IT'S NEVER THE MONEY, IT'S ALWAYS THE MONEY

Sticker shock palliative: "Don't choke. Bespoke!"

Okay, maybe you still won't feel better about paying big bucks for what you think ought to be yours fer nuthin', but at least you know the person selling whatever you're buying thinks hand crafted goodness is worth the price.

A couple of weeks ago, Adam Davidson wrote a terrific short article in the Sunday New York times on the peculiar and economically dismal business of hand made haberdashery.

You don't have to be a clothes horse to recognize one of the strange ironies of his story, and how it relates to creative work at a place like 1AU Global Media. Hand worked wonderfulness costs money, but hand worked wonderfulness does not get made in massive Pacific rim factories. Still, you have to ask yourself if any handmade anything is ever worth the pain, for buyer and seller alike. Like all things of vital importance, the answer depends.

We understand the seller's dilemma immediately. Handwork means there's no economy of scale. You can only make what you can produce yourself, and you can only raise prices so far until you destroy your own market.

For the buyer there's the hassle and headache of having to specify endless details for that special custom something. Specificity takes time at all stages of the process and generally costs a lot more than a commodity. And yet the option persists. What's more, some things practically demand handwork while some things inevitably require assembly line solutions.

You probably buy a certain class of handmade products regularly: food. You know that deli you always visit where they make your turkey and sprouts on rye to your own, custom spec whenever they see you come in the door--extra hot peppers, hold the mayo? It might just be a sandwich, but it couldn't get made the way you really want in a factory, on an assembly-line, or by machine. Way down the spectrum there's the linen and candlelight place downtown for which you made a special Saturday night reservation. The ginger Seabass with asparagus you ordered appears at your seat by means of delicate hand work in the kitchen. Unlike the waxed papered sandwich at the deli, all the little details matter here: the precisely poached vegetables, the razor thin curly cue of lemon skin along the fish, the cobalt patterns on the plates themselves.

There's no such thing as a handmade car, at least not in a conventional sense. But this is really a blind alley. By coming up with examples of mass production's efficiencies and successes we're avoiding the central question. We understand why handmade goods cost more. The question is really one of value proposition: do you consider that cost overage worth it? It's arguable that all restaurant purchases require some measure of handwork, perhaps more than most other industries. There may not be a lot riding on a successful outcome of your turkey sandwich. If you're honest with yourself, the same could be said of that expensive Saturday restaurant experience, too.

But does it matter?

It matters to me.

I cannot pretend that modernity's technological marvels sometimes facilitate just what I'm looking for without need for an artisan's influence. The computer I'm using at this moment came off a factory assembly line. (I'm going to side-step the enormous creative collective that designed this electronic palantir.) So did the desk chair on which I'm sitting. But most of the commissions we undertake here at 1AU are for creative work that's precisely unlike anything that's come before. That's the great differentiator, and that's why slapping together a bunch of video clips in the preinstalled software on your own computer isn't the same thing.

Adam Davidson's article talks about a Jamaican tailor living in Brooklyn who makes $4000 suits for a living but could never afford to buy what he sells. Does he make suits for the money? Of course. But is he in it for the money? I doubt it. It's too much work, too much identity, too much of himself in each suit that leaves on the wealthy backs of his customers. When someone walks out of his shop wearing a sharply creased suit to a midtown power meeting, the immigrant tailor knows he just influenced––ever so slightly perhaps, but genuinely influenced––the direction the world will tilt that day. Whether it tilts for good or ill is a subjective consideration--a big one, I realize--but I'll leave that for another day. He added something to the world, something of himself, and that makes all the difference.

