The Ten Commandments

Monday, October 28, 2019

Here I am with Rob Walker yesterday outside the Texas State Capitol. We were walking back from our panel at the Texas Book Festival and I took us through a side exit so we could say hello to The Ten Commandments. I suggested a photo and someone suggested we point to our favorite commandment. (Mine was easy, Rob couldn’t decide.)

It might seem blasphemous to goof on the Ten Commandments on a Sunday, but the monument has a less-than-pious history: It was one of a series erected in a nationwide program cooked up mid-century by The Fraternal Order of Eagles and aided by director Cecil B. DeMille. Yes, that Cecil B. DeMille, the director of The Ten Commandments. He thought the monuments would make excellent publicity for the film, and several actors from the movie were present at the unveilings (that’s Yul Brynner on the left, Martha Scott, who played Moses’s mother, on the right):

(The second photo comes from a comic book the Eagles put out called On Eagles Wings, about a delinquent boy who goes on a camping trip to learn about God.)

The monuments have inspired many: some to legal action, some to website development, some to vandalism via automobile. (A deranged Arkansas man drove his Dodge Dart into at least two of the monuments.)

“Here’s my problem: Why are there ten?” George Carlin asked in his special, Complaints and Grievances. “You don’t need ten! I think the list of commandments was deliberately and artificially inflated to get it up to ten. It’s a padded list.”

“Ten sounds official,” he joked. “Having ten commandments was really a marketing decision.”

He then boiled down the list to two. (I won’t spoil it, just watch. Or listen.)

Shel Silverstein went the opposite direction in “The 20 Commandments,” and showed Moses chiseling off the second half of the list so it was light enough that he could carry it down the mountain. (You can read the whole thing in Different Dances.)

Sometimes people will ask me why I’m so fond of the list of 10 format.

“Well, it was good enough for Moses,” I say. “And it’s good enough for me.”

Homewrecker

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Made from doorknob flyers I found all over our street while listening to Dolly Parton’s America.

Filed under: Sunday collage

On moderate giftedness

Saturday, October 26, 2019

Tom Hart emailed me the other day, asking if I remembered a Kurt Vonnegut passage where he talks about how “we all are all dispirited because we feel like have to compete with the world’s best, not just fulfill a role (say artist, writer, storyteller) in our tribe or extended family.”

I did, believe it or not. It’s from his (underrated, IMO) novel, Bluebeard:

I was obviously born to draw better than most people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on.

I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives – maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on.

That’s what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world’s champions.

The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tapdances on the coffee table like Fred Astair or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an ‘exhibitionist.’

How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, ‘Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”

Of course, Bluebeard was written in 1987. I think the internet, for better or worse, has meant that quite a few moderately gifted people — people like me! — have managed to eke out livings based on our weird work and building an extended family out of the fellow weirdos who find us.

I shall enjoy it while it lasts!

Time, space, and materials

Friday, October 25, 2019

Artists and children both need the right combination of time, space, and materials to do their work.

Here’s how Ursula Kolbe puts it in her book Children’s Imagination: Creativity Under Our Noses (emphasis mine):

The elements of time, space and materials make it possible for children to explore, invent and make their ideas visible. Thinking of these elements as invitations gets to the heart of the matter.

It’s the combination of unhurried and uninterrupted time, inviting spaces and materials that guides mind and hands, that invites creative thinking. Seeing, handling, and thinking are inseparable, as Rudolf Arheim, psychologist and scholar of art and ideas, reminds us.

Together, time, space and materials provide ‘invitations to act’.

Those adjectives are extremely important: unhurried and uninterrupted time, and inviting spaces and materials.

Years ago, my friend John T. Unger turned “time, space, and materials” into an equation for producing work. (Only he uses the word resources instead of “materials” — “Resources meaning materials and tools, or the money to get them.”)

Time + Space + Resources = Work

His insight was that you need all three at the same time, otherwise you fall into idleness. Here, in John’s words, are variations on the equation:

T+R-S=Idle: You have time and resources but no work space. Examples: a rock band with close neighbors, a dancer with a no floor space, any visual artist whose space is improperly ventilated, too small, or is not conducive to the use of their proper tools.

