WHADJA EXPECT?

What time is it?

I expect a lot, actually, especially of myself. I get frustrated when I know I've merely phoned it in, scratched the surface, written two cliches in a row.

Expectations can lead you to treasure and they can lead you to the abyss. They can build respect and they can cause calumny. Expectations define goals and calibrate presuppositions. They can also tie you in knots.

The thing about doing creative work is that expectations are simultaneously your best armor and your worst enemy. If you've done well before, people expect high quality next time. That tends to instill loyalty among fans, and help you continue doing what you're doing. Of course if you don't deliver something sublime, dashed hopes can shatter a reputation in no time at all. Positive expectations that fail to deliver can prompt death spirals of doubt, friction, and poor judgement.

But nobody's great all the time. Even your best friend acts like a jerk once and a while. Michael Jordan had bad games from time to time. In terms of expectations that I believe should hold particular sway, it's vital always to expect integrity among those closest to you. Honest appraisals and honest effort matter more than perfection of craft in almost all cases. To expect less is to live in a house with a leaky roof. Gentle rains may not destroy the furniture, but come a bad storm and your risks rise.

At 1AU we hold these values close. While everyone on the team has some degree of cross-applicable skills, we all specialize, too. The great synergy that emerges from cross pollination of ideas demands honesty and effort. That leads to expectations of mutual respect and of probity in pursuit of solutions. Without it, we're working at cross purposes.

Is it fair to expect excellence from colleagues all the time? Not at all. Is it fair of myself--or anyone, really--to assume that all creative output will be sterling, that nothing short of superb work ever deserves to be done? Of course not. But the expectation of an overall pursuit of quality defines fair and reasonable expectations, in my opinion.

Should we simply presume that everyone believes this, that everyone want to pursue excellence? Nope. We all know lots of people who choose to bump along, to get by, to slouch. That's fine, but for my part I choose to steer a polite distance around.

Consider this: without reasonable expectations, everything we did every single day would be left to the vagaries of whims and chance. Expectations force us to bring our best selves to our work and to each other. Expectations provoke honest dialogue and thus honest efforts because we understand the rules of the field. When we bring our best selves to creative work and to those with whom we create that work, we expand the potential for us to bring similarly positive values to the broader domains of our lives, too.

Next week, we continue this train of thought with a look at politics in creative work.

--MS

HEY: ONE MORE THING! Our new movie WATER FALLS opens on October 10th. Check out all the latest on the movie at the website http://gpm.nasa.gov/waterfalls

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VIDEO IS DEAD. LONG LIVE VIDEO.

The teenager next door is doing it in his bedroom.

The grandparents up the street are doing it in the park.

The school guidance counselor is doing it in the auditorium.

They're shooting video, and sometimes even editing it.

But who cares? Video plays everywhere. It's ubiquitous. It's so omnipresent as to be ordinary. It's about as surprising as a text message, as novel as a horseless carriage.

This never used to be the case, but as with all things technological, the extraordinary becomes ordinary faster than milk sours at room temperature. Is anyone surprised that you can add electric light to your dark living room with just the barest finger pressure against a plastic switch? Perhaps not, but if you lived in the middle of the 19th century, you'd be totally amazed.

Video has mutated into new, strange forms of micro-modernism and also harkened back to older forms that have been transmogrified into contemporary dialect.

Let us not even speak of embedded YouTube links. There's no point in deconstructing the value propositions for different creative groups to choose Vimeo over Vevo, Dailymotion over The Daily Show. The issue is that as the new lingua franca, video will eat itself if it cannot remember its origins.

Remember writing? Photography? Music?

What's interesting is how much those disciplines and countless others continue to play essential roles in the modern video lexicon, even if their cultural pedigrees are often buried under push-wipes and snap-pans and other electronic filigree.

