Author, writer, malcontent. Reader, procrastinator, humourist, employee, raconteur, cynic, commentator, introvert, daydreamer, sceptic, idealist, loner, philosopher, sharp shooter. … Ok, not sharp shooter.
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Today author & raconteur Lee Battersby has published what amounts to one of my pub-style rants on the nature of things, over at the Battersblog. This time: carrots. Part of Lee’s examination of art & writing.
And if none of that makes sense to you, you should probably go back to the beginning.
Thanks, Lee, for including me. 
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Was lucky enough to attend the Alan Ball interview at the Opera House tonight. He’s a warm, funny man & down to earth, surprised, I think, by the event & the crowd. I thought: this is what you get when you talk to a real writer, that acknowledgement of how hard won the successes are, & how constant the failures. And what interested me most was his inspirations, where they’d come from and where they’d eventually lead.
He was writing the Cybill Shepherd vehicle, Cybill, many years ago, writing what he called “moments of shit”. Moments, I would paraphrase, of cloying sentimentality, averaging one a week for three years. And at night, at 2am, he’d sit awake at his desk writing a movie that would express his rage. And he called that movie American Beauty.
Right before Alan (sorry, I just can’t refer to a human being as ‘Ball’, it sounds … weird) was nominated for an Oscar for American Beauty, he had moved onto a job writing a sitcom about a talking dog, & hating the ‘tv sitcom gulag’. But luckily for him, he won that Oscar & the talking dog sitcom got canned & he got to move on. To an idea that was pitched to him by an exec at HBO.
“We want a show about a family who runs a funeral home, we think you’re the guy to do it,” she said. Something clicked in Alan’s brain, the idea of death and dark, dark humour. And so – despite being contracted for another year of talking dog – he wrote a pilot.
And HBO said, “We like it, but it feels like you’re playing safe. Can you make the family more fucked up?”
Alan said, “Yeah. I can do that.”
See, that’s what I find most interesting about the creative process. That sometimes the grain of sand that starts the pearl comes from someone else, some other source that triggers your brain and you cannot NOT do what they’ve aluded to, even though the idea may not have been yours. The expression of that idea becomes all you can do. I’ve had some moments of that, sometimes, & if I can step outside my existing frustrations, I realise that the two big projects coming out this year with my name on the cover are BOTH grains of sand that began with someone else finding a trigger that set my brain in a direction that had to be realised. Which makes me just a little bit even-more-gladder for those other people.
And the reassuring idea that even when you’re in a gulag, there could be something awesome about to happen for you outside its walls.
At least, I fcking hope so.
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I’m slowly rediscovering the joys of blogs lately, though trying to recall how & with what tools I was ever able to stay on top of all the juicy feeds & blogs & advice & sundry out there. Why, just today I discovered a comic book with invisible ink dialogue (thank-you, Warren Ellis) & an artist who makes portraits out of pencil shavings (Kyle Bean).
As further organising of my electronic life, yesterday I started re-labelling old email filters, as their folder names had become nonsensical in the march of time, & discovered a folder that’s been quietly collecting the poets.org Poem A Day for, oh, at least a year now (didn’t this thing used to run only in April each year?). I also managed to unsubscribe from about a dozen ‘special offer’ newsletters that, frankly, I never even read. I notice lj tells me I have about 1999 unread messages, but I figure it’s either a) those hundreds of alerts I set up for when my favourite bloggers blogged (which, er, I then stopped reading a while back), or b) all that Russian spam I’ve been getting on my journal.
I remember Lily C blogging about a house move years ago, & some spectacular advice she received: give yourself the gift of more space. That adage always stuck with me. And now I’m using it to dig my way out from under this pile of electronic wreckage. Because that’s what it feels like: wreckage. An online equivalent to the dump where Jupiter Jones secreted his hideaway in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Three Investigators (hey, what a great bunch of books! I haven’t thought about them in years, but suddenly I’m right back there with Jupiter, Pete & Bob with his weird metal leg cast. What was with that, anyhow?). I’ve been living in the middle of an electronic junkyard for the last year or so, the walls slowly caving in while I stare into a blue screen, oblivious to what’s teetering around me. With the walls punched out, I’ve scored some electronic white space.
Now to remind myself to be selective about what I use that space for.
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You know, when someone roams the world photographing the first hundred people they find in each city (who agree to be photographed), & then average those hundred faces & call each composite by the city name — it’s surprising how similar we all look.
Or, well, maybe it isn’t.
But somewhere in there is a nice philosophical lesson in celebrating our similarities. Be nice to do it without losing our differences, though, eh?
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“Is it my role as an artist to say something, to express, to be expressive? I think it’s my role as an artist to bring to expression, it’s not my role to be expressive. I’ve got nothing particular to say, I don’t have any message to give anyone. But it is my role to bring to expression, let’s say, to define means that allow phenomenological and other perceptions which one might use, one might work with, and then move towards a poetic existence.”
– Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor’s art is beautiful, but he doesn’t set out to make it beautiful. Some pieces smack of spirituality, but he doesn’t set out to make it spiritual. What he does is design a space for the viewer, to allow the viewer to insert themselves into the art. Like with his giant Chicago piece, Cloud Gate: it reflects the sky and the people around it.
