Private mythologies

[Viva June]

My private mythology is one in which I'm a decent sort of person.

[RaleC]

Mr. D, I've charted a professional course just as erratic as your own - digging post-holes on ranches in the US south-west, washing dishes till 2am while attending school, swept floors in studios, worked as chaser/ground crew for a celebrity hot-air balloon service, painted murals around town, measured inseams in a tux rental place, co-wrote behavior management programs with a clinical psychiatrist for children in interum care, volunteered my weekends working as an aid with people incare with disabilities, played in various bands at night, worked in the multimedia dept, whilst simultaneously working as a team leader in sales, at a bank's corporate headquarters, music journalist and photographer, illustrator, trend scout, ghost wrote for AR funded artist demos for label pitches in Australia and London, and now I work as a composer for television, amongst other things - I'll always try something new, and put it back into my work. I've done anything to get closer to my goals - composer of music, and writer - while paying my own way in the world. I never went to college because I didn't have the money - even with 3 jobs at a time. I weight train, box and run 6 times a week. I've done well for thirty-three and look forward to what happens next.

All of these various jobs had their adventures and horrors. And all of them were colored by either the tin Saints and martyrs of the music industry (Arvo Part, Leonard Cohen, Bad Seeds, John Cale, Tangerine Dream &c.) and fiction (Lovecraft, Hemmingway, McCarthy, Melville, Harry Crews &c.)

I don't really remember, but I'd say if I owned a flannel shirt when I was 14 it would have been because of guys like Kurt Cobain. This is the kind of transformative mythology that I was talking about in my previous posts, and Joel is talking about here. Everybody here has similar stories - and it doesn't seem right to demean people for admitting they hold some model of behavior up as a standard, and you don't. It'd be a lie to say no other person or book has ever touched you deeply enough to influence your behavior - I mean, you're here afterall.

To get back to the topic, I'd say Corto Maltese became a big player in the pantheon of my internal skies. When I was living in London I was turned onto the comics (given to me in English, as a birthday gift) because of a superficial resemblance in the way I look to it's lead, an Italian friend still refers to me as "Mal-tez-ay". It's Hemmingway and Conrad with the mysticism of Schulz and the German Romantics:

Corto Maltese - Corto Maltese in Siberia * Part 1 - YouTube

More recently a conjunction of the Philokalia and Andrei Tarkovsky's work utterly transformed the Christian church to me. From pinch-faced and judgmental medieval rage-cult I was raised in to something far more splendid. Is it true? Who cares - for me it is. The historical truth seems to be irrelevant, and gets in the way of it's power as an artistic force for transformation.

Oh, I second the Moominvalley is "real" statement. It is indeed. "The Spring Tune" is the finest statement I've read on what it's like to make "art".

[Jeff Coleman]

Quote Originally Posted by Viva June

My private mythology is one in which I'm a decent sort of person.

I just want to highlight the simple beauty of this statement.