The lament is that video's ubiquity has dampened the power of the medium. Like the thrill of seeing electric light for the first time in a world's fair pavilion, lightbulbs have no thrill at all when you're stumbling for one in the middle of a twenty-first century night. Video has only become omnipresent in the past decade.  Insofar as it's a tool available to millions if not billions of people, I have to wonder if the trend going forward is not the evolution and development of newer, better videos, but irrelevance. The moment we are inured to the power of something -- lightbulbs, for example--the moment they lose their hold on our consciousness. Video isn't there yet, but it was only a few years ago when it was an extraordinary thing to click on and play a video link in your web browser. Now it's ordinary to gulp down entire seasons of episodic television on a wireless tablet sitting on your couch or a stiff airport lounge chair. Sometimes I even catch a glimpse of people doing this in traffic, stopped at a light. (Put that phone down, please.)

Clearly there will continue to be new stories and new storytellers who bring all sorts of invention and power to this rapidly changing medium. But the era of amazement and thrill stemming from the medium itself has long since past. What's left to separate signal from noise, as it's always been throughout the history of creative enterprise, is the value of the content. Content is always king. Now that the dawn of the video era is over, no one can foretell what the long day of video's ubiquity will bring.

--MS

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FRAGMENTATION

 

When blog postings go up on the site I try to insure that there's some corresponding note on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and on Facebook. I mean, it won't mean a thing if no one knows it exists. Or as the great, late physicist Richard Feynman once put it, if you don't write it in your journal, it never happened.

Hang on one second, I just need to pick up this call…

"Hello? Yep. Yes, we'll be there. Three o'clock? Sure. With the documents? Sure. Okay, see you then."

So, yeah. The blog. It's tough sometimes when there's also a major project we're all working on. But it's especially tough between projects, when there are a million things in development, all sorts of ideas cooking, when we're taking meetings and running around to scout locations and working on technical and artistic tests. Sometimes then it's especially tough to focus. Sometimes in the middle of a crushing production schedule, it's strangely easier for the ideas to just come out. Blood pumping, with a focus that's laser beam tight, the clarity of ideas often shines bright.  Of course, sometimes there's the issue of just having the energy to get them out, but that's another story.

Just one second…got to respond to this quick Facebook tag.

"Blueberry pie, oh my."

Right. Anyway, the team is fully engaged in a gigantic new spherical production, and we have a list of other projects in the pipeline. Speaking engagements have been busier than ever this past year, and we continue to get offers from a wide variety of clients. As for the website…

Hang on one sec.

"We could shoot it sixteen-by-nine if we do it for ordinary HDTV playback, but we'd be pleased to show you some examples of ultra-wide playback options if you'd like. We think that could be terrific for your venue. Or if you really want to do something interesting, let us design a multi-faceted surface, with carefully timed sequences running among non-contiguous screens."

Okay, so yeah, the website is firing on all cylinders right now. With some of the matching social media efforts we've been putting out, plus the ancillary blog posts elsewhere (Tumblr, Wordpress, etc) people are talking and the phone keeps ringing. Can't complain about that! But the real issue is...

Sorry.

"Hello? Hey! Yes, great to hear from you. I'm sorry, but can I call you back? It's a bad time right now. Sure. Just in the middle of something."

Where was I? Oh, yes: the real issue is…

Sorry.

"Hello! Sorry, yes, this is a bad time. I'm just trying to do this one thing. One thing! I'll be right with you."

…as soon as I take the teapot off the stove…whistling like a….

So, anyway.  There we were. Cameras rolling, sound was clean, when this client comes charging across the soundstage, and says, "…

Listen. Why don't you come back next week. Next week the blog will be talking about the cultural ubiquity of video and the various ways that's affected our industry, as well as the public's ability to consume media of any sort. Trust me, it will be interesting.

I'm going to make a sandwich. And a cup of tea.

--MS

PS -- Does this make you smile? Make you think? Make you wish next Monday were one sunrise away from arrival? If so, you may be ready to become one of our loyal outreach team! How do you assume that lofty role? Tell your friends! Tell your colleagues. Share our link on your Twitter and Facebook page, and let people know where you turn every Monday morning for a blog of a different color. You were expecting horses?

