Vacation Message December 2024
Season’s Greetings Our AMAW World Household!
Subsequent 12 months might be my twenty eighth 12 months (!) of getting began AMAW. I can’t consider how shortly the time has handed.
After I replicate on life on Terra firma and the way wild it’s to be alive in the present day, I by no means lose sight of what it additionally means to be an Artist — a custodian of tales. A steward of the planet and its residents. A receptacle of feeling and self-expression. For as we forge that means via our work, we’re additionally connecting to the life-giving supply of our work: nature, the planet, the celebrities, the stream, the cosmic dance that has sustained and perpetuated life for billions of years.
I’ve been requested many instances over the course of 28 years how I might outline my “methodology”. I’ve been steadfast in refusing to take action — as defining and labeling issues additionally reduces them. Places them in bins. Categorizes them in simply digestible codecs for a cohort that desires simple (and fast) solutions to issues which can be far more nuanced, intricate and ephemeral. (To not point out, a part of the Collective Unconscious and subsequently probably not quantifiable.)
However years in the past, I learn a quote by sociologist Brené Brown — whose early work influenced mine — and he or she stated that the definition of bravery (which concurrently means vulnerability) is to, “Dwell in threat, uncertainty and emotional publicity with out figuring out the result.”
Eureka!
After I just lately re-read that definition I believed, “Oh my goodness… That’s what we’ve been educating for nearly 30 years.” It encapsulates the weak (and but empowering) situation of inserting your self in conflict-driven conditions of storytelling that may naturally ply your emotional publicity and power you to live-moment-to-moment with out taking part in the result. In fact as actors, we all know the result of a scene that we’re engaged on as a result of we have now learn it. However the moment-to-moment expertise of it requires that you simply virtually (figuratively) lobotomize your figuring out and reside riskily within the uncertainty of what the second brings up.
That’s scary and exhilarating; courageous and exposing, dangerous and unsure.
Susceptible.
And that’s analogous to life. Particularly as 2024 involves an finish.
However we neglect. We go about our days habituated by our each day routines, information, commitments, and acquainted behaviors. In case you’re like me, you additionally wrestle with the ruinous tendencies of social media and the distortion and detrimental impulses it generates.
We lull ourselves into our somnambulistic methods of residing — typically erasing the thrill of uncertainty and the actual moment-to-moment expertise of being alive.
Our Massive Tech-driven world and corporatization of … properly… all the pieces is complicit in that sleepwalking. As we traverse our careers, private lives, our artistic growth and religious journeys, we get seduced by the convenience by which we succumb to the algorithms, the silo’s, the hyped recognition and the sameness of all of it. The homogeneity of mass-production and data-driven leisure.
Kyle Chayka, in his guide Filterworld talks about how algorithms flatten tradition and drive tradition towards sameness. It shapes our aesthetics and the way all the pieces is pushed towards an identical homogeneity: “Advice turbines like Netflix’s high picks, TikTok’s ‘for you’ web page, and Spotify’s autoplay recommendations are the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and maybe least significant items of tradition [that] are promoted.”
However we’re Artists! We aren’t shoppers! We aren’t merchandise of suggestibility. We aren’t the unthinking robots of mass hypnosis, are we?
My good good friend Christina and I have been speaking in regards to the rise in Fascism that’s occurring virtually all over the place in in the present day’s societies. She screamed, “In case you’re going to be a Fascist, be a Fascist for Fact!”
Certainly.
That’s what being an Artist means. Maybe now greater than ever (though that assertion all the time feels vital and I’m positive Artists have been saying that within the tenth Century)!
However you get the inspiration.
It’s in these disturbing and dare I say, dystopian instances, that we stand for fact. An Artist, of their work, is shifting towards the apotheosis of their self-expression. You observe your work to not change into a very good technician. You observe to change into an incredible Artist. And in doing so that you, you stand for one thing. You could have one thing to say. You aren’t the regurgitation of all the pieces you’ve got consumed earlier than or what you might be bombarded with. You might be creating your individual interpretation of what it means to me to be alive in 2025.
As a lot because the commodification of just about all the pieces has change into commonplace in our tradition — contradictorily, we live in a time the place, increasingly more, myriad methods to create and share your work are being generated.
So that you don’t have to attend anymore! And because the urgency of issues appears to accentuate — we don’t have that form of time anyway.
I used to be on the West Hollywood pool just lately and considered one of my fellow swimmers requested me what I did. After I advised her, she remarked, “Oh… so that you’re a content material creator!”
I do know she meant properly and was excited for me, however was unaware that she too has drunk an excessive amount of mass-produced company buzz-word bullshit Kool-Help: content material.
I dramatically sunk to the underside of the pool and thought to myself… “Content material” is for the within of a cushion! “Content material” is what’s packed in your suitcase! The “Contents” are the components in a field!
I’m an Artist! You might be an Artist! So is she, for that matter. The way in which you reside your complete life is inventive.
Content material isn’t what we’re making.
We’re making Artwork. Music. A poem. A dance or a play. We aren’t making “content material” to replenish different individuals’s time or house or distract them with their “second screens” in order that they will ignore the “content material” to observe another “content material” to switch the stupefying “content material” that has change into the backdrop of all our lives.
We’re making individuals assume. We’re connecting the thread of our humanity with the filaments of others. We’re empathetic and present a world in want of a lot therapeutic how the facility of artwork and empathy can try this. We don’t conceal behind technical devices and telephone screens. We really feel. We share our emotions with others. We’re interpreters of the celestial to beat the burdens and pains of our mortal-ness. We use the custom of storytelling to convey mild to darkness. We give
others hope. We train. We have now a ethical and moral obligation to inform tales that may change humanity. And within the pursuit of telling them, we ourselves are modified.
That’s You. That’s Me. That’s what being an Artist means. Maintain onto this. It’ll preserve you getting in 2025.
Completely happy Holidays, All!
Right here’s to a blessed New 12 months.
Love, Tony
