Am I my resumé?
Am I even that person that goes by the name I call myself?
And how did FA get to be such a long, long way to run?
Weighty questions, not answerable by a Google search.
(Well maybe FA. That's Oscar Hammer-Styne trying to be clever.)
At the outset I would have said that I have been pretty much myself on-line. But my facebook page is rarely frequented by me, and when I do post, I generally try to be pithy. Pithy is not really me. I go on at length in person, and at even greater (endless) length in my own head. Sleep doesn't slow me down much, it just unleashed those demons of the id that want to rant and rave.
In the end, I decided that Googling "Ken Beck" did not shift my self concept very far. I was impressed by two of the "Ken Becks" that ain't me - the Boston Artist and the California writer - but this is not a mediated presence for ME.
My one whimsical, deliberate departure from literal interpretation of self is a significant one: I am jcraster on youtube. Craster was Lermontov's composer in "The Red Shoes," (Which Anton Walbrook pronounces 'shooss'). Walbrook's Lermontov gets all the great lines relating to Craster: "let's see what you can do in the way of a little REwriting." But Craster (Marius Goring) does get to say "you see this STICK! Follow it!!" He also gets the girl, if only for a short time. For me, taking up this identity is a way of acknowledging the hack work aspect of dance musicianship (or by extension, my career in general) which goes with the territory of collaborative work. Craster is my alter ego when I make work which is not up to par. The quality went out before the name when on.
Why did I take up that identity for youtube? I have not posted anything of questionable quality: my wedding video, a techno stunt in which I do about three significant things at once, and lately, three recordings of Edison records from my collection. Perhaps it frees me to be more mediated as a potentiality.
Who am I? I can't answer in a short form. Give me lebensraum: symphony or novel, body of work, a life. As a mediated presence, I get to inhabit some other plane: to be an actor.
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