Impulse

There’s noth­ing quite like a man­i­cally enthu­si­as­tic British pro­fes­sor.  Benjamin Zander’s TED talk is excel­lent.  Switching eas­ily between comic and pro­found, he demon­strates how clas­si­cal music can move every­one, and smoothly weaves in excel­lent lessons on lead­er­ship and opti­mism.  I want to grow up to be like him someday.

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“A poem is never fin­ished, only aban­doned”
 — Paul Valery

Many have gen­er­al­ized this quote to apply to all artis­tic endeav­ors.  On a video for current.tv, Ira Glass pointed out that all artists have excel­lent taste.  They have a clear taste or vision of what work in a par­tic­u­lar medium could be, and they cre­ate because they are dri­ven to demon­strate that taste.  But, there’s often a gap between the artist’s taste and his skill level.  That gap causes end­less frus­tra­tion, and in part gets to the phe­nom­e­non behind the above quote.  Often, an artist’s taste exceeds his skill (or mate­ri­als), thus can never fin­ish a par­tic­u­lar work; only aban­don it and move on to the next project. 

Tonight, I’m con­tem­plat­ing this choice for my movie.  I’ve been work­ing on it off and on for two years now, and have com­pleted two full revi­sions of it.  On one hand, I could con­tinue pound­ing my head against it, try­ing to make it enter­tain­ing to gen­eral audi­ences.  I’m con­tem­plat­ing a com­plete re-cut that would help do just that, and I’d learn a whole lot along the way.  I have no idea how long it would take given that it’s taken me two years to get here. 

On the other hand, I could just decide that the audi­ence for this movie is only those who have par­tic­i­pated in the Race Across America or are endurance cycling enthu­si­asts.  If so, I don’t have to worry about all the expo­si­tion that moti­vates the major re-cut.  I could just con­tinue with the cur­rent cut and fin­ish in a month or so.  And move on to other projects.  Of course, this path involves a low­er­ing of expec­ta­tions for myself — always a bit dif­fi­cult for me.

Hmmmm.….  (where the heck did I put poor Yorick)

While I pon­der this like Hamlet, do go watch the Ira Glass video.  It’s incred­i­bly handy for any­one in the sto­ry­telling trade.  Heck, I might go so far as to say any­one doing any kind of cre­ative work, but then, I’m a fan.  Click the link, then click On Storytelling, then on Ira Glass.

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The FISA Amendments Act comes up for a vote tomor­row in the Senate.  For those not in the know: FISA extends the 4th Amendment so that wire­tap­ping or elec­tronic sur­veil­lance requires a war­rant.  The Amendments Act com­ing up tomor­row guts FISA so that the exec­u­tive branch can lis­ten to your phone con­ver­sa­tions with­out a war­rant.  At issue here too is whether or not the tele­coms who allowed war­rant­less wire­taps (even before 9/11!!!) should be granted immunity.

Here’s a really inter­est­ing video that describes many issues and actu­ally changed my mind on a few things:

Regardless of whether you’re for or against this, time is of the essence to influ­ence your sen­a­tors.  EFF has made it easy to find your sen­a­tors & call them; just type your zip code in here. 

Myself, I think that if elec­tronic sur­veil­lance were around in 1789, they’d have writ­ten it straight into the 4th Amendment.  Further, in this world where infor­ma­tion is power, keep­ing FISA keeps a bal­ance of power between gov­ern­ment & cit­i­zens as well as between the branches of gov­ern­ment.  As all the iden­tity theft prob­lems have shown: infor­ma­tion is more impor­tant nowa­days than phys­i­cal belong­ings — if it takes a war­rant to search my phys­i­cal belong­ings, why should it not take a war­rant to search or tap my information?

I used to think that we should give the tele­coms immu­nity if it means we can keep FISA strong.  The video above changed my mind.  Immunity means no law­suits, which means no inves­ti­ga­tions into what the gov­ern­ment did, which means no way to hold the gov­ern­ment account­able.  We have to hold every­one account­able to hold the gov­ern­ment accountable. 

I just called my sen­a­tors and it takes only about 60 sec.  Pretty amaz­ing when you can defend your con­sti­tu­tion in only 60 sec­onds (and a whole lot eas­ier than what sol­diers in Iraq have to do).

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I didn’t really know much about Buckminster Fuller until a recent New Yorker arti­cle edu­cated me.  The inven­tor of the geo­desic dome & mod­u­lar hous­ing was a pretty wacky guy.  Though nearly all of his ideas flopped, he had some good ideas in his approach.  My favorite involves cling­ing to a piano cover as a life preserver:

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‘If you are in a ship­wreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top … that comes along makes a for­tu­itous life pre­server,’ Fuller once wrote. ‘But this is not to say that the best way to design a life pre­server is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are cling­ing to a great many piano tops in accept­ing yesterday’s for­tu­itous contrivings.’

[from the New Yorker arti­cle by Elizabeth Kolbert]

Often, the biggest hur­dle in solv­ing a prob­lem is find­ing the out­dated or invalid assump­tions you’re habit­u­ally mak­ing.  These assump­tions are the piano tops in our think­ing.  Alaska Airlines pro­vides a great exam­ple of how get­ting rid of an assump­tion allowed them to redesign the check-in process to save $8 mil­lion a year.  (Documented in Hustle & Flow at fastcompany.com; via Signal vs Noise):

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The new design will cre­ate sig­nif­i­cant cost sav­ings. Seventy-three per­cent of Alaska’s Anchorage pas­sen­gers now check in using kiosks or the Web, com­pared with just 50% across the air­line industry.

I won­der how many old-school assump­tions the rest of the air­lines are mak­ing.  Perhaps if they found them, bank­ruptcy wouldn’t be the indus­try norm.  It also makes me think of Amory Lovins’ TED talk on end­ing US depen­dence on for­eign oil (his book describes his plan in detail).  One of the basic assump­tions he breaks is that end­ing the oil depen­dency is a costly, com­plex prob­lem.  He then goes on to show that the solu­tion is not com­plex and pays for itself as it’s imple­mented.  How many of our world’s most press­ing prob­lems are blocked on the assump­tion that solu­tions are com­plex and costly? 

It’s not just a busi­ness prob­lem — this hap­pens every­where.  Scientific dis­cov­er­ies get hid­den or con­fused by uncon­scious assump­tions in inter­pret­ing data.  Writers get stuck resolv­ing their plot lines.  The “ah ha!” moment usu­ally comes when you dis­cover the unnec­es­sary assump­tion you’ve been mak­ing.  Suddenly your think­ing is clear and a solu­tion seems almost obvi­ous (though often feels unconventional).

Another exam­ple: In Million Dollar Murray, Malcolm Gladwell points out that pub­lic pol­icy on home­less­ness is based on the assump­tion that home­less­ness fol­lows a Gaussian bell curve — that the major­ity of home­less peo­ple were per­ma­nently so.  He shows that home­less­ness fol­lows more of a power-law curve — that most home­less peo­ple are only in that sit­u­a­tion for a few months, then never again.  Only a few home­less peo­ple are reg­u­larly on the streets.  If you change the assump­tion, thus the pol­icy, you could save gov­ern­ments mil­lions and bet­ter serve both the tem­porar­ily and per­ma­nently homeless.

All this reminds me of my favorite scene from The Contender.  It’s not actu­ally in the movie, but in the deleted scenes sec­tion of the DVD.  While I agree it was super­flu­ous to the movie, it is a gem of a scene.  In it, the White House Press Secretary and Chief of Staff are sit­ting in the oval office, exhausted by the incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult process of con­firm­ing a new Vice President (expertly played by Joan Allen).  The President (Jeff Bridges) comes in, sits down and says,

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“You got five apes in a cage. You got a banana hang­ing by a string in the mid­dle of the cage. You got some stairs going to the banana. Now, pretty soon, one of those apes is gonna go for the banana. As soon as he hits the stairs, you take a hose and you spray all five apes with freez­ing cold water for five minutes.

Now, some time passes, and pretty soon another one of the apes is going to make the same attempt with the same result: all five apes get sprayed with the cold water.

Now you turn off the cold water. You never use it again. One of the apes is going to go for the banana. He hits the stairs. The other four apes pounce on him, and beat the shit out of him. OK. Understandable.

Now you replace one of those orig­i­nal apes with a new ape. After a while, that new ape, he’s going to spy that banana, and when he goes for the stairs, the other four apes are going to jump on him and beat the shit out of him. Right?

Now time passes. You replace another one of the orig­i­nal apes with a new ape. That new ape is going to go for the banana. The other four apes are going to beat the shit out of him — includ­ing the first new ape, who as no idea why he’s enthu­si­as­ti­cally beat­ing the shit out of this poor guy, nor why he, him­self, had the shit beat out of him. Ok?

Now, you keep replac­ing the orig­i­nal apes with new apes until finally, you’ve got a cage filled with five apes who have never had the freez­ing cold water sprayed on them, and nev­er­the­less, not one of the apes will ever attempt to climb those stairs again.

Why not?

Because, that’s the way it’s always been done around here.” 

By the end, the apes oper­ate under the assump­tion that reach­ing for the banana is bad, and must be pun­ished.  But, that assump­tion is out­dated; made, in fact, before any of them came to the cage.  In real­ity, since we’ve shut off the water, there’s noth­ing other than that assump­tion that pre­vents any ape from get­ting the banana.  Just like peo­ple who clung to piano tops don’t see the life preservers. 

It’s so easy to be ruled by assump­tions you’re not aware of.  I think it’s help­ful to break these assump­tions when­ever possible. 

Here’s mine for the day: that the only way for me to be pro­duc­tive on a project is to spend all day work­ing on it (this assump­tion ignores the evi­dence that I’ll pro­cras­ti­nate end­lessly, search­ing for a huge block of time to work).   To break it, I’ve spent no more than 1 hour on any given project.  As a result, I’ve got­ten a bunch done.  It feels good.

What uncon­scious assump­tions are you mak­ing?  Go find one today and break it. 

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Not!

I’ve heard that New Zealand looks very sim­i­lar to the Pacific Northwest.  I think some­one took that too lit­er­ally.  Here we are, one week from sum­mer, and we have the same weather as the Kiwis have one week before their winter. 

I’m glad I have a good win­ter coat to enjoy this sum­mer in!

Update: Not look­ing much bet­ter.  Flights from Seattle to Auckland start at $2044.  Hmm…

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I’m incred­i­bly cre­ative at avoid­ing cre­ative work.  I’ll find myself with a spare half hour, and think, “Hey, I’ll do some­thing cre­ative!”.  Photography? I can’t set up the lights & shoot enough in that time.  Writing? I can’t really get into a story with only 30 min­utes.  Film edit­ing?  I’ve got to watch 70 min­utes of footage first.  OK, maybe exer­cise?  I’m too tired.  Does this sound at all familiar? 

I think all cre­ative peo­ple excel at this in some way.  Meanwhile, count­less men­tors pre­scribe doing some cre­ative work every day.  I’ve often para­phrased the maxim, “When all hell breaks loose, make art.”  So, it’s impor­tant to get stuff done regularly.

I’m becom­ing a huge fan of incre­men­tal­ism: doing tiny bits of work instead of huge projects.  This prac­tice is a great rem­edy for my delu­sions of grandeur.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sat­is­fy­ing myself with tiny lit­tle projects: given 15 min­utes, I’ll set up lights for a photo.  I won’t shoot; not enough time.  But I’ll set them up so in a future 15 min­utes, I’ll get to shoot.  The result — other than my din­ing room being filled with pho­tog­ra­phy gear — is that I’m get­ting work done and feel­ing bet­ter for it. 

Early this week, I got sev­eral bits of bad news in just a few hours time.  I was all geared up for a lovely bout of melan­choly.  Instead, though, I looked at my list of stuff I wanted to do, and just started back on the list — doing lit­tle things I know I wanted to do.  In about an hour, I was feel­ing great again.  Doing micro­scopic cre­ative projects was a bet­ter rem­edy for the blues than any­thing I’ve pre­vi­ously encoun­tered.  I guess they were right: “make art”.  (I note that it doesn’t say “make great art”). 

Today I was noodling on this, and for what­ever rea­son, JFK’s famous quote came to mind: “Ask not what your coun­try can do for you — ask what you can do for your coun­try.”  Yeah, I don’t know why it propped into my head either, but I decided to riff on it a bit.  It always helps me to have a lit­tle catchy mantra to remind myself to do things — like make art when blue. 

Here’s what I came up with: “Ask not how time con­strains you — ask how you can exploit your time.”  Not as melo­di­ous as JFK, but it gets the job done.  And, I like how it demon­strates the master/slave role reversal.

However it’s phrased, the les­son I’m learn­ing comes down to — accept no excuses; make stuff; I’ll feel bet­ter for it. 

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The last movie I shot stills for, Stanley Cuba, is now avail­able for pre-orders on amazon! 

Now that I think of it, another movie I worked on is also on ama­zon: Police Beat (in which I worked under the glo­ri­ous title 2nd 2nd Assistant Director — yes, that’s two 2nds).

Ahh, it’s nice to see projects come to completion.

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The Economist has an inter­est­ing brief arti­cle on why gov­ern­ment use of the web has been inef­fec­tive while in the pri­vate sec­tor, the web has been a pri­mary dri­ving force in the econ­omy.  This got me think­ing about what would hap­pen if we really did have uni­ver­sal healthcare.

