Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

I'm coming down with a cold. How do i know this? Besides the tickle in the throat and the stress in my sinuses, there is this malaise and depression. My every fear and anxiety chooses to express itself. Hypochondria and insecurity reign. After I take handfuls of various vitamins and mash inquiringly on my lymph nodes, the most paranoid delusions set in. And the worst, the worst of them all, is this one: Suppose you never have another idea?

It's the manifestation of my direst fear, as I sit in front of a blank page and dab the snot from from my miserable nose and don't have a clue what to write. Maybe I've just run out of ideas. Maybe I've reached mental menopause and having spent all of my eggs, must just sit barren in front of some banal television screen for the rest of my life. It's my monster fear, a greater fear than starvation or falling or drowning.

Ideas are my diet. I live on them. Having a good idea is better than having sex or a bowel movement. Where do they come from? I don't know.

My uncle Ace used to say to me, "If you wanna get somethin', ya gotta go to the gettin' place.' If you want money, you go where the money is. If you want women, you go where the women are. If you want dope, you go where the dope is. Mohammed must go to the mountain, because the mountain sure as hell isn't coming to Mohammed.

But I don't know where ideas come from, so it's hard to go to the gettin' place.

Ideas are like radio waves. You can't see them but they permeate the atmosphere. They are always there. It just requires a proper receiver to hear them. Which brings me back to my cold. My receiver is not working well. It fades in and out; there is static all over the dial. My antenna is full of snot. I can't even get the local stations.

I've been offered medicines, decongestants and anti-histamines, but those remedies are worse than the sickness. I think that a glass of warm whisky applied every four hours is a more palliative solution. In a few days the snot will melt from my antennae and I'll be on the air again.

I still won't know where ideas come from.

Do you have any theories?

i do i deas
becuz they are
there for the havin'
but sometimes
i'm not hungry
enuff for the takin'

better to lapse
into the silence
and let the cup
of ideas refill
itself with new
stuff to art about

where do they come from?
they're always there
like heart beats and breathin'
no stopping thought from bein'

(vitamin c by the thousand mgs
three straight shots of tequila
half a good doobie, brother,
and a solid overnight coma...
wake up to fresh coffee
a good shit and shower
and welcome the sun)

aspirine with C vitamine, tea with lemon and honey and lots of paciencia.
yeah, sometimes it seems the antenaee doesn´t work, but there are always ideas: fucking cold, it´s late, pass me the salt, you know...

What we ( you and I) call "ideas" for our art were personified by the Greeks and then later by everybody in the West as The Muses.

A poet or a painter speaks of his "muse", and sometimes further personifies her with a living human woman ( or a man for gay artists).

She ( for straights like me) is fickle-- she flits from artist to artist, never settling permanently on one of them. She is passionate, then cool. She is hard to please, requires "paciencia", as Arcadia puts it in her charming Latin way.

She needs to be placated, requires your exclusive attention, then wrestles you to the floor and insists on fiery coition just when you had something ( or someone) else in mind.

She can be damned expensive-- like requiring a new typewriter or a thirty-dollar brush. A painter friend said to me, "When I pay thirty dollars for a brush, I expect it to do the painting for me."

The Muse is not always easily bedded, we artists find. Sometimes she gives you a cold, a hangover, or the clap-- quite innocently it would seem.

But she's waiting, waiting her chance to get even.

Someday she might go on an extended sabbatical, sick of your devouring ways.

Theodore Roethke, the American poet used to say, when he'd finished a poem:

"My God, could this be the last time?"

The Muse is a kind of minor goddess, of course. She can nurse you when you're sick ( having made you that way) and is full of promises, promises, promises.

Oh yes.

And hope.



--Z

most likely your going to die
but t is okay the youth here hsve the wheel

I don´t find paciencia charming and I was talking about resfríos and not about muses, but what you wrote, zlatko, it sounds good itself.

