Beyond the Age of Content
Hello everyone and welcome back to The Creative Life. I'm your host Jim Kroft. This episode is called Beyond the Age of Content. It's about what the life of Man Ray, one of the most radical artists of the twentieth century, can teach us about making real creative work in an age that wants us to post, perform, and chase likes. It's about the discipline required to get.
Speaker 1:As Steve Martin once said, so good they can't ignore you. After watching a documentary on Man Ray, I started drawing parallels between his move to Paris in 1921 and my own move to Berlin in 2007 just as social media was beginning its takeover of our lives. What came out are some hard won reflections on the traps that hold creatives back and what it actually takes to push through them. We're going to talk about why giving yourself permission to disappear may be the most important creative decision you ever make. We'll look at what it costs to commit fully to your path and how the failures along the way become the fuel that transforms your work into something undeniable.
Speaker 1:There's a line I keep coming back to in this one. You cannot know what the gods have planned for your work. Your only job is to keep giving the gift. So guys, before we dive in, I just wanna say thank you so much for being here. If you enjoy what's inside, I'm not running ads.
Speaker 1:I just want all the good stuff to come directly to you. But if you'd like to pay it back in some way, please take a moment to rate and review, to drop a comment, or to forward it onto another creative that you think could draw some value from it. Because for me, it's not about trying to get the damn algorithm working. It's about going out and trying to help people and to hopefully make a difference to people's lives. But on a personal level, it keeps me going with the podcast.
Speaker 1:It gives me fuel and energy for the next steps. Alright. Let's dive in. Thanks for being here. Big love all.
Speaker 1:Chapter one. Give Yourself Permission Over Seeking Validation In 1921, Man Ray moved to Paris at the age of 31. It hadn't worked out for him in The US. He wasn't making a living, his paintings weren't selling, and he find himself chronically broke. Arriving in Paris, he felt liberated from the need to make it.
Speaker 1:There, avant garde art wasn't marginal, it was expected. For me, arriving in Berlin at the age of 27 felt like a liberation from the societal trajectory of my peers. I knew I wanted to be an artist, but the absurd vision of the young man was quickly mute by the irrepressible capacity of life to atomize one's timeline. And so I traded my younger hope for status in exchange for something far more important, time and anonymity. That's what Berlin offered.
Speaker 1:I think that's what Man Ray found too. The trouble so many of us have now more than ever is the craving for immediate validation. This is the corrosive aspect of social media. The hidden danger is that the more you chase becoming someone online, the more you are pulled from the activities that actually develop your craft. Today, we see everyone chasing reputation before they've developed the work itself.
Speaker 1:Moving to Paris wasn't just about wanting to emerge for Man Ray. It was a place where he could disappear for a while. He didn't need to justify his day. He didn't need to legitimize his urge to experiment. A day spent exploring what the world dismissed was not lost.
Speaker 1:It was his journey towards a deeper expression. Simply put, Paris offered him permission. And I remember the 2008 after squatting in a building next to the tackle is for much of 2007, I'd moved into a flat only to then get myself evicted. A friend moving to Hamburg left me his furniture less apartment though he was kind enough to leave a mattress. I spent my time looking out at Osbanov Station, piecing together a song called Modern Monk.
Speaker 1:It took months of writing and rewriting. I felt fractured, alien in my own skin, but I was rescued time and time again when one chord would finally knit to the next. It took desperate searching to weave together this elegy to a broken self. Few people ever heard it, but it was enough to save me during a time when I had little link to my family, when I'd also lost my mother and had no contact at all to my father. I don't know exactly what man Ray was going through but I imagine it was a similar desperation.
Speaker 1:You cannot truly step into the unknown, to step off the bridge from the life expected of you into a life without guarantees, without welcoming that desperation as a passenger. What I love about Man Ray is that this desperation and this courage began his long croaking ascent to greatness. He experimented without the need to cohere. One night, he accidentally placed pins and glass directly onto photographic paper and was thrilled with the results. These became his so called reographs.
Speaker 1:They were nothing the market would pay for, well, at least not yet, but they were the works that would eventually forge his name. No. They were the result of a man willing to play in the dark until something stuck. And the crazy thing, his deepest aspiration was to be known as a painter, a desire that in fact needled him until the day he died. So three takeaways for creatives until this point.
Speaker 1:First of all, enter the dark room. You cannot know in advance what you will be known for but to find it, you must be willing to enter the darkroom of your own soul. Second, the validation trap. You seek validation from social media But if you need it too much, you are bartering away what the work actually wants to become. Give yourself permission not to perform.
Speaker 1:Third, the recognition paradox. The only way to eventually gain true artistic recognition is to be willing to live entirely without it. Chapter two, what a threshold really looks like. There are times in our creative life when we face a hard choice. Do we accept the status quo of where we come from or do we do something radical?
