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creative practice

How to save the world

March 22, 2010

The new prob­lems of the world require fresh approaches. They require our inge­nu­ity and our care­ful, cre­ative con­sid­er­a­tion. You and I know this, but still most of us don’t often get mean­ing­fully involved.

Why is this?

I think there is a col­lec­tive feel­ing that these prob­lems are too big for any of us to make a real dif­fer­ence. We doubt our abil­ity to influ­ence impor­tant mat­ters when there are well-connected lob­by­ists, busi­nesses with billion-dollar bud­gets and polit­i­cal par­ties firmly wed­ded to their own notions. And these doubts seem per­fectly warrented.

There is a great para­gragh in Chomsky’s Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent, about what keeps us from being polit­i­cally active:

Very few peo­ple are going to have the time or the energy or the com­mit­ment to carry out the con­stant bat­tle that’s required to get out­side of the [main­stream media]. The easy thing to do you know — you come home from work, you’re tired, you’ve had a busy day, you’re not going to spend the evening car­ry­ing on a research project, so you turn on the tube and say its prob­a­bly right, or you look at the head­lines in the paper and then you watch the sports or some­thing. That’s basi­cally the way the sys­tem of indoc­tri­na­tion works. Sure the other stuff is there, but you’re going to have to work to find it.

This is the chal­lenge we face. Even if your beef is not with the media, you don’t have the time or the energy for it (what­ever that ”it” is for each of us) at the end of the day. We take care of our fam­i­lies, feed our cat, mow the lawn and then there’s not much left over. So, our hard-won uni­ver­sity degrees in Geo-Chemistry or Post-Feminist Neo­col­lo­nial­ism stare down at us from the wall, while we avoid eye-contact and look for a new episode of the Fam­ily Guy.

But the tide is turn­ing my friends

Indi­vid­u­als (as com­mit­ted, edu­cated and inter­ested as they were) have found the sys­tem stacked against them for hun­dreds of years. It had to do with the chal­lenges of orga­niz­ing. It was the basis of Marx’s opti­mism (‘If ONLY we could orga­nize!’) and every major world leader benifited from the fact that they couldn’t. Orga­niz­ing was very hard.

Back in the day

Con­sider how hard it was to even share a news­pa­per arti­cle with a friend:

  1. You had to get your own copy of the news­pa­per and cut the arti­cle out with scissors
  2. Then, find an envelope
  3. Then, copy out your friend’s address
  4. And then get a stamp and go out­side to find a place where you can send the letter

It wasn’t THAT hard, but it was hard enough that you prob­a­bly wouldn’t bother. What WAS hard was form­ing a group. You would need to get the word out some­how (maybe by let­ter again) and have a place to meet. It took a con­sid­er­able amount of time and effort and at least a lit­tle fund­ing. The inter­net has removed a lot of these barriers.

The major chal­le­nege to mass-participation for hun­dreds of years has been the dif­fi­cul­ties involved in orga­niz­ing. I recently fin­ished Clay Shirky’s hugely-underrated Here Comes Every­body,which asks the ques­tion: ”what hap­pens when peo­ple are given the tools to do things together, with­out need­ing tra­di­tional orga­ni­za­tional struc­tures?” (The mail­ing a let­ter exam­ple above is adapted from his book).

Today we can group together almost effort­lessly; we can orga­nize and coor­di­nate asyn­chro­nously, in muli­ple groups at the same time –with­out geo­graph­i­cal or finan­cial constraints.

So today it’s mostly a ques­tion of lead­er­ship. If your vision is strong enough, if your idea is impor­tant enough, a lot of us can and will hap­pily join you.

You have the power!

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The Music Video Reinvented

December 3, 2009

Check out this music video from the group Ok Go. Mesmerizing.

Cool, huh?

It reminds me of Feist’s 1234 video

and the tread­mill video –also by Ok Go. These guys have it fig­ured out. There is some­thing sub­tly com­pelling about these videos. I can watch them over and over again. I think we appre­ci­ate see­ing peo­ple just being peo­ple –not being scan­dalous or overly special-effected, just hav­ing fun and being human.

Update: This video from Oren Lavie also falls into this genre of music-videos-showing-people-doing-interesting things.

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The 7 Benefits of Creative Practice

October 25, 2009

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Find­ing a way to be artis­tic can add tremen­dously to your qual­ity of life.