FOLLOWING THE BLUE DOT

I do it. I bet you do it, too.

Maps! I'm talking about digital maps!  Getting from "here" to "there"! (You never know what people really think when they read a blog.)

Not too very long ago it used to be that we all found our way around the flat earth with crinkled paper maps. When we couldn't get good ground truth from our multi-colored route finders, we'd stop for directions at a local store or gas station and ask for directions. We'd scribble notes about where to turn and how far to travel. We'd try to figure if the received guidance jived with clues we could glean from our printed maps, and we'd try to estimate which compass direction we thought we were headed.

Now we follow blue dots, or let disembodied voices in our telephones tell us where to turn.

Those cloud-based, scalable maps are marvels, to be sure. Millions ditched paper maps faster than bowls of cold oatmeal and instantly found where they needed to go. Major new market segments exploded, supply-chain management and package delivery systems accelerated, and traffic information finally offered the potential that things might get better where it counted. Where could there possibly be a downside?

I'm not crying "downside", but I am raising a philosophical point. You're gonna roll your eyes (I know you are!), but try to open your mind to this. I miss the moments of unexpected discovery that came from finding less predictable ways through space. I miss the moments of achievement, the brain work necessary to figure out complex routes, the discoveries of how cities and towns were arranged. And, like endless examples in a million different forums, I miss the casual brush with unexpected people whom I might have to ask for directions.

Yes, I have to admit it: even as I miss certain aspects of what used to be, route finding is better now. It's faster, more efficient, surprisingly accurate, and with crowd sourced inputs getting better all the time. But the nuanced moments of invention and discovery are largely gone from the process. Creative solutions to ordinary dilemmas are the sparks of ignition that often provoke greater flights of invention downstream. Sure, modernity has replaced old problems with new ones, and individuals--and cultures--constantly encounter new challenges to lash to the creative wheel.

But for a creative person, I suppose the thing that most captures my attention is that we are gradually ceding our personal responsibility to inhuman systems. I'm concerned about algorithms seeping into every aspect of our lives under the guise of "making life a little easier".

First it was speed dialing that made us forget phone numbers. Then auto-correction software killed our collective ability to spell. Kids no longer learn to write cursive handwriting--whither the personal signature? Now it's maps, and all that goes with it.

It's better now, yes. But when the software police come to bolt algorithmically pre-digested dialogue into one of my screenplays, I think we'll know that things have gone past the point of no return.

--MS  (Hey, you can follow me on Twitter @michaelstarobin if you're so motivated.)

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POLITICS

Are our political leaders supposed to do the right thing because they'll lose the next election or because it's the right thing?

Does it matter?

I think it does matter, but clearly the first option should not  be dismissed out of hand. In politics the art of the possible sometimes has nothing to do with the underlying values powering the pursuit. By means of an example, consider the particular way President Lincoln pursued the Emancipation Proclamation. (Need a refresher? See the brilliant historical encapsulation in Stephen Spielberg's masterful "LINCOLN".) The abolition of slavery on moral grounds alone would have been too onerous for his political foes to support. Instead, an ever-so-slightly weaker position allowed fence-sitters to save face and side with him, thus insuring his victory without the emotionally more satisfying results of complete and total victory.

But you ask, "Why should we care about this in creative enterprise? Why is this in the 1AU blog?"

Creative people don't simply punch a clock. Whether working on a film as an assistant camera person, or playing second viola in the symphony orchestra, artists invest their work with themselves. They have to. Without self, creativity generally rings hollow.  But the moment creative enterprise expands beyond the realm of a singular painter holding a singular brush, politics inevitably accrue. It's inevitable because it's unlikely that the designated leader of an enterprise is the only person with a good idea. Even with a clearly defined hierarchy--a chain of command established from the outset--good leaders understand that they have to deal with people. Good leaders also know that even with a singular vision, they're fools if they don't seriously consider the good ideas of those around them. Likewise, members of the corps de ballet, so to speak, need to be able to express themselves to a director without foolishly expecting public adulation or artificial praise.

That's where politics asserts itself most loudly.