Money pushes all of us around, no doubt. But I've yet to meet a creator who avoids doing the actual work of creation. The cynical part of my brain compartmentalizes industrialists from more easily identified creators, from artists. But I think this is probably a narrow view. The successful industrialist creates by establishing wide-field solutions to complex problems. He or she may not be designing the new 3D model for a piece of consumer gadgetry, or the actual sewing patters for the fall pret a porter collection, but he or she is solving conceptual problems to bring those items to life. Handwork? Hard to say. I suspect that craftsmanship is a term that fits more comfortably with the work of actual, physical creative work. But creative work always requires handwork, no matter what form it takes. That this creative process affords different navigational routes through time with different appraisals about the value of money is what makes it tricky. The big differentiator, I believe, is that while the "mass producer" may be motivated by the creative impulse, the hand working creator almost always sees themselves in the labor. I suspect that while all of us who do one-off, custom projects want to be respected and well paid, we don't do what we do simply for money. We do what we do to change the world's tilt, even if it's for just a moment.

--MS

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RAIN AND SUN

The rain speaks.

I'm standing at the window watching a heavy, late summertime rain fill the air. Early yesterday, bright sun washed out the sky; it hadn't occurred to me that a storm may be right behind.

By and large we at 1AU work in a high-tech world. That means we spend a lot of time around computer monitors and electrical cables and cameras and, of course, endless hours inside. We work by electronic light. We breathe recirculated air.

It almost sounds like life aboard a spacecraft.

But today it's raining, and it occurs to me that the vaguely romantic mood I'm in directly relates to the water falling from the sky. I laugh at myself when I think of how I sat in my car this morning, strategizing for a minute as I tried to think of a way to minimize the soaking I'd get when I opened the door. I considered all of the options, worked out the moves like choreography: sling my shoulder bag securely, then grab the flip-lid coffee cup with right hand while I pocket the car keys with my other. I'd adroitly bump the driver side door shut with my right elbow, and dash for the door, 50 meters across puddle-strewn pavement.

Ready...? "Go!"

Result? I got wet. And then I stood at the door to my office looking out through the glass--dripping, slightly chilled-- and I decided not to be annoyed at all.

Rain falls; winds blow; temperature changes. The natural world speaks, but not to us. It speaks and we may listen in, like passengers in a train terminal listening nonchalantly to a private phone conversation in the chair next to us. The natural world offers food for thought, backdrops for moods, be they bright or melancholy. The natural world is not something to resist. Taken with a measure of grace, it's a touchstone, always surprising, always authentic, often changing, yet reliable and honest every single day.

As artists we should be open to all sorts of influences, from surprising physical experiences and diverse people. As the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurasowa said, "Artists cannot avert their eyes." Where that comment evokes considerations of social justice, and nuanced political observations, and moments of transformation, I'm sitting here with rainwater on my glasses recognizing how it also suggests that we not lose touch with sources of inspiration directly enveloping us. Sometimes it's rain; sometimes it's the act of band-aiding a paper cut earned when you rush to refill the aging inkjet printer in the corner. Inspiration comes from observation, and observation comes from wanting to be a participant in your own life rather than a spectator.

Today the sound of rain--that low, white noise vibration––becomes a natural soundtrack to the movie of my day. But so do bird songs in sunlit afternoons, and the mournful whistles of late autumn breezes as they coax me to pull the sides of my collar closer together. Sights, sounds, feelings of air on skin: the natural world is raw material for art. And as regular readers of this column know, I believe art is the natural byproduct of a vibrant life.

MS

YIELDS FROM THE AETHER

Generating ideas can be like catching fish in a river: you can get better at snagging 'em, but you can never control the entire process. As a team, ideas are the fuel that propel our actions. We spend a lot of time cultivating ideas, nurturing them, helping them become constructions worthy of resources and action.

They're like children, come to think of it.

But ideas do not immediately yield results. They do not entirely behave like the creations they grow into either. Creations come from hard work, perseverance, and craftsmanship. Ideas are about letting go.

This summer the team is deep into the idea-generating business. With long days of sunny weather, the promise of extended weekends, and big summer movies tempting us away from projects at hand, idea cultivation runs the risk of withering on the vine. But looking closer, the big challenge seems not to be the generation of new ideas, but the transformation of those ideas into results.

That's always the great duality. Ideas shimmer in translucent light; they generally do not stand up dressed in bold, primary colors. Work, on the other hand, accumulates like bricks, like opaque, matte objects that need to be fitted together into larger structures. Ideas radiate, work stands firm.