I love the generosity of his view: that art is there to draw expression out of the viewer, not to impose the view of the artist.
It’s a reversal typical of Kapoor: his Space as Object looks like a box full of emptiness; Turning the World Inside Out II does exactly what it promises to the viewer’s gaze. And works such as Yellow feature a hollow at the centre that Kapoor repeats and updates over and over. An absence at the centre and yet a place that fixes the gaze and makes us think of infinity and mortality. Another trademark is the deep blood-red found in pieces like Her Blood, with saucers of giant reflective material that look both convex and concave all at once: an over-sized visual illusion brought to life. And also Mother as a Mountain, where shape and colour are impossible to divide.
Just beautiful.
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In honour of a lovely weekend (spent partly at the fantastic Finders Keepers Markets in Sydney), I present to you Anna-Wili Highfield’s fabulous paper art.
Plenty of art at the Finders Keepers Market, much of it wearable. I found pressed metal is in, & so are teapots. I bought some $6 origami flowers & a stunning leather laptop bag that makes me WANT to be an author on the run. And now, too soon, the weekend is over.
In writing news: 32 scenes into what I’m calling the Colossal Re-Write. Slowly sloooowly … catchee … storee.
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I love a good Friday night off from social engagement, committment, plans, duties, things-to-do. A Friday night on the lounge with a good book and some Law and Order episodes on TV.
And I love new pretty links.
Today:
Looking for business card inspiration, I found this awesomeness:
http://creativebits.org/cool_business_card_designs
Looking for the gift for the girl with everything? How about designing her some new shoes:
http://www.shoesofprey.com/
And here, a local blog on craft and pretty, inspirational things:
http://dailyimprint.blogspot.com/
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This /w cheeseburgers is rather wonderful and I don’t know why.
But isn’t all great art like that? A little bit more, a little bit ‘other than’ something that’s easily put into words?
Also little naked person storage is kinda funny. ;p
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Toothbrush, check, passport, check, notes for panel, check, copies of A Book of Endings to use as beercoasters give-aways, check, list of MEXICAN places to eat in San Francisco, check, US dollars (now over AUD$0.90, keep ‘em coming), check. What HAVE I forgotten?!
While I shut down my browser for the first time in weeks, here are some pretty things:
* Via Ellen Datlow, Vivian Maier‘s street photography of Chicago in the 50s-70s. Awesome.
* Livia Marin‘s wonderful sculptures of Broken Things. I would like for one of these to be cover art on my novel, which was called Broken Places, but which I might rename in honour of Marin’s work. I love it.
Possibly a few more distracted posts like this before I fly out tomorrow. Ahhh, Air NZ, how I love your comfy seats, supreme little TVs & excellent New Zealand reds with my meals.
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is this:
Steamy Window, Alyssa Monks
And get this, it’s a painting. See more of Alyssa Monks’ work here and at her website.
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Yes, still with the lurgy. Which gives me plenty more time to surf the net. Even managed to do some writing on the Great Unsaleable (ie. novel) today. If it wasn’t for the poor health, I could really get used to this lifestyle.
In today’s best pickings:
Lev Grossman responds to the responses he garnered in that whole thing about plot & genre from the other day (you might remember that).
Nicholas Jones, Book Sculptor & Bibliopath (I like it!), shows off some of his wares on his site. Doesn’t seem to have any recent updates, though, alas. Perhaps he’s engrossed in a book someplace.
Peter Jansen does have some recent updates, though, and these works are absolutely mesmerising. I think this one is my favourite. Apparently he studied physics and philosophy. No wonder some of his stuff is so hard to actually look at. Brain. Can’t. Hold onto. Whole image. At. Once.
And now for some Burn Notice.
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A good, long chat today with author rcdaniells about the importance of visual inspiration. Oddly, I don’t hear a lot of writers talking about visual influences though I suspect it’s more prevalent than a lot of people make out. Plenty of people talk about the importance of music, ‘what music do you listen to while you’re writing’, & so on. For me, I don’t listen to music. In fact, I hardly ever listen to music. But art, I’m always seeking it out. It’s like food. Sustaining & satisfying.
So I thought I better share something visual today. And here it is: Simon Hoegsberg’s uplifting (ahem) work entitled ‘we are all gonna die‘.
And music is nice, too. It’s just that to me music is rarely… relevant.
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I’m often not a fan of subversive art, finding its teenaged narcissism unattractive.
I make an exception for this guy, though. There’s just too much nutty good humour to Banksy’s art.
Described as a ‘covert graffiti artist’, the true identity of Banksy is unknown. (Instantly my mind rushed to the conclusion that it’s a consortium. I mean, if *you* had a secret identity, wouldn’t you want to share it around? It’d be far more confusing for your followers that way. And since Banksy seems to excel at thwarting expectations, it’d be an efficient way to achieve that… Just a theory).
Banksy, I think, is working in the tradition of Monty Python & other British comedians willing to look silly for the sheer fun of it. He’s suggesting a fantastical, fun, down-to-earth world. Grin-worthy art!
