The Final Blog Post

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 19 February 2015.



Cold weather day today.

I'm hitting a wall, something between busyness on the one hand and my thoughts about the project on the other.

Mostly, I'm losing the vision. Maybe the current vision is too much for me to bear. I know that it's always been outsized, but I feel like a sun who becomes a red giant just before collapsing in on itself.

The day to day, week to week, month to month of the blog is taking its toll. You may have noticed that I've started trying to use freely usable, properly attributed photos recently, replacing or deleting old, unattributed ones. Finding good freely usable photos--which I think is par for the course with a blog--is time consuming and usually a step down from the images I used to find. YouTube videos, which don't need to be attributed, don't automatically post on the various platforms; they need to be posted each place manually. Every photo and video I use needs its dimensions changed in html to fit properly. I've considered other ideas like snapping my own photos using my kids' dinosaurs and action figures, but that sounds even more time consuming.

On top of this, the blog is not taking off much. We've had some big spikes at times, like the Ferguson post, which probably just pissed a lot of people off. But the number of visits usually hovers between 5 and 20 pageviews per day. And if I don't post for a few days, that number goes down to zero. This is discouraging given the amount of work it is.

Moving on to the music, I get overwhelmed any time I consider what it's going to take to get anything off the ground. It was hard enough with you in Lansing; I get tired just thinking about what it will take with you in Traverse City. And although I'm a lot better at playing than I was 2 years ago, I still make so many mistakes even just practicing at home. I started writing stories and poetry at a young age, but my serious interest in music didn't start until my 20's when neurons were almost myelinated. I don't have a "high ceiling" when it comes to music. When I'm on stage and everyone's watching me I make even more mistakes.

I think the following is true:

1. I'm a pretty good songwriter
2. I'm a piss-poor guitarist
3. I'm a piss-poor keyboardist
4. I'm a piss-poor singer
5. I'm a piss-poor performer

I've heard #1 from enough people to believe it. #2-5 are true, but the fact that I can do all four of those things has been moderately impressive to people, rendering me a little less piss poor overall.

My goal with the project now seems to abandon it in the best possible way. I want to cue up the Concert for Iceland so that it could still happen if conditions were to become more favorable.

What does that mean?

Well, at the bottom-left corner of the blog's front page, there is a small orange period. Click on that and you'll see what I've been working on, what I consider to be my final goal regarding the project. I want to get this all linked and set up and, at that point, I want to withdraw to a much lower level of involvement. Actually, even getting this all set up is going to be quite the accomplishment. It will take some time; my guess is that I won't be done until summer at the earliest.

Best case scenario moving forward? I write songs and others perform them. I feel like the Concert for Iceland is a coherent group of songs, a good place to stop.

What might that look like? We've thrown out a few ideas:

1. Augustine White's band
2. Arthur White Memorial Concert/Album (dead, catatonic, presumed dead?)
3. Rock Star: INXS-type thing
4. Find someone to play Arthur White

So honestly, what am I going to do about this? I think I'm going to devote all my energies to completing this hidden page. The remaining blog posts will be any remaining Basement Songs and then my Influences for each song. Okay, I might also get in some of the last few email exchanges too. The Benefactor/Leif Ericsson idea can't be forgotten!

Maybe this email that I'm typing right now will be the final blog post. I guess this is kind of sudden, but it's actually going to take a long time to accomplish.

A Sketchbook for the Project (Part 3 of 3)

The following is an excerpt from a 17 October 2014 email exchange between Art and Will. 

Clay Shirky

Art:

I've been thinking some more along the open source, JamKazam lines. I did go to the site and was favorably impressed/intimidated with the professionalism and smoothness of the interface. 

It sounds like the live component will remain free forever; the more intensive, after-the-fact multitracking option will be available for a small price after the beta period is complete. 

On a related topic, I want you to watch this little segment about ePortfolios, which I happen to be getting up and running for my non-AP seniors this year. The section I'm starting you at has to do with the concept intrinsic motivation and its relationship to successful websites. 

These are the three keys according to Clay Shirky:

1. Make people feel good about participating
2. Give users autonomy 
3. Keep the system as open as possible

I think this is our business plan moving forward: to make the blog as close to this as possible.  

What does that look like? I have a few ideas and I'd like to hear some of yours. Perhaps this would be a good time to seek out input from some of the people visiting the blog or one of its social media platforms. 

For one, we open up the "sketchbook" and take every opportunity to share what we're working on, warts and all. We already do that with the conceptual underpinnings of the site by posting our emails, but I think we need to start doing that with the music by posting YouTube videos of me playing songs in my basement "studio." 

Although this development breaks out of one paradigm--the overemphasis on finished product and the exclusion of process--it remains entrenched in the one-way artist-to-audience orientation of artmaking. The new frontier for us--in addition to opening the door to a more process-oriented approach--is to engender a more symbiotic model of artmaking and to harness the power of the "open source" paradigm. As Helen Barrett points out, it is this paradigm that allowed Wikipedia to utterly destroy Microsoft Encarta (10:45 in the same video). A similar fate may await musicians and artists who cannot find ways of capitalizing on this trend. 

So, again, what would that look like? 

I think Jamkazam could break this thing wide open for us. 

