Colin Marshall

1-Man wisdom

Nearly every time I go to Little Tokyo for a stack of imagawayaki from the Mitsuru Café, I see Arthur Nanake, the 1-Man Band. Madelaine had her camera this time, so she sat down to shoot his performance of an old Korean pop song (video embedded above) while I went to Nijiya for a few cans of UCC coffee. When I returned, Arthur urged her to sing along to the choruses. (“I’m counting on you, Madelaine!”) Then he played us a modified version of “She Loves You”, Beatles songs being a pillar of his repertoire.

As you can see, Arthur mounts all his instruments on what looks like an elaborately handcrafted rig of PVC pipes. This offers a lot to watch beyond the man’s own bold selection of hats, robes, and non-matching socks. My attention always goes straight to the feet in those non-matching socks, with which he compresses a series of almost steampunk-looking bellow-ish bars made out of the same white plastic as the frame itself. From what I can tell, those pipes control a synthesizer which puts out bass notes. This in addition to his guitar, his main keyboard, his drum machine, his harmonica, and the stick on the head of the guitar that he uses to play not just the cymbals but another, smaller keyboard.

After his set, Arthur sat down next to us to talk for about twenty minutes. He kept asking if I played an instrument myself — “You can go slow,” he exhorted, “but never stop” — which led me into this roundabout explanation about how I kind of do, but only when I sit down to record, and then usually when I make movies that need a soundtrack. Having played in Little Tokyo and elsewhere for decades and decades and seeing a lot in the process, Arthur no doubt has a story relevant to any subject, but my mentioning filmmaking rung up three:

• A film student approaches him back in the nineties and asks if he can shoot him playing for a few minutes and answering questions for a few minutes. This student ends up shadowing him for months, winding up with the short documentary Secret Asian Man, which “opens” for every screening of The Eyes of Tammy Faye at Sundance in 2000. (The festival heads see some connection between the two self-styled stars.) Arthur himself gets in on the action, playing “Secret Agent Man” live at the screenings, and, if we can believe the Kenneth Turan clipping he produced for us from one of his many jam-packed folders, knocks the audience so dead that Tammy Faye’s distributors accuse him of limelight theft. Arthur suggests he and Tammy Faye do duets instead, but nothing came of it.

• Thirty-odd years ago, a “bearded man” stands right in front of him has he plays and plays and plays. “After five or six songs, I satisfied him, and he went away,” Arthur said. “I wondered, who was that?” Months later, he gets a call from the producers of One From the Heart by Francis Ford Coppola — a bearded man! They’d like him to appear in the movie. Then more months pass in silence. Suddenly, he gets another call: they need him on the set in two hours. Arthur now maintains that his material remains on the cutting room floor but, had the film included it, it would have explained why “You Are My Sunshine” becomes such a thing at the end. He also told me about a semi-similar scenario decades later, when, only because he waited hours to play at a benefit, he got an audience with a bigtime gospel producer who also possessed a certain looseness with the $50 bills.

• One day, he notices he hasn’t gathered a crowd. In fact, he spots the crowd somewhere else, but he can’t tell what they’ve crowded around. Then a blonde, long-haired entity emerges from the mass and approaches him, but, too busy trying to figure out who’d generated all the fuss, he isn’t playing! Unamused, the creature moves on. He later learns its identity: Gwen Stefani, lead singer of No Doubt. “I thought it was a guy!” Arthur told me. I include this story because I, too, think Gwen Stefani is a guy.

These illustrated his broader point: “You can be in the right place at the right time, but you have to be doing the right thing!” Of course, Momus sang about this on his Voyager album, but it also brought to mind Brian Eno’s reworking of the old line about luck as the intersection of preparation and opportunity: “Luck is being ready.” I would have said it to Arthur, but I didn’t want to have to explain to him who Brian Eno is. Then again, part of me believes that of course this 74-year-old, six-kid-having street musician from Kyoto would know who Brian Eno is. Why? Probably because, in my brief time talking with him, Arthur made a hell of a lot more sense than I expected him to — a hell of a lot more sense than I expect from most of the people I interact with, actually.

Harness your unconscious mind for fun and profit

I’ve always distrusted my unconscious mind, and I only now realize how that’s screwed me. Someone recently mentioned to me that he learned English and Japanese by exposing himself to those languages in their “real and raw” states with media made by and for native speakers. Therein lies the case for immersion: envelop yourself with the language you want to understand, and your brain cranks toward comprehension even when you’re not actively studying it. I guess Bart Simpson learned French that way, though when I first saw that episode I felt terrified by the mere prospect of someone expecting me to learn a foreign language, much less in a country that expects me to speak it. “But how?” my five-year-old self would have pleaded to know. “But how?”

