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Raise A Little Hell (timotheories November 2016)

Posted on November 3, 2016 by Tim Kuefler

You know what they say – if you don’t like what you got, why don’t you change it. If your world is all screwed up, rearrange it. Raise a little hell of your own.

That’s been my modus operandi ever since I broke up with my long-term partner in October of 2014. Just over two years ago, I found out she had been cheating on me, and it broke my heart into a thousand more pieces than had happened when I first learned she had a mental illness and would be living with her parents indefinitely a year prior. To put it into perspective, my life got flipped, turned upside down in the summer of 2013, and then once more in the fall of 2014 for good measure.

But from the infidelity and trust broken, I was given the gift of looking at my life as an individual once more. And an opportunity to realize that I could fight it, nay, I could right it. Not the relationship lost, but the identity regained.

So I raised a little hell, and it’s been one of the best things I could have ever done. My life purpose is back on track, and I’ll be rolling ahead at full steam ever since. Don’t stop believing dear readers. That’s right my friends, I’ve got more improvements to make with the timotheories brand, and lots of theories to share.

Let’s tackle that sumbitch named November with a great vengeance and furious anger.

*Disclaimer* As always, every week I purchase an album and movie one week ahead of the actual review release and while I have the best intentions, I don’t always get what I want… so if you follow me on instagram (@timotheories) you can actually see what’s coming.

timotheories summarized – November

Stimulating Sundays – (11/06) Cross Talk Ep. 13, (11/13) Georg Rockall-Schmidt preview interview, (11/20) Georg Rockall-Schmidt interview, (11/27) Cross Talk Ep. 14
Melodic Mondays – (11/07) Tove Lo, (11/14) Common, (11/21) Martha Wainwright, (11/28) Justice
Theatrical Tuesdays – (11/01) The Rocky Horror Picture Show, (11/08) Star Trek Beyond, (11/15) Morris From America, (11/22) Finding Dory, (11/29) Hell or High Water
Wisdom Wednesdays – (11/02) Accelerated Learning – 20 Hour Rule, (11/09) Facebook, (11/16) Housing, (11/23) Scott Snyder, (11/30) Income
Timely Thursday – (11/03) timotheories November, (11/10) Remembrance Day, (11/17) Artwork update, (11/24) Black Friday part 2

The year of all killer, no filler is on it’s last legs friends. Let’s make a final push and ensure that we live fast and die young. We have the capacity to see some really great things if we stick with our regimen. For instance, I already shared the Accelerated Learning theory from Josh Kaufman, but I’ve got some thoughts on Facebook, comic book writer Scott Snyder, and a further consideration of the principles outlined in my previous Postconsumers post.

Oh and you know, I ain’t gonna leave you on the flo, when you want some mo! My first ever international interview is on the books and ready to integrate itself into your nooks. And crannies. Featuring one YouTube personality in the form of Georg Rockall-Schmidt.

What about Cross Talk you say? Episode 13 and 14 are well on their way, already recorded and preparing for the cutting room floor. Maybe we’ll talk about spoofs or maybe we’ll discuss movie breakthroughs, but you can be sure it’ll be a good time. I got an AV guy helping us out for the first time. Oh yeah.

And those are all of the theories I can come up with for now friends. Please leave some comments, to let us know what you want to see in coming months and subscribe to the blog too! Love you creative cuties, keep it real for me.

Tim!

I Can’t Get No Satisfaction (Syndication)

Posted on July 20, 2016 by Tim Kuefler

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever have it all, dear readers.

I want to have a successful blog, publish a few bestseller novels, create & feature in at least 3 popular YouTube video series, maintain a healthy diet that include meals, meditation, exercise, & affirmations, create meaningful & beloved paintings, and operate a community driven app for the arts.

Now you might say that that is crazy, but a lot of that those ideas tie in and relate to each other, which means that I’ll be sharing my brand across a number of channels, and working together with others to produce a brand that is viable and collaborative.

But in order to do that I need to syndicate – which happens to be a major part of marketing.