One of the most lethal challenges to a good idea are the many explanations people tell themselves about why it won't work. People tell themselves why their ideas are impractical, why they don't have the resources or the time or the opportunities to make them come alive. Plus, there are always endless distractions. After all, work takes work. Life tempts us with other ways to spend our time.

But ideas, properly nurtured, can overcome inertia. Good ideas can turn mountains of work into acts of creation. That's why coming up with good ideas are probably not something you want to leave to chance. Once in a while a good idea will simply pop into mind, but over the long term, it's better to be proactive rather than reactive. But of all the concrete, constructive suggestions for generating new ideas, there's one that rises above all others: let go of what you know.

Letting go of what you think the world is supposed to be is like opening your car's window on the highway. Ideas rush in without restrictions. The world becomes an engine of invention. You suddenly notice how trees grow, how traffic moves, how bread rises, how satellites orbit. You'll suddenly see familiar things you've seen your whole life in bold, new lights. You'll observe and you'll drift and then WHAM! you're crashing right into a new idea.

It's not as easy as it sounds, and believe it or not it takes some practice. We all have presuppositions surrounding us, some far more entrenched than we realize. It takes practice to let the world flood in. But consider an inversion of the old saw: apres le deluge, vous.

But don't forget: after ideas germinate, you gotta get down to work if they're gonna grow.

--MS

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REVISITING THE PAST, CREATING THE FUTURE

On a recent family road trip we stopped to visit the high school my mother attended in the 1950's. Located in the crumbling outskirts of Newark, New Jersey, Weequahic High School stands as a testament to the one universal truth: everything changes.

In the middle decades of the 20th century, Weequahic was regarded as one of the 10 best public high schools in the entire country. Philip Roth went there; Albert Einstein lectured there; the curriculum taught Chinese and Swahili there before most Americans ever thought there would be a reason to learn things other than Romance languages.

Everything changes. Located amid the depressing ruins of what used to be one of the nation's great cities, the front of the school faces Chancellor Avenue now like the broken friezes at Abu Simbel face the Egyptian desert. Inside the front door, the proud, inspiring post-modernist murals that met the historically extraordinary student body decades ago hide now behind cheap plexiglass shields to forestall abuse and degradation. The hallways show cracks and off-kilter locker doors. The lighting sputters and flickers for want of fresh bulbs. The paint peels. The sentiment that immediately floods a visitor is one of sadness, of lost opportunities, of societies beat up and beat down.

Students still attend.

My mother still speaks of her days there with reverence and respect. The aging alumni with whom she's still in contact--and they are a spectacularly accomplished bunch--still hold up the image of the place as if it were a light in the darkness of a descended city. They still talk about obligations to the future, and responsibilities for the past, and deep values locked in the DNA of a great idea.

Why write about this for a blog that purports to be about creativity? After visiting this remarkable, uniquely American place-- sharing stories, listening to legends, considering the implications-- a deeply resonant thrum begins to flood in. Those feelings yield to thinking. Thinking turns to cognition.

To wit: good ideas are not enough. The history of civilization, from its technological advances to its cultural inventions to its wide and endlessly surprising art, all spring from good ideas. But plenty of good ideas have come to naught. The great civilizations of middle America in the last millennium routinely slaughtered endless lives as human sacrifices even as they turned back the jungle and fed hundreds of thousands, building astounding cities and mathematical frameworks and orderly societies.

How many screenplays have rattled around people's heads without finding enough traction to make it to completion? How many paintings and dances and poems have simply crumbled beneath the realities of making those works whole, of bringing resources of time and clarity and money to bear on their completion? The continuity of good, profound ideas sometimes does not overcome the inertial forces of desert sands grinding those ideas down.

Even great civilizations crumble.

But ideas endure. Those murals still exist inside the front atrium of Weequahic High School. There are inspirations still embedded in the fading paint, capable of inspiring new students. That is, the potential for inspiration still obtains if the power of good ideas can be nurtured and cultivated, supported and reinvigorated.

Things always change. If we adopt this as a true statement, then we also open the potential for great things to rise from seemingly irretrievable pieces. Sometimes things change for the better.

We should therefore commit to engaging the world in an endless process of creation.

