Vacation Message December 2024
Season’s Greetings Our AMAW World Household!
Subsequent yr will likely be my twenty eighth yr (!) of getting began AMAW. I can’t imagine how shortly the time has handed.
After I mirror on life on Terra firma and the way wild it’s to be alive at this time, 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 celebs, the move, the cosmic dance that has sustained and perpetuated life for billions of years.
I’ve been requested many occasions over the course of 28 years how I’d outline my “methodology”. I’ve been steadfast in refusing to take action — as defining and labeling issues additionally reduces them. Places them in containers. Categorizes them in simply digestible codecs for a cohort that desires straightforward (and fast) solutions to issues which are far more nuanced, intricate and ephemeral. (To not point out, a part of the Collective Unconscious and subsequently not likely 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, “Stay in threat, uncertainty and emotional publicity with out figuring out the end result.”
Eureka!
After I lately re-read that definition I assumed, “Oh my goodness… That’s what we’ve been instructing for nearly 30 years.” It encapsulates the weak (and but empowering) situation of putting your self in conflict-driven conditions of storytelling that may naturally ply your emotional publicity and drive you to live-moment-to-moment with out taking part in the end result. In fact as actors, we all know the end result of a scene that we’re engaged on as a result of now we have learn it. However the moment-to-moment expertise of it requires that you just nearly (figuratively) lobotomize your figuring out and stay riskily within the uncertainty of what the second brings up.
That’s scary and exhilarating; courageous and exposing, dangerous and unsure.
Weak.
And that’s analogous to life. Particularly as 2024 involves an finish.
However we neglect. We go about our days habituated by our day by day routines, data, commitments, and acquainted behaviors. In case you’re like me, you additionally battle with the ruinous tendencies of social media and the distortion and damaging impulses it generates.
We lull ourselves into our somnambulistic methods of dwelling — usually erasing the joy of uncertainty and the true moment-to-moment expertise of being alive.
Our Massive Tech-driven world and corporatization of … nicely… all the things is complicit in that sleepwalking. As we traverse our careers, private lives, our artistic improvement and religious journeys, we get seduced by the benefit through 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 things is pushed towards an identical homogeneity: “Advice mills like Netflix’s prime picks, TikTok’s ‘for you’ web page, and Spotify’s autoplay solutions are the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and maybe least significant items of tradition [that] are promoted.”
However we’re Artists! We aren’t customers! We aren’t merchandise of suggestibility. We aren’t the unthinking robots of mass hypnosis, are we?
My good pal Christina and I have been speaking in regards to the rise in Fascism that’s occurring nearly all over the place in at this time’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 essential 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 occasions, that we stand for fact. An Artist, of their work, is transferring towards the apotheosis of their self-expression. You apply your work to not grow to be technician. You apply to grow to be an important Artist. And in doing so that you, you stand for one thing. You’ve gotten one thing to say. You aren’t the regurgitation of all the things you may have consumed earlier than or what you’re bombarded with. You might be creating your personal interpretation of what it means to me to be alive in 2025.
As a lot because the commodification of virtually all the things has grow to be commonplace in our tradition — contradictorily, we live in a time the place, an increasing number of, 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 lately and certainly one of my fellow swimmers requested me what I did. After I instructed her, she remarked, “Oh… so that you’re a content material creator!”
I do know she meant nicely 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 substances in a field!
I’m an Artist! You might be an Artist! So is she, for that matter. The best way 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 refill different individuals’s time or house or distract them with their “second screens” in order that they’ll ignore the “content material” to observe another “content material” to interchange the stupefying “content material” that has grow to be 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 do this. We don’t cover behind technical devices and cellphone 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 deliver gentle to darkness. We give
others hope. We educate. 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 can hold you moving into 2025.
Joyful Holidays, All!
Right here’s to a blessed New 12 months.
Love, Tony