Speaker 1:Man Ray set off by steamship from New York in 1921. He must have watched his past recede as the boat heaved into his future. What did he feel? Excitement? Worry?
Speaker 1:Panic? The only thing certain is that he was moving through a threshold. We have moments in our lives where we know we are moving definitively from where we were towards where we are going. The world is before you, flush with the unknown, revitalized, new and utterly terrifying. For me, I knew there would be no coming back.
Speaker 1:I had felt for too long like I was living someone else's life living back in The UK and that I had not yet stepped into my own adventure. I sold all my belongings, put whatever I could into my van, whatever would fit, and I left. And I arrived in a Berlin blanketed with snow on the evening of the 01/12/2007. My first act was trying to get my van into the courtyard of my alleged dicks. It was too tight.
Speaker 1:I ended up backed up on Friedrichstrasser with a 100 cars behind me and everyone shouting Scheisse Englunde, Vas Macansey. I was very intimidated. Now the building I stayed in was deserted. It had once been used by the Stasi as a listening post. So I set up camp and drank three Hefeweizens.
Speaker 1:It was minus four degrees and in my tipsiness before sleep, my mind swayed between how the fuck has my life come to this and this is exactly where I meant to be. I have only a handful of photos from that time. It was a time that was about the living of the experience itself, not the recording of the living. Now, if you'd like to see some of the photos, I would ask you just to take a moment to check out my Substack which is, called the Creative Life and I'll put a link in the description. And there's a photo that I'm looking at and it's from the 2008 and just after I'd sort of set myself up a little bit better and it's a sepia photo and there's a mattress mattress there.
Speaker 1:There. There's a single candlestick, which is one of the few things I brought over from The UK. And out the back, I could look out and I could see the garden, the back area of the tachalis and further out into the distance receding the the the the the TV Tower of Berlin hoisted high. And it was just it was an amazing time in my life. So raw, very painful, very isolating, but very beautiful.
Speaker 1:So I guess that Man Ray when he arrived might have had an easier landing. He was met by Duchamp at Gar Saint Lazar and that very first evening, he was introduced to the movers and shakers of the Paris Parisian Dada scene. As for me, I went for a walk the next day and had a panic attack under Banhof Friedrichstrasse, which I wrote about in the the song, which is titled Banhof Friedrichstrasse and there's a lyric that I I I wrote and I can recount it here. It was a there was a time in my life sorry, let me think again. There was a time when I was fucking up everything beautiful to me.
Speaker 1:I took my life and left it all behind, arrived in a brand new city, having a panic attack under Bernhof Friedrichstrasse when I arrived. Hertzlichtviel common sag mir vasi volen. I wondered if I'd ever survive. So guys, I'm gonna drop the song in at the end of the at the end of the podcast and, you can just have a listen and it kinda contains all of that rawness. And if you'd like to have a listen, it's available on my album, Love in the Face of Fear, which is on Spotify.
Speaker 1:So this panic attack under Bernhard Friedrichstrasser was the threshold moment of my life when all the dark that exists in the world presses upon you and you feel you will crumble under its way. The thing is, and this is my reflection on Man Ray too, I had removed choice. I had removed choice from my life. There was no ejector seat. There was no going back and there was no plan b.
Speaker 1:I didn't know it then, but it forced me to commit to my path. And that commitment, that commitment to your path, that is the ultimate creative asset. So my takeaways from this section from chapter two are these. One. Prioritize the mission.
Speaker 1:Prudence is a virtue, but there are times when you must temper the need for a safety net. You don't have to throw your life off a cliff, but you do have to decide if you are going to prioritize the work that you have set out to do. Two. Own your adventure. When you feel the urge to go backwards, ask yourself, do you want to live the adventure of your own life?
Speaker 1:Retreating often means returning to someone else's version of who they think that you should be. Fuck that. Chapter three failure is the ultimate catalyst. Man Ray's first solo exhibition took place in December 1921 at the library six, a bookstore and gallery owned by the wife of the poet, Philippe Support. Now forgive me if I've said that wrong.
Speaker 1:Now what were his sales? Zero. He had arrived in Paris with the dream of being a painter, yet he failed to sell a single piece. I wonder how this man of 31 who had risked everything on this move fell in that silence. The curious thing about failure, however, is that you do not know its ultimate intention.
Speaker 1:In the moment we view failure as something static yet failure often indicates that you've actually done something, that you've made a move, and it carries an animation that exists beyond the immediate disappointment. Later, Man Ray reflected, my exhibition was a great success from the point of view of the interest it created, but not a single painting sold. And he wrote that in a letter to Ferdinand Howeld. And there is the crux. It created interest.