People don't have ideas

Ideas have people

for a minute
I thought I saw
a light coming on



ideas are generated by thoughts, clearly.
I once read that thoughts are communications emanating from our "entire" selves, which are translated to our "partial selves, ie the part of us that we are aware of/concentrate upon.
As well as thoughts, ideas use the rules we establish to "rule" our world. Beliefs, truths, convictions, call it what you want. We use these as a sandbox to make our ideas.
There is also imagination, which, it seems, is very close to ideas, except that imagination seems a lot more "erratic", maybe because the information is a lot more litteral (not distorted by our convictions), and therefore not translated.

From my point of view, you can't stop having ideas, because you can't stop thinking or experiencing emotion, or ruling the world around you.
On the other hand, you can cut yourself off from the communications and various weird dialogues you have with yourself, willingly or not so willingly. I don't see the point in it, but you can.
By listening to those communications you can learn more about imagination and ideas. As for methods one can use to do that, I'm not sure, maybe start a dream journal. I know that paying attention to my dreams influences my creativity.

Ideas come from a large bird that care flys them to us down from the clouds, wrapped cozy in a shaw, (if you're a speaker of a language with gender built into the language like Spanish or French then the color of the shaw depends on the sex of the idea, blue for boys and pink for girls, purple for hemaphrodites and white for nuters). God makes ideas in heaven and sends down idea storks, just like cosmic postmen, who deliver them to waiting minds. That was what my aunt told me, but I've been thinking that maybe ideas are that base of existance itself and then it is us that springs from them, yeah, that's it, the eternal ether, idea, the real reality, the question is not where the idea comes from, but where does the thing that has the idea come from? But aside from airyfairy abstract stuff and fairytale avian couriers, I think that experience, events, happenings bring those everpresent ideas forward. If you see something in the street that catches your eye, then your mind may locate itself around ideas that are in someway connected with what you see. Maybe there are things about your character that tend towards certain ideas as opposed to others. Hey, you know, I am getting sick too. I little irritation in the sinus, throat, sniffle, cough. I am in the mountains now, so that is maybe the sniffle part, just the cold, you know how it makes the nose run, but the cough and irritation I fear may be a bug. I am in exiled Dali Lama's place, trying to catch a glimpse of him, enough red robed monks to fill your Tibetan monk quota a few times over. Get well buddy, you and Artguy. Hot liqour and try incense too, honey and ginger, lemon and garlic.

he had an idea
of me, then
i came
to

be

snot holds in all the good ideas and they build up for later. be careful when you blow, you might lose a good idea. best to take zicam, wild turkey, buffalo wings and lots of very cold water. keep the notebook handy. i dont advocate the use of illegal substances but i do recommend them. you know the drill.

idea
hi dear
I'd hear but I fear your revendical tears
that zombie dear trying to get my rear
running on 8th gear on a freight ride to no-w-here
hide and seek won't get you anywhere near
so come alive with the idea pioneers
words'll get you druk and make you a seer
turned inside out your eyes will jeer

so come out of your hiding closet you dusty skeleton
come alive and stop rusting
in that very dark closet
full of stagnant memories
cars that don't work
and deer hides

yeah?

IDEA is a clone of a swedish retailer that deals in do it yourself concepts.

you go down aisles (arranged labyrinthian style) and stuff i's, d's, e's and a's into your cart.

if and when you arrive at an exit, you may self-assemble your items until you find one that can walk out by itself.

The concept is catching on world-wide. Watch the papers for the next location. Soon, in your very neighbourhood!


(copyright, all IDEAs reserved, all parking free)

you near on rhymed every word with idear here dear, but the best was:

so come out of your hiding closet you dusty skeleton
come alive and stop rusting

Stop Rusting!

and Judih's grocery story game, all Ideas Reserved, the Rusty Skeleton walks on it's own, you've borne a brain child; don't tell anyone in Jr. School about the Idea Stork, they'll all laugh at you in Psycology Class (anybody know how to spell Psycology, is that right?)

Interactive do enhances apocalypse

Inter-dimentional epileptic aardvark

Is "doh" even art?

Ice-Down-Everything Award

I don't eat ants (because I'm a lampshade)

If directed, edge away

Imaginary drugs enhance automatrons (but not always)