Note: There are a couple brief not-safe-for-work moments in this film.
Patronizing, ponderous, well-meaning, self-aggrandizing, incoherent… young artists are subjected to a lot of unsolicited advice, and not just from their parents.
But what happens when a young artist actively seeks it out?
Her resultant short film, above, appears to be the work of a deliriously aggro inner child, one with a keen bullshit meter and an anarchic sense of humor.
The pulsating reproductive organs aren’t entirely inappropriate. Listen to Eliasson’s full interview to hear him equate making art with making the world. Now that’s the sort of advice that will put a young artist to work!
Some of the more generous advice:
Build a good name, keep your name clean, don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful.
Don’t be embarrassed about what excites you.
If you are doing something weird that everybody hates, that might be something worth looking into and worth investigating.
Make your own way in the world. Wrap up warm. Eat properly, sensibly. Don’t smoke and phone your mom.
We love imagining the sort of unfettered advice Shuhman will one day be in a position to dispense.
You can see some of her post graduation illustration work on her Flickr page.
Practicing for countless hours before we can be good at something seems burdensome and boring. Maybe that’s why we’re drawn to stories of instant achievement. The monk realizes satori (and Neo learns kung fu); the superhero acquires great power out of the blue; Robert Johnson trades for genius at the crossroads. At the same time, we teach children they can’t master a skill without discipline and diligence. We repeat pop psych theories that specify the exact number hours required for excellence. The number may be arbitrary, but it comforts us to believe that practice might, eventually, make perfect. Because in truth we know there is no way around it. As Wynton Marsalis writes in “Wynton’s Twelve Ways to Practice: From Music to Schoolwork,” “practice is essential to learning music—and anything else, for that matter.”
For jazz musicians, the time spent learning theory and refining technique finds eloquent expression in the concept of woodshedding, a “humbling but necessary chore,” writes Paul Klemperer at Big Apple Jazz, “like chopping wood before you can start the fire.”
Yet retiring to the woodshed “means more than just practicing…. You have to dig deep into yourself, discipline yourself, become focused on the music and your instrument.” As beginners, we tend to look at practice only as a chore. The best jazz musicians know there’s also “something philosophical, almost religious” about it. John Coltrane, for example, practiced ceaselessly, consciously defining his music as a spiritual and contemplative discipline.
Marsalis also implies a religious aspect in his short article: “when you practice, it means you are willing to sacrifice to sound good… I like to say that the time spent practicing is the true sign of virtue in a musician.” Maybe this piety is intended to dispel the myth of quick and easy deals with infernal entities. But most of Marsalis’ “twelve ways to practice” are as pragmatic as they come, and “will work,” he promises “for almost every activity—from music to schoolwork to sports.” Find his abridged list below, and read his full commentary at “the trumpeter’s bible,” Arban’s Method.
Seek out instruction: A good teacher will help you understand the purpose of practicing and can teach you ways to make practicing easier and more productive.
Write out a schedule: A schedule helps you organize your time. Be sure to allow time to review the fundamentals because they are the foundation of all the complicated things that come later.
Set goals: Like a schedule, goals help you organize your time and chart your progress…. If a certain task turns out to be really difficult, relax your goals: practice doesn’t have to be painful to achieve results.
Concentrate: You can do more in 10 minutes of focused practice than in an hour of sighing and moaning. This means no video games, no television, no radio, just sitting still and working…. Concentrated effort takes practice too, especially for young people.
Relax and practice slowly: Take your time; don’t rush through things. Whenever you set out to learn something new – practicing scales, multiplication tables, verb tenses in Spanish – you need to start slowly and build up speed.
Practice hard things longer: Don’t be afraid of confronting your inadequacies; spend more time practicing what you can’t do…. Successful practice means coming face to face with your shortcomings. Don’t be discouraged; you’ll get it eventually.
Practice with expression: Every day you walk around making yourself into “you,” so do everything with the proper attitude…. Express your “style” through how you do what you do.
Learn from your mistakes: None of us are perfect, but don’t be too hard on yourself. If you drop a touchdown pass, or strike out to end the game, it’s not the end of the world. Pick yourself up, analyze what went wrong and keep going….
Donʼt show off: It’s hard to resist showing off when you can do something well…. But my father told me, “Son, those who play for applause, that’s all they get.” When you get caught up in doing the tricky stuff, you’re just cheating yourself and your audience.
Think for yourself: Your success or failure at anything ultimately depends on your ability to solve problems, so don’t become a robot…. Thinking for yourself helps develop your powers of judgment.