Speaker 1:He dared to put himself out there. The danger I see for so many creative artists is that we are using the Internet as our gallery, and it's not, and it can never be. Art is made to be beheld. Beyond that, exhibiting draws the energy of humanity. Library six I don't know how to say it.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna give up on that. Library six was a bookstore for God's sake. And yet what happened? The failure of his exhibition was the catalyst for his transformation into photography. He didn't just want to make money, he had to or he would have been forced to leave Paris.
Speaker 1:He'd spent the majority of the $500 he'd arrived, that's $8,500 in today's currency, on the exhibition. So he bet himself hard on backing himself. And at the time, he was living in a small room at the Hotel de Ecole in Montparsner. Yeah. In Montparsner.
Speaker 1:Okay. I'm not going to correct that. I'm just really bad at French. He had to act. His funds were disappearing fast.
Speaker 1:This transition from starving painter to famous photographer was remarkably swift, but it began with humble steps. So what were these steps? Now number one, documenting art. To survive, he photographed paintings for artist friends. Two, connecting.
Speaker 1:Through these artists, he met Paul Poiret, the era's top fashion designer. Three, the pivot. His artistic shots of Poiret's models attracted socialites like Peggy Guggenheim, who paid high prices for private portraits. And four, mainstream success. This buzz landed him major contracts with Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Harper's Bazaar.
Speaker 1:And all of this this career progression, this strange and wonderful and and and and this event sequence that seemed to come from nothing but suddenly became a catalyst, all of it happened because he had no choice. We hate to be backed into a corner, but that is often when you realize these are the only tools that I have in the world. Those things I can see right here and by god, I'm going to use them. Six months after the exhibition, Man Ray wrote, I have finally freed myself from the sticky medium of pain and am working directly with light itself. Sometimes you have to let one dream die to keep the artist alive long enough for a resurrection to take place.
Speaker 1:So what about this? In 2023, Man Ray's painting Promenade sold for 5,880,000.00. My takeaway for creatives. One, failure is kinetic. Failure is not something static.
Speaker 1:If you put work into the world, something is already moving even when the balance sheet looks like zero. Two, constraint is clarity. When options disappear, you discover the tools you actually have. That is often where your real work begins. Conclusion, a personal reflection.
Speaker 1:I wondered many times during my early years in Berlin if I was wasting my life. It was an electro city and I had arrived as a rock and roller. I did, however, get gigs and lots of them three times a week in the old white trash and the iconic Cafe Zapata, which was in the Tacalis and is now closed. And, again, please check out the article on Man Ray in the creative life because you can see some of these photos. And in it, you can see there was this picture and I'm playing there with my band at the time called Myriad Creatures and it is absolutely rammed and there is a metal dragon amongst the mayhem and it blew fire over the audience.
Speaker 1:And no gig was ever complete without the stage being utterly invaded. As the years went on, I made my way up through the underground and eventually got signed by a major label deal, EMI. And that was my dream from the start. And when it happened, I was already over the age of 30 and I I couldn't believe it. And the gigs got better and for a while, things got easier.
Speaker 1:Now no one ever tells you this, but it just gets easier the higher up the ladder you get. I lost that deal though in 2013 after EMI was taken over by Universal and I descended back into the dark. One day, I realized this, no one is coming to save me. And I looked around my room and I saw three things, a guitar, a camera and a mirror. And in that mirror, I saw myself.
Speaker 1:I started hustling for film and photography work. Yet all the while, the dream of music called restlessly and relentlessly in my heart. Looking back, music is to me what I believe painting was to Man Ray. And so I started recording a new record in my kitchen, again, pictured in the article on Substack. As I recorded these new songs, I kept my heart open and then without expectation, the gods made their invitation.
Speaker 1:A call from China came in and thus began my life as a solo troubadour and one who had no idea he was about to start of shooting six documentaries that would eventually screen all around the world in film festivals. Now you never know the meaning of what you're living through as you're living it. And for many of us, even Man Ray, you will never know the meaning and possibly even the impact of your work as you release it. And yet, atom's fizz, the invisible has its own charge. How could you be so arrogant as to assume to know what the gods have decided for you?
Speaker 1:Or that this current desperate attempt should be defined by today's dismay. What matters is that you keep giving your gift not for anyone else, not even for yourself but because that is itself the meaning of the gift. That is to give it. The only thing I'm certain of now being in my mid forties is that life is shorter than any of us realize. I lost my mother as a teenager but I never lost mortality's lesson.
Speaker 1:Whatever you are working on today, it has meaning. It has value. It has a worth that you as of yet have no idea of. Just keep giving it. Dare to, to anyone who may need it.
Speaker 1:That, that is to my understanding what the meaning of life is. To keep giving the gift.
