The other day, a very clever man explained to me about careers and learning curves. He was saying that every two years we complete another learning curve, take a look around at the career we’ve been having, and say to ourselves “has that worked? Do I really want to keep doing that for another two years, or longer?”

I’ve had a similar conversation with a few different artists recently, except that there seems to be one essential difference between the art world and the world of regular work, which is that people who work in the “straight” world (please excuse the crass generalisation) don’t really see themselves as having a choice about what they do. Whereas people who work within creative fields such as art often find themselves drawn there and stuck there by internal pressures.

It’s this pressure to make that I find interesting. Although make isn’t really the entire description: it’s also dance, sing, perform, paint, sculpt, install… any selection of words that you want to use to talk about creative work. The fact that we don’t have one single word that can sum up the creative span says a lot about our attitudes as a culture to anything outside the narrow band of work-in-an-office-sense-of-the-word work. Because these creative fields are work.

And, while it’s well known that these creative fields are not the most well remunerated, it’s still something that people want to make a living doing. Hans Abbing, the dutch economist who studied the artistic population of Holland, noted that when art stopped being the primary concern of the creative types, they often got more interesting jobs in related areas. This would be the raft of gallery, museum, and university-level jobs that enable cultural creativity to continue in the local area.

As pure conjecture, I would say that it’s impossible to rely on that raft to keep the creative economy going in any one area. For instance, the remit of universities and galleries is actually very different to what artists need. These large institutions need a constant foot-fall of visitors that they can show to funding bodies in order to qualify their existence. Artists need a way of producing work and being supported while producing work. Sometimes these two needs overlap like a venn diagram, but there will always be an overabundance of creativity that cannot be supported.

Continuing with my conjecturable musing, 2009 promises to be the start of penny-pinching times for a lot of organisations. Contrary to most people who are (like me) spouting unasked for opinion in a textual form, I can see some great upsides to this, such as finally encouraging people to take a two-year look around themselves and ask if they truly are happy at the end of their learning curve. I also think it’s a great time for people to ask if they are getting what they want from floating along with the raft.

The next section will have some thoughts on what is around apart from clinging to the raft, and will also get round to the question of mavernship in cultural circles.

Try saying ‘impressivement’ in an European accent. Maybe that makes it better.

Anybody who knows me, knows that I really like the Buck Rodgers TV show from the 1980’s. Idly browsing Youtube over the Christmas period, I’ve found this outake from the original pilot, where Buck and Wilma kiss.

Awwww.

I don’t think they ever got round to kissing at any other point in the show. Maybe they cut it in order to avoid sappy love stories, or possibly because the writers couldn’t think of any way to generate plots other than “Buck meets girl, girl in trouble”.

The video above is such a classic piece of mid-1990’s footage. The style of it is pretty eye-catching, washed in original sentiment grunge, but gear-heads like me will notice the reel-to-reel tape recorder in some of the session footage. Do you know how expensive recording things used to be? It was crazy! Now everybody has got a laptop that can do multitracking, so the cost of making a single has dropped.

And bear in mind that the footage you are seeing is from 1996. There wasn’t really an internet in the same way that we have one now; search was still getting started in a lab at Stanford University. There was still a media hierarchy that meant it could take months for some media to come out - ’sleeper hits’, etc, that would permeate through a system of media.

I don’t really know much about Jem Cohen, who according to wikipedia has also designed the album covers for Fugazi. Apparently he shot this video for a fanzine, which seems like a very ambitious fanzine. At first I was confused, and thought that he was the same Jem that used to be in the Pogues, and later went on to make music inspired by the philosophies of the Clock of the Long Now. This is not so; apparently Cohen is his own Jem, working in different areas.

I’d stick with the video up until the last song, ‘Angeles’, comes on. That’s my recommendation, anyway.

Cool, huh?

I’m going to keep my site this way for a while, as I feel that it’s a bit of a baffle that stops the less-nerdy and those people who casually browse my site keeping an eye on me (but actually hate me).

I had to buy a new helmet, because my old one broke when I was going round the corner near Heaton Park Road (actually, the junction at Heaton Hall Road and Wandsworth Road) and did a huge swerve to avoid some numpty riding a downhill bike. I mounted the pavement and ended up gently crashing to the floor in a tangle of skinned elbows and bouncing craniums.

Whilst I was fine physically, it would have been nice if the idling taxi driver parked nearby could have checked on me, as I lay on the pavement looking dazed. It would have been even nicer if my fellow cyclist, who I swerved to avoid, had done a little more than turn his head to check on me. But I don’t expect any signs of intelligence from taxi drivers or people who ride downhill bikes in city areas.

My new helmet is manly, huge enough to fit my bonce, and comes in lovely 1980’s colours. It’s difficult to not buy a new helmet when you prang yourself and find a bad-ass crack down the back of your old helmet, and I’d like to thank the manager of my local Edinburgh cycles for taking the time out to help me find a helmet accomadating enough for my cranium. Because, in all modesty, my head is fecking massive.

Over the summer period, I helped develop a one-day course for teaching people Wordpress. Today I ran the first course I’ve done by myself (having had far superior teachers to hide behind in my previous sessions).

They’ve all been graciously hosted by Newcastle’s Polytechnic, and I’ll be posting up links to their excellent websites as soon as possible… or they could leave them in the comments! Hint hint!