If you care about creating anything, care enough that you actually want to spend your precious, fleeting time working to make something worthwhile, there is no such thing as writers block so long as your motivation to create is greater than all of your reasons not to.
The real value of art is in its ephemerality. Yes, I hope you desire what I create, and yes, I hope to continue to make a living creating things. But the value of art as social function worth doing is the exquisite bright light it shines directly onto the moment of its creation. In its best expression, we can only hope that work gets rescued from its own private steamer trunk so it can cast light on others.
I tried my best to explain what we were doing, but I was also conscious not to risk over-promising our potential, considering just how much we didn’t know ourselves. For several of our principal stakeholders the tension started to grow uncomfortable. It was hard to trust my assertion that “we’re onto something”, even though nobody had seen anything like the thing we were onto. I think we managed to survive this tension due to the simultaneously palpable excitement had started to build in the shared production spaces where we were working.
Ideas are funny things. They do not always show up on time, and they often don’t show up when it’s convenient either. I vividly recall the moment to this day: sometime in the middle of the holiday week, late at night, a simple thought came to mind. The moment the idea crystalized, it released something new and thrilling, effectively setting off a cascade of events and discoveries.
The moral conundrum is whether it’s even possible to give oneself over to a night of artistic joy when tragic fires burn elsewhere. I treasure rare evenings seeing live theater. In other moments I ake pleasure in figuring out how I might shoot a particular photograph or a script I’m readying for production. In all cases I’m aware that millions of others are not sharing my experience. They’re just hoping for ordinary things like clean water and a reassuring sunrise.
Good collaboration requires everyone to lean in. There’s likely going to be a quarterback or movie director or CEO leading the conversation, but expectations established before the meeting should insist that everyone needs to come prepared. No matter who you are on a team, know your role to the best of your ability, no matter how unglamorous it may seem, but also make an effort to understand the big picture.
After two millions years it still makes evolutionary sense for working groups of creative people to cluster in real life around a piano or a drafting table or a monitor on a movie set. Software sends us to isolated laptops, with intermediation run through glass screens. Software can eat the soul of good work if the team isn’t careful, with participants fiddling with settings as much as they may be working on bringing new ideas to life.
Big-top spectacles have been a cultural commonality forever. Crowds always have and likely always will show up to distract themselves from the day-to-day, even when there’s no obvious benefit to anyone but the canny producers who convinced them to buy a ticket. In a capitalist culture, the action itself is the value, and there’s no point in keeping a vigil hoping the mainstream will suddenly develop deeper intentions beyond having a good time.
Considering how hard ordinary life has become for so many people, it’s probably no coincidence that much of our daily entertainment diet has adopted a vocabulary about survival. Sometimes we’re checking out how a group of weekend vacationers are going to survive the local axe murderer. Sometimes we’re just chillin’ with a team of government assassins rationalizing dirty deeds while struggling to figure out why their home life is so fraught. In other words, hard days have become good times.
Perhaps you can conjure the clattering iron radiator in your first apartment after college. But will you ever care about last week’s meme that pinged from one social network to another? The flow of daily irrelevance flooding your phone washes away real, unretrievable hours like an unstoppable stream filling an infinitely wide basin. Memories of the sounds from your first apartment may not be the most important thing in your life, but they are impressions collected from your actual life. That radiator literally radiated heat into the place you lived.
There are gestures of science fiction here, but this story definitively takes place in the real world. The externalities finds stable footing in the world of science, and as a robust skeleton for more delicate interior considerations, that stability adds mass and relevance. The natural world, and those people dedicated to understanding its intricacies, serves as a narrative backdrop. Through the eyes of the book’s short cast of characters we are reminded that there are dramatic and profound alternatives to the exceedingly complex lives most of us live in the industrialized world.
The scene was a little strange. It was odd to see so many peppers in a such a big pile, spread across nearly ten feet of tabletop. It also became several things at the same time. In one way the scene was singular, a mass of tangled, elongated green shapes connected into one unified object: a pepper sculpture. In another way it showcased a profoundly beautiful way of seeing nuances and differences of so many things that appeared the same, but were actually distinct and unique: peppers as stars in the infinite sky.
The Book Review aggregates a collection of contemporary thinkers who have spent more than just a a few minutes focused on a particular subject or narrative. To write a book means an author has typically labored to research, excavate, and shape what they want to say. It is a condensation of intense focus, and often a much deeper dive into a sliver of culture than any short-form anything.
Imagine a creative process that essentially feeds on little more than what’s cool right now, a millimeter deep understanding of our collective roots and our personal roots. A culture that doesn’t understand its own references, that trades primarily in disposable memes, is a culture doomed to being controlled by whatever political forces ultimately own the platforms of distribution.
The number one thing we collectively did with our Promethean information powers was unhinge our jaws and try to swallow as much newly emerging social media as possible—voraciously, absent-mindedly, relentlessly. We became boa constrictors incapacitated by trying to swallow not simply a goat, but an elephant.
What does it matter if I skip a single, socially lubricating word when I’m talking to a massive, barely competent LLM housed in the cloud? I might be saying words, but nobody’s ears are really listening to what I’m saying. If we’re being honest about this, who cares?, especially considering that I’m only speaking to a digital assistant. Read on, because I believe it means a lot, and I’ll explain why.
Ideas are no longer bound by time and space and opportunity. In fact, since you’re likely reading this on a hand-held device, you’re intimately aware of just how many ideas are pulling at your attention right now. Too many, most likely. We must make choices.
Ordinary things are everywhere. The benches, the goofy elephant picture, the water fountain, even the tropical leaves in all directions were not in themselves the source of inspiration. Inspiration comes from following through with goals. It comes from doing the work. It comes from noticing events of the day, the chaos of monkeys howling in the trees, the acrid tang of a poorly maintained pick-up truck’s exhaust, the sweet burst of a freshly picked orange.
With everyone clicking and posting photos all day long with their cell phones, the challenge of finding interesting photographs isn’t especially hard. I’m not worried about finding a singular giraffe image, or any other easily identifiable asset that I may need for a quick turnaround production. I worry for reasons that lurk beneath the surface like shallow rocks at the shoreline.
Capitalism is no longer an engine of modernity; it is the engine of modernity. With thinning ranks of winners taking disproportionally larger and larger slices of material wealth, the environment for most creatives has reached a crisis point.