Learning musical instruments presented the same problem. I understood the process as having to do with hours upon hours of physical familiarization with an instrument, of listening hard to other people play that instrument, and, above all, of listening hard to yourself play it, but I couldn’t mentally map that out in a way that convinced me it would work. Hence my early struggles with and avoidance of new means of expression linguistic, musical, or otherwise. I didn’t so much find the tasks themselves difficult as I found breaking my mental block about the idea of the tasks and the precise mechanics of their culmination impossible.

That David Ogilvy observation I quoted a little while ago keeps looping in my head: "Big ideas come from only one place: the unconscious. Nobody's ever had a big idea by a process of rational thought.” He spoke of having to “flog himself” to read through all the technical material on the new Rolls-Royce, but only when he’d ingested it, then ingested a big dinner and settled in with a nice bottle of claret, did his unconscious mind produce a way to advertise it. (“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-
Royce comes from the electric clock.”) That this process works now seems clear to me, or at least as clear as I find anything, but the how of it badly tripped me up for the longest time. I could never summon any faith in anything other than conscious, deliberate reasoning. It still trips me up, but slightly less often now that I have an awareness of it.

Naturally, I now wonder how to harness these automatic processes of my unconscious mind — the cycles of thought always running in the background, if you will — to best stuff-making and/or stuff-doing advantage. My attempt to psychologically “place” myself in Los Angeles before moving there in September involves writing a list of “alternative” L.A.-based novels for The Millions, and thus reading a bundle of them in preparation. A coming trip to Mexico City necessitates similar relevant-cultural-product absorption, including but not limited to Alex Cox’s El Patrullero and books like David Lida’s First Stop in the New World and Daniel Hernandez’s Down and Delirious in Mexico City.

Gearing up to devote a much larger portion of my life to filmmaking, I’ve been cramming my mind full of material on the nineties U.S. indie wave that originally inspired me; material on the working methods of kind of filmmakers who tend to have to fend for themselves, financially, intellectually, and aesthetically (Jarmusch, Greenaway, Godard); and the cheap, freewheeling, convert-every-glitch-into-an-artistic-choice first pictures from these directors. And since I feel compelled to imbue my own next film with the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges, you know I’ve been cramming down some labyrinths.

But the unconscious mind — or at least my unconscious mind — needs a hell of a lot of time to chew on this stuff, and that gives me trouble. In my experience, it does its work so slowly that I never notice the progress in real time, only as sudden epiphanies — but so, it seems, did Ogilvy. It also demands that I break my unwillingness to take in what I don’t understand immediately and completely, like the movies, internet videos, and TV dramas in Japanese, Korean, and Spanish that feed those languages, raw, whichever part of my brain can process them involuntary into something resembling linguistic skill.

Sure, I can’t diagram how all this allegedly happens, but would I want to? As I just heard Adam Carolla say on Fitzdog Radio, if you envision life in its totality and everything it requires of you, you’d never do anything. If you think a second floor would look good on your house, you have to put your head down and just act on the vision. If you ponder about all the hassles with lawyers and architects and contractors and zoning and materials, you’ll go straight to bed instead. But if you stare at your feet and take a step at a time, sure, it’ll take twice as long and cost twice as much as the estimate, but ultimately, that second floor will be there, you’ll have stories to tell — and you’ll have actually lived. So, bonus.

Do it; do it now; do it to crack yourself up

Despite having endured years and years of lukewarm expectancy about his movies (“Surely the next one will work as cinema. Hmm. Okay, the next one, then...”), I think I may worship Kevin Smith anyway. So he wears black hoodies and billowing jorts. So he writes scripts where characters say lines like “I didn’t have a roadmap to sexuality.” But damn, not only has he put together an uncommonly unified life and work, he’s hypnotized me with the sheer power of his words. I’ve listened to, like, six hours of The SMODCast in the past two days. And I have other things I need to listen to.

In my experience, the show’s formula works like this: come for the astonishing fact that Smith and co-host/producer/pal Scott Mosier can release wave after wave of dick jokes and observations about Namor the Sub-Mariner and actually make you laugh with them; stay for the weirdly penetrating insights about living life and making stuff. For these guys, living life and making stuff seem to have merged into one and the same, which I’ve long assumed the only viable long-term way to play it. They crack the dick jokes, make the Namor references — indeed, Namor dick jokes — shoot the movies, and record the podcasts, each as facets of the same big... thing. Therefore, any given subject, no matter how seemingly vulgar or juvenile, can well lead to observations that remind me of just that of which I must be reminded.