The econ­o­mist points out that because there is no com­pe­ti­tion in gov­ern­ment — you get only one per coun­try — there’s no com­pe­ti­tion or drive to make things effi­cient.  “Failure in bureau­cracy means not bank­ruptcy but writ­ing self-justifying memos, and at worst a trans­fer else­where. Bureaucrats plead that just a bit more time and money will fix the clunky mon­sters they have created.” 

Further, imple­ment­ing effi­cient online ser­vices often require a dif­fer­ent per­son­al­ity than is often found in bureau­cra­cies: “The exam­ples of good e-government in our spe­cial report have a com­mon fac­tor: a tough-minded leader at the top, will­ing to push change through against the protests of cor­rupt or incom­pe­tent vested interests.”

So what hap­pens if we have uni­ver­sal health care?   The health care & insur­ance indus­try is already hor­ri­bly laden with paper­work and bureau­cracy.  It’s ripe for online & elec­tronic effi­cien­cies.  But, if you elim­i­nate the already slim com­pe­ti­tion, and encour­age more bureau­cratic per­son­al­i­ties to have power, will it just get worse?  Will med­ical costs (which every­one would bear) actu­ally go up because of sys­tem & infor­ma­tion inefficiencies?  

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I’ve been send­ing my resume around, sniff­ing out job oppor­tu­ni­ties in the tech world again. A friend of mine, curi­ous at this choice after spend­ing 5 years on other cre­ative pur­suits, asked the good ques­tion: “Why?” I liked me response enough that I decided to post it here:

Funny how paths don’t go straight, but in more of a cir­cle.  It’s a bit like the movie It’s a Wonderful Life (vis­i­ble in it’s entirety on google) — Jimmy Stewart keeps try­ing to travel to dis­tant lands and adven­tures, only to come to appre­ci­ate later what he already had all around him in his home town. 

My story is just like the clas­sic:  Once upon a time I worked in a fortress of soft­ware and grew to hate it.  I thought I was bored of tech, so I left the land of tech­nol­ogy for the radi­ant fields of cre­ativ­ity.  I made movies in the land of film­mak­ing, hunted Definitive Moments in the land of pho­tog­ra­phy, wrote sto­ries in the halls of fic­tion, and even rode the roller coaster of startups.

I noticed that these cre­ative careers didn’t seem all roman­tic and glowy as they had seemed.  In fact, because I had walked away from every­thing I was good at (in the tech world) to do things I had barely done before, it was quite a bit harder.  Further, it never really “felt right”.

Meanwhile, I was con­stantly play­ing with tech — prob­a­bly about 40hrs / week.

So, I climbed a craggy rock in my mind and thought about what I enjoy: imag­in­ing new things, cre­atively solv­ing prob­lems, build­ing things that hadn’t existed before, syn­the­siz­ing new ideas, work­ing on some­thing that demanded an inten­sity in bal­ance with how pas­sion­ate I felt about it, work­ing with oth­ers, learn­ing new things.  These are all things I can do in any field. It’s all design — whether it be soft­ware design, graphic design, story design, etc.

Why not do all that in a field I have a ton of expe­ri­ence, skills, and inter­est?  Meanwhile, I can get an extra help­ing in the so called “cre­ative” arts. 

After 5 years, I finally had come to under­stand wis­dom in Hugh MacLeod’s book, How to be Creative, namely: “Keep your day job”.   (I read that book 4 years ago; I guess it took one year per word to sink in)

I hadn’t got­ten burned out by tech at my old job, but by the fact that I was up in the senior man­age­ment cloud, man­ag­ing peo­ple instead of doing all those cre­ative things I listed above. 

With that, I turned my metaphor­i­cal horse around and rode back home to the land of tech — via a con­ve­nient sun­set, of course.

Now, this all doesn’t mean I’m aban­don­ing every­thing I did in the last five years — I’ve had too much fun doing it.  I’m just real­iz­ing that there’s ways to have my cake and eat it too.

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Proving you can’t take the geek out of the geek: The lat­est issue of American Photo, and the FontShop newslet­ter came in today’s mail.  Charlize Theron, dev­as­tat­ingly beau­ti­ful as always, appears on the cover of American Photo with a head­line promis­ing more pic­tures inside.  The FontShop newslet­ter, on the other hand, con­tains spec­i­mens of the lat­est fonts and essays on graphic design and typography.

Guess which one I opened instantly.

(font cred­its: Pique’n’meex by Kevin King, via DaFont.com; Trebuchet via Microsoft)

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