011: AVM Trilogy #2 VEGETABLE
The Author reports back for part two of the trilogy: The secret to life is being absolutely devd.
It happens when you least expect it. The numbing effects of daily life seem to be at usual strength; the recycling puts itself out, texts get responded to, the subscriptions are on auto-renewal. Then, and quite suddenly, you hop up out of bed to find your swag button broken.So what’s the fix? Deep breathing and quiet prayer? Ice cold watermelon sprinkled with Tajín? What about an unsolicited collab between mature legends Barbra Streisand and Paul McCartney? And on your birthday to boot? There must be a German word for that.
Dear reader, it happened to me. The stars aligned on my birthday, after a disturbed sleep thanks to some American teenagers playing what one can only assume was a Riverdale marathon on a neighbouring hotel balcony. Opening my chosen music streaming app, there it was before me. Barbra, hands clutched on the precipice of prayer, signature -natural!- nails gleaming. A look of rapture across her leonine face. She may have just got another dog back from the cloner, or seen the size of the album cheque…but what if it’s purer than that, I pondered. What if it’s r-a-p-t-u-r-e?
DEVOTION, RAPTURE, WIST. This tectonic trio shifts beneath me as I navigate life. This is my secret, and if it sounds naïve to you, fear not. I worry a lot, fuck up all the time, have committed to the bit and found it oft’ far more than I could chew.
In fact that’s the whole point. I am absolutely devd, but I do it anyway. Won’t take my word for it? There’s a poem by Mother Teresa for that.
Swag not withstanding, I hop up before 7am most days. I no longer bother with closing my curtains. This is not laziness; they are light things, diaphanous, not hard to draw at all. This is my dedication to natural light, my belief that it makes me softer, better, faster, stronger. I drink the contents of a metal water bottle, I choke a little, some droplets make their way down my chin.
Having been stuck so long in the past, and unable to visualise the future, I am coming to trust the relatively steady ground of the present. I talk to myself in the bathroom, obsess over a single word for days. I do not know where I fit into the world and who to talk to about that. This is ok, until the next moment. After all, it is only moments that we may ever hope to manage.
“I am absolutely devd, but I do it anyway.”
On the topic of anniversaries, it was a year ago that we hopped on the AVM Staff call which would bring into being a strange, buoyant thing…entirely unsolicited and yet, absolutely necessary. Rounder than a beachball, hazy like a ghost. The Absolutely Devd orb, my favourite object of them all.
At the root of the Abs. Dev mindset is the practice of letting go. Etymologically speaking, when de is paired with vastare, they come to mean thoroughly laid waste. We must shed our skin, learn what is to be carried forward and what left behind. Without some experience of total - thorough - stripping of self, how can we know what must be rebuilt? If you catch a smile on the face of someone wearing the above tee, it’s because they’re ABSOLUTELY DEVD, see?
And the thing about DEVD is, it is not merely as it seems. An abbreviation of devastated? Sure. And at the same time; devilishly inspired, deep voiced, definitely victorious-d ? At AVM, we like to say that two things can be true at once. And if two can, why not several, why must we stop at all?
All my best friends have light retail addictions; nothing too serious, but a t
herapist would say different. It’s the ones one cannot abstain from entirely which are the hardest to kick. We have to buy things, and we have to eat. As with any prescription offered to blast away addiction, I have struggled with the side effects of stubbornness. Specifically, how to navigate the monetisation path for creative outputs.
When I went to big school, my favourite thing to wear was an H&M knock-off of a Henry Holland mock-up of the original Katherine Hamnett slogan tee. It was huge and purple and bore the three-word order, KISS ME QUICK.
Ever since Hamnett wrote ‘CHOOSE LOVE’ on a teeshirt, it has been a vehicle for brand expression, an easy way to identify with a particular club. These days, musicians depend on fans purchasing tour T-shirts, and CHOOSE LOVE is a charitable institution providing aid to refugees the world over.
Whilst AVM may be idiosyncratic, quasi-anonymous, a digital publishing platform the likes of which the world has neither asked for nor hitherto seen, it is also plugged into the commerce concept, into how to communicate its message. Like all organic matter, like every animal, vegetable and mineral, it came at first from nothing.
Feeling absolutely devd? There’s a T-shirt for that.
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