So first, on an episode where they talk about the details of their self-distribution plan for the upcoming Red State — a film that has drawn mainly eerily reserved responses so far, but never mind — Mosier points out that, when it comes to making stuff and getting it out there the way you want, you can’t truly fail. God, that sounds trite when I type it out, but bear with me: he and Smith go on to explain that, if you do your thing and all goes “successfully” according to plan, sweet — and you’ve got the story to tell on a podcast. If you do it and it sinks, well, then you’ve got, like, three stories. Doing = winning, in some sense, no matter what. Not that they spelled it out this way, but you also enjoy the self-respect that comes with acting on your ideas. You don’t get it as a consolation prize for forfeiture; in fact, I fear you don’t get anything.

Second, on one of the shows where they recall their days at the Vancouver film school where they met, they discuss the making of their first documentary short, Mae Day: The Crumbling of a Documentary. Groups had to come up with a documentary idea and pitch it to the class, so Smith and Mosier, simply wanting to win, came up with this super-earnest speech about nobly bearing cinematic witness to the gender journey of Emelda Mae, a local transsexual. This won over their classmates, as designed, but then the guys realized they didn’t actually want to do a project so fakily high-minded. Luckily, Emelda Mae suddenly skipped the country, which offered Smith and Mosier the chance to have actual fun making a jokey, self-deprecating movie about their failure to produce the cinematic gender journey, etc. Mosier drew a lifelong lesson from this: unless your projects amuse you, and thus you can amuse yourself making them, you’ve probably got nothin’.

Third, and in the same episode, Smith brings up a post from You Are Not So Smart about “present bias.” The relevant research found that, the sooner a subject had to watch a movie, the stupider a movie they would pick to watch. Which movie did the subject want to watch next week? Schindler’s List. Which movie did the subject want to watch right this second? Mrs. Doubtfire. This comes as old, old news to those interested in things procrastinatorial — that post even invokes the marshmallow kids — but perhaps it took a couple of Namor-dick-joke-making podcasters to bring my mind back to it.

“There is no future,” Smith says. “The future is an illusion.” The sharp, supremely capable, immaculately organized future versions of ourselves do not exist, so we’d do well not to lard them with all the challenges and responsibilities we feel unable to handle today. You won’t find future-you substantially more able than present-you — or you might, but it doesn’t help to assume you will. I feel I should make one of these claims: either “Whatever you’re not doing now, you’re not doing” or “Whatever you wouldn’t do now, you wouldn’t do at all.” A tired point, perhaps, and one I’m sure I’ve made before, but I consider my most of my thoughts about the past and future wasted, irrelevant: the present winds up dictating both of them anyway.

Despite the energizing observations from Smith and Mosier that moved me to write it, the process of cranking out this post has laid upon me an overwhelming weariness. Maybe I’ve simply grown weary of relaying things people have said about doing stuff, no matter how inspirational. Maybe the element of self-amusement has dissolved. So I guess I’ll stop doing it — right now.

Away with words

Despite his high articulateness, Werner Herzog seems to consider himself inarticulate. I suspect this means something. I spent the weekend watching a retrospective of his documentaries put on by Cinefamily, possibly the world’s finest organization and certainly one of the main engines driving my move to L.A. (Herzog himself regularly wrong-foots journalists by praising what he thinks of as the unmatched vibrancy of L.A.’s culture, of which I would now call Cinefamily a bastion.) Watching his footage of shimmering mirages, grinning tribesmen, flaming oil wells, scampering desert foxes, medal-bedecked African dictators, and superstitious throat-singing Siberians — after, of course, re-reading the relevant sections of Herzog on Herzog — I though, “Man, this guy just does stuff.”

Point being, Herzog does not appear to live in words. He uses words, but he denies them primacy. David Lynch does this too, and in recent years has discussed publicly how he uses Transcendental Meditation to “fish” for the ideas lurking in his unconscious mind. Last night I watched “Pope of Modern Advertising” David Ogilvy on The David Susskind Show. Ogilvy said something I had to tweet as soon as I heard: “Big ideas come from only one place: the unconscious. Nobody's ever had a big idea by a process of rational thought.” He described how he might read a five-foot stack of materials on the Rolls-Royce or whatever he needs to advertise, but that the actual idea for the ad doesn’t come until he settles in with some after-dinner drink. Or, as Lynch might say, “Somewhere there's all the ideas, and they're sitting there and once in a while one will bob up and the idea is made known suddenly. Something is seen and known and felt all at once, and along with it comes a burst of enthusiasm and you fall in love with it.”

Herzog often talks about the “big metaphors” his films contain — Fitzcarraldo’s steamship pulled over the hill, Stroszek’s endlessly dancing chicken — and always quickly insists on his total ignorance of their meanings. They force him to abandon words, or force words to abandon him. (An example, perhaps, of the creative process I laid out in another tweet: “(1) Make your mind as interesting as possible, (2) build a gateway for others to get into your mind.” A validation of Herzog's famous dictum that, to become a filmmaker, you must only "read, read, read, read, read"?) Contrast this with me; I’ve noticed I can’t do anything unless I neurotically explain, re-explain, and re-re-re-explain it to myself in words. How could pulling a steamship over a hill and filming it ever survive that squirrely process?

I have to pound myself to take actions in the concrete world with endless sheets of language, and I too often remain utterly intransigent until absolutely self-convinced. Alas, the elusiveness of airtight arguments — let alone my suspicion that, for most worthwhile endeavors, no rational arguments even exist, airtight or otherwise — ensures that, in the time I take to formulate them, the opportunity passes. Studying Korean, Japanese, and even Spanish helps with this by forcing me to think not of words themselves but of the “actual things” to which they refer. (Herzog’s knowledge of many languages even beyond English and his native German — merely coincidental?) Yet I remain a long way from allowing action in the concrete world to assume the place of primacy I’ve let language usurp. Praised from early childhood for my “way with words,” I labor under a natural inclination to believe that language can accomplish anything. It can’t; it mostly accomplishes the easy task of tangling me up in its net. So I’d better cut this post off right here.

Backwards entrepreneurship

I must have a career (a) not dependent on the benevolence of the taxpayer but (b) where Andrei Tarkovsky nevertheless commands great importance. This may demand the strategy now known as “backwards entrepreneurship.” In interview with something called Daily Brink, Jesse Thorn, my Fearless Leader at Maximumfun.org, defined it thus:

Would you call yourself an entrepreneur?

I’m a “backwards entrepreneur.” My entrepreneurship stands from trying to find a way to eat while I do things that I like.

(Paul Graham variation: “to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve.”)

Backward though it may be, only this form of entrepreneurship calls to me. No, scratch that — only this form of entrepreneurship makes sense to me. I can envision someone figuring out which business model stands the greatest chance of making money — of attracting whichever customer base seems the largest or spendiest — in the same way I can envision squaring the circle. You can think about it, but surely... surely nobody can actually do it?

Often, when I get on this jag — it happens with increasing frequency — friends wonder aloud if I’ve turned downright anti-capitalist. Nonsense! I’ve long assumed it obvious to everyone that, as far as my political sense runs, it runs only toward capitalism — possibly as far as shameless capitalism. I would live in no society but a capitalist society, not least due to capitalism’s tolerance for non-capitalists. Try living as a communist under capitalism; now try living as a capitalist under communism. See which works out better.

My capitalism takes the form of the Catholicism dear to so many members of the modern Anglosphere: deep in one of the lesser chambers of my heart of hearts, I buy it. Yet I totally lack the wherewithal to practice it with anything close to rigor and, what’s more, find the whole affair dispiritingly wanting in aesthetic taste. I’ll turn this over to (past Marketplace of Ideas guest) Alain de Botton, from his book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work:

It was in the eighteenth century that economists and political theorists first became aware of the paradoxes and triumphs of commercial societies, which place trade, luxury and private fortunes at their centre whilst paying only lip-service to the pursuit of higher goals. [ … ] Their self-indulgence has consistently appalled a share of their most high-minded and morally ambitious members, who have railed against consumerism and instead honoured beauty and nature, art and fellowship. [But] it is the high-minded countries that have let their members starve, whereas the self-centred and the childish ones have, off the back of their doughnuts and six thousand varieties of ice cream, had the resources to invest in maternity wards and cranial scanning machines.

Marc Maron and Tom Scharpling, making their things

Marc Maron does stand-up comedy and the podcast WTF, which, for my earbud time, has risen to become one of the best interview-y concerns going. Tom Scharpling does The Best Show on WFMU. Tom joined Marc on WTF and talked about the journey toward doing his own media thing. Resonant words:

Tom Scharpling: I was like, “I’ve got to get good at writing. I’ve got to dedicate myself to finding a job. I can’t have something like this, that’s taking me off course.” So I quit for a couple years.

Marc Maron: Quit radio?

Tom Scharpling: Yeah, I quit the station.

Marc Maron: That was that juncture where it’s like, “The radio thing — I’m not even getting paid for that. I’ve got to get out of [working at a sheet music store] or I’m going to get old there...”