Consider a page on the blog that would host the sharable, editable Jamkazam recordings of our songs. You and/or I would do the initial recording, but we would encourage others to get subscriptions to Jamkazam and start adding to these recordings at their leisure. Other, related materials, such as sheet music, would also be made available. Some of this, too, could be given an open source feel by sharing them as editable Google Docs (rather than read-only pdfs!). Yes, some of this seems risky, but we take on that risk and bend over backwards to (1) make people feel good about participating, (2) give users autonomy, and (3) keep the system as open as possible. This, of course, could create a superabundance of material to post to our various platforms. And, of course, I am not forgetting that this is exactly what we originally were thinking way back when! 

Okay, before getting too excited, take a moment to realize that all of this is easier said than done. 

But, really, I'm talking about one additional page to set up within the blog. Perhaps also another page where, as mentioned in a recent email, we explain to our audience what we are trying to accomplish. 

All of this is a big change in our basic trajectory, but one well worth pursuing. 

I say Arthur White is open source or nothing! 

You mentioned that the CEO of JamKazam contacted you personally. I wonder if you could somehow explain the above ideas to him and see what he thinks. If nothing else, maybe we could get his endorsement (in the form of a quote that we have permission to post to this page on the site). After all, from what I've just outlined, we may be using this as our main platform and actively sharing it to as wide of an audience as possible.

Sketchbook for the Project (Part 2 of 3)

The following is an excerpt from a 17 October 2014 email exchange between Art and Will. 

Philip Glass "20.IX Book of Longing" by MITO SettembreMusica - originally posted to Flickr as 20.IX Book of Longing. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Art:

"Sketchbook for the project" is exactly right. And yes, it may very well be the project, full stop. 

The difference is that we open that sketchbook for everyone to see. This is nothing new; a seed of this has been present from the very beginning of the project and perhaps from much earlier. 

It's only now that we're beginning to understand it. 

We're letting everyone have a glimpse at the formlessness that is, in some sense, a precondition for creation. The sculptural aspects of the blog provide the requisite Apollonian stage through which we can gaze into the abyss and not be destroyed in the process. And Nietzsche asserts that the Apollonian will be "energized and raised aloft" by this encounter--another explanation for why generosity of this type generates something! 

Paradoxically, the best way to get the plastic project up and running is keep "going back to the well," that is, highlighting that moment at which form comes out of formlessness. 

There's always the fear that we might devolve into what my college housemates dubbed a "Mind Party," where we end up wandering the streets with an untuned, 2-string guitar singing snatches of Christmas carols to bewildered neighbors until someone offers us Rice Krispy Treats. 

Or, even worse, "The Whitewater Tapes." Not even going to go into that one. 

Of course, this story originates from those days, when I was getting down to some artistically entropic states that only now, nearly 20 years later, am I "capitalizing on" in any appreciable way. That is the exact moment at which the first Arthur White songs came into being. That's when I built the cardboard tunnels, snaking along the sandy floor of our Michigan basement. That's when my friend and I wrote The Principles of Theory: A Systematic Approach to Ideas. 

And none of that material ever saw the light of day, except for The Principles of Theory, which was unceremoniously presented to Philip Glass (without any contact information or way for him to follow up, of course). 

I think the difference between then and now is the persistently Apollonian intentionality of the current project. We need to keep on approaching this formless state with the goal of containing it, of framing it, of shaping it into something, of getting it to annunciate itself more clearly...not letting it languish in its formless, inarticulate fecundity. 

I like the idea of explaining the project somewhere on the site. Maybe we can start working on the wording for that. That said, there's also much damage to be done by following up Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey with 2010: The Year We Make Contact. As usual, we'll have to affect the usual Dickinsonian tack of "tell the truth but tell it slant." 

I like the idea of JamKazam too and I think it's a good fit for this current impulse. Keep me updated on that!

A Sketchbook for the Project (Part 1 of 3)

The following is an excerpt from a 17 October 2014 email exchange between Art and Will. 

Daedalus and Icarus by Charles Le Brun

 Art:

I'm tired of holding things back just because perfection is out of reach. 

I want to be generous with this pittance of loaves and fishes. And I think it's not just etymological coincidence that generosity generates something. Once I get the camera on my Macbook fixed, I'm going to start performing, posting and embedding YouTube videos of those performances. "Basement Songs" or something of the like. Usually, I will have Francis strapped to my chest with a baby carrier. Usually, I will make several mistakes, but I will do my best to put my best foot forward. I'd love it if some musicians would take those videos and record their own guitar solo over the top--nothing fancy, an impromptu audition--and send it back for me to post: to potentially bring that dynamic to what is currently an esoteric, elitist, one-way proposition. Not saying anyone will bite, but at least we'll be exuding a little more openness. 

And if someone takes something and becomes a millionaire (that's not arrogance, just a thought experiment), all the better... 

It means that things are moving: the once-stagnant waters rush, the once-imprisoned Daedelus and Icarus fly, and the once-involuted labyrinth evolves into a journey.

Will:

I really like the blog. 

It took me a while, but I get it now. I'm wondering if in this new spirit of generosity it might make sense to have a spot on it, maybe under Farthington's profile, that briefly explains what the project is so that we can make it slightly more accessible. Video and music will definitely help in that regard, too.  

I'm working on setting up JamKazam on my computer. It could open up a lot of options for me and for us. For one, we could have virtual Arthur White concerts: no video, just sound. We could perform with anyone who can use the free program. We could host Arthur White jam nights (they frequently host jam nights with tons of random strangers playing together). 

It's a very approachable company--the owner has contacted me a few times! It's an option that didn't exist when we started. It also makes multi-track recordings, so we or other people could tweak, add, or subtract whatever we like. It would allow for the sketching of a lot of concepts, and right now, that's the beauty of the blog: it's basically the sketchbook for the project, if it isn't more or less the project itself these days.

You Have One Identity

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 20 August 2014.

I guess my thought is to not worry too much about what the era is with the pictures.

I believe one of the aspects of the project is finding one's true self, and, in our case, that would be resolving the dichotomies of Art and Arthur, Will and Will. I still think it makes sense to put together fantasy situations whenever we have the time, resources, and wherewithal to do so. But I also think we should document things as is, as they are actually happening in reality. Using the "vintage" filters adds an interesting layer to the dichotomy of true and false selves, but I think it's worth doing in whatever capacity.

Mark Zuckerberg

You mentioned in a previous email about how "nobody sustains the legend." I think our project is about bringing a legend to life and as I said way, way back as my rationale for starting a blog, that is an interesting story in and of itself. As for myself, I probably won't be able to muster much authenticity this year, costume or setting wise. But I'm going to go ahead and document me working on the project. And if that means a 70s-looking photograph of me sitting at my Mac working on Garage Band, so be it. At this point, it is keeping with the disjunctive time aspect of the project.

Remember, our own time period would be post-"turbulent reversals"!

This brings up some ideas worth exploring. I had a pretty awesome discussion with my cousin a few years back. It started with Mark Zuckerberg's famous quote "You have one identity," which is so fascinating, since he is one of the prime forces facilitating the wholesale fragmentation of identity we experience today. Of course, he's not totally to blame, because the machine just serves up whatever dream/nightmare the human being imagines.

But could it also be said that we express our one identity more fully by having avatars? I keep my identities way more separate than you do, but I'm conscious of a lot of "orphaned" aspects of my identity that are reclaimed within this project. When I chartered the whole idea back in 1998, it was my way of expressing a seeming overabundance of masculinity in a music scene dominated by shoegazing indie eunuchs. In inventing this and other identities, I have, in some sense, created more commodious frames for self expression. I guess it could be true that there is a way to just "be who you are" sans avatars but, in my experience, I've needed to find, invent, and/or hijack various vehicles to fight back against the deadening effects of society's ever-constricting boundaries.

I'd like to hear your opinion on this, but I also like that the project has not come to a definite conclusion about this question, that we are holding up both possibilities as the tragic and/or comic outcome of this undertaking. Documenting the project in its artifice and in its reality seems like a good idea regardless of what we decide (if we decide).

So that's my pitch for both fiction and nonfiction photographs.

The Third "Leg" of Our Retirement Plan

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 18 August 2014.

An old Poladroid Polaroid

We're working out the day or night that I can get everyone cleared out of the house for recording purposes. We definitely think it can be done, but we're just looking at the most advantageous, least disruptive opportunity. I worked over at my parents a few times while they were gone, but it's just inconvenient. It's much easier to do it in our house, but it really requires that my beloved progeny be gone. I will start loading those up to Dropbox as soon as I finish them.

I remain committed to the blog for various reasons (I can be potentially talked out of these). One is that I feel my creative process is aided by the dialectic of our email exchanges. My process has a tendency to become involuted and, even though we're not making much progress right now, it invigorates me and keeps me on an even keel with the project. I know you haven't been as keen on it at times, but if you can indulge me whenever possible, I'd appreciate it.

Or explain to me why it's foolish!

A second reason is the perhaps laughable idea that all this will be interesting to someone someday. I show The Truman Show every year to my seniors and I found it interesting that the production was held up for a number of years for some reason, during which time the screenwriter or director wrote backstories for all the characters. Some of the actors remarked how helpful all those backstories were as they tried to get inside the minds of their characters. I like to think that--unlike backstories, which never see the light of day artistically--our musings are actually part and parcel of the project. Whether or not that's true, it is a rich repository of our ideas, one that can definitely play a role in any future dramatic productions.

This leads me to my final topic, and I could use some input. I will almost certainly not be able to keep up my level of email exchanges during the school year, especially with the renewed focus on recording. I want to introduce a new type of post, which would essentially involve keeping a photo log of our labors. Let me give you my rationale and some ideas I have.

First, the photo log is something I think we should be doing anyway given the "self-mythologizing" theme that is so central to the project. We can't have all those photos be thrown together the last minute when we're putting the finishing touches on our large coffee table book (the "third leg" in our retirement plan). We will need thousands of pictures by then. At any rate, this is a discipline that we can no longer procrastinate. My thought is we should simply take lots of pictures of ourselves working on the songs.

I like Instagram's filters for creating instantly vintage-looking photos, including a high-contrast black and white. I haven't used it because I don't have a phone on which to download the app, but it might be a good option when I get one. I think flickr is pretty much just as good. But I like that we would do a little on-the-fly mythologizing by taking appropriate pictures and slapping a cool filter on them. Everyone knows it's just a filter...but we are so okay with that! Do you have any experience with these platforms? Preferences?

I'm also pretty sure all of these can be embedded and posted to other websites: Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, and possibly Pinterest.

link: Poladroid.net

Evidence of Wrong Turns

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 26 June 2014.

Yeah, I was thinking about how, in some ways, you are the Apollonian and I am the Dionysian.

