UnQualified

 "Most of my lyrics are contradictions.
I'll write a few sincere lines, and then
I'll have to make fun of [them]."

Soon after G and I met, he asked to see some of my poetry. I was thrilled and immediately said yes, but then I warned him, with what I thought of as charming self-deprecation, that it was angsty and melodramatic (I believe I told him that my muse is a 6-foot-tall Amazon with a penchant for getting her heart broken and then screaming about it). "Are you sure you're still interested?" I asked.

He replied: "Yes. But stop qualifying yourself."

In other words, if someone asks to read your writing, say "yes"...and then stop talking.

It was a revelation. What I had thought of as a witty introduction to my writing was actually a neon sign that flashed, "I suck." Actually, it flashed, "I kinda, sorta, think that maybe I could possibly be an OK writer, but I'm probably not, and anyway, if you hate it, I won't judge you, because it's not good, and I really, really want you to like it, but I doubt you will, but..."

Being an artist takes balls. It's not hard work the way paving streets or waiting tables or tilling soil is hard work, but it is hard. Great artists make it look as easy as breathing. Even the earliest Picasso looks effortless, Bjork sails through impossible vocal arrangements without breaking a sweat, and Tom Waits was obviously born under some sort of lucky star that prevents him from ever doing anything that doesn't work.

But it's not easy. It takes a lifetime of work to be great. Many people are born talented, but greatness...that's something else entirely. And I guarantee you that nobody great ever walked around saying, "Well, it's kinda OK, I guess. You might like it. Or you could hate it. Or, well, maybe..."

Or, if they did, then they lived and died in obscurity. Emily Dickinson comes immediately to mind. I wonder how she spoke of her writing? Or Vincent van Gogh.
Some artists will lead you to believe that they think of themselves as mediocre, but don't buy it. Kurt Cobain may have derided Nirvana for playing 3-chord progressions, but he spent hours perfecting his sound, including his playing and his voice. Nothing about Nirvana's success was accidental or spontaneous.

It's not that self-deprecating humor is never charming. Sometimes it is. And many of us would rather err on the side of humor than be thought of as pretentious pricks. But no matter how witty you are, verbally eviscerating your work is always self-destructive. An artist who makes fun of his own songs is also making a mockery of his fans, even if he doesn't mean to. (Of course, in his case, he regularly mocked his fans, whom he didn't like. But that's really just another qualifier, isn't it?)

I think, in almost every case, qualifying is used as an insurance policy. If I say it first, then they can't hurt me with it. Right?

Unfortunately, it doesn't really work that way. When Cobain qualified himself, what he really did was shape the definition of his own work. "Simple" became "stupid" and "popular" became "inane." And there's no reason to do that. Simple + popular = classic, right? But by apologizing for the work in advance of criticism, instead of protecting himself and his work from that critique, he invited it. Hell, even HE thinks the songs are stupid and inane--I guess they must be. Or, if they're great, then maybe it's by accident. He wasn't a great musician, just a druggie who got a lucky break.

If you are a successful artist, people will line up to hate you and your work. It doesn't matter how great or new or popular or beautiful it is. In fact, the more successful you are, the hungrier they will be. It is impossible to pre-empt them. All you'll do is add fuel to a fire that is going to burn regardless.

As Stereo Console prepares to release its debut album, we switch from creation mode to promotion/marketing mode--and it's not a place I particularly want to be. But I believe in the project. I love it from start to finish. If nobody else in the world wants to listen to it, I will. On repeat.

Now all I have to do is unload a lifelong habit of qualifying so that I can promote it the way it deserves to be promoted.

Ready... Set......

-Lex

You Can't Make an Ugly Pair of Pants Without Breaking a Few Hideous Fabrics.

This fabric, for sale on etsy.com, is a near-exact replica.

When I was a senior in high school, I took a class that was somewhat optimistically called "Fashion Design." Having spent over three years in the school, I was more than a little surprised to find it among the course offerings, and downright shocked to learn that our school boasted a room full of sewing machines. There was even a teacher! She came complete with denim dresses and espadrilles.

The entire situation raised several pressing questions: Who was this teacher, and why was she never seen outside of the fashion design classroom? Why did no one else know about the sewing machines? Given the retro nature of both the machines and the teacher, were we, in fact, entering a space/time wormhole of alternate reality every time we went to class?

I never got an answer to any of these questions, or figured out whether I am a "summer" or "fall." I did, however, learn how to sew, a fact which renders Fashion Design one of the top 5 most useful classes I ever took.

The first garment of clothing I ever made was a pair of drawstring pajama shorts. These, I thought, would be stunning in a lovely black fabric sprinkled with a subtle bowling motif.

Needless to say, the project was somewhat doomed from the start.

However, I sat down with my pattern and my pins, my scissors and my fabric, and got started.

If you've ever done this, you know that, initially, your fabric, to which you have painstakingly pinned little bits of brown tissue paper, looks less like an article of clothing and more like the kind of puzzle people have to do in corporate team-building activities. None of the individual shapes look anything like any clothing you've ever seen before, and it's nearly impossible to keep track of each of them, let alone to have any idea where they're going to end up in the final product.

At one point, sure I'd done everything wrong, I very nearly threw the stupid thing in the trash.

But something happened as I started pinning and sewing each of those pieces together. Suddenly, where before I'd had a pile of junk, I now had a leg hole. And then a waistband. And then another leg hole. And then the single most hideous pair of bowling-themed homemade drawstring pajama shorts ever to grace the planet.

And you know what? I actually wore them. I was that proud of myself.

That moment, when I looked down at this mess in my hands and realized it was becoming something, was a revelation. Where before there had been parts, now there was a whole. And, as ugly as those pajama shorts were, they were greater than the sum of their parts.

Sometimes we get the sense that creations land in artists' laps, fully formed, delivered on a silver platter from Muse Central.

But creation, artistic or otherwise, involves work, time, and at least one moment (if not many) in which you look down at the pile of crap you've been sweating over for days and think, "I would be doing the world a favor if I burned this and became an accountant instead."

But, if you perservere, you may just end up with a masterpiece. Or a pair of shorts that makes your ass look huge and saggy.

-Lex

Digital Sea, Available Free

I was six the first time I stole music. I tuned the radio to Hot 99.9, waited for a favorite song, hit "record" on my Fisher Price tape recorder, and made as little noise as possible while the precious tunes imprinted on the rolling strip inside the cassette.

...Until I got distracted and wandered off to play Barbie, leaving Casey Kasem to his own devices. Somewhere, there's a box of homemade cassettes filled with hours of Top 40, complete with ads and a background soundtrack of my sister and me fighting over whose Barbie got to wear the hot pink skirt with the purple sequins.

I upgraded to a dual cassette recorder in third grade, and later made mix tapes from CDs. Throughout high school, I probably made and received an average of one mix tape a week.

It's hard to remember now exactly when Napster entered my field of awareness. I must have been a junior in college, because I remember sitting at my desk with my roommate, the two of us so excited we were literally crammed into one chair and leaning forward, our heads together, toward the monitor, feverishly downloading every random thing we could think of, including "Woke Up This Morning," the Alabama 3 song from the opening credits of The Sopranos.

We had a blast. And, since we were downloading music we would never have purchased (remember, this was pre-itunes, so things like "Woke Up This Morning" weren't necessarily readily available via any other means), it didn't feel like stealing. Or at least, not stealing that mattered.

Besides, I'd been stealing music for years. And what musician in her right mind would begrudge her inclusion on my mix tapes? Isn't it an honor, a joy, if someone loves your music so much that she must include it on the tape she's about to give her boyfriend?

This is how I justified my theft of music, via Napster. It didn't seem, initially, to be much different. And though I didn't end up downloading very much, since the program hogged my computer and I deleted it fairly quickly, it was years before I really understood why Napster was bad for music--for the musicians and the audience.

