Take Five: Learning life lessons
There wasn't time for much new to discover this week, so I extracted some lessons about the creative impulse from the last couple weeks of experiencing the world.
“Take Five” is posted each Friday, and offers five things I spent some time with over the course of the previous week. No criticism, no in-depth analysis, just a few things I think you might be interested in checking out. When the spirit moves me, I’ll post other things at other times.
Today's list is a change of pace. Everything here was something I experienced in the last couple of weeks that taught a small but valuable lesson about the creative impulse and how to feed it.
1. Scott Phillips
Scott Phillips is one of my favorite writers. From The Ice Harvest (one of the best thrillers of the past 25 years hands down, and the source for a great movie as well) to the new The Devil Raises His Own, Phillips has shown his mastery of plot, character and finely paced storytelling. He's also a hell of a nice guy. I had the pleasure of meeting Scott at the Bouchercon mystery convention several years ago, and invited him to the second book festival I produced back in 2014. He took part in a "Noir at the Bar" event which was one of the last times I read my own crime fiction work or even really pursued it. Fast forward a decade, and we had the chance to grab coffee when he visited Iowa City. He talked with me like a fellow writer, though my all-encompassing bout of imposter syndrome tried to short-circuit it. I made excuses about life getting in the way and he pushed back by saying the writing would be there when I had time to come back to it. Hearing him treat me like a writer made me start to think like a writer for the first time in a long time. The lesson here is that we lose nothing when we acknowledge people's pursuits, and we gain everything when we allow people to do so in regard to our own work.
2. ‘ENO’
I had the chance to see the new movie "Eno" about musician Brian Eno recently. It is a "generative" film, in that it is driven by "bespoke generative software designed to sequence scenes and create transitions out of (filmmaker Gary) Hustwit’s original interviews with Eno, and Eno’s rich archive of hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage, and unreleased music." The results were fascinating. It's strange to say, but I have listened to Eno for more than two decades and listened to dozens of releases, yet I wouldn't call myself a big fan. I like his work, but I'm not obsessed despite owning and listening to much of it. With this film, I became a very big fan of the way he thinks and articulates his views about music and creativity. He has famously stated that despite having been in Roxy Music, one of the most influential bands of the 1970s, pioneered and named the ambient music genre, and made hundreds of hours of music, he is not a musician. He doesn't let a lack of training or expertise keep him from doing what he loves. The lesson being that we should embrace what we like to do, even if we are not trained in it, even if (though this is not the case with Eno) we wouldn't be considered to be very good at it.
3. Mike Viola
Yes, it’s a return engagement. This notion of sticking with something was reinforced a couple nights later when I saw Mike Viola and his band perform at Gabe's. This quintessential dirty rock club is the sort of place young bands inhabit as they tour the country trying to make a go of it. But Viola is nearly 60, with a decades-long career that never reached the heights his talent and early success might have indicated. He's a wildly gifted songwriter, a great guitarist, and owner of one of the best voices in rock. But what he does exceedingly well never clicked with the masses. He has been on a hot streak of late, with four exceptional albums of finely crafted rock songs. This new work in hand, he hit the road last year to tour for the first time. He had played shows, but never strayed too far from home, never loaded up a van and played night after night. He's doing it now, and seems to be thrilled in the process. He played to about 15 people in Des Moines, then followed with a show for around 30 the next night. "Thanks Iowa City," he said. "You're the biggest crowd I've ever played to in Iowa!" The lesson here is to keep doing the things you love, and recalibrate how your view the results rather than let yourself be down about not meeting the mark. And if he returns, the word of mouth from those who attended ought to double the crowd the next time.
4. MJ Lenderman
I returned to Gabe's a couple nights later for a very different show. There, 25-year-old MJ Lenderman played to a sold out crowd. You could have added Viola's crowd from the night before to this throng and not even know it. I can't say I necessarily enjoyed the show, because I couldn't hear it well enough over the din from people my age or older who seemed so pleased with themselves for coming to a rock show in a dingy rock club that they wouldn't stop talking about it. I'll admit the first time I listened to Lenderman — on the breakout single "Hangover Game" — I chuckled at the riffy novelty, but didn't imagine much of a career for the kid. But the more I listened, the more I liked. I did one of my typical dives last weekend, listening to his five-album catalog in reverse order, and could hear his sound devolve. The clear homage to the likes of Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Drive By Truckers, Jason Molina, and Neil Young in the earliest work is simply part of the palette in his newest music. It's there, but there is a lot of Lenderman in there, too. The lesson here is that it's OK to make art that resembles your influences as long as you continue to push through and subsume them until you create your own art. Now I hope he remains able to shrug off the accolades and keep making what he wants to make, not lured into watering it down for the masses. My bet is that he will.
5. Me
The last lesson comes from the way this was assembled. I suppose it is a combination of "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" and "first break all the rules." I set the parameters for these "Take Five" posts when I found myself taking longer than I would like between posts, or jotting down a note or two before realizing the topic wasn't worthy of a full 800 words or so. The idea of sharing five things each week gave me a framework that has made it a pretty easy way to prompt my own writing, share some things with people, and start to build a bit of community. But if that framework becomes constraining — if, say, I'm in the middle of running a book festival and didn't really encounter anything new of note during the week — then I can either let it go and run the risk of falling out of the habit, or tweak the framework to allow something else to work.
I will literally "take five" from Take Five next week, as I'll be traveling and won't be able to take a time out to post (see what I did there, jazzbos?). But my hope is that I come across all kinds of things I'll want to share the next week. Or not. Stay tuned.