-MS

PS -- To our regular readers, please take 20 seconds (or thereabouts) and retweet, cross post, or otherwise pass the link for this blog--and its 1AU Global Media home--onto your own readers and friends! Call it karma, call it kismet: we'll just call it cool! Cool?

RESETTING

Our chief technologist and master editor Vicky Weeks has a knack for getting right to the center of the coconut. When we're deep into production or out on the road and everyone needs to take a few hours to go over plans, break down, clean up, or otherwise find their brains, she says it's time for us to "reset".

Clearly the term draws cultural connections to the ubiquitous ghost in the collective machine. We're all so tethered to our myriad devices; the very idea of resetting ourselves seems to be an extension of the machines we use. By investing our identities with this mechanical process, it's almost as if we've capitulated free will to some sort of Borg collective, as if "resetting" ourselves is simply a standard procedure for living as part of a larger hive mind.

But I fear I'm heading down a digressive path.

Beyond a cultural analysis of machines-versus-humanity, Vicky's expression always makes me smile for it's perfection. In elegantly simple language it suggests an awareness that big actions and important decisions are often made best when someone is stable, solid, and whole. To "reset" is to find a center point, a moment of equilibrium in what may have been roiling seas. It is to have a moment's clarity, or at least a moment's peace amid the jangle of reality.

If you know anything about media production, reality jangles. It rips and snorts and bucks like a bee-stung bronco. To hope for anything different is to be a fool in a warrior's game. But even samurai understand the value of sitting quietly. Sometimes the very act of quiet breathing, of carefully coiling the extension cords and repacking the equipment bags can make all the different in the world for successfully completing tough shooting days.

Some people fall into the trap of thinking they need to reset too often. It's one thing to be organized, but to reset too often is to give yourself an excuse for not actually getting anything done. Real engagement with creative work--with life, really--requires us to stay in the game and figure out how to find balance through movement. In the fast-moving obstacles and challenges of a busy day, balance is less a stable position than it is a confident sequence of footfalls that resist panic as they lightly hop from position to position. In aggregate, those hops should be moving you forward.

Resetting is different. It's a system downshift, a reboot, an intentional pull of the power plug. It can be something designated for a few hours, or it can be something designated for many, many days. You don't do it when you're tired; for that you should just get some rest. Resetting is for finding your center again, with the specific goal of heading out for unknown horizons. It's not something to take lightly, even as it can dramatically lessen the force of gravity for a precious period of time. In some ways it's a sacred thing, and like all powerful techniques, something that should be intensely respected, infrequently employed, and done with mindful intention.

It's okay if you enjoy it, too. I know I do.

--MS

PS -- To our regular readers, please take 20 seconds (or thereabouts) and retweet, cross post, or otherwise pass the link for this blog--and its 1AU Global Media home--onto your own readers and friends! Call it karma, call it kismet: we'll just call it cool! Cool?

NOT DONE YET

My sister sent me this link. Unless you're an Aaron Sorkin fan, the specific contents of the video might not mean much to you, but I'm not posting it here to reminisce about West Wing, The Social Network, or other walk-and-talk dramas from Hollywood's number one dialogue master.

What really got my attention was the repetition over the years of these so-called "Sorkinisms". Is he plagiarizing himself? Is he lazy? Has he forgotten to back up his hard drive over and over and over again?

No, and I suspect he's only barely in touch with the answer himself. Love him or hate him, Sorkin is an artist. He creates because the act of creating helps him figure out his world. He revisits similar characters over and over again because those are the kind of characters that help him refract his own life. In visiting the same kind of people repeatedly in his scripts, Sorkin plays with familiar lines over and over again just like a painter plays with similar colors and shapes and concepts. Matisse repeated the same two-dimensional paper cutout dancer shapes many times; the abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell revisited a crudely bulbous and angular design over and over again. We recognize Pete Townsend's guitar playing with just a few notes; Mozart sounds like Mozart.

Artists create to make the world whole. Or, perhaps more accurately, artists create in often mighty attempts to make their own worlds whole. Repetition of various themes are just efforts not quite perfected, not finished being poked, not quite out of mind. Sorkin finds his artistic voice through familiar rhythms and emotions he puts into the mouths of his dramatic proxies. Others try other themes.