For most of us, much of our active time every day is dom­i­nated by task-completion-activities, things that aren’t par­tic­u­larly mean­ing­ful or impor­tant to us, but just have to get done. Cre­ative prac­tice is about mak­ing a time for meaning.

Here are some ben­e­fits of a cre­ative prac­tice: (Any­where where I’ve writ­ten ‘writ­ing’ feel free to sub­sti­tute any other kind of artis­tic activity).

1) To be hap­pier. Aristotle’s def­i­n­i­tion of hap­pi­ness is “deploy­ing your full force along lines of excel­lence.” Writ­ing allows you to do exactly that. It’s about dis­ci­pline and see­ing some­thing through. And I do find it makes me hap­pier, feel­ing a piece come to form. As Hugh Macleod says, “Every­body has their own pri­vate Mount Ever­est they were put on this earth to climb.”

2) To learn. Peo­ple always say, “Write what you know,” but writ­ing is always a process of dis­cov­ery. By writ­ing you’re not just doc­u­ment­ing what you already know, but you’re coming-to-know things you hadn’t yet realized.

3) It’s good for your career. Before I was hired for my most recent job I was Googled by my inter­view­ers. They men­tioned in my inter­view that they’d read by blog about Roger Fed­erer and were impressed. I could tell that they were more com­fort­able with me because they had some evi­dence of how my mind works. In a way, they knew me. It made me more of a known entity and slightly less of a risk. I don’t write my blog for the recog­ni­tion. But it’s nice.

4) To be gen­er­ous. When you share your art, you’re being gen­er­ous. Even the tini­est, hon­est obser­va­tion is a gift. (That’s what I think any­way). And gift-giving cre­ates com­mu­nity. If you share some­thing that peo­ple can read (or  look at and see truth in) that, if noth­ing else, is com­fort­ing to peo­ple.  Also by writ­ing, you put your­self out there. You make your­self a lit­tle vul­ner­a­ble. You show that you’re human and peo­ple appre­ci­ate that.

5) To keep a record. I sit in air­ports and cafes around the world, writ­ing mun­dane minor details about how the light is shin­ing in through the steam of my morn­ing cof­fee or about how the smell of saw­dust takes me back to my dad’s stu­dio above the garage on Sec­ond Street.  Tak­ing the moment to write these thoughts makes me aware of things I wouldn’t oth­er­wise notice. It helps me appre­ci­ate the moment, in the moment. And read­ing my notes later reminds me of the life I’m liv­ing. It shows me what I like about my life and explains, in lit­tle ways, how my life is com­ing together. Cather­ine Bowen said that, “Writ­ing … is not apart from liv­ing. Writ­ing is a kind of dou­ble liv­ing. The writer expe­ri­ences every­thing twice. Once in real­ity and once in that mir­ror which waits always before or behind.”

6) To stay bal­anced. We all want jobs that value our human­ness. But it’s okay for a job to just be a job. It doesn’t have to fill absolutely every void in our lives. Hugh MacLeod (in his ebook) shares what he calls his Sex and Cash The­ory. He explains it like this: “The cre­ative per­son basi­cally has two kinds of jobs. One is the sexy, cre­ative kind. Sec­ond is the kind that pays the bills. Some­times the task in hand cov­ers both bases, but not often. This tense dual­ity will always play cen­ter stage. It will never be tran­scended.” This the­ory sug­gests that it’s okay that your col­leagues value your ideas about life or appre­ci­ate your humour, because it’s just a job. In a way, it’s a good prob­lem, I find that the ten­sions from my work­ing life give me some­thing to write about. They feed my art. A few times, when I finally have no dis­trac­tions and all the time in the world to write, I draw a blank.

7) It feels good. Author Natalie Gold­berg com­pares her cre­ative prac­tice with exer­cise: “Some days you don’t want to run and you resist every step of the three miles, but you do it any­way. You prac­tice whether you want to or not. You don’t wait around for inspi­ra­tion and a deep desire to run… You just do it. And in the mid­dle of the run, you love it. When you come to the end, you never want to stop… That’s how writ­ing is, too. Once you’re deep into it, you won­der what took you so long to finally set­tle down at the desk.”

In more ways than one, the future belongs to the cre­ative classes, the peo­ple who have devel­oped a voice and have both­ered to share.

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