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Posts tagged "notknowing"
Baldwin: What do you think you do best? You lead a band, you play guitar, you write music, you produce music and you sing. What do you think your greatest strength is, if you had to pick one?
Yorke: That I don’t know what I’m doing. I like the fact that I still don’t know what I’m doing. I think – no, honestly. I’ll go through whole phases of months where I haven’t got a clue. I regularly lose complete confidence in what I’m doing.
Filed under: not-knowing
This is a book about the work involved in making movies… I’ll try to tell you best I can how movies are made. It’s a complex technical and emotional process. It’s art. It’s commerce. It’s heartbreaking and it’s fun. It’s a great way to live.
The first sentence in Lumet’s bio actually made me gasp: “Sidney Lumet’s films have received more than fifty Academy Award nominations.” Fifty. And he made fifty years worth of movies: 12 Angry Men came out in 1957, and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead came out in 2007. What was his secret?
I don’t think art changes anything… I do it because I like it and it’s a wonderful way to spend your life.
Lumet was opposed to the concept of “the auteur”—he was very much more what Terry Gilliam calls “a filteur.” He chose material and movies to make that he could make personally interesting to him, but he always emphasized filmmaking as a collaboration. “If all this sounds like hard work,” he said, “Let me assure you that it is.”
There are so many good bits in this book:
- “All good work requires self-revelation”
- “I don’t want life reproduced up there on the screen. I want life created.”
- “What we’re doing matters. It needs concentration.”
- “We’re not out for consensus here. We’re out for communication.”
My favorites, which translate well to other art forms:
“What the movie is about [should] determine how it is to be made.
“Discussions of style as something totally detached from the content of the movie drive me mad.” I’m a big fan of the “don’t worry about style” school, believing that style emerges out of the things you’re obsessed by. Lumet put it perfectly:
The question “What is this movie about?” will be asked over and over again throughout the book. For now, suffice it to say that the theme (the what of the movie) is going to determine the style (the how of the movie.) […] I work from the inside out. What the movie is about will determine how it will be cast, how it will look, how it will be edited, how it will be musically scored, how it will be mixed, how the titles will look, and, with a good studio, how it will be released.
But what of what Lumet calls, “The ‘auteur’ nonsense?”
So-and-so’s “style” is present in all his pictures. Of course it is. He directed them. One of the reasons Hitchcock was so deservedly adored was that his personal style was strongly felt in every picture. But it’s important to realize why: He always essentially made the same picture. The stories weren’t the same, but the genre was…
“Creative work is very hard, and some sort of self-deception is necessary simply in order to start.”
The truth is that nobody knows that that magic combination is that produces a first-rate piece of work… all we can do is prepare the groundwork that allows for the “lucky accidents” that make a first-rate movie happen.
But the self-deception has to be a balanced kind:
I think most of us feel like fakes. At some point “they” will get onto us and expose us for what we are: know-nothings, hustlers, and charlatans. It’s not a totally destructive feeling. It tends to keep us honest. The other side of that coin, though, the feeling that we own the work, that is exists only because of us, that we are the vessel through which some divine message is being passed, is lunacy.
Don’t let today’s work hurt the way you evaluate yesterday’s work.
[You] have to watch your inner state very carefully as you come into rushes. Perhaps today’s shooting hasn’t gone very well. You’re tired and frustrated. So you take it out on yesterday’s work, which you’re watching now. Or perhaps you’ve overcome a major problem today, so in an exultant mood, you’re giving yesterday’s work too much credit.
If you have even a sliver of interest in how movies are (or were) made, this is a must-read.
Great mini-interview w/ Beck and Philip Glass about their recent collaboration.
I’m interested in what happens to music when other people use it. Whereas there are composers who don’t like anyone to touch their music, I think people should because they do things I can’t think of. I’m the opposite of being possessive about a piece.
