Wow –- Frank Chimero’s recent articles are just killing it.
It’s that sort of thing that happens when you read a great writer or thinker and you feel like you are actually being taught a new language, a useful way of organizing thoughts and impressions you already own in some messy, unstructured form.
For example, you may feel you’ve been looking at the color red, starting to notice it, to begin to recognize it’s qualities and instances, to differentiate it from non-red; but then this person comes along and says, “by the way, that’s called ‘Red’.” Then all of the sudden these hazy, half-formed (but deeply felt) impressions become clear and you gain the ability (that comes with all language and categorization) to manipulate the concept abstractly, to apply metaphor, make new connections, and deploy the concept as a new and useful tool in your own life or work or play.
Anyway, Mr. Chimero is writing some really great stuff. For instance:
Pseudo-Structures
There is no secret to creativity besides possessing a habitual work ethic. But sometimes, it’s just hard as hell. Here we are, fortunate enough to possess hands that can harness magic to turn nothing in to something. We have ears pointed towards the muses. But the only voice I’m hearing is Alan Alda’s, and I’m waiting to see what kind of hijinx he and Honeycutt have gotten themselves in to on this MASH rerun.
Motivation has a reputation for being elusive. (I’ve looked hard, but it’s nowhere in this MASH episode.) Sometimes, if you’re lucky, it will come to you. A voice breaks into song. Pacing turns to dance. An image appears. A story surfaces and begs to be told. The kettle whistles with kinetic energy and a creative act is fostered in to being. You’ve done well and you get to keep your gift for another day.
It’s magical when a song or story writes itself. But, it’s also a rarity to have motivation invite itself over and come to your doorstep with a muse. Typically motivation comes alone, and doesn’t know what to do with itself. Creative energy without an outlet is wasted. Motivation doesn’t disappear. It evaporates.
Creatives have to be quick to put their motivation to task. One strategy is to use what I call a “pseudo-structure.” A pseudo-structure is a rule, limitation, or theme used to get the creativity flowing. They’re frameworks for creative activity and improvisation. Limitations are the playground of a creative mind, and these rules are a way to get to work. They are a latticework on which to hang ideas.
Many of the greats used pseudo-structures. Vivaldi wrote four violin concertos: one for each season. Shakespeare’s sonnets follow a specific rhyming scheme and are always 14 lines. During Picasso’s blue period, he essentially only painted monochromatically. There’s many more.
The restrictions in a pseudo-structure can take many shapes. They can be conceptual, where the restrictions determine the subject matter of the work. (Write a song for each one of the muses. Create an illustration for each letter of the alphabet. Write a short story inspired by each member of the Jackson 5.) They can also be structural, where compositional restrictions are created. (Paint on surfaces that are 3 inches wide and 24 inches tall. Write a 14-line sonnet. Choreograph a dance, where the dancer doesn’t step outside a 6×6’ square) Or instrumental, where the tools are deliberately crippled. (Paint monochromatically. Write without pronouns. Write a song on a mistuned guitar.)
Once some restrictions are set, it’s best to consider the qualities of the pseudo-structure and how they can leveraged. For instance, if I were painting monochromatically in blue, I could choose to only paint things that were really blue, or sad scenes, or even places bathed in bluish, cavernous light. Or, if I really wanted to push it, I could paint the Blue Man Group in front of a blue screen giving a weather forecast. Sometimes, a simple pseudo-structure can provide unpredictable results.
No matter what pseudo-structure one chooses for themselves, it should be restrictive enough to help them get going, but open enough to not dictate what path they take. Remember: these rules only exist to get things started. Feel free to break them during the process if it would benefit the final result. Pseudo-structures aren’t a necessity for creative work. They’re a tool that can be used to overcome the gap between finding the desire to work and knowing where to put your efforts.
Creativity is about action and life is about movement. The creative spirit is about transforming nothing in to something and seeing how we can get ourselves in to hijinx of our own. And those are the best sort. Sorry, Honeycutt.
Tom Waits - Tom Traubert’s Blues.
Bones Howe, the album’s producer, recalls when Waits first came to him with the song:
He said the most wonderful thing about writing that song. He went down and hung around on skid row in L.A. because he wanted to get stimulated for writing this material. He called me up and said, ‘I went down to skid row … I bought a pint of rye. In a brown paper bag.’ I said, ‘Oh really?’. ‘Yeah - hunkered down, drank the pint of rye, went home, threw up, and wrote ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues […] Every guy down there … everyone I spoke to, a woman put him there.”[2]
Howe was amazed when he first heard the song, and he’s still astonished by it. “I do a lot of seminars,” he says. “Occasionally I’ll do something for songwriters. They all say the same thing to me. ‘All the great lyrics are done.’ And I say, ‘I’m going to give you a lyric that you never heard before.”’ Howe then says to his aspiring songwriters, “A battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace / And a wound that will never heal.” This particular Tom Waits lyric Howe considers to be “brilliant.” It’s “the work of an extremely talented lyricist, poet, whatever you want to say. That is brilliant, brilliant work. And he never mentions the person, but you see the person.”
Tom Waits Interview.
