Are You Famous Yet?

Everybody wants to be somebody. Nobody wants to grow.

Goethe
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"In the future everyone will have their fifteen minutes of fame." So said Andy Warhol: Have you had yours yet? No? Well, don't worry about it. Fame is a phantom. Fame will get you to the pitchers mound, but it won't win the game. Besides why be famous for 15 minutes? Life is bigger than that.

When I was a boy I kept hearing my mother say "You've got to learn to make something of yourself." In my childish but not stupid mind, I interpreted that to mean that according to my mother I was nothing and I didn't know how to become something. The ethic of the day was that one gained a position in life, that one took one's place in society and kept it. Any other type of life was considered a failure. Along with one's position in life came a label. What do you do? "I'm a carpenter." Not, "I make furniture out of wood." If you were a master carpenter then you were known as "a cabinet maker."

A man could have such a label and be proud of it but a label does not define a man. It's a convenient thing to put on your tax return but you know even when you do it that your life is much more than that. The danger is falling into the old habit of treating the label as your position in the world. Because then you settle for it, It's a secure mask. You don't have to look past it.

I have had positions, and some fame. Not movie star or professional ball player fame, but some degree of celebrity, particularly as a broadcaster in New York. But I knew, even when I saw my name in the paper and deposited my nice check, how gossamer the whole thing was. Not only because I could be forgotten about but even more how easy it would be to forget myself, accept the secure mask of a label and never face growing anywhere, in anyway. So I left that job, that label. People thought I was crazy to give up such a "position." It was risky, there's no denying that, to go back into a career as an actor. There was no security, the income was variable and the fame, such as it was, was intermittent. But none of those things concerned me. What did concern me was learning who I was, becoming who I was, growing into a real position of reality and fulfillment. So if someone asked me what I was I could say "I'm an actor" but the real answer to that questions was much too complicated to explain to anyone. "What do you do?" "I live."

DB
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Garnered Genius 3/16/09

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gaugin
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Here again are you? Good.
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I was a member of the Art Students League of New York City. When I first started life drawing, I was terrible at it. Some of my drawings were embarrassingly bad. There was a woman in the class whose drawings were excellent. Not only did she have a near flawless rendering of the figure but she also managed to capture a sense of life in each piece she did. I would get to the class early, wait until she chose a seat and then sit next to her. I copied. I plagiarized. Out of the corner of my eye I watched to see how she started a drawing and how she continued it, to try to learn from her how to approach the whole problem of drawing the human figure. Thanks to her and my persistence at learning how, I eventually got very good at it, in my own style and manner. Then I noticed that some of the younger students were always sitting next to me and watching me. Okay. It was pay back time.

Artists have always used other artists ideas, all through the centuries. If you listen to 17th Century music you will hear a lot of composers trying to sound like Bach. In the 18th Century there were Mozart copiers. And so on. Today, how many rock bands play in the style of some other band?

But every now and then someone breaks through the tradition. Arnold Schoenberg was well trained in the tradition of Late Romantic German music but one day he decided that all twelve tones were of equal importance. He set aside the tradition of harmonic and intervalic progression and made what became known as twelve tone music, The dancer Isadore Duncan came out on stage, threw herself on the floor and gradually rose up. Something happened then that finally got called Modern Dance. Pablo Picasso drew a portrait one day that showed the face looking front and sideways at the same time. Jackson Pollock took his brush and dripped paint on his canvas. Andy Warhol painted a picture of a soup can. Samuel Beckett wrote a plotless play and some poet, I don't know who, let go of strict meter and let the words dance around themselves.

Each time those things happened there was a massive, silent crack in the sky which almost no one noticed. The world would never be the same. Revolutions had taken place. Right at this moment, somewhere in the world, it is about to happen again.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
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Get your taxes done. Then celebrate.