Be optimistic: Optimism helps you get over your mistakes and go on to do better. It also gives you endurance because having a positive attitude makes you feel that something great is always about to happen.
Look for connections: If you develop the discipline it takes to become good at something, that discipline will help you in whatever else you do…. The more you discover the relationships between things that at first seem different, the larger your world becomes. In other words, the woodshed can open up a whole world of possibilities.
You’ll note in even a cursory scan of Marsalis’ prescriptions that they begin with the imminently practical—the “chores” we can find tedious—and move further into the intangibles: developing creativity, humility, optimism, and, eventually, maybe, a gradual kind of enlightenment. You’ll notice on a closer read that the consciousness-raising and the mundane daily tasks go hand-in-hand.
While this may be all well and good for jazz musicians, students, athletes, or chess players, we may have reason for skepticism about success through practice more generally. Researchers at Princeton have found, for example, that the effectiveness of practice is “domain dependent.” In games, music, and sports, practice accounts for a good deal of improvement. In certain other “less stable” fields driven by celebrity and networking, for example, success can seem more dependent on personality or privileged access.
But it’s probably safe to assume that if you’re reading this post, you’re interested in mastering a skill, not cultivating a brand. Whether you want to play Carnegie Hall or “learn a language, cook good meals or get along well with people,” practice is essential, Marsalis argues, and practicing well is just as important as practicing often. For a look at how practice changes our brains, creating what we colloquially call “muscle memory,” see the TED-Ed video just above.
In elementary school, a playful teacher gave us an assignment. Everyone was to dream up some sort of amazing invention, then draw both a design and an advertisement for it.
It seemed most of my classmates were primed for a future in which sneakers would come equipped with fully operational, built-in wings.
I succumbed to peer pressure and turned in an ad showing a laughing, airborne boy, taunting an earthbound adult by dangling his be-winged sneaker-clad foot just a few inches out of reach.
My Fleet Foot was awarded a good grade, but I felt no passion for it. The invention that truly captured me was the one depicted in my favorite illustration from Patapoufs et Filifers, the funny French children’s book my father had passed down, about a war between fat and thin people. The thin characters were industrious and highly driven, but the fat ones knew how to live, lounging in feather beds beside wall spigots dispensing hot chocolate.
Those spigots were—then and now—a technological advancement I would love to see realized.
In the Fiction of Science, the short film above, Wong, a graphic designer and Google Creative Lab’s VP, shows how storytelling can put the spurs to those with the training and know-how to usher these wild-sounding advancements into the real world.
Case in point, the cell phone.
Martin Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, is widely regarded as the father of the mobile phone, but when we take a broader view, the cell phone actually has two daddies: Cooper and Wah Ming Chang, the artist responsible for many of Star Trek’s iconic props, including the phaser, the tricorder and the communicator—a “portable transceiver device in use by Starfleet crews since the mid-22nd century.”
(Not surprisingly, Cooper was a huge Star Trek fan.)
Touch screens and 3D fabrications born of hand gestures are among the many creative fictions that have quickly become reality as science and art intermingle on movie sets and in the lab.
If you’re inspired to take an active part in this revolution, Google Creative Lab is currently taking applications for The Five, a one-year paid program for five lucky innovators, drawn from a pool of artists, designers, filmmakers, developers, and other talented, multi-dextrous makers.
Last summer, a rumor circulated that Cormac McCarthy, one of America’s most beloved living writers, had passed away. In the midst of a devastating year for famous artists and their fans, the announcement appeared on Twitter, but it “was, in fact, a hoax.” As McCarthy’s publisher—recently merged juggernaut Penguin Random House—confirmed, the author of such modern classics as Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, and No Country for Old Men “is alive and well and still doesn’t care about Twitter.” The literary community is better off not only for McCarthy’s good health, but for his disregard of what may be the most fiendishly distracting social media platform of them all. He is still hard at work, on a novel called The Passenger, tentatively slated for release this year.
You can hear excerpts of The Passenger read in the dim, shaky video below, from an event in 2015 at the Santa Fe Institute, an independent scientific think tank where McCarthy keeps an office and where he has plied a secondary trade as a copy-editor for science-themed books, including Quantum Man, physicist Lawrence Krauss’s biography of Richard Feynman. (McCarthy’s “knowledge of physics and maths,” writes Alison Flood at The Guardian, is said to exceed “that of many professionals in the field.”) McCarthy’s latest work seems like a departure for him.