T+S-R=Idle: You have time and space but no resources. Example: you quit your job and moved into your parent’s basement, but ran out of paint & canvas. Or you saved up enough cash to rent a big space and take time off, but your welder just blew out it’s coil and there’s not enough cash left to fix it. Or you took a part time job so you’d have
more time to work, but you can’t afford materials after you pay the rent.

R+S-T=Idle: You have resources and space, but all your time is used to maintain them. Example: You have a great job that pays for a huge loft and you’ve purchased everything you need to do a big project. But every night when you come home, you’re just too burned out to get anywhere with the stuff.

“The trouble is,” he says, “it’s almost impossible to get all three at once.”

Time gets used to make money. Money gets used to pay for space. Space is hard to justify unless you have the time and resources to make it pay for itself. The whole equation can easily turn into a vicious circle in which you constantly have to rob Peter to pay Paul.

We can easily see this play out in the lives of children, too.

For example:

S + M – T = You provide a nice space and plenty of materials in the classroom, but the bell rings and it’s time to stop for the day, regardless of where the children are in their work.

T + S – M = You provide the time and space for children to work, but all you’ve given them to draw with is crummy old crayons and scrap paper.

M + T – S = You provide great materials and lots of time, but nowhere to spread out.

Etc.

My question is whether increasing the quality or amount of a variable in the equation can make up for a lack of one the others.

So, for example, you have very little time, but you have a dedicated space and materials ready to go so you can pop in at any opportune moment and work.

Or, you have no space to work, but you get up early when the kids are in bed, and use the kitchen table.

I’m scratching my head thinking about how space and time can make up for a lack of materials, which might reveal something about their importance. I suppose if you have lots of time, you can scrounge around for materials?

I’ll think about it some more, but until then, remember the equation:

Time + Space + Materials = Work

At home with FINNEAS

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Here is a sweet mini-portrait of growing up in a small, loving house in a great city and being given the time, space, and materials to do your work:

The video combines three of my loves: musicians talking about the recording process, unschooling, and how to make a creative environment at home.

Finneas O’Connell, a 22-year-old singer and songwriter, also co-writes and records the music of his younger sister, the 17-year-old phenomenon Billy Eilish. They grew up in a 2-bedroom in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, and were homeschooled by their actor parents, resulting in a musical partnership that thrives on their friendship and trust.

Their parents’ decision to homeschool was partially inspired by the fact that Finneas was born the year of “MMMBop” when the Hanson Brothers broke big. As their dad put it, “I was completely swept away by these kids. They were religious Oklahoma home-schooled, but nonetheless. Clearly what had happened was they’d been allowed to pursue the things that they were interested in.”

It’s interesting to me that homeschooling isn’t just part of their story, it’s central to their story. Finneas summarizes the results:

Being born when I was born, and just being able to afford a computer and Logic Pro, just being afforded the opportunities I was afforded, living in LA, making music, being homeschooled, having time in the day to make that music, it was this gift I was given of time and resources.

He talks about the importance of their home as a space:

“There’s a crazy intimacy to what we’re doing…. There’s such a private feeling. It’s our house. It’s where we’ve experienced everything. That allows us to make some kind of music that feels wholeheartedly exposed, as far as who we really are as people.”

His sister, Billie Eilish, says the first song she recorded, “Fingers Crossed,” she wrote at age 12, inspired by one of her mother’s assignments:

I was in the songwriting class my mom taught, and the little assignment was that you had to watch a movie or a TV show and then write down all the parts that you thought were good hooks or good lyrics. So, I watched The Walking Dead — like, why not — and then I wrote down all this stuff. People don’t even know that that’s what it’s about, because it sounds more like a longing heartbreak song. But nope, it’s about zombies.

(Steal like an artist!)

Elsewhere, she talked more about their homeschooled childhood:

“When I see movies set in summertime, that’s what my life was like all the time, but it doesn’t mean I didn’t learn,” Billie explains. “My mom would cook and she’d be like, ‘How much goes into this?’ And that’s how we learned.”

Homeschooling was crucial partly because Billie deals with auditory processing disorder—it’s hard for her to listen and absorb meaning in standard ways—but it had the happy side effect of sharpening her sense of self. “I never went to school, so popular was never a thing for me. I don’t understand peer pressure,” she says.

Filed under: unschooling

PS. Just for fun, here’s Finneas vs. Owen in his studio: