I Don't Brand

In the last two or three weeks, I've been asked to be a part of several workshops or panel discussions on the importance of 'branding.' Know your brand, You Are Your Brand, etc. It makes me wonder if I've been doing something wrong, teaching the kinds of professional development workshops I do.

To me, the point of having any kind of business acumen as an artist is to free yourself of the need to be a product. It means understanding that participating in the market is not really a choice but a necessity, but that by doing it with your eyes open, you can ideally make some choices about how that participation impacts you.

The idea that artists need to "brand" ourselves with a sort of motto or image that is supposed to define how we sell our work is counterintuitive to me, as is the notion that we need to specialize. I've had a decent hybrid career, albeit one in which some people don't really know what my work is at a glance, because I have been pretty steadfast in refusing to narrow down what I do too much. Other people help me do that when necessary, with a particular project.

Doing a good budget means you know what your work costs you so you don't promise too much to your buyers, donors, users or colleagues. Doing a good proposal or Kickstarter means you can raise money you need and make your contributors feel they are part of something great. Negotiating a better contract means you both maintain some control over the important things, and give license to future rounds of artists in your position to do the same. Speaking well in front of people engenders good conversations about the work. And taking advantage of social media can just mean using another tool, or engaging your curiosity. But none of this means you have to be just one thing. It doesn't mean you're always trying to sell.

For the record: I think branding is a word that belongs to advertisers and it should stay that way. I find it kind of a shameful word because it conjures up what people do to cattle, and in the past what they have done to other people. To brand yourself, to be your own brand, means to me that you're a tool of the marketplace. You're an instrument, rather than an agent. I know I'm a bit of a killjoy with this one. Okay. I'd rather let marketing people brand the work, and leave me to just be a human being making events. I'm fine if it's confusing to you. I'm fine if you have to spend a little more time to figure it out.

The Times' Real Estate Section Makes Me Mad

In 2000, I wrote copy at a dot com startup called Fashion500.com, which was either ahead of its time, a dumb idea, or both. It folded about eight months after I got there, and for a few months I got unemployment (what my wife called a ‘Department Of Labor Fellowship’) between freelance gigs.

I was trying to write short stories, as well as monologues. Some afternoons, when I didn’t know what else to do, I picked a neighborhood I’d never spent time in, took a train there, and walked there for several hours. One of my stories, which eventually became a monologue, was about a guy who walks and walks until he knows every street in the city intimately. (I also made a show called Desk about the Fashion500.com, which you can see a few minutes of here.)

During this period, I lived in Williamsburg, near McCarren Park, pre-swimming pool, pre fancy loft developments. I took walks in Jackson Heights and Corona, Sunset Park and Flatbush; I walked in a neighborhood whose name I can’t remember, or which has been renamed, in The Bronx, and even took the Staten Island commuter train to a few far flung suburban plots out there.

I luxuriated in these walks – no talking, no purpose except to see and go. I especially liked being somewhere unfamiliar at the close of a workday, when everyone was returning to their homes. Some people, you could see them letting the workday tension slough off their backs; some people you’d watch steel themselves for what must have been another rough night ahead. Some people delayed the inevitable at a bar. I love imagining what strangers are going through.

I thought of my walks as a way to understand the city more broadly, to take comfort in anonymity, and to calm myself from the uncertain time I was going through, work-wise.

9-11 happened within this period. I walked more, further, than ever in the weeks right afterward. In addition to the grief and horror, the love I felt for the city and my friends, I remember a few specific moments on walks that stand out: the first panhandler to integrate September 11 into his ask (“the attacks left me stranded down here, man, and I need $46 to get up to Albany”); the group of men that gathered quietly to protect a Lebanese barbershop that had been receiving anonymous, threatening calls.

I remembered this time as I tried to figure out just why this New York Times Real Estate article was so infuriating to me and other people like me – especially white artists who’d been in the city more than a few years. 

Maybe it was the assumptive tone – starting with the title – the idea the city was made to be gentrified, that anyone reading would, and ought to, prefer or need high-end boutiques, fancy coffee or organic produce over a dollar store, a bodega, or a big supermarket where the food was affordable and people had union jobs. Maybe it was that you could have read this same article, though maybe a little less brazenly written, 15 years ago, just substituting different neighborhood names. Maybe it was the article’s inherent racism and classism, which didn’t deal at all with the complexity of the changing city – the fact that many have people lived in the neighborhoods detailed here, happily, for many years, without the benefits of hipsters, $5 lattes or skinny jeans. Maybe I just feel less alienated by aesthetics of a dollar store than I do by the pretense of farm-to-table, and waxed mustaches, although I do love the food.

