have you ever been part of someone else's confessional art? or have you made art about real people in your life?

has anyone ever written a song or story or stand-up set etc that was somehow about your real life, or a fictionalized version of your real life? was it flattering? horrible?

or have you made art about the people in your life? did you feel guilty about it? did it hurt people you care about?

do artists have a license to use everything that happens to them as part of their art? should people close to artists accept this as something they "signed on for"?

where are the lines? real names?

thinking about this because the comedian Marc Maron did a thing about his break-up this week, after years of talking about his relationship in pretty intimate detail.

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1155/751884298_65d0414cb8_o.jpg

lock thread

After graduating college I tried to write a novel (completed perhaps 70% of it) somewhat based on my college experiences. If that manuscript were to turn up today I'd probably die of embarrasment.

In college, I drew a comic strip that ran in the campus paper twice a week. The characters were all dogs and cats, but my friends all recognized themselves anyway.

They were flattered for the most part. But I was going through this bad break-up and this bad new relationship at the same time, and that spilled into the strip too.

Usually, I'd wince 20 years later over something like that, but they actually came out ok and I'm satisfied with the fact that the strips were halfway funny and nothing like the horrible, horrible novels I'd try to write. The then-girlfriend approved her appearance, yelling at the main character to rot in jail after he tried calling the ex for bail first. And the ex-girlfriend was okay with her appearance since I plugged one of her campus group events in that particular entry.

The then-girlfriend later wrote a story about visiting her boyfriend from Oklahoma. Now that was offensive.

I went on one coffee date with a standup comedian. It went ok, but it was pretty obvious there wasn't any connection, chemistry, whatever. We e-mailed over the next few days and I said it was nice to hang out, but I didn't think we'd be a good match.

About two years later I heard that she'd worked me into her stand-up act, in a bit about online dating. I was "You-Are-Not-My-Match Guy."

a friend of my mother's, with whom she's no longer close, wrote a memoir of those years in which my mother's a passing character: this passing character who shares my mother's name does something that's both out-of-character and anachronistic, and so it served as a kind of bellwether of how fictional the memoir must have been in the details of its main content (an affair with a famous writer iirc).

"those years" being the years when they were close, i.e. the seventies.

a friend of mine recently went through an extremely rough breakup with her boyfriend. she suffers from depression, and he was very distant, unaffectionate, drank a lot, etc. The guy is a local actor/singer, and he had written a postapocalyptic musical for a theatre festival.

Within 10 minutes of watching it, it was completely obvious that he had taken his recent relationship with my friend and largely used it as the basis for his musical, but a revisionist one in which he basically played himself, and the piece lionized him as some amazing guy who conquered his demons.

A bunch of us really wanted to kick his ass. She (fortunately) skipped the show after she heard what it contained.

i wrote a song in 1995 that dealt with a lot of the feelings i was having at that time about the diminishing presence of the teenage mutant hero turtles in the evening television schedules, a subject that had been the cause of several deep and very personal disagreements in my household and among my wider peer group (i had already been suspended for writing pro-splinter slogans on school whiteboards in permanent marker some weeks before, much to the chagrin of the chairman of the school board, whom i had long suspected to be a power rangers sympathiser using his influence to ill effect in that regard).

the song was a poor thing, but pithy in its more lurid scatalogical qualities, and it proved popular enough that one or other of my drinking companions of that period thought it worth recording, in somewhat amateurish fashion though i say it myself, on a sony double deck one night. one thing leading to another it gained significant traction on the underground copied-cassette market that served as the neural pathways of the countercultural hivemind back in those days in rural ireland. within three months i had appeared on local radio. within six months i had gone national. by the time i ought to have been sitting my intermediate exams in june 96 i was assistant head of political and current affairs at rte ( although there was obviously loud clamour to situate me in light entertainment to address the longrunning turtle issue, which i regret to note runs to this day as an acknowledged farce).

but i digress.

to answer the question in specific- the song referred to both of my parents, one third of my brothers and several notable parishioners as mindless philistines (among other things i prefer not to recall in full detail) and, rather unfortunately, early local exposure led to its being the subject of a running three-part sermon from fr o'brien- the theme being the rashness and insolence of youth and the lamentable decline of faith-based programming in the plum 6-9pm weekday slot.

Never dreaming of the successes to come, my father leathered the shite out of me three sundays from four in october, forced me to recant publicly in seven separate public houses on the island (which i did by penning my fulsome regret in the style of an file rafteiri to the air of 'mo ghuile mear', performing sean-nós to what hot press described as 'stunning effect') and banned all ninja turtle paraphanelia from the house. i carried on or about my person for some several years two minature soft plastic sai, the only items i managed to withhold during the monthly searches for contraband that he carried out from that time until i finally moved out.

our relationship never fully recovered. when he passed a few years back i threw them in with his coffin.

i wish i hadn't.

i miss them.

i read in some lifestyle magazine or other that richard ashcroft had used the tune itself as the basis for the orchestral backing to 'lucky man'. after the tricky business he encountered with the sampling in bittersweet symphony his people were anxious to make contact and sort something out. i signed what they sent me, refused all incomes. left them to it.

some things are best left buried.

i think our own john d once told, prob about 10 years ago, that he penned a tune after we had this argument about dance music. i was prob v rude and shouty as was my manner at the time (these days my rudeness is more of a quiet thing.) i tried to find the post but i could only find the row.

it all ended amicably.

i tried to find the post but i could only find the row.

beautiful summation of...something, idk

I had a novel dedicated to me but it was not confessional.

should people close to artists accept this as something they "signed on for"?
No.

At age 15, I wrote a song about girl who had just broken up with me. I previewed it for her in a practice room at school and she was like "uh-uh. no." This happened at a time when I was also trying to change my band's style from comedy ska-punk to emotional pop-punk. I lost my girl and I lost my band.

beautiful summation of...something, idk

haha - a sort of "wood for the trees" sense of loss.

i wrote a song for a girlfriend once. it taught me not to write songs about my life because they're really embarrassing!!

i'm writing some drama stuff at the moment and i constantly steal things from real life, but never wholesale really. little anecdotes and stuff that are good, i might add them in if they fit the character.

An ex wrote about me in a song once, after we broke up, but it was pretty metaphorical and non-obvious (an extended nautical metaphor, iirc) so I didn't mind. I actually really liked the song.

I have had two poems published in my life and one of them featured the son of a (different) ex boyfriend, but only tangentially and the poem was about ME ME ME and I doubt either the ex or the son (who was eight at the time) ever read it.

I don't think it's fair to assume that being in some sort of relationship with an artist means you are fair game for subject matter. I'd be pretty irked if I were featured in someone's work in an identifiable way and would probably not really trust that person as a friend anymore.

that parker posey painting pic is one of my fav ILX things ever, always brings a lol

My mom used to write a weekly column for the countywide newspaper. High school kids would stop me in the elementary school hallway and ask if I really did make it to the conveyor belt level of Crazy Kong.

I should go back and read those again. I was too young to be embarrassed, so Lord knows what she may have actually written.

any artist who just literally transcribes/transfers elements from their life to their work is being a shitty artist. I love a lot of purportedly autobiographical stuff (Joe Matt, Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks", tons of rap stuff) but good artists know that the authorial voice is ultimately an artificial and created one, and use this to the work's advantage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-vwMEEe7E

I have a big family. They're mostly extended family. Probably about half of them (including those no longer living) are or were 'artists' or 'writers' with varying degrees of success.

So, yes, it is inevitable that family members or their defining characteristics are mentioned or touched upon on in their works of art.

There are a lot, but the one I will mention is a recent one. Someone in my family made a web TV series, or whatever they're called, and one of the main characters is basically a version of a family member who is close to me. She made it so obvious, because she actually used the person's real name. The thing that got to me is that she basically did it to make fun/mock this family member. She sent me a personal email talking about this 'webisode' in generalities, telling me to check it out. I saw it all right, but I never replied to her nor did I ever let her know that I ever watched it. I just ignored it. The funny thing is I consider her a bright person, but she talked about this episode with such sincerity and genuineness, that it left me a little confused. I decided not to even get involved in this situation.

I don't really care if a character is based on a real person, but try to use some anonymity, or at least be vague or ambiguous. Don't use their real name or a name that is close to theirs.

Some of my writings are very personal and they are about me, my life and family members. The first drafts usually are the most honest and use their real names or abbreviations. As I develop them, I ensure there is some ambiguity and remove any dead giveaways. I'll impose my own ideas about them and use those ideas to, say, come up with the character's name. So, I just happen to really like Greek mythology, so I'll throw that into the mix and make references that are less obvious or more esoteric.

I think it's possible to make it clear who the real life analogue is while still making it obvious that the account is fictionalized/drawing attention to the authorial voice (ie, Bukowski's "Francis Ford Lopolla" in Hollywood, which always makes me laugh)

do you think this is, by definition, bad art? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyone_I_Have_Ever_Slept_With_1963%E2%80%931995

woah crazy spacing

nah the presentation there is really the thing. if it was just a list of names published on a webpage or printed in a chapbook it would be bad art.

imho

An ex wrote about me in a song once, after we broke up, but it was pretty metaphorical and non-obvious (an extended nautical metaphor, iirc) so I didn't mind. I actually really liked the song.

going to blame carl for the existence of the Decembrists from now on

I was taken aside by a singer-songwriter friend with whom I'd a month prior had a one-night fling, and she played me a song that had a chorus along the lines of "such a busy, busy, busy, busy man". I was resolved to take it in stride, she had a few times written indictments-as-songs for other people, but it did end up hurting my feelings and we fell out of touch as friends.

As for my own songs I get accused of emotional-strip-mining all the time, though it is rarely ever the case

so sad u r no longer friends with taylor swift

omg

in your position I'd write a response, perhaps sympathising with her ultimate inability to be the right gender idk

...

we should all be allowed to post like some grotesque jaymc/kenan interface once a year maybe

Dunno if I'm in anyone else's confessional art. Will be a bit put out if it doesn't happen at some stage

[maroon 5 joke]

this poem shall be
dedicated to lj
fan of band 'jute gyte'

nhds 15/10/13

- wrote a comic strip when I was in college based mostly on my real-life dysfunctional relationships

- wrote several songs for or about girls I knew. One of those was for someone I overheard talking to a friend about how awesome it would be to have a song written about her, not imagining it would ever really happen. Would never use real (or even made-up) names though.

- am not aware of anyone writing music, art, or comics about me.

i had a girlfriend once who had written a batch of songs, all about her ex-boyfriend, and we went out for almost a year and broke up, and then she wrote some more songs and they were also about the same ex-boyfriend

Dunno if I'm in anyone else's confessional art. Will be a bit put out if it doesn't happen at some stage

― HAVE YOU SEEN ME? Please don't hesitate (imago), Tuesday, October 15, 2013 2:52 PM

be careful what you wish for ??

ha

fyi i have band practice in a few hours, will let you know if we incorporate you into any of our songs

yay. they have to be confessional though

fyi they will probably all be about cats

my cat will be very hurt if you write a song about him btw