If we could afford it time- and money-wise, I would totally just do the garage, DIY version of the project we started with: put on shows, generate footage, get it on the Internet, and let the story unfold that way.

I'd be totally fine with a version of the project where we just pick a show from the timeline and put on that concert, then repeat. I think you go Apollonian when it comes to the records and live performances--you want to make them flawless.  I'm probably more Apollonian about the story, especially when it comes to chronology.

...filming for some unknown and presumably useless reason

I think what sets our story apart from The Office or Parks and Rec is that we don't have an anonymous documentary crew filming for some unknown and presumably useless reason.  I totally agree: there is absolutely no reason for the documentary crew to give a crap about 11 years of some paper company in Scranton.

In our case, if Jo is the frame, then the story is unfolds around her.

She is on a quest to understand her own father amid her own existential crisis, and she quickly learns that the only way to do so is to understand Arthur White, the man who inspired him to risk everything and who inadvertently led him to his death. There's that old cliche that cynics are jaded idealists, and I think that's true for Jo. She has her father's nature and her mother's nurture: her dad was attracted to truth and beauty like a moth to a flame, but her mom raised her in a cloud of cynicism, preaching the gospel of her father's betrayal and the idea that life is pain.

I think where I'm very Apollonian is that I don't really care that much about sharing the story of our quest to create the project.

I had the same problem in all of my drawing classes: my teachers would try to get me to leave all the marks of my process in my work, where to me, they were just distractions, evidence of wrong turns. But I trust your vision here.

Regarding our story, I think we need to see if we still like the strategy of aiming toward a TV show. The advantage is that we can map out the whole story without spending money, rehearsing, acting...all the things that are difficult for us. The disadvantage is the difficulty of getting the show signed and produced. Also, for good or bad, we probably won't end up being Art and Will.

If the show gets signed, we'll probably end up with lots of interviews about the making of the show anyway.  I watch too much cable, and I can't believe how much television is devoted to behind-the-scenes stuff. I've seen more interviews with and stories about the cast of Mad Men than I have episodes, and I've seen all the episodes.

Plus, we still have the blog.

So Opposite of Facebook

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 29 May 2014.

I got caught up on the blog and I've enjoyed seeing it mixed up a little more with email excerpts, phone calls, and music.

"so antagonistic to the default settings of Facebook"

I like the idea of using fame as a way of protecting our stuff, but things like lists and memes are mostly what get reposted on Facebook. I'm happy to promote the blog on Facebook; that's super easy for me and I've done it a few times. But it doesn't have an easy point of entry for anybody trying to learn about the project. There's so much you need to know in order to follow any of it. That makes it ideal for elitist hipsters and intellectuals, but bad for drawing most people into the project.

That's not a criticism. I like the blog as it is, but that's because it's targeted to the three of us! I see it as being most useful as a chapbook, a repository of our ideas.

If we want it to be a tool that draws people into the project, we've got to simplify it and make it easy for people to enter the background of the story. That's not super appealing to me, though; it runs us into the problem of putting a lot of effort into things that aren't about developing the story. Right now, I see the best use of our time as developing the TV show and the music. The blog as it stands really helps me with the TV show by creating a type of greatest hits of our communications. I'll work at promoting it, though, because I'd love to see what happens with something so antagonistic to the default settings of Facebook. Maybe it's so opposite of Facebook that there's a place for it.

Fame could be a strategy to protect our content, but I'd like to still use some old fashioned legal approaches. I have a long tradition of half-writing pilots and movies and then either deciding they stink or solving all the problems in my head and losing interest.

In other words, huge dreams and very little attention to practical reality.

Framers

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 19 March 2014.

I like the Joe Lazarus Jr. campaign almost being echoed/ paralleled/ shadowed by the blog.

Like the two emerge simultaneously or the one shortly after the other, but the blog--the more nefarious entity--controls the outer frame while providing no content of its own.  Even when Joe is able to achieve some kind of victory with regard to Arthur or the project, the blog posts it and thereby claims a kind of ownership over it.

This to me seems a very insidious aspect of the whole embedding, linking, posting/ reposting, tweeting/ retweeting phenomenon: the author/ artist no longer has control of the final way their works will be framed (maybe never did).  And later "framers" can, in a sense, usurp authorship by re-presenting someone else's work in their own context.

History will not be kind to this generation: usurpers with a penchant for thinking they are all famous, all standing on their own proscenium stage before a captive audience of their own adoring followers/ fans/ friends (our project obviously takes that same penchant to a ridiculous extreme).

Maybe the actual creators, those whose art is at bottom of the frames-within-frames will get some kind of credit when these accretions are finally removed. Or maybe modern artists are actually making art with this sort of framing in mind, such that the art requires that kind of gratuitous framing to have its effect.

Maybe it's all smoke, no fire.  All buzz, no substance.  Okay, I'm digressing...

Loopy Longhand

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will and Joe on 12 March 2014.

I have also been thinking about the original reasons for this blog and whether those provide enough rationale to continue. I can always get the remaining few elements in and then "kill off" the blog, like they do characters in television series.

A few last "panicked" posts and then silence.

Here are some of the reasons for continuing:

1. To capitalize on this "goldmine" of discourse and artifacts that have been compiled over the last 24 months by repackaging it for the blog
2. To provide a clearinghouse of materials to facilitate the next performance (cf. the Dropbox folder and Bandcamp page for the May 30th show)
3. To allow fans to follow as we work our way toward one or more "finished" products

I have to say that doing this has given me a strange burst of creativity generally, not just with regard to the blog.  I am feeling a little better about continuing on for a while longer, but I want to focus a little more on items numbers 2 and 3.

