My world on the web
It was a bleak winter, and these books helped me through.
Here is an idea I love that may or may not be true:
Some books are centripetal ā they suck you in from other books.
Some books are centrifugal ā they spin you out to other books.
I want to be able to be wrong. I want to change my mind! I want to evolve.
Being wrong publicly is the easiest way to learn what you need to know. The trouble is: itās also the easiest way to get yelled at or shamed or ācanceled,ā as they say.
To do the exploration that growth and change requires, one needs a forgiving mediumā¦ but what one really needs forgiving readers.
Silence is a pocket of possibility.
One way you know if a book is any good is if you are still thinking about it a year after you read it.Ā (Or five years, or a decade, etc. The longer you think about a book the better you know it is.) Another way to know if a book is good is if it seems like every week you read an article that could be a supplementary chapter.
I take the thing Iām disgusted with,Ā imagine the opposite, andĀ push that out into the world.
Identifying poison, privately, butĀ sharing nourishment, publicly.
The first exercise in Jeff TweedyāsĀ How To Write One SongĀ is called a āWord Ladder.ā (Not Lewis CarrollāsĀ word game.) It goes like this:
- Make a list of ten verbs related to some profession. (He uses a physician, I used a construction worker.)
- Write down ten nouns within your field of vision.
- Connect the words that donāt usually go together.
An audio compilation of my bestselling books about creativity in the digital age, Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work! and Keep Going.
If you catch an idea, you know, any idea, it wasnāt there and then itās there! It might just be a small fragment, of, like I say, a feature film or a song of a lyric or whatever, but you gotta write that idea down right away. And as youāre writing, sometimes itās amazing how much comes out, you know, from that one flashā¦
This reminds me of an interview between Kevin Parker and Rick Ruben in which Parker talks about the challenge of capture ideas when they come to you. Ruben shares how Neil Young always responds to ideas no matter how rude it may be. This excerpt captures Young’s thinking:
Usually 1 sit down and 1 go until Iām trying to think. As soon as I start thinking, I quit… then when I have an idea out of nowhere, I start up again. When that idea stops, I stop. I donāt force it. If its not there, itās not there, and thereās nothing you can do about it… Thereās the conscious mind and the subconscious mind and the spirit. And I can only guess as to what is really going on there. (Zollo, 1997, pp. 354-5)
Ruben then gives Parker permission to stop what you are doing and capture the ideas when they come.
It took us two days to get through 42,000 words, which Iām told isnāt too bad! I had two big revelations:
1.Ā Recording is aĀ physicalĀ process.Ā Itās actually really hard work ā it requires a ton of concentration and performance while sitting on your ass. My throat and my nerves were raw and I was an exhausted wreck at the end of the day! You start to notice every single weird pop and click your horrible mouth makes. I drank probably 3 gallons of water. (I was told, too late, that a green apple helps with mouth noise.)
2.Ā You should record the audiobook before you turn in the book.Ā I alwaysĀ read my work out loudĀ when Iām editing, but being forced to say your words into a microphone and hearing your voice over headphones turns up every wart and wrinkle in the text. āWhat illiterate wrote this script?ā I thought, five minutes into recording. The books got even better in the course of recording.
The process of using tools provided and dialling in remotely reminded me of Jacob Collier’s reflections on the use of Source Connect on the Switched on Pop podcast.
Looking forward to hearing the books. Maybe it is a trick of the mind, but I always like hearing an author read their own work.
Do you want the artists you love answering emails or do you want them making the work you love?
Because itās hard to do both.
What this became over the course of a month was a really cool kind of daily blogging exercise. My posts got deeper (and longer) as the month went on and I started using the albums just as an excuse to write about whatever they made me think about when they were playing.
Taking lessons in creativity from my kids.
For those of us lucky and healthy enough to stay home and isolate, what the virus really destroys is our sense of time. Days feel like weeks. Months feel like seconds.
āIt used to be āthat song is so 2008ā. Now itās āugh, that song is so 10am. What are you thinking? With that old song you old man?ā
I find that my diary is a good place to have bad ideas. I tell my diary everything I shouldnāt tell anybody else, especially everyone on social media. We are in a shitty time in which you canāt really go out on any intellectual limbs publicly, or people ā even your so-called friends! ā will throw rocks at you or try to saw off the branch. Harsh, but true.
Personally speaking, I find the challenge is that such spaces are the last to get tended to, yet often the most important in regards to mental health.
Ear candy: I have a lot of writing ahead of me, so Iāll soon be making my way through PitchforkāsĀ 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time. An album missing from that list is Hiroshi YoshimuraāsĀ Music for Nine Post Cards, which my friendĀ JezĀ just wrote about. Another composer on that list Iām really into right now is Daniel Lopatin, akaĀ Oneohtrix Point Never, who did the soundtrackĀ for theĀ recent Safdie Brothers film,Ā Uncut Gems.
