FLY BY NIGHT

It's a long day's journey into night. Upon arrival, perceivable distance shrinks. Dangers lurk. Passions rise.

Night transforms expectations, emotions. It builds drama; it adds intrigue. When The Sun goes down the air cools off, winds slow, moisture condenses.

People change clothes. Some retire their working day duds for favorite sweats. Depending on whether there's work the next day, some transform their sartorial presentations in the opposite direction, opting for sleeker shirts or dresses--clothes meant to be seen, ironically, at the time of day when natural light is least available.

What of those who work at night? Nighttime is the province for labors out of rhythm with the natural order. Night work requires a conscious effort to travel against the temporal grain like a salmon going upstream. It demands that energies ramp up as most of the world ramps down. It demands internal engines of motivation. It requires constant reinvention for successful work to happen at all.

At night you cannot forget who you are; there is no autopilot. As an artist, night imposes itself on your spirit, provoking simultaneous dream-states of invention while it lulls you into complacency, a siren song to all who make things: it won't matter too much, so just relax!

A successful night of work invigorates as much as it exhausts. Traveling in the opposite direction from a normal day's trajectory, you feel a sense of clever competence, a sense of doing a hard thing about which the rest of the world can only dream, warm and cozy in their beds. But a night of unsuccessful work reminds you just how much you're missing, how the day will come and you'll be dry and exhausted for it, nothing to show for your labor and nothing left to recharge you. The day feels out-of-joint, and you're stuck with the knowledge of time forever gone.

Do I ