World as Ecstasy: September 2023
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World as Ecstasy: September 2023
What I've been up to and thoughts on living as a creative
What I’m Working On
I’m working on surviving the heat in my corner of Texas, that's what. Most of my life, with the exception of my time in the military, I’ve lived in New York, and even though I've been in Texas for a number of years now, this is the first summer where I’ve had to worry about things that had never been a consideration, such as watering the foundation of my house, making sure the blinds and curtains on all my windows block not only light but also heat, and the pièce de résistance for the summer, the death of my central air conditioning unit.
Thank the Buddha it's September; we should be experiencing our seasonal cold front soon, with clouds rolling in from the west, and behind them, a thirty-degree drop in temperatures. It's a phenomenon that continues to amaze me. I could step into a supermarket, and the temperatures would be in the upper nineties. By the time I'm done shopping and step back outside, it would be in the upper sixties.
Due to these conditions and the singular focus I've had to place on keeping tabs on how much the foundation of my home is shifting in the drought, I've not had much creative energy to work on anything other than beginning the editing process for the second half of my novel series, tentatively titled Athena.
I’ve had a number of friends ask if I’ve made any good money yet from my books, and the answer is no.
Hell to the naw, no.
No writer—or artist in general—does this to make money. Those who try eventually end up being captured by their audience, locking themselves into creating content that guarantees the kind of commercial success and recognition that becomes an invisible prison for the creative. This is especially true if audience capture depends on finicky algorithms on social media.
After reading Contagious by Jonah Berger, I have a better understanding of what gets people to click on links or engage with content, and the algorithms that are currently at play only respond to people’s sense of wonder or their rage. When it comes to trying to capture an audience and market my work, I have to ask myself, do I want to play that game? Do I want to be like a gambler at a slot machine, hoping for the jackpot of virality?
The answer is no.
I want to write.
I want to be honest.
If the work is good, it'll eventually find the right audience. How it finds them will depend on me continuing to put in the work and going offline to meet people who could end up becoming ambassadors for what I do: the 1,000 True Fans Method.
It's how I was able to establish myself as a photographer in New York and later, after my move to Texas. I was only able to do that through networking and working with models—content creators in their own right—whose word of mouth was at the heart of being able to establish a successful boudoir studio until I had to close it during the pandemic, which was for the best.
It was during the shutdown that I went back to writing. I had a number of my poems published in literary journals in the 1990s. My poem, Ezekiel,
was adapted for performance at the Nantucket Short Play Festival in 2000, thanks to an ex-girlfriend who continued to act as my ambassador long after our breakup (as I had been hers).What I'm working on this month, aside from surviving the heat, is preparing to put myself back out there, meet new creative people like my ex, and make things happen again so that, once more, I could act as an ambassador for the artists I meet, and they could act as mine.
All organic, without the help of an algorithm.
If you're in the same situation as me, I hope what I've shared helps. Leave a comment and tell me how it does. I'd love to hear from you.
What I’ve Loved Lately
Books
Speaking of algorithms and finding an audience, this month I am reading a book that, if it had come out today, the algorithm would've buried it because the author is “controversial,” which would've been a shame. The book, Journey to the End of Night, blew me away when I first read it in 1993, while I was still coming to terms with the existential crisis that came about after my military service.
As always, here’s the following description from Goodreads:
Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.
I have to admit I picked this book partly because it would give me an opportunity, again, to clown on the people who post reviews like this on Goodreads:
If this reviewer had bothered to finish it, as I did back in 1993, they would have realized that was the point of the book. Celine survived the Great War. That's the effect the First World War had on him. It was what compelled him to write, not for money (although he needed it) but to get the poison out. This book resonated with me so much back then because it was that disease I was also fighting to overcome. The disgust I was feeling for the world—that all combat veterans feel at some point and that, in the act of writing, we're trying to tether ourselves back to the world, to regular people who, in the perception that is shaped by the disease, we see as sleepwalking through life.
Going back to what so many of my friends have asked and their follow-up question, “Then why write?”
I write to get the poison out.
I write to dispel the perception I sometimes have of people so that I can continue to connect with them. I am actively working on dispelling that sense of loneliness that sometimes seems like the only way to cope with it is to self-medicate.
I self-medicate with words, songs, and the vibes projected by good people so that the foundation of my being can continue to be rooted in compassion, whereas the reviewer, who characterizes themselves as a “magnificent mansion,” appears to have a foundation rooted in ego.
I imagine the foundation at the base of their being is as fragile as the foundation of my house.
News and Updates
Music
If you love listening to DJ podcasts, I have two produced under my stage name, Karma of Dove, that I invite you to check out.
Three AM Deep
A monthly mixtape-style set devoted to underground techno, house, and nu-disco sounds loved by die-hards who are still on the dance floor at 3 a.m., while others are starting to make their way home.
World as Ecstasy
A monthly mixtape-style set devoted to world music and indie dance sounds made popular by the Buddha Bar series.
My main social media profile for music can be found at soundcloud.com/karmaofdove.
Photography
My main portfolio can be found at https://vemares.co/austin-boudoir/.
I continue to have an Instagram profile devoted to my photography, which remains under my real name. That can be found on my website.
Writing
For now, my novels and books of poetry are available through Amazon. Click here to see my current catalog.
Follow the Instagram profile devoted to my author platform at instagram.com/viktor.e.mares/.
This is a must-read for any artist.
The 1,000 True Fans Theory was proposed by Kevin Kelly in 2008, stating that an artist needs only 1,000 true fans to maintain a fruitful, albeit unspectacular, career. I’m okay with that.
I’ll publish soon.
I’m still in my feelings about this. I can’t wait for the heatwave to end.