I don't want to spell out everything at this point, but buried within this Dionysian swamp will be some very practical tools to use once the time comes to gather ourselves and move forward.  Using the "labels" feature, I want provide the following: (1) finished mock-ups of the songs and (2) videos demonstrating how to play the songs (cf. "Learn Guitar with David Brent").

The fact that this material will be buried but accessible seems better for a number of reasons.  One, I think it impresses on collaborators that we're not your "ordinary band" (for lack of a cooler sounding way of saying that).

Two, I do like an odd mix of obscurity and notoriety with this project in general; in some ways, the dissembling interface of the blog provides me with that comfort zone.  That said, I want certain chosen ones to be able to access the more pragmatic tools within the site.

As far as helping me, I would appreciate any "artifacts" you can provide.

Joe, it sounds like you are still caught up in the blessed busyness of your life!  I don't expect you will be able to provide much.  If you are able to send or upload anything--raw video, stills, photographs, etc.--it would help.  Will, same thing...a rough draft of the May 30th script with your scribbled notes comes to mind.

I may have shared with you that this project reminds me of how much I enjoyed those box sets that were coming out in droves in the 90s.

It really was an art form of its own packaging those things.  And I would go through them for hours.  I'm not sure what I liked better: listening to "Stone Free" on CD or seeing the lyrics of that song scribbled out in Jimi's loopy longhand on hotel stationary!  I agree that no one will want to necessarily see that stuff without at least one awesome finished product.

But I'm hoping we will have an awesome finished product.

As we get closer, the blog may be more a matter of recording practices, posting live versions of songs...heck, maybe someone could do an audio diary or something.  Certainly an upcoming Google hangouts meeting would be fair game.

Oh well, time to go to sleep.  But I'm having a brief uptick in my commitment.  I hope I've conveyed my reasons for feeling that the blog is still relevant at least somewhat clearly.

An Unnamed Rustbelt City

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will and Joe on 28 December 2013.

I thought this would be a good time to explore Arthur's "miserable, dejected state," especially since Will is gone.

I want to play karaoke-style versions of my songs because that's all I have left (both in real life and in the story).  I think it makes sense that this is when you find me, Joe.

I'm thinking about some pretty intense character disguise with a white beard, shoulder-length white hair, and an old beat-up Cosby sweater.  Maybe I could even be playing my songs on my beat-up classical guitar at one of these corners where you see people begging (I don't know--that's probably insensitive).

This is when Joe Lazarus finds me and takes me in to his home "in an unnamed northern rustbelt city" (unnamed for fear of Farthington's thugs).  Here they set about attempting to re-record the lost songs (documenting the results in words, pictures, video, and rough tracks).

Long story short, this is a much scaled-down phase of the project, one that will allow me to work on songs and keep the story somewhat on people's radar.

Posting old pictures would be another thing.  In addition to working on my "old" Arthur White look, I want to work on the younger one as well.  Once I have that put together, I may start "leaking" some more old photos.  If either of you feel like getting into costume and finding an authentic setting (does Joe have/need a costume?), we could start stockpiling some photos from "the past."

A final disclaimer is that these things may take a period of several months to get up and running.  In other words, I may do a lot of work before officially "launching" this phase.

The Thoroughly Dionysian Underpinnings of This Universe

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 20 February 2014.

I have really been enjoying this Internet vision a lot.  Whether anyone else will enjoy it is another matter, but, for the time being, it giving me a surge of purpose and creativity.

At any rate, I figured it's probably just as well that I manage the blog and other electronic aspects of this approach.  I did, however, want to ask you if I can continue to "curate" your emails alongside my own (I've only done the "Interview with Rustyy" so far).

I'm thinking, for example, of your January 24th message about the Apple rep, which I loved.

What I'm proposing is that you let me edit these a little--breaking up your paragraphs into a more journalistic style that bloggers favor (e.g. occasionally giving a significant thought its own one-sentence paragraph).  The alternative would be that, when I find something that I like, I could send it back to you and you can edit it yourself.

Here's a preview of the post I was planning using that email.  I've also titled it.

Beyond that, I am just laying the thoroughly Dionysian underpinnings of this universe.  The blog, its search tools, and a few other structural components will later provide the requisite Apollonian "stage" through which to glimpse the Dionysian horror without being destroyed.

I'm going to begin working in some of The Principles of Theory material next (interestingly, another story told primarily through emails), perhaps followed by some "song fragments" (pieces Arthur was working on just prior to the Concert for Iceland), and other artifacts.

In all of this--the excerpting of emails, the curating of artifacts, etc.--something makes you wonder if all these people suffered some horrible demise.  And if that's true, who is running the blog?  And how can Arthur White "return"?

Actually, according to The Principles of Theory, the badly mangled body of Carlton Farthington was found in the third-floor subbasement of the steam tunnels beneath University of Michigan's campus 17 years ago this September.

How, then, has he returned to write these upbeat but strangely disconcerting emails?

Webmaster

The following is a January 2014 email exchange between Will and Art.

Will:

I was thinking...it cracks me up that my alter ego is Will, but that yours is really not just Arthur, but Dr. Farthington.  Farthington, like Will, wants to impose order in Arthur's world, but it's an order that completely disrupts Will's sense of order.   

