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Scott Rosenberg

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Cheap art

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In the 1980s I worked as a theater critic. I spent a lot of time in expensive Broadway theaters and ambitious nonprofit repertory companies. But some of my most memorable experiences were at street theater events by groups like the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater. I first saw them in Boston at a time when the manifesto below was relatively new. It’s now a quarter century old but it hasn’t lost any of its truth.

For most of my writing life I’ve had a copy of this poster on my wall near where I work. When we rebuilt my basement office I lost track of it, but recently found it and rehung it. Here it is for you. (I got this image here.)

Happy long weekend, everyone. Make some cheap art!

All is flux

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I’m at the Oakland Airport waiting for a flight. They’re rebuilding the terminal here to accommodate fancier and doubtless more expensive concessions. The seating area near the gate for my flight was crowded, and I was early, so I moved to a less crowded area down the hall. Twenty minutes later, I looked up and saw that the flight’s gate had been changed: I was now sitting five feet from my plane’s departure doorway. I’d been stationary; the situation had just moved in my direction.

When I was studying software development, I learned that smart developers build products not for the market as it exists at the time but for where they think the market is going to be in the future. This wisdom recalls the famous hockey saying about skating not to where the puck is but where it’s going to be.

I’ve been thinking about these ideas as I watch the news industry struggle with changes that it could have (and should have) foreseen years ago. For me, making the transition from newsprint to digital in 1995 looked like the obvious thing to do — surely that was where the puck was heading, right? What surprises me today is not that the media-industry meltdown is happening but that it has taken so long to happen.

I recently discovered the wonderful game Fluxx, which I’ve been playing with my kids. It’s a simple card game with one profound concept: the rules and goals of the game are constantly shifting; the cards you play frequently alter both the process and the winning conditions.

Fluxx is enormously fun and entirely unpredictable. It’s also, I think, excellent training for life. It’s a crash-course in flexibility and agility. It teaches you to plan for change — but also to not get too attached to your plans.

Perhaps the next time news executives gather to ponder their options they should set aside a session for a few games.

Everything connects

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For something like 25 years I have had a postcard (now tattered and brown-edged) taped near wherever I write:

John Muir quote

One reason I became a writer is that I love the sensation of finding connections. It can stun me, make me laugh, or help me feel that I understand the universe just a little bit better.

I’ve spent the last few months researching my next book. I’m nowhere near done (and will continue!). I could conceivably, and profitably, devote whole additional years to further research.

But I’ve also reached a point in my labors that I now recognize from previous large writing projects. My brain feels like it’s overflowing. And everywhere I look, whatever I’m looking at seems to connect to what I’m writing about. Everything is hitched to everything else.

That means it’s time to start writing.

The exhilarating and painful work of trying to preserve that apprehension of interconnectedness on the page always involved some amount of disappointment, at least for me; where the apprehension is oceanic, the written end-product is finite.

But a completed book has one advantage over a vague sensation: it can be shared. So here goes!

Maazel: “What I do here is of no importance”

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On Fresh Air yesterday, conductor Lorin Maazel described his Zen-like approach at the podium, aimed at achieving “no tension … other than the intensity of one’s musical imperative”:

The first thing to do is learn how to breathe — very deep breaths, slow. Then you stand in one position if you’re going to conduct, or sing, or whatever, for about a minute, and you deliberately relax every muscle in your body. You become aware of the fact that quite a few muscles are tense, so you relax them, all the way down to the calves of your legs. Then you take one more very slow breath.

And then you say to yourself, what I do here is of no importance whatsoever. I am here as a servant. And if I’m nervous, it means that I think what I’m doing is important. That is an egocentricity which no interpreter can allow himself the luxury of. You’re there to serve the music, and you have to be in the best postiion, psychological and physiological, to do so. Which means no tension, no nerves. Yes, exhilaration. Yes, enthusiasm. Yes, focused energy. But no nervousness. Because that’s counterproductive.

Eugenides on valentines: “cheapening and commodification”

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Overheard at the end of Michele Norris’s interview with Jeffrey Eugenides on last night’s All Things Considered:

MN: Happy Valentine’s Day to you.

JE: Thanks for having me.

MN: I was going to ask you if you’re doing anything special for Valentine’s Day, but your someone special might be listening.

JE: I’ll tell you, one of the first things my wife and I decided when we got together was that we would never celebrate Valentine’s Day.

MN: What?

JE: One of the first things that made me fall in love with her was our mutual antipathy to Valentine’s Day.

MN: Wait a minute — an author who puts together a collection of love stories has total antipathy for Valentine’s Day?

