OK - 12:50 - Morning a long time away. I suffer from Sommerloch (I know this thanks to @felixxx) at least when it comes to my comic about Phill... Light, family celebrations, heat, bicycle trips... my brain is boiled.

But @shortcut wrote a post yesterday, and I knew that I had to write something about a thing i have had in mind since @roused released his inner hippie. Sounds confusing? It's the Sommerloch messing with my brain.

I have meet @shortcut here on Steemit and in e-mails - one day he might be coming to Copenhagen or I will go to Bonn, but right now we are virtual. Even so I have a good impression of his thoughts when it comes to art (I think), so when he wrote a post yesterday I was not surprised to read this:

Dear friends,

as you might know, I'm participating in this year's #maysketchaday, where I basically "exercise daily to build immunity to perfectionism. Any medium, anything goes."

When I was younger I was proud of my perfectionism. I used a lot of time, really a lot of time finishing my projects and I had to compensate by working manically. Time was invested and things was made... but slowly. At a certain time I made 4 large painting and it took me 6 month. When I finally had to say to myself, "these are as good as they get", my friends at the academy bought some beers and celebrated my incredible folly. I had high romantic ideas about art, as did most of the people I knew. We were children of the eighties. A time where this feeling was growing in us all, even though it made no sense. It was a strange time. The lurking atomic war, the experiments of our hippie parents that had left us children deeply scared while they just sat there talking about themselves, the nihilism of the yuppies (whose crazy superstar is now ruling the white house), the simple seducing synth-pop, the world of computer games that was so primitive that it must have harmed our brains, the drugs... and the punk-movement that had grown into a real life place, a community, an aspect of our lives even for the ones who hated punk.

Punk was a strange thing. It still had the age-old romanticism of the heroic, of the sublime. But it also was a radical political idea, and this is the aspect I want to talk about, because one of the radical ideas was that quality was a bogus. Some evil bourgeois control mechanism that was meant to hold us down. Everybody was equally good. John Coltrane and your friend who played guitar. I was never buying into this. I love John Coltrane, I love quality and I am old-fashioned enough to stay that way, but does that mean that you as an artist should shut the fuck up if you are not good enough?

This is the question I wanted to talk about. (And I just had to close the tab that played Chet Baker, because that was too damn much quality right now)

Enter @roused... who is a German, who is from USA, who knows a lot about music, an incredible person to whom I have been introduced by @shortcut. @roused and I talked about the inhibitions quality impose on us - in the comments of a post I am not able to find right now. I had posted a lot of my amateur music and we were somehow writing comments about that and some other stuff I can't remember right now... and now I remember :) It was about releasing your inner hippie! (a tag @shortcut invented - tag-inventor as he is.) So the question was: Would @roused publish some of his own music? The answer from @roused was a big NOOOO! And I was left incredibly curious and sort of embarrassed that I had just done that exact thing myself.

I am not going to come up with some big solution. I am torn. I am not sure that I dig this time where everybody just publish their dilettante kitsch crap, and I like it when people do anyway. I would like to get to know @roused's music even though it might have a hard time comparing to all the guitar-heroes he is making these great interviews with, and I appreciate @shortcut's project with overcoming the perfectionism (or maybe more precisely the inhibitions); I could also mention @steevc's many open mic posts. He sings. I like it.

This long, incoherent text will have to end. I hope you can read between the lines what I am getting at, but I wrote this underneath @shortcuts post today. Much better and shorter than this blob.

Here is what I wrote:

I have thought about what to write (yes, I use far to much time on comments, but this one I wanted to get right, so I didn't write yesterday). Then Youtube slowly through Johnny Otis, Nat King Cole and Esperanza Spalding took me to this:

Listen to the long introduction. It says all about inhibitions, perfectionism et all. I think that the most important thing to have in mind is that we can only give ourselves and we can never know what it means. Bob Dylan makes these mediocre paintings, he can't sing, but somehow he simply did himself in front of everybody. That's it. Our admiration for the masters will keep us on our toes, but it isn't meant to keep us on the ground.

I will like to end this messy post with this:

My friend @shortcut has started to write some posts every morning - #morgenseiten he calls it - morning-pages. Here is his explanation of the project:

It goes like this: you shall each morning write from the soul, anything going through your head.

He writes a lot more, but this is the essence :) (Read his first morgenseiten post here)

I have decided to try the same. I write from the top of my head every morning or late morning if I have been sleeping late. I only correct typos and make a headline afterwards. Else everything is left as written. Expect some of it to sound like stage directions.