His earlier novels mined the richness of Southern Gothic and Western traditions, and “have subtly woven in science,” writes Babak Dowlatshahi at Newsweek. But The Passenger “will place science in the foreground.” Santa Fe Institute president David Krakauer calls it “full-blown Cormac 3.0—a mathematical [and] analytical novel.”
So we know Cormac McCarthy is a genius, but how is it that he found the time to become a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowship-winning novelist and, on the side, a student of theoretical physics and math? His secret involves more than staying off Twitter. As McCarthy tells Oprah Winfrey in the video at the top of the post, excerpted from his first television interview ever in 2007, he has made his work the central focus of his life, to the exclusion of everything else, including money and public adulation from fans and admirers. For example, he answers a question about why he turned down lucrative speaking engagements with, “I was busy. I had other things to do.”
It’s not that I don’t like things, I mean some things are very nice, but they certainly take a distant second place to being able to live your life and being able to do what you want to do. I always knew that I didn’t want to work.
How did he pull off not working? “You have to be dedicated… I thought, ‘you’re just here once, life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.’” McCarthy doesn’t “have any advice for anybody” about how to avoid the daily grind, except, he says, “if you’re really dedicated, you can probably do it.” As Oprah puts it, “you have worked at not working?” To which he replies, “absolutely, it’s the number one priority.”
Lest we immediately dismiss McCarthy’s philosophy as cluelessness or privilege, we should bear in mind that he willingly endured extreme and “truly, truly bleak” poverty to keep working at not working—or working, rather, on the work he wanted to do. There’s a bit more to becoming a multiple award-winning novelist and MacArthur “Genius” than simply avoiding the 9‑to‑5. But McCarthy suggests that unless artists make their own work their first priority, and material comfort and economic security a “distant second,” they may never truly find out what they’re capable of.
A quick fyi: this video is a little not safe for work.
You know you want to create something, but how on Earth to get it out of your mind and into reality? Sometimes you simply can’t see the way forward, a situation in which every creator finds themselves sooner or later. When the sculptor Eva Hesse hit a creative block in 1965, she wrote of her problem to a close friend, the conceptual artist Sol Lewitt. He emphatically suggested that she “just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder,” and furthermore that she stop
wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just
DO
You can read Lewitt’s reply in full, which offers much more colorful advice and supporting verbiage besides (as well as a far bolder “DO” than HTML can render), at Letters of Note. Though personally tailored to Hesse and her distinctive sensibilities, Lewitt’s suggestions also show the potential for wider application: “Try and tickle something inside you, your ‘weird humor.’ ” “Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool.” “If you fear, make it work for you — draw & paint your fear & anxiety.” “Practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty.” “Try to do some BAD work — the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell — you are not responsible for the world — you are only responsible for your work — so DO IT.”
Though all this has plenty of impact on the page, it has an entirely different kind when performed by actor (and champion letter-reader) Benedict Cumberbatch, as seen and heard in the Letters Live video above. Putting on a not-overdone New York accent, the English star of Sherlock and The Imitation Game delivers with all necessary force Lewitt’s advice to “leave the ‘world’ and ‘ART’ alone and also quit fondling your ego,” to “empty your mind and concentrate on what you are doing,” to know “that you don’t have to justify your work — not even to yourself.” Be warned that this creative coaching session does gets a little NSFW at times, but then, so do some of the finest works of art — and so do the truths we need to hear to make them.
Some moments in history strike us as dramatic ruptures. Certainties are superseded, thrown into chaos by a seismic event, and we find ourselves adrift and anxious. What are artists to do? Gripped by the same fears as everyone else, the same sense of urgency, writers, musicians, filmmakers, painters, etc. may find themselves unable to “breathe with unconditional breath / the unconditioned air,” as Wendell Berry once described the creative process.
We might remember the radical break with tradition when the shocking carnage of World War I sent poets and painters into frightening places they had previously left unexplored. Virginia Woolf summed up the situation in her essay The Leaning Tower: “suddenly like a chasm in a smooth road, the [Great] war came.” Shattered as they were, her generation overcame their paralysis. Modernists of the early 20th century were able to speak to their broken age in ways that continue to speak to ours.
But we should temper our belief that bad times make good art by noting that the most visionary creative minds are not simply reactive, responding to tragedy like reporters on a crime scene. As Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock— two of the 20th century’s most consistently innovative musicians—suggest, artists at all times need a set of guiding principles. (See the two play “Memory of Enchantment” above in 2002.) There is always a lot of personal work to do. And in “turbulent and unpredictable times,” the two jazz greats advise, “the answer to peace is simple; it begins with you.”