Tom Scharpling: Exactly; I was going to be trapped.

Marc Maron: “... and I’m going to focus.”

Tom Scharpling: “I need to start writing and just get myself out of this place in my life.”

Marc Maron: It’s a horrible place.

Tom Scharpling: Because you can feel that you might never get out of it.

Marc Maron: [strangled noise]

Tom Scharpling: There’s no guarantees. On any of this stuff.

Marc Maron: Ever!

Tom Scharpling: You know people who never get beyond a certain point, for whatever reason. It’s like, “There’s no guarantee I’m not one of those people. There’s no guarantee I didn’t hit the ceiling, whatever I’m hitting right now.”

Marc Maron: “I might be done!”

Tom Scharpling: Yeah, “This might be it for me.” But then, in your head, you think, “No, this is not it. I’m still going on a journey. I still have other places to go.” Maybe you don’t. Maybe this is the end of your line.

Marc Maron: That’s a horrible struggle, because I don’t know who you are in your mind, but in those moments — it’s almost a moment where, literally, there’s a part of your heart that’s reaching out to your parents, almost, like, “Take me to the place, mommy!” There’s this moment, like, “How do I get there?” Then you realize, “I’ve got to cry, then I’ve got to do this work.” But there’s something about that weird area where the fear of success and the fear of failure is the same thing. Like, “If I finish it, what if it stinks? And if I don’t do it, what if I’m still stuck?” That thing? You ever get that thing?

Tom Scharpling: The fear of success is not the thing for me. The feat of failure is almost all of it for me. I feel that looming.

Marc Maron: But it doesn’t stop you from doing things, which is good.

Tom Scharpling: No, exactly. I’ve always thought, you know the amount of geniuses that there are out there? There’s like five of them, maybe. It’s like, Paul Thomas Anderson, that guy is on a different plane from all of us. Then there’s, like, the bottom twenty percent, the Rupert Pupkins of the world that are just completely talentless, don’t belong...

Marc Maron: But keep going!

Tom Scharpling: They have to learn that themselves, when the cards get dealt: okay, wasn’t for me. But that middle stretch: all it is that separates the people is just how hard you work on it, and if you keep your head in the game. I was just like, “I can do okay in that mix. I know I’m not a genius, but I’m pretty sure I’m not Rupert Pupkin. I know I’m not a fraud.”

Marc Maron: Right. The authenticity thing’s important.

Tom Scharpling: It’s like, if I do the best I can do, that takes care of a certain amount of it. I’ve always operated with that in mind.

Marc Maron: We’re probably similar in the way of the amount of pressure we put on ourselves.

Tom Scharpling: Oh yeah. That’s part of why I quit.

Marc Maron: You hit a wall. It’s like, “What else am I going to do?” You feel like you’re spinning. You’re like, “I’ve done this. It’s not changing!”

Tom Scharpling: My thing is also, it’s a listener-supported station. There’s no way to ever monetize what I’m doing there. I’m working for the greater good of this noncommercial station, which I am completely on board with.

Marc Maron: But did that function also support, not your self-sabotaging element, but the idea that there’s something noble about it, number one, and also number two, there’s integrity built into it?

Tom Scharpling: Yeah. But you get tired at a point. I got so tired of this thing that just felt like it would never end. It felt like I had a certain amount of responsibility to the station to be earning a certain amount of money to keep the thing going, which was not really true. I do make a good amount of money when it’s the fundraiser, but the station has survived the big DJs coming and going. It’s always managed to survive. But I put an unrealistic thing on myself, thinking, “I have to be here every week.” The thing that was fun for everybody else kind of became a job for me, a job that I can only lose money on, this job that I can only lose money on — and it will never end. I just got sad.

Marc Maron: It’s like a sentence.

Tom Scharpling: Exactly.

From Put This On, Tom Scharpling’s three rules:

1. DO THE WORK. Can you look yourself in the mirror at the end of the day and say that you did the best you could?
2. BE THE BEST POSSIBLE VERSION OF YOURSELF. Don’t shortchange yourself or pull your punches because of some internal negative voice!
3. WRITE DOWN WHAT YOU NEED TO DO. It helps. Do those three things and you’ll be more alright than not.

Ira Glass on being interviewed by Marc Maron:

Being interviewed by Maron reminded me of an old axiom about interviewing: that an interview is a party you're throwing and your guest will mirror your behavior. Marc is an insanely intense guy, and stares into you as you talk — it really feels like his eyes are piercing inside you — and then when he speaks he reaches inside himself and talks in the most heartfelt way possible. In a room with that, you'd have to be made of stone not to respond in the most soulful way you can summon up. He's emotionally present and he makes you emotionally present. I don't think that's any kind of calculated move, it's who he is when he's performing. And of course it gets amazing results.

