dabbling in all sorts of ways to hush up our inevitable deaths

HELLO. I am a creator of many things. I write nonfiction and comedy; I am a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist; I curate an art-science salon; I have scholarly training as an anthropologist, historian of science, and experimental psychologist—all of which I am constantly trying to channel into new forms of writing and teaching. I live in a Boston artists’ collective called Cloud Club, which is home base for much of my work and where I host events that integrate all of these artistic and intellectual explorations. My three children live with me and my partner there part-time. I am doing my best to inspire them to realize themselves creatively and intellectually, without compromise. Given that I am struggling for basic financial survival, this is not always easy.

The sections that follow explain more about my background, my current and future projects, and why I am seeking out patronage to support these endeavors. But in short, here's the monthly game plan:

• One magazine-quality article (which I will attempt to publish via major venues)
• Four blog posts, including work-in-progress from my next major book project, MAKERAKING  (my website is metasymptom.com)
  
• One Lost Marbles Salon (in reality, one every 4-6 weeks)
• At least one comedic post (and / or possible video from my very first attempts at stand-up)
• Continuous work on projects with less tangible deliverables:
  • pitching new article ideas to a variety of publishing venues
  • continued songwriting for and management of Bury Me Standing
  • live music performances in multiple bands

If you become a patron, I will also send you a monthly letter to let you know *how things are going.*

~Background, current & future projects, reasons for patronage~

WRITING AND PUBLISHING

BACKGROUND:

I stubbornly cling to a Romantic ideal of art “speaking for itself” — that is, that good creative work can’t but help find its audience. At the same time, I’m also experiencing how recognition and basic livelihood do not go hand-in-hand. I have done comedy writing for Cracked. My piece has 1.5 million views. I made $50. I wrote an important article for The Atlantic on the racist legacy of scientific research on marijuana use. I made $100. I wrote a piece for Wired on YouTube parodies of antidepressant advertisements as a new form of patient activism. I didn’t get paid at all, because it was counted as an op-ed piece. And so on.

This is not to say that I will stop pursuing these and similar publications to get my work out into the world; they have much larger audiences than I have on my own, and it is usually quite rewarding to work with their experienced editors. But given the amount of time it takes to research and write and pitch and edit and re-write and fill out all the contracts, their direct financial compensation is, at the end of the day, an unsustainable source of income.

The patronage model would make writing a less-risky endeavor. For example, if I have put innumerable hours into a piece that I cannot seem to get published in traditional venues, I can at least publish it myself through my website, knowing that I essentially have been compensated for this work by a trusting audience of patrons. And the dialoguing that is possible on my site via comments could make these essays living, evolving pieces of scholarship and contemplation that perhaps could later be reworked and published elsewhere to find even larger audiences.

Here is some of my published writing:


My personal website also features some unpublished, work-in-progress writing.

NEXT BIG WRITING PROJECT:

"MAKERAKING"
I have begun work on a major new book project, called MAKERAKING. It’s part autobiography, part philosophical and anthropological exploration of debt, drugs, and space; part plaintive invocation of new muses. This book represents a new experimental form of writing for myself, which intertwines my scholarly research in the history of psychiatry and technology with some years’ worth of extensive personal journaling that documents mental illness, vexatious relationships with drugs and alcohol and bodies, and occasionally obscene psychoanalytic essaying on the guts of the individual overwhelmed by social norms. It might read something like a modern-day Eros and Civilization or Life Against Death meeting Dostoyevsky’s Notes From The Underground and Terence McKenna’s psychedelic revisionist historicism. When it's funny it will be funny.

I recently realized that this project has, until now, been drawn and quartered from itself. I had been working on seemingly separate book projects: One on how social media is transforming relationships between artists and audiences; and one on the recent history of psychopharmaceutical and psychedelic drugs. In the throes of my own journaling, I discovered how these ‘topics’ were in fact threads in the same fabric. Both books ultimately have the same philosophic thrust—a progressivist digging for creativity and authenticity in the midst of a society that blocks the imagination at every turn.

Perhaps more significantly MAKERAKING is the first writing project that I have been intimidated by, because it’s the first time I’m setting out to share writing that comes from my gut. My published writing so far has been ... safe. It’s been smart or witty, but maybe also aping at writing that goes for the jugular. So this book will drag my intellect through my guts (delicious). Otherwise I fear I'll doom myself to wispy gamesmanship.

