So okay, good news -- I'm getting tantalizingly close to the re-opening of my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, or CCLaP. In fact, for awhile there I thought it was going to be today when the revamped CCLaP website would be online again; I was to go through the first half of my oral surgery a week and a half before that (wherein I had eight teeth surgically removed), so I figured that I'd have nothing but time after that to sit around and finish up the new website, and start populating it with entries each day.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Here's me in happier times -- right after the first surgery, in fact, two Thursdays ago, when I was all doped up on Vicodin and Novocaine and not caring the slightest that blood was currently gurgling out of my mouth (indeed, taking a kinda perverse pleasure in it). Ah, but Novocaine eventually wears off, and Vicodin prescriptions eventually run out, leaving one with an unpleasant truth; that one has recently had eight teeth rather forcibly ripped out of one's head, and that this is bound to make one's mouth pretty fucking sore for quite some time afterwards. So sore, in fact, that one might find oneself suddenly unable to concentrate for more than about ten minutes at a time, making pervasive work on a central project pretty much impossible. Oh yeah, that's right, surgery sucks, and your entire life tends to come to one big fucking standstill afterwards. How could I have forgotten that?

In fact, this gets into an even larger problem I'm having these days -- that over the last couple of months, I've decided to make some pretty big changes to my life (including all this dental work, reopening CCLaP, quitting smoking, bicycling a lot more, and gaining 40 pounds), and so now tend to get extremely frustrated whenever this process takes longer than I want it to...which tends to be just about all the time. I mean, this clash between my dental work and the CCLaP reopening is a perfect example -- I literally can't tell you how frustrating it is to be to be forced to sit around and do nothing for about a month altogether, for the pathetic reason that my body can't keep up with my ambitions. How dare my body not be able to keep up with all the things I want to accomplish these days! Who the fuck does my body think it is, demanding to take a month to get over having 16 teeth surgically removed, and refusing to let me concentrate on other projects until it's over? Fuck my body, man!

Those older than me, of course, I'm sure are already laughing with recognition; why yes, I am almost 40, and yes I am dealing right now with my first serious acknowledgment of mortality. Because let's face it -- when you're younger, you think you understand what human frailty and mortality is about, but you don't really start to understand it until the first time you try to do something with your body and your body won't let you. Right now, right now at this point in my life, is the first time I've ever had to deal with this, as is the case with a lot of males in their late thirties; the first time I tell my body to do certain things and my body simply replies with, "Nope, ain't gonna be happening today."

It's frustrating, frankly, an emasculating experience to be sure, and a major contributor to the fabled White Male Mid-Life Crisis; more so than even women, I think, men especially hate telling their bodies to do something and having their bodies refuse. And it can be a terrifying experience too, in that it can sometimes feel like someone else has taken over your body, and is making it do things you don't want it to. What do you mean, I'm suddenly not going to have solid stools for a week for no discernible reason? Do you know who exactly the fuck you're talking to? Who are you to deny me, body? I fucking own your ass!

So anyway, that's part of the process I'm going through this spring; not only changing a lot of the details of my daily life, but also learning how to be more patient with these changes, and also to accept that there are some things (like recovering from surgery, apparently) that I simply can't do as fast now as I could when I was younger. And that's probably the biggest irony of the entire situation -- that I'm having a lot harder time accepting that last fact than other more alarming things in my life, for example just the massive amount of physical pain I'm dealing with these days because of all this dental work. Physical pain is something I'm used to, something I know how to cope with; my body not obeying me, though, is a new experience, and one that freaks me out a lot more. Yeah, older readers, I know, I know -- if I think it's bad now, just wait until I'm in my forties and older, I know. Let me have my mid-life crisis, will ya?!

Okay, okay, enough whining already! What's in place for the revamped CCLaP, I hear you asking instead. Oh, I'm glad you asked! Basically it boils down to this -- that after six months of CCLaP being on hiatus, and after me spending the last month thinking intensely about the ways I want to do things differently this time, I think I'm finally beginning to understand what a lot of friends have been saying over the last couple of years, which is that I've been tending to skip over the exact things concerning arts administration that I'm actually best at, and that I could be having a lot more successes if I simply wouldn't do that. I'll explain...

