Colin Marshall

Beautiful impudence

Charlie Hoehn seems to be a pretty cool dude. I first learned of his existence when he cut together my Think Different TV conversation with Ben Casnocha. I had to send him my recorded half of the program, and so obligingly tossed an uncompressed three gigabyte file his way. I blame, uh, the unfamiliar gear I was using. Yeah, that's it.

But he managed to roll with my blunders — just astounding how far my skill with video has come since then — and and get the thing uploaded and available to the teeming millions. I later heard murmurs about some sort of "e-book" he'd written. Something to do with getting a job after college? Yeah, yeah. The same stuff early-to-mid-twentysomethings like me are always hearing about, at or against our will. I said I'd get around to it.

As it turns out, Recession-Proof Graduate: Charlie Hoehn's Guide to Getting a Job Within a Year of College, which you can read free at that link, is somewhat misnamed. Its advice strikes me as sound even if (a) you graduated college more than a year ago, (b) there's no recession on or (c) you didn't go to college at all. In fact, it's probably even more effective if (c).

The core of Hoehn's job-getting method is what he banners as "free work," and it's just what it sounds like: finding people or organizations on the rise, familiarizing yourself with them, then offering to perform free work for them. This free work, so the theory goes, makes up for its lack of a paycheck with more opportunity for connection, exposure and career-relevant experience than any non-free work could provide at such an early level of the game.

You can tell that doing free work is a sound strategy, because it comes endorsed — indirectly, anyway — by two of humanity's wisest sages: Baltasar Gracián and Jordan Morris. In The Art of Worldly Wisdom, Gracián urges his readers to "never compete," and offering your work for free — at least initially — puts you in a situation where you don't have to compete as competition is normally understood. (I'm definitely down with this. I'll put myself against all free-working sound-and-video-making interviewer/essayists out there who dare to challenge me.) And I've quoted Morris here before as advising fellow aspiring comedy professionals to make the much smoother, easier step from "Can I work for you for free?" to paid work than the crazily more difficult step from "Give me money!" to paid work.

I quite like how Hoehn conveys the mindset needed to take this route: "The recession is not the obstacle. The obstacle is to abandon conventional job-hunting methods." These Fight Club-style declarations pop up every now and again in this brief book; my favorite is probably "We are not all winners. We are not unique snowflakes. We do not deserve paychecks," though I'm also partial to the bit where he announces that "I'm about to mess you up with the truth."

The most vivid mental image, though, comes in the section where Hoehn dismisses sites like Career Builder, Monster and Craigslist — "where mediocrity thrives":

Job postings are like city bars. There are typically only a few really hot "offers" in the huge crowd, while the rest are fairly lackluster. And no matter which one you're looking at, there are a bunch of other guys with Ed Hardy shirts competing for them. It's exhausting, so you need to rethink your strategy.

All this echoes stuff I've written oven and over again here, though, so I suppose I'm predisposed to give it the thumbs-up. Lord knows I champion doing stuff for free until people jam kleenex in their ears to block my pounding, repetitious sound waves. What Hoehn makes more explicit than I usually do is that you should be prepared to come up against some solemnly nodding heads when you talk about conducting your career like this, that you'll be given loads of unsuitable advice by those who want to "justify their own [bad] past decisions."

I can also get behind Hoehn's warning against "shotgun blasting your resume to dozens of companies you couldn't care less about" in a desperate bit to get on some track — any track — to the middle class. As a friend's dad once very sagely observed, the real job market doesn't post want ads. It's underground, and thus you'll need to put your ear to the ground to get tapped in. What's more, it operates socially. "Decide what kind of work you're interested in, and TELL PEOPLE about it," Hoehn writes. "If you really want job offers, look through your network."

But what if, like me, you get squicked by the notion of a regular job? Hoehn suggests figuring out what sort of lifestyle you'd prefer first, and only then determining how work fits into it. This sounds simple but strikes me as critical: I see a lot of people attempt, typically with little success, to cobble their desired lifestyle together around the immovable hulk of the job they landed in. It ain't pretty.

My ideal is to achieve total life-career integration. I don't claim to know much, but I do realize that a severely compartmentalized life — and that's more standard than it might at first glance seem — ain't for me. (I can understand why some people opt for a certain "work" and a certain "life" and never have the twain meet, but I guess my cognitive profile is different or something.) This approach demands you answer a series of possibly uncomforable questions: what do you want to make? Who do you want to work with? How do you want to live? These sound like cake, I know, but when Hoehn writes that you'll have to "be mercilessly honest about what you really want," that's quite a bit more soul-searching than one normally does in the course of a day. How many people are as clear and upfront as possible, even to themselves, about their own desires?

In any case, I heartily endorse this event or product, but I can't say much for Slideshare, the service on which it's hosted. As far as I can tell, it offers two viewing sizes: way too small and way too big. And clicking "full screen" inexplicably advances the slide, so I moved around in circles a lot while reading. I feel like Recession-Proof Graduate should be a PDF. Is there a PDF somewhere? Or should I maybe compose an experimental novel just for Slideshare that will slowly but inexorably prompt me to understand and thus come to love its quirks?

Hoehn is, according to his blog's about page, 23 years old. By all rights, a man of 25 such as myself should never deign to admire the work of his juniors, let alone learn from it. But I've never paid much regard to all rights. I never want to become one of those A-holes who makes bloated claims about the advantages of his additional "life experience" — i.e., "time spent in involuntary biological persistence" — because he's got nothing else. I make a point of learning from those younger than me.

But because I'm young myself, there aren't that many people younger than me to learn from. Nevertheless, if you take a look at, say, who I've interviewed, you'll find plenty of dudes whose birthdates come a slight few years after mine but from whom I've learned much: Andy McKenzie, Alex Mann, Ben Casnocha. But they're all in their twenties, and I'm constantly on the lookout from even younger people to from whom to learn. I've learned from the Foodie at Fifteen. I would learn from a twelve-year-old, given the chance.

An anonymous commenter left this on my above-linked double-barreled interview with Alex Mann:

Textbook case: Delusional college grad spawns masturbatory 'wisdom' before even landing both shoes on the battle field.

Beautifully impudent, really. A young, aspiring marketer scribbles 'artist' on a digital crown and boasts it with a smile fueled by the prospect of commercial ascendancy.

I cannot tell you how big a smile that put on my face. In two words, the phrase "beautifully impudent" captures exactly what I want to be: completely heedless of the "rules" yet always aesthetically aware. Though I do not believe that I have yet achieved fully beautiful impudence, I continue to strive for beautiful impudence with each passing moment. (Beats beautiful impotence, I suppose.)

And while we're talking perfect summation, one of Hoehn's posts was just the other day quoted by Jason Kottke:

Why do you think I’m such a huge proponent of free work? Doing work for free forces you to find jobs where you can honestly say, “I would do this even if I weren’t being paid for it.” That’s an expression I took a bit too literally, but it is spot on.

My favorite part of The Dark Knight is when the Joker is talking to Harvey Dent in the hospital, and he says: “Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just DO things… I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.”

And therein lies the best career advice I could possibly dispense: just DO things. Chase after the things that interest you and make you happy. Stop acting like you have a set path, because you don’t. No one does. You shouldn’t be trying to check off the boxes of life; they aren’t real and they were created by other people, not you. There is no explicit path I’m following, and I’m not walking in anyone else’s footsteps. I’m making it up as I go.

It’s harder, for sure, and kind of scary sometimes. But it will allow you to look at yourself in the mirror and know you’re playing by your own rules.

Hell, that might even be more valuable than what's in the book!

Critic critique

A Roger Ebert blog post about critiques of him and my usual low-level continuous line of thought about film writing combined to make me want to get my thoughts straight about my personal favorite critics. (Note that I specifically mean print critics; if we include the net ones, we'll be here all day.) They are as follows:

I am forever indebted to that very same Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times for what, over at least thirteen years of reading his reviews every Thursday, amounts to not just a remote mentorship in film appreciation but an extended article-writing master class. His influence has undoubtedly crept into my own prose style in thousands of subtle, hard-to-detect ways; classic Ebert lines pop into my head on a daily basis. His thinking has shaped me too; not for nothing do I often quote his dictum about a movie not being about what it is about but how it is about it.

