Search Results for: log book

Lifted type collages

Thursday, November 18, 2021

“I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them.”
—Ray Bradbury

I’ve been working on a series of collages made from type I (literally) lift out of magazines. They’re sort of inspired by the word paintings of Wayne White and printmakers like Amos Kennedy, Jr.

What I do is, I keep a list of phrases in my notebook I want to make and then when I have a minute or I’m burned out, I make one.

Sometimes they’re phrases we say a lot around the house. (This one is stolen from one of my favorite movies, Withnail and I. I say this in mock outrage a lot to my kids.)

Sometimes they’re more abstract. (I took the Target tape off a package.)

Sometimes it’s a phrase I can’t stand. (“Don’t get me wrong.”)

Sometimes my wife suggests one like “They can’t all be winners.”

Sometimes I notice a phrase everybody starts saying.

I like to do conversational shortcuts and the passive-aggressive phrases you hear a lot in the South and the Midwest.

These pieces are very different than my other work, so it’s not exactly clear to me what I should do with them. Not sure they’re right for a book, but maybe I can work my way up to a dozen or so and make a notecard set or a series of posters out of them.

That’s the thing about new work, it’s not really your job to judge it, you just keep the channel open and let the stuff come…

Exploit or explore?

Thursday, November 11, 2021

A diary diagram (with The Creative Learning Spiral in the middle)

In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson reports on research into what causes “hot streaks” in careers. (Some personal favorites, off the top of my head: Al Green 1971-1974, Robert Louis Stevenson 1884-1886, Harrison Ford 1979-1989, etc.)

“It’s a complicated idea that comes down to three words,” Thompson writes. “Explore, then exploit.”

There’s a never-ending tension in creative work between “exploring new ideas and exploiting old certainties.”

Say you’re a car manufacturer. Every year, you must decide between investing in future innovations, such as self-driving software, and finding ways to squeeze new revenue out of existing technologies and materials. Too much fanciful R&D spending, and this year’s profit plummets. Too much emphasis on tweaking existing product lines, and you get squashed by some fresh upstart in a decade.

Thompson notes that the same tension exists on the individual level: Do you spend your time exploring new possibilities or do you “shut up and play the hits,” so to speak?

Thompson’s piece notes that the “explore, then exploit” theory seems to back up the main idea of David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. David responded in his newsletter, “Exploration is Key for a ‘Hot Streak’ at Work,” and told the story of what happened when his first book, The Sports Gene, became a surprise bestseller.

I felt like the book was my sports capstone project: the exploit of my years as SI’s science writer. I wanted to go back into explore mode. Except, suddenly there was a lot of pressure not to do that, and instead to brand myself as the sports science guy and write another, similar book, and quickly. The pressure was to keep exploiting.

I found it difficult to navigate. The book had consumed me and stretched my competence. I wasn’t ready for another one. A professional advisor told me: “You’d be an idiot to let it be five years before you have another book out.”

Maybe! But choosing to be an idiot for six years, or playing the fool, led David to the “most impactful work” of his career.

Heraclitus noted that, like with guitar strings, it’s the unique tension in life that creates harmony.

I see this tension between exploring and exploiting not as something to get over or beat, but as a kind of field from which our work emerges.

If an artist is to keep working, they will never resolve this tension, nor will they want to. (See: Milton Glaser on Picasso.)

I have a few more thoughts:

1. A “hot streak” can’t be due to the will or actions of the artist alone.

When I look at the hot streaks listed by Thompson (“Albert Einstein in the early 1900s. Aretha Franklin in the 1960s. Steve Jobs in the 2000s.”) and the ones I listed above, I can point to the sceniuses that gave birth to those particular “hot streaks,” or acts of genius. (Green and Franklin did their best work at the peak of the album industry, Ford was there at the birth of the blockbuster, etc.)

In order for artistic or creative work to be “impactful” the conditions must be right. There must be an audience ready to receive the work. The creative person has very little to do with that.

Perhaps the best way to know if it’s time to explore is if the conditions don’t seem ripe. In such winter-like moments, it may be best to disappear and explore. (Read, for example, about the career of the late actor Dean Stockwell, which is a story of working and disappearing and reappearing again.)

My favorite sentence in Thompson’s piece echoes my thoughts on wintering and dormancy: “Periods of exploration can be like winter farming; nothing is visibly growing, but a subterranean process is at work and will in time yield a bounty.”

