For various reasons I’ve been thinking a lot about quality work recently, and likewise about art. Some of this is tied up in things going on at work, but most of it is probably me trying to decide who it is that I want to be as I move into this next phase. It comes up when friends ask what I’m going to be doing–how many books I’ll write, will they all be SF, or whatever it is that I write (grin). It’s also tied up in Lou Reed’s death, which has struck me in a way that was much deeper than I would have imagined.
I don’t mean that in the morbid, dreary way it might sound. I’m terribly sorry he died, of course, but I’m thinking about him more for the remarkable art that he left behind. I don’t love it all by any means, but I very deeply respect it.
And then along the way I found this little piece of video that (for all its, again, heavy emotion) really struck a nerve about what it means to be an artist.
I’ll leave it to you to decide if I’m just getting a bit over the top silly here, but I can’t help but feel something important in that video, and despite it’s subject matter it makes me feel strangely good about people with a true purpose, true calling, or, well, maybe just people with a truth.
I admit fully that I don’t know what that is, but whatever it is I’m pretty sure that I want it. Even if it’s just a tiny slice. [grin]