Seattle Puts the “Professional” in “Creative Professional”

Photo by Alex Michaelsen on Unsplash

I’m starting to feel like people exchange their personality for the art piece. We channel our energies into an object, an image, or a product, and then gather people to stand around and look at it. When the standing-around-and-looking is actually a pretty uncreative experience. And then we bump into each other and ask what we do when we’re not there.

Kill me.

What about the creative life? What about the creative self? What about the creative personality?

This is why I hosted “Everything is Empty and Nothing Can Be Broken,” an empty windowless, warehouse party with paint and balloons and swim noodles and inflatable creatures to throw around.

I’m sick of precious objects. I’m sick of being surrounded by things that can’t be broken. But apparently it’s ok if our selves are broken. If our creativity is broken.

I feel a deadness inside this culture in Seattle, even among artists or “creatives”. An absence of passion in the present moment. So much that I’ve been internalizing it, and I watch myself from the outside, like, what’s happening?

I want to restore passion and creativity in all moments, and not just be satisfied with channeling it into a particular medium or a particular object. This is what I mean when I talk about multimedia omnitomy. Playing with and dissecting everything. See “Every Child is a Multimedia Omnitomist.” Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who sees this. Like everyone is content to ask the same interview questions over and over to each other. Like everyone is content to ask about what the other person is “doing,” as if we’re not doing something now! Make this moment matter. Make this moment a memory. I’ve been dying for emergent, escalating, creativity. But we’ve stacked on so many adult inhibitions, that it’s become who we are, and we don’t realize it or challenge it.

Many of the conversations I’ve had in the past five years in Seattle are easily replicated by a pre-SmarterChild-era program. Many of them have been fascinating, but very, very few have been fun. I’m sick of it. In my late teens to mid-twenties, my friends and I were like a scene from a Marx Brothers movie. Wordplay, physical humor, and escalating creativity. Now it feels like everything is so contained. And everyone seems so content with it!

I don’t like what I’m turning into here. I realize there’s more that I can do to bring that playfulness to the interaction, but it’s an uphill battle. I’d rather build times and spaces and moods that allow that to happen. I also want to challenge this in our culture. I want us all to see it and change it. I’m sick of these dry report-back conversations. So, so sick of them.

I don’t want it to become me. I don’t want it to become any of us. And this, among many other important reasons, is why I fight for collective liberation. I just really wanna play. And all this oppression crap is getting in the way. I’m over it. I know it seems like playing is an unimportant thing, but it’s really the most important thing. It’s what we do for its own sake: intrinsic value. It’s so important, and I want more of it.