define your terms, bitches

A while back, my dear old friend — the AWESOME NYC writer/artist/zinester/flâneur, Miss Ayun Halliday — posted as her Facebook status update this marvelous quote from Miss Amanda Fucking Palmer:

“Stop pretending art is hard.”

Concurring to my core, I responded with, “THANK YOU. Cleaning hotel rooms is hard. Picking grapes is hard. Mining coal is hard. Creating art is a GODDAMNED PLEASURE — and anyone who tells you any different is COMPLETELY FULL OF SHIT and should be immediately kicked in the taco.”

Both Miss Ayun and I were then swiftly taken to task by a woman on her friends list for being, “pompous for assuming everyone’s experience of creation is the same.”

Pompous? Perhaps. But my point is this: IN MY EXPERIENCE, most of the artists and creatives I have encountered who spend their time bleating on and on about how HARD it is to create their art tend to be:

1) 19 years old

2) RABID Sylvia Plath acolytes

3) SHITTY, UNINTERESTING, UNPRODUCTIVE artists.

Forgive me, but as a pompous prick…I am only able to forgive two of those crimes.

The way I see it is that by the time we tuck a few years under our gunts and realize our time in this delightful place is, indeed, quite finite, wringing our hands and idly waiting around for divine inspiration to strike whilst complaining about how “hard” it is to create the stunningly beautiful (or the marvelously grotesque) just becomes sort of…silly. You know?

So, because, ultimately, artists serve as the voice, the truth, and the conscience of humankind, I believe this shit needs to be put in its proper and helpful perspective. When I find myself, “struggling with my art”, here is the perspective that always works best for this particular RABID Sylvia Plath acolyte:

Ask an impoverished mother in Appalachia, Port-au-Prince, Detroit, or Darfur just how much she cares that my, “art is hard” — and my guess is she would undoubtedly respond in the delightful spirit of the following photo.

Now, ASS IN CHAIR.

HANDS ON WORK.

SHUT THE FUCK UP…and GET TO IT.

About muffybolding

Muffy Bolding is a mother/writer/actor/knitter/feminist/withered debutante who likes the smell of asparagus pee, and remains obsessed with the bathroom hygiene of her three children -- despite the fact that they are 23, 19, and 16. She is blissfully married to a cute Jewish boy who looks like Willie Wonka, but remains tragically in love with the dead poet, Ted Hughes. She has the mouth of a Teamster, and her patron saint is Rocco (pestilence relief.) Ms. Bolding lives in Southern California, where she enjoys typing words, making movies, and plucking the rings from the fingers of the dead. She was the co-creator and Editor-in-Chief of the award winning satire zine, Fresno Lampoon, and in between writing screenplays, carnival barking, and savagely threatening her trio of darling larvae with a wooden spoon, she currently publishes the zine, "Withered Debutante." More of her work can also be found in the anthology, "Mamaphonic: Balancing Motherhood and Other Creative Acts", the compilation zine, "Mamaphiles III: Coming Home", as well as in The Cortland Review and hipmama.com. She is currently writing and producing for film and television, and working on a book of essays entitled, "Inside A Chinese Dragon." She has slept around, but not nearly as much as she would have liked.

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