Some people simply have trouble working in groups. They struggle to back down or they cannot speak up. Sometimes they get their timing confused. Sometimes they forget that ideas and technical capabilities are not separate from the emotional containers that convey those ideas. More practically, political simplicity gets you nowhere in terms of funding or fans. A more nuanced political listener will learn from an audience without capitulating his or her vision. A savvy producer will understand how to reach a funding source while maintaining his or her own integrity. I'm not calling any of this easy, I'm just calling it essential. Creative teams need to figure out diplomatic ways to move through challenging dilemmas without losing sight of an even more challenging goal. It's true that some creative groups break a lot of china as they move through the world, but for myself I find this a rather distasteful way to operate. Even if an enterprise is a complete success, the cost of disharmony in the world rarely seems like a reasonable trade.

That said, nobody likes endless campfire songs, full of conviviality and warmth but yielding nothing substantial in the morning. Once in a while: sure. But forever and always? Creative groups of all types need to respect that politics as a means of manipulation is disingenuous, but as a means to bring sensitive perception to disparate, oxygen-starved ideas, it matters. Politics is the art of the possible.  Funny, but that sounds an awful lot to me like making creative projects in a group.

--MS

PS -- Yes, yes, here's where the good people of 1AU ask our dear readers to share what you've read with friends and colleagues. And here's the place where you think, "Oh, sure, one more imposition of my precious time." Well, we're asking. It's something we value above rubies, above gold: if you like an idea enough to give it a moment's thought, then consider giving it a measure of freedom. When you share an idea with another person, you release an idea to grow freely in the world.

Like what you see? Set it free.

The Consciousness of Money

With cyberspace populated by semi-autonomous “bots”, and smart phones sending wireless messages onto the web to look for last minute plane tickets, and software agents in refrigerators circuits ordering more orange juice from a wired supermarket before we even notice we're out, one begins to wonder if we're giving up our freedoms one convenience at a time. But incremental developments aside, one human invention that’s been around for centuries remains in such demand as to be perhaps the first artificial consciousness.

Money.

A cursory glance simply casts an eye of desire on it. But it is really the cash that’s got a hold of us. Consider:

It’s really worth nothing, but it convinces us of its value; it talks us into protecting it. It has value because we collectively believe it has value. A bottle of water can quench a thirst. A fertile field can produce sustenance for years. A whole box of money can do nothing, but it’s desire to exist, to grow, to spread, whispers Faustian bargains in our ears and we listen. We take it in, protect it under our mattresses, pay others to project it in steel rooms at banks, obfuscate to friends and relatives about how much we may or may not have. Consider this:

If you squint while stopped at a red light, the cars all around look like blood cells rushing through veins and arteries. Traffic lights act like heart valves, buildings and businesses act like organs, apartment complexes and housing developments act like bone marrow.

Money rushes around the human organism.

Just like in nature, if there’s a niche to be filled, life rushes in and adapts to fill that niche. If an organ needs assistance, blood and nutrients rush to fix it. If money discovers a need--it's own need, mind you-- it pulls people and energy—lives—towards it like a biological magnet. Cars leave their parking spaces at the crack of dawn, their drivers pulled inexorably to office jobs and fork lift operation and days in front of a fourth grade class. We tell ourselves these are our jobs, but the compulsion to these labors are often just the relentless tectonic pressures of money.

Further evidence of money's consciousness is the endless creative energy among financial entities to forge connections where superficial horse-sense seems to fail. Take the French automobile company Renault and the Japanese car company Nissan. Separated by more than 10,000 miles, the two behemoths share an unusual alliance, and the two together market a wide range of cars in the United States, a foreign country to each of the partners. The soul of the alliance is an effort to broaden the power of manufacturing scale without demanding that each partner bow beneath the sword of the other. This union of competitors is predicated on money talking; corporate cultures in France and Japan could not be more different, but there they are, locked together at the brain stem. To the thousands of workers at each company actually assembling the cars, clicking keyboards, and ordering parts, theirs is not even the illusion of autonomy. Their lives are directly governed by the wages parceled out like pollen among worker bees. They can no more go their own financial ways than they can decide to build a new type of engine on their own. The money in the system is the deciding factor. It is money which reached across culture and space to create a partnership of expedience, and it is money which unifies the executive ganglia making rudimentary decisions regarding aesthetics and strategy. But lest any observer of the system, internally or externally, consider that the executive class has significantly more say than the employees on the factory floors, consider: significant corporate missteps might only end the current incarnation of the financial arrangement built by the Renault/Nissan partnership. Just as the wooly mammoth shed its coat for the summer of the post ice age, so to will the money be transmogrified should those companies pass into the historical record.

Supply side economists will rush to say that corporate bankruptcy is proof that money is not conscious, that it's in the realm of humans and the decisions they make. Rising stocks are based on good decisions and a smidgen of good timing, and by the way, also add money to the economic ocean.

But money is not a population issue. More currency does not equal a bigger, biologically more successful population. Money is more akin to biological potential. It's the promise that it's capable of enormous growth if the conditions are right, and the guarantee that it will endure in a slower, even dormant state when conditions are bad. It is the sleeping code of the global genetic germ, activated like an allele, and deactivated by a drug.

Money can never be inherently creative, but the shadows it casts onto the world around it warp and bend like our own mortal umbras as we walk in the world. The challenge for creative people of widely divergent stripe is to recognize that money is not fundamentally what's important, even as the pursuit of money may be a necessity. Moreover, a creative class (potentially everyone alive, by the way) must get smart about what's going on. Money is an android with a mind of it's own. We created it; it required humanity to get up and walk. But once it set out into the world, it began to pursue it's own routes, pushing and pulling and influencing the world in ways that sometimes cause people of great intellect and purported integrity to disagree vehemently. If we're smart-- if we're paying attention and don't want money's limited, artificial intelligence to push us around-- we have a fighting chance to build a culture that values the subjective rather than the objective. I am moved much more deeply before the motley altar of beauty than at the sparkling altar of money. One radiates energy out into the universe, the other sits and gathers mass.

I would rather light up the night.

--MS

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Money's Value is a Matter of Perception

What does it cost?

The question practically exists outside of time, outside the world. It's built into almost every transaction, and cost is not always a matter of money.

The old saying goes that you can have only two of the following: faster, better, or cheaper. Notice that the arrangement doesn't even require you to determine what kind of goods or service you're asking for.

Money is a measurement of condensed time. Money makes up for what sweat might possibly yield, or for what sweat simply cannot produce alone. A toaster is cheap, but no amount of independent labor from even a smart, motivated person will yield one.

But money is unlike most other human inventions. More than most other things, you want it. Don't pretend otherwise. Sure, you love your family and your freedom, but what do you spend literally two thousand hours a year pursuing doggedly? Like the slogan from the early days of MTV, "Too much is never enough." Pursuit of money sends us all to grinding labor, to endless stress, to acrimony and sacrifice, often with limited promise of lasting rewards. The madness is that it usually takes money to make money, or to make money in any substantive amount that tips the balance of future in a measurable way. That's why most of us are beholden to others who control deeper reservoirs of the stuff than we have.

But does it genuinely, authentically, deeply matter?

If you were to ask most people if they'd willingly abide the great works of art being cast onto a bonfire in return for ten bucks, I'd like to believe that most would say no, even if they knew nothing about art. But ask the same thing for ten million dollars, and I fear for our cultural legacy.

Money matters because it's a proxy for time, and time is the ultimate measure of value. Time means life. Money means you can buy the services that free you from labor, and the goods that facilitate--or promise, at least--comfort, pleasure, or confidence, and all of that means you have more time for life.

The problem is that money has become a misdirected proxy for meaning. We conflate the purchase power of money as a means to an end, as the reason to be alive. But see: we're artists here at 1AU. We already have reasons to live. There are photographs to make, poems to write, movies to produce, dances to choreograph. There are books to read and soups to taste and hands to hold. The size of bank accounts do not make those soups any more savory, those hands any warmer, those books any more compelling. As Pete Seeger said, "How can I keep from singing?"

The money isn't important.

Okay, I see it: you're cringing. Your face is tight, you've already glanced away, thinking you may not finish this naive prayer, this tale of misplaced, juvenile innocence. Just read a few more lines.

I'm fully aware of money's great power, just as I rightfully fear the power of the gun wielded by the undisciplined guerrilla fighter. Only fools pretend there's no potential for profound influence. The fantasy is always that we can James Bond that gun out of the fighter's hand, or, more on topic, suddenly find ourselves flush with cash. Do we want the gun? Nope. Neither do we want the cash. We want the freedom that each affords us. We want the autonomy, the security, the clarity about how to manage our next few precious minutes of this fleeting life. But consider that gun: what would you possibly do with it? Grabbing it gives you nothing but instantaneous sovereignty over circumstance. It neither feeds you, nor shelters your allies, nor brings you love.

Therefore my thesis solidifies. The pursuit of money may be a necessity of the modern world, just as more visceral pursuits are the immediate necessities of pre-industrialized cultures. But as a means to an end, it's worthless. It is it's own end: money pursues more of itself. The moment it gets any greater cultural value beyond being simply a tool, it becomes a false god.

Ironic, isn't it? As a media production team, we're in a very expensive industry, always scrabbling in a relentless pursuit for resources to achieve artistic visions. Artistic visions do not feed you nor shelter your allies either. But they are REAL. They are actual moments of meaning created out of chaos. They are subjective, and thus debatable, whereas money is always objective and outside the realm of debate. Without the ability to discuss or debate something's merits, value's proof evaporates like morning's bold promise yielding to daytime. We need money to do what we do, but it's not the money that matters in the end.

* * *

Next week we continue the bling-thing, with thoughts about money's easily misunderstood consciousness. It's true: it walks, it talks; we listen closely and have a few things to say...next week right here on the 1AU Blog "Faster than Light".

--MS

PS: You know you can follow us for more info, right? Try these cool links, and share them with your friends:

Twitter @michaelstarobin

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PROPERTIES

What is the property of a flower? Diaphanous petals--curvaceous of course--daring declarations of intention to all who notice, seductive edges radiating from a central core: flowers announce themselves. They do not hide. Inherent properties of flowers vary from species to species, but each type has its own list of specifics: bright colors here, spiky there, smooth and round, flat and bold. The properties of a flower define it's identity.

Now, turn to consider the following: what is the nature of ownership? To possess is to govern, or at least define rights of access. To own something is to assert influence. Property defines place, identity, even parameters of time.

There's a fascinating relationship between the two ideas, the concept of property as a description of something's inherent nature, and the thought of property as a concept of ownership, of something belonging to something else, singularly, personally, perhaps intimately. When we consider the properties of a thing, we focus the concept of identity inward on the subject. Properties of an object or an idea itself, a flower, say, resist external ownership. They are inherent; they cannot be bolted on or transferred by contract. A rose by any other name doesn't give a damn who owns it; it smells as sweet no matter who possesses the receipt. Even the mighty Immanuel Kant suggested that the attributes of a something do not come as a direct result of existence; they are inherent unto themselves, with matters of existence demanding compartmentalized vocabulary. Attributes do not prove existence.

I hear my creative Muse impatiently tapping her coffee spoon against her demitasse. Are we talking creativity here or are we talking about law? Or even more exasperating (she's edgy this morning), are we waxing philosophical in this space without good justification?

Properties of individual creative works defy ownership. They defy the concept of becoming "property" even as they often belong to a person or an institution. A painting, a sonata, a superb bowl of French Onion soup each have unique properties. Where the last in the list may have an exceedingly short, delicious, life span, the principal obtains for the lot: what can it possibly mean to own the unique nature of something? (Calmer now, my Muse smooths out her sundress, a faint grin on her face as she stares out the window.) No doubt it's possible to own a Monet, a Moore, a Mondrian, but to assert the potential for transformative "properties" of those works in the same ways that "property" transfers with each contractual writ is to pretend something substantial. It's to assume abilities beyond us. It's hubris.

The most easily identified property, of course, is real estate. But when well made, buildings not only outlive their creators, but begin to abnegate the identities of those who conceive of them. Buildings may be owned in a contemporary, legal sense, but the essential natures of their beings accrue over time rather than by declarations at the bank. Properties of a real estate property evolve over time, tumbledown or exquisite, storied or infamous.

Paid? Sure, we should get paid for creative work. The relative value of creative work varies with each piece, with each category of work. Sidewalk caricatures probably ought to get less per piece than detailed urban planning schematics. Without financial appreciation for the hard labor of creation, those who create would not be able to do so. But payment for work is not the same as determination of property, of who it belongs to. More importantly, payment is also not the determination of it's unique properties.

Creators all of us, each in our own unique domains, we therefore achieve a sense of freedom in our actions when we release philosophical ownership of our works. We discover the properties of exotic flowers each day as we do the labor of traveling through the hard lands of our inventive efforts. Once discovered, the work leaves us, like children flying away to their own new lives, seeds of a blossom borne on the wind, with hopes that they take root somewhere healthy, appreciative, and peaceful.

--MS

PS -- Does this make you smile? Make you think? Make you wish next Monday were one sunrise away from arrival? If so, you may be ready to become one of our loyal outreach team! How do you assume that lofty role? Tell your friends! Tell your colleagues. Share our link on your Twitter and Facebook page, and let people know where you turn every Monday morning for a blog of a different color. You were expecting horses?

WORDS ABOUT WORD

Microsoft Word: I still use it, but it's no longer my go-to program for all things written anymore.

It used to be that Word was the last word in words.  That changed when the world's dominant publishing environment became an endless forest of glowing screens, found everywhere simultaneously. Instead of Word's proprietary formatting rules invisibly structuring language behind the scenes, minimally formatted text made lots more sense.

Or, said differently, minimally formatted text up front makes more sense when it's likely that millions of scriveners like myself will shortly mark-up their words with their own hypertext of some sort. Meta-textual hooks are a pain in the neck when the program holding those words already has an architecture underneath.

Let me simplify my frustration: I can't stand it when my word processor hijacks my tab settings. Someone out there knows why it gets screwed up, but it drives me crazy, and it takes me mentally out of what I'm doing. Using Word makes me an endless software manager, distracting me from being a writer.

What you're reading now I'm writing this in a program that I dismissed for more than a decade: Apple's TextEdit. It's strange. With almost no formatting information at all, my scribblings here cut and paste comfortably into the WordPress engine I'm using to power this site. Markup's a breeze, and because my blog posts are usually short, the tools are great for fast, easily navigable texts. It's simple, it launches quickly, and the files are small. What's not to like? Besides, the bloated behemoth that underpins the Office suite just rankles philosophically. As a child it was always fun to have infinite options, in the event that someday….SOMEDAY… I just MIGHT want to do some obscure mail merge with an integrated Excel spreadsheet. But seriously? I think I've used about ten percent of the Office tools available, and I'm not likely to sink the precious time to learn tools that have precisely zero percent chance of ever being needed. That bloat don't float!

But I'm being honest here. I must admit that I…do…still…use…Word. I must. for longer pieces, or carefully laid-out, artfully designed document formatting I still find it indispensable. Finding text strings across big documents is simply easier; major formatting tools are profoundly more powerful; organization tools do what I need them to do. (Yes, I'm actively messing around with Apple's Pages, but it's not quite in the fingers yet…) Word is also still the keeper of an all important network-effect, that because it's the standard program in the world, it remains as such. But that hold on everyone's phalanges is beginning to weaken.

But these days, when I use Word I have to know that I'm "going in", that I'll be in Microsoft-land for a while. Imposed formats change the ways we interact with our ideas. Tools shape art. When I have to move a mountain, I drive a bulldozer. But I've been playing more and more with minimal approaches to what I always assumed would be imperturbably solutions for daily tasks. My bulldozer gathers more dust these days. Lately my words just want to be free, and keeping the Microsoft keys on the counter has been a revelation. These days I move mountains more often simply by asking them to move. Such is the power of words set free.

Word.

--MS

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OTHER TOOLS

I love walking into good kitchen and cooking stores. I always discover a beautiful looking stainless steel gizmo for delicately coring the stems from tomatoes, or a clever wooden box with slats designed to catch breadcrumbs. I always look, I always turn devices like this over in my hands, and I always put it back on the shelf. Inevitably I wander over to the knives. The better stores have endless rows of knives. The thin, strangely curved grapefruit knives; the long, pointy fish filleting knives; the cleavers. These all strike me, however, as museum pieces. The real measure of a knife set depends on the heft and balance of the chef's knife, and the paring knife. The rest? Nice, but not essential, just like the missing verb in this sentence.

Naturally, I already have a terrific chef's knife. My little paring knife––the one that came with the chef's knife as a wedding present many years ago––has a cracked handle, and I plan to replace it someday soon. But here's the reality: in concert with a sturdy cutting board and a few basic pots and pans and a reliable source of heat, I can make you whatever you like.

I love to cook. I love to cook all sorts of things, complex and simple, easy to pronounce and exotic and obscure. As I get older, however, I find that the tools I require to keep up with my expanding skills ironically narrows. You just don't need that much to do a great job.

Don't misunderstand. There are plenty of widgets and gizmos and specialty items that make life a whole lot simpler, or simply a lot of fun, or even in some circumstances absolutely essential to get the job done. But if you're honest with yourself, there aren't too many. It this is true of the moviemaking experience. Hollywood movies may utilize extraordinarily complex tools and techniques to deliver their goods, but plenty of stories, and indeed plenty of scenes inside even the largest Hollywood spectacles, hit the screen with minimal frippery. You need huge crews and vast special effect teams for some things, but I bet you recall the intimate dialogue scenes even more. Those were made with only a handful of people.

Now listen closely. Not for a second do I reject using state-of-the-art equipment when the opportunity avails itself. It's not only a pleasure to use a great tool, but a great tool can enable qualitative differences that lesser tools cannot. Why do you think Stradivarius violins are still so highly regarded? But at the same time, I often find myself looking for the leanest solutions to deliver the best results. Unless absolutely necessary, a deep toolkit can consume precious time, distract from the job at hand, and inhibit your best intentions. It's a tricky balance. Those who skimp on their tools inevitably suffer the consequences, and can never aspire to the full potential of their vision. Those who live for their tools are no longer living for their art.

Ah, Microsoft Word: I hardly knew ye. Once the dominant player, in fact the 800 pound gorilla of word processors, I find that good old Word no longer holds my attention. In the earliest of it's days, I assumed I'd need to learn all of it's cool and promised techniques for turning my words into professional looking documents. As the years went on, I accumulated certain skills in the program where necessary. But the thing that always held me in thrall when using Word… were the words I tried to string together on my blank screen, trying to say something, trying to reach an audience. Word didn't matter; words mattered.  And where the program tried to seduce me with its fancy formatting potentials, I've regularly chafed at the tedious distractions is imposed while I was trying to figure out a phrase.

I need it from time to time, but I find I need it less and less.

Of course give me the chance to shoot with a Red Epic camera and a knowledgable data wrangler and I'll gladly tell you how essential it is for my craft. I'll tell you with a serious straight face, and I'll be happy, happy, happy for it.

Tools matter. They just can't matter too much.

I'll have a little more specifically about Microsoft Word next week.

--MS

PS -- Does this make you smile? Make you think? Make you wish next Monday were one sunrise away from arrival? If so, you may be ready to become one of our loyal outreach team! How do you assume that lofty role? Tell your friends! Tell your colleagues. Share our link on your Twitter and Facebook page, and let people know where you turn every Monday morning for a blog of a different color. You were expecting horses?