Hammer the Mirror: Reclaiming Art Through Community and the Collective
(or: Why I’m Not a Sociologist)
Let me tell you about why I’m not a sociologist.
I was 18 years old, finishing up my high school diploma in the conservative (Canadian conservative—more boring and staid than the exceptionalism/fascism/lady-hate/people-hate/hate-hate) Ottawa community of Westboro-McKellar Park. My friends and classmates all had singular visions for their futures: doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, arborists, spouses, children, mortgages, affairs, death. I was still fairly wayward. I worked in restaurants and surrounded myself with idiosyncratics and crazies who turned me on to art that wasn’t being passed around Nepean High School. My world listened to Zappa and Waits and B-side Japanese import shit that defied the trends of the mid-90s. But I still listened to Pearl Jam and Nirvana. I’m not a monster.
My investigations into art went deeper than my peers, because my adopted community demanded more than rote fandom or pop sensibilities. I found obscurity and oddity—what the kids might now call “deep cuts.” Most of my friends never made it past “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Even Flow,” while I found Green River, Mudhoney, and back catalog SubPop. I read hard-to-find UK music mags, and traced connections from band to band through live music reviews and liner notes. I’d spend hours in small indie record stores listening to CDs and talking to the stoned dude who seemingly worked at all of them. I found it a challenge that yielded the reward of art beyond the corporate or the pop star, deep cuts of deep cuts. “Hey man, have you heard the new Colonel Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit?”
In literature, while my contemporaries rarely read beyond what our drunk high school English teacher, Mr. McNamara, had us reading (we could smell the scotch in the soup thermos, Ed)—CanLit staples (so many Margarets) and Gatsby—I was indulging in what the weirdos gave me while we smoked duMauriers behind the lines of unsuccessful restaurants. My burgeoning bookshelves were filled with Vonnegut, Robbins, Adams, Kesey, and Hunter S. Thompson. It was Thompson who led me astray.
Not into drugs, alcohol, and reckless abandon—that was genetic and inevitable—but rather Sociology. In my local libraries and bookstores, Thompson’s work was placed in the Sociology section. I recall, though perhaps this is apocryphal, that even his books were labeled Sociology. So when it came time to apply to universities, I chose the Sociology departments, with no real understanding of what the discipline was. Imagine my surprise when, during the first weeks of courses at Carleton University, we did no drugs (in class), nor did we go on grand road trips with our lawyers or join the Hell’s Angels or stalk conservative leaders with our caustic wit, and left-leaning values. Instead we read endlessly about class and had to take requisite Anthropology classes, and let me tell you, Margaret Mead (so many Margarets) does not party.
I had been misled by the simplicity of the Dewey Decimal System and underqualified high school guidance counselors. I dropped out. Life went sideways. And, though perhaps this is reductive, it was all because of what I would realize over the next three decades: Our collective obsession with labeling and classification leads not just 18-year-old middle-class Canadians astray, but it puts unnecessary restrictions on art and academia.
I wouldn’t return to higher ed for another decade, and thank god it was in English Lit and Creative Writing, but my challenges with classification and labeling continued. I recall asking my tired fiction workshop professor why a text couldn’t be both poetry and fiction, why there weren’t collections of short stories and poetry abound. He told me, “Because it matters what writing is,” to which I replied, “Why?” before he moved on to the next assignment.
My frustration with labeling in writing-based art communities is likely a result of the institutionalization of the craft. “The number of schools offering bachelor’s degrees in creative writing [rose] from three in 1975 to 733 [in 2017],” and the number of MFA programs in creative writing now sits at over 255. The natural result of something once housed in (perhaps romantically) the Vesuvio Café, the Chelsea Hotel, and the Frolic Room residing within the bureaucratic construct of a college is that it will be given order. The first (and still prominent) Creative Writing MFA program in the US was the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Under the leadership of writer and scholar Paul Engle, the program became the template for writing programs the world over, which itself is inherently problematic. My man Vonnegut called Engle “a hayseed clown, a foxy grandpa, a terrific promoter, who, if you listen closely, talks like a man with a paper asshole,” which to me is forever fitting of a man who constructed the workshop format that American professors are inexplicably tethered to.
That writing is taught so universally, so monopedagogically, so singularly defies the very purpose of it, which is “to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers” (Baldwin) or “the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life” (Berger) or “almost entirely inquiry based and self-regulated. It is a fragile process of teaching oneself to work alone” (Fernandez) or… look, google your own art quotes, but the point remains: art is about inquiry, provocation, and self-discovery. But also courage and risk, or as Brecht said: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” To demand that it be created within rigid, unbreakable labels is counter-intuitive; how can one discover, inquire, or provoke if handcuffed by arbitrary parameters? It’s like asking Ibn Battuta to find Mecca with a map of Tulsa (deep explorer cut.)
To produce artists like one would construct accountants or doctors or athletic trainers is an attempt to define and categorize those who work within its disciplines. As Elaine Dissanayake argues, “No matter how strange they looked or unskilled they seemed to be [they] were conduits of transcendent meaning, of truths from the unconscious, expressions or revelations of universal human concerns that the art was uniquely endowed to apprehend and transmit.” Classifying artists is akin to classifying art, which can only result in rote engagements with the world.
The problem now is that many artists—in particular those who aspire to the aesthetic of the craft and not necessarily its engagement, in an attempt to be Instagram important and not artistically interesting—see art as an entrance to capitalism and not a mode for argument, foster cultural change, or organic expression. Art, the art that is curated for us and not by us, is too easily accessible. Beyond Instagram, where visual art is sold like a Jenner sells Ozempic, (I don’t know the painter’s name, but she’s hot and smokes Camel lights) you can visit nearly every gallery or museum from the comfort of your iPhone. Books the algorithm thinks we’ll like or want us to buy are automatically deposited into our digital shopping carts. Suggested listens are queued up on Spotify. Netflix has the next series you’ll love lined up. Self-curation is a lie—the culture is being fed to us by AI.