I do find, however, that, like any quantitative rating, the "stars" he assigns pollute his signal with noise. (To be fair, he himself rails against them on occasion.) I feel they also contribute to a genre-relativist slant that I don't quite understand. He's often quoted as writing that "when you ask a friend if Hellboy is any good, you're not asking if it's any good compared to Mystic River, you're asking if it's any good compared to The Punisher." Except that I probably am asking if it's any good compared to Mystic River — or more like compared to Ran, Solaris, Maborosi, and so on.

I meta-applaud Ebert's undying championship of Werner Herzog and of all the rich, unusual films he so often stands for, though I can't help but feel troubled at the suspiciously high praise he's been giving the average release lately. And I could not forgive a mere mortal's dismissal of Abbas Kiarostami, Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man and most of David Lynch's career. But Ebert is no mere mortal.

I wish the Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum wasn't in semi-retirement, because he's got some of the finest cinematic tastes I've ever seen. His top hundred list comprises, in equal measure, films I would be unlikely to have heard of otherwise with ones I've seen and found life-changing. Close-Up, Stalker, Barry Lyndon, F for Fake, Playtime: they're all there. And if that's not enough, he's got an essential thousand for you to chew on.

In contrast to Ebert, Rosenbaum not only loves Kiarostami and Dead Man but has written freakin' books on them. Unfortunately, I also recall him being pretty down on Herzog, so he's kind of Ebert's negative. Read them both and you'll stay on an even keel, I suppose.

Almost every time I discover a film that I love and consider underseen, the New York Times' Manohla Dargis turns out to have gotten there first. When I got turned on to Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy, I found she'd reviewed and loved it too:

There are roughly 90 viewing days left till Christmas. By that point most of the big studio movies will have opened for the consideration of the paying public and Academy Award voters, and untold numbers of words will have been spilled about the same handful of serviceable or perhaps even brilliant films of the sort that dominate the discourse every fall. Odds are that none of those contenders will capture the tenor of these difficult times with more sensitivity or greater attention to beauty than Kelly Reichardt’s “Old Joy,” a triumph of modesty and of seriousness that also happens to be one of the finest American films of the year.

Same deal with Aleksandr Sokurov's The Sun:

Even so, Mr. Sokurov seems to me far less interested in Japanese history than in creating a world that in its perverted and closed logic conveys the psychology of power, a reasonable endeavor for a filmmaker born under Soviet totalitarianism. The sense of imperial decay is exquisitely conveyed by the eerie and sui generis beauty of Mr. Sokurov’s images — here he serves as his own cinematographer — which at times suggest the soft-focus style of some 19th-century photography. At other times, however, you might as well be staring at a neglected exhibition in a natural history museum, a vision of life shrouded in dust and cobwebs. What strange world is this, you might wonder, even as the all-too-human figures, the horrible facts and catastrophic battles gradually come into focus.

Same deal again with Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Blissfully Yours:

As the filmmaker freely indulges in the forest's voluptuousness and his own feel for composition, his characters — freed from work, the city and everyday life — shed their clothes and tentatively bump against one another with both pleasure and frustration. In this secret place, where even the smallest gesture becomes an epic of emotion, these three people finally find a moment of quiet by letting the earth swallow them whole.

I'm quite tempted to call Dargis the smartest working film critic, although she's subject to odd false positives, as with Richard "Darko" Kelly's Southland Tales. Despite such indiscretions, it remains that, if I wasn't spoken for, I'd be all, plz marry me manohla, k thx

The Boston Globe's Wesley Morris seems to be to be way, way underappreciated. Every one of his reviews that I've read makes me think, "Hey, this guy Gets It." He gets Ming-liang Tsai:

The send-off is King Hu's 1966 swordplay epic ''Dragon Inn," which on the night we see it screened plays to a crowd whose density seems, mysteriously, to swell then shrink. The man behind ''Goodbye Dragon Inn" is the Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-Liang, who's one of the coolest things going in the movies (in Asia or anywhere else), and he's arranged the whole picture in the Fu-Ho theater, a vast, leaky behemoth that's part dungeon, part Dickensian mansion, part armory, and, as far as I'm concerned, completely alive.

He gets Charles Burnett:

[Killer of Sheep] is a major landmark in American moviemaking: a vivid ballad for life as it was lived by people whom movie cameras could rarely seem to find. Pam Grier's house wasn't terribly far from this place, but she may as well have been living on Pluto.

He gets Gus Van Sant:

[Elephant's] lingering question is why. Also up for consideration is what Van Sant intends in his refusal (or is it his inability?) to tell us. We spend time with Alex and Eric as they sit around Alex's bedroom, which we're tempted to canvass for the Marilyn Manson posters or the drug paraphernalia. They're not there. These boys are clean. Still, Van Sant tempts us to assign a motive to their crime. Is it the target-practice videogame Eric plays? Is it the instructive Nazi documentary that the boys passively watch? Is it the kids who bully Alex? Or is it his parents, whose heads never make into the camera frame? Could it be the kiss the boys share in the shower on the morning of their spree, or the Beethoven Alex practices on his piano? It's all inconclusive and ultimately irrelevant. With a daring that some will call irresponsible, Van Sant challenges us to lay blame for an act that at its core is absolutely senseless. Nazi, queer, gameboy: It doesn't matter what a killer is, only that he has killed.

I wish Morris would write a book or something, 'cause I'd really like to interview him and get a first-hand view — or listen — into the workings of his critical mind. Maybe I'll just ask anyway.

I have already composed a post in praise of the New Yorker's Anthony Lane, but I simply cannot emphasize this enough: the man's the best writer in the game. In the context of film criticism, some of his sentences qualify as superhumanly brilliant. I have re-read certain of his reviews so many times, seeking the possibly mythical wellspring of his prose quality, that they're committed to memory. (I suspect the wellspring has two components: hard work, and a lot of it.)

But we can't ignore the fact that, despite the sheer joy of reading his pieces, Lane regularly takes heat from cinephiles for appearing to lack any kind of critical or theoretical framework. I think this charge sticks, though in some other, greater sense, I feel that it's somehow "cooler" not to have a theory, that he's escaped some sub-realm of weeniedom in refusing to develop one. Perhaps this contributes to the difficulty I have in using him as any sort of guide, but damn, can he ever integrate a joke smoothly.

I also really like where the Village Voice's J. Hoberman comes from, which I suspect owes much to his past as an experimental filmmaker. Also, his first-ever review was of Eraserhead, so, promising start. I don't have a huge amount to say about him, other than that whatever he likes, I feel I must watch. Maybe that's the best compliment I can give a critic.

Heuristic roundup '09

When I joked about adding one more heuristic to my master list, homais asked if I actually have a master lists of heuristics. I don't, but I've rattled off so many that I should. Feeling that this might (a) produce a useful/galvanizing post for readers and (b) offer me a fruitful challenge, I combed my entire 2009 archive, 2009 being my most heuristic-y year to date, for anything that could be considered a heuristic.

And, uh, good question: what can be considered a heuristic? The term gets thrown around, especially in the net circles in which I run, but I suspect each user of the term uses it in a slightly different sense. Wikipedia sez:

Heuristic (pronounced /hjʊˈrɪstɨk/, from the Greek "Εὑρίσκω" for "find" or "discover") is an adjective for experience-based techniques that help in problem solving, learning and discovery. A heuristic method is particularly used to rapidly come to a solution that is hoped to be close to the best possible answer, or 'optimal solution'. Heuristics are "rules of thumb", educated guesses, intuitive judgments or simply common sense. A heuristic is a general way of solving a problem. Heuristics as a noun is another name for heuristic methods.

In more precise terms, heuristics stand for strategies using readily accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control problem solving in human beings and machines.

That's the most appropriate definition I know of, but I'll streamline and slightly rejig it for my own purposes: the heuristics on this list are easily memorable and implementable life problem-solving strategies — "quick and dirty" ones, if you like — that I've drawn from experience which, even if they prove shaky in border cases, still work most of the time. Naturally, they therefore concern the sort of problems I personally care about and nudge the user toward the sort of resolutions I personally desire. Mileages, as ever, vary.

Of this 2009 set, the ten I find most useful-seeming follow, in no particular order:

• "Would I respect me?" I supposedly ask myself this about either my life in general, as a tool for broader self-assessment, or about a specific action I'm contemplating taking. Pro: straight to the point. Con: too much wiggle room — where's the line between what's respectable and what isn't?

• "What benefits my future self?" I've found no better way to battle the bad habit of foisting tasks and undesirabilities onto the Colin of a few days from now than to identify what I could do next and automatically choose whatever benefits my future self most — or harms him the least, anyway. Pro: eases the dealing-with of future unforeseen developments, both positive and negative. Con: what if present Colin gets hit by a bus, leaving nobody to collect my future-self benefits?

• "Find the thin end of the wedge." This is stuff of folk aphorisms about thousand-mile journeys begun by single steps, camel noses poking inside tents and what have you. Meaning: daunting tasks are made more doable than they seem by isolation of the small ones that precede or collectively constitute them. Werner Herzog, discussing the task of assembling an entire cast of little people for Even Dwarfs Started Small, put it eloquently: "One dwarf would tend to know another." Pro: makes hardish stuff not so hard, at least perceptually, which is half the battle anyway. Con: could potentially get me under more onerous obligations than I can foresee.

• "Barf it out, then clean it up." A friend quoted her journalism teacher as saying this, and I've since adopted it as a pithy reflection of the broader phenomenon that the sole path to non-suckage winds through the treacherous woods of suckage. I must therefore make peace with producing something sucky and then iterate that initial product until it achieves decency. The trick is avoiding discouragement by that first piece of suckiness. As a writing principle, everyone knows this — you pound out the rough draft, then do the real writing, which is rewriting — but I submit that it's applicable across all pursuits. Pro: it's the only way to create good things, I suspect. Con: risks incentivizing producing crappier than I have to, at least to start. A worse initial effort might make fruitful iteration tougher.

• "Can I fail at this?" It's like Raymond Chandler said: there is no success without the possibility of failure. Therefore, something I can't fail at is also something I can't succeed at. I can fail at conducting an interview, writing an essay or making a video. I can't fail at meandering around the internet in search of "neat stuff to read." In a recent tweet, I defined procrastination "the temporary displacement of tasks at which it is possible to fail with tasks at which it is not possible to fail." I suspect I'm less far off the mark than ever, especially regarding why procrastination is not a productive tendency.

• "Always produce." Hat tip, of course, to Paul Graham. Operating under the mandate of always producing something, no matter if it sucks, isn't fully formed or doesn't match my vision, drives away the seductive demons of fantasization whose mission is to keep me thinking about doing stuff but never actually doing it. Thinking about doing something doesn't help, and in fact probably un-helps. You might have noticed Nike's successful employment of their own version of this heuristic. Pro: easy motivator, addresses a hugely common issue. Con: could lead to a life-threatening miscalculation or two.

• "What's the deadline?" Even when solidly in the actually-doing-stuff phase, I find my stuff rarely reaches actual doneness in the absence of a hard end date. Because how do I identify "doneness," anyway? I can always keep noodling away on a project, telling myself it's incomplete, if I never need to hand it in. This has the ancillary effect of preserving the precious mythologies of B.S. one builds about one's own brilliance. ("Oh, but it would've been awesome if I'd had more time!") Hence the importance I've come to grant the skill of adhering to self-imposed, sharp-edged rules. I have set a deadline of 11:30am on this post, for example, because I otherwise risk spending all day on squirrely retoolings. It's happened before. Pro: prevents life from being overtaken by unending boondoggles. Con: how to know exactly where to set the deadline?

• "What are the rules?" Though this is perhaps my interest in conceptualism talking, it seems to me that nothing interesting ever gets done or made without rules, whether imposed by the creator or by the creator's circumstances. I find "drive across country without using a freeway" more interesting than "drive across country," "write a novel without using the letter e" more interesting that "write a novel," "make a movie for ten grand" more interesting than "make a movie." Crude examples, but you get my meaning. This has all been said before, but more in terms of creativity being truly sparked by limitations, necessity being the mother of invention, things opened up by way of closing them off, etc. I like to think of it as arbitrarily setting down the first element and taking it as given, using it as a structure on which to build the rest of the work. (Then, if you like, remove the structure.) Pro: makes the first steps easier. Con: encourages stunts, though stunts aren't necessarily worthless.

• "What am I doing now?" I often fall victim to the delusion that circumstances will be somehow be more advantageous in the future, so that's when I'll really bear down on my work. Of course, conditions are never so much more suitable when the time actually comes, or at least they're not as perfect as I'd perhaps assumed they'd be. So if I want do something or be a certain way, I try to cut off any line of thought that terminates in my having convinced myself that I'll act on my intentions in the future. If I'm serious about it, it'll be reflected in what's going on right now, at the present moment. There's no such thing as ideal conditions. Pro: prevents excessive pipe-dreaming. Con: sounds superficially like a mindset some flake on Oprah would peddle.

• "What's the hardest thing I can do?" Again, my hat tips to Paul Graham: "This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what's the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it." What more could I add? Pro: helpful when choosing between defined options. Con: the usual problems about the very act of option definition, plus, how do you define "hardest"? Also, it might lead into pointless exercises in frustration.

This may come off like a foray into the internet's obnoxious "tip" culture, I know, but so be it. Rest assured that I'm not trying to sell you anything. Which is probably why I don't make any money. Oh well.

Pimp

Haven't pimped in a long damn while.

If you haven't been listening to The Marketplace of Ideas, here are the luminaries you've been missing:

• Mayan Cycle composer Jeremy Haladyna on converting seemingly every possible nonmusical thing, the Mayan calendar included, into music
• Capturing Reality documentarian Pepita Ferrari, on the art of documenting other documentarians
• The Philadelphia Lawyer on the total and utter suckage of the legal profession
• Laurie Brown and Andy Sheppard, host and producer of CBC Radio 2's The Signal, which is probably the perfect music show
• Comic artist and comic journalist Peter Bagge on what it's like to draw cartoons for Reason and what the deal is with bums
• Treeless Mountain filmmaker So Yong Kim on how, exactly, she made one of the finest films of 2008 (and why Hirokazu Koreeda is so inspirational)
• WFMU general manager Ken Freedman on what makes a great freeform station great
• Slate wine columnist Michael Steinberger on what happened to French cuisine, and why
• Nick Drake's biographers Trevor Dann, Patrick Humphries and Peter Hogan on the 40th anniversary of Five Leaves Left
• On religion and falsity with Your Religion is False author Joel Grus

If you haven't been reading Podthoughts, here are the podcasts you've been missing:

• The Tobolowsky Files
• Edgy Podcast Reviews
• Critical Thinking
• Wiretap
• Airborne Event Dronecast
• Common Sense
• CD Baby DIY Musician Podcast
• The Japanofiles
• BBC World Service Documentaries
• The New Yorker: Fiction
• More Than One Lesson
• The People You Don't Know
• Adventures in Modern Music
• The Phil Hendrie Flashback
• TEDTalks

If you haven't been listening to Barely Literate, here are the books you've been missing:

• Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood
• Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater
• Joseph Heller's Something Happened (featuring Battleship Pretension's Tyler Smith!)

If you haven't been reading The Humanists, here are the cinematic masterpieces you've been missing:

• Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up
• Wayne Wang's Chan is Missing
• Hirokazu Koreeda's Maborosi
• Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy

If you haven't been reading The KCSBeat, here are the chapters of freeform radio history you've been missing:

• A Brief History of KCSB, part VIII: the technological 2000s
• A Brief History of KCSB, part VII: the transformative 1990s
• A Brief History of KCSB, part VI: the Sean Hannity-y late 1980s
• A Brief History of KCSB, part V: the high-powered 1980s
• A Brief History of KCSB, part IV: the improvement-filled late 1970s
• A Brief History of KCSB, part III: the identity-questioning early 1970s
• A Brief History of KCSB, part II: the riot-y 1970
• A Brief History of KCSB, part I: the fledgling 1960s

If you haven't been listening to Soundforum, you can stream back shows on its site. (Many more to be added there in a sec.)

