Statement on a future introduction

I’ve decided to start writing again. I had previously maintained a blog in the early days of the world wide web, and again from 2000-2006. In both cases I posted poetry, song lyrics, fragments of fiction writing attempts, occasional philosophical and political treatises, art manifestos, and life observations. This was during the infancy of social networking, and eventually I stopped writing because social networking provided a platform for these quick bursts of textual creativity.

I’ll admit first that I find myself out of practice. At one point in my life, I wrote thousands of words per day. I still do, in the form of business presentations, technical documentation, strategic emails, and I still write songs and poems at my normal rate. Remember: Being lazy isn’t how long it takes you to finish a task but how long it takes to start it. I gave up fiction writing in 2009, when I finished the first draft of a novel that was so unreadable that I can barely look at it today. I have been occupied with survival and paying the bills for most of the previous half-decade, with little time for creative endeavours that do not generate income besides an expensive break for two years of live performance a few years back.

I’ll admit, secondly, that I go crazy when I take a long break from self-expressive pursuits. I start to convince myself that I am aging out of the creative sphere. That I am now too old to draw an impressive audience. That I can’t relate to the younger generation. That memes tho. That I am in possession of a terrible sense of humor. That I have failed too many times to take the big risks again. That I can’t make myself vulnerable when I have a family to care for.

Obviously I want to discourage self-doubt - but I also want to encourage honesty. I don’t want a blog. Social networking, when you are encouraged to carefully curate your comments and identity, is a safe alternative to genuine creative expression. Where your content must be copyright-safe and scrubbed of potential offense. I am forced to go elsewhere to find a publishing platform that guarantees the utmost privacy - in order to allow for the utmost honesty. So here we are in google docs.

I didn’t realize it at the time, or only slightly, that over the past few years I have been assembling and preparing a massive multi-media work of art, only if I were able to unify all of my passions into a single work. It has taken a considerable amount of theoretical work, and generating the organization for a new format, as well as years of research. I am now ready to start work on what I believe is my life’s work. For the bulk of my adult life, and most of my teenage years, I have been primarily working on “the zenith/znth.” The band has been my survival mechanism, my cultural crutch, my networking opportunity. Since 2010 I’ve also accumulated a list of ideas for works in a variety of media beyond music. This is a normal process for most modern musicians, who eventually all discover their sounds can go with other things. I’m incorporating music, but also film, animation, aesthetics, political theory, literature, science, and philosophy. A considerable degree of what I’m working on does wilfully violate copyright law in its earliest stages. I will be incorporating not only original pieces in a variety of media but incorporating other’s works as well. I am exposing the entire vector of a creative trajectory from origin concept to rendering. Hence the need for security and privacy. I’ll get into describing this soon, but more on why now and not later.

Beyond the native urge to create in itself, there are a number of reasons that I must start writing again. In the first few months of this year, several music heroes have passed away in such swift succession that a thick air of mortality seems to have settled down around my daily thoughts. My son was born a few weeks before the new year, and my innermost thoughts have been echoing a background hum resembling some notion of legacy, behind the usual primary parental concerns such as keeping my beautiful boy alive. 2016 is also an election year, and I’ve been reading and experiencing propaganda and mistruths on a level that I have never before witnessed. Propaganda is so omnipresent and to such an overt degree from both sides of “the aisle.” I am therefore thinking on an almost constant basis: if I die tomorrow, what exactly am I leaving behind for my children? The younger generation’s relation to music is changing, so my pile of self-recorded and self-released albums may very well mean nothing to him when he’s grown. Perhaps his children will value it (I am sorta counting on a zenith revival when I reach my 60s; that is my retirement plan). But there is so much more to me that I want my son to know before I pass away. I also don’t want him to fall for this ubiquitous propaganda method, social filter bubbles, peer pressure, cyber-bullying, reductionism or memetification of nuanced concepts.

I want to explore a wide range of topics and collect interviews with experts on a number of subjects. The primary topics that I am perhaps on some level qualified to write about are music, technology and media, philosophy, politics, and parenthood. I will also discuss my research and experiences in the fields of history, education, business, and living life itself from home-improvement to survival. I will confer with experts on subjects as diverse as thermodynamics, genetics, sociology, comedy, and navigating office politics, the last being a topic I have yet to successfully crack.

I am trying to leave something for my son that he can reference as an explanation for why I decided to take some of the courses of actions that I took in my life. I want him to avoid the mistakes that I have made, of course, but also to celebrate the accomplishments that may seem mundane to him at some future point in human history. Not only am I writing to my son, but I also intend to write to a larger audience. I despise the over-simplification and polarization of so many complex ideas that take viral form today. The name of this journal is “Intelligencer,” a 19th century title for newspapers. My purpose is to inject some intelligent analysis to some of these high level ideas that are being so brutally reduced. I don’t want to force my values on anyone else - I want to provide frameworks for thinking about them on a different level than what I see in both mainstream journalism and social networking.

What I intend to do here is to mold a new format for participatory art, one that seamlessly weaves together music, film, software engineering, and theoretical discourse in an honest and self-aware construction. This project has a definitive beginning and endpoint in mind, though it will take decades to finish. There might be some resistance to such an ambitious endeavour, as massive projects seem to wither with time or fail under the artist’s own inevitable disinterest. I have some experience, however, with managing large projects, and see this as just another, to be handled using the more successful tools I’ve gathered over the years leading bands and starting companies. I have scheduled years of inquiries, and have in mind a format that will build on itself in an iterative, cyclical manner.

I intend to launch a more public version beginning January 2017, though will continue to keep significant content out of public access for many years to come. For now, I’m limiting access to this google drive, sending more invites on a monthly basis. Google docs is a perfect place for me not only for the sake of privacy, but also because of how simple the interface is for annotating and commenting. Feel free to markup and comment all over these documents. When the iteration completes, you will see your changes integrated into the larger whole. Essentially, I am taking a computer programmer’s version repository as methodological system for organizing my documents.

For example: when I cycle back to this document in January 2017, I will be able to construct a legitimate public-facing introduction rather than this preliminary draft of an artist’s statement. I will have answered criticisms, responded to fact-checks, identified further experts, gathered evidence, dealt with differences of opinion, and explored my own logic deeper and thus will be iteratively improving the set of ideas in play and that I wish to represent in the work itself.

With all this being said, rather than leave you this first month empty handed with merely meta-conversations, I will append herewith my initial entry. This is a short entry about a philosophical topic I’ve already explored in prior work, and will return to again and again: the nature of reality. This might read like a college essay, but in a looser format. Not all of my writings will be of this nature.