Posted on by Asia Lenae

My Muse Is Not A Horse: A Rock Star’s Rejection of his MTV Music Award

What drives us?  Psychologists argue there are two kinds of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic.  Extrinsic motivation is when we feel compelled to take a course of action or perform a certain behavior either to avoid punishment or earn an external reward.  The serious student who spends long hours hunched over textbooks in the library, most likely, is extrinsically motivated: he memorizes the major battles of the Civil War and labors so intensely to understand the causes of the Russian Revolution— not because he’s appalled by the bloodshed of Antietam or genuinely interested in why communism appealed to millions— but because he wants to get an A in his high school history class and gain Ivy League admission.

Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is when we take up a hobby or pursue a passion for its own sake— not recognition or reward.  The children’s lit fanatic who collects rare first editions of classics like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Secret Garden; the lover of romance languages who finally dedicates herself to learning Italian; the thrift store addict who adores all things retro and spends Sunday afternoons perusing secondhand shops for mid-century furniture: all are intrinsically motivated. 

Sadly, most of what we do in life is extrinsically motivated: we work in a monochrome gray cubicle for eight mind-numbing hours a day at a miserable job so we can afford designer handbags and luxury vacations; we stay late at the office to get a promotion; we save money so— one day— we can leave our cramped apartment in the city and finally buy our own house with navy trim and a red door.  We might scribble sentimental love poems to our crush or play terrible thrash metal in our friend’s garage for fun but— as time goes on— we long for fame and fortune, acclaim and awards.  After all, why else would we subject ourselves to the humiliation of playing lame high school dances and gigs in dimly-lit half-empty bars?  If you’re a musician, isn’t the goal to sign to a major record label and tour the world?  Why endure the long hours of rehearsal and sleepless nights on the road if not for the stadiums of screaming fans, the wild parties, the feathers and platform shoes, the profiles in Rolling Stone?

nick cave & the bad seeds

According to the intelligent Nick Cave, lead singer of post-punk band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, there are more reasons to create than glamorous perks and prestigious awards.  We shouldn’t make a movie to get a glittery gold star on the Hollywood walk of fame or write a song to win an MTV Music Award.  We should make art for its own sake: for the satisfaction of saying exactly what we mean, for the incomparable joy of expressing who we truly are.

Like many struggling musicians, Cave and his band toiled in obscurity for years.  But when in 1996 their haunting ninth album Murder Ballads was hailed as a masterpiece of morbidity by critics, they finally gained the attention of MTV, who nominated Cave for its Best Male Artist of the Year award.  In this glorious “fuck you” of a letter to the network, Cave courteously (if cheekily) rejects his nomination, explaining his muse is not a horse and doesn’t deserve to be subjected to the indignities of competition:

“21 Oct 96

To all those at MTV,

I would like to start by thanking you all for the support you have given me over recent years and I am both grateful and flattered by the nominations that I have received for Best Male Artist.  The air play given to both the Kylie Minogue and P. J. Harvey duets from my latest album Murder Ballads has not gone unnoticed and has been greatly appreciated.  So again my sincere thanks.

Having said that, I feel that it’s necessary for me to request that my nomination for best male artist be withdrawn and furthermore any awards or nominations for such awards that may arise in later years be presented to those who feel more comfortable with the competitive nature of these award ceremonies.  I myself, do not.  I have always been of the opinion that my music is unique and individual and exists beyond the realms inhabited by those who would reduce things to mere measuring.  I am in competition with no-one.

My relationship with my muse is a delicate one at the best of times and I feel that it is my duty to protect her from influences that may offend her fragile nature.

She comes to me with the gift of song and in return I treat her with the respect I feel she deserves — in this case this means not subjecting her to the indignities of judgement and competition.  My muse is not a horse and I am in no horse race and if indeed she was, still I would not harness her to this tumbrel — this bloody cart of severed heads and glittering prizes.  My muse may spook!  May bolt!  May abandon me completely!

