Welcome to Earlobe Calming: a collection of desperate, vulnerable, and collaborative acts. My name is Gabriel Coleman and like most people I’m a lot of things. I’m an artist, musician, writer, and environmental historian. I am also desperate, and have spent most of my life in various states of financial desperation. As it stands, I’m receiving, or should be receiving, an annual living stipend of 17,316 euro to support my PhD research at Trinity College in Dublin. I’m immensely grateful for this funding and feel very fortunate that an institution is interested enough in what’s going on in my brain to pay me to read and write for four years. However, circumstances being what they are, 17,316 euro doesn’t quite cover the even the basic expenses of rent, food, living expenses, and student loan payments that surround me. At the same time, I’ve spent my life building a collection of creative practices that, aside from the rare exception, haven’t ever represented any sort of monetary income. I help create two podcasts, I write a weekly column of cultural criticism, I’ve released an album of music, assemble DJ sets, take photos, create visual art and performance, cook, bake and develop recipes, I build interactive maps and websites and so much more. I haven’t done this work to make money, but at the same time I’m not opposed to making money from the things I create. I also feel an ever increasing pressure to give up these various creative practices in service of spending my time being financially productive. These are the concerns I hope this project can address. Earlobe Calming is an effort to close the financial gap I find myself continually falling into using the different kinds of creative work I enjoy doing. It’s also a way to justify the creative labor I’m afraid to lose as a valid use of my time
So here’s the proposal: can I make something for you? Or rather, can we make something together? Is there an idea rattling around in your brain that I can help put into the world or a big question you have that I can work to answer? When you’ve thought of something, whether it’s a vague feeling or a highly specific request, go to the project website https://gabriel.town/earlobe, click on C for Create and toss it into the form there. There’s space for a proposed title, project description, proposed monetary compensation, and even material expenses if they’re relevant. The form isn’t any sort of binding agreement but a way to start a conversation and after you submit the idea, I’ll be in touch over email and we’ll work together to figure out what shape the project will take, timeline and compensation. After the piece is finished, I’ll share it in this feed for public consumption, along with details of how the idea evolved, who proposed it and how much was paid for it. Hopefully the end result will be a feed full of pieces that resonate deeply with the folks who proposed them and can be enjoyed generally by anyone who stumbles across them. The nice thing about a podcast feed is that it makes it easy to share all kind of media, texts, audio, images and video can all end up here so the creative horizons are open! So what would you like to see? I’m quite literally down for anything. Do you need a DJ set full of songs about food so you can dance around your kitchen while cooking dinner? Do you want to know about the history of marathon nutrition and how we got from bananas to bags of goo? Do you want help writing a letter to your senator, or a song for your pet chicken, or an erotic fanfic about your favorite Twin Peaks characters. Okay maybe these are all thing I want to see… Anyway, any ideas you have, I would love to hear them so head to https://gabriel.town/earlobe and let me know what’s on your mind!
Just some last things before I go: This is an open ended project and I still have a lot of questions about how it will work. I don’t have commission prices because I want each work to be an open conversation and I don’t want to limit who can participate. I’m interested in working with other creators and even handing over the feed to other desperate folks as we figure everything out together. I also want to use this feed for other ongoing projects and series, like the Money Talks series – an exercise in financial transparency – the first of which will be posted in the feed at the same time as this introduction. I also don’t know if this is going to work. In a way, Earlobe Calming is a question: is the kind of work I create worth any money? Do people, not just friends and family but general people, want to pay money for the things I can create? It’s a scary question but it’s one that I think I need an answer to. If you’re interested in getting in touch to talk about how any of this is working, any ideas or feedback you have, please get in touch via email or twitter, both of which in the podcast description and on the website.
Lastly I just want to say thank you. Thank you for listening, for your company. Thank you for your patience and understanding along this new adventure and thank you for your help.
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