This is post number three in the Importance of Marketing series. We already have the business plan post ready for your absorption, so be sure to check that one out as well. But I digress, let’s now focus on today’s Wisdom Wednesday topic – A post about the importance of content syndication.

What’s content syndication timotheories?

Well my dear, sweet readers, content syndication is a way to put your name and ideas out there into the ether. It helps you build your reputation and generate leads which then generate sales for your business. If you can figure out a healthy mix of syndication, you’ll be rewarded with search rankings, increased traffic, and better exposure to your personal brand. Did I mention that it will also help promote you as an industry leader too? And when you become a leader, people start back linking to your blog.

That’s when you know you’ve hit the big time.

But in order to get your name out there, you should set up a strategy first. Set some goals and determine the results you need in order define that content strategy. You need to be honest with yourself and ask the hard questions. Like whether you’re positively impacting the community around you with your syndication methods or if you’re really going to drive traffic with your current plan.

What it comes down to is quality content and quality resources to manage your syndication. You could use the carousel method and increase your traffic by publishing to established websites like Hubpages or you could go the advertising route and use something like Newstex to get paid when other publishers source your material. Having said that, you aren’t assured to get paid right away if you share your material for a fee, your content has to be of a certain calibre.

And we haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to promotion. Just using a syndication delivery method isn’t going to get you there alone. Yes, you have to take advantage of the networks mentioned already, but you’ll also have to start guest blogging on websites that already have success in a wide breadth. And of course you need to consider where social media and forums fit into the mix. Every social media application and forum has a different tone, so be very mindful of how you construct your tweets, posts, shares etc.

But before I get too far into the weeds and begin the process of telling you in detail how to syndicate your content, I’m gonna stop the post and let these theories sink in.

After all, at timotheories, we are about digital curating at heart, and that means giving you content in bite size pieces. We would never expect you to swallow the elephant all at once.

And so I’m out of theories for today, I hope you enjoyed this peek into syndication, and I look forward to releasing the remaining introductory points on the importance of marketing. I’ll see you tomorrow friends, with something timely and rather tasteful.

Tim!

Contest, Context, Concept (Fairness In Art)

Posted on July 3, 2016 by Tim Kuefler

My parents tried their very hardest to impart ideas of fairness in us from a young age. “Share with your brothers and sister”, “make sure that everyone gets a taste of that pizza”, “you all need to do your part to keep the house clean”, “don’t forget that it’s your turn to do the dishes”, and so it went, on and on.

Every family deals with these challenges.

But I more time I spent with fairness and other moralizations as I grew into adulthood, the more I struggled with that notion of fairness, because each of the four of us had unique interests, talents, and levels of influence within the family hierarchy.

Fairness is supposed to represent a way of making value judgments that are impartial, and many well defined roles and responsibilities are given their own value sets to help establish fairness, in particular for activities and institutions which revolve around instruction.

For example, I often think of teachers and their responsibility to uphold an objective. Yes, anyone can take on a teaching role, but professional teachers are the group I’m going to focus on.

Back to the objective of teachers.

The objective of teachers is to educate students in skills and knowledge. Where it falls down for me though is through the method of instruction employed (pedagogy) by many teachers – that they know best because they’ve been trained to know the best. Pedagogy assumes that there is an ideal way to learn and an ideal way to teach, and thus the practice concerns itself primarily with how best to teach. Professional teachers are trained in pedagogy. Now, let’s put a pin in that idea for a second.

When we come out of post-secondary education, no matter our specialization, many students with a bachelors, masters or doctorate, assume an expertise in that particular field.

And we each gain a sense of fairness particular to that subset of knowledge, but going back to the family example from earlier, the problem is that if you have four children who all grew into unique roles, for example a BFA Art & Design, a BSc Psychology, a BFA Drama and BE Drama and Chemistry, and lastly a BSc Physics and BE Physics and Drama, each family member has refined their “fairness” through a different learnt pedagogy.

So almost all university graduates walk away with a sense of rightness or righteousness, depending on how you look at it. Then some time passes, and hopefully that code eases off somewhat, because another skill that post-secondary education is supposed to teach you is to continue to pursue education throughout your life.

