The Charrette is Now The Culture Shock
I’m going through a little bit of a personal rebrand over here.
If there is a theme to this Substack, it’s that I pop in every few months to tell you that I am back and committed to writing regularly, only to disappear again for another few months. I suspect I will repeat this pattern until I die. (Hopefully, I’ll at least crank out a few essays that are total bangers, so I’ll at least keep all 650 of you moderately entertained over the next 56 years.)
But as for today, I’m here to announce a few changes: The Charrette is no more. Well… at least in the form of a Substack publication.
Over the last few years, I have been plugging away at my small marketing business. When I first started this Substack publication, I had just lost my job, and was struggling to decide what I wanted to do after having been in a super competitive and demanding field for so long, so I filled my time with writing personal essays between filling out job applications and sending out Upwork proposals. I discovered Substack, and realized I could make some pin money by turning on subscriptions, so I incorporated as a business to catch that subscription income, and, fittingly, named it The Charrette.
Some of those Upwork proposals panned out, and I was able to get a few other private marketing clients, and since I already had a company, I just filed all my new work under The Charrette LLC and didn’t think much more about it.
Fast forward to a few months ago — after having a few small life catastrophes and taking at least one (maybe more) online courses on how to 10x my business, I realized I needed to get more serious about finding clients.
Also, I always have a strong pang of guilt when I log onto Substack, see that I gained about 12 new followers in one week without even trying, and yet have no plans to write anything in the foreseeable future.
The best solution I could find was to partition my entire business. The Charrette, as you know it now, will henceforth be known as The Culture Shock.
What is The Culture Shock? (Custom domain name pending…)
If my online business courses taught me anything — it was NOT how to 10x my business. It was actually that if you wanted to make any dent in your growth, you needed to “niche down.”
Generally speaking, I think that is good advice, but as far as this publication goes, I’m choosing to completely ignore it (at least for now).
TL;DR: What this Substack is about
When I left on my Latter-day Saint mission to Spain, I felt a lot of culture shock. I mean, who just parks their car on a sidewalk? (Answer: 95% of Spaniards.) The culture shock I felt returning to the United States was exponentially more disorienting. (Some people have never had to wait in line for 45 minutes at a Spanish post office to mail a postcard, AND IT SHOWS.)
Quite honestly, the culture shock has never subsided, and I think we are living in the most culturally disorienting in the history of humanity. While I’ll still talk about art, history, politics, and the like, I’m going to focus on culture more generally.
A note about the cover art
I had my friend, Eliza Anderson, who works for the Deseret News, do the cover art for The Culture Shock. She did an incredible job, as always, and put up with me through a number of revisions.
If you read my series on Marat, you’ll know that I love the French Revolution and particularly the Delacroix painting of Liberty Leading the People, so I asked Eliza to do a modern take on it. I’ll go into the meaning of each part of it in another post, but in short, I wanted it to be more of a commentary on the chaos and incoherence of modern cultural politics.
Eliza did a great job.
What The Culture Shock is NOT about
While there were a lot of reasons (read: excuses) why I wasn’t writing, chief among them was that I felt too limited in what I could write about. While I love history, I by no means consider myself a historian, and while I usually enjoy discussing politics, this election has me feeling so cynical and everyone else feeling so grumpy that I don’t want to talk about it unless I know I can have a thoughtful conversation devoid of sloganeering and #basic analyses.
It’s not that I won’t ever talk about these things again, but with SO much pressure to churn out content in the politics and history space, it gets easy to report decontextualized facts and draw erroneous conclusions. If and until I get Joe Rogan or Sharon McMahon famous and can literally say whatever I want, I’m going to avoid that.
What the future holds
As of now, this Substack will be more of a repository for my personal essays and reflections, but I would like to turn it into more of a community ideas forum in the future.
At one point, someone suggested we have a book/movie/culture club (which I briefly tried to start until I realized I was in over my head), and I loved that idea. Look forward to that in the future!
Sure, but what are you doing with The Charrette?
The Charrette is now officially my boutique marketing agency. I focus on working with artists and arts organizations to create content and automate their marketing processes. We (and yes, I mean WE because I finally hired some help), will create email marketing campaigns, social media ads, blogs, etc. We’ll also automate some of your marketing processes so you can sell your services in your sleep.
In short, we’re creative marketing for creative people.
If you’re interested in learning more, join my email list here, and connect with me on LinkedIn. I’d love to collaborate with you!
See you all in another couple of months… probably.