There comes a time when a form you have developed, or a way of doing something, becomes overly familiar, and therefore the cause of much discontent and boredom. When Bob Dylan made his famous ‘switch’ to electronic guitars, he was booed: but what was the alternative? For him to gallop along, at the same steady rhythm on the same trail, for perpetuity: to grab his six string and pluck the same general chords and moan about the same all too familiar themes. Despite how much acclaim and financial success such a form of repetition might bring, it is not a state of being that one can sustain for long; that thing worked so hard for becomes a source of great pain. This is how I have felt with my own life as of late, and a great deal of my ‘work.’ What’s the solution? To quit, or complain about it (anymore than I just did here)? Not quite my thing. Complaining does nothing, and doing nothing itself drives me insane. Anyone who thinks that they can work tirelessly just in order to earn a forever-retirement beginning at a young age is a fool. So there we have it—I will twist and turn away from old moods, themes, and subjects.
The paid dimension of this blog alters the form and content of the writing here by a substantial amount. It might not be instantly clear as to why that is, but I will divulge. It is much like, I imagine, how a CEO feels if he has to consider board members, share holders, etc. You can’t simply roll up your sleeves and say ‘hey, we’re going in this direction and if you don’t like it you can fuck off.’ Some CEOs manage this—like Steve Jobs, for instance—but how he tells the consumer to fuck off is put a lot more delicately than that. What remains, however, is that there is a clear dynamic established, a dynamic that is quite easy to prop up if what is being offered is free, and is reduced, dramatically so, with the introduction of a reciprocated form of investment—usually financial, but not always. In our terms, it is the case that I have a rather annoying word in the back of my mind when I ‘create’ an article, or come up with an idea for one: is this valuable to a general kind of readership? It seems like an innocent question, and perhaps is even flavored by a quiet ethical concern, but how it modifies the practice of what is done here is more than innocent, and more than unsubstantial.
You might imagine that this question was even more pertinent for myself and my business partner when we began work on the brand we announced recently. Perfume, like fashion, is more than just a commodity, and has greater depth to it than mere utility: it is just as much an artistic expression, and any approach which doesn’t at least reckon with this comes out sterile, siphoned of all vital energy. This is how most ‘mainstream’ perfume design happens. It is hardly ever the result of one man or woman asserting their vision, who feel compelled by an idea and solemnly vow to see it through to the end, everything else be damned. It is instead ‘dreamed up’ in a boardroom by tasteless men in suits; the concept is whatever they think will appeal most to a specific market as it relates to ongoing industry trends; notes, concoctions, formulas are passed through rigorous consumer polling. It is fundamentally a democratic process, everything has been approved by committee, and assembled with input from any man walking on the street. There is, as a result, essentially no ‘vision,’ and by consequence nothing at stake other than revenue and projected growth. This, to me, represents a great failure of commerce. We decided that we wouldn’t do things this way, and it was because of this approach with this brand that I realized I was failing here, with Good Propaganda. With every idea I had for something I wished to cover, I incorrectly considered what that unnameable mass called a ‘readership’ might think about it. I completely avoided anything which I didn’t think would appeal to most people, and I narrowed my focus dramatically to the most shallow of topics, attempting to make them as profound and accessible as possible. While I think the general trend of thought in my writing over the last year—amounting to some 80,000+ words, and spanning over 40 articles—it is now an approach that I can’t stand by anymore. The terrifying truth of the matter is that I need more courage: I need the courage to fail, otherwise what else is there? Even if an article, or the blog, ‘succeeds,’ it won’t have been my own success. It will be mere validation from a market. That is not what I’m going after—what I am going after, such as truth or originality, does not pivot around such things as success, or recognition in one’s own time. These are rightly viewed as rapacious constraints around artistry and pioneering. The willingness to fail—and, by a great extrapolation, the willingness to be excommunicated or exposed to death—is what allows for courage. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the refusal of its dictation. Fear accompanies courage, but does not guide it. This is the only way to live, it is the only way to think, it is the only way to create. So there it is—the new attitude I will take with future writings.