So once again, to the people at MTV, I appreciate the zeal and energy that was put behind my last record, I truly do and say thank you and again I say thank you but no…no thank you.

Yours sincerely,

Nick Cave”

nick cave & the bad seeds #2

Ultimately, Cave is modest enough to recognize that such competitions are meaningless.  Winning an MTV Music Award—just like earning the prestigious honor of a Man Booker or MacArthur Fellowship— doesn’t mean you’re a genius, or the voice of your generation, or actually the “best” artist: winning is often the result of luck and happenstance.  As Jennifer Egan remarked about winning her Pulitzer:  “If you happen to be in the final few, it’s because you’re lucky enough to have written something that appeals to those particular judges’ tastes…Deserving only gets you so far.  Winning a prize like that has a lot to do with cultural forces; with appetites at work in the culture.”

Lesson?  We shouldn’t treat our art like a sport: our goal shouldn’t be to win a gold medal or cross the finish line ahead of our competitors.  As Brenda Ueland so beautifully expressed nearly a century ago, everybody is talented, original, and has something important to say.  Because we are human, we are entirely unique: we can’t be compared to others and what we create certainly can’t be categorized into “winners” and “losers.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 7 Comments

Oscar Wilde on Why All Art Is Rather Useless

wilde

What is the purpose of art?  Pablo Picasso believed it was to wash the dust of daily life off our souls while Proust contended it was to reawaken us to extraordinary beauty of the ordinary world.  Leo Tolstoy held that the aim of art was to instruct: we read and write stories to be better people.  According to the great Russian novelist, we should read Pride and Prejudice— not for Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth’s witty banter or the delightful charm of high society and British manners — but to learn valuable lessons about love.  Romance is not enough, Jane Austen teaches us, and we shouldn’t judge a potential paramour on first impressions alone.

Aesthetes, on the other hand, held the philosophy of “l’art pour l’art”: art for art’s sake.  A 19th century intellectual and artistic movement, aestheticism asserted art was valuable in and of itself— it didn’t need to have a moral purpose.  Unlike Tolstoy, the aesthetes, most notably poet, playwright, and lover of lavish capes Oscar Wilde, maintained art (at least, good art anyway) was concerned with one thing: beauty.  Art seduced the senses; it didn’t stand on a soapbox to lecture or promote a political opinion.

Needless to say, aesthetes who made art for its own sake were condemned as degenerate debauchees and hedonistic pleasure seekers.  As 19th century Europe entered the industrial revolution, factories rose, millions moved from the quiet countryside to the noisy commotion of crowded cities, and goods that once took months to make could be produced quickly on a mass scale.  In the efficiency-obsessed industrial age, it was thought immoral to pursue pointless pleasure.  After all, what’s the “use” of a poem or painting or sculpture?  Why labor to capture the loneliness of a diner in the middle of the night or the loveliness of a floral tea cup, jar of apricots and loaf of bread when you could be doing something useful?  Art seems frivolous when there are crops to grow and railroads to build.

hopper painting

In this clever, charming 1890 letter to one of his fans, Wilde concedes that all art is rather useless.  Much like a flower or sunrise or sunset, art is a thing of beauty— that’s it.  But just because art is useless doesn’t mean it has no value.  Though our capitalistic society contends a thing is only worthwhile if it can be exchanged for dollars and cents, making art is its own reward.  As Brenda Ueland wrote in her endearing classic, one of the most important intrinsic rewards of making art is the “stretched understanding, the illumination.  By painting the sky, Van Gogh was really able to see it and adore it better than if he had just looked at it.  In the same way…you will never know what your husband looks like unless you try to draw him, and you will never understand him unless you try to write his story.”  With his trademark irreverence, Wilde explains that—above all— art brings us bliss:

“My dear Sir

Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood.  It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way.  It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility.  If the contemplation of a work of art is followed by activity of any kind, the work is either of a very second-rate order, or the spectator has failed to realise the complete artistic impression.

A work of art is useless as a flower is useless.  A flower blossoms for its own joy.  We gain a moment of joy by looking at it.  That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers.  Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower.  It is not part of its essence.  It is accidental.  It is a misuse.  All this is I fear very obscure.  But the subject is a long one.

Truly yours,

Oscar Wilde”

floral tea cup chardin

Our society tells us that writing a book is only worthwhile if it becomes a New York Times bestseller, a film only if it wins the Academy Award for Best Picture.  If our portrait of a Parisian couple never hangs in the Louvre and is only ever featured on the mantel of our mother’s living room, we will be fools; if we dedicate our lives to our art but never “make it”— never publish our work, never experience the exhilaration of seeing our book at Barnes and Noble— we will have failed.  Why had we worked so hard?  Why did we devote years to something that never “got us anywhere”?  Wasn’t all that time a waste if— like Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, and Vincent Van Gogh— our work was lost to the dusty oblivion of history and we died tragically unknown?

For Wilde, the answer is a resounding no.  Even if we write a book no one reads or toil for years and squander our life savings to make a film audiences loathe, we should not regret it.  We’re always better for having created.

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 1 Comment

Anais Nin on the Secret to a Satisfying Sex Life

Ours is a sex-saturated society.  On television, 2 out of 3 programs contain suggestive, sexual anais & diariescontent; spectacles like the Super Bowl regularly feature twerking and pole-dancing.  On social media, millions follow shirtless men and scantily clad women in thong bikinis.

Half a century ago, porn was limited to your dad’s Playboys and a few rare home videos; today porn is mass produced by a multi-billion dollar industry, as easy and convenient as french fries from McDonald’s.  The internet is a portal to a pixelated play land where your filthiest fantasies can come true.

Despite the prevalence of porn and the widespread acceptance of casual sex, today our sex lives are less satisfying— not more.  By giving men unrealistic expectations of women’s bodies, porn extinguishes male libido and can even hinder their ability to perform.  In the words of groundbreaking feminist Naomi Wolf, “real naked women are just bad porn.”  Not only does porn ruin real sex, it causes women to loathe themselves.  After all, how can a flesh-and-blood woman begin to compete with a submissive sex slave whose only purpose is to fulfill her male viewer’s every fantasy and whose vocabulary is limited to seductive moans and exaggerated exclamations of “yes!  more!”?

Though pornography had yet to completely spoil sex in her lifetime, dedicated diarist Anais Nin understood sex is a matter— not of the body— but of the mind.  Along with her lifelong friend, lover and fellow writer Henry Miller, Nin wrote erotica for an anonymous client at a rate of $1 a page.  “Leave out the poetry and concentrate on sex!” the collector demanded.  In this passionate and prophetic letter, featured both in the indispensable Letters of Note and the exquisite The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume 3, the always articulate Nin responded:

“Dear Collector:

We hate you.  Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession.  It becomes a bore.  You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships which change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.

You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of others, which are the fuel that ignites it.  Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional.  This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements.  You are shrinking your world of sensations.  You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood.

If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world.  The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion.  You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation.  Sex does not thrive on monotony.  Without feeling, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed.  Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.

How much do you lose by this periscope at the tip of your sex, when you could enjoy a harem of discrete and never-repeated wonders?  Not two hairs alike, but you will not let us waste words on a description of hair; not two odors, but if we expand on this, you cry “Cut the poetry.”  Not two skins with the same texture, and never the same light, temperature, shadows, never the same gesture; for a lover, when he is aroused by true love, can run the gamut of centuries of love lore.  What a range, what changes of age, what variations of maturity and innocence, perversity and art, natural and graceful animals.

We have sat around for hours and wondered how you look.  If you have closed your senses around silk, light, color, odor, character, temperament, you must by now be completely shriveled up.  There are so many minor senses, all running like tributaries into the mainstream of sex, nourishing it.  Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.”

seduction & anais nin

A writer of erotica and a notorious seductress herself, Nin had the prescience to know porn would pose serious problems.  Pornography is provocative in the most predictable ways: lewd profanities, unimaginative dirty talk, obscenely large breasts, huge cocks.  Its purpose?  To immediately satisfy our most depraved desires. 