Which leads me to my theory for the day.

I don’t think that fairness exists in life. Shock. Gasp. Awe.

From a young age we are told to do our best and worry about ourselves, but that still stimulates us to try harder, and in a family setting, it can simultaneously instill a sense of competition amongst siblings.

Which is actually a good thing. Because life is competition.

We compete for grades, jobs, sexual partners, games (sport, video, tabletop), and status. But that ideation of fairness is just part of the conscious desire to simplify the world around us. Which lets us determine what is right and wrong, and gain a sense of control over the world.

But the world functions purely on those levels of success, so whatever morality we put into art making, education, business, and any other aspect of life is purely personal. When we stop to reflect on the problem at hand and look at the scale, it comes down exactly that.

Individually we might love something or someone, but that doesn’t mean that song is a popular song or that person should love us back. Decision-making is not resigned to one person or one subset of people, but to the broader picture of humanity.

So stop considering what you internally feel is correct or worthy, and consider what you have done for your community or the people around you and that will help guide the art you create.

It’s about impact.

The greater the impact, the more people who want to reward the efforts of the person who created that ripple. If you can move a stadium of people with your music, or entertain a crowded street with your improvised unicycle and ball juggling act, or even divide a whole city with your graffiti that addresses the automation of industry and complacency associated with it, you’re going to get recognition.

If you share your song with one person, one person cares, but if you shared it with influencers on YouTube, then you are all of a sudden an instant success.

Someone once said that life is unfair, but that’s not really true. Life is very fair, but we try and assume authority over fairness and change it. Fairness is competition, realized by what we are able to accomplish in our community.

Going back to the point I made earlier about families and fairness, I think families should work to achieve the workload, but we should cut that word right out of instruction, children need to learn their strengths and contribute to society in a way that they are best capable, and educators need to facilitate this via models of instruction, with tempered positions of authority.

But that’s just a theory.

Tim!

Art House

timotheories presents Tim Kuefler (Allegory of the Collage series)

Gallery | Posted on March 17, 2016 by Tim Kuefler

Well, I have finally done it. My real “identity” is out there.

I had to do this because I promised you a peek into my art practice going forward, and today I deliver, dear readers.

Now is the time of great reckoning for I’m putting up personal elements of myself for display and inspection, and potentially for sale as well. It wasn’t an easy decision, but if I am going to further refine and evolve this project of curating, creating, and collaborating, I need to inject myself into the mix.

Let’s go over my back story a bit more so before I open up the floor to some of my art.

I received my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art & Design from the University of Alberta in the spring of 2007. My major focuses during that time were painting, drawing, and sculpture. Pretty classic examples of fine art education. I didn’t always believe this, but I am very fortunate to have a university education and to have studied with professors that had invested their own art practices in both the modernist and post-modernist eras of art making. I believe this because it informed my own decisions about art.

You see dear readers, by dealing with two specific schools of thought constantly it either fueled or resulted in a great split in my mind and own practice about the very nature of art making. I began to produce work that was either conceptual or technical, and sometimes both. It felt rather like a struggle with divorcing parents, and as a child (student), I couldn’t possibly know which parent was the right one to pick (school of thought), so I did what I’ve always done in my life, I chose to do something different.

I made art for myself and specifically to both impress and disrupt my professors. This was almost ten years ago. And so I share with you an ongoing series of work I’ve been creating since my senior year of university, which has inspired paintings and drawings, some of which I will share later on in coming months.

At one point I called the series below, the Allegory of The Cave, because I was self-prescribing philosophy when I first started to deal with my issues of doubt and frustration at institution and with routine. Something which comes naturally for a lot of artists. #realtalk

Almost ten years later, I have a blog that is gaining real traction thanks to readers like you, and I am working on community with artists of all walks of life. This blog serves as a platform for my vision of more accessible community across the arts, a soapbox for my theories and other artist theories on the arts, a theatre for collaboration, now a gallery for my own art, and eventually a lounge and studio for both art enthusiasts and artists. More on that last bit in future posts. Please hold me to it.

