Allow me to reintroduce myself. Hi. I’m Ben. I find myself at midlife (hopefully) with, among other assets and deficits,
a fulfilling family life,
an engaging and financially sustaining career,
a set of preoccupations (or pet obsessions), and
creative impulses.
What to do with this embarrassment of riches?
The first two, I work with elsewhere. Online, largely through my creative output and writing, I grapple with the third and fourth via a set of cultural, aesthetic, and intellectual ideas, artifacts, and productions. Experience has taught me that others place this collection of items (the cultural constellation I am compelled to orbit) somewhere on a spectrum between wholly unrelated and irresponsibly eclectic. I disagree; and my theory is that:
By attempting to articulate the connections across these seemingly disparate interests, I will—at the very least— (a) have a nice time, (b) perhaps learn something about myself, and (c) even perhapser, produce something of value or interest to others.
It’s curious to me that I seem to need an audience for this endeavor, if the primary and secondary goals are self-amusement and self-discovery, respectively. I think I’m looking for an interlocutor—in a purely nonliteral sense. The eclecticism of my interests means that no other real-live people (whom I’ve encountered) share them sufficiently to help me map the connections. I.e., no one wants to talk about this stuff in the way I seem to need to: The music people don’t care about Wittgenstein; the Muppet people don’t fuck with Blade Runner; and so on.
So if the interlocutor I’m looking for doesn’t exist, I will imagine them. This imagined audience is an entity (like Joyce’s ideal reader traversing Finnegans Wake in a single sleepless reading) that is both imaginary and essential. (Of course, “interlocutor” isn’t quite right as it’s more of a monologue-receiver, and in my imaginings, an enthusiastically interested one.)
I’m confident this audience doesn’t exist, or that it’s actual existence doesn’t matter, as long as the performer-audience structure creates the forum for me to figure this stuff out—because here’s my other theory: Understanding the coherence of my aesthetics is tantamount to understanding myself à la a sort-of pop-psychological self-actualization. And wouldn’t that be nice?
So what am I doing to articulate the connections? Here’s a list:
I’m writing, recording, and performing songs under the band name Indoor Condor
I’m generating images using old-fashion photo-montage collage techniques
I’m writing little essays that are part appreciations of my pet obsessions and part autobiographical reflections
You can keep up with parts or all of this via my website, Instagram (which also posts to Facebook and Threads), and my musical output which is housed on Bandcamp and available on all the music streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Amazon, YouTube, etc.) You can also sign up for the Substack where this “about” entry resides.
What are you about?