Were I to come into an unexpectedly vast sum on money, Yohji Yamamoto’s meatpacking district shop is one of the first stops I’d make. Very sad to hear that that store and others are closing, as part of his bankruptcy filing. Recommended: Wim Wenders’s documentary about him, Notebooks On Cities and Clothes, in which he visits the Toyko studio and gradually comes to appreciate the vision and craftmanship, fashion as an art form.
It started snowing on New Year’s Eve sometime around 12 at my old office and we were scheduled to leave at 2. If you left anytime earlier, you wouldn’t get credited with a full day’s pay. Voluminous flurries quickly packed up and meant no matter what kind of car you drove, a tap on the gas pedal could mean skidding into the lane right next to you. Still, the president of the company didn’t let us go. We waited two hours, on a day no one was working anyway, because the schedule said 2 is time to leave. By that time, the roads were congested, any commute took five times as long. Even if you wanted to go to a party, you wouldn’t make it in time. It’s just bad management. The problem is that most management in America is bad management in this regard. Things are done a certain way because they’ve always been done that way. Viewing presence as work rather than actual work. There’s no way this will last, there’s too much resentment built up. I really liked Inc magazine’s interview with Jason Fried of 37signals because pretty plainly states modern work ethic and what most companies should value to stay competative: making “things less complicated” and cutting “all that BS about being somewhere for a certain number of hours. I have no idea how many hours my employees work — I just know they get the work done.”More: “I hate it when businesses treat their employees like children. They block Facebook or YouTube because they want their employees to work eight hours a day. But instead of getting more productivity, you’re getting frustration. What’s the point? As long as the work gets done, I don’t care what people do all day.” On that note, check out Drake Bennett in the Globe Ideas section and Witold Rybczynski’s Waiting for the Weekend.
From WSJ: “As long the economy stays grim, bankruptcy filings will become increasingly common – which may diminish the stigma that accompanies bankruptcy. It is, in a sense, surprising that so many Americans should still feel ashamed of bankruptcy when those in a far more comfortable situation feel no such chagrin. Corporate bankruptcies are an accepted part of doing business from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Executives who collect $30 million from a bank in the years before it collapses are not expected to give it back.”
Abandoned schools in Detroit might double as zombie movie sets. (via.) On the other hand, “Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished.”
Interesting points from Wooster Collective, “Should Art Be Treated Like Stocks?” You could also suppose, “Should Art Be Treated Like Gold?” There’s no question the government expects to inflate our way out of this mess. Thus demand for gold — demand for objects rather than paper (interestingly, this isn’t happening with diamonds due to increasingly competition with De Beers, who for so long controlled the output.) Art involves tricky issues of scarcity and value. There’s no end to the variables when it comes to art by living artist. The artist may decide, “oh, I like this one I’m going to make 500 more like it.” Or he might die tomorrow. So as an investment, it’s always a gamble.
Stock prices for gun companies.
“When jobs disappear” in The Economist. A must read article on global job losses. Europe’s fragile temp workers. Why America was hit so hard and so quickly. And the scary future for some Japanese, who depend on their job not just for the wages, but for beds to sleep in. Toward the end of the article there’s a brief summary of the US foreclosure crisis puts it in a way I hadn’t really seen examined: that an upside-down mortgage is a problem of mobility. They are stuck in homes and can’t move for better job prospects. When you think about it, what is more American than the capacity to throw all of your things in a carryon and drive off to California for a better life?
Survival Creativity: Return to Pencil and Paper
Tara Donovan Haze, (Stacked Clear Plastic Drinking Straws)
Luis Buñuel’s daughter once said he never would have had a creative outlet without the invention of film. (I think the interview is part of the Phantom of Liberty DVD extras.) But he wasn’t just lucky to be alive in the era of filmmaking — he was lucky to afford a camera, to find collaborators who didn’t bail on him, to have the time to make a picture.
Those are luxuries that many of us can’t dream of, even in the era of Flip video and desktop editing. True, you can fake a student ID, borrow equipment and use FinalCutPro for free. But the human capital, the coordination, the time, the planning. The depending on other people. It’s not that easy. You can’t rely on any outcome. There’s nothing a creative person can rely on more than a pencil and paper.
If you are enslaved to expensive tools, you cannot be creative in a down economy.
When everything is unprecedented, nothing can be relied on, nuclear holocaust seems in no way outside the bounds of possibility, we might one day wheelbarrow a stack of bills to buy a coffee, and some of the sanest among us are stockpiling soup cans — nothing is as critical as the cost-free transfer of ideas from brain to paper.
Survival Creativity.