JE: Oh yeah. Don’t you think it’s the cheapening and commodification of something rare that we’d all like to celebrate in private and on our own time?

MN: I personally like flowers and chocolate.

JE: Well, your special person, I hope, is listening.

I have always come down on Eugenides’ side of this argument. Fortunately, my “special person” does too.

Some Gibson, then a break

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We’re leaving tomorrow on a brief mid-winter getaway, so I may be absent from these precincts for a handful of days. Before I go, two passages worth savoring from Andrew Leonard’s recent interview with William Gibson in Rolling Stone:

How does it break down for you? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?

I find myself less pessimistic than I sometimes imagine I should be. When I started to write science fiction, the intelligent and informed position on humanity’s future was that it wasn’t going to have one at all. We’ve forgotten that a whole lot of smart people used to wake up every day thinking that that day could well be the day the world ended. So when I started writing what people saw as this grisly dystopian, punky science fiction, I actually felt that I was being wildly optimistic: “Hey, look — you do have a future. It’s kind of harsh, but here it is.” I wasn’t going the post-apocalyptic route, which, as a regular civilian walking around the world, was pretty much what I expected to happen myself.

Also:

The very first time I picked up a Sony Walkman, I knew it was a killer thing, that the world was changing right then and there. A year later, no one could imagine what it was like when you couldn’t move around surrounded by a cloud of stereophonic music of your own choosing. That was huge! That was as big as the Internet!

Mind-changing thoughts for the new year

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Every year around this time John Brockman poses some Big Question to his Edge discussion group, a salon of scientists and intellectuals. The results are typically all over the map but you can almost always find something of value and/or use. This year’s question was “What have you changed your mind about?” Here are some nuggets I excavated from the sprawling pile:

BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin writes about how online communities need tending, describing BoingBoing’s experience with managing its comment space (the site hired Making Light‘s Teresa Nielsen Hayden to moderate). Her conclusion is that online discussions are best moderated by human hosts rather than voting systems or algorithms:

Plucking one early weed from a bed of germinating seeds changes everything. Small actions by focused participants change the tone of the whole. It is possible to maintain big healthy gardens online. The solution isn’t cheap, or easy, or hands-free. Few things of value are.

This isn’t exactly news; the gardening metaphor as applied to online conversation has a long history stretching back to the early days of the Well (and probably Usenet as well) and extending more recently into communities like Flickr and Wikipedia. But each new generation of online services needs to learn this lesson through experience; BoingBoing has managed it well.

Linda Stone writes insightfully, as always, about attention — and how we habitually hold our breath as we answer email (I tried observing myself and, yes, it’s true!):

I believe that attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit and that we can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals.

But lately I have observed that the way in which many of us interact with our personal technologies makes it impossible to use this extraordinary tool of attention to our advantage.

In observing others — in their offices, their homes, at cafes — the vast majority of people hold their breath especially when they first begin responding to email. On cell phones, especially when talking and walking, people tend to hyper-ventilate or over-breathe.

The rest is here.

Nick Carr — echoing ideas in his new book, The Big Switch, which I’m reading now — jumps off from a line by Chinese leader Hu Jintao to argue that the Net is becoming more centralized:

It’s not Hu Jintao who is deluded in believing that the net might serve as a powerful tool for central control. It is those who assume otherwise. I used to count myself among them. But I’ve changed my mind.

Kai Krause, who created software tools for designers that were hugely popular a decade or so ago, writes about the frustrating ephemerality of creativity in the software field.

Noting that “hardly any of my software even still runs at all,” he writes:

I used to think “Software Design” is an art form.

I now believe that I was half-right:
it is indeed an art, but it has a rather short half-life:
Software is merely a performance art!

A momentary flash of brilliance, doomed to be overtaken by the next wave, or maybe even by its own sequel. Eaten alive by its successors. And time…

Finally, Alison Gopnik, the psychologist and coauthor of The Scientist in the Crib, writes about the purpose of imaginative play:

Learning about the real world has obvious evolutionary advantages and kids do it better than anyone else. But why spend so much time thinking about wildly, flagrantly unreal worlds? The mystery about pretend play is connected to a mystery about adult humans – especially vivid for an English professor’s daughter like me. Why do we love obviously false plays and novels and movies?

…In fact, I think now that the two abilities — finding the truth about the world and creating new worlds — are two sides of the same coins. Theories, in science or childhood, don’t just tell us what’s true — they tell us what’s possible, and they tell us how to get to those possibilities from where we are now. When children learn and when they pretend they use their knowledge of the world to create new possibilities. So do we whether we are doing science or writing novels. I don’t think anymore that Science and Fiction are just both Good Things that complement each other. I think they are, quite literally, the same thing.

