I am a GENIUS! (*sob*, for I am no genius)

i get that all the time. i have tapes and tapes of music ideas that i will never use. but i also have some that i'm really proud of. try it out anyway and see if it works. or ask yourself again tomorrow morning whether its a good idea. but don't give up. sure, that particular idea may not work out, but don't let it put you off, cos you will have heaps of great ideas! perhaps you could ask someone close to you and whos opinion you respect what they think?

This happens to me all the time. Usually, it happens after I talk to someone. I will state a very absolute position about some social issue, and then, later, step back and say, "well, maybe I was being too extreme" or "maybe I am being too harsh", etc. I then lose all my interest. BLAH!

"art installations"

I had the idea to frame a mirror and call it "You" but then after a few minutes realized it was a pretty bad idea.

But I did have another idea that I still think is awesome. I wanted to paint many amazing beautiful pictures, and fold them up so no one can see them.

Yeah, if someone wants to unfold them, it's no big deal, but if I seeing them trying to do it I would try and stop them. Maybe they would see them and think they were not very beautiful, so I would have to make them iindisputably beautiful.

Last spring I was all gung ho to start a 'zine, to be called Tiger Meat. Its theme was to be the men of music into whom my tigress-contributors want to sink their claws and carry off back to their lairs.

Fortunately I never followed through with this.

The world would be a better place if more zines were realized to be bad ideas before they hit the press.

this is me re: most of my writing. in dunedin say with the (haha) artistic community & poetry evenings & so on I have people/audiences to bounce ideas off & that; up here in my tower bedroom of solitude I am thee schlob.

Last night I thought I'd figured out the unified field theory, but I forgot to carry the 2.

Melissa, just take the idea for the art project and start to mentally improvise upon it - you might well end-up with something incredible.

And, um, for my brilliant thoughts - I've learned not to voice them, 'cause people start pointing out flaws or I feel ridiculous and drop the entire concept. I'm much better off just struggling through things on my own, and while almost nothing ends-up the way I initally envisioned it (from food to writing to art to travel) I usually find I've created and/or participated in something that I could not have previously contemplated.

Right now I am mulling an art installation project - I've been jotting ideas and sketches in notebook as they occur to me - it's a blast to look back and see where things have evolved from (and occasionally I stumble across something that I've forgotten, and am able to revive and then revise). Actually, I just love my notebook - it's full of everything from ramblings and ventings to story ideas to outlines for books to poetry drafts to books I want to read to grocery and "to-do" lists - I hope they burn it when I croak, else I am going to be eulagized as being incredibly batty (or maybe brilliant?) A key to the notebook - fun colored pens (I love the metallic gel thingys!) and crayons and so forth - and writing every which way but straight. All of which is good for me, 'cause I've four years of technical writing/ editing behind me, as well as many more years of practice in the topic - which means I haven't been thinking much of "creating" for some while - I am working to re-oil my mind, with some luck.

Every story I write, when I'm writing it, is the best thing ever. A couple months later I want to burn every draft I've made of it.

More specifically, in this one autobiography class, I thought of something which I considered quite clever, but when I mentioned in class, the prof basically said it was no-duh given. Of course this experience prevented me from voicing other things I was afraid were givens but turned out not to be. I can't actually remember what it was, so I'm not be specific at all.

Also, my rough draft of Ulysses was hot stuff, wow look at all the linguistic trickery and manipulation of chronology Joyce does, turns out I'm regurgitating elementary poststructuralism all wrong. Hahah.

i remember listening to this dj fear ragga jungle set on my minidisc and looking out the window of the tram - i saw someone was tapping their fingers in time to the music (and the more i looked the more it seemed that somehow everyone was moving to the beats, cos they were so intricate) - i wanted to go round and collect lots of footage of people tapping their feet/hands/nodding heads/just normal movement/ and edit/manipulate it to make a video for my friend's d'n'b track. 1)my friend makes techstep 2)i finally thunk 'this must surely have been done before' and lo, every night i go out i now notice the video displays with the same stuff, a lot.

Mel, you *ARE* a genius, and the sooner you just realise this and learn to work with it, instead of running it down and letting your self loathing ruin it for you, the happier you will be. Creativity is a gift, it comes from someplace else, it runs through you and leaves you feeling like gods have walked through your insides. This is the best feeling in the world.