One of the things I've been adamant about with CCLaP this whole time is that it not be a repeat of the other no-budget arts experiences I've already had; the entire point of opening CCLaP, after all, is to start generating a significant amount of revenue, giving me the kinds of budgets for future projects I've never had access to before. And so when my friends would say things like, "Why don't you start with what you know, by putting on no-budget projects that you could charge a little money for, and start building a profit that way?" I'd always respond with, "Been there, done that, now I'm interested in getting a big chunk of change from an outside investor at once, and doing big things with it from the get-go." I've since had that desire pretty much beaten out of me, by actually finding an investor last summer and then having him fuck me over a week before CCLaP's live-event schedule was slated to start. And that almost killed the arts center for good, frankly, which is why I put everything on hiatus for six months to begin with, because I was just so fucking angry and bitter over everything that it wouldn't have done any constructive good at all to keep working on it at that point.

But if I'm no longer going to pursue an external investor, what to do? Well, raise the money myself, obviously, which gets into the crux of the problem, first discovered last summer -- that I haven't convinced enough people yet that I know what the fuck I'm doing, or at least not enough yet to raise the several thousand dollars I need to make an actual serious go at it all. And this (I think) finally gets into what my friends have been talking about this whole time -- that what I'm really best at when it comes to this subject is in pointing out cool artists most others haven't heard of, from the giant slushpile of crap currently known as the public sphere. And my friends are right -- I am good at that, better than a lot of people, for a variety of specific reasons:

1) I have more patience than others for going through the crap in the first place; this is the guy, after all, who keeps on top of 400 blogs a day, as well as over 150 photographers each day at Flickr (both via RSS feeds), who was attending a peak of four poetry open mics every week in the 1990s, etc.

2) I've gotten very good at discerning the difference between beginning crap and beginning crap with potential, because of dealing with the subject almost every day for 17 years now.

3) I'm naturally talented at explaining why the good stuff is good, and why people should pay more attention to it than to the rest of the crap; in fact, you could argue that this was my greatest strength as a professional writer as well, which is why my blog was always a lot more popular than my novels.

And 4), I'm good at looking at all these things in a unique way; of appreciating artists for reasons others might not have considered, or connecting groups of artists in ways that others haven't thought of doing.

And really, if you want to get all Deconstructionist and everything, ultimately that's my job as an underground arts administrator -- I'm in charge of wading through the unending pile of crap that exists in that medium, pointing out the stuff I think worth your attention, explaining why I think it's worth your attention, and convincing you that I'm not full of shit myself. And if I do a good job at this, the theory goes, you all will eventually reward me, by buying the merchandise and attending the live events I end up producing, featuring these underground artists you've never heard of. And so all this, then, fairly profoundly changes the way I need to approach operations at CCLaP; because before, you see, the idea was to build a community around CCLaP who all had an active hand in who and what the center featured, so in that case the quality of the individual artists took a backseat to the building of the actual community.

Now, though, with the goal mostly being to convince people to take me seriously as an arts administrator, and to generate revenue rather than create an activist community, the entire nature of what CCLaP will do becomes different; it's about quality now much more than quantity, of very selectively picking out just the best and most intriguing artists I come across, rather than the "open call" system of last year's Fellowship program. I'm pretty sure that this is what my friends have meant over the last couple of years, expressed in different ways; that what I just described is what I'm really best at, not building communities of strangers and finding outside financial investors and all that, and that they're surprised I've been skipping over the stuff I'm specifically best at, just so I can do things the same ol' boring way that everyone else does things.

And really, when approached from this attitude, it's hard to disagree; and indeed, I'm tempted to call myself for a moron for not seeing it earlier, and realizing that I have indeed been skipping over the very stuff that could most easily and profoundly help me get CCLaP initially established. Although to be fair, my original sentiments still hold true; the entire goal of CCLaP still continues to be to generate a significant amount of revenue, so that eventually I can take on the kinds of projects I've never gotten the chance to take on before, as well as never have to work another day job besides it again. I guess the thing that's changed, upon reflection this winter, is the realization that I can do the things my friends have been urging me to do, while still doing it in a new way and not repeating the experiences of my past.

So in that regard, here's now how things are shaping up as far as spring and summer activities for CCLaP, which I'm hoping to start up in about three weeks when I'm finally fully recovered from my surgery...

--To begin with, good news for those who like my online writing, which is that the CCLaP website is changing quite a bit; it's going to be even more frequently updated than last year, now featuring not only a lot of notices about Chicago-area events (like was done last year) but also now lots of extended critical essays from me, about all the various random artistic crap I'm into at any given moment. In fact, I've already started getting myself into the habit, over at the other personal blog I maintain these days; I just got a Netflix account for my birthday, in fact, and am now writing a thousand-word essay there about each movie I see, which I will be moving over to the CCLaP website as soon as it's open. The theory is two-fold, you see: 1) that if I can get up detailed analyses of the more mainstream artistic things I like (such as movies, for example), this will give audience members a much better reference point for understanding why I pick the various underground artists I do; and 2) that the more regular original content I'm able to get up to the site (especially fun stuff like reviews of weirdo movies), the bigger and more passionate an audience I'll have there. So anyway, that adds up to just a tremendous more amount of output from me there than before -- a Flickr photographer of the day, a story or poem of the day, movie reviews, essays about random crap I'm obsessed with at the time (for example, I recently watched all the 1930s and '40s Max Fleischer Superman cartoons, which blew me away), along of course with lots of notices about local artistic events, as many as I hear about myself.

--Then to augment that, I've decided to beef up last year's original podcast plans -- to start doing them at least twice a week this year, one an audio episode that consists of an interview with someone intriguing, the other a video episode that covers a recent local live event, shot on my cellphone and edited on my home computer, all of it delivered via an iTunes channel among other options. Hey, why not, right? This is another example of what I've been talking about, of something I'm actually pretty good at and for some reason have been just skipping over in my past plans for CCLaP. I've already been doing one form or another of a podcast, after all, for the last two years now, and for a lot of people those are their favorite things of all the stuff I do; for almost no extra effort at all, I could be producing a twice-weekly podcast that could turn out to be really quite popular, all with technology I already own and with almost no overhead costs.

--All the while, then, I'll also be accepting submissions of literary works, and hopefully later this summer will be ready to publish CCLaP's first paper book and actually start generating the organization's first revenue. And again, this time I've decided to go a completely different route, which is to say that I'm going back to the old way of doing things; that instead of getting obsessed with printing CCLaP's first book a traditional way, and finding the big chunk of outside money needed to do so, it's instead going to be a run of handmade "art" books that I design and assemble here in my apartment, or maybe occasionally with friends. I have the experience, after all; Lord knows I have the time; such a method would let me make just as many books as I have the money at any given moment to afford; I can set things up so that Amazon takes care of all the selling and shipping of physical books; and with them being handmade, I'll be able to charge more money than usual as well, while simultaneously keeping costs low. Again, just a situation where I was skipping ahead in my brain to the way that everyone else does it, never acknowledging that I have the means at my disposal right now to do things in a much cooler and more cost-efficient way. Anyway, so this is where my newfound curator skills will be of most use; that is, of all the manuscripts I'm bound to see from now until August or whenever, I can only afford to publish one of them, and owe it to both myself and CCLaP to pick the most absolutely insanely great one I come across in all that time. If I can do this, and avoid picking someone just because of their enthusiasm, this will go a long way towards selling a lot more copies of the first book.

--And then of course, for those who missed it earlier this year, I'm teaching myself Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash right now, or to be honest have been thinking about getting back into my training soon, and that's so I can build an interactive virtual photography gallery at CCLaP on top of everything else. And that's going to be extremely cool, I think; not only this great interface for showing off 20 to 30 photos by an artist at a time, but also with the artist and myself conducting a series of audio interviews about each piece, embedded in the Flash pages in a way so that it feels like you're actually walking through a gallery with us, stopping at each piece and having a little conversation about it. And then I'm going to do this like last year as well, to tie each show with a free electronic book in PDF form, that people will be able to download and print on their own end if they want; and then some merchandise for each show as well, handled this spring and summer by Cafe Press which is a little crappy but whaddya gonna do, it's no money upfront. And this of course is in lieu of a physical gallery I want to eventually own in Chicago, although at this point I estimate I'm at least a half-decade away from something like that, if not a lot more.

--And then last but not least, I also still have plans to build some sort of new piece of software too, as a way of both helping out a community and promoting CCLaP. But which idea, do you suppose?

A) Do I build a new social network at Ning.com, combining Chicago cafes that feature visual artists with visual artists looking for cafes in which to feature?

B) Do I build what I call "Curatr," a way for Flickr fans to present their "Favorites" in a much more sophisticated and powerful way?

C) Or do I build this wiki I've been talking about forever, the "CCLaP Guide to Being a Self-Sustaining Artist?"

But that's a phase-2 project for the site anyway; the main concentration this spring, of course, will be on the three items mentioned previously.

So anyway, that's how things are looking these days; and now, if you'll forgive me, my jaw is just giving me endless amounts of shit again, so I think it's time to gobble down another four naproxen sodium tablets and go take a nap. Damn you, o rusting and clattering shell of a body I inhabit! Damn you to hell!