Simultaneously, his presence in the story tends to be my biggest obstacle...he consistently messes with the vice grip I'd like to have on the story.   

It's pretty awesome!

Art:

Indeed, that is interesting.   

And actually, here's another interesting factor: I have my own "vice grip," an Apollonian side of my own when it comes to certain things...a side that is coming out as I work on this blog (which attempts to bring order to the underlying chaos).  I guess that's Carlton Farthington in a sense, channeling Art and Will's efforts toward his own ends.   

I like a clean, polished, eminently intelligible interface...that's Apollonian.   It's not everything that I want it to be because I'm not a web designer (I want to hire one some day), but it's clearly something that I obsess about.   

Much of my content may be Dionysian, but, with this blog, I find myself searching for different ways of framing and organizing the material (naming conventions, labels, sidebar, and--when we have enough content--a horizontal navigation bar, possibly with drop-down menus). 

I don't want to edit the content of what we've posted, but, in my role as "webmaster," I will exert a strong editorial impulse to make sure everything fits within the organizational underpinnings of the blog. 

I originally thought that maybe we should spend a lot of time brainstorming exactly how to roll things out, etc. but I also wonder if we should just get a posting schedule going and give it a try for a while before evaluating it.  In some ways, I think the overarching architecture of the site will be what makes it all cohere. 

But, as Ezra Pound wrote in his Cantos, "I cannot make it cohere."

We're a Nietzschean Dialectic!

The following is a January 2014 email exchange between Art and Will.

Will:

I think constructing the story of Arthur White fits my Apollonian leanings and throwing it in a postmodern blender fits your Dionysian leanings.   

I'd love to talk whenever you have the chance, but I think it's clear that as far as we and our alter egos are concerned, after we come up with ideas, my job is mostly to impose order and your job is mostly to mess with it.   

I'm most in my element trying to form the legend in my head from start to finish.  I think it's best that you take charge of the architecture of all things stream of consciousness, meta-narrative, disjointed, post-structuralist, tangential, and destabilizing.   

I'm hardwired to write an epic morality tale...that's the strength and the shortcoming I bring to the table.  I'm depending on you to screw that up in meaningful ways...I hope you'll depend on me be the straightening force. 

I think carltonfarthington@gmail.com falls under the purview of your wisdom, not mine.  I think it's a good idea not because I get it, but because you do.

Art:

Yes, I remember now: we're a Nietzschean dialectic!  

Nietzsche was bent bringing back the Dionysian, which he felt had been paved over by the Socratic man, the Alexandrian age, the Enlightenment, his own age...   

But I would like to rewind back to the Hegelian and say, you're right: we need to "know no shrinking or half heartedness" in being the thing we most are.  That's what the all-important sublation/synthesis most needs in order to occur.   The "only wrong" in this dynamic is when "one desires to deny the other power" not realizing itself as just one part of the synthetic whole.   

And I'm referencing Hegel's ideas on tragedy, so there is danger in this.   

As A.C. Bradley explains in his lectures on Hegel, what is tragic about tragedy is that the observance of one power involves the violation of the other (usually with one or more deaths in the process).  But Hegel also pointed out tragedies in which the synthesis is achieved through adjustment of demands/repentance.   

Like how Athena is able to save Orestes by brokering a deal between Apollo (Apollonian/Olympian) and the Furies (Dionysian/Chthonic).  I think we want to go for that latter option, appreciating and making room for the demands of the other...all without falling into half-heartedness.   

And yes, I do look to you to be that other, straightening force!

Will:

It's working...I'm already questioning whether you wrote that response or Dr. Carlton Farthington did!

The Church and the Tower of Babel

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 16 January 2014.

So, I've been racking my brain about some of the details.

I think I want to talk to you on the phone or over Google hangouts at some point about how we will configure the release of these sundry elements (emails, videos, blog posts, etc.).  I think that discussion definitely should be prefaced with a prayer to the Holy Spirit!

We are walking that fine line between the Church ("every man heard him speaking in his own language") and the Tower of Babel ("The Lord confounded the language of all the earth").

That conversation aside, I'd like to slowly but surely start preparing the basic architecture.

The choice of whose account the blog is under seems a critical choice.  As you know, my vote is for carltonfarthington@gmail.com.  That said, I want to configure things on the blog so that this fact is not at all obvious.

Actually, I want people to get the initial impression that it's Art and Will--the real-life teachers in an impossible, barely existent band--doing the blog, talking about their alter egos, Arthur White and Will Witkowski.

The unique circularity this configuration achieves is that one of the least believable characters, Carlton Farthington, ultimately lays claim to the outer frame, rendering the existence and/or agency of all the other characters, including the real-life Art and Will, suspect.

I only want this to occur in the case that someone clicks the "Contact Us" link and sees carltonfarthington@gmail.com show up in the address line.  I might like to bury that information even further, such that someone would have to search around a little bit (perhaps run "Carlton Farthington" through a search engine and have his blog, "The Return of Arthur White," show up in the results).

Or even further, to bury this very thing I'm writing now somewhere in the blog, engendering even more epistemological despair in that Art seems to be the one writing the post but Carlton Farthington is the one posting it on his blog!

We Resolve to Awe and Wonder

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 14 January 2014.