I do eventually want to publish the book. And although it will contain plenty of original scholarship on drugs and political economy, its style will likely defy the strictures of a traditional academic press. I’ll shoot for a big press. But first I need to complete a full manuscript. I need time. But not more than one year from now. I already have a couple hundred pages of writing …

Some of it looks like this (it's blurry in real life):


CURATION OF THE LOST MARBLES SALON

I have recently launched the Lost Marbles Salon. This is a series of events that combines lecture-style presentations with music, performance art, and art installations, with each salon addressing a particular theme (recent ones have included “secrets,” “bodies,” and “circuits”). Past participants have included a neuroscientist, a contortionist, an undertaker-poet, a beatboxer-didgeridoo duo, a plein air painter, an anthropologist, a mechanical engineer. With my multiple hats as an academic, writer, and performer, I am lucky enough to be networked into these very different scenes, which I can now pull together to transform how to explore and experience a given topic or idea. The Lost Marbles Salon is held at Cloud Club, the Boston artists’ collective where I live, and it all takes place in a pretty damn magical space.

This is what (one corner of) Cloud Club looks like:


Here's an excerpt of a performance from a recent Lost Marbles Salon (theme was "bodies"):


This space itself is relatively small, comfortably accommodating about 40 people. My current monetization model with Lost Marbles is simply to collect donations at the door and split them among the performers / participants. I also reimburse myself for whatever I’ve spent on wine and snacks. But I’ve yet to make any sort of profit; at the end of the day I’m lucky to break even.

There is also quite a bit of front-end work involved in curating the salon, from tracking down and inviting potential performers, coordinating dates that work for everyone, maintaining the invitation list, sending out announcements, tracking RSVPs, setting up the space for the performances, arranging for people to work the door and collect donations, and researching and writing whatever new piece I end up presenting at Lost Marbles myself.

I plan to scale up Lost Marbles, including its own website with searchable, archived content. I will also set up live streaming of the salons themselves.

BACKGROUND IN RESEARCH, TEACHING

My official training is that of an academic scholar, and university teaching and research positions are my usual day jobs. But good, longterm appointments are very hard to find, especially if you are not able to relocate (which for me would entail uprooting my children, leaving Cloud Club, dismembering Bury Me Standing, and abandoning my entire network of artists and musicians—not least of whom is my beloved partner who is a valued teacher at the Berklee College of Music). So while I’ve held a number of postdoctoral research positions and lectureships—prestigious ones, too—they have all been limited appointments. I am currently without any academic appointment, other than non-stipendiary formal connections. This is not for lack of trying; it’s just a tough job market, and the academic job cycle is dramatically slower than for other lines of employment.

At the same time, I’ve always looked askance at a traditional academic career in the first place. Going after tenure requires a narrowing of the kinds of questions you get to ask, the networks you travel within, and the kinds of venues you where will likely publish. But even just within academia my trajectory suggests a kind of unquenchable yearning and detouring: I went to a music conservatory, then a quirky liberal arts college. I got a master’s degree in cognitive neuroscience, then a Ph.D. in the history and social study of science & technology. I have held multiple postdoctoral positions where I did research on everything from medicine and policy to behavioral economics and neuroendocrinology. I have taught in history of science and anthropology departments. So, I wander, but not aimlessly. My own intellectual and academic path with all its disciplinary twists and turns reveals a personal obsession with exploring the undeniable weirdness of the very possibility of human existence. What are we? What are we here for? What makes for a good life? How should that be attained? All of this makes me interesting and at least likely to pick up piecemeal teaching. But in practice this eclecticism has made me nearly unhireable for ultra-competitive traditional tenure-track professorships—precisely where the real longterm academic job security is.

With patronage support I could worry less about pursuing these full-time tenure-track positions, and be more selective taking part-time teaching positions that feel least compromising. Or perhaps I could become liberated altogether from the university, with complete autonomy to develop newly inspired modes of teaching, including The Lost Marbles Salon.

I must admit that I have found university lecturing to be uncomfortably archaic, especially in the age of social media. How strange to talk at a couple hundred students gathered passively in a room together. Why not just record myself and post it online for anyone to consume?

I would also add that, in my humble opinion, the current state of academic publishing is undemocratic and elitist. Unless you have a valid university ID, it is hard to gain access to academic journals. Otherwise they have prohibitive pay walls (e.g. charging a reader $35 to download a single article). Academic publishing may be important to advance one’s academic career, but it’s not obvious how that writing itself can find wider audiences.