So, I recently decided to change the title of the series to the Allegory of the Collage, because This series represents the complex narrative I am weaving for myself and my local community, by using material from local publications, with local characters and events that don’t have a distinct meaning in the image just yet, but an abstract and big-picture feeling. And frankly, because it is succinct in it’s purpose and as a metaphor for timotheories itself – to create art by combining different materials together with a solid backing.

More importantly, creating art for the purpose of joining people and ideas together has always been important to me, and because I want art that looks good in my own home, I have an obligation to produce that which is interesting and entertaining. The discipline of writing 5 days a week, and producing a minimum of 2 videos a month is all related to the passion of creating to be at peace and to fulfil what often feels like a compulsion to share.

It is very important to me that the work a produce be authentic and related to myself and what I experience in this life, so I always make work which ties back to that creed. I learned that lesson from a professor in my second year of university, and whether he truly believes it or was just lecturing, it’s solid advice.

This series is made up of text and pictures that are taken from local events, people, and ideas, and is naturally authentic for those reasons.

In sharing my work on my blog, I want to challenge others to make their own work better, to become full-fledged entrepreneurs in a time when we are entering back into cottage industry practices because of the access the internet provides to us on a global scale; an era of modern craft. And so I developed this post, to begin the process of adding my gallery of artwork into the blog in some capacity, eventually with piece titles, prices and everything, but I felt a visual introduction and artist statement was a good start for now.

If you are interested in commissions, prices of the work I’ve included in today’s post, or if you want more information about the series, please leave some comments below or email me at timotheories@outlook.com.

And of course, please follow me to get even more awesome content in the future. I interview visual artists, designers, musicians, actors, and other creative types every month. I also write reviews on film and music as they relate to my theory of film as the great narrative of our culture, and I always have some wisdom, events, and theories to share. Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you on Sunday with a new Cross Talk episode!

Tim!

The Matrix Effect (Cross Talk Ep.2)

Posted on February 21, 2016 by Tim Kuefler

Hey there dear readers! I hope your weekend has been excellent and full of art and all kinds of awesome and amusing things!

Oh thanks, but how are you doing Tim?

Oh, very good, thanks for asking!

Well, actually I’m feeling a little out of touch with reality, to be honest. My weekend started on the 13th of February and is finishing up tomorrow before I head back to the regular grind.

You see, I took some overdue and much needed vacation time to catch up on some of my personal to-dos, which effectively resulted in a 10 day weekend for me. I’m making that sound like I didn’t get anything accomplished, that’s note true, I got a lot done, in fact!

However, the consequences of this decision are just starting to get back to my brain.

You see, dear readers, when you break from routine too much it can cause your body to fight against you, which has been proven time and time again in various studies on the difficulties of changing habits. And this is topic is something we’ve touched on before here at timotheories. However, we haven’t really addressed the opposite side of the coin, which can also have disastrous results…

If you do too much of the same thing, you will experience what I theorize is similar to the effect Neo experienced in the first film in The Matrix trilogy (the one most everyone enjoyed), which I will very carefully call The Matrix effect for now, but not claim ownership of, for fear of long-term copyright infringement issues.

Essentially what this means is that if you see too much of the same thing, over and over again, without any careful and deliberate subtle shifts of that thing to make each entry appear unique, your brain starts to recognize the pattern and wakes up from the state of comfort, it often operates in.

This is a bad thing.

But luckily for you friends, I have a good thing to share with you instead!

That’s right, it’s that time of month when timotheories shares with you a new episode of Cross Talk! So strap in, hold on tight, and get ready for our discussion on the topic of – Realism VS Escapism in film, or how films deal with logic gaps that can potentially break your attention from the story.

This is going to be a great topic where Chris and I explore the successes and failures of movie tropes, typecasting, when science and art intersect, and how movies address their fantasy elements to create franchises, among other things.

I’ve included a direct link to the video for you here, but as mentioned before we now offer you embedded video on the blog so you don’t have to navigate away from the post. Please take a look below to watch Episode 2 of Cross Talk!

I’m out of theories for now, but check back tomorrow for a fun Melodic Monday entry from a group out of the Ukraine.

Tim!