I see what you mean regarding manageability.  My initial thought is that it is a lot more manageable (devil often lurking in the details, of course).

We are writing and otherwise producing volumes of stuff that works within our narrative, because our narrative had already embraced meta-narrative as an integral element long before this recent development.

This is just taking it one step further.

As far as the digital proficiencies, I consider myself pretty capable having been a long-time technology coach/point person in my district.  I've never been a big blogger, but I am adept at mastering and integrating new technologies.  I see a lot of what I like in certain blogs and feel I can replicate the basics of what I see there.  That said, I want to dink around with things for a while before opening it up to the general public.

In terms of losing the wow factor of finished products, I see the concern...

But I feel like our current model has us continually falling off everyone's map (as if we were ever there in the first place).  I have a lot more time to make my way over to the computer or down into the basement than I do to lug equipment to this or that practice or show (which I nonetheless still maintain as one of our preeminent goals).  If we share songs and longings and ideas, faithful followers can potentially have the excitement of seeing sad, lonely chords banged out on a piano transformed into full-fledged extravaganzas with guitars blazing, etc.  And they can participate, they can commune, they can contribute...just like we intended in the first place!

I like what you said about the meta-narrative as well, how it should not just be the domain of relativism.  Instead of necessarily pointing toward the relative, I see it as pointing toward the irrational, which is a wholly baptize-able concept.  Irrational, in mathematical terms, means "cannot be reduced to a ratio or fraction."  So pi, phi, square root of 2, etc. are irrational.  Many times, what Jesus said is irrational in the sense that I've defined above.  Think ye on this (1 Corinthians 1:22-25):

For Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom,
but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,
but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

I don't think it irreligious to say that we can't reduce God and/or His Universe to straightforward formulas, patterns, and quantities.  Without talking about religion all the time, I think that we--having been created in the image and likeness of that most irrational Creator--might very well partake in that irrationality in our own creations.  Does that mean that God is without symmetries, without rhyme or reason?  Of course not.  But we won't be pigeonholing him in our small-minded human projects and conceptions, reducing down him into comprehensible fractions, integers, natural numbers, etc.  That would be the conceit of the Enlightenment and its intellectual progeny.

As you say, we resolve to awe and wonder.

Resolution to Wonder

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 13 January 2014.

I've always loved tangential meta-narratives, but I also love art that doesn't show signs of its process at all.

I would bet that every great piece of art has a great story behind it, but the art itself should be amazing regardless of the story.  By turning the story into the art, we may lose the wow factor of the "finished" products.  We'd have to maintain a fairly rigorous level of dynamism: the infrequent narration of a story in which nothing happens won't advance our cause.

One of my favorite things about your idea is that it has the potential to subvert a postmodern form: the meta-narrative.

I think the great modern writers generally hated the doctrine of modernism, and I think we may be in a similar boat, striving for Catholic orthodoxy while creating postmodern art.  I don't know a great way to put this, but I see in Apollonian/classical forms a tendency toward resolution and in postmodern forms such an assertion of relativism that resolution is impossible.  What I prefer to both is what I see as a very Catholic thing--something that is both and neither at the same time.

For lack of a better term, I'll call it resolution to wonder.

Christ tends to communicate truth in parable and paradox.  I'm always struck by the fact that what he says is absolute truth and perception-frying mystery at the same time.  It's truly satisfying food and endlessly hunger-inducing simultaneously.  It's an explosion and a resolution...we resolve to awe and wonder.

Where postmodernism's ambiguity tends to point toward relativistic nihilism in its irresolution, great Catholic art draws people toward truths infinitely larger than we are.   The result is that we can feel resolved and unresolved at the same time.  Chesterton and Graham Greene stand out to me as two Catholic authors who nail resolution to wonder in a modern framework (The Man Who Was Thursday and The Power and the Glory are particularly important to me).

I'd like to see what we could do with resolution to wonder in a postmodern framework.

We Must Behave As If We Are Famous

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 14 January 2014.

I had an interesting fight in my head with an Apple rep the other day that made me think about the Internet vision.

Basically, I was really frustrated that Apple creates devices that permanently alter the notion of what education is, but simultaneously pretend they are creating technology to help us do our jobs better, when really, they are obliterating our jobs as they have existed.  

There was this weird insistence he had that the existing architecture could house the new environment.  He'd talk about the beauty of a girl handing in a Garageband song in place of her history term paper and getting an A on it.  From my perspective, a song is a very different thing than a term paper, and if I were to accept a Garageband song, that should be the assignment itself and I should teach Garageband literacy.  

But the fight got me thinking.  

He was simultaneously criticizing us as teachers for living in the past while trying to assure us that the old ways are as important to the future as ever.  I suggested that new technology creates new forms and obsolesces old ones and that print literacy, the thing I teach and that he wants to help me teach, is the old form obsolesced by digital culture.  The nature of scholarship itself has to shift: if multi-media, hyperlinked presentations are a superior mode of scholarly idea exchange, I need to teach toward that, not the five-paragraph essay.  I couldn't get why he kept validating what I was doing as the right thing while simultaneously calling it backward and out of step with the times.

At any rate, my sister has been very interested in a lecture she heard in which a guy said that film photography is real photography and that we have no idea what digital photography is yet because people have just been using it as an analog for real photography without thinking of its true nature.  That really resonated with the frustrations I was feeling with the Apple rep.  The guy had been thinking about the new technology as being a slight improvement to the old technology without recognizing what it actually was or how it completely shifts the ecology of the academic world, despite the fact that he was trying to extol the virtues of shifting.  

And then I started thinking about our digital adventure.  

McLuhan said that satellite technology recalls the proscenium arch--that it makes all of us feel as though we must behave as if we are famous.  I definitely had my experiments with fame as a medium in college, and the Arthur White project is full of issues of rock-and-roll mythmaking.  It's interesting that the story is grounded in 1970's record production and the 21st century digital quest for the legitimate, the proliferation of new historical approaches, and the disruption of hegemonic cultural narratives.  

Poetry as we've known it is just about dead, the novel is basically dead, film has a couple centuries left tops, but this new digital form doesn't even have a name or much of a tradition yet.  It soaks up all sorts of forms, but it isn't a form itself yet.  We're completely immersed in it but we haven't named many of its tropes yet, can't point back to its geniuses and study their work...there's no Aristotelianism of the form yet.  

We cave into the pressures of the form by denying ourselves any privacy in constructing the world of Arthur White, but we still subvert the form by developing an extended narrative that aims toward truth, beauty, and goodness...to the wonder of God, as we've discussed.  It's a chance to be in our age but not of it, to work within the true form of our day while fighting the sorts of philosophy (or lack of philosophy) the form perpetuates.

So, in short, I like it.

The Swaddled/Crucified Existence Engenders Something Awesome (Part 2 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 9 January 2014.

Okay, the answer to what it would look like is probably going to be somewhat anticlimactic, but I can't sustain anymore high-level thinking.

The first thing is to create a blog.

Yep, there, I said it.  Create a blog in which we tell the story-story, but we also tell the story of trying to tell the story-story, which in turn becomes another (frame) story.  

Yes, we post certain things that are straight story, straight character.  Maybe Joe Lazarus still makes pleas to his audience to help him on his journey of self discovery; in other words, sometimes we submerge ourselves entirely within the medium/media such that the storyteller disappears.  More or less traditional.  

The new frame, however, opens up new opportunities:

• An entry exploring what kind of wig I should get
• A video of me doodling some logos for the band
• Choice passages from of our correspondence 
• Footage from the May 30th show with commentary
• Excerpts from The Principles of Theory 
• A video of me banging out the bridge of a song
• A tour of my pitiful basement "studio"
• Scribbled lyrics like you sometimes see in a CD box set

Additionally, I'd like to be frequently wading into all of the above and making sense of it, letting our intentions be known, asking for help in pursuing the real(?) story of making the story a reality...one that is all those good premodern things: whole, complete, and separate from both artist and audience.  But by this point, the audience is wondering if even that is real and that there isn't some other frame through which these data are more fully and more coherently comprehended.

And though the one show had a surprisingly powerful effect, for some reason I think this blog could be freakishly amazing if done right.  

Why do I say that?  

Because it creates the frame which unleashes an onslaught of everything.  

I don't doubt that somehow "little things" like shows and stories and movies and musicals and documentaries could materialize within this commodious framework.  But when we focus on those objects, those destinations, those end products, it's like everything collapses in around them.

Maybe because it becomes a kind of idolatry.

The Swaddled/Crucified Existence Engenders Something Awesome (Part 1 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 8 January 2014.

I'm thinking, as usual.  

James threw the Macbook on the floor and now it's making a "death beep."  So recording in my basement man cave is impossible for the time being.  

Also the low D on the piano is sticking.  

I'm meditating on this notion that the swaddled/crucified existence engenders something awesome.

So as to not become despondent, I reject the notion that my many constraints prevent me from creating.  I instead posit the opposite through faith: constraints, suffering, and setback are the fertile ground within which new life explodes.  I'm not sure what's male, what's female, etc. in this fecundity analogy, but I believe this.  I'm willing to stake a lot on this.

I'm going to lay this new idea on you.

It's a subtle change, but it all began when I made a passing reference to post-structuralism in a recent email.  This has been hinted at in various forms since the very beginning: the idea that telling the story is the most interesting story.  What's more, that the people telling the story could be characters (the main characters?) in the story.

Why do I say this now?  

Here's one major reason: I've been going back and marveling at the 248 threads I've saved from our correspondence dating back to July 27, 2012.

That's right--threads, not individual emails.  

And many of these threads include extremely involved exchanges on the creative process, the Catholic artist in the postmodern age, etc.  

Add to this the many other products that have been spawned from this process: scratch tracks, Pinterest boards, photographs, fliers, websites, a radio interview, unedited documentary footage, a pitiful recording studio in my basement, fully- and partially-realized costumes, etc.  

Add to this other artifacts that predated the current project such as the earliest-known Arthur White poster, The Principles of Theory, and the countless stories that revolve around them, and you have a treasure trove of material with which to create a post-structuralist work of art.  

And the only thing preventing us from using this material (and opening the floodgate to future similarly self-referential deluges) is a decidedly premodern insistence on the story being a self-contained object that is whole, complete, and separate from both artist and audience.

Don't get me wrong: the Arthur White story is an amazing story with fairly progressive ideas of what counts for text, etc.  

That said, the story of us--of what we're imagining, trying, and mostly failing to accomplish--is even more amazing.  Why not let all of that "real" material cross-pollinate with the artifice?  Paintings within paintings ad infinitum.

So what would that look like?  I'm going to reply to this email with the answer.