Borderlands

Our culture is about success, ‘Rich & Famous’ our mantra. No matter how badly we screw up, a strong tenet of Western Civilization assures us ‘they’ will suddenly adore us (and regret ignoring our fledgling efforts) once they see we’ve succeeded (ie. we are rich & famous, yes!).

Counter culture rejects all that, celebrating communal values and humble anonymity.  We’re not supposed to hear of counter culture heros until they sell out, ie. get rich, famous, or both.  The counter culture ideal of success is to be wildly productive, ingeniously inventive and ambition free while maintaining a seductive cool.

Bloggers punt indie bands mentioned by Rolling Stone off the ‘it’ list because they are now eligible for celebrity and its incumbent wealth (do the wee bands care?). To get around this, an unknown art-savant can be groomed by the well connected patron saint (think O’Keefe-Stieglitz, Smith-Mapplethorpe, Dylan-Grossman) who swings wide the pearly gates pour l’artiste anonym. It’s a way to keep your street creds while joining Scrooge McDuck in his money bin.

Then there are the outliers revered by the masses for their creative (as well as lucrative) success:

'In this book I'm interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.'
Malcolm Gladwell

Film editor Walter Murch compares the collective nature of creativity in old world art forms and new, from the Sistine Chapel (starring outlier Michelangelo) to modern cinema.

‘Fresco painting was an expensive effort of many people and various interlocking technologies, overseen by the artist, who took responsibility for the final product... Every person who works on a film brings his or her own perspective to bear on the subject.  And if these perspectives are properly orchestrated by the director, the result will be a multi-faceted and yet integrated complexity that will have the greatest chance of catching and sustaining the interest of the audience, which is itself a multi-faceted entity in search of integration.’
Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye

Caldwell devotes a book to outliers and our notions of success.

'My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think. That's an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.'
Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers seems like a book worth exploring. It’s on my list for 2010. In the meantime, I wish you creative sagacity.  Work your fertile borderlands one row at a time, high-fiving the neighbors who ground and surround you. 

Photo credit James, Scotland England border

Try to disappear

My mother’s standard answer when complimented on her cooking was, ‘I just use good recipes.’ As though, with the right recipe, tasty food just makes itself.

I though it was her English reserve talking, the ‘don’t blow your own horn’ approach I tried to overcome as performing songwriter, where self-promotion is part of the game.

But from here, staring down a new year, I’m rethinking my mama’s humble pie.  Where would any of us be if we didn’t have good recipes?

Georgia O’Keeffe, moving west to paint, spent her days exploring the desert terrain.  Her recipe involved observation, thought and constant application of paint to canvas.  After all, those vistas, vivid to be sure, don’t exactly paint themselves.

‘The cliffs over there - you look at it and it's almost painted for you, you think. Until you try.'

Georgia O’Keeffe

Walter Murch, film editor on movies like The English Patient and The Godfather, Part III, describes his recipe for achieving invisibility in his work.

‘I will keep on working until I can no longer ‘see myself’ in the material. When I review my first assembly of a scene, more often than not I can still vividly (too vividly!) recall making the decisions that led to each of the cuts. But as the scene is reworked and refined, it reaches a point, hopefully, where the shots themselves seem to create each other: This shot ‘makes’ the next shot, which ‘makes’ the next shot, etc. In this way, the Walter Murch who decided things initially gradually recedes until, finally, there comes a point where he has become invisible and the characters take over, the shots, the emotion, the story seems to take over. Sometimes - the best times - this process reaches the point where I can look at the scene and say, “I didn’t have anything to do with that - it just created itself.”’

Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye

I gather, from these artists, that none of them think good recipes are substitutes for hard work and creative flow. My mother’s comment about cooking nicely joined O’Keeffe’s ode to ‘try’ with Murch’s acknowledgement that excellence lets you disappear.

Recipes are road maps and measuring tools.  Between setting out and calling it a day, there’s work, play, patience, judgement - every painstaking facet of art. The recipe gives an artist a familiar structure within which to dare.

Here's a very good recipe for relationship to anything and anyone you love:

‘Always wave goodbye until they can't see you.’
Regina Brett

Because your loved ones, human and created, need your fond attention, until you disappear.

Happy New Year!

Photo credit Alfred Stieglitz, Georgie O'Keeffe