My friend Emma—who now owes me five dollars for blogging about her—has been into acting since the day we met. To be exact, she has been dramatically-inclined since day one of Kindergarten when a shared pink frosted donut translated to lifelong friendship (if only it were still so easy). Emma was the perpetual lead in our high school plays and went on to study experimental things like method acting and Ghanaian yoga at NYU’s Tisch School. She came back to the city after college with the intention of auditioning and acting, but making dollars to write rent checks got in the way of her intentions—a tale of harsh realism we’ve all heard before—and she hasn’t done much acting since. Lately, Emma’s been excited about applying to graduate programs in social work, deciding to pursue something practical and impactful, hoping acting will fit into the life equation somehow, somewhere.
Like I said in my last entry, I’m reading Just Kids, by Patti Smith. The book is evocative of a faded era when New York was crawling with people pursuing art with a single-mindedness bordering on shortsightedness (okay, maybe that’s not totally gone). In the Sixties, community developed around creation, hallucinogenic drugs and depleted funds. There was a sense of being in it together for the sake of art—that which is pure and real. Some of Smith’s friends like Robert Mapplethorpe and Allan Ginsberg hit it big; others did not and died penniless—drugged up and drugged out—with little to show for a life spent pursuing their passion. Maybe that’s just the way it's gotta be, but Smith presents a picture of starving artists who are happily (and literally) entranced in art for art’s sake—doing it because it’s what they love. In theory, what better reason to do something? In practice, though, the true pursuit of art falls into the annoying category of easier said than done.
A few weeks ago, Emma was offered and accepted the female lead in a short film made by a team of Wesleyan graduates. On a whim, Majken, Emma’s boyfriend and I went to be extras in the film, which was shot upstate at the gorgeous house of former New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Riechel. We were part of the party scene in which we mimed drunken excitement (not too much of a stretch), sipped on Welch’s white grape juice and watched some real acting going down from the corners of our "drunken" eyes. Even post-hiatus, Emma was in her element: natural and real. During a break, I asked her how things were going.
“I forgot how much I like doing this,” she sighed, “this really messes up my plans.”
Though an important realization to have, Emma seemed equal parts stressed and excited by her light bulb moment. Such a realization forces a question no one is really equipped to answer: What now? In some ways, it’s easier to forget that you love making art because when you suddenly remember—which you will—those carefully-crafted life plans start to crumble beneath you. We hope we can pursue art while tending to more basic survival needs, but art so often takes last priority until it becomes an occasional diversion, akin to Thursday night kickball or that book club you infrequently attend. After a while, that lifelong artistic passion is just one more discarded hobby. No matter how much you talk about it, art only happens when you make it happen. Emma is only acting when she’s acting, and I’m only writing when I’m writing. For both of us, artistic production represents a small percentage of our daily lives. Do we still get to call ourselves writer and actor, or have those become wistful misnomers?
Art is a tricky thing to pursue in a city where every third person’s got big talent, where coffee shops are dense with Macbook scribblers and galleries are full of modern brush strokes. For decades, New York has been the mecca to which you march to pursue creativity, hit it big and find community while doing it. Problem is that’s not quite as lovely as it sounds. Like Emma, I find myself caught between wanting to pursue an art form that contents me in a way that most things do not and realizing that I need to find gainful employment that also contents me in the more-than-likely chance that writing doesn’t pan out. Though pursuit of art and gainful employment are not mutually exclusive, their happy collision is certainly rare. Passion and practicality bite at each other’s throats as we try to figure out how to spend our waking hours. When is art the main attraction and when must art play second-fiddle to more earthly pursuits? What tips the scale?
All this forces a rabbit hole set of questions that I spend a selfish amount of time pondering . Why do we write, draw, act, sing or dance? Is it with the intention of fame or is it for personal release, fun or fulfillment? Is artistic production supplementary to the other things with which we fill our time or is art meant to take center stage? What is our purpose or project? Once you figure that out—good luck, suckas—is that purpose personal or public? Is our art really any good? And, even if our parents, professors and friends respond with a resounding yes, how do we ever really know? Once we ponder these unanswerables, there’s this huge element of luck, chance and serendipity that determines whether people pay attention to your art. Being a big deal may be the perfect storm of raw talent and crap shoot. Perhaps the bottom line question, then, is this: Is my talent worth the crap shoot? If yes, how much of my life do I pour into something that still offers no real certainty?
I have a monumental amount of respect for people who make art (even more respect for those who make good art). The creation of culture is freakishly important to our society, and someone’s gotta drop everything to create it. If you give up before you start, you will never know if you’re meant to be one of those culture creators. What it boils down to for me, though, is that I have to find something else I really love doing, something that’s important, fun and meaningful that I will feel good about even if it means placing writing backstage. Call me a coward or a cynic, but I don’t want to be 40 with nothing to hang my literary hat on besides some short stories my parents think are great and a blog that occasionally random people read. There needs to be something else that runs parallel to my art that makes me happy and proud (and well-fed). For now, that’s teaching and making time to write when I can. In a few years, I may try to turn some tables, but for now this makes sense to me. At 24, developing myriad passions gives me room to think, combine and create. The challenge now is flexing the teaching quads while keeping the writing biceps toned should I want to bust ‘em out. Hard, but not impossible.
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