Our job now is to find the indie record stores of the digital age. Find the 2025 equivalent of the 40-year-old line cook who digs Mike Watt, the stoner at the cash, the RIYL column from a magazine that no longer exists. We need to, as my buddy says, seek out the underground shit, do the work because that’s where culture is being developed. You can either chase money or cultural change, but rarely both. This is how guys like Joe Rogan and the Manoverse gained prominence—they used indie/grassroots models, worked against corporate systems, and “created a culture focused on unhinged traditional masculinity.” We need to create the non-toxic-bro version of this collectively. If we don’t come together—not just as individual artists, but as like-minded artistic communities—to create art that aspires to tell different stories, then we allow art's influence on culture to be appropriated for the sake of free market capitalism. It’ll be a broken mirror. And not in a cool Brechtian way.
Nine years ago, when I was writing for Indiewire and FLOOD, I pitched an essay to each of them called, “Billions is the Worst TV Show Ever, and I’ve Never Even Seen It.” Neither publication was interested. One editor asked how I could judge a TV series I’d never seen. Perhaps a valid point, but I’ve never seen The Kardashians and any of the Real Housewives either, and I know that shit is straight-up cancerous bile. My argument was that television, a democratic medium that nearly every class invites into their household—as an art form—is mostly incapable of interrogating issues of class and wealth and tends to portray poverty as a punchline rather than a societal concern.
Plus, I thought the title was aces.
But, the piece was dead, though I eventually snuck a version of it folded into a review of Shameless, called “Poverty on Television: Shameless and the American Dream,” in which I noted,
[...]Shameless [indicts] American apathy toward poverty in ways that reportage or documentary can’t, in that the series is able to delicately balance its argument, humanizing plight with sentimentality, but also in developing characters who are at once authentic and identifiable. A feature on poverty can be compelling, but is limited in its singularity. Shameless allows the vicarious experience of an entire class. It fosters not just understanding, but empathy.
Here we are just short of a decade later, and that excerpt feels remarkably dated, as if generations, not years, have passed. We are living in a post-empathy reality, where oligarchs and wealthy octogenarians have convinced the populace that everything is someone else’s fault, probably someone in the country illegally or with a disability or is guilty of ascension while marginalized. And much of what we consume on TV, be it streaming or traditional network, perpetuates the absence of empathy while doping Americans into believing their wealth, their win, the American Dream, is right around the corner.
It’s not.
Philosopher Marshal McLuhan, the “father of media studies,” believed that television contained the immediacy and emotional appeal that could mobilize social movements more effectively than print media, the kind of action we could use now more than at any other moment in my lifetime. “Television demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being. It will not work as background. It engages you... images are projected at you. You are the screen,” he wrote in The Medium is the Massage, a theory brought to truth, as television would put the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement in the living rooms of Americans. “Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America—not on the battlefields of Vietnam.” He further argued that the imperfection of television as it was in the 1960s allowed the viewer to participate in filling in the picture, literally and figuratively, a mental conversion of pixelation to perfection.
I would imagine McLuhan’s hope for mobilization was focused on the news, and he would fire to his Canada Heritage Minute if he had to bear a second of what passes for television journalism in 2025. Empty vessels of punditry and propaganda propagate the airwaves 24 hours a day, divided into biased polars. While on the right, FOX News and OANN fellate Trumpism and excuse fascism, on the left, CNN and MSNBC wallow in centrism and TikTokable sound bites. No news network seems at all concerned with the fact Nazis are now in power but rather appeasing their corporate overlords and selling their dignity for dividends. Just yesterday, MSNBC did a DEI sweep of their schedule, elevating former Biden apologist Jen Psaki while ousting no less than five anchors from marginalized communities, not to mention Lester Holt’s “planned” exit from NBC Nightly News.
But as we come out the other side of “Peak TV” and televisions in our homes with clarity and expanse that even the man who foresaw the Internet may not have even imagined, the moment McLuhan hoped for television seems to have passed. While there is so much on television that is wonderfully creative and informs public discourse (Severance, Yellowjackets, Letterkenny), much of it is pageantry, propaganda, and empty escapism depicting the ever-widening class divide while apathizing the viewer. And Kardashians. In TV and film and music and sculpture and painting and SNL and interpretive dance, we need more chances taken, more communities built, more collective, more focus on art and not how it will look on Instagram.
I am—as my Post-War Canadian Literature professor announced disappointingly each time I would speak in class—not an academic. It is not my calling or concern. My hope for art is idealistic and self-serving. I want someone to listen to what I have to say. How I get that message out is the challenge. But, “someone has to write the books,” I’d shoot back at the CanLit prof, and I repeat that credo here: Someone has to write the books. And if literature, and by extension creative writing programs, are to produce/foster/cultivate interesting work that the academics of tomorrow will deconstruct with fervor and tenure, we would do well to discourage the academicization of our discipline and all art forms. Categorization overcomplicates an inherently simple craft, and its continued institutionalization is death. We are overthinking the form so that academics are validated and, by extension, dated. As Vonnegut said, “A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo” (Vonnegut). Academics see writing as a monumental endeavor when it is not nearly as erudite or complicated. It’s just the alphabet mixed up a bunch of times in search of inquiry, provocation, and self-discovery in service of our limitless imaginations. We are allowing the labels to become fodder for the algorithm and further allowing art to become what, at its best and most important, defied: Derivative, market-driven, and perpetuating culture instead of defining or reinventing it.
And that’s why I’m not a goddamn sociologist.