Another problem I’ve gained awareness of as regards my writing, or really my general approach with anything shared, is I’ve done my best to ‘disembody’ my thinking: in short, to disentangle my thought from where it comes from, which is of course my own life and the experiences gained from there. It was my thinking that by more or less removing myself from the equation, I could present the fruit of my labor without muddying up said fruit from the soil it came from. This, from one perspective, could be seen as a kind of insecurity (and admitting to the insecurity in question does not by itself delimit said insecurity, or even lessen its hold). My name, or rather my ‘alias,’ which everyone by now is familiar with so as to maybe not think about my actual name, Vanya, is itself a kind of sly synecdoche of my project in general. My real name—what my mother and my friends call me by in ‘real life’—is Ivan, and Vanya is simply a nickname for Ivan. So the name that everyone online knows me as, is almost real, almost true, almost authentic, but not quite. My profile picture plays into this as well: it’s a selfie in an old bedroom of mine, cut off at the chin and put into a black and white filter. To a certain extent, the creation of an alter ego is an unavoidable consequence of being ‘known’ by others. Even if all efforts are taken to remain 1:1, as close to signal without inviting distortion in, the distortion is ultimately not in your own hands, as it is the result of a perception formed by others which happens regardless of who you are, what you think, what you feel about the world or yourself. This is a problem which more or less persists in all forms of relationships, whether they are conducted online or not, whether it’s of a personal and intimate scale, or is like that of one single man addressing a great number of people at once. Wherever there is communication, there is also miscommunication, and the effects of such miscommunication inevitably comes back to the one who communicates, in some cases as advice, feedback, or critique, but also, if you aren’t careful, as forms of control. This is a trap that I see all too often online, and by ‘public figures.’ At a certain point, who you are fades, and you are left with, or you become a representation of, a figure in a mirror, without reference to the original being from which the mirrored image sprang from. This, precisely this, is what I have tried to avoid, and why, before the ‘Vanya’ account, I refrained from putting my work out there, sharing my thoughts—I was an ‘unknown entity,’ and by design. But work demands an audience, whether it is present when the author is alive or not, and this requires, at least, a kind of openness with one person, and from there a great deal many more which may or may not follow. As the sign says before the entrance to hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here…’ but, as an old friend once said, who also gave me advice when I asked for it once even though he had no reason to: ‘Part of every ominous intuition is the strange sense that we’re powerless to heed it. “No good can come of this” means “no good can come of this,” not “turn the other way.”’ Said another way, perhaps: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here, does not mean don’t enter. Just abandon all hope, and carry on…
As a relatively young man still, I am naturally quite competitive, and measure myself up against the most impressive figures still living, and most of the time, already dead. Hemingway was 26 when he wrote The Sun Also Rises; Steve Jobs was 21 when he founded Apple; Napoleon became a general at 24; Yves Saint Laurent the head designer of Dior at age 21, without any traditional training as we would understand it. Need I mention Alexander the Great becoming King of Macedonia at 20? Or Nietzsche given the title of full professor of Greek and Latin languages at 26? It always seemed to me, and there was historical precedent for this thought, that there was no real reason to wait. If you feel compelled to do something, find a new place, discover a new innovation, or merely develop a corpus of work, there was nothing but timidity barring you from at least trying. Hell, Arthur Rimbaud, one of the most revered poets and also influential, quit writing forever by the time he was 20—meaning, he had finished what would be his life’s work before that point, and had composed his letters and poems in his teenage years. As ever, all of the figures mentioned here have been in my mind for the past seven years, as I went from place to place, and thing to thing, in search of a task most suited for whatever my particular talents may be. As it happens, shortly after I turned 25 a few weeks ago, I will share two major works, more or less at the same age as my spiritual forebears did, and in some cases ahead of them. The novel, having been originally conceived two years ago and worked on tirelessly since then, is now being edited by a close friend of mine, the only person I consider worthy of the title of ‘peer’ in relation to me, and thus trustworthy enough to bring the novel to the finish line. Soon, very soon. I don’t think it’s helpful to announce exact release dates too far in advance. I will likely drop it after a week of promotion. I’m not even sure I want to promote it at all. I’m long past the stage where I feel that it’s necessary for me to promote my work. I do the work because the work interests me. Everything after that, not so much.
The second major work, of course, is the brand—Saint Sans. The opportunity to develop a product in such a cloistered and insular industry was very appealing to me. I remember a year ago I sat down with a friend, who more or less didn’t believe it could be done. We had a drunken screaming match, and a year later he smelled it. A text followed the morning after, with one final word adorning the admission that it could be done, and in fact had been done: ‘Bravo.’ That’s enough for me.
In the last few months in particular, I have been working on it, with my business partner who you all know, I’m sure, from sunup to sundown. I was all too happy to throw myself completely into it, and with that has come a kind of absence from my presence online and in this blog too. Energy is finite, and you need to know when and how to direct it, and it seemed like the right time to go more or less singular with my focus. But now, thankfully, I can achieve something closer to a balance, and with this comes an ability to return to this writing with a fresher set of eyes, and maybe a fresher approach. With the release of these ‘major works,’ two installations in my general oeuvre, also seems like a good time to inaugurate this project here, which resembles more of a fluid, ongoing record of my thinking, which evolves and pushes constantly into new territory, with its own new style. More personal, more ‘real,’ for lack of a better word—more ‘I’ sentences, and less omniscient 3rd person hovering beyond the text. Everyone talks about how difficult it is to be yourself, to become yourself, but reading how difficult it is doesn’t quite translate into a true knowledge of its difficulty without yourself undergoing the process.
As I have mentioned before, people are not people, just as blue is not blue—these, like names and labels of all sorts, gesture towards an essence which supersedes that which attempts to signify it. The word love does not incarnate love. Just the same, the name Vanya—which I may stop using, and instead go by Ivan, in a further attempt to 1:1 everything—does not by itself gesture to who I am. That name, passed around from chat box to chat box, or tweet to tweet, maybe even said out loud in some instances, does not tell the truth of what I am, no more than John does for John, or Alex for Alex. But with that name, which attaches itself to that personhood and being, comes a kind of tether to ‘other’ people; it creates a social bond and continuity, in the way that when you think of a name, such as Vanya or John or Alex, you also immediately think of the associations that come with it, such as physical attributes or personality quirks, or deeds or sins. It is impossible to convey how such a thing weighs on the fluidity of a person’s being, in the form of expectation and the ensuing guilt or repercussion of failing to meet said expectation. We remember great men for their accomplishments, but we do so looking backwards: in the moment they were all rebels, not-yet idols or names in history books. Jesus Christ was not just a messiah, but a transgressive, boundary destroying figure; they crucified him exactly for this, we should remember. It’s not a small thing to continually refuse limitation, to swear your oath upon that which actually moves within, or ‘as’ life. And not everyone can pull this off—indeed, most do not. Those who find a material form of success or staying power beyond that line they crossed without being accepted by the community have their own kind of a pantheon and labeling: usually we call them evil, villainous, or downright wicked.
To tie up some strands here, I might return to Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, a movie about a man I revere, and a movie which I loathed for its endless failings. The actual experience wasn’t so bad, but I must give the credit to the cocktails I had with friends down the street before the viewing. On every other account, the film was a catastrophe. Ridley Scott undoubtedly thinks of Napoleon not as a ‘great man,’ but as a kind of bumbling fool, or otherwise preternaturally fortunate. This in itself is not such a bad stance to take, and in fact I love Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which more or less has the same quarrel. However, where Tolstoy’s take on the procedure of history was enlightening, and well done, which is to say fairly, Scott’s was mere caricature, and a poorly drawn one at that. It was as if he had never even read a biography of Napoleon, or was able to contend with what would have animated him as a young soldier during the revolution. Instead, we are treated to 3 hours of his stumbling sexual yearning for Josephine, and out of five battles shown, two were his defeats. The movie, in fact, says nothing, is about nothing, and has little to no insight shown into the characters themselves, which were miscast. I enjoy Joaquin Phoenix, but he was far too old to play a charismatic Napoleon in his mid 20s to late 30s, which constitutes much of the runtime. Disappointment, but not even that—I never expected much from Ridley Scott anyways, and Napoleon strikes me as a man too big for the big screen.
This also illustrates a multifold point I gestured at far above. When you put yourself ‘in the arena,’ so to speak (I hate using cliches, which this one is by now an unfortunate form of, but I think of Theodore Roosevelt, and not dawdling twitter handles who say it), you open yourself up to a great deal of criticism, and this is why there is a kind of advantage to being more or less anonymous, if you must put yourself out there. Even here, just now, I criticized Ridley Scott, somewhat harshly, although not nearly as harshly as I might have wanted to, who did in fact ‘put himself out there,’ and, funnily enough, he himself was criticizing Napoleon, a man in the arena if there ever was one. Large crowds are, as I have mentioned before also, not just a powerful concentration of energy for some kind of grand use, but also, and because of precisely this, are a source of danger for anyone who attracts their attention. I can’t imagine how much the average pop star fears stalkers, paparazzis, random engagements on the street. I completely understand Kanye screaming at paparazzis, and I applaud Justin Bieber’s smooth handling of it whenever it happens. All the same, it has generally not been something I’m interested in, but recognition (I won’t use the word fame) is a form of consequence for having to put one’s work out there, which, if you do the work, I do believe you are condemned to do—it’s a matter of obligation. And as things have turned out, I have put work out there for a while now, and will be putting out the two major works cited above very soon, and because of this, the veil of anonymity becomes rather impossible to sustain. Which isn’t to say that I will suddenly drop it, or move on from it, by posting questionable, attention-seeking selfies, but the name Vanya might sooner rather than later feel ridiculous, especially if friends and family know the brand name, and that name continues to grow. More than that, if it does grow, I see a very real case being made for me flying out to certain places—LA, NYC, Miami, Paris—and getting involved with growing the brand however I can, even if that includes rubbing shoulders with people, getting dinner, making new friends in important places—that whole terrifying ordeal. It would feel absurd for me to have to explain why I have a large twitter account named Vanya, and deal with the discrepancy in terms of online behavior with who I am ‘in real life,’ which, believe it or not, is rather laidback, quiet, and more or less passionate, but not overtly eccentric or ‘larger than life.’
In the end, there is a person writing this, a person behind the works which will soon release, and this person wishes to pull away from unnecessary mystery, and into whatever remains natural for the sake of the work, and for the sake of authentic being. Rather than anticipate in the form of a self-fulfilling announcement what that will look like, I will just begin acting and writing as I see fit, with a more conscious posture towards that pernicious dynamic called expectation, which must always be overcome in the name of that which calls us all forward. There is no other way of life that I will accept. No compromises.