The funny thing is that even as we may collectively smile sometimes, even deride, repetitive been-there-done-that thematic references from specific artists, I find that if someone doesn't have a distinct enough voice to be recognizable, they may very well not have a voice worth listening to closely. Certainly there are plenty of risible creations by wannabes who endlessly continue to take pictures of pretty swans floating serenely beneath stone bridges at sunset, but I'm speaking about something else. That something else is, of course, intangible; there's never a solid dividing line between the repetitive artist when he or she has run out of things to say, and repetition because an artist is still speaking about an idea that continues to produce fruit, that's not done growing yet.

Either way: Sorkin. Fascinating, creative, gutsy, nuts-y. And yes, my DVR is set to record The Newsroom. Who cares if he's said it all before? It's what he's talking about and the way he does it that really grabs me.

--MS

PS -- To our regular readers, please take 20 seconds (or thereabouts) and retweet, cross post, or otherwise pass the link for this blog--and its 1AU Global Media home--onto your own readers and friends! Call it karma, call it kismet: we'll just call it cool! Cool?

Storm!

There's always a storm ahead. The question is when. Then the next question is, "What are you going to do when it comes?"

History rarely celebrates The Couch Potato. Crowds never gather to cheer the timid, the sedentary, the boring. Sing it, Virgil: "Audaces Fortuna iuvat."

But you know what? A day or two after a natural calamity, everyone's wishing for a little prosaic ordinariness.

The mid-Atlantic states got clobbered by a colossal storm on summer night in 2014, knocking out power, felling massive trees, ripping power lines from their poles like spider webs ripped from backyard porch railings. It came on a Friday and by Sunday morning more than 1 million people were still without power. Substantial water restrictions were imposed due to a suddenly darkened water pumping station in the region. And may I add parenthetically, that this all sent a particular pang of fear into my heart, because triple digit temperatures dangerously threatened to desiccate my thriving tomato crop. But perhaps I shouldn't jest about such widespread woe.

Widening the metaphorical lens, I can't help but be aware of the tragic fires this year in Colorado. Homes and lives have suffered terribly, and major portions of vital national wilderness have turned to ash.

Pulling back even further, it's inevitable that perditions elsewhere in the global village should immediately come into focus. Debt crisis, Syrian upheaval, African strife, environmental decay, abrasion of the American social fabric: trapped in an art gallery a hungry person hardly notices the  paintings all around.

Of the many lessons a life in the arts teaches, the two most essential are fortitude and perseverance. No kidding: "the show must go on" means so much more than simply a rallying call for nervous high school students at the spring play. But the real world often requires us to drop philosophy for practicality. Philosophy informs how we will act; that's why it's essential to develop deep philosophical skills early on. The actions we make in life are choices shaped by a life of philosophical training--good choices if we've trained ourselves well, not so good choices if we've missed the forest for the lumber mill.  Surrounded locally by a calamity that merely hints microcosmically at the substantially larger challenges elsewhere around the world, I'm aware of the discontinuity between philosophy and practicality.

In the past few days, we've been working hard to develop a number of new, substantial projects. New treatment pages and reference art are starting to add up, starting to gather exciting critical mass. We're aiming high, looking far, and running the engines at high revs. Nobody cheers for the complacent, and these days we've been pretty busy.

Then the storm hit.

As I turn in my chair to look out the window, it's a lovely morning, now two days after a gusty wind and rain have stopped. The air is almost still, the sunlight golden yellow, the few singing winter birds giving no indication of the rough night they weathered just recently. But the storm also forced momentum to come to a crashing halt on those new projects, as practical realities and the emotions and energy necessary to propel them got siphoned elsewhere.

That perseverance thing, that thing about the show going on? It's not about dumb, donkey-headed stubbornness. It's about taking the day in stride, come what may, no matter what winds or rain may lash fragile flesh. It's about a sense of humor, grim sometimes, but a sense of humor fundamentally. It's also about a determination to be undaunted, even as the unexpected knocks you for a loop. Because the unexpected is always gonna knock you for a loop.

Of course, you can't think these things when you're wondering where your family is going to sleep now that your home is a pile of rubble, or your nation in tatters from political unrest. But later, later, later… long after the smoke has cleared and democratic elections held, and people you love are together again telling stories, the artists of the world will have led the way in making sense of events that really had little to do with ordinary reason and rhyme. Acts of creation matter most when the world runs down. The perseverance inherent in those who have something to say puts a frame around the otherwise Brownian chaos of unpredictability. By framing the world, we make sense of the world. By making sense of the world, we find our fortune.

In case you're wondering, by the way, we're back to being full speed ahead getting those new projects off the ground. Stay tuned.  Go farther.

@michaelstarobin

facebook.com/1auglobalmedia

PS -- To our regular readers, please take 20 seconds (or thereabouts) and retweet, cross post, or otherwise pass the link for this blog--and its 1AU Global Media home--onto your own readers and friends! Call it karma, call it kismet: we'll just call it cool! Cool?

MUSIC AGAIN (Time Enough for Love)

There's something else about music that begs consideration. Two weeks ago I decried the ubiquity of ordinary music. Today I'm celebrating the plethoric diversity of great music from all corners.

Part of this bounty comes from a strange economic phenomenon: when supply becomes so available that financial value plunges to irrelevancy, aesthetics and beauty become the coin of the realm. When work doesn't bring in revenue, pleasure in simply making it becomes the ultimate reward.

It's like that in all things. Why do poets endure? Painters rarely stain a canvas these days to put food on the table. Acts of creation explain themselves. Creation denies entropy. Creation imposes meaning and structure on forces working mightily to spin apart. Do we ever need excuses to embrace our lovers?

But what of music specifically? There's no way to hold it in your hand. The moment it's brought into being, it's gone. We all recall songs and tune snippets, but recollection is not the same as permanence and presence. Recordings preserve music, but in an essential, existential sense, music flees like time.

Music is the epitomized aesthetic of emotion. Its ability to organize and synchronize other senses affects us all, even if we hardly realize it. The ubiquity of music, from commercial jingles and cell phone ring tones to the person in the next cube who plays that maddening radio station all day makes it easy to dismiss and overlook.

I love listening to street musicians play next to subway station entrances. They might be asking for a few dollars (and they usually get something from me, no matter how I feel about their particular groove), but there's no way that the thousands of hours of practice time accumulated throughout their lives are worth the few bucks that speckle their instrument cases. They play music…because playing makes living worthwhile.

There are so many essential threads to pull here: are traditional, western instruments a dead-end in an electronic culture? In an era of grinding competition, does music have a cultural value if it can't sell a million downloads? Does anyone ever just listen anymore, or is music now just an art form to color the atmosphere of inveterate multi-taskers?

There's a lot to the subject. But as the great Russian composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninov famously said, "Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music."

D.S. al coda.

-MS

GEAR LUST

Right now I'm really jonesing for a thunderbolt RAID. I'd also love to order a short stack of what the smart money thinks will be new, kickin' Apple laptops, and hand 'em out to the team. The Apple World Wide Developer's Conference starts this week, and the latest coolness from Cupertino promises all sorts of speed, efficiency, and future-forward sleekness. Coupled with a new set of Canon cameras for a big new gig we're currently developing, hot software upgrades, and a fabulous motion control system, our purchasing spreadsheet starts to look awesome.

In the meantime, we've got work to do.

The funny thing about gear is that it can become a means to an end for people who aren't careful. It's not about wasting money, per se, although that risk certainly exists. The real danger is about thinking that some piece of hardware or software is going to make your work better. You know the type: some people geek out on acquisitions for their own sake. They buy fabulous guitars without learning how to strum more than a few chords. They spend big money on rounded, gleaming kitchen appliances without knowing how to cook much more than microwave dinners.

The right tools most certainly matter. Roads are not built with carpentry tools, and you can't expect a cell phone camera to stand in for an Alexa. When we need to use specialized gear, we do. (Don't even think of looking in our cable closet!)