A platitude, perhaps, but one they illustrated nearly a year ago in an open letter at Nest HQ with some profound, if challenging, prescriptions for our present cultural illnesses. Shorter and Hancock’s counsel is not a reaction to the rupture of the presidential election, but a response to the events that preceded it, “the horror at the Bataclan… the upheaval in Syria and the senseless bloodshed in San Bernardino.” Not passively waiting to find out where the past few years’ violence and unrest would lead, the two have made ethical, philosophical, and spiritual interventions, presenting their philosophy and ethics through jazz, Buddhism, science, art, and literature.
Below, you can read their ten pieces of advice “to the next generation of artists,” or at least excerpts thereof. They begin with a reassuring preface: “As an artist, creator and dreamer of this world, we ask you not to be discouraged by what you see but to use your own lives, and by extension your art, as vehicles for the construction of peace…. You matter, your actions matter, your art matters.” That said, they also want to assure readers that “these thoughts transcend professional boundaries and apply to all people, regardless of profession.”
First, awaken to your humanity
You cannot hide behind a profession or instrument; you have to be human. Focus your energy on becoming the best human you can be. Focus on developing empathy and compassion. Through the process you’ll tap into a wealth of inspiration rooted in the complexity and curiosity of what it means to simply exist on this planet.
Embrace and conquer the road less traveled
Don’t allow yourself to be hijacked by common rhetoric, or false beliefs and illusions about how life should be lived. It’s up to you to be the pioneers.
Welcome to the Unknown
Every relationship, obstacle, interaction, etc. is a rehearsal for the next adventure in life. Everything is connected. Everything builds. Nothing is ever wasted. This type of thinking requires courage. Be courageous and do not lose your sense of exhilaration and reverence for this wonderful world around you.
Understand the True Nature of Obstacles
We have this idea of failure, but it’s not real; it’s an illusion. There is no such thing as failure. What you perceive as failure is really a new opportunity, a new hand of cards, or a new canvas to create upon.
Don’t Be Afraid to Interact with Those Who Are Different from You
The world needs more one-on-one interaction among people of diverse origins with a greater emphasis on art, culture and education. Our differences are what we have in common…. We need to be connecting with one another, learning about one another, and experiencing life with one another. We can never have peace if we cannot understand the pain in each other’s hearts.
Strive to Create Agenda-Free Dialogue
Art in any form is a medium for dialogue, which is a powerful tool… we’re talking about reflecting and challenging the fears, which prevent us from discovering our unlimited access to the courage inherent in us all.
Be Wary of Ego
Creativity cannot flow when only the ego is served.
Work Towards a Business without Borders
The medical field has an organization called Doctors Without Borders. This lofty effort can serve as a model for transcending the limitations and strategies of old business formulas which are designed to perpetuate old systems in the guise of new ones.
Appreciate the Generation that Walked Before You
Your elders can help you. They are a source of wealth in the form of wisdom…. Don’t waste time repeating their mistakes.
Lastly, We Hope that You Live in a State of Constant Wonder
As we accumulate years, parts of our imagination tend to dull. Whether from sadness, prolonged struggle, or social conditioning, somewhere along the way people forget how to tap into the inherent magic that exists within our minds. Don’t let that part of your imagination fade away.
Whether you’re a jazz fan, musician, artist, writer, accountant, cashier, trucker, teacher, or whatever, I can’t think of a wiser set of guidelines with which to confront the suffocating epidemic of cynicism, delusional thinking, rampant bigotry, hatred, and self-absorption of our time. Read Shorter and Hancock’s full open letter at Nest HQ.
David Lynch meditates, and he meditates hard. Beginning his practice in earnest after it helped him solve a creative problem during the production of his breakout 1977 film Eraserhead, he has continued meditating assiduously ever since, going so far as to found the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and Peace and publish a pro-meditation book called Catching the Big Fish.
It might seem nonsensical to hear an artist of the grotesque like Lynch speak rapturously about voyaging into his own consciousness, let alone in his fractured all-American, askew-Jimmy-Stewart manner, but he does meditate for a practical reason: it gives him ideas.
Only by meditating, he says, can he dive down and catch the “big fish” he uses as ingredients in his inimitable film, music, and visual art. You can hear more of his thoughts on meditation, consciousness, and creativity in his nine-minute speech above.
