Welcome to the first episode of the podcast! I’m really excited to share these stories with you about how our missteps and disappointments and serendipity lead us smack-dab into our life plans. Today, I’m talking with my guest Becca about creative actualization: how our drives for self expression and creativity get derailed whether by internal narratives or structural oppression, or the demands of making our work “marketable.” It’s a conversation about how we keep on creating, even if that looks like playing the piano for no one but ourselves. 

Major themes: 

Punching up, not down. Forming a sense of self and creative endeavor with little family support. The demands of being “profitable,” who can afford to do art, and the integration of art into our regular lives. Imposter syndrome, working through our blocks. Decolonizing your time! Piano – just playing vs. performing in front of people. Sucking at something before you get good. Embracing our imperfections. Karaoke culture – permission to love singing and be bad at it! Grappling with our sense of inherent “badness” and the systems that hold us back. Tikkun Olam: the repair of the world and of ourselves. The consumption of art vs. the creation of art, and the treachery of false dichotomies. 

References: 

* Decolonizing Time by Nichole Marie Shippen* Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott * The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron – and apologies for being cynical about it. This only exposes my own envy about developing a discipline to write and create. (Obviously!)* Crazy Ex Girlfriend* Supernatural* Marie Kondo* Jeff Koons – lol, I thought he was a pop musician, but he’s actually a pop visual artist. * Karaoke – this will prove to be a motif throughout the podcast, I’m sure. 

Becca paraphrased a quotation, “Art is controversial, or else it’s propaganda.” We didn’t figure out who said it, but here are some related quotes that may have been the crux of her remembering: 

W.E.B. Du Bois: “…I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.” (Which is the opposite sense of propaganda that Becca intended.)

George Orwell: “All art is propaganda…on the other hand, not all propaganda is art.”

Keith Haring: “I don’t think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul.”

Full episode transcripts are here.

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Banana peel by Max Ronnersjö. Theme and interstitial music by Jon Schwartz.