Some of my inspirations
1) Failure Tolerance
I’m a big fan of failing early and often, and publicly too! When you accept that you definitely will fail—and other people will witness it—and you’re still willing to do the thing anyway, then you are scott free to be, to do. To create something unlikely. The best things in my life have happened because I have been willing to fail—spectacularly. Before I do I usually have to coach my ego that We are not actually being annihilated. That This might be uncomfortable for a little while but it’s not life-threatening. Then swallow and do the thing.
2) The thinker of tender thoughts — fan art version
Shel Silverstein’s The Thinker of Tender Thoughts is its own powerful reflection on losing ourselves to respectability. But have you seen the fan art version (signed “Kellen”) where he doesn’t cut off his hair and it grows wilder and chokes out the haters?
3) All organizing is science fiction
A gift from one of my favorite contemporary imaginers Adrienne Maree Brown. We can only have the future that we can imagine. If you want to organize, if you want a kinder world, your first work is in fiction. “I believe that all organizing is science fiction—that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle, and almost everything about how we orient toward our bodies is shaped by fearful imaginations. Imaginations that fear Blackness, brownness, fatness, queerness, disability, difference. Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.”
4) Bill of Musical Rights
Music for People has such a warm, humanistic approach to music. Music in the West has become so performance oriented. But it’s a human expression and a human need, that’s accessible and natural to all of us.
5) “What is the power of art?”
In a powerful set at MassMOCA, Saul Williams recounted how the Klan had all but been put out until the release of The Birth of a Nation—then membership exploded the following years—Williams asked “what is the power of art? What IS the power of art?” And I’ll add, what will we do with that power?