What it comes down to most for me is that this article, like so much that is unspoken within our politics right now, assumed that our current relationship between economics and politics is unquestionable and inevitable. That, when wealthier people move in the streets get cleaned up and the place becomes more desirable, and that is okay, or at the very least, it’s just how it is.

I read the article and I thought, not only has The Times Real Estate section remained unaware of, or complicit in, the gradual dismantling of New York, it seems to do so proudly. Is that journalism?

In the past, New York was more dangerous, financially cracked, and in some ways harder to raise a kid. It was dirtier. The city still ignored its poor. There are many things about the place that are better now. There were just more neighborhoods where more kinds of people could live. I just read and thought, the rich have always had their places. Do they really need the whole thing?

Last summer I saw a talk about New York City’s sustainability plan, called PlaNYC, which is actually a pretty awesome document. It addresses things like green spaces, food deserts, and other issues that actually apply to everyone here, or ought to. But as more of the city becomes prohibitively expensive to all but the most desperate to live here, or those with the most means, my question remains: at what cost, and for whom? If our city is not for everyone then what does sustainability mean?

To come back to those walks. I saw them then as an introduction to the larger world of New York, as an affirmation of my citizenship here. Now I worry that it was actually the city I knew, or thought I knew, bidding itself farewell; that promise that you could find your people, your neighborhood, your barber, your created family away from where you grew up, and still be a train ride away from work.

I know that there will likely always be areas that are more welcoming, and surely this nostalgia of mine, like all nostalgia, is leaving out something important. But when I think of those walks now, seeing people I’d never know come out of the train, awakening to what was about to face them when they walked through their doors, I worry I was watching our city become a shadow. Just one that wears designer flannel and serves better coffee in compostable cups.  

Thought of the day

I don't care about the amount of arts funding we have in this country. I care about the distribution of resources.

I don't care about grants. I care about health care.

More on this later.

Tim Etchells Wrote What I Wish I Had Written, And Hopefully Will Write At Some Point Soon

"I believe in that, he said. Performance creates a space in which different kinds of contact are possible, different kinds of conversations. It is a place to step out of, side step from the general tendency to commodified lust wrapped, crushed and hidden in panic and terror." - Tim Etchells

2013 morning oatmeal anecdote

In our house, everyone likes oatmeal. And for people who know us, "our house" means many different locations these days, as Jo goes through grad school in Illinois and I come back and forth and go elsewhere for work. So the idea of "home is what you make of it" or "home is what you make in it" is especially meaningful.

Whichever place we live in, we do good oatmeal. With sautéed apples and dates, nuts, a little maple. Slow-cooked, fast-cooked, whatever. We are hot cereal aficionados. (Afficionadi?) We have it down to an art and a science. It’s a practice, the thing we do many mornings in a row, regardless of how the day before has left us feeling. It’s totally ordinary and totally celebratory – the idea that the day’s first taste should be sweet and nutritious. It pairs well with other flavors and you're not hungry 15 minutes later. 

I don’t know what 2012 was. It wasn’t ordinary. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t something I’d like to repeat. It had many, many things worth celebrating, and many, many people came to me through it that were inspiring. Many people gave us their homes when we needed them.

2012 was a lot of work, the right kind if not the easiest. It involved some mourning and some renewal, slivers of light and palpable fear. But we got up at least some days and tried to make the first taste a good one, something on the tongue that would whisper that the rest of the day had promise.

Back to oatmeal. We can make it after any kind of night before. It’s always pretty good. Sometimes it’s great. Sometimes it’s a little underdone or wanting. But it gets you back into your life from the dream world.

This morning, Jan 1, 2013, I was up early, so I made the oatmeal. I put a few drops of balsamic in the sautéed apples and figs; I used ghee instead of regular butter, and that gave it a bit more depth of flavor, a little more shine. I let the cereal cool just enough so my son wouldn't burn his mouth, and I put in some sunflower butter at the end. I didn't rush but when it was done, it was done. 

While we ate, Jo said I had upped the ante, that I’d brought my a-game, to this cereal. That I’d raised the bar and set a new standard. This thing we tasted all the time had deepened our appreciation for what it could give us. This was perhaps overly flattering, but that’s how we talk to each other when we’re at our best, which I wish was more often.

My hope this morning is that, all year long, we all up the game on our oatmeal. That the daily events  that make our lives creative, tasty and good for us, the ones that combine the pleasing bitter sting of coffee with the salt of a walnut, with the crunch of an apple, with the sooth of hot grain, get better with time, celebrate the ordinary and lead us somewhere more peaceful and more alive.

Against the binary

I am tired of binary arguments on the web. This blog is dedicated to something else. Otherwise you're just wrong and I'm just right. More to follow.