He illustrates this idea in a story about Arthur Russell:
I wrote him a cello piece, and he liked the work and was playing it. And I came back about three months later, and I heard it and I said, “Arthur, that’s beautiful, but what happened to the piece?” And he said, “No, no, that is what you wrote,” and I said, “Arthur, it’s no longer what I wrote, it’s your piece now.” And he thought I was being upset, he apologized and I said, “No, no, no, I think we should put you down as the composer.” He had reached the point of transformation. The incremental changes had turned it into this other thing. I love the fact that he did that. And I love the fact that he didn’t know that he did it.
Filed under: not knowing
Writing: it doesn’t get any easier.
The writer David Rakoff died of cancer last night, and while Googling him, I came across this video, “Why I Write (And Why It Only Gets Harder).”
In his book, Don’t Get Too Comfortable, Rakoff admits:
Writing is like pulling teeth.
From my dick.
In Half Empty, he talks about the necessary pain-in-the-ass of the first draft:
Writing—I can really only speak to writing here—always, always only starts out as shit: an infant of monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible, and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever). Unlike cooking, for example, where largely edible, if raw, ingredients are assembled, cut, heated, and otherwise manipulated into something both digestible and palatable, writing is closer to having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food.
He goes on to talk about the writer feeling a “constant beginner-hood” and how “mastery” in writing is elusive, as opposed to all other grownup tasks:
As a child, the distance between desire and execution was a maddeningly unbridgeable chasm. What the mind’s eye pictured and what the body could achieve were altogether different… but then hands grow from smudging little mitts into useful instruments… One progresses from novice to adept with a soothing reliability. Except for writing. Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up.
Starting work on my third book, I’ve certainly felt this pang — isn’t this supposed to be easier than last time? Shouldn’t I fucking know how to do this by now?
Here’s Keith Ridgway in his recent piece “Everything is Fiction”:
I don’t know how to write. Which is unfortunate, as I do it for a living… I’ve written six books now, but instead of making it easier, it has complicated matters to the point of absurdity. I have no idea what I’m doing.
Filed under: not-knowing.
Elizabeth Gilbert on having a genius vs. being a genius
After we had a Twitter back-and-forth about artists choking on their success, my friend Sunni Brown reminded me of this TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, which she gave after her book Eat, Pray, Love was a huge success. In it, she talks about all the ridiculous stuff we expect of artists, and how people kept asking her if she was terrified of not being able to match the success of her last book:
I’m pretty young, I’m only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. And it’s exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right? I should just put it bluntly, because we’re all sort of friends here now — it’s exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. Oh, so Jesus, what a thought! You know that’s the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o’clock in the morning, and I don’t want to go there. (Laughter) I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love.
And so, Gilbert set out to look for artistic models to emulate, and made her way to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who didn’t believe that artists were geniuses, but rather, that they had a genius, or a spirit, that kind of hung out and helped them do their work.
And then the Renaissance came and everything changed, and we had this big idea, and the big idea was let’s put the individual human being at the center of the universe above all gods and mysteries, and there’s no more room for mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine. And it’s the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual.1
So, she suggests, why can’t we go back to that old model of acknowledging that we don’t completely know what is happening when we create something, and sometimes the spirit visits and sometimes it doesn’t?2
Maybe [the creative process] doesn’t have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you’re finished, with somebody else. And, you know, if we think about it this way it starts to change everything.
This is how I’ve started to think, and this is certainly how I’ve been thinking in the last few months as I’ve been working on the book that will soon be published, as the dangerously, frighteningly over-anticipated follow up to my freakish success.
And what I have to, sort of keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that, is, don’t be afraid. Don’t be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be.
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What’s interesting is that this is also around the same time that the myth of originality comes into play… ↩
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It’s something that Tom Wait has embraced, as Gilbert wrote about in her terrific 2002 profile of him. ↩
(via adamnorwood)
Donald Barthelme, “Not-Knowing,” from Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews
The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do… The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention… Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing…
Re-read this essay a few days ago. So many great one-liners:
A writer, says Karl Kraus, is a man who can make a riddle out of an answer.
or:
Am I a masterpiece or simply a pile of junk?
or:
We must allow ourselves the advantages of our disadvantages.
Filed under: not-knowing.
