One of my favorite podcasts is Here’s the Thing, and on a recent episode host Alec Baldwin interviewed Viggo Mortensen about his latest film, Captain Fantastic. Towards the end he mentioned this:

“By taking the risk of trying hard means you are going to make mistakes, and then the most important thing is hopefully realizing that and doing something about it. Being a good dad is not a static thing. Having a good marriage isn’t a static thing. Neither is a democracy. Neither is a friendship. Tomorrow morning you have to start over, continue the process and make adjustments. And if you don’t… it’s a game that moves as you play, and if you don’t move you can’t play”

Viggo Mortensen, on Here’s The Thing

Mike Pesca hosts The Gist podcast on Slate, one of my favorite news/opinion shows. He had an excellent piece on May 12th about politics and elections, which I transcribed. I don’t know enough about the U.K. election to agree it was a good or bad thing, I’m merely fond of the questions and observations he makes here:

Imagine if you were a performer or a stand up comic, and you magically knew the jokes you could say that would get the audience to laugh. Reliable jokes. You’d probably say those jokes. Maybe you’d use those jokes as ballast, and from that reliable set of jokes maybe you’d experiment, or maybe not, maybe you’d just revel in the laughter. What if you were a playwright and you knew what audiences would like, I don’t mean you had the sense that they liked this sort of play, you really polled audiences. You knew the plots they liked, you knew the characters they liked, you knew how to write a play that everyone would generally say, yeah, that’s the sort of play I like.

What about you at a party. And someone is whispering in your ear… the anecdotes they’d like to hear. Maybe the quips they’d like to hear out of you. The stories they’d like…the phrases that will make them smile. That will make them think you are the kind of person they’re glad they invited. No matter how much of a rebel you think you are, I think it would be pretty hard to go against the script. Maybe you could do it here and there, as a toe touch, but generally, if you knew that these were the things you should do, say or act like to get in other people’s social graces you would do those things.

And what if you were running for office. And you knew what the people wanted to hear. Maybe some of the people, those in your party wanted to hear slightly different things than other people, but you’d probably say “I’d say some of those things to the people who need to hear it when they need to hear it” and then when… I become the nominee I’ll say the things all of the people want to hear. Well this is the state with politics today. The state with polling is that every politician knows what the right answer is. What the popular political answer is. And as much as people want to say “You have to do the things that are unpopular, that’s leadership” yeah, that’s also unemployment for a popularly elected politician.

…In the U.K. they call an election and then they have that election 6 weeks later. And there’s much less money in the election. Less money for TV and less money for polling. The politicians in the UK. do not know as much as the U.S. politicians know. Therefore U.K. politicians generally say more what they believe. And this is a good and useful thing. You might say “that’s a good and useful thing to have more honest politicians”. If you say what you believe than you can be exposed for having bad ideas. This short election span, this lack of someone whispering in your ear what is the exact right thing to say, it can expose a party, it can sweep those bad ideas out of office. That is exactly what happened in the U.K. I wish that could happen in the U.S. It leads to honesty. Honestly good ideas, but also, there is a virtue to these honestly bad ideas.”

Mike Pesca hosts The Gist podcast on Slate, one of my favorites. He had this fantastic piece on Wednesday, 2/11 which I transcribed. Fantastic commentary on news, media, entertainment and truth. He hints at narrative fallacy:

A white man in his fifties from NJ who faked news is being pilloried for betraying the audience by making us question our institutions and ask who can we really trust. A white man in his fifties from NJ who faked news is being celebrated for delighting the audience

The difference between Brian Williams and Jon Stewart is the difference between carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. We had two very different contracts with these two men in suits, sitting at desks, reading the news. One of them is a satirist, the other a fatherly figure with an old media, old transportation title: anchor. And from him we want sobriety. These guys who played, at least on air, a version of friends had such similar backgrounds: Jersey upbringings, sports in high school, great communicators.

Stewart, even when he was a stand-up, was best when riffing off of non-fiction. Williams, a truly witty man, an SNL host, reportedly sought out Jay Leno’s old job when he left the tonight show. He could have been locked into the stuffiest straight jacket in America, but he was ready to bust out and be funny.

And I reject by the way the contention that sense of humor is the antithesis of serious or believable: Lincoln, Kennedy, Churchill, great wits all. And even newsmen can be funny without losing their gravitas. Walter Cronkite did a guest spot on the Mary Tyler Moore show. For all the tsk’ing this week about how Cronkite wouldn’t have hosted Saturday Night Live. Well, no, you’re right: here was on CBS. Edwin Newman, esteemed NBC newsman, did host Saturday Night Live.

Brian Williams was extremely articulate and that was a key to his appeal and maybe his undoing. I’ve heard it said that in these last few days that he wasn’t so much a journalist as he was a celebrity. One is supposed to be a virtuous pursuit and the other term is dismissive. But think of the overlap. A journalist is a storyteller, at his best a communicator, elements of charisma and a feel for the dramatic play into this. Knowing how to tell an anecdote, maybe even spin a yarn, helped burnish the Williams brand to the point where if Scott Pelley were caught in a lie it would be more confusing, but less of a national scandal.

In fact, right now, under our noses, there is a similar charade being perpetrated apparently some guy David Muir is claiming to be the anchor of ABC World News tonight and no one is even fact checking that claim.

…it is strange how news about journalists doesn’t go under covered. The first is to note that in my experience the closer a news story adheres to the rules of narrative the more you should be suspicious that the events actually transpired as described. I am not just talking about shlocky, obviously manipulative “journalism”. I’m talking about the best journalism. I’m talking about works that have won Pulitzers, the radio shows you love, the non-fiction authors who are the most acclaimed. They’re not lying, but there is a shading. A leaving out of complicating details. A landing on salient points in a way that is satisfying to our species’ desire for linear tales. But antithetical to the messiness of the world.

Secondly it doesn’t surprise me that at the center of this was a war zone exaggeration… war correspondent was a gap in William’s resume before he became an anchor. So it doesn’t surprise me that he’d fill in this gap with such, lets say, abandon. The funny thing about all of this is that anchorman is the ultimate position of illusory importance. When they are on the air they seem so vital to the culture, but when they go away they remembered very little. Peter Jennings died less than ten years ago this summer. Ask a young person if they know who he is. Jennings drew 5 million more viewers a night that Williams does now.

But this satirists. The jesters. They seem to have more staying power. Will Rodgers. Mark Twain. Aristophanes. And now Jon Stewart. None of them really claimed to tell the truth. But of course, they all did.

[transcription by me]

Steinbeck on writing:

Writing is a very silly business at best. There is a certain ridiculousness about putting down a picture of life. And to add to the joke – one must withdraw for a time from life in order to set down that picture. And third one must distort one’s own way of life in order in some sense to simulate the the normal in other lives. Having gone through all this nonsense what emerges may well be the palest of reflections. Oh! It’s a real horse’s ass business. The mountain labors and groans and strains and the tinniest of rodents comes out. And the greatest foolishness of all lies in the fact that to do it all, the writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true. If he does not, the work is not even worth what it might otherwise have been.

All this is a preface to the fear and uncertainties which clammer over a man so that in his silly work he thinks he must be crazy because he is so alone. If what he is doing is worth doing – why don’t more people do it? Such questions. But it does seem a desperately futile business and one which must be very humorous to watch. Intelligent people live their lives as nearly on a level as possible – try to be good, don’t worry if they aren’t, hold to such opinions as are comforting and reassuring and throw out those which are not. And in the fullness of their days they die with none of the tearing pain of failure because having tried nothing they have not failed. These people are much more intelligent than the fools who rip themselves to pieces on nonsense.

…but I believe the great ones, Plato, Lao Tze, Buddha, Christ, Paul and the great Hebrew prophets are not remembered for negation or denial. Not that it is necessary to be remembered but there is one purpose in writing I can see, beyond simply doing it interestingly. It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage. If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this: Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice. And how any negative or despairing approach can pretend to be literature I do not know. It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would milleniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth, and a few remnants of fossilized jaw bones, a few teeth in strata of limestone would be the only mark our species would have left on the earth.

From Writers at Work, The Paris review interviews, 4th series.

This quote appears in chapter 2 of The Myths of Innovation:

“It used to be said that the facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context… a fact is like a sack – it won’t stand up until you put something in it.”

—E.H. Carr (From the excellent What is History?)

 

Here’s the quote of the week:

We’re all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

– Charles Bukowski

I begin my novels knowing what happens. I write endings first. I write last sentences, sometimes last paragraphs first. I write collision course stories. There is always something coming that the reader anticipates.  What you can’t know is when and who the casualties and survivors will be, but you see the what. You know what’s coming…

Many of my wrestling friends find it odd that I’m a writer. Just as many of friends in the writing world find it odd that for so many years I was a wrestler and a wrestling coach. But they seem very similar to me. In both cases, you have to be devoted to tireless repetition and small details for many more hours than you will be in competition. You will be with a nameless workout partner, a sparring partner, drilling the same outside single leg dive, inside collar tie, hundreds upon thousands of times. Well, how many times as a writer should you rewrite the same sentence? The same paragraph? The same chapter? If you’re good you never tire of that.

I don’t intend to stop. Dropping dead at my desk sounds pretty good to me.

– John Irving, from interview on NPR

Mark Twain on where ideas come from, in a letter to Helen Keller after she was accused of plagiarism:

Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that “plagiarism” farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington’s battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did.These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.

Source

When asked what surprised him most about humanity, he said:

‘Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.’

This quote is often attributed to the Dalai Lama, but this is disputed. I love the quote though.

Also see: the use and misuse of quoting people.

Quote of the day:

“I see worlds and worlds of rooms and desks where men and women are gathered around in robes, coats, suits and dresses to say what I shall write speak talk and sing. And they tell me that I am locked and barred from singing the true feelings of my nakedest skin. You are gathered here this morning to burn my finest papers. You are here in this room, at this very hour, to tell me that there is something ugly, vile, vulgar about me somewhere, somehow, some way. I excuse your ignorance. I am not ashamed of me nor ashamed of myself. My body is naked now and it was born naked.”  —Woody Guthrie

 

Here’s a good one from Grohl’s Grammy award acceptance speech:

“To me this award means a lot because it shows that the human elements of making music is what’s most important. Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that’s the most important thing for people to do. It’s not about being perfect, it’s not about sounding absolutely correct, it’s not about what goes on in a computer. It’s about what goes on in here (points to heart) and it’s about what  goes on in here (points to head).”

David Grohl

The quote of the day:

“All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The more I’ve learned, the less I believe it. Power doesn’t always corrupt. What power always does is reveal. When a guy gets into a position where he doesn’t have to worry anymore, then you see what he wanted to do all along.”

-Robert Caro, Interviewed in Esquire, 12/16/09

Some folks at Pixar, like their President Ed Catmul, offer great and true insight into the creative process. Here’s Lasseter with an excellent quote:

“I will never let a story reel go into production without it being great… I can show you early versions of the Pixar films when they are terrible. Every Pixar film was the worst motion picture made at one time or another. People don’t believe that but it’s true. We don’t give up on the films… we work, and re-work these story reels and [only] then we go into production. We then do the staging with the camera work. We go and record the dialogue with the actors. We’ll do the animation. Meanwhile, all the things that have been modeled that’s in the set and the characters has to be colored, with texture, and then it’s brought together, and lit, and we do the final rendering… it’s a lengthy process. It’s hand made… it takes 4 years.”

