From then on, I always played center forward even though most of the Black-Yellow team was faster or technically more gifted. But I had a quicker apprehension of movements in space and always had an instinctive nose for goal. That often drew the opposing defenders to me, which created space for my teammates. I could read situations, and those were the kind of players who always impressed me most, someone like the 1980s Italian defender Franco Baresi, who could intuit the collective intentions of the opposing forward line; no one matched the depth of his understanding of the game. As a forward, the Bayern Munich player Thomas Müller is the same species; he seems able to ghost into the area unopposed; he identified space like no one else, and no one seemed able to track his movements.
– Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog seems a man who can offer an insight on any topic. From the joys of living in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, to Franco Baresi’s masterful reading of the game.
The only relevant artistic talent is the ability to deal with frustration. Most of what I produce is not good enough. It’s too complicated, too simple, or has been done before (by myself or others). This is and always will be frustrating. But I can only survive as an artist if I can constantly brush it off and start over again with childish enthusiasm. That is the most important superpower.
Be reckless. A piece won’t be great unless you risk it being terrible. By that I mean sometimes a drawing starts out nicely, but then I’m so afraid of ruining it that I become hesitant — which inevitably ruins it. That’s why you should…
…Deliberately ruin a drawing! This is liberating (and incredibly difficult) exercise. Make a drawing using your usual tools, then step on the gas and drive it into a wall at full speed. Make it pompously, unapologetically, irrevocably ugly and wrong.
Be less precious about your art. The benefit of this exercise: you remember that if you don’t like it, you can always do another one.
Draw like nobody’s watching. Nobody sees what you’re doing in your studio. You can make 97 bad drawings, and three great ones. As long as you only show the three good ones, people will believe you’re a great artist.
Trust the drawing to have its own life. I start with an idea from my head. By default this is derivative and predictable. When I start putting it on paper, it starts having its own agenda. It is only when I manage to let go of my original intentions, that something interesting begins to happen.
Accept that only a fraction of your work is “great”. (Whatever “great” means)!
Walk away, The come back. Wait a few days before deciding whether a piece is “great” or not. Drawing is hard and requires all your attention. Thinking about the merits of a piece is a waste of energy. You’ll be a much better judge tomorrow.
Don’t count the hours. Art is not efficient. Sometimes a good piece is born in minutes, but even then it’s usually surrounded by days of seemingly fruitless poking. Accept this and you’ll be much happier.
Sitting at my desk is always right. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking how to make good work. There are millions of tips and tricks and manifestos out there. But at the end there’s only one single truth for me: sit down and start drawing.
Really what Christoph is saying here is, loosen up! Get in front of your drawing board daily and draw!
I like printing. I get a real kick out of it. I mean sometimes when I’m feeding the press, I forget that’s nothing but an old broken-down machine. I think to myself, that’s a black monster who’s going to snap off my fingers if I don’t keep him tame. You know what I mean?
MR. HEALY
I often have the same image myself.
THE BOY
When I go out on deliveries, I always wear my apron because I want everybody in the street to know I’m a printer.
MR. HEALY
Boy, I never met a linotyper who liked his job.
THE BOY
They like their job on payday, I bet you.
MR. HEALY
They sit all day, plunking keys. There’s no craft to it. There’s no pride.
THE BOY
Nowadays, I don’t know you have to be so proud. Mister Healy, I just figure there ain’t much future in being a compositor. I mean, what’s wrong with linotyping? If the didn’t have linotype machines, how would they print all the books in the thousands and thousands of copies?
MR. HEALY
Are there so many good books around? Are the authors any more clever?
THE BOY
How are you going to set up daily newspapers? You can’t supply the public demand for printed matter by hand setting.
MR. HEALY
Are the people any wiser than they were a hundred years ago? Are they happier? This is the great American disease, boy! This passion for machines. Everybody is always inventing labor-saving devices. What’s wrong with labor? A man’s work is the sweetest thing he owns. It would do us a lot better to invent some labor-making devices. We’ve gone mad, boy, with this mad chase for comfort, and it’s sure we’re losing the very juice of living. It’s a sad business, boy, when they sit a row of printers down in a line, and the machine clacks, and the mats flip, and when it comes out, the printer has about as much joy of creation as the delivery boy. There’s no joy in this kind of life, boy–no joy. It’s a very hard hundred dollars a week, I’ll tell you that!
Intriguing contrast in this scene. Mr. Healy doesn’t view The Boy’s work as craft, but the boy does. He take genuine pride in his work.
In a way both Mr. Healy and The Boy are both right. Reminds me of when Spike Lee mentioned drama is created when two opposing perspectives are right (paraphrasing).