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 4. Vito Acconci's Undertone (1972)

If you can't see the above media player, either click the icon in its empty place or this post's permalink

Undertone. 9:15 min. By Vito Acconci. Ubuweb's description:

In this now infamous tape, exemplary of his early transgressive performance style, Acconci sits and relates a masturbatory fantasy about a girl rubbing his legs under the table. Carrying on a rambling dialogue that shifts back and forth between the camera/spectator and himself, Acconci sexualizes the implicit contract between performer and viewer — the viewer serving as a voyeur who makes the performance possible by watching and completing the scene, believing the fantasy.

Because what we have here is a mere snippet of a larger work, I'm not sure how far my own comments should extend. But I do wonder if the whole thing bears the same world's-grubbiest-poetry-reading feeling. In the clip, Acconci sits down at a table, starts very deliberately talking about the girl he's envisioning "under the table" who's "slowly" rubbing his "thighs." Then he flip-flops, insisting that he wants to believe that there's nobody under the table, that he made it all up. Then he starts talking to the camera, pleading to the viewer: "I need to know that you'll be there. I need to know that if I were rolling toward the edge of the table, you'd be there to stop me." I'd say that's the creepiest element.

The Ubuweb entry quotes David Antin, who, in a 1975 Artforum article, describes the video's visual style as "exactly equivalent to the presidential address." Interesting comparison, though I can't say it would have struck me independently. What I'm seeing is more like a piece of performance art with a camera aimed at it, but our mileages all vary. On the plus side, he's wearing clothes!

The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2005)

The Sun, which in most senses counts as a World War II film, albeit a highly nontraditional one, may well be the first to recreate that event primarily with sound. Or at least it recreates the twilight of the Japan-United States conflict, when MacArthur's crew rolled literally up to Hirohito's doorstep and declared occupation. Indeed, Sokurov's film rarely moves far beyond that doorstep, preferring to concentrate on the eccentric living god's immediate surroundings as the drizzle grows heavier, the buzz of overhead warplanes grows louder and the soldiers' uniforms grow shabbier.

For this film's Hirohito (as portrayed by the strangely protean Issey Ogata), the whole living-god thing turns out to be more an irritant than an honor. From the opening he argues to his remaining attendants, sometimes obliquely and sometimes directly, that his body differs not at all from that of a "mere" mortal. His coterie won't hear of it, but Hirohito serenely states and restates his point, floating through his usual hyperscheduled routine of meals, meetings, marine biology research sessions and "time for private thought," even as the front grinds ever closer.

Despite this dire situation's ostensible ideological charge, Sokurov meditates on the human to the near-total exclusion of the political, a choice which has drawn some critical fire. But I, no big advocate of the further entanglement of art and politics, find that the filmmaker's narrowed purview works almost entirely to the good. The Sun is, in a broad sense, a film "about" World War II, but it's more importantly a film of the super-fine-grained details of a deified man's non-relationship to his desperate inner circle and, ultimately, to the outside world that breaches his dynastic bubble.

The most visible probe comes in the form of General MacArthur himself, presented as a benevolent hulk, a stern yet doughy figure of hard authority who insists on a one-on-one dinner audience with the conquered monarch over whom he towers. Though this meeting doesn't dominate the runtime, it feels — perhaps due to the measured buildup, perhaps due to the spectacle of these characters who might as well be space aliens to one another attempting to connect — as if it dominates the film. MacArthur, every inch the disappointed father at the head of the table — and in this case, literally at the head of the table — treats Hirohito like a spoiled child who knows not what he does. At this point in the film, we could be forgiven for thinking the same of this twitchy middle-aged eccentric who never learned to open doors for himself and insisted, not long before, that his country's hopless battle continue to the grim end.

But the Hirohito of Sokurov's vision isn't so much heedless of the rest of humanity as simply incapable of engaging with it. Enraptured with the formaldehyde-soaked crabs he studies, he sees his wife perhaps once every few months; his son, barely at all. His many lines, even when spoken toward another character, never read as actually directed to the external world. Hirohito often speaks, but he leaves no doubt that even what comes between his cryptic parables and recitations of verse is meant only for himself.

Alongside its blueish, somewhat televisual video cinematography and constant low-level score of the mounting chaos without and the beeps of vintage electronic communication gear within, its central character's unbridgeable distance from the human race gives the experience a eerie chill. But then, this is a film which delivers its greatest impacts with tics, gestures and buzzes, where an atom bomb's devastation exists as nothing more than an offhand reference.

Joyful Craft, Fuck-You Money and Entrepreneur's Disease: a conversation with Alex J. Mann

In an attempt to follow a conversation as scintillating as the one I had with Andy McKenzie, I've turned to the font of curiosity and entrepreneurial enthusiasm that is Alex J. Mann. By way of an introduction, I'll copy-paste a selection of his, er, introduction:

I’m 23 years old. I live in San Francisco. I’ve previously lived in New York City, Philadelphia and Florence. I mean business, but I like to relax. I’ve accomplished minor success, but it wasn’t easy. Nothing worthwhile ever is. I’ve previously started two businesses of my own, and failed gracefully. Failure is always more constructive than success; it’s also less fun. I’m currently running my third venture, which I raised seed funding for. I also research and consult independently for people and companies I admire. I enjoy traveling, and have visited 15+ countries. I plan to visit the rest soon. The more you learn about other people, the more you learn about yourself. My ideal world is one where we define ourselves by our joyful craft, rather than our dreadful career. I believe good art is the best business. I have no idea what I want to do with my life.

We'd been talking over e-mail when the subject turned to entrepreneurship, the conditions that affect the modern young entrepreneur and how that self-starting impulse fits into the broader world of human creation. At that point, the conversation became simply too interesting not to take public.

Alex Mann: The concept of entrepreneurship is often stuffed into a little box, limited to specific concentrations of business. A simple Google search for the term brings up what appears to be an overpriced MBA course on the subject. What I think is missing, and what I attempt to evangelize, is its applications outside "business as usual." For instance, breaking down how an artist or writer looks at risk, return and opportunity cost. Paul Graham articulates his business well. But the anomalies are less traditional business-types like David Byrne and Takashi Murakami, who view their art as investments.

As a journalist, how do you take and measure risk? Journalism is an evolving -- not dying -- industry. How have the changes affected your work output and risk appetite?

Colin Marshall: I should first admit that, if I call myself a journalist, I'll only be 25 to maybe 75 percent correct. My work breaks, roughly, into four "quadrants": broadcasting/interviewing, writing/essayism, film/video and sound/music. (Not that they're compartmentalized: essay films, sound-art broadcasts and written interviews like this one all happen at the borders.) Only the first two seem to me to be inherently journalistic pursuits, though the third, given my interest in documentary, isn't without journalistic qualities.

That said, I find I measure risk in my journalistic capacities in pretty much the same way that I measure risk in my other ones. That is to say, I overestimate it -- as almost every human being does -- and the overestimation hurts me. The real humor in this is that journalism, in the forms that interest me, is an un-risky sort of endeavor. (I've never been one of those Young Fourth Estate Types who dreams of clandestinely meeting Deep Throat to learn the dark state secrets that, by god, the American people deserve to know.) Journalism, as I practice it, is for me more of a tool to learn about subjects with which I'm less familiar, make connections with interesting (i.e., stuff-doing) people, raise my public profile for improved attraction of randomness and lay the groundwork for future projects.

I don't think I'd want journalism to be my "job," though, partially because I am uncomfortable with the idea of a "job" but also because, at least at the present moment, I'd have to deal with the thousands of old-guard hand-wringers deeply convinced that, contra your point, journalism is dying, not evolving. Then again, if the maintenance of my food-and-shelter supply chain relied entirely on the functioning of a no-longer-functional business model, I'd be bitching and moaning too. Business evolution is the death of one model and the rise of another, but the death-of-journalism types only care about the one leaving the building.

Not being a career journalist, I care mostly about the newer model(s). My expectations of journalism do not include a lifelong meal ticket, a retirement package or much directly measurable payout at all, really. My expectations of journalism do include a free hand to excel -- because whatever doesn't offer much of a paycheck must offer that freedom -- and the opportunity to accrue the aforementioned knowledge, profile, reach and stuff-doing friends. (Not to mention the fat speaking fees that truly sharp journalistic types like Charlie Rose command. But then, I enjoy public speaking too.)