A fine insight — one that generations of readers of science fiction and fantasy know in their bones already.
[tags]edge, john brockman, xeni jardin, boingboing, online communities, linda stone, attention, nicholas carr, kai krause, alison gopnik[/tags]

The value of coming clean about mistakes

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The 10ZenMonkeys blog has the transcript of an extraordinary speech by Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland delivered at a recent conference for the Craigslist Foundation. (Found via BoingBoing.)

This passage about admitting your mistakes is worth taking to heart, particularly for those newsroom veterans who scratch their heads over posts like my last one:

Number Three, Don’t Lie. This is for real. There is something about the relationship between the not-for-profit sector, the government, the foundations, and the donors that creates a massive incentive to lie — flagrantly, and often.

And it’s not just a one-sided thing. The relationship between not-for-profits and foundations is like the relationship between teenagers and parents. You don’t really want to tell them everything that’s going on, and they don’t really want to know. So there’s this dance of deceit, shall we say.

“What’d you do this weekend?”
“Oh… Studied! With my friends.”

And the parents say “Good! So glad to hear that!” Because they don’t want to know. And so what do you say?

“How did the year go?”
“We had success after success! All goals were met, and a good time was had by all.”

And what was there left to say? “Good! Good!” They don’t want to know about the youth in your program that cussed you out and set the building on fire. They don’t want to know that you hired somebody once again who was a complete idiot. They don’t want to know, and you don’t want to tell them, and therefore we all stay very ignorant. Then the actual innovation curve has flattened out, because nobody’s telling the truth about what we’re going through any more. We’re all self-deceiving and trying to make it look good.

At the Ella Baker Center, we adopted a reporting form that freaked out our board and advisors. It was very simple: highlights, low lights, and lessons learned. We created a discipline in the organization that we would report out the bad stuff. First of all, everybody knows the bad stuff anyway, because the person you fired is talking right now, so it’s not like it’s not out there. But did you learn anything?

Program officers at foundations, donors, and philanthropists are just inundated with lying, false crap. And they know they’re being lied to. If you took all your annual reports and just read them end to end, you’d have to conclude that we’re now living in a socialist paradise. Everything’s going well, people are being served, and all the children are happy. And then you look at any newspaper, and it’s very clear that we might be fudging a bit.

So my experience has been that donors and program officers love to actually get the truth. They don’t punish you for it if you learned something. I think if all of us started to confess a little bit more, we would learn a little bit faster.

No obligation to be famous

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My exposure to the strange music and story of Jandek, the reclusive Texan singer-songwriter, has been limited to occasional enthusiastic mentions by John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. But NPR did a story about Jandek last night that concluded with this observation by critic Douglas Wolk. It bears repetition:

“There’s not an obligation to be famous,” Wolk says. “We live in a culture that has impressed on us the idea that everybody not only can be famous, but should or must be famous, and if you’re not famous, you’ve failed, and if you’re making art and the world doesn’t cheer you, then it’s a failure, and that’s just a lie. And it’s a lie that Jandek realizes is a lie, and he’s gotten around it his own way.”

[tags]jandek, fame, celebrity[/tags]

New blogs of note

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  • Kevin Kelly appears to be blogging, and, unsurprisingly, in just a few posts he’s providing considerable food for thought. In this post, he describes his (successful) effort at creating a sort of desktop memento mori:

    I decided to take the idea of number days seriously, and to revisit my earlier experience of counting down my remaining time on this lovely mortal plane. My hope was that a reckoning of my numbered days would help me account for how I spend each precious 24 hours, and to focus my attention and energy on those few tasks and projects I deem most important to me. Indeed, it might help me decide which ones are most important, which is the harder assignment.

  • David Edelstein, my favorite film critic (I’m biased, as we’re old friends and former colleagues), has begun a blog called The Projectionist for New York magazine’s Web site:

    Cyberspace being infinite, at Slate I had license to write between 250 and 2,500 words on a movie, and no digression was too digressive. Now, there’s the horror, the horror of eliminating whole paragraphs to fit the page — in addition to changing, for example, “did not” to “didn’t” to pick up a line and removing anything in parentheses. I do not always want to use contractions, and I like parentheses. You never know where they might lead.

    And who knows where this might lead? Movies connect with us on an unconscious level, and blogging is a pipeline to the id.

  • Finally, Bill Wyman, who I worked with for many years at Salon, has a fine new blog on the entertainment industry — with a heavy emphasis on music — at Hitsville.