Cheaper

My instinct has recently bent toward cheapness. This isn't so much a move born of semi-typical 24-year-old's destitution — which is not to say that I'm T-Pain or nothin' — but of a line of aesthetic thinking down which I've traveled for what turns out to have been years. Perhaps we can call it an "ascetic aesthetic"; simply put, I've found that I'm more fascinated by stuff that happens to be cheap. What this doesn't mean: things that are chintzy/tacky/kitschy/otherwise, things that are so mass-market that they're simply inexpensive at the point of purchase or things hobbled by a lack of resources.

I'm talking about works whose creators didn't, because they couldn't, vainly attempt to wash away their problems and beat back tough decisions with what Robert Rodriguez calls "the money hose." I'm coming to believe that no interesting creative move was ever made by dropping big bucks, not least due to the realization that many of my favorites were crafted under thin financial conditions. Werner Herzog describes his pillar of cinema Aguirre, the Wrath of God as a "child of poverty," a project with so little funding that filmmaker and company had to deal improvisationally with the unexpected, such as flooding jungles and deadly arrows flying in from nowhere. Some truly delicious dishes comprise startlingly inexpensive ingredients: red beans and rice, for example. (Not that I've achieved any competence yet making it myself, but with iteration comes mastery.) I'm convinced that, using the most impoverished technical materials ever — a rickety old no-sound 16mm Bolex camera and a consumer cassette recorder — Chris Marker somehow committed alchemy in the making of Sans Soleil. Brian Eno and Robert Fripp's (No Pussyfooting) was recorded for £12, the cost of tape, which even in the early 1970s was, by music industry standards, zero. It's no accident that podcasters in their basements are putting out more compelling audio content for a marginal cost equal to pocket change than large public radio outfits do burning through hundreds of dollars per minute. The most innovative tech startups, such as the ones funded by Paul Graham's Y Combinator, operate on little more than the cost of dorm beds, ramen bricks and a net hookup. Shane Carruth completed Primer, the finest time travel picture ever made — and time travel narratives are a total third rail — for $7,000.

I don't have a super-solid hypothesis about why the better stuff tends to be the cheaper stuff, though perhaps economy of means forces creators to — brace yourself for grotesque management-speak — "think outside the box," to find clever workarounds and unexpected solutions to situations usually resolved with pricier clichés. My own recurring question has become, "How can I do this cheaper, quicker, more creatively?" As I've written before, if you want something good, you go where the money isn't.