Go to work

The hosts of one of my favorite film podcasts, Battleship Pretension, recently addressed an intriguing bit of negative listener feedback on the show. I forget his specific grievance, but the guy writing in took issue with the number of major films Tyler and David regularly admit to not having seen. A fair point, but, as Tyler and David replied, you’ll always leave certain movies unseen no matter how hard you watch, and unlike them, you probably didn’t go to film school. Plus, there are social lives to be had, beers to be drunk, pizzas to be eaten, etc.

Yet I kept thinking about the complainer’s core concern. On the surface, he seemed to claim Tyler and David hadn’t seen enough movies to have earned the authority to talk about the form itself. Down below, the complaint echoed a demand I feel myself having of anybody I listen to talk about anything, whether they’re talking about film, music, literature, visual art: how do I know you’re experiencing, exploring, and thinking about this stuff even when you don’t want to? I happen, for example, to have two tabs open with two different James Wood articles. His reviews instill in me confidence that he doesn’t read and analyze novels just when he feels like it; he goes to work. I wouldn’t trust his judgment if he didn’t.

Needless to say, “going to work” doesn’t necessarily mean turning up to an office every day — and, for most interesting crafts, rarely if ever does — but it shares an element with that. I sometimes think about this as habit, asking myself, “Does this creator do this work habitually?” I sometimes think about it as a system, as in, “Does this creator do this work systematically?” I need to know a creator is giving me only the tip of an iceberg built with great working regularity.

Unlike that one dude, I don’t think Tyler and David fail to go to work with Battleship Pretension. They record and release a show per week, almost like clockwork. They don’t seem to take “me” days. I realize, though, that the complainer objected to their film viewing, not their film discussion; while the show’s regularity makes clear that they must discuss films even when they don’t want to, I admit to having no way of knowing whether they watch them regularly, even when they don’t want to.

So if you want to make a life of some craft, it makes sense to institute a system, a schedule — no matter how basic — as soon as possible. Sure, I’ve conducted 150-some-odd Marketplace of Ideas interviews, but interviewing only becomes what I do to the extent that I do it regularly — which, pretty much, I have. I’ve been writing longer, but I’ve done it much less regularly; some of my print stuff and online columns run on a schedule, but the rest I’ve too often foolishly chained to the petulant beast of “what I feel like.” Filmmaking I’ve done least regularly of all, choosing so far to rely on the vanishingly rare fuel of inspiration. No surprise that I’ve done it the least. Unsustainable practice, as the enviros would say.

This looks the same from the consumer’s side as it does from the creator's. I respect most the work of creators who, broadly speaking, do what they want to do — especially when they don’t want to do it. Whatever you or I do whether or not we feel like it, that’s what we capital-D Do. (On reflection, you might find this is painting; you might also find it’s slinging macchiatos.) This remains only a suspicion, but I’ve come to think that I only really do what I do every day. Anybody I’d presume to consider an audience likely believes that about me anyway, so I think I’ll go ahead and get it tattooed on my wrist now.

What Tips Your Wedge?

You know how a lion tamer keeps his deadly cat-beast from attacking just by holding up an old chair? The chair’s legs that confuse the lion; its brain detects four individual points in motion, and they can’t figure out which to focus on and kill. It’s the paralysis of perpetual distraction. (I learned this from watching Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control like a dozen times. You only need to watch it once to pick that up, but still, I recommend watching it and the rest of the Morris oeuvre like a dozen times.) Sometimes I feel a lot like that lion. This wouldn’t be so bad, except I also feel a lot like my own tamer.

The chairs I hold in my own face take many forms. Right now, I’m staring at the chair that is Firefox, its row of tabs presenting six effective legs. When I go home tonight, I’ll face my bookshelves, absolutely bristling with the distinctive legginess of yet-unread reading material. All the time I spend today thinking about the things I should be working on will feel just like being surrounded by chairs, all of different shapes and colors, their legs seeming to bend and spin unpredictably.

Surely you’ve been in similar psychological situations. Ultimately unpleasant, definitely, but damn, they’re kind of addictive, aren’t they? When something’s always there to distract you, you don’t really have to address anything in the short term. Why, you could call it an opiate; opiates are distractions almost by definition, I’d say. Perversely, the more I’ve got to do, the more distracting chair legs I desperately seek out. ("Oh, that thing that failed? Not my fault. I was really distracted.") Which is a hell of a danger when you, like me, are specifically into working on a bunch of different things at once.