I am stupid enough that I almost always blunder through and actualise those "Wow, wouldn't it be great if I..." inspirations. Sometimes I regret them, mostly I don't. Even things which seemed like horrible, stupid, awful ideas later I grow to realise they were actually good things.

That fucking solo show, for one... it was SOOOOO traumatic. I so nearly didn't do it. I so nearly got up and walked off in the middle of the set. I thought it was a bad idea, and I wanted to lay down and die immediately after the set. But in the weeks following, half a dozen people have independently told me that it really touched them. So it *was* a good thing.

Don't let self doubt and self loathing rob of your talent. Please. The world needs more people like you!

Melissa--I don't care if it's silly. Go ahead and do your art project anyway. The worst that can happen is that you'll have done an art project and be that much more experienced and competent the next time you try to do something. (This is the "nine thousand drawings" effect: you become a good artist by making nine thousand bad drawings, each slightly less bad than the one before it.) The best that can happen is that it'll be really good anyway. And there is no good thing that can happen by _not_ doing it.

If no one ever said "fuck it, I'm gonna write a book" no one would ever write a book. Stop procrastinating and fishing and worrying and dallying and just do it. Fuck what anyone else thinks. Fuck what you think. It's not gonna kill you or stop you getting into heaven or whatever so it doesn't matter so you might as well do it.

Douglas, yeah that's right, I think becoming "genius" can be fairly gradual for many people, and it may rise and fall. So many people whom are considerd geniues say that they have times of horribleness, but they do more and more creating. It takes repetition to explore one's creativity, and then you get a knowledge of what you can do, then you can improve on that.

And, Nicks attitude is right. The first step is to not care.

I only started writing good when I stopped worrying about writing good.

i wanted to start a commune. the idea actually lasted for several months.

Pete started writing good?

Mel - carry this art project anyway, aim to prove yourself wrong. Concentrate on enjoying the creative process.

This is exactly how I feel whenever I try to write something that's not computer or music-releated. In August of 2001 my dad had a heart attack, and I ended up flying out to Edmonton to help my mom out while he was in the hospital. She was in the process (with him) of moving from Manitoba so that they could be closer to her parents, who were going through some tough times (her dad in the hospital, too). My parents had just signed the papers for their new condo when dad had the heart attack (okay, okay, not at the realtor's office, but later on that day). Anyhow, point being that they had unfinished business in Manitoba, a 14-hour drive away. So when I got to Edmonton, we spent a week going to the hospital and trying to stay on top of things, hoping he'd regain consciousness...and then did the road trip back to Manitoba to look after some legal issues. So, we're there setting up mail forwarding when Sept 11 happened. We then split up; I took her car and she took mine, and I drove back to Toronto while she was going back to Edmonton. The car broke about two hours into my journey, and it became the worst road trip ever for a number of reasons, including reactionary wingnuts at virtually every stop I made along the way back home, assuming I'd agree with every racist thing they said. Fab. Anyhow, made it home and dad died shortly afterwards.

Seems like an okay story to tell, yeah? But the more I think about the more boring it seems, even if I fictionalize it. Even when people tell me I should do something with it, part of me thinks no one would care. So yeah, I empathize totally.

Well, the thing is the project I'm thinking of is QUITE large scale and possibly just really horrible post-conceptual tosh. It would also require a large amount of investment and devotion and groveling and massive amounts of cooperation that I'm not sure I could coordinate.
And the more I think about it, the more I think the theme behind it is simplistic and dull, and that it has probably been done before.

I always have these absolutely massive and impractical ideas that I never carry out.

I am an artist with no art, a writer with no writings...

*grin* I am all for massive and impractical ideas - the world needs many more of them, I daresay. Who wants to be limited by practicality? Seems to me to be better to push further and further - if you don't know that something is impossible, then you can achieve it, right? (Er, did I just make that up or should I attribute it to someone?)

Actually, I'd appreciate if anyone more art-literate than I would IM or email me so that I may bounce this idea off of them.

you should AIM rainy about it! (i don't think shes on right now tho)