Seduction, however, depends on delaying— not gratifying— desire.  After all, who is more alluring: the belligerently drunk bro who instantly agrees to come home with us or the mysterious man who only longingly looks at us across the bar?  It’s the tease that’s most tantalizing.  If you want to make yourself irresistible, you should conceal, not reveal: the curve of a hip, the graceful arch of a back, the neckline that reveals just a bit of your decolletage, the entrancing scent of perfume on the wind, the forbidden, flirtatious glance across the table that lasts a little too long seduce us in a way the most x-rated porn cannot.  As Proust so wittily observed over a century ago, we most want what is denied us.

The great tragedy of our time is we have porn, but no passion; we have sex but have forgotten how to make love.  For sensualist Nin, sex can only enrapture if it involves all the senses, if it’s connected— not divorced— from head and heart.  Hungry for more of Nin’s intriguing insights and luminous prose?  Read her on the mystery of memory and the bliss and hell of New York.  Need more advice on sex and love?  Revisit Alain de Botton on how to be charming and Proust on how to be happy in love.

Posted on by Asia Lenae

F. Scott Fitzgerald on What’s Worth Worrying About

What worries us?  Countless pointless things.  We worry about our social status, whether we have aletters of note large enough bank account/an impressive enough job/a prestigious enough degree.  We worry we’re “falling behind” because our closest friends are buying houses and having babies.  We worry about our appearance: do we look boyish and flat-chested compared to those voluptuous Victoria Secret models on fashion runways?  is our ass too flat?  are our tits too small?  are our thighs too big?  We endlessly worry about what other people think: do our mother and father approve of our unconventional choice of career?  do they brag about our accomplishments at family dinners or sit in silence while the other relatives boast of their children’s community service trips to Somalia and admissions to the Ivy League?  is our date— whom we care little for and see absolutely no future with— charmed by our attractiveness and captivated by our conversation?  do our Instagram photos in far-flung, exotic places provoke the envy of our high school friends?  does our neighborhood barista refuse to make conversation—not because they’re exhausted or introverted or having a bad day— but because there’s something fundamentally wrong with us as we’ve always suspected? 

As a curator of wisdom and diehard devotee of The Great Gatsby, I was delighted to discover what chronicler of the glittery excess of the jazz age F. Scott Fitzgerald had to say about worry.  Found in Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, a printed treasury of one hundred and twenty five letters that began as a digital museum of the same name, Fitzgerald’s letter reminds us very few things are worthy of worry.  His advice?  We should care about living in accordance with our deepest values and beliefs; we shouldn’t give a single damn about what other people think.

On August 8, 1933, Fitzgerald wrote the following to his daughter, whom he affectionately called Scottie:

Dear Pie,

I feel very strongly about you doing duty.  Would you give me a little more documentation about your reading in French?  I am glad you are happy— but I never believe much in happiness.  I never believe in misery either.  Those are the things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed pages, they never really happen to you in life.

All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties, which are doubly costly.  If there is such a volume in the camp library, will you ask Mrs. Tyson to let you look up a sonnet of Shakespeare’s in which the line occurs “Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”

[…]

Things to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about Cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship
Worry about. . .

Things not to worry about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

Things to think about:

What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:

(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

With dearest love,

Daddy

F. Scott Fitzgerald & family

Including letters ranging from literature’s finest writers like Emily Dickinson and Anais Nin to history-making public figures like Benjamin Franklin and Winston Churchill to iconic rock n’ roll singers like Elvis Presley and Mick Jagger, Letters of Note is an invaluable addition to any library.  If you love encyclopedic compendiums of timeless wisdom and want more insight into the art of writing specifically, read the Paris Review interviews in Women Writers at Work, which include Anne Sexton on how poetry helped her exorcise her demons and find a sense of purpose, Maya Angelou on the exquisite torment of the creative life, and Joyce Carol Oates on the myth of mood.