me I could play anything at all, so long as he hadn’t heard it before. (Isn’t that sweet?)
This was my first night “off” after a month of Occupy Wellington which was born on October 15th. After Occupy, instead of jamming on music, we started jamming on Loomio, tryna make a company that felt as idealistic and human as Occupy did on the good days, tryna build software to make organising feel more like collaborative improvising.
These days Ben is back on tour with some of his other bands. I’m still jamming on Loomio, but now it is mature enough to keep growing even if I stop paying attention. I’m still a performing artist, but I don’t spend much time in galleries, and most of the time I’m not playing music.
I perform on Facebook most days. You might have seen my character, This Is A Terrible Party But All My Friends Are Here So I’m Gunna Have A Good Time Anyway. I’m slowly developing a new character to play online and at gatherings. He’s called White Man Whose Life Keeps Getting Better As He Listens More To Women and People of Colour.
Re-reading this story, and comparing it to the people and places I’ve seen this year, one obvious theme is ‘privilege’. I have freedoms that are inaccessible to the majority of humans. I lost my job, but I didn’t go hungry. I was raised in a peaceful healthy place, trained to be ambitious and responsible. I wasted a ton of money on a pointless degree, but I had internet access so I could get educated anyway. There are many privileges in this story, but I think there’s more to it than that. I’ve met thousands of privileged people who are bored and sad and disengaged and grumpy.
I’ve always had privilege, but something changed 9 years ago. These days I call it “courage” (which sounds a bit like a fighting word but really it just means “heart”). I think I’ve only had courage for 9 years. Lance and Ben showed me that courage is a social phenomenon, we en-courage each other. Your enthusiasm and acknowledgement and celebration and validation en-courage me. I get dis-couraged by crappy jobs, toxic relationships, poor health, injustice, and the meaningless noise filling up our communication channels. I imagine it like a fluid to soak in, sometimes I’m drenched in courage, and sometimes I dry out.
Since then I’ve been tryna en-courage people around me too. In 4 years of university nobody ever asked me “what are you into? what do you like? what sets your skin on fire? what do you want to say? what do you want to do? what do you WANT?”. As soon as I asked myself those questions, I got answers, and meaning, and love, and community, and joy. I keep asking those questions, keep answering them again, and keep getting more and more results, all the time.
