Postcards I sent the boys from the Keep Going tour. (I missed several cities.)
Off the road and back at it
The cruel irony of book tour is that I go around talking about creativity when I myself am at my least creative. Tour leaves me underslept and exhausted, bereft of any kind of reliable routine or workspace, barely able to concentrate on a book… pretty much the opposite condition of the one I need to be in to sustain any kind of decent work.
Here’s musician Brian Eno on why he quit touring:
I noticed that touring — which is wonderful in some ways — is absolutely confining in other ways. It’s so difficult… you just can’t think about anything else. You try your hardest: You take books with you and word processors, and you’re definitely going to do something with the time. And you never do. It’s so easy for it to become your exclusive life, this one and a half hours every evening that you play. And I just thought, “I’m losing touch with what I really like doing.” What I really like doing is what I call Import and Export. I like taking ideas from one place and putting them into another place and seeing what happens when you do that. I think you could probably sum up nearly everything I’ve done under that umbrella. Understanding something that’s happening in painting, say, and then seeing how that applies to music. Or understanding something that’s happening in experimental music and seeing what that could be like if you used it as a base for popular music. It’s a research job, a lot of it. You spend a lot of time sitting around, fiddling around with things, quite undramatically, and finally something clicks into place and you think, ”Oh, thats really worth doing.” The time spent researching is a big part of it. I never imagined a pop star life that would’ve permitted that.
How wonderful it is, now, to be off the road, and back home, not just isolated in my bliss station, but surrounded by my favorite artists, my boys, six and four, who are churning out all sorts of wild work all day.
(Above: Owen photoshopping an album cover. Below: Jules’ comic of the Three Little Pigs.)
How the magic happens
People often ask me how I manage to put together my weekly newsletter week after week, even on the road. Well, as you can see, sometimes I have help. (Ha!)
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Yesterday, I was looking at this Stairway to Nowhere in my hotel — the kind of “luxury” hotel with lots of fancy finishes and no ice in the ice machine — and I was thinking about the news, and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” came to mind, as it often does these days:
Many years ago there was an Emperor so exceedingly fond of new clothes that he spent all his money on being well dressed. He cared nothing about reviewing his soldiers, going to the theatre, or going for a ride in his carriage, except to show off his new clothes…
“It’s strange people think they need Arendt or Orwell to figure things out,” Jeet Heer tweeted not long ago, “when everything was spelled out in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’”
“But he hasn’t got anything on,” a little child said.
“Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?” said its father. And one person whispered to another what the child had said, “He hasn’t anything on. A child says he hasn’t anything on.”
“But he hasn’t got anything on!” the whole town cried out at last.
The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, “This procession has got to go on.” So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.
After I finished the story again, I thought of 16-year-old climate change activist Greta Thunberg, whose autism informs her approach: “I don’t fall for lies as easily as regular people, I can see through things.”
To the politicians, she says: “You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in the answers that will allow you to carry on as if nothing has happened.”
But will anybody listen? Will anybody change? “Is my microphone on?” she asks.
Children are able to see through our bullshit, but if we don’t respect them and listen to them, we learn nothing from them, and nothing changes. The Emperor is allowed to proceed, because “the procession has got to go on.”
An alternate world
“You wake up in the morning, look out at the day – blue sky, fluffy clouds – then go online and ten minutes later you have lost the will to live.”
—Nick Cave
Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files is my favorite newsletter, and today’s letter was so beautiful I wanted to share it here. It’s about giving our children a way of avoiding despair and coping with the onslaught of apocalyptic news and other assorted garbage in our streams every day:
I have always seen it as a kind of parental duty to show my own children beautiful stuff, and in doing so reveal to them an alternate world. By beautiful, I mean interesting, inspiring, ambiguous, challenging and sometimes dangerous things that exist within the world of art. I feel that the online world provides us ready access to a vast and ever-deepening barrage of bad shit, where the cruel reality of the world is well covered. This continual onslaught of negativity can erode our souls and the souls of our children. My job is to show my children that there is a whole universe that exists beyond the grim issues of the day. This is not to divert them from certain truths, but rather to remind them that the parallel world of art and the imagination can literally save their lives, as it certainly saved mine.
Read the whole thing here.
- ← Newer posts
- 1
- …
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- …
- 27
- Older posts→