I disagree with Mr. Healy though. We’re not inventing enough laborsaving devices…
1. When faced with provocation to what someone has said, give it five minutes. Take a walk, or weed the garden, or chop some vegetables. Get your body involved: your body knows the rhythms to live by, and if your mind falls into your body’s rhythm, you’ll have a better chance of thinking.
2. Value learning over debating. Don’t “talk for victory.”
3. As best you can, online and off, avoid the people who fan flames.
4. Remember that you don’t have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right-mindedness.
5. If you do have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right-mindedness, or else lose your status in your community, then you should realize that it’s not a community but rather an Inner Ring.
6. Gravitate as best you can, in every way you can, toward people who seem to value genuine community and can handle disagreement with equanimity
7. Seek out the best and fairest-minded of people whose views you disagree with. Listen to them for a time without responding. Whatever they say, think it over.
8. Patiently, and as honestly as you can, assess your repugnances.
9. Sometimes the “ick factor” is telling; sometimes it’s a distraction from what matters.
10. Beware of metaphors and myths that do too much heavy cognitivie lifiting; notice what your “terministic screens” are directing your attention to — and what they’re directing your away from; look closely for hidden metaphors and beware the power of myth.
11. Try to describe others’ positions in the language that they use, without indulging in in-other-wordsing.
12. Be brave.
So many of the bits in this list is about building time between one’s initial reaction and delivering a wise response. Much of the wisdom here is to be comfortable with not responding immediately.
He had played almost all of his career since his defection to the United States in the National League, first for the Phillies, and then for the Mets. He had played centerfield, and then as his legs gave out and the surgeries mounted he switched to right; but since coming to the American League he had played nothing but designated hitter, never taking the field, spending the whole game on the bench until his turn to bat came around. Sometimes an aging player can flourish as the DH, smacking home runs at a decent clip and stretching his career by a couple of years. But hitting, though he did it magnificently, had always been only one part of Rodrigo Buendía’s game. As a younger player he had been one of the top outfielders in the game, covering vast distances, making legendary catches, throwing out runners at home plate from deep in the outfield grass. He had not been moved to the DH position, so much as reduced to it.
Passages like this is why I’ve kept my ticket aboard the Summerland locomotive. There’s whole pages where I give it a blank stare, hoping it will all make sense at the end. But the baseball bits, here Rodrigo Buendía’s back story, where Ethan, Jennifer T., Thor and co have all “jumped” (a form of sort-of time traveling and teleporting?) to Buendía’s compound in some mini-verse Cuba?
Weird.
Chabon, Michael. Summerland. United States, Thorndike Press, 2003.
There may be no writer more autobiographical than Yukio Mishima. Everything he wrote was about himself. The film Mishima is a portrait of the writer Mishima, and the music of Mishima is meant to add a further dimension to the film. With the Mishima material I used my total immersion strategy, reading every book in English I could find. I was very impressed with his writing. It was passionate, it was modern. In his life he had arrived at a transcendent experience that was at the core of what motivated him to be a writer. For all the writers I personally know, writing is a way of accommodating themselves to the world, of making the world a bearable place in which to live. Mishima became a writer in order to make the world understandable to himself.
Philip Glass
Glass, Philip. Words Without Music. New York: Liverwright Publishing, 2015.
The ferisher baseball lay warm and almost animate, a living thing, in his fingers, he recalled Peavine’s words: “A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.”
Or a November evening.
For the Rangers, World Series Champions.
Chabon, Michael. Summerland: A Novel. New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 2002. (pp332)
But the thing that we maybe haven’t said or touched on as much that just in your invocation of the rocking chair and sepia tones and so on looking back. Something about beauty and craft. If Stripe is a monstrously successful business, but what we make isn’t beautiful and Stripe doesn’t embody a culture of incredibly exacting craftsmanship, I’ll be much less happy. I think the returns to both of those things in the world are really high. I think even beyond the pecuniary or financial returns, I think the world is uglier than it needs to be.
It’s a free lunch where one can just do things well or poorly and beauty is not a rivalrous-ly good. We can just architecture, but my intuition is that more of Stripe’s success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like beautiful things and for rational reasons. Because what does a beautiful thing tell you?
Well, it tells you the person who made it really cared, and you can observe some superficial details, but probably they didn’t only care about those and then everything else in a very slapdash way. And so if you care about the infrastructure being holistically good, indexing on the superficial characteristics that you can actually observe is not an irrational thing to do.
When, on Halloween 1962, Thelonious Monk entered Columbia Records’ 30th Street Studios, New York, for the first time, he had a few old tricks and plenty of fresh treats in store for his then-expanding audience.
Writer unknown. From the backcover of the CD case 🙂
Let this spin on repeat:
“I say, play your own way. Don’t play what the public want – you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing – even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.”
Floodlights and Goalposts 