This is a great interview. Here are a few of my favourite bits :
Q: What’s heaven for you?
A: Me and my wife on Rte. 66 with a pot of coffee, a cheap guitar, pawnshop tape recorder in a Motel 6, and a car that runs good parked right by the door.
Q: What’s wrong with the world?
A: We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. Leona Helmsley’s dog made 12 million last year… and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio made $30,000. It’s just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains. We are monkeys with money and guns.
Q: Can you tell me an odd thing that happened in an odd place? Any thoughts?
A: A Japanese freighter had been torpedoed during WWII and it’s at the bottom of Tokyo Harbor with a large hole in her hull. A team of engineers was called together to solve the problem of raising the wounded vessel to the surface. One of the engineers tackling this puzzle said he remembered seeing a Donald Duck cartoon when he was a boy where there was a boat at the bottom of the ocean with a hole in its hull, and they injected it with ping-pong balls and it floated up. The skeptical group laughed but one of the experts was willing to give it a try. Of course, where in the world would you find twenty million ping-pong balls but in Tokyo? It turned out to be the perfect solution. The balls were injected into the hull and it floated to the surface, the engineer was elated. Moral solutions to problems are always found at an entirely different level; also, believe in yourself in the face of impossible odds.
Q: Do you have words to live by?
A: Jim Jarmusch once told me “Fast, Cheap, and Good… pick two. If it’s fast and cheap it wont be good. If it’s cheap and good it won’t be fast. If it’s fast and good it wont be cheap.” Fast, cheap and good… pick (2) words to live by.
Q: Tom, you love words and their origins. For $2,000…what is the origin of the word bedlam?
A: It’s a contraction of the word Bethlehem. It comes from the hospital of Saint Mary of Bethlehem outside London. The hospital began admitting mental patients in the late fourteenth century. In the sixteenth century it became a lunatic asylum. The word bedlam came to be used for any madhouse- and by extension, for any scene of noisy confusion.
Q: What is a gentleman?A: A man who can play the accordion, but doesn’t.
Conversation between Beck and Tom Waits.
BH: I bought a car once— I didn’t know the battery was under the driver’s seat. I had taken it in to get an oil change. When I showed up, the mechanic…his pants were burned off. The metal in the seat, it hit the battery and it went up in flames.
TW: Burnt his pants off?
BH: Yeah. He had been a master mechanic in Germany. But when he came to America he didn’t have the same credentials and was working out of a Salvadorian tire shop. He was a genius mechanic. I showed up one time and said I only had $15 and the car was on its last leg. We had become friends, so he said he would see what he could do. I came back later and he had taken a piece of string and a matchstick and re-rigged the stick shift. It would have another good month in it. But when it burned his pants that was the end, he wasn’t having it. I called the car Jaws because the front of the hood had been smashed in so the hood was slightly open. It was a station wagon so it kind of looked like a shark. I painted some teeth on it at one point.
TW: That could catch on…that’s what Einstein said, if it has a flaw and its irreparable turn it into a feature. If you’re always burning the pancakes, put it on the marquee. Burnt Pancakes, 99 Cents. People who can fix anything with string are disappearing. I think most things can be fixed with string, but we need to be reminded of that. Except if you pour a fresca into your computer, I don’t think that will work. Or if you pour a coke in the back of your television the string won’t work. It’ll turn into a coffee table immediately.
(Read the whole thing here).
I bought this in Munster, Germany.
Matt Whitwell, Cassette Rainbow
Those into Daytrotter should definitely check out the new Alberta Cross session.
‘Ghost Of City Life’ is amazing. Not to mention how good the piano and drums sound…
P.S. if you’re not into Daytrotter… sort your life out.
My favourite discovery this week has been Moderat.
Berlin based electronic duo. The album is incredible.
This song has been playing in head none stop today.
Moderat - Rusty Nails
My attempts at a little tumblr animation.
Tom Waits - Tom Traubert’s Blues.
Bones Howe, the album’s producer, recalls when Waits first came to him with the song:
He said the most wonderful thing about writing that song. He went down and hung around on skid row in L.A. because he wanted to get stimulated for writing this material. He called me up and said, ‘I went down to skid row … I bought a pint of rye. In a brown paper bag.’ I said, ‘Oh really?’. ‘Yeah - hunkered down, drank the pint of rye, went home, threw up, and wrote ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues […] Every guy down there … everyone I spoke to, a woman put him there.”[2]
Howe was amazed when he first heard the song, and he’s still astonished by it. “I do a lot of seminars,” he says. “Occasionally I’ll do something for songwriters. They all say the same thing to me. ‘All the great lyrics are done.’ And I say, ‘I’m going to give you a lyric that you never heard before.”’ Howe then says to his aspiring songwriters, “A battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace / And a wound that will never heal.” This particular Tom Waits lyric Howe considers to be “brilliant.” It’s “the work of an extremely talented lyricist, poet, whatever you want to say. That is brilliant, brilliant work. And he never mentions the person, but you see the person.”
My favourite discovery this week has been Moderat.
Berlin based electronic duo. The album is incredible.
This song has been playing in head none stop today.
Moderat - Rusty Nails