If you’d like to hear more, the video just above offers a nearly two-hour presentation at UC Berkeley with Lynch as its star. You’ll also hear from outspoken quantum physicist John Hagelin and Fred Travis, director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness and Cognition Maharishi University of Management. Some of what they say might make good sense to you: after all, we could all use a method to clear our minds so we can create what we need to create. Some of what they say might strike you as total nonsense. But if you feel tempted to dismiss all as too bizarre for serious consideration, you might meditate, as it were, on other things Lynchian: backwards-talking dwarves, severed ears on suburban lawns, alien babies, women living in radiators, sitcom families in rabbit suits. He’s certainly pitched us weirder concepts than meditation.
For some secular introductions to meditation, you may wish to try out some of these resources.
Vonnegut fans long for this level of access, which is why we are doubly grateful to writer Suzanne McConnell, who took Vonnegut’s “Form of Fiction” (aka “Surface Criticism” aka “How to Talk out of the Corner of Your Mouth Like a Real Tough Pro”) course at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the mid-60s.
The goal was to examine fiction from a writer’s perspective and McConnell (who is soon to publish a book about Vonnegut’s advice to writers) preserved one of her old teacher’s term paper assignments—again in letter form. She later had an epiphany that his assignments were “designed to teach something much more than whatever I thought then… He was teaching us to do our own thinking, to find out who we were, what we loved, abhorred, what set off our tripwires, what tripped up our hearts.”
(A decade and a half later, Vonnegut would subject his own novels to the same treatment.)
A noted humanist, Vonnegut instructed the class to read these stories not in an overly analytical mindset, but rather as if they had just consumed “two ounces of very good booze.”
The ensuing letter grades were meant to be “childishly selfish and impudent measures” of how much—or little—joy the stories inspired in the reader.
Next, students were instructed to choose their three favorite and three least favorite stories, then disguise themselves as “minor but useful” lit mag editors in order to advise their “wise, respected, witty and world-weary superior” as to whether or not the selected stories merited publication.
Here’s the full assignment, which was published in Kurt Vonnegut: Letters(Delacorte Press, 2012). And also again in Slate.
Beloved:
This course began as Form and Theory of Fiction, became Form of Fiction, then Form and Texture of Fiction, then Surface Criticism, or How to Talk out of the Corner of Your Mouth Like a Real Tough Pro. It will probably be Animal Husbandry 108 by the time Black February rolls around. As was said to me years ago by a dear, dear friend, “Keep your hat on. We may end up miles from here.”
As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. “This above all …”
I invite you to read the fifteen tales in Masters of the Modern Short Story (W. Havighurst, editor, 1955, Harcourt, Brace, $14.95 in paperback). Read them for pleasure and satisfaction, beginning each as though, only seven minutes before, you had swallowed two ounces of very good booze. “Except ye be as little children …”
Then reproduce on a single sheet of clean, white paper the table of contents of the book, omitting the page numbers, and substituting for each number a grade from A to F. The grades should be childishly selfish and impudent measures of your own joy or lack of it. I don’t care what grades you give. I do insist that you like some stories better than others.
Proceed next to the hallucination that you are a minor but useful editor on a good literary magazine not connected with a university. Take three stories that please you most and three that please you least, six in all, and pretend that they have been offered for publication. Write a report on each to be submitted to a wise, respected, witty and world-weary superior.
Do not do so as an academic critic, nor as a person drunk on art, nor as a barbarian in the literary market place. Do so as a sensitive person who has a few practical hunches about how stories can succeed or fail. Praise or damn as you please, but do so rather flatly, pragmatically, with cunning attention to annoying or gratifying details. Be yourself. Be unique. Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.
Since there are eighty of you, and since I do not wish to go blind or kill somebody, about twenty pages from each of you should do neatly. Do not bubble. Do not spin your wheels. Use words I know.
poloniøus
McConnell supplied further details on the extraordinary experience of being Vonnegut’s student in an essay forthe Brooklyn Rail:
Kurt taught a Chekhov story. I can’t remember the name of it. I didn’t quite understand the point, since nothing much happened. An adolescent girl is in love with this boy and that boy and another; she points at a little dog, as I recall, or maybe something else, and laughs. That’s all. There’s no conflict, no dramatic turning point or change. Kurt pointed out that she has no words for the sheer joy of being young, ripe with life, her own juiciness, and the promise of romance. Her inarticulate feelings spill into laughter at something innocuous. That’s what happened in the story. His absolute delight in that girl’s joy of feeling herself so alive was so encouraging of delight. Kurt’s enchantment taught me that such moments are nothing to sneeze at. They’re worth a story.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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