So, while I am eminently qualified for academic work—both teaching and publishing—I have experienced disheartening compromises with both. Currently I do still pursue this line of employment since, at the end of the day, it offers some autonomy for me to craft my own voice, at least compared to many other day jobs out there. Not to mention health care. But ideally I want to be less tethered to it. I am looking for patronage to help me attain the degree of independence I have learned is necessary for me to be as creative as possible.

My educational trajectory so far:

MUSIC

Your patronage will indirectly help my band Bury Me Standing, for which I do much of the songwriting, managing, and promoting. In general the band is trying to fund itself through live performances. The music we release online is free unless somebody opts to pay for downloads. That said, an additional income stream might allow us to produce more videos and help to fund professional-quality live recordings. We are also developing a video mapping component to our live shows, which will soon require paying fabricators and coders.

Bury Me Standing has started collaborating with producer David Bottrill (Tool, King Crimson). We are in pre-production phases with him right now, but we will need a substantial amount of funding to take that relationship to the next stage and head into an actual studio.

Here is some of the music I have written for Bury Me Standing (these are soundcloud links):


[band photo by SKuby]

For nearly a decade I have been an integral part of the Boston music scene, mainly drumming for numerous bands. While I’ve recently cut back my involvement with some of these projects to focus on Bury Me Standing, I still drum for HUMANWINE, The Folks Below, and Adam Glasseye and Insect Fable. As any working musician knows, rehearsing and doing shows is time-consuming. But it is a crucial part of sustaining a local creative scene.

I have been a percussion instructor, both teaching private lessons (at students' homes and through a Worcester music store) and conducting workshops on found-object percussion and groove-based drumming. My partner Vessela Stoyanova and I are in the midst of developing more advanced workshops on odd meters and progressive rock.

Here is a fuller list of projects I have performed with in Boston:


GETTING BEYOND FEAR AND LOATHING

As I near the age of 40, I have the impending sense that my life is on a collision course with itself. The powers-that-be keep pressing in to keep me in debt, to thwart attempts to find fulfilling employment within traditional realms of the material world. I have the résumé of an ambitious polymath, but I am broke and I slip further and further into debt. I have even gone through bankruptcy, car repossession, and liens put on my bank account. I must admit that, especially as a father of three, I constantly battle the guilt and wonderment of failure that society has instilled in me over being materially worse off than I’ve ever been. It’s like the cruel pub sign that Kurt Vonnegut evoked to epitomize American inequity in which the poor are taught to loath themselves: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?”

Indeed. I find myself fantasizing more about winning the lottery than just about anything else. And I don’t imagine myself jet-setting all over the world or living lavishly in any way. I simply imagine myself waking up and getting to create exactly what I want to create, without worrying about scrambling for part-time insecure teaching jobs, or other forms of employment that will distract me from my true calling.

At the same time I have found myself getting pulled towards something more significant, more redeeming. I now live in a bizarre art space where i hold unique events that merge art and scholarship; I’m now writing for the first time for myself; I’ve co-created a band and am songwriting for the first time.

So I am turning to Patreon as both a viable and uncompromising way to help provide a basic living from my creative endeavors, which at this point do not yet generate a viable income on their own. To be honest, I believe that, in a true civic democracy, all digital “content” (awful word) should be free. But that leaves us to figure out how writers, artists, musicians, and alternative educators can earn their livings. Shy of a radical reworking of economic safety nets in the U.S. (like guaranteed living stipends and health care for all citizens), direct patronage has become an important gift-economy model that sidesteps demeaning “opportunities” of market capitalism, like advertising or corporate sponsorship.

The patronage relationship is one of trust. You need to trust that I will work tirelessly to push myself to create extraordinary things. Most importantly, you need to be excited about the creations I am putting into the world, from writing (academic, popular, comedic, epic) to organizing and hosting art-think salons to songwriting and performing original music.

And for me this is what Patreon boils down to: I am seeking out patrons who will essentially fund me to push myself in these directions, who will help literally buy me the freedom to create what deep in my bones I know I am supposed to create, without compromise, without fear.

THANK YOU.

• *** To be honest, I will do my best to pump out all of my creative work regardless of how much patronage I receive. But the more direct support I get, the less time I'll spend scrounging for insecure jobs and the more time I'll have to focus on this creative output.***