I got my first job when I was 14. My mom had to sign working papers for me. It was a tipped job bussing tables at an upscale restaurant, and I often made about $100/night (which very nearly made up for the indignity of wearing a red bow tie). This would have been in... 1996 or so, when we still had a music store in town and CDs cost between $15 and $20. So, naturally, I thought of my salary in terms of how much new music it could get me: Instead of thinking, "Great, I earned $100 tonight," I thought, "Nice. Five CDs."

In other words, music was something I worked for. The musicians worked to make it, and I worked to own it. And I valued it as such. My CD collection was organized, and I took pride in keeping the jewel cases pristine. I pored over the liner notes, and was always disappointed when the physical design of the album wasn't up to scratch.

I made mixes, of course, but this added to the number of hours I dedicated to any given song, which added, rather than detracted, from the value of the music. I also received mixes, and valued them as well, not just for the music itself, but for the work my friends had poured into them.

Downloading music illegally involves exactly none of the above steps. Instead of valuing the music by virtue of the work involved in its acquisition, we've come to see musicians as people who owe it to us to give away their work because we can't be bothered to pay for it. There seems to be this idea floating out there that music is so fun to make, and being a musician is such a great job, that the artists pretty much owe it to us to keep at it, whether they make any money or not. And anyway, we all know that they make more money than we do, so it's a victimless crime, right?

I'm not going to sit here on my self-righteous high horse and suggest that Madonna has been financially stripped by Internet vultures. Lady Gaga has more money than a person could spend in three lifetimes. And there certainly have been unknown artists who have benefited, sometimes hugely, by "giving away" their music until they were "discovered" by the big labels and turned into overnight millionaires (Justin Bieber, anyone?)

But it's not just the individual musician who stands to lose in a culture that devalues music and art, which our culture undoubtedly does (how many school art programs have survived the current economic problems?). It's also the loss we all experience when we forget that art is important. That it has value--it adds enormous value to our lives, but only if we acknowledge that value do we truly benefit from it.

I don't know what teenagers are like today. Surely some are still pouring over the digital equivalent of the liner notes. Surely some still work for music. And maybe my friends and I were more unusual than I realize, and most of our peers simply listened to whatever came on the radio. I don't know. But I do believe there has been a fundamental shift in the way we value music, as well as writing and visual art. Because there ARE plenty of people willing to do it for free (blogging has proven disastrous to the field of journalism, for instance), and I believe the audience loses as much as the artist when such devaluation becomes mainstream.

-Lex

Night Owl

Midnight - 2 a.m. is my favorite time of day to work. I love being awake when the world is quiet. I never realize how noisy other people's thoughts are until they're turned off. I love when it's just me, content and productive, writing or drawing or musicking. It's an alone time of day, but not a lonely one. A time without distractions, a time when I can focus.

Or it used to be. Then I had a baby.

I knew I wouldn't get much sleep when Niblet was tiny. Everyone warned me about that. It didn't make 3 a.m. feedings any more fun, but knowing they were short-lived did help.

What I didn't know was that, once she stopped waking up in the middle of the night for food, she'd become a pathologically cheerful morning person. And not just for a few months, but (so far anyway) for the entire stretch between infancy and adolescence.

When I was a teenager, my mom always woke me up by 9 a.m. on the weekends. "Wake up!" she'd call from the hallway. "The day is half over! And take a shower! I can smell your hair from here."

At the time, I found it annoying. Now I find it insane.

When you're a parent, there's a very simple golden rule: Kid asleep = Time off. Time off from being responsible, time off from pretending you never eat cookies for breakfast, time off from kid-friendly media, time off from the constant, nagging question: Am I screwing up my kid right now?

Time off means time to work, and I need my work. I need to write, I need to play, I need to create things. Everyone who has that drive knows what I mean by 'need'. Our work is who we are.

It also requires total submersion. It's not something you can dip in and out of in between potty training and marathon viewings of PES videos. At least, it's not something I can dip in and out of. Being a parent means not only putting the needs of your kid first, but doing it without resenting that you're doing it. And when I'm working, I resent every interruption. I resent having to pee.

