Photographer Arno Minkkinen on how creativity is like a bus station:

There are two dozen platforms, Minkkinen explains, from each of which several different bus lines depart. Thereafter, for a kilometre or more, all the lines leaving from any one platform take the same route out of the city, making identical stops. “Each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer,” Minkkinen says. You pick a career direction – maybe you focus on making platinum prints of nudes – and set off. Three stops later, you’ve got a nascent body of work. “You take those three years of work on the nude to [a gallery], and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn.” Penn’s bus, it turns out, was on the same route. Annoyed to have been following someone else’s path, “you hop off the bus, grab a cab… and head straight back to the bus station, looking for another platform”. Three years later, something similar happens. “This goes on all your creative life: always showing new work, always being compared to others.” What’s the answer? “It’s simple. Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.”

As Oliver Burkeman explains, “if you pursue originality too vigorously, you’ll never reach it. Sometimes it takes more guts to keep trudging down a pre-trodden path, to the originality beyond.”

Filed under: originality

Does it matter that what you’ve achieved, with your online special and your tour can’t be replicated by other performers who don’t have the visibility or fan base that you do?

Why do you think those people don’t have the same resources that I have, the same visibility or relationship? What’s different between me and them?

You have the platform. You have the level of recognition.

So why do I have the platform and the recognition?

At this point you’ve put in the time.

There you go. There’s no way around that. There’s people that say: “It’s not fair. You have all that stuff.” I wasn’t born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you’re new at this — and by “new at it,” I mean 15 years in, or even 20 — you’re just starting to get traction. Young musicians believe they should be able to throw a band together and be famous, and anything that’s in their way is unfair and evil. What are you, in your 20s, you picked up a guitar? Give it a minute.

cf. Steve Albini lays it out for a failed X-Factor contestant

I came across this great site called Middle Mojo, which is all about creativity and aging, asking, “What happens when creative people get older and older people get creative?”

The Aimee Mann interview is excellent.

On writer’s block and lack of feedback from people who actually cared about her work:

I was interacting only with the record company. If I would write a song or record a song, the only people who would hear it and comment on it were people at the record company. And they have of course a totally different agenda than an agenda of art, of is this good or does it move me? And so 100% of the feedback I would get on what I would do was just depressing. Like, it’s not a single. So if you never get any feedback where people get any joy from what you’re doing or connect to it or are moved by it in any way, then you really start to feel like, “Well I don’t know why I’m fucking doing this.” I mean, sure I can write songs for myself but I mean, I am playing them for other people. And it gave me a very skewed belief that nobody cared.

(She couldn’t write for months and months until a friend of hers gave her The Artist’s Way.)

On making up games for songwriting:

I would make up these games for myself – I still do this actually – and Michael [Penn, her husband] and I started to do this with a friend of ours. We have, like, a songwriter’s club. We developed a really elaborate version of it, but I had a simpler version. I always started with writing down names of chords on little slips of paper, and then just threw them up in the air. And whatever landed face up, those were the chords. I did some other stuff, like cutting out headlines and things from newspapers. I got that idea from Fiona Apple, actually, to kind of jump start lyrical stuff.

On the difference between making art when you’re younger vs. older:

When you’re younger you have goals that are kind of about getting attention, maybe from certain people, or trying to create an identity. Having your art kind of wrapped up with specific or general members of the opposite sex, and trying to prove to other people or prove to yourself that you’re good or that you can achieve or that you’re special or interesting or whatever you’re trying to prove. And in lieu of having those goals and motivations, sometimes it’s really hard to be motivated to work. And in talking to him, the conclusion I drew was this: that we have those goals when we are young in lieu of having been taught skills of discipline and perseverance. And they serve for a while as a temporary substitute, but now it’s time for us to learn those skills of discipline and perseverance and practice and hard work. Those are skills that you have to learn. And some people get to learn them when they’re young so they don’t need to have these carrots and sticks of craziness and dysfunction. But when you don’t get taught those basic skills, you do need them, or it doesn’t happen.

On what 12-step programs can teach artists:

Let it go. Control the things you can control. And if you put that into practice enough and you literally spend no energy on shit you can’t control, which is everything.

Great read. Check out the other stuff on the site.

After 25 or so years of directing, Steven Soderbergh is retiring from film. A few great bits:

“Just make stuff and don’t agonize over it.”

I was watching one of those iconoclast shows on the Sundance Channel. Jamie Oliver said Paul Smith had told him something he hadn’t understood until very recently: “I’d rather be No. 2 forever than No. 1 for a while.” Just make stuff and don’t agonize over it. Stop worrying about being No. 1. I see a lot of people getting paralyzed by the response to their work, the imagined result. It’s like playing a Jedi mind trick on yourself, and Smith is right. That’s the way I’ve always approached films, the way I approach everything. Just make ’em.

How to learn anything: identify your heroes, figure out what they did, then get going.

On learning to paint:

What’s exciting is to feel at the very beginning of something. It’s also terrifying starting from scratch, but panic has always energized me. It’s the same process as anything: identifying who your heroes are, figuring out what they did, and then just going and doing it. I can stare at my Lucian Freud book for hours and hours, but at a certain point you have to go to the wall and imitate. … I’m always curious to hear how something was made—though I have no interest in why an artist did something, or what his work means. Like with Jackson Pollock: I’m always interested in what kind of paint and canvas he used, I just don’t want to know what he meant. You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

Steal from everywhere.

The very idea that someone from Congress can’t take something from the other side because they’ll be punished by their own party? That’s stupid. If I were running for office, I would be poaching ideas from everywhere. That’s how art works. You steal from everything.

Great read.