I feel on a basic level as if I could approach all four of "quadrants" entrepreneurially. Perhaps it's not too far beyond the pale to call myself a talk show entrepreneur. But I'm not quite sure how to articulate what, exactly, constitutes the entrepreneurial approach itself. When you talk about entrepreneurship outside "business as usual," how far, to your mind, can it extend? What operating qualities do you find that David Byrne and Takashi Murakami share with any dozen successful Silicon Valley guys we could name?

Alex Mann: Entrepreneurship is an applied mindset acquired over time. To be an entrepreneur, it requires thinking and feeling like one, which takes practice. The perception of the term is convoluted due to what's taught in business school and the repetitive industry blogs flaunting it as their theme. While I admire the tech entrepreneurs profiled obsessively on the web, it's the artistic outliers I find truly fascinating.

The extension of entrepreneurship, or my interpretation of it, would probably be clear with a definition. At that, I'll funnel the wisdom of Paul Graham and say that entrepreneurship is "making something that people want." It's a liberal representation, but in all fairness, it should be. The "making something" aspect can be anything, including, but not limited to: interviews, essays, software, music, art, communities and ice cream. The "that people want" aspect is more defined, assuming economic tangibility and an understanding of supply and demand.

Crunching the phrase together would proclaim you're making stuff good enough that someone, somewhere in the world, will pay you more than it cost to make. Successful entrepreneurs leverage the relationship between the two halves of the phrase to their favor. This is why the guy that's actually scooping the ice cream isn't an entrepreneur, even though he's technically "making stuff people want." The guy who scouts the location of the shop, develops a unique formula, builds an efficient serving system and manages a skilled team to execute the entire operation, is an entrepreneur. He's made something out of nothing, or, he's made more out of less.

The reason a stereotypical entrepreneur is a technology entrepreneur is because the software business has relatively low barriers of entry. You can develop a piece of software at the cost of an engineer's time and server fees, both continuously dropping in price. The low financial cost of developing software adds leverage to the "making something out of nothing" relationship. The financial "something" can prove to be relatively large, simply because your inputs, mostly time, are comparatively slim. Successful tech entrepreneurs are noticeable, and thus stereotypical, because their return on investment is often quickly substantial.

The operational practices of David Byrne and Takashi Murakami are unique, and using my purposely scattered criteria, are arguably entrepreneurial figures:

David Byrne and the Talking Heads invented a fresh genre of sound by combining punk, world, electronic and rock. Similar to Byrne, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs develop software by choosing sporadic features from existing platforms and molding them into a unique creation. Looking at the progression of social networks, from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook to Twitter, the "pick what works and drop what doesn't" evolution is apparent. Also, the Talking Heads live shows weren't concerts; they were meticulously engineered performances (i.e. Stop Making Sense). Technologists, like Byrne, are concerned with product perception, including engineered design. Byrne understood the importance of design to marketing, and so do successful Valley entrepreneurs.

Takashi Murakami popularized a new wave of pop art, like nothing since Andy Warhol, and has a team of artists working under him to execute his grandiose vision. Like Murakami, an entrepreneur, specifically the Valley types, often have teams working behind the scenes allowing them to appear "bigger than they are." Technical ideas are rarely executed by just one person, as a surplus of development tasks can be outsourced and uncredited. Also, Murakami's work is a business platform beyond paintings, expanding to books, film, sculpture and even handbags. He's has created a global brand that sells itself in unexpected genres. Entrepreneurs hope for business development this effective.

The connection between art and entrepreneurship is based on the continuous experimentation involved with each activity. It's an instinct as much as it's a skill. An artist chooses from an unlimited variety of colors, strokes a brush on a canvas and patiently reworks and edits until a picture appears. An entrepreneur chooses from an unlimited variety of hypothesized ideas, tests a market, and diligently works a revenue model until a business appears. Murakami, Byrne or any Silicon Valley entrepreneur experiments often and has learned to fail quickly if they must.

What is your entrepreneurial process, from start to finish, for any one of your artistic compartments? What is your creative daily routine? My parallels to Byrne and Murakami are less traditional icons for someone in business. I've reviewed your list of icons. Who's practice is most "out" of your arena?

Colin Marshall: That's one of the finest definitions of entrepreneurship that I've read. It's certainly most appealing, especially those bits about "pick what works and drop what doesn't" evolution, about "continuous experimentation involved with each activity." That is a mindset that I've consciously attempted to apply to much of what I do or produce. I could stand to up the rate of mutation in my work, actually -- I suspect I fall victim to staleness of formula somewhat too often.

And yes, the Graham command "make something people want" deserves all the thought one wants to give it. I know I enjoy making stuff, but gauging what "people want" seems like an altogether tougher nut to crack. Then again, hasn't Graham also written about this? My mind returns to his essay "Copy What You Like", in which he advises the reader to look to their own genuine pleasures in order to find out what people want, because hey, they're a person too. Here he gets his point across by describing what happened when he didn't do this:

When I was in high school I spent a lot of time imitating bad writers. What we studied in English classes was mostly fiction, so I assumed that was the highest form of writing. Mistake number one. The stories that seemed to be most admired were ones in which people suffered in complicated ways. Anything funny or gripping was ipso facto suspect, unless it was old enough to be hard to understand, like Shakespeare or Chaucer. Mistake number two. The ideal medium seemed the short story, which I've since learned had quite a brief life, roughly coincident with the peak of magazine publishing. But since their size made them perfect for use in high school classes, we read a lot of them, which gave us the impression the short story was flourishing. Mistake number three. And because they were so short, nothing really had to happen; you could just show a randomly truncated slice of life, and that was considered advanced. Mistake number four. The result was that I wrote a lot of stories in which nothing happened except that someone was unhappy in a way that seemed deep.

One problem, though: I do genuinely enjoy a lot of those short stories he seems to be talking about.

In any case, whatever one could call my "creative daily routine" turns out to be highly variable, since I have to wedge it in around "regular work," that is to say, the stuff that pays me cash bucks but is not broadcasting/interviewing, writing/essayism, film/video or sound/music. (I'm not sure how much sense it makes to organize life this way at my age, but bear with me.) But, to whip out my own horn and toot, I'm pretty good at that. Which is not to confuse skill at a practice with the practice itself being tenable, but still.

Pretty much everything I do has its basis in writing, since that's where the bulk of my thinking happens. In its involvement with concrete reality via manipulable symbols and responding readers, I find writing has an enormous advantage over pure thinking. I would submit that my creative routines are cyclical, and begin with absorbing some input from the world -- films, books, music, blog posts -- thought-digesting this input by writing about it here or elsewhere and then using what I write as a prompt for other types of action. I might write up a movie, write up an album, and then learn from the writing process that I should combine them into a video or something. To use a stupid-simple example.

If I could be said to have ever used an "entrepreneurial process," it would be in the development of my most fully-realized project, The Marketplace of Ideas. That phrase almost misrepresents it, though, since it's almost ludicrously un-nuanced:

1. Flip on Charlie Rose, notice that I like interview shows
2. Discover podcasts, notice that technology has arrived that a such a point that interview shows can be produced on the cheap
3. Remember that I am licensed to broadcast on a local radio station
4. Simultaneously assemble podcasting gear and FM program proposal
5. Send out "feeler" e-mails to potential guests
6. Record, distribute interviews
7. ?
8. Profit

But! Your elegant definition above states that an entrepreneur "chooses from an unlimited variety of hypothesized ideas, tests a market, and diligently works a revenue model until a business appears." In this case, I did choose a hypothesized idea. Unless you count looking at my download stats and nodding solemnly as market testing, though, I haven't done any market testing. Nor have I given thought one to revenue models, at least in the sense of revenue models for the show itself.

I recall once reading an interview with The Sound of Young America host/producer Jesse Thorn wherein he admitted that, when he thinks about delivering what the market wants, he looks at the market and a voice within him says, "Eww, the market wants that?" I think I harbor a little bit of that voice myself. Jesse uses a donation model, which has made him a success but with which I would be for some reason uncomfortable. I think quite a bit about the revenue model of my life as a whole, and in that context no given individual project necessarily needs one of its own.

I'll interpret your question about which of my icons is, in what I know of their own creative/entrepreneurial processes, most different from me. The obvious answer, to work his name into this response as many times as humanly possible, is Paul Graham. As a past internet tech startup founder and current internet tech startup funder, he would seem to reside in a different universe than me. Yet in his essays, he thinks brilliant and clearly about many of the same issues I do -- and sometimes he seems to be the only other guy who does.

John Brockman's working style also appears to bear little similarity to my own. As an organizer and literary agent, he remains behind the scenes much more than I do (or would want to), and as someone who works primarily with science and engineering types, he's also quite distinct from my own subject areas. But on a fundamental level, he's in the basic business of communicating with other humans, which I suppose is also my thang (and the thang of everyone in the icon rectangle, I'd argue).

I'm now going to take this entrepreneurship angle in an even more personal direction. What provided your own entrée into entrepreneurship? Friends? Family? Mentors? School? Surroundings? You just decided to get into it out of the blue? What was your journey from guy-with-an-inkling-that-being-an-entrepreneur-might-be-neat to legit entrepreneur?

Alex Mann: My entrée into the land of entrepreneurship, or whatever you'd like to call it, breaks down into a relatively easy answer and a personally difficult, somewhat self-indulgent answer. The easy answer is a bit of the Gladwellian Outlier equation, where a mix of luck, timing and cultural advantage guided me into it. The difficult answer is admittedly a combination of my stubbornness to bureaucracy, the urge to be creative and the audacity to do things on my own terms. Both factors have become reliant and dependent on each other, while each of the inputs you named have played a role as well:

Friends: Friends, at least initially, did not play a major role in my career choice, although they did play a role in my personality development. Through my friends, I had a knack for being competitive both psychologically and physically, while always in good fun. Currently, on the other hand, a few friends play a crucial role as an entrepreneurial support team. Business decisions, especially in what I do, can be so ambiguous that it's beneficial to have someone around not afraid to call you out on being irrational, idiotic or crazy. These friends, however, were developed after I started diving into entrepreneurial projects.

Family: Family was influential, even though it was through hindsight that I was able to recognize it. I was brought up in a household that encouraged me to earn the things I wanted, resulting in me working from a fairly young age. I remember feeling slightly rebellious attempting to pave my own way (to the extent that I could) as an adolescent, rather than relying on an allowance. It sounds silly now, but it built a foundation for projects to come. Also, my father runs a business and he's an artist, so my appeal to that combination of capitalistic design makes sense as well.

Mentors: I've been grateful enough to seek out a select handful of mentors that are both doing what I want to be doing and doing it in a way that's personally appealing. Even when I find myself damagingly particular, it's soothing to know those I look up to have made their radical aspirations a reality. The path I'm on has been shaped by mentors, although it hasn't necessarily been determined by them. They mostly act as reinforcement.

School: Contrary to my feelings on the university system in regards to academic applicability, I'll take a chance of sounding hypocritical my admitting my school, not my schooling, was influential on my entrepreneurial endeavors. In addition to studying finance, an aspect of my degree was deemed "engineering entrepreneurship," allowing me to pursue my own projects and courses while getting graded on them respectively. Fortunately, the professors I worked with were not just academics; they were "been-there, done-that" entrepreneurs. The degree flexibility allowed me the time to focus on what I wanted, instead of what the university wanted.

Surroundings: As I mentioned before, I come from a family of artists, so that part of the equation was natural, especially in my fondness for people like David Byrne and Takashi Murakami. I also grew up constantly listening to music, especially hip-hop (I grew up in the suburbs, who didn't?). The hip-hop artists I listened to had a unique way of gaming the system, or at least pretending to. Either way, from a young age, I identified the existence of the hustler's advantage. Meaning, I recognized a way to win a system not by conning or trickery, but by using your mind.

The path of entrepreneurship didn't pop out of the blue. It was a long equation of factors, some described above. I remember one of my first businesses, perhaps marking the start of the journey, was when I was 11 or 12 years old and CD burners were released into the market. I recall scanning computer store pamphlets in the mail identifying where I could purchase the cheapest device, reviewing listings for blank discs and finally raping my 56K modem limitations as I downloaded every Billboard Hot 100 song on Napster. I then sold discs for $5 to $10 a piece. The lower range was for copies of complete albums I owned and the higher range was for customized mixes. I always charged girls less. Since then, I've become less sympathetic to gender, while more sympathetic to the viability of the music industry.

I've experimented with other projects, including failed startups and even working on a trading desk at an investment bank on Wall Street. Like any skill, making money takes practice, especially if you want to enjoy what you're doing. Occasionally, this may mean leaving a piece of your dignity at the door. Like you said, artists often begrudge the economic process by saying "eww, the market wants that?" But, when you look at the guys who have won, they've all partially "gave in" at some point or another to get where they are now.

My journey was a combination of me doing what I wanted, people telling me I couldn't, trying something else, not liking it, and again doing what I wanted with the maturity and empathy to make it work. I assume I'll go through this cycle a few more times as well. Ultimately, I have realized I enjoy working on startup businesses. It's not because startups are entrepreneurial; it's because they are vehicles for entrepreneurial people.

Colin Marshall: And thus, as we continue down the "entrepreneurial people" subject, we arrive at one the ideas that prompted this whole conversation in the first place: Entrepreneur's Disease. What, third parties reading this might ask, could this awful-sounding malady be? Simply put, Entrepreneur's Disease is how I've bannered an affliction of which I was once vaguely aware, but which I've come up against several times in my efforts to interview entrepreneurs on The Marketplace of Ideas.

Any reader of mine knows that I find entrepreneurs to be some of the most interesting people around. Hell, any reader of this post alone could have figured that out. As an interviewer, I'm thus extremely interested in interviewing entrepreneurs. One of my very first guests on the program, a certain young entrepreneur named Ben Casnocha, turned out to be interesting enough to give me hope for much future entrepreneur-interviewing. Authors? Artists? Broadcasters? Musicians? Scientists? Sure, all solid guest material, I thought, but give me more of these entrepreneurs!

But alas, the dream remains unrealized. I've since found that many entrepreneurs -- if not most of them -- aren't exactly chomping at the bit to be interviewed, and the ones who submit to my questions tend to be either unwilling or unable to answer them with much richness, detail, clarity or connection to other elements of the human condition. When I try to scout out entrepreneurs to talk to, I usually find they can't say much about anything besides their current project's core mission. If that.

I remain at a loss as to why this Entrepreneur's Disease seems to have afflicted so many, to such a degree. When I brought it up with you in an e-mail exchange, you sounded as if you recognized it. So what's your take on the Disease? Is it a real thing, or am I making it up? Is it as bad as it sounds, or do I exaggerate? Can we hope for a cure?

Alex Mann: The entrepreneurial path, shrouded in startups, is life entangling. It's an obsessive journey, especially in the early stages of a company, entrapping the chosen traveler like a giant vampire squid in the hopeful progress of their venture's success. It's truly a selfish establishment where the entrepreneur and respective organization take precedent over most other things in life. It requires ego, aggression, an appetite for risk and probably a few loose screws.

Given the listed symptoms, your coined Entrepreneur's Disease is less a hyperbole and more an actual condition. I mean, what type of nut would choose to put themselves through that? I've never met an entrepreneur who would not be deemed a bit "crazy" if they were let loose in the "business as usual" setting. To use a personal example, a few years ago when I was heavily involved with finance, I wasn't hired for a hedge fund job because they thought I'd "try to takeover the company." And, it wasn't a positive thing. Crazy or not, you really have to love the entrepreneurial process to remain determined on its path. The deck is not slanted in your favor.

The Disease is a real thing, but probably more explicit for the outside observer than it is for even the most self-aware entrepreneur. Articulation of the craft in respect to the human condition is not an easy task. To echo reasons you've already mentioned: it's hard for an entrepreneur to look past their own project and mission. It's a tunnel vision where anything besides the venture is blindly distracting. It's a cruise control of the mind. Careful articulation of "what do you do?" is not in line with how an in-the-moment entrepreneur thinks. This is why one entrepreneur explaining to another entrepreneur "what they do" is painless. They can fill in between the lines, while other people can't.

The rationality for the self-acceptance of the Disease, of course, is the home run. The "fuck you money." The golden relief of success. The result of stuffing an entire career's worth of accumulated wealth into a pot at the end of a startup's life of three to four yours, or in the case of certain companies, one to two years. The method entrepreneurs use to articulate their process, in terms of vision and mission, isn't a crutch; it's their way of viewing their world at any given time. It's not that they don't care about anything else; it's just that caring about anything else takes their eyes off the prize.

Articulation is a hurdle because the entrepreneurial process, again using the example of a startup, is completely ambiguous. Picture a 360 degree circle of arrows pointing outwards, each one beginning with the input of the entrepreneur at the center and ending in a different output at the edge. With each output, the process begins again with an unlimited amount of potential inputs and respective results, each one affecting money available, time-to-live and morale. Knowing the "right" path to take is impossible without the ability to compile the relevant information. This is why an entrepreneur builds a startup with a balanced team, advisory board and investors. It's so they can make the best decisions possible with the most information, improving the odds at any given time.

With that being said, how could a single entrepreneur accurately articulate what they do? The best, most sensible answer would result from an interview with everyone influential in a given entrepreneurial organization.

If I can take a step back, or maybe I already did by attempting to explain the Disease, I'd like to admit, with the chance of contradicting myself, that the majority of the Disease is in the head of the entrepreneur. The work of the entrepreneur--the actual operational work--could be completed during normal work hours and not during the daily twenty-hour time period classically described. As we discussed before, a large aspect of the process is experimentation. With experimentation comes questioning, panicking and even some dreaded freaking out. Most entrepreneurs work the same way they articulate, which is a bit all over the place. So, your exaggeration accurately reflects the Disease, because an exaggerated reality is exactly what the mentality is.

Is it curable? No, I believe it's embedded into the entrepreneurial culture. But can it be alleviated? Sure. Entrepreneurs -- take a deep breath and chill the fuck out. The entrepreneurial paranoid disillusionment has no merit on the success of a venture; it just makes the narrative more dramatic, exciting and egotistic.

What role have you observed ego playing across the fields of art, science and business? Does the inability to explain "what one does" make an interview guest more or less interesting? Do you recall a pattern of successful guests attributing a portion of luck to their personal success? Thirty years from now, what do you envision your body of work to look like?

Colin Marshall: I suspected that Entrepreneur's Disease might be not just a correlated affliction, but a condition springing out of the very nature of the entrepreneur itself. I've heard over and over again that "startups will consume your life. No, really, they'll totally consume your life, and you can't even envision the extent of the utter completeness with which every non-startup aspect of your existence will be decimated and the earth beneath it salted." Sounds like the victims of Entrepreneur's Disease have not just heard that but embraced it, internalized it and loved it.

As unappealing as the life of someone in the heady midst of Entrepreneur's Disease might superficially sound to me -- and probably sounds to many readers -- I must admit my unquashable attractions to (a) bold, audacious moves, (b) complete self-determination, whether it leads to success or failure, (c) endeavors the odds are against and (d) the amassing of fuck-you money. Especially (d). So I probably front like I understand entrepreneurship less than I actually do.

And even though I haven't done much classically-defined entrepreneurial stuff -- yet -- I can tell that your urging fellow entrepreneurs to "take a deep breath and chill the fuck out" is well-advised indeed. Taking a deep breath and chilling the fuck out represents, in fact, a cornerstone of my own approach to life, so I've learned its advantages firsthand. Of course, to take a deep breath and chill the fuck out requires one to rein in the old ego a bit, since a roiling internal demand for self-aggrandizement does not mix well with chilledness.

But some amount of ego is necessary, I would submit, or at least extremely helpful, whether the arena is art, science or business. Though he's perhaps not the most sterling example, I remember once hearing Donald Trump ask, in response to a confrontational Larry King Live caller question about his big ego, "What successful person doesn't have a big ego?" I don't feel that anyone I would consider "successful" lacks an ego, but maybe that's because they all have -- or, more realistically, need -- a high public profile.

I do fear that working to satiate one's own ego, while it could result in some impressive feats, risks turning into the short road to madness. Trump had a solution to that, too: in the same interview, he revealed that, no matter how big a deal he's doing, he constantly reminds himself that "it doesn't matter." He said that, in a world where an earthquake in India, say, might kill thousands of people in a day, it makes no sense to freak about the business gamesmanship you're engaged in, even if it goes south. So there you go: a couple unexpectedly wise lessons from The Donald. Just avoid adopting his tonsorial weltanschauung and you're set.

I've run into surprisingly few totally egotistical interview guests, which surprises me now that I think about it since they tend to be so accomplished, and can usually articulate their motivations intelligently. If I gave them more of an opportunity to chalk those accomplishments up to luck, I could probably separate the humble from the, uh, less humble. But I've never liked the concept of luck, not because I don't believe it exists at all but because I find it so sloppily thought about. Many seem to consider it a purely random absolute determinant of success, but the sharpest people I talk to appear to treat luck more like something they can use rather than something that has its foul way with them. Brian Eno, whom I'd give my left buttock to interview, said it best. I've quoted it before, and I'll quote it again: "Luck is being ready."

Thirty years on, I'll ideally have created as many interesting things as possible in the aforementioned realms of text, film, broadcasting and sound (and, if possible, domains yet unenvisioned). My mandate increasingly consists only of creating interesting things, since creating interesting things leads to making connections with interesting people. That leads to collaborations with said interesting people, one of which I work on as I type right now. That leads to the making of even more interesting things, which leads to even more connections with even more interesting people, all of which makes my life, and those of my collaborators and the fans of the stuff we make, more interesting.

As you can surely tell, what can be created in this manner involves many unpredictable variabled and thus rapidly becomes difficult to envision. Theoretically, I should be able to measure my accomplishment not just by what out there in concrete reality owes its existence to my hand, but by how connected I am to others who make stuff.

Let me turn this around on you. Give me -- give us all -- the bigger picture, as you envision it, for the long-term enterprise that is Alex J. Mann. Let's say you've managed to accrue all the fuck-you money you'd ever need, and you can ignore existing markets with impunity, if you so desire. What sort of project do you start up? I don't need any specifics, and besides, any specific would be incorrect. Freed from any restrictions to which you might currently be subject, what do you start working on?

Alex Mann: In an ideal world, The Project will defy a fine line of craftsmanship between what's traditionally viewed as work and play. The thoughts I'll carry with me out of bed in the morning will remain fluid until I crash restfully at night, all pulsing to the beat of The Project. The Project will remain dynamic to global markets, solving a problem deemed by most as unsolvable. The pride of The Project will be contagious, igniting entrepreneurs to start building and luring corporate drones to quit their jobs to join them. The Project will disperse political laughing gas, surprising the liberals and scaring the shit out of the conservatives. The Project will be remarkably simple, in both design and structure. And regardless of the size of my bank account, I'll strive to make The Project immensely profitable, because profit is the way the invisible hand of the market signals capitalism is working as intended.

To be honest, I have no idea what The Project will be.

You see, my problem is always having too much. To put my finger on what The Project will be still feels, like you said, entrepreneurially incorrect. However, I can briefly chronicle three, admittedly broad, problematic theses that bug me enough to work on:

1. Cracking the social media marketplace by developing an intelligence platform that helps organizations improve and accurately measure their decision making;
   
2. Accounting for individualized learning styles at the crossroads of education and technology, specifically at the university environment;
3. Compensating artists across all aspects of media, including journalism, music, film and art, with revenue streams -- not marketing streams -- fueled by their content.

The first is something I'm currently working on full-time. The second is something I envision will be my next startup, because I'm dabbling in it already. The third, to be honest, bothers me the most, while I have done little to alleviate it besides one consulting project for a startup. Regardless, my Disease-free entrepreneurial mindset tells me I'll continue to dance around these ideas one way or another. My strategy, I think, is forward velocity. Meaning, even if I misstep somewhere along the way, which I have before and will again, is to fall forward in line with the theses of my work.

No such thing

Damien Hirst, also known as "that shark guy," "that spot guy," or "that skull guy," has taken a lot of heat for his latest exhibition, No Love Lost, in which He Actually Paints. Many art critics I admire — including, I think Robert Hughes — seem to regard it as his waterloo. I'm not quite sure.

Granted, I don't find Hirst's by-his-own-hand paintings, which have been widely derided as uncreative and amateurish, aesthetically engaging in any meaningful way. And granted, too. he's drawn what in the realm of living artists qualifies as a firestorm of bad publicity. But on the other hand, he's drawn a firestorm of bad publicity. Because there is no such thing as bad publicity, that simply means he's drawn a firestorm of publicity, which equals victory.

I just flatly dropped that "no such thing as bad publicity" line, and people might nail me on it, but I do feel that it's true. My own view on publicity deals only with absolute values of brain space attained: either you have attained brain space, or you have not. Whether you have attained any given quantity of brain space for something "good" or "bad" doesn't matter, at least to the publicity itself.

Though I've written before about my own ineptitude at publicity-generation in general, I do find that I'm particularly ineffective at generating the "bad" kind of publicity. If I could somehow move a couple dozen popular bloggers to begin hating me and publicly slagging me off on the regular, I would gain immense amounts of brain space. (I need this brain space, because I have nothing else to trade on.)

I actually aspire, in some moments, to become one of those people irrationally hated because bitter people regard their existence as some sort of "injustice," something "gotten away with" — that is, they're all, "How could anyone be allowed to earn a living/become well-known/get satisfaction in that way I find offensive and/or insufficiently painful?" Kind of like Damien Hirst!

What it is

A partial list of categories about which rigid thinking routinely gets us into trouble:

• interesting/boring
• novice/expert
• fiction/nonfiction
• clarity/opacity
• amateur/professional
• art/business
• high art/low art
• sound/music
• girl friend/girlfriend
• outsider/insider
• narrative/nonnarrative
• one/many
• representation/abstraction
• true/false
• experimental/conventional

I got to wondering about this while visiting part two of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art's California Calling, an exhibition of works from this humble state's modernists over the past 60 years. I overheard, as one often overhears at modernist shows, a visitor complaining that they "don't understand" piece x. This called to mind a bunch of similar utterances I've heard or heard about over the years, including but hardly limited to demands for the symbolism of Chris Burden installations and exasperation from a friend of Madelaine's who, employed at a museum's gift shop, was constantly asked what the sculpture outside means.

But I also worried. As a museumgoer who happens to enjoy abstract modernism over perhaps all else, I fear that I might come off to those who complain about not understanding, getting, grokking the work that I regard myself as having successfully grasped it, having incisively Gotten To The Bottom Of It, where all the appreciation lies. This is not the case. As with the best narratives, song lyrics and publicity stunts, I find that the most enjoyable visual art is not, in any final sense, graspable. It has no Bottom to Get To.

Permit me to re-quote Jonathan Jones, as his relevant observation merits many more quotings than even I plan to provide:

The easier it is to say what a work is about, the less interesting that work becomes. The greatest art takes a lifetime to understand; the slightest takes a moment. And if it really is reducible to an explicit message, is it actually art at all?

It seems obvious to me — dangerously obvious, almost — that an artist, or most any class of creator, wouldn't want to simply dream up a message, encode it in layer upon layer of obfuscation and thrust it onto an uncomprehending public for the grappling-with. Infinitely better, though infinitely harder, to craft a work with just the right pitch of ambiguity that gives it as many meanings as it has viewers, listeners, readers.

Yet I've never mustered the courage to tell this to my fellow Steely Dan aficionados, nor to any observers of anything who insist on determining precisely what a work is "about," or, more hubristically, what a work "is." The procedure of figuring out what a work is appears to be nothing more than the identification of a category or of categories to slot it into that no further thought will be required. Permit me to now re-quote Doris Lessing:

I wrote a story, The Fifth Child, which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on.

A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, “Of course The Fifth Child is about AIDS.”

An effective conversation stopper, I assure you. But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyze a literary work like this. If you say, “Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,” you tend to get baffled stares.

My third re-quote is, naturally, of Douglas Adams, responding to someone who asked for the "message" of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

No message. If I'd wanted to write a message I'd have written a message. I wrote a book.

I have thought, written and bitched about this much before, but I hadn't considered the categorization angle. If you can categorize a work as "a story about AIDS" or "a series cautioning against the tyranny of bureaucracy" or "a song about Owsley Stanley," you feel satisfyingly "done." You have received the "I know what this is" impulse, as if you had resolved the shape of a distant sweet fruit or vicious cat on the savannah, and thus completed your task. But you're probably wrong, or at least missing out on the work's interestingness.

Hence my high enjoyment of my csn-prompted Friday visit to Los Angeles's Museum of Jurassic Technology. Here is a museum that eschews all categories, presenting an experience that's almost literally indescribable. Fact mingles with fiction, past with present, representation with abstraction, metaphor with the concrete, high with low, narrative with nonnarrative, experimental with conventional, outsider with insider, clarity with opacity. In its face, all conventional museumgoing practices fail, forcing the visitor to kiss the "I know what this is" impulse goodbye, at least for a few hours. Plus, their gift shop stocks almost every available Andrei Tarkovsky film on DVD, so hey.

To round things out with a fourth re-quote, I come to a man known for his repudiation of excessive categorical thinking, Mr. Alan Watts:

If you weren't thinking, you wouldn't notice the passage of time, and as a matter of fact, far from being boring, the world when looked at without chatter becomes amazingly interesting. The most ordinary sights and sounds and smells, the texture of shadows on the floor in front of you. All these things, without being named, and saying 'that's a shadow, that's red, that's brown, that's somebody's foot.' When you don't name things anymore, you start seeing them.

So it's not as if I understand the art I enjoy most — I just avoid burning mental bandwidth by fruitlessly trying to fit it into more categories than it actually fits into. I should extend this habit of mind, this awareness of the danger of what I'll call "category dependency" (though that sounds like the name of a concept some social scientist already invented), to non-art stuff as well, leaving aside the fraught question of what, exactly, constitutes "non-art stuff" for another day.

One example might be the very way that one leads and constructs one's life. It's an area where I've been ultra-category dependent in the past, and I'd be surprised to meet anyone who hasn't. Remember the questions you faced as a kid about what you wanted to be in adulthood, and how responding felt like picking from a limited, predefined list: doctor, policeman, fireman, butcher, baker, what have you. This illusion seems to persist for many well into adulthood — hell, well into death. When I think about what I want to do now or in the future, my impulse is to put it in terms of other people. If I refer to a career that's "one quarter Werner Herzog, one quarter Charlie Rose, one quarter Brian Eno and one quarter David Foster Wallace," it's descriptive in one way but probably quite suboptimal communication in another. If you're imitating someone who's come before, after all, your greatest possible victory is to come in second. Why bother?

I've realized that charting one's own course in terms of other, previously-charted courses hurts as much as it helps. As much as claiming that you're working toward becoming like Joe Icon satisfies others' questions about your slightly unconventional aspirations, it's no recipe for originality. It certainly does you the dishonor of expressing no bolder goal than slotting yourself into a category, albeit a small one defined by an individual rather than a large one defined by an industry. Some people — a lot of people, myself included — get spooked when they lack an example to which to adhere. Sometimes they even discard their ambitions for lack of a predecessor. I'm considering adding "avoid adherence" to my list of heuristics.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 3. Vito Acconci's Open Book (1974)

If you can't see the above media player, either click the icon in its empty place or this post's permalink

9:10 min. By Vito Acconci. Ubuweb's description:

Acconci's open mouth is framed by the camera in an extreme close-up, bringing the viewer uncomfortably close. A desperate sense of strained urgency comes across as Acconci gasps, "I'll accept you, I won't shut down, I won't shut you out... I'm open to you, I'm open to everything... This is not a trap, we can go inside, yes, come inside..." Acconci continues to plead in this way for the length of the tape, his mouth held unnaturally wide open. The pathological psychology of such enforced openness betrays a desperate struggle to accept and be accepted by others. The sustained image of Acconci's open mouth also evidences a sinister, vaguely threatening streak that is more or less evident in much of Acconci's work.

Though the commentary associated with Open Book seems to focus on the disturbing vibe generated the Acconci's slurred, insistent pleading, I'm more worried by his Halloween teeth. How did they get so jagged and strangely spaced? Is this the dental fate of the experimental filmmaker? Still, they're better than Al Gore's, I suppose.

I don't have so much to say about this piece, save that it represents Acconci's jumps from black-and-white to color and from no speech to almost nothing but speech. As a vehicle for creep-outiness, it's actually super-effective; directors looking to effectively convey a character's menace could take a lesson or two from Open Book's framing and delivery. Might need some zombie dentures, though, for the full effect.