2. Does “impactful work” really equate to the best work?

I’m always a bit suspicious of the metrics involved in such studies. For this one, the hot streaks were “determined by higher-than-average art-auction prices, IMDb film ratings, or scientific-journal citations.”

I can tell you that in my own career, my most impactful or “successful” work is not my favorite work, nor the work I think is best. It is merely the work that connected the most with others. (Caveat: artists are often the worst judges of their own work.)

4. The line between exploitation and exploration can be pretty blurry.

Take Prince, for example. He had one of the hottest hot streaks of all time at the end oof the seventies and throughout the eighties. But he covered so much territory in that time, made such a diverse range of good music, can you say he was primarily in an exploitation mode? (To be fair, his commercial peak, Purple Rain, was a calculated move to become a superstar…)

5. Is a “hot streak” desirable for the artist?

That which burns hottest burns out more quickly. A hot streak is hard to live up to, though you can warm yourself by its embers for quite a long while. Which brings me to my next thought…

6. Exploration needs to be funded.

Exploitation mode pays for itself (until it doesn’t) but the exploration mode needs to be paid for up until it pays off. (If it ever does.) One of the great gifts of a major success is that it means you can go away for a while and experiment… if you have the guts to turn your back on the temptation to exploit indefinitely. (See David’s story above.)

7. There’s a micro and macro view of this.

If you zoom in, it’s possible you can do your exploiting and exploration at the same time. I think of John Waters: “I think it up in the morning and I sell it in the afternoon.”

Doing a gig based on what I know in the morning, for example, pays for my afternoon of writing and reading about what I don’t know.

Musicians tour so they can stay home to write and record. George Clooney acts in a big mainstream movie so he can direct an indie one. Etc.

8. Explore and exploit map to the right and left hemispheres of the brain.

As laid out in Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary and Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, the left hemisphere tends to be all about exploitation and what it already knows for certain and the right brain about exploration and what is new. Chaos ensues when the left hemisphere gets its way too much, as it also does when exploitation becomes the main mode of the wider culture.

9. The playfulness of children can help us break out of exploit mode and back into explore mode.

See: Alison Gopnik’s writing on the subject:

Inside the mask

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
—Oscar Wilde

“It’s Halloween… I’ve got my Bob Dylan mask on.”
—Bob Dylan, 10/31/1964

Our second pandemic Halloween is coming up, so I’m thinking about masks. Specifically, how much I love photo projects that involve people wearing masks.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard, *Romance (N.) from Ambrose Bierce #3*, 1962

I’ve recently become interested in the photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. In the late 50s in Kentucky, Meatyard, an optician who called himself a “dedicated amateur,” found a bunch of masks in a Woolworths and “over the next 13 years, Meatyard persuaded a procession of family and friends to don one of the Woolworths masks and pose in front of his camera.”

[Photographer Emett] Gowin, who posed for a Meatyard portrait, recalls thinking that wearing a mask would surely erase all sense of personhood. “But when I saw the pictures,” he says, “I realized that even though you have the mask, your body language completely gives you away. It’s as if you’re completely naked, completely revealed.”

Meatyard, btw, wasn’t some lone outsider — he was a part of Lexington’s artistic and literary scene. (Here’s a nice essay that points out the connection between Meatyard’s work and Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary.)

photo by Inge Morath, masks by Saul Steinberg

One of my favorite little art books is photographer Inge Morath’s Saul Steinberg Masquerade, a collection of portraits from the turn of the 50s/60s of people wearing Steinberg’s paper-bag masks.

These pictures remind me of something Vlad Nabokov wrote in Strong Opinions:

I don’t think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every morning. I think that the audience an artist imagines, when he imagines that kind of a thing, is a room filled with people wearing his own mask.

A state of flow

Thursday, October 21, 2021

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has died.

Earlier this year my 8-year-old said, “When you’re making video games, you have to find that perfect balance between easy and hard?” And I told him he’d basically summarized Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow, and drew him the diagram above to explain.

Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience was a big influence on me when I read it back in 2007. There’s a passage in that book about crossword puzzles that I thought could also be describing my newspaper blackout poems:

There is much to be said in favor of this popular pastime, which in its best form resembles the ancient riddle contests. It is inexpensive and portable, its challenges can be finely graduated so that both novices and experts can enjoy it, and its solution produces a sense of pleasing order that gives one a satisfying feeling of accomplishment. It provides opportunities to experience a mild state of flow to many people who are stranded in airport lounges, who travel on commuter trains, or who are simply whiling away Sunday mornings.

Csikszentmihalyi then goes on to talk explicitly about poetry and writing:

What’s important is to find at least a line, or a verse, that starts to sing. Sometimes even one word is enough to open a window on a new view of the world, to start the mind on an inner journey….

He also wrote about the joys of being an amateur:

Not so long ago, it was acceptable to be an amateur poet….Nowadays if one does not make some money (however pitifully little) out of writing, it’s considered to be a waste of time. It is taken as downright shameful for a man past twenty to indulge in versification unless he receives a check to show for it.

(I wrote more on the subject in Show Your Work!)

Csikszentmihalyi’s TED talk, “Flow, the secret to happiness”

Csikszentmihalyi also wrote a book called Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention and he made an interesting list of “paradoxical traits” of creative people:

1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.

2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.

3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.

4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality.

5. Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted.

6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time.

7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping.

8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative.

9. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.

10. Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.

RIP.

3 stories about artificial intelligence

Sunday, October 10, 2021

1. Composer and Beethoven biographer Jan Swafford was asked to respond to the “10th symphony” created with artificial intelligence. “At the end of the symphony I found myself more philosophical than annoyed,” he writes.

The ability of a machine to do or outdo something humans do is interesting once at most… When it comes to art, we need to see a woman or a man struggling with the universal mediocrity that is the natural lot of all of us and somehow out of some mélange of talent, skill, and luck doing the impossible, making something happen that is splendid and moving—or funny, or frightening, or whatever the artist set out to do… Here’s my assertion: True intelligence is in a body. Intelligence outside a living body, as some sort of abstraction, is innately impossible, or should be given another name.

Swafford points out (like Nick Cave has) that part of the beauty of Beethoven is, “in contrast say to Mozart and Bach, with him it’s often as if you can hear the effort, the struggle, hear in the notes what it cost him to rise above the universal mediocrity.”

He writes of his late friend, the painter Francis Gillespie:

She would spend a year or more on a painting of flowers, struggling to represent them with virtually photographic accuracy. In fact, as she knew perfectly well, she didn’t have the technique to do that. “I’m really sort of a primitive,” Fran would say grimly as she worked. But what makes her paintings hers is exactly the grand failure of her attempt. Her pictures are beautiful, close to photos, but always a little off, and the offness makes them singular.

Ted Gioia calls this “an aesthetics of imperfection.”

In this story, the human has something the machine can never have.

2. In Sam Anderson’s profile of Laurie Anderson, he notes that the artist has “become obsessed, lately, with artificial intelligence.” She worked with researchers to make text engines in her style, the style of her late husband, Lou Reed, and an Anderson/Reed blend of the two. Anderson says a 1/3 of what the computer spits out is junk, 1/3 is boring, but 1/3 is “surprising, even authentic, some kind of fresh magic.”

Sometimes she sits there with the hunger of an addict, feeding words and pictures into the engine, seeing what comes out. For a long time, she would save the texts. They felt so precious. After a while, though, she realized that the texts were infinite. She could have one whenever she needed it. So she read them and then let them go.

At one point, Laurie Anderson reeds a poem the machine spit out in Reed’s style. It’s not bad. “Wonderful,” she says. “Just great. He’s talking to me from somewhere else. I definitely do feel that. The line is pretty thin for me.”

(This scene reminded me of something out of Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow.)

In this story, the machine gives the human a combination of something it had and something it never had.

3. I am sympathetic to Swafford’s assertion that “intelligence is in a body” and “the aesthetics of imperfection.”

I also know that some of my favorite art came out of the interplay between human and machine. It is between the two that a third thing emerges — Beethoven, after all, was wrangling notes out of a machine with keys.

I think it is worth noting the difference between analog and digital machines. Analog machines, I would venture, give you more mistakes that you can work with — a brush runs out of ink, and the dry texture gives you new marks, Lee Perry blows ganja smoke and dirt on a tape reel, and new sounds emerge. (You throw dirt in a laptop and you’ll simply fry the machine.) That said, even digital machines and pieces of software have quirks and we ascribe them personalities, and work with them.

I would also note the difference between words and music. Words are more abstract than music. They are more easily fed into a computer and spit back out. They also must be interpreted by us — when we read the poem in the style of Reed, summoned from the computer, it is already an abstract, linear text. We must interpret the words. Music is not interpreted. It is what it is. It is heard.

I confess I have gone from being cranky to curious about A.I., and I wonder what sorts of grunt work it could do for me. (Could it spit out a book proposal?)

In my story, the machines help us to honor what is not machine-like in us.