I can't get my time at 2 a.m. anymore. Now I have to be awake at 6, and I have to be happy about it.

Niblet sneaks into our room in the mornings, comes around to my side of the bed, and says, "Mommy. Mommy. Mom. Mommy? Mom. MOMMY!" until I roll over, squinting. Then she breaks into a huge grin, spreads her arms wide, and says, "It's MORNING TIME!"

Only a gargoyle would snarl in response, but that's what I become if I haven't had enough sleep. So now, I give up my precious nighttime hours. I don't make it anywhere close to midnight, even.

It's taken awhile to get used to my new schedule. Now I get up like every other schlub, take a shower, get Niblet dressed and fed, and and work while she's in school.

Fortunately, I slip into that focused work place pretty easily these days. I'm much more efficient than I used to be. My muse had better show up on time, because I'm here and ready and time is short.

When I was pregnant, people told me that once I was a mom all of my priorities would change. That everything I ever did in life would be for my kid. I think this was meant to make me feel good--it does give one a sense of purpose, after all--but it scared me. What about my work? What about my brain?

Fortunately, my brain is the same as it ever was. When I work, I forget everything and everyone else around me. I forget that I'm a mom, I forget that we're out of milk, I forget that the dirty laundry is threatening to take over the house, and I work.

Just like always. But with daylight.

-Lex

The Atomic Missiles: The Unauthorized Post

When I was in college in New Brunswick, my favorite local band was The Atomic Missiles. They were friends of mine, brilliant guys and artists who had never played or written music before they decided to become a band.

I was there the night they decided to become a band and learn to play. In that order. They had an idea that they could market themselves and create a buzz even before they had their first show. In a way, it was more marketing experiment than musical experiment, at least at first. But it was a marketing experiment  born of good fun rather than monetary interest. Their attitude that night, and pretty much every night thereafter, was: why not?

It's fair to say that I spent a lot of time with The Atomic Missiles during the very early days. They made patches from rough cuts of orange canvas that they hand-stamped with "Atomic Missiles." They were very cool and, sure enough, started popping up on backpacks around campus before the band had played their first show--possibly before they had written their first song.

But they also attacked music with gusto. They practiced constantly. They had so much fun that, even early on when their "sound" was still so raw that it was hard to listen to, their attitude was contagious. It was impossible not to have fun at an Atomic Missiles show. And, with all that practicing, it didn't take long before they sounded pretty good. One of their first hits was a song called "Charmander." I think Charmander was a character from Pokemon, but not knowing for sure didn't affect my ability to love the chorus: "Charmander, Charmander, you're gonna die."

I don't know what happened to The Atomic Missiles later on. At least, not first-hand. I left New Brunswick long before they did, and lost track. I do know that they kept playing, that they became quite popular, and that they stayed together for a long time. There was at least some rotation of band members, and I don't even know exactly who ended up really being IN the band, but most of the guys from the house they shared are still musicians, and they all still have the same attitude about life: why not?

The attitude of the guys who lived in the Missile's Silo, their name for the house they shared, was so contagious that it infects me still. It was the first time I'd ever seen anyone, let alone an entire group of people, actively decide that the possibilities for fun and success outweighed the potential for embarrassment. Deciding to play in front of people is terrifying, and it stops many amazing artists from singing, or playing, or even writing or painting. But what is embarrassment, really? It's not physical pain. It's a little uncomfortable, maybe, but it doesn't actually matter in the big scheme of things. Besides, I can live the most careful life imaginable and still feel embarrassed on a regular basis (especially considering my penchant for tripping over nothing and accidentally somersaulting into dog poop). So why not shake off that fear and go for it? If I'm going to be embarrassed anyway, it might as well be on my terms.

That's what The Atomic Missiles taught me. And it is in that spirit that we, Stereo Console, launch this blog.

Welcome!

-Lex