mary-masked

Nine Inch Nails, Seeing a Master at Work

Published: October 16th 2018, 5:51:14 pm

But that's not the sort of concise, telling, detail that you want in storytelling.
so about art.

I promise this is related: Remember that story I posted about getting over my fear of my abuser by making fun of him?
https://www.patreon.com/posts/back-from-sex-21203607

I pitched that story to RISK and they accepted it. But the feedback was that I needed to add some details of the abuse so the audience could really understand the weight of my fear. And that was...hard to write about. Not just because those are tough memories to relive and sift through, and not just because I've had a hard time writing much of anything recently, but also because the majority of his abuse was cumulative. "My boyfriend wouldn't let me go to sleep until we had sex," doesn't sound so bad until you take into consideration that this happened every night I spent with him, and that I was working at least two sixteen hour days a week, and that he lived with me for a month. Then you remember that sleep deprivation is an interrogation technique. But that's not the sort of concise, visceral, detail that you want in storytelling.

I felt a little bad taking a break from everything to go see NIN but I REALLY wanted to see them and the tickets were expensive so I went. The concert was amazing. They covered David Bowie's I Can't Give Everything Away and I cried. I cried again during their final song, Hurt.
People told me that Trent Reznor really feels Hurt every time he performs it but, to be honest, I didn't really believe them. It's been more than 20 years since he wrote it. He performs it a lot. And that raw, bleeding, despair is so deep that I couldn't believe he could just pull that up out of nowhere every single time. But, holy shit, he DID. It was like watching him cut himself open and bleed on stage (ironically, I've seen people actually cut themselves on stage and it's nowhere near as emotionally effective.) It was also like hearing the song for the first time again. The staggering honesty of it hit me again. I remembered that he had dredged up all the darkest parts of their self hatred and put it onto a best selling record and I was stunned.

I've been told that my strength as a performer and writer is in making myself vulnerable to the audience but I couldn't imagine reaching that level of vulnerability. Not even with myself, let alone in front of millions of strangers, over and over again, for twenty years. 

On the ride home, the words just started to flow.

The best inspiration comes from watching a master.