G. Steve Journal

Don't Think!

There's a story the late author Tom Wolfe told about his first magazine article, for Esquire magazine.  The magazine had flown the young writer to LA to report on the car culture there, putting him up in a luxury hotel and sparing no expense, including paying a photographer $10,000 to document the scene even before seeing the copy. 

At the end of a week, Wolfe sat down to write and found himself unable to even begin.  After procrastinating most of an evening, he called editor Byron Dobell to tell him he's unable to finish the piece.  Dobell instructs Wolfe to just type up his notes then and send them along – he'll get another writer to do it.

Freed of the burdens of grammar and style, a newly energized and unencumbered Wolfe begins: "Dear Byron", speed types 49 pages of notes randomly punctuated, finishes at 4 am and sends off the mess of papers before going to bed.

When he calls Byron to see how he made out, Byron tells him he loved what Wolfe sent and, after removing "Dear Byron", ran the piece as submitted, punctuation and all.  And so was born Gonzo Journalism and a career.

Which brings us to the take-home point, succinctly summarized here by sci-fi author Ray Bradbury and understood at some level by creatives everywhere:

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

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Something Inside

Never work for other people at what you do.

Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it in some way you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society.

And I think it's terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people's expectations. I think they generally produce their worst work when they do that.

The other thing I would say is that if you feel safe in the area that you're working in you're not working in the right area.

Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being and go a little bit out of your depth and when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about at the right place to do something exciting.

                                                                                                                                –– David Bowie

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Not Knowing

Came across this tweet that may very well express the motivation of creatives generally –– it certainly describes my decades-long journey of photographic discovery:

 

Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.

                                                                                                        - Lucille Clifton

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Me

In a recent issue of THE NEW YORKER art critic Peter Schjeldahl explores the work of painter Edward Hopper, describing him as "the visual bard of American solitude," and observing that "once you've seen a Hopper, it stays seen, lodged in your mind's eye." 

Hopper, describing his style, explained: “I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me.”

Exasperated by questions of what his works meant, he squelched one interviewer by exclaiming, “I’m after ME.”

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Follow...

Everyone is inspired by a different muse, and you follow your muse

                                                –– MAD magazine cartoonist Al Jaffe

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Make Good Art

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.

Make good art.

I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn’t matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.

                                                                                                                                         ––   Neil Gaiman

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Beautiful Responsibility

There may be as many reasons explaining what motivates a person to express themselves creatively as there are artists, but one of those reasons has to be the desire to, as Julia Margaret Cameron once recorded: "...arrest all beauty that came before me."

Recently came across some excerpts from the writings of Viktor Frankl that perhaps explains that desire more fully:

...it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility! ... [W]hat we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality...  In truth, it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe....the reality that we have rescued into the past in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness.

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Things As They Are

Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange chronicled the era for the Farm Security Administration and created one of the iconic images of that time, "Migrant Mother."

In a recent virtual presentation, MoMA curator Sarah Meister reveals that Lange displayed in her studio, the following quote from Francis Bacon:

 

                                                             The contemplation of things as they are
                                                              without substitution or imposture
                                                              without error or confusion
                                                              is in itself a nobler thing
                                                              than the whole harvest of invention.

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Fluid Questioning

Songwriter Andrew Bird on how he writes a song:

It’s kind of a racket. When I step onstage I feel myself adopting that comedian’s posture, a shrug of the shoulders that says, “I don’t know, folks. We’re all just puzzling through it together. I’m not going to pretend to have the answers but here’s what I’ve seen.”

To emerge from creative hibernation with my perfect oeuvre and worldview fully realized feels stifling and boring. And while I’m anything but an exhibitionist I have this perverse impulse to introduce half-written songs and invite the trouble that it might bring. Maybe I’m saying to my former teachers, “Look, by your standards I’m failing, but it feels great.” But mostly it’s that I just prefer a fluid questioning present to a fixed past.

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It's The Old Lesson

To celebrate his 90th birthday, the NY TIMES re-published a 2017 interview of lyricist Stephen Sondheim by playwright Lin Manuel Miranda, which included this bit of creative advice:

Sondheim: ...you know, it’s the old lesson, you’ve got to work on something dangerous. You have to work on something that makes you uncertain. Something that makes you doubt yourself.

Miranda: Talk a bit about that danger and uncertainty.

Sondheim: Well, because it stimulates you to do things you haven’t done before. The whole thing is if you know where you’re going, you’ve gone, as the poet says. And that’s death.