TIME TRAVEL

I'm listening to a 70-year-old recording of a 300-year-old piece of music on a two-year-old computer. I thought I was working on this week's blog, but I guess what I'm really doing is time traveling.

For the first time in human history we're now in an era where a sort of time travel is commonplace. In Bach's Cello Suite #4 (BWV 1010), sound preserved by inky graphical notations scratched by quill pens on candlelit paper transforms into sound under the deft fingers of the great cellist Pablo Casals, seated decades ago in an entirely analog recording studio.

Those analog sounds are now traveling forward in time, long after Casals and the engineers around him and inevitable marketing department of his recording company have gone back to the Earth. Played on my twenty-first century electronic gizmos, the resonant sighs of his sculpturally human instrument are now digitized, even cleaned up, with tape hiss magically removed, newly balanced frequency responses added to the mix, and modern remastering polish applied over all, conferring nothing but freedom for the music to fill my room.

I have no idea if these words I'm writing will be read by anybody 300 years from now, although I have my suspicions. But the monumental efforts and inventions of those rare superhuman creators like Bach hundreds of years ago are now something of a cultural echo that continue to provoke thoughts here in the present. It's almost as if the echo comes first, as if we're hearing the sound of humanity's invention bouncing off walls from the past, before the vast numbers of humanity got born into comparative easy times for creating things. We select what moves us not only from the world around us, but from time, and even distant space. I live in 21st-century Maryland; Bach lived in 18th century Europe, Casals in 20th century Catalonia, Spain. There's no good reason we should be in communication at all except…there it is. Sure, the ideas in the thread-- Bach to Casals to me-- only move in one direction, but then the arrow of time also flies from the bow string in only one direction.

Everyone knows that our sneakers come from China, our grapes from Peru, our oil from the Gulf of Mexico. These are all expressions of our immediacy, are instantaneous ability to acquire precisely what we want and what we need. I realize this is an upper-class, first world observation; most the world needs much more than it receives, and certainly it receives much less than it wants. It would be callous to believe that first world cultural time travel was an entirely democratic phenomenon.

But as students of all ages now consider the ocean of educational options rolling in at their feet via online opportunities, it's essential to place the genesis of all these new ideas in the context of deeper time. None of us create anything just based on the experiences of our own lives. But as the ability to preserve ourselves is now easier, more powerful, more permanent than ever before, it's probably important to consider what kinds of echoes we may be leaving for students in some distant future to find.

Complacency in our digital assistants is a mistake. The fact that these extraordinary scores have survived across the centuries for me to hear Bach's musical transportations only amplifies the point. Imagine a world where those scores disappeared! Then realize that most of humanity's creative acts great and small have disappeared over the years for one reason or another, and it's becomes imperative to at least consider how our inspirations of today may be accessible to future generations, one way or another.

--MS

PS — Have something to say? Leave us a comment! Don’t want to miss the latest from 1AU? Sign up on our mailing list. (Cool email like ours is better than that boring stuff that clutters your inbox, right?) Consider yourself a fan? Please re-Tweet us, post to Facebook, or otherwise forward us to your friends. Cool? Yep: cool.

THANKFUL

I think I speak for all of us at 1AU when I say one of the big reasons we love what we do is that we have the great, humbling privilege of working with new ideas everyday. As professional creators, our working lives are all about having conversations on subjects we may have only just discovered, or recently excavated. What we make is not unlike the fruits of a long, successful expedition. When Howard Carter uncovered Tutankhamun's Tomb in 1922, the discovery itself made him famous, but it's arguable that a discovery like that would not have attracted anyone's attention if it did not involve great challenges of politics, funding, and endless, delicate digging in desert sand. The adventure of discovery is nearly as important as the discovery itself.

In short, I'm thankful.

Ninety years ago this week, Carter made his fateful discovery, opening a tiny hole into one of archaeology's--and popular culture's--greatest discoveries. But Carter is no instantaneous discoverer. He is no lucky traveller on a lark with a trowel. For decades he made his way across Egyptian sands, searching, digging, reading the signs for a long lost culture hidden from the 20th century by disinterested sands. Most of those years he labored in anonymity. In fact, eighty-nine years ago Carter almost gave it all up, and not by choice. His benefactor George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, gave the great archaeologist one more season worth of funding. He told Carter either to make a major discovery or call it quits.

Timing is everything. Carter became a legend.

Should Carter have showered his benefactor with obeisance? With deference? With fawning subservience? I don't think so. Carter made the discovery; his funder made the discovery possible. There's a space in history's bookcase for both.

I would suggest that the things Carter most owed his benefactors are gratitude, thanks, and appreciation. People who make discoveries, who risk bold ideas of all sorts often have the vision to even dream such things because the paths they've taken in life are not about acquiring the means to empower such things. Lifetimes of academic study or artistic development often do not yield the resources to fund novel enterprises. Risks do not mean these enterprises have guarantees of success. They would be ordinary things if there were no risk, and for those asking for backing, be it financial, political, or just someone to hold the ladder while we climb up to the ceiling to paint on our backs, it's essential that we retain an honest dollop of awareness that we'd be nowhere without our benefactors.

Are you a benefactor? A client? Thank you very much. Now, pardon us please: we have work to do.

While I may sound like an entitled, self-interested, smug know-it-all, I actually believe that people, governments, and institutions that have the means to support risky scientific, aesthetic, or academic enterprises are obligated to do so. It's part of the social contract. Societies require many inputs to be healthy and whole. Just as farmers shouldn't have to be responsible for laying the roads that help them get their goods to market, artists and explorers should have some means to pursue goals which inevitably will contribute something substantial to the societies in which they live.

But money and politics will get you…money and political stamps of approval. They don't do anything to stage an opera. They don't lift a single shovel of sand. That's why on this Thanksgiving I'm also celebrating, even calling out, the often unsung numbers who stand shoulder to shoulder as teams, enabling enterprises of all sorts. You think Spielberg makes his movies by himself? How about Elon Musk and his rockets? Of course not.

I'm thankful for that tight, close group of colleagues who help me transform seemingly impossible mountains of ore into refined jewels one shovel at a time. I'm thankful for all the late night checks on render queues, for spontaneously generated ideas for clever 3D models captured on the backs of envelopes while walking up from the mailbox, for smart schemes to hide a microphone in a shot. I'm grateful for a sense of humor on set when the clock threatens to knock us out, for smart ideas that are unafraid of being alternatives to expectations, for helping wash dishes after a wrap party. But mostly I'm thankful for the sense of teamwork that comes from shared ownership, that none of us are able to make what we do by ourselves, and that when we work in sync we're capable of things we can only dream about as individuals.

I'm grateful to walk out into the desert every single day secure in the knowledge that I'm not alone.

This Thanksgiving, consider how you excavate the deceptively plain sands all around you, empowered by your benefactors, colleagues, friends, and community. Nobody creates in a vacuum. But because some people make their way through life propelled by the need to create and explore, it's essential that we maintain a dialog about the many ways all parties to the process play a role. Call it reciprocal gratitude. It's not something that needs to be spackled onto our lives like an abrasive obligation. Instead, consider it a shared bottle of water, something to hand off to the person next to you when you unexpectedly find yourself digging in the sand, trying to get something done.

From everyone at 1AU Global Media we wish you all the best for a safe and satisfying Thanksgiving.

--MS

PS — Have something to say? Leave us a comment! Don’t want to miss the latest from 1AU? Sign up on our mailing list. (Cool email like ours is better than that boring stuff that clutters your inbox, right?) Consider yourself a fan? Please re-Tweet us, post to Facebook, or otherwise forward us to your friends. Cool? Yep: cool.

TRACES

I recently purchased a bright orange pair of low-profile athletic shoes. Yes, they're comfortable, and a little zany, but those aren't the reasons I bought them. I bought them because they remind me of the teacher I once had, a master producer of documentary film and video.

I don't like hanging onto lots of bric-a-brac. I'm not much for keepsakes and talismans. But the older I get, the more I realize how much I've structured my physical and intellectual worlds to capture echoes and shadows from my past.

This teacher of mine almost always wore kooky running shoes. I recall a particularly crazy pair of his: a split-toed set of bright yellow Nikes that I think he bought on trip to Japan. He's a little guy, not much more than five and a half feet, but rarely have I ever met someone with as much presence or passion or power. He lives in Los Angeles and travels the world making socially minded documentaries for NGOs and broadcast outlets, always supplementing his income with teaching stints to motivated students who want to learn how to tell their own stories.

As I look down at the orange New Balances on my feet today, I find myself wondering if I'm simply trying to emulate my heroes, to play dress-up. As I think about it, I'm more confident than ever about my answer. It's only by preserving the traces of those people in our lives who matter that any of us transcend our own boundaries and have the ability to reach others.

These traces come in all forms. Sometimes we adopt a matter of dress that gently reminds us of someone else. Sometimes we pick up an article of speech and integrate it into our own language without even thinking about it. The easiest examples are photographs or physical artifacts that we keep in our personal spaces. As I've been thinking about this lately, it occurs to me that this preservation of intangible connections to others is in itself a creative act. It remakes the world consciously or unconsciously, tethering us to other people who continue to reach across time and space and shape our actions. As each of us makes our own determinations about what these tethers are and how they function in our lives we remake the universe.

Primarily I spend my life with artists and other highly creative people. As the old saw goes, "artists steal". Read this aphorism as a good thing, a natural phenomena, not a crime of actual theft. For artists it's as natural as breathing to draw upon the traces of other people in service of craft; we steal from everything, especially those influences that affect us most.

But most people are not artists, per se. Creative? Sure. That's why this blog exists in the first place. My point is that a more conscious awareness of the creative influences we feel from people in our lives is one way that everyone can plug in to the power of interconnectedness.

And if you're wondering, "What does interconnectedness have to do with creativity?" it's simple: it's has everything to do with creativity. Without it, we would not remake the world with stories, paintings, music, or even clever ways to stack firewood. Without the need to preserve the traces of others and play new riffs on their old tunes, there would be no motivation to create anything new. Creativity rarely flourishes without at least a moment for it to communicate with someone else.

If you're wondering if I always wear zany sneakers, the answer is an unequivocal no. But when I bought these tangerine trainers recently, I bought them thinking of my teacher. Now on the odd day when I put them on, I think of him and find a tiny spark of shared values reinforced. On other days I think of other people, of other habits, of other values. I'm reminded that in an infinite lifetime, I'd never lose touch with any of the people who matter to me. But life is not infinite, and I must remake my own world everyday, often with the traces of those in my life who made an impression.

That's why I'm an artist.

-MS

PS — Yes, yes, it’s always the same old request here at the bottom of the blog. “Please share with your friends if you like it…yadda, yadda, yadda.” There are even the little buttons around here where you can post it to Facebook, Tweet it far and wide, distribute it all sorts of ways. But you know what? You COULD! And you know what that would do? That would make us SMILE.

Marveling about THE MASTER

Pop culture is not always the province of art. Creativity? Absolutely. But art?

It's been said that movies are the ultimate middlebrow experience, art for the mainstream. Sure, sure there are those outlier projects, cinematic experiences that push aesthetic, artistic boundaries or strive for narrative and visual novelties outside majority experience. But most of the time, movies reach toward the middle. Despite the spectacular complexity and expense to make one, they're easy and cheap to consume. They require minimal commitment on the part of the casual viewer. They're fun for a date night, a sleepover, a long airplane ride. Most of them are disposable, forgettable.

Still with me? I know this chafes a little, but be honest with yourself. I'm not talking about the many movies you've already woven into the weave of everyday life, to which everyone who knows a readily quotable line can relate. ("You talking' to me?") Fame and sheer memorability do not confer greatness all by themselves.

I love movies; that no surprise. But I find that it's the eternal promise a great movie might--might!--emerge amid the maddening throng is only one of the many reasons I pay close attention to them. It may sound like my middlin' opinion of the form belies a hypocritical sentiment…but I say "no". Instead I believe that an honest regard for the categorical value of something should not offer qualitative appeasements of earnest critical appraisals. There is no absolute measurement of quality, therefore there's infinite potential for discovery. Or, said another way, just because there aren't a long list of great movies doesn't mean there aren't lots of good movies, even interesting ones, too.

In a future essay I'm going to talk about some of the shared attributes that define lasting works of art. But today I'm going to focus on one work, a rare cinematic outlier. It's called "The Master", and while it's most certainly not for everyone, I regard it as one of the great works I've seen in years.

There's a common presumption that real artists can't be happy. The Hollywood corollary to this suggests that this is the reason why there are few real artists who make movies: movies that don't make people happy rarely turn a substantial profit. As a statement of conventional wisdom there are grains of truth here, but I don't believe it's actually so simple. If anything, Hollywood is the problem; serious cinema is not. 21st century moviemaking is much more democratic than it was in the 80s and 90s, with digital technologies forcing budgets down and raising the artistic dreams of independent filmmakers to astonishing heights. "The Master" certainly doesn't find its soul in an imagined super-eight world of backyard suburban sets, but nor does it find itself in the three act world of neat 'n tidy dramas with beginnings, middles, and ends. To be clear: this is no Hollywood film. For starters, it's daring.

Then consider this surprise: who shoots with a 65 mm film negative anymore? Not many, but this crew did. The colors are saturated and lush; the framing wide, yet powerfully intimate. There's nothing like an extreme close-up in a wide format to bring out nuance and saturated emotional vibrations.

The director Paul Thomas Anderson has done something which I consider remarkable. He's made all of the leading characters, most especially the two principals, volatile and intensely flawed. The character of Freddy, played by Joaquin Phoenix, presents a compromised soul to a degree that I don't think I've seen portrayed so honestly before, so richly painted.

I'm not writing a movie review per se, although let me reinforce what you've already gathered: I thought the whole thing brilliant. What prompted me to write about "The Master" were the choices the production team made in an effort to bring it to life. The actors, the production designers, the camera and lighting crews, and the writer/director all must have lived through a single, shared fever dream of rich intensity and soulful honesty. Ostensibly about the power of charisma, we experience the challenges and seductions for both charismatic people in love with their own influence, and those more ordinary folks who follow the charismatic ones. The movie prompts us all to consider why we get up every morning and face the day. The narrative is thick and dense. It does not give the audience lots of breathing room in its urgent portrayal of intense characters, and the vivid visuals offer little in the way of elbow room for us to slacken our focus. But most of all – – and I want to emphasize this above all else – – the movie doesn't show off simply to show off. It's true that creativity of all types and styles by its very nature puts itself on display. Emily Dickinson may have tucked her finished poems in a steamer trunk, but the moment she set ink to paper she decided there was some measure of those works destined for eternity and ultimate presentation.

There are some artistic enterprises that make presentations of self-indulgence a priori requirements. Rock 'n roll, opera, mural painting, Hollywood movies, television commercials, and many other forms of invention strive to grab you, to say, "Look at me". This movie does that too of course; it's just the nature of the form. But that's not the reason for this movie. "The Master" has no gratuitous car crashes, nor "how-did-they-do-that?" camera moves, nor location shots that strain credibility about how the production team gained access. People wear clothes we recognize, they eat food we recognize, the music playing in the background sounds like things we all heard growing up. It's a movie that has the confidence to plumb the murky machinery of people you know, not people you want to ape. It explores beauty in the ugly, in the weary, the busted. It provokes in its precision of voice, and in its precision--for that is the right word-- it evokes a strange interior sensation of hopefulness. Here is a movie that engenders a humane sense of hope because it presents itself in a precise, truthful voice, and considering how much media we all consume that's designed to be anything else but truthful, the sheer audacity to witness the world and then project it brightly back without blinking builds gravitas.

No, this isn't a movie that's going to rake in the mega-bucks. It takes a little work. It's neither disposable, nor easy. But as an antidote to the endless anodyne acts foisted on our media consciousnesses, The Master offers an alternative. It asks us to listen closely; watch carefully; think.

Sounds like good advice for life.

--MS

PS — Have something to say? Leave us a comment! Don’t want to miss the latest from 1AU? Sign up on our mailing list. (Cool email like ours is better than that boring stuff that clutters your inbox, right?) Consider yourself a fan? Please re-Tweet us, post to Facebook, or otherwise forward us to your friends. Cool? Yep: cool.

INSURMOUNTABLE?

Staring into a blank canvas or empty screen, toeing the starting line of an endurance race, taking the first step of a 2100 mile journey - the end seems so far away, impossible to conceive. Yet the human spirit never stops craving the unknown, the obscure - whether it be a scientific breakthrough or a foggy mountain peak. Maybe it's that challenge that drives change, fueling humanity's movement forward.

In a recent expedition to the top of Mt. Katahdin, arguably the most formidable mountain of the Northeastern US, this energy was physically tangible amid the intrepid climbers, as thick in the air as the clouds themselves. In many ways everybody on the peak was at the high point of their own pilgrimage - some were completing a six-month hike of the Appalachian trail, others had scrambled over the lichen covered granite for a challenging one-day hike. Everyone was together - smiling, congratulating, stripping to their skivvies for a well deserved photo-op - yet each individually had just completed their own trip into the unknown, overcoming their own pains and challenges, bringing their own creativity and two feet to get them to the top.

Every painting, every movie, every climb begins with the same inner quandary: insurmountable? Maybe. But there's only one way to find out. Commit to the first step, then put one foot in front of the other.'

VW text EE photos

PS — Have something to say? Leave us a comment! Don’t want to miss the latest from 1AU? Sign up on our mailing list. (Cool email like ours is better than that boring stuff that clutters your inbox, right?) Consider yourself a fan? Please re-Tweet us, post to Facebook, or otherwise forward us to your friends. Cool? Yep: cool.

[flagallery gid=5 name=Gallery]

STIRRED

Movies are like food. What's perceived as good isn't the same for everyone, and it isn't even the same for each of us sampled on different days. A person don't have to give up what he or she already likes in order to discover something else. Therefore, even though I'm going to guess that you hadn't planned on this trip into French New Wave cinema when you started reading, check out this five minute clip from Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 movie Two or Three Things I Know about Her. I don't like to make it a general habit of focusing on a bit of media out of its proper context. But this scene strikes me as something representative of a much larger idea. It's also happens to be beautiful on its own merits.

I've read about this scene before, but I must sheepishly admit that this scene and the entirety of the movie from which it's excerpted has always been a yawning hole in my cinematic background. By now I'm assuming you've clicked the link and watched it. One of the things that grabbed my attention even before its famously existential coffee moment is the fabulously sculptural way Godard arranges his space. Twenty seconds into the clip we see a man and two women at a corner banquette in a Parisian cafe. The nearly perfect balance of their triangular sculpture is as much a part of the overall narrative as the individual characters themselves. Even if we know nothing about the movie, nor the stories of the characters it contains, we immediately feel a smart tension in this image, the three players each in their own worlds, all balanced spatially in the shot. The geometry of the scene tells us that each plays a role in the other's life; without one, the triangle would collapse.

Godard deftly deftly directs us to the contents of a magazine one person is reading by showing us one of the actor's eye lines-- that is, the direction the character is looking. It's too easy to poke fun at the avant-garde voiceover that immediately follows; if that's what you're doing, cool it for a second and listen again! This isn't twenty-first century irony; this is an actual idea, fresh from the moment it emerged into the culture.

The shots are tight, whether framed on the magazine pages or on the faces of the characters. The minute vibrations of the carefully handheld camera place us directly in the scene, at the table. But it's the movie's sound in cinematic collaboration with the picture that makes this special. Television would not ordinarily try something so experimental, so unrealistic. Television pretends to be real life, even if it sets its stories on distant planets or gilded cruise ships. Cinema has the freedom to think differently.

The background sound drops away, replaced by our narrator's interior monologue, whispered no less. Could we declare this the exercise of a showy young auteur, a self indulgent artistic stunt? Sure. But listen to what the narrator says and watch his characters embody the space.

"Maybe an object is what serves as a link between subjects, allowing us to live in society, to be together." We see coffee stirred in a cup, a froth of bubbles spinning on the surface like galaxies, like dancers, like flower petals in a stream. The monologue muses about objectivity and subjectivity, about finding a place for oneself in a world in motion, in relationships of all kinds. That first line, about objects serving as links between subjects, is as much about human relationships--intangible things, but still objects philosophically--as it is about the value and aesthetics of those relationships--the biggest subject in most people's lives.

"Say that the limits of language are the world's limits," it continues, "…and that when I speak, I limit the world, I finish it….But if by chance things come into focus again, it may only be with the advent of conscience. Everything will follow from there."

No wonder this man is whispering. It's challenging to discover the universe in a coffee cup, to say nothing of confronting your own mortality in a Parisian cafe.

Now look: I like a spandex superhero movie as much as the next popcorn chomper, and I'm plenty geeked about Double-Oh-Seven and a band of long-marching hobbits heading my way. But here we see a collection of washed out close ups and stirred coffee and Parisian faces and cigarette smoke and I feel my blood accelerating. Artistic invention is not always about light and color and movement. Sometimes it's about noticing the most essential details in the world right in front of us, and then taking the time to wonder about it all. Those observations take moments of focus sometimes, and any subsequent wonderment takes internal resolve. Most of us do not want to spend precious personal energies to question our place in the universe when we stir our morning cuppa joe. But there is easily as much surprise, energy, amazement, and daring romance in the keenly observed real world as there will ever be in the manufactured life of our fantasy creations.

PS — Have something to say? Leave us a comment! Don’t want to miss the latest from 1AU? Sign up on our mailing list. (Cool email like ours is better than that boring stuff that clutters your inbox, right?) Consider yourself a fan? Please re-Tweet us, post to Facebook, or otherwise forward us to your friends. Cool? Yep: cool.

IMPROVISATION

Improvisation: that's when you have an idea and you make up the next bit based on what you just did a moment ago, right?

I bet you do this a lot. We all do. But often people mistake improvisation for "making it up as you go along". No doubt there are elements of this in all improvisation, but artists know something intuitively that onlookers may discount. Lots of practice making things up leads to better results when you've got to perform.

We're heading into presidential debate season and no matter which side you support, keep one small corner of your brain open to the inevitable display of improvisational footwork from both candidates. They've both practiced prior to the debates; we all know that. They both have their standard buzz lines and tropes and stylistic flourishes; we know that too. But we don't know precisely what they're going to say to the inevitably unexpected events that arise and neither do they. They will improvise.

Each of us improvises when we reach the next moment in our lives. Do you think every surgeon knows precisely what they're going to see when they cut someone open just because they've had twenty years of training? Does every NASCAR driver know what's going to happen on lap 217, even though the job can be reduced to "drive fast and turn left"?

So, what's not improvisation? I could argue that all things fit the improvisational spirit, considering that life will eternally provoke unexpected moments for "making it up as you go along". But some things aren't so fluid. Some things are genuinely predictable. Monthly bills to pay, nightly dishes to wash, weekly reports to write for your boss: none of these fit the spirit of improvisation very much. But sometimes moments of inspiration springing from deep understanding of these tasks leads to invention and innovation, and the first time you try them out…voila: improvisation. Things only become codified, even ossified, after they've been done a million times.

When you give a speech, you're not improvising. You're presenting something that's gone through revision, trial, testing, and rehearsal (and if you're not, you definitely want to call us, 'cause we provide all sorts of great coaching services!) When you're building a model rocket from a balsa and cardboard kit, you're not improvising either. But the moment you're not sure what to do at the podium when one of the spotlights inexplicably goes out, or you discover that the rocket kit came with a cracked stabilizer, you've suddenly been thrust into the realm of improvisation.

This is not comfortable for everyone. Not everyone likes to riff on a theme. Some people feel much, much better working from a set of known data, from a cookbook, or a sheet of printed music. This is not only okay, it's valuable. I rely on concrete thinkers to do concrete things. I demand it of myself, in fact. Cooking, writing a novel, flowcharting the architecture for new software all require disciplined thinking and rigorous labor. They cannot be done well without a focused mind. But focused thinking is not the same as rigid thinking. The value of improvisation is being able to notice an unexpected opportunity, seize it, and not get tripped up by the inevitable surprises.

Undisciplined improvisation is just making it up and you go along. The difference in being a good improviser is the ability to impose the ballast of discipline even as you tack with ungovernable winds. Good improvisation is being able to take cues from known rules, briefly experienced inputs, precedents and even accidents, and not get thrown. Great improvisation is being able to take those elements and turn them into something breathtaking. Done well it's effortless; it just flows.

--MS

PS -- Have something to say? Leave us a comment! Don't want to miss the latest from 1AU? Sign up on our mailing list. (Cool email like ours is better than that boring stuff that clutters your inbox, right?) Consider yourself a fan? Please re-Tweet us, post to Facebook, or otherwise forward us to your friends. Cool? Yep: cool.

IT'S NEVER THE MONEY, IT'S ALWAYS THE MONEY

Sticker shock palliative: "Don't choke. Bespoke!"

Okay, maybe you still won't feel better about paying big bucks for what you think ought to be yours fer nuthin', but at least you know the person selling whatever you're buying thinks hand crafted goodness is worth the price.

A couple of weeks ago, Adam Davidson wrote a terrific short article in the Sunday New York times on the peculiar and economically dismal business of hand made haberdashery.

You don't have to be a clothes horse to recognize one of the strange ironies of his story, and how it relates to creative work at a place like 1AU Global Media. Hand worked wonderfulness costs money, but hand worked wonderfulness does not get made in massive Pacific rim factories. Still, you have to ask yourself if any handmade anything is ever worth the pain, for buyer and seller alike. Like all things of vital importance, the answer depends.

We understand the seller's dilemma immediately. Handwork means there's no economy of scale. You can only make what you can produce yourself, and you can only raise prices so far until you destroy your own market.

For the buyer there's the hassle and headache of having to specify endless details for that special custom something. Specificity takes time at all stages of the process and generally costs a lot more than a commodity. And yet the option persists. What's more, some things practically demand handwork while some things inevitably require assembly line solutions.

You probably buy a certain class of handmade products regularly: food. You know that deli you always visit where they make your turkey and sprouts on rye to your own, custom spec whenever they see you come in the door--extra hot peppers, hold the mayo? It might just be a sandwich, but it couldn't get made the way you really want in a factory, on an assembly-line, or by machine. Way down the spectrum there's the linen and candlelight place downtown for which you made a special Saturday night reservation. The ginger Seabass with asparagus you ordered appears at your seat by means of delicate hand work in the kitchen. Unlike the waxed papered sandwich at the deli, all the little details matter here: the precisely poached vegetables, the razor thin curly cue of lemon skin along the fish, the cobalt patterns on the plates themselves.

There's no such thing as a handmade car, at least not in a conventional sense. But this is really a blind alley. By coming up with examples of mass production's efficiencies and successes we're avoiding the central question. We understand why handmade goods cost more. The question is really one of value proposition: do you consider that cost overage worth it? It's arguable that all restaurant purchases require some measure of handwork, perhaps more than most other industries. There may not be a lot riding on a successful outcome of your turkey sandwich. If you're honest with yourself, the same could be said of that expensive Saturday restaurant experience, too.

But does it matter?

It matters to me.

I cannot pretend that modernity's technological marvels sometimes facilitate just what I'm looking for without need for an artisan's influence. The computer I'm using at this moment came off a factory assembly line. (I'm going to side-step the enormous creative collective that designed this electronic palantir.) So did the desk chair on which I'm sitting. But most of the commissions we undertake here at 1AU are for creative work that's precisely unlike anything that's come before. That's the great differentiator, and that's why slapping together a bunch of video clips in the preinstalled software on your own computer isn't the same thing.

Adam Davidson's article talks about a Jamaican tailor living in Brooklyn who makes $4000 suits for a living but could never afford to buy what he sells. Does he make suits for the money? Of course. But is he in it for the money? I doubt it. It's too much work, too much identity, too much of himself in each suit that leaves on the wealthy backs of his customers. When someone walks out of his shop wearing a sharply creased suit to a midtown power meeting, the immigrant tailor knows he just influenced––ever so slightly perhaps, but genuinely influenced––the direction the world will tilt that day. Whether it tilts for good or ill is a subjective consideration--a big one, I realize--but I'll leave that for another day. He added something to the world, something of himself, and that makes all the difference.

Money pushes all of us around, no doubt. But I've yet to meet a creator who avoids doing the actual work of creation. The cynical part of my brain compartmentalizes industrialists from more easily identified creators, from artists. But I think this is probably a narrow view. The successful industrialist creates by establishing wide-field solutions to complex problems. He or she may not be designing the new 3D model for a piece of consumer gadgetry, or the actual sewing patters for the fall pret a porter collection, but he or she is solving conceptual problems to bring those items to life. Handwork? Hard to say. I suspect that craftsmanship is a term that fits more comfortably with the work of actual, physical creative work. But creative work always requires handwork, no matter what form it takes. That this creative process affords different navigational routes through time with different appraisals about the value of money is what makes it tricky. The big differentiator, I believe, is that while the "mass producer" may be motivated by the creative impulse, the hand working creator almost always sees themselves in the labor. I suspect that while all of us who do one-off, custom projects want to be respected and well paid, we don't do what we do simply for money. We do what we do to change the world's tilt, even if it's for just a moment.

--MS

PS -- Have something to say? Leave us a comment! Don't want to miss the latest from 1AU? Sign up on our mailing list. (Cool email like ours is better than that boring stuff that clutters your inbox, right?) Consider yourself a fan? Please re-Tweet us, post to Facebook, or otherwise forward us to your friends. Cool? Yep: cool.

RAIN AND SUN

The rain speaks.

I'm standing at the window watching a heavy, late summertime rain fill the air. Early yesterday, bright sun washed out the sky; it hadn't occurred to me that a storm may be right behind.

By and large we at 1AU work in a high-tech world. That means we spend a lot of time around computer monitors and electrical cables and cameras and, of course, endless hours inside. We work by electronic light. We breathe recirculated air.

It almost sounds like life aboard a spacecraft.

But today it's raining, and it occurs to me that the vaguely romantic mood I'm in directly relates to the water falling from the sky. I laugh at myself when I think of how I sat in my car this morning, strategizing for a minute as I tried to think of a way to minimize the soaking I'd get when I opened the door. I considered all of the options, worked out the moves like choreography: sling my shoulder bag securely, then grab the flip-lid coffee cup with right hand while I pocket the car keys with my other. I'd adroitly bump the driver side door shut with my right elbow, and dash for the door, 50 meters across puddle-strewn pavement.

Ready...? "Go!"

Result? I got wet. And then I stood at the door to my office looking out through the glass--dripping, slightly chilled-- and I decided not to be annoyed at all.

Rain falls; winds blow; temperature changes. The natural world speaks, but not to us. It speaks and we may listen in, like passengers in a train terminal listening nonchalantly to a private phone conversation in the chair next to us. The natural world offers food for thought, backdrops for moods, be they bright or melancholy. The natural world is not something to resist. Taken with a measure of grace, it's a touchstone, always surprising, always authentic, often changing, yet reliable and honest every single day.

As artists we should be open to all sorts of influences, from surprising physical experiences and diverse people. As the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurasowa said, "Artists cannot avert their eyes." Where that comment evokes considerations of social justice, and nuanced political observations, and moments of transformation, I'm sitting here with rainwater on my glasses recognizing how it also suggests that we not lose touch with sources of inspiration directly enveloping us. Sometimes it's rain; sometimes it's the act of band-aiding a paper cut earned when you rush to refill the aging inkjet printer in the corner. Inspiration comes from observation, and observation comes from wanting to be a participant in your own life rather than a spectator.

Today the sound of rain--that low, white noise vibration––becomes a natural soundtrack to the movie of my day. But so do bird songs in sunlit afternoons, and the mournful whistles of late autumn breezes as they coax me to pull the sides of my collar closer together. Sights, sounds, feelings of air on skin: the natural world is raw material for art. And as regular readers of this column know, I believe art is the natural byproduct of a vibrant life.

MS

Back to DC, Back to the Future

After a terrific week at the Jackson Hole Science Media Symposium, we're headed back to DC. It was great to spend time catching up with old friends and terrific to meet lots of new people with awesome ideas and energy.

The coming change of seasons feels like an appropriate bookend to this adventure. We're looking forward to exciting new projects in our queue, and look forward to staying in touch with you. (Hey: that rhymes!)

Go farther.

--VW, MS