A Handy Guide: Notes Toward A Genre Movement

I know you're bursting with assorted creative juices, but let's face it: your masterpiece is likely to end up on a garbage barge where not even famished seagulls will peck at its fearless yet wholly inedible vision of this world we call ‘real.' Why? Because you tried to go it alone! Nobody who tackled their craft with brains and passion and monastic discipline, aspiring to be the lone inventor of something splendidly next, ever got further than, like, the theory of relativity. So just stop thinking outside the box-that is no path to glory in the year 20now. Instead, think inside another box that hasn't been assembled yet.

You'll need to gather the nobodies and nascent artistic failures that constitute your circle of friends. Meet secretly; no outsiders must know that your bloggable microtrend is an inorganic mound of pure, uncut market potential. Once assembled, pick a medium (painting, poetry, monkeyshine) and make up a niche. The particulars of this genre are window dressing-what matters is that people can easily mold them and produce mildly different permutations of the same three or four ideas.

Here are a few examples of artificially engineered genres to get you brainstorming.

Microfilm
Make hundreds of non-narrative videos, none more than 4 seconds long. Claim they are about ‘our shortening attention span' and invite comparisons to Twitter, resisting the analogy only to point out that your project is more of a ‘collage.'

Grillwave
A reactionary assault on the dream-smooth, cassette-era-nostalgic tunes of hot chillwave artists like Washed Out, Neon Indian, Toro y Moi. Bands should feature multiple laptops and no more than two members. Give the act a moniker that contains one ethereal and one caustic element, like ‘Cloud Peroxide' or ‘Whisper Scum.' Filter all vocals into an aged Dell laptop (never Apple, for reasons you refuse to discuss) and out through a microphone laid flush against the shitty laptop speakers. For your breakthrough single, illegally sample the songs you are satirizing and lay track over track until it sounds like elevator muzak masturbating to 1997's Pure Moods Vol. 1.

Implied Stand-Up Comedy
Steal the pedestrian observations you normally hear at comedy clubs, remove any punchlines, and translate the results into mime routine. Do not wear mime makeup. When someone inevitably asks about your mime training or whatnot, pretend to be confused about what a mime is.

Memnoir
Write about your actual, rambling, boring life-except have shadowy vice and police department corruption and huge explosions periodically break the quotidian plane. Employ bland prose and a disinterested tone throughout the factual 70% of the text, always lulling the reader deep into the daily calm of your unembellished existence before having anachronistic gangsters appear to demand ungodly sums in cash and break your pinky finger in two separate places. Insist that your work be categorized as ‘nonfiction' and doubt the veracity of painstakingly researched accounts of modern warfare (in the same breath, if possible).

Thrillurai
So you know how steampunk is this costume-intensive alternate reality predicated on the spectacle of Victorian characters with awesomely exaggerated steam technology? Replace ‘Victorian characters' with ‘badass samurai of feudal Japan' and ‘awesomely exaggerated steam technology' with ‘guns.' Rip off John Woo if you have to.

* * *

After hammering out the guidelines, go your separate ways. Begin to independently release material corresponding to this manufactured aesthetic, never hinting that you know one another. The internet, our incumbent grand vizier of what's cool and what was cool for forty-six minutes on Tuesday afternoon, cares little for your collectivization; it wants to be your connective tissue, not dissect it. Should you reveal that your art is the result of manifesto'd group action rather than scattered yet strangely related energies, you leave the hype machine powerless and annoyed.

Infiltrate on varied wavelengths, however, and soon people will point and declare: "This thing is like that thing." Critics will gleefully cast a net over the whole diaspora, even snaring some folks in no way affiliated with your conspiracy, and officially declare a movement. By the time impressionable up-and-comers are latching onto this style-around when a newspaper first observes it-there will be nothing left to explore. You have already defined, mastered and abandoned the mood. You are too mercurial to be tied to this stuff. Maybe you noisily disavow it, acquiring precious mystique.

Then lay low, emerge, repeat.

Miles Klee HAS BIG PLANS that he can't talk about right now.