But more important than the latest and greatest gear is mastery of what you have at your immediate disposal. The most powerful tool in your arsenal, no matter what business you're in, will always be your willingness not to compromise on your vision. The right tools can help you say what you want to say, and we strongly believe there's almost never a reason to use anything less than the best tools you can put your hands on. But tools are only just means to an end. Would you rather your bright idea lose some of it's luster while you spend days upon days grinding away on new user manuals, or would you rather dive in to the project like a pro and make that idea shine right now?

New gear--of all sorts-- is fun, no doubt about it. New gear also facilitates acts of creation that you might not be able to do otherwise--and that most certainly makes it valuable and essential. In the production world, new gear isn't a luxury but an endless part of the landscape. But new gear in and of itself…is just stuff. Ideas, in contrast, are transcendent.

This week at Apple's WWDC Jonathan Ive's Elves will undoubtably give us glimpses of shiny futures, and I'd be lying if I said we weren't watching the event with close, geeky interest. But before we start pricing new kit, there's a set of cool storyboards we're working hard to refine, and when we get it smoothed out in a couple of days the shot is gonna be awesome! Then we'll think about what we need to bring it to life.

Thanks for reading. Next week…what's that? They're going to give clues about the new iPhones? Right on! I just know that everything will be better if I can snag one of those…!

-MS

Music Matters

Those of you who know something about modern production techniques know that music doesn't count for much these days.

Sad, sad, sad.

Music tracks can be purchased by the bushel, like cheap plastic baubles selected from endless market stalls. There are fine jewels out there if you know where to look, but most never catch the light. They just play in the background, adding volume but limited mass.

Part of the problem can be described by a strange paradox. As content of all types becomes easier to produce with the advent of cheap, powerful software and hardware, the signal to noise ratio rises. It used to be that people who created music were musicians. But that's not necessarily the case anymore. Plenty of people can now create complex, even specialized music tracks with only minimal musical training. Orchestration, arrangement, performance: the skills for making music only a few years ago have largely transformed into a different set of skills today. People still play, no doubt, but in terms of those vast bins of music for sale, playing bows to programming, or even lower down the food chain: knob fiddling. I'm not saying programming is easy, and good programming is even harder. But what of great music?

The question is one of need versus desire. For many purposes, adequate is more than enough, and in an age of ubiquity, adequate is everywhere. Virtuosity is much, much harder to come by. Ironically, it also has more limited purpose. Virtuosity either facilitates some sort of qualitative measurement that presents it subjectively "better" than other similar works, or virtuosity completely changes the rules by radically leaping forward. The second purpose is more exciting, of course, but it's also the most precious, most elusive thing of all. In terms of leaping forward, objective, qualitative comparisons are irrelevant. Virtuosity speaks a special language.

Goodness, greatness, and irrelevant ordinariness extend beyond the ear, of course. It's simply that because of music's untethered nature, the subject is more ripe for examination. Photography, video, graphics, animation: ease of content creation does not confer greatness. The challenge is to recognize and appreciate what's truly superb amid the clutter..

But should any of us ever care? If adequate is good enough--if what you need built on your property is an ordinary garage and not the Sistine Chapel--is there ever a reason to care about virtuosity? Everyone needs food to survive, but nobody needs to dine in four-star restaurants.

Don't believe it.

Virtuosity redefines the middle. It sets the bar, it shapes the culture. Without any judgment I make the following declaration: the great and vast aesthetic middle describes the mass of most people's days. Most music you hear--on the radio, in commercials, in movies--keep the pace moving perhaps, but doesn't do much to change the conversation. Same goes for middlin' photography, video, food, architecture, and everything else in the purview of creative human effort.

But as we all know, it can. Music matters because it's intangible. It's a proxy for the intangible nature of our own lives, descriptive of our moods and our endless lists of things to do and sometimes even our dreams and hopes. I don't know anyone who doesn't dream in some way about his or her own future. The value of great music rather than simply ordinary music, particularly in multimedia production, is as much a statement about refusing mediocrity in life as it is about also finding a great beat.

As far as I'm concerned, that's why the beat goes on.

--MS