John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer at Pixar, on Charlie Rose, 12/5/11

 

“I don’t write to get something through to somebody. I write for various reasons. Some songs I write for the pleasure of writing the song. It doesn’t have any great meaning, it’s just a song. Songs are nice. Kids sing songs all the time for the pleasure of the singing. The pleasure of the rhythm. London bridge is falling down… There’s a pleasure in singing the songs, there is a pleasure in writing the songs. Some songs you try and express yourself emotionally. Those are different songs for me. And they express what I feel and they relieve tensions that I feel when I express them. But I don’t think about getting through to somebody.”

– Paul Simon (From “Songs of America” documentary)

Here’s the quote of the day. I wish more stars in all workplaces felt this way (Although Kobe has plenty of history of being less than coachable):

“[Brown] was not afraid to criticize the star guard [Kobe Bryant] after the exhibition opener Monday against the Clippers, pointing out to reporters that Bryant was one of many Lakers whose defense was subpar.

Brown called a timeout less than a minute into the third quarter that night after Bryant left Clippers guard Chauncey Billups open for a three-point attempt. “That’s his job,” Bryant said. “I’d be upset if he was letting me skate through things. If you make mistakes, it’s a coach’s responsibility to point those out. If he can’t point that out to me, he has no chance in pointing that out to anybody else.”

From The L.A. Times article on Lakers coach Mike Brown

“A lot of my job is taking what they bring and turning it into something. This is a chord change, this is this, this a melody, ok – but what does that mean? Where am I? If I close my eyes, where am I? What does this music mean?”

– Eddie Vedder, about Pearl Jam (From Pearl Jam 20)

 

American Masters recently released a two part documentary about Woody Allen (available online in U.S.), which I highly recommend if you are interested in learning about the creative process. While I loved his early movies, I didn’t follow the rest of his career closely (although his recent Midnight in Paris was excellent). Regardless, this documentary is an excellent balance of direct commentary from Allen, choice clips from his films and insight from critics, co-workers, family and others.

Here are two gems:

“There are a lot of surprises that happen between writing it, doing it, and seeing it on the screen, most surprises are negative. Most surprises are that you thought something was good, or funny, and it’s not. I’ve made just about 40 films in my life and so few of them have really been worth anything. Because it’s not easy – if it’s easy it wouldn’t be fun, it wouldn’t be valuable.”

“By the time you get the thing together it’s such a mess, and you’re flitting around the editing room making all sorts of compromises, and saying well gee, if I put the last scene first, and the middle scene at the end of the picture, and get a narrator, and use dissolves, and use opticals, and put this in slow motion and use titles here, you’re struggling for survival. And I still screw up a lot of the time. So that’s why I’ve often said… the only thing standing between greatness is me. There is no excuse.”

-Woody Allen, American Masters Documentary

“Whenever I start working on a song, I immediately try to forget everything, to empty my hands and head of anything that may be hanging over from another song or album. I try to approach it like, ‘This is the first time I’ve ever played guitar. What am I going to do?”

– The Edge, U2

This is basically the idea of Shoshin, or beginners mind.

My favorite Buddha quote, in honor of his birthday:

Believe nothing,
no matter where you read it,
or who has said it,
not even if I have said it,
unless it agrees with your own reason
and your own common sense.

Buddha

From an interesting series in The Atlantic on first drafts, and creativity:

After the first pass, the painting is wrong—at least in that it’s not complete yet. Because it’s a face, I can’t leave it turquoise, I can’t leave it purple. I love having rights and wrongs. You have to hang in there until you get it to read correctly. I just work intuitively and start making corrections. The colors combine like words into a sentence, or notes into a chord. Then I’ll rotate the painting so that a different axis is up. That allows me to reanalyze all the shapes and colors. The system seems totally mechanical and so systematized, but in fact the thing about limitations like these is that they free you to be more spontaneous and intuitive. The painting is always in a state of flux.

-Chuck Close, as told to Alex Hoyt for The Atlantic

Theres an interview with Close and singer Paul Simon here.

The series includes short articles on creative process by Paul Simon, Frank Gehry, T.C. Boyle and more.