Asking around the tubes for recommendations as to how to improve my nonexistent self-promotional skills — to, uh, make them exist — a noticed a certain theme in the replies:

• You probably don't want to narrow your interests, but I think if you want to market yourself you need to get yourself more narrowly identified, and then pound the public with that thing.
  
• You seem like an interesting guy, but I don't know how I would describe you to my friends: he's a interviewer/reviewer/commentator/creator/curator? If you could only talk about or do one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be? Pick it then concentrate on that.
  
• If I were you, I'd find a common thread among my projects and unify them, build my brand by creating reliably new content in one outlet.
  
• If you want to move into some kind of work for these things, you gotta pick one area you want to move into, and work on promoting that. Are you gonna be a writer about film, or a musician or what?
  
• Not to say that you can't do a million goofy side projects, but pick the area you want to be the go-to guy for and put the lion's share of your energy into that. Otherwise you're trying to build several different careers at once, or in Seth Godin language, you'll have an unfocused and muddy personal brand.
  
• It seems to me that you are essentially a critic, working in a variety of media, as well as a sometimes filmmaker/DJ/producer of field recordings. That's not a laser beam focus, sure, but it's not as scattered as you make it out to be. I guess my advice is: present yourself cohesively.
  
• Become known for one of these things, let the rest follow.

Some of this echoes the standard injunctions about not being a “jack of all trades.” Point well taken, but it’s only fair to put the phrase in its original context: "Jack of all trades, master of none, though ofttimes better than master of one.” (I’m pretty sure it didn’t start out as a slam.) That’s partially why I’m into engaging in a load of different pursuits in the first place. Another, larger, part must just come down to brain operation. For me, the jack of all trades, master of none lives an infinitely more interesting life — not just offtimes, but alltimes. I can’t make lion brain to concentrate on all the legs of a the chair at once, yet I can’t summon the motivation to kill just one. None interest me in isolation.

Yet these suggestions are also quite helpful, because they point to a strategy I hadn’t thought about before. Despite having gone on and on about the importance of thinking in terms of the “thin end of the wedge” in getting yourself to work on stuff, I’ve never applied the same principle to self-promotion. This is promising: don’t be a laser, be a wedge. Become known for something very specific, but make that the thin end you use to hammer the rest of what B.S. Johnson would have vividly called your "enormous totality" into the public consciousness.

While this would unfortunately constitute insufficiently immediate recognition of my status as a Gen-Y unique snowflake, I suspect it has some application. The trick, if you’re so inclined, is to figure out what specific thing you do makes the best most penetrating tip of the wedge. Someone suggested that I might make a go of “cultural tastemaker.” That still feels a little itchy compared to “cultural stuff-maker,” but if I can make it work, I will branch out to “self-help author” by writing an awful book entitled What Tips Your Wedge?

Systems analyst

This week’s Marketplace of Ideas, just up today, is a conversation with Chris Guillebeau, the dude who writes the blog The Art of Non-Conformity (which is now the book The Art of Non-Conformity). He’s the best kind of guest: a creator whose work fascinates me and is pretty much exactly what I need at the moment. He’s all about encouraging you to scrap pre-made life templates and do your own thang, but he exudes absolutely none of that sketchy cellphone-salesman vibe I tend to get from the bottom eight-ninths of the “lifestyle design” internet crowd.

A big part of what I drew from his book is that, while it’s all well and good to aspire to the life well lived, you could use at least a semi-clear idea of what that might be to you. A surprising number of people, no matter how often or intensely they fantasize, seem wrong-footed when confronted with the question of what, if all the constraints of time and money were lifted, they would actually do. I leapt straight to my wrong foot, anyway, when I asked myself that. I seem to recall Chris writing something in his book about how few people would really be satisfied by buying yachts or sipping poolside margaritas all day. I know I wouldn’t; I suppose I know it so well that I’ve never even bothered imaging those things.

There’s a bit in The Art of Non-Conformity about imagining your ideal day. It’s a decent hack — oh yes, I’ve signed onto that term — to figure out the broad directions in which to engineer your very existence, a scale not easy to force your mind straight into. I tried writing my own ideal-day qualities down, and they’re equally interpretable as ideal-life qualities, given that the day is in some sense life’s microcosm:

• Creating media (be it writing, sound, image, film, video, radio, etc.)
• Being in a place that I’m not in the majority of the time (and the swifter among you realize the implication: I wouldn’t be in any one place a majority of the time)
• Exercising in some form (running, cycling, yoga, climbing, what have you, though I haven’t climbed in quite some time and my bike’s front wheel is doing this weird thing where it pushes its brakes back and forth)
• Communicating with neato people (in whatever form it takes, and preferably in more than one language, meaning the fire under my drive to attain bare-bones competence in more than one language needs all the wood it can get)
• Working on several projects that are chronologically discrete (i.e., they don’t stretch out open-endedly and indefinitely toward the grave)
• Learning in some previously unexplored subject area, sub-subject, or sub-sub-subject-area (by reading, visiting, eating, listening, talking, Googling — hell, any method’s fair game)
• Engaging in one or more ongoing “life experiments,” which Chris writes about in his book but which Boing Boing founder Mark Frauenfelder and I will discuss in next week’s MOI, so more on these later (suffice to say that they’re about placing certain unusual conditions on your own life and seeing what happens — he moved to the South Pacific, for instance)

Clearly, there is only one life for me: the life of the systems analyst.

Moments of Clarity

Buying a read bean bun at a Japanese market. Watching a steam pipe in an Apichatpong Weerasethakul movie. Glancing at a bunch of Douglas Coupland novels on a shelf. Running. Staring at a city map. Reading Brian Eno’s diary entry for April 17, 1995. Few and far between though they may be, these moments of clarity — nay, these Moments of Clarity — always repay the wait.

Clarity, I’m starting to suspect, is something I need more than money or even time to accomplishing my goals. The problem is that it’s also a hell of a lot more flaky-sounding. I mean, “clarity”? Sheezus. Yet I do find that my worst frustrations come when I’m not thinking clearly enough to act decisively — should I use that em dash or not? Em dash or not? Em dash or not? — and that most of my peak performance happens in a relative void of mental clutter. Sometimes just defining a desired outcome in my imagination is enough to power me forward, though there are days when even that seems like a Herculean task.

In these aforementioned Moments of Clarity, though, it’s like my entire life falls into order, however micro-briefly. In that tiny window, it’s like the compass stops spinning and just points: I know just what I must achieve and just what I must do to achieve it. Still, it’s more of a gestalt; I can’t verbalize it enough to, like, convince anybody, or even to jot it down in a Moleskine for later reference. Hence all the time I shamefully watch myself pouring time straight down the drain, like a bloodshot meth-head pounding desperately on the tin doors of each and every trailer lab, searching for the one that can make it to give me just the right high. I compulsively walk library shelves, scanning for just the right typographical unconventionality; I comb the net for just the right early video art; I flip through magazines from the nineties, looking for just the right union of form and substance. All in the name of inspiration, but all, typically, for naught.

Though it’s tough to trace out the cause and effect precisely, I fear I’ve never successfully induced a Moment of Clarity. They seem to come unpredictably, of their own accord, in a pattern of settings that looks absolutely nonsensical but nevertheless feels exactly right. But that doesn’t stop me from endless application of what I yesterday called “clarifying devices”: Aim for the life well lived. Would I respect me? Do things slower. Do things faster. Do hard things. Do hard things in a way that makes them seem like easy things. Fortune favors the bold. Fortune favors the stealthy. Be less autistic. Focus harder. Is there a possibility of failure? Reward is proportional to risk. Add more personality. Subtract more personality. Only have epic goals. Only have eminently doable goals. Don’t have goals. Are you producing? Aim for the general. Aim for the niche. Only connect. Is this remarkable?

Isn’t this search for clarity about finding ways to get your brain excited, as much as anything else? I find that the more junk is floating around my mind, the harder it becomes to get excited enough about something to actually work on it, or even to draw inspiration from it. Mental noise feels as if it weakens mental stimulation, whether it’s from the worthy stuff (that article you’ve been writing) or the less so (trending Twitter topics). And what prevents me from dropping myself into meaningful work more powerfully than anything else? Fear of insufficient mental stimulation ahead — fear of boredom.

Even though I rarely experience anything that could be called boredom, some sort of primal terror of it keeps me from spending as much effort on promising pursuits as I could. I think it helps to take some time to crank down my average volume of mental input so as to boost my sensitivity to it when it really matters. I guess I can see why David Lynch meditates so much. I was just this morning listening to Mark Maron talk to Judd Apatow on WTF about how sure they are that a couple fifteen-minute sessions a day could totally transform their lives — if only they could bring themselves do it. I have to believe that, when your level of ambient mental static gets down there toward zero, clarity-hunting isn’t an issue and the world around you becomes a hell of a lot more interesting. It’s the same principle that makes a humble slice of turkey taste like such a flavor explosion after you’ve endured a monthlong beans-and-plain-yogurt diet. Maybe I should invest in one of those sensory deprivation tanks from 1982.