If your tools chose you, they can also choose to leave you if you can’t afford them. But everyone has access to pencil and paper. Everyone can archive their thoughts in the most basic form available.
Tara Donovan Untitled, (Styrofoam Cups, Hot Glue)
Many gold medal runners come from third world countries. Not so many divers, fencers, skiers, or golfers. Why is it, other than the ease of running. No required uniforms, no required equipment. You don’t need to ask your friend, (leisure time is a scarcity too in poorer countries.) All you need to run is your own body.
In the west, we get hung up on sneakers for overpronators and iPod-plugin pedometers. In actuality, running is the sport that anyone can do — and do well with natural gift and determination…. Like writing and sketching.
The artist who needs 50 tons of steel for the next project is vulnerable to a choking of his creative talent due to grants denied and such things. The one who can make something powerful with nothing more than paper and pencil knows no matter how hard life gets, he can always create.
For writers, it’s difficult not to rely on a keyboard. No, not for want of internet or email. But for transcribing ideas as soon as they happen. As soon as I retreat to my notebooks, I get frustrated. I can’t write as fast as I think and sit and watch as the end of my sentence gets lost in the jumble of ideas I’m trying to jot down.
Cursive handwriting is understood an antiquity, but writing at all feels unnatural to a digital native. And that chicken scratch I’m guilty of, no matter how hard I practice, is largely unintelligible — even to me — after I’m finished.
“If everything we do still had to be done by hand, there would not be enough hours in the day” aregistration manager tells the BBC in an article about the “Slow death of handwriting.” More on the subject from Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting by Kitty Burns Florey.
Modern writers are making writing more expensive. A laptop isn’t a necessity. Nor is a coffee and scone at a quiet cafe as you poach the neighborhood wifi. I should be able to write as well in a dark, cramped room in the worst neighborhood with no heat and no light. If not better than I do, say, at Starbucks on my Macbook.
Ironically, after splashing out recently on a new one, I can’t get in my proper writing form. My wrists, even after three weeks, haven’t adjusted to the new keyboard. I feel more mechanical and disconnected from the process. Sort of like it feels going through a daily routine without a good night’s sleep.
Tara Donovan Haze, Strata, 2000-2001 (Elmer’s Glue)
Michael Agger, one of my favorite tech culture reporters, (“How we read online”, “Thoreau’s Worst Nightmare”) has another provocatively titled article “Kill Your Computer” for the Big Money:
[Quicksilver] presents itself as a powerful “program launcher”—allowing you to load Web sites, find phone numbers, and e-mail files with a few keystrokes—but it’s really a philosophy. If you become adept at Quicksilver, you reach a state of wei wu wei—acting without doing. Here’s how the site puts it: “Quicksilver becomes an extension of yourself; the process fades away leaving only results.” Ohm.
This philosophy seems right to me—in my experience, the best computer is one that disappears when you are using it. Many of us who use computers all day don’t really “like” computers. We just want the box to work—i.e., get out of our way so that we can get things done. Sometimes, with your computer, it’s unclear who is serving whom. Watch as the user attends the computer during program installs, crash recoveries, and tedious system upgrades. Watch the user clean the hard disk and cure it of viruses.
I just still haven’t got a handle on this button-less touchpad and the keyboard feels just a little too smooth, too indefinite. Which is why this post is probably a little jerky to read. But maybe it is better to be ever vigilant of the device with which you engage your ideas. A reminder that one should not rely too much on it.
Forget for a moment that digital cameras, video is getting cheaper and cheaper at a higher and higher quality. For some people a $300 camera is still simply unaffordable. If the worst collapsitarian fantasies come true a camera, just $300, will seem even more decadent.
Which is why its important to preserve one’s skill with pen and paper. Worst comes to worst, you can still create.
Previously:
- Handmade Looking Writing
- Saying Yes and Hearing No
- Reading Only Devices: Why iPhone, Kindle, and Tablet PCs Might Mean Smarter Blog Comments
- Crazy Artists, Crazy Authors, and Blog Comments as a Slush Pile Unfiltered
NYT on ex-bankers blowing unemployment checks on MediaBistro classes, starting sketch comedy troupes, and “completing” their screenplays and novels.
“When the stock market crashed in October 1929, sound film was younger than YouTube is now.” – A. O. Scott points out in a wonderful essay on hard times and good movies. “Audiences want to be lulled by romance or tickled by comedy, but they also have a hunger to see reality depicted. Above all there seems a universal appetite to see the rawness of the world given the shapely and soothing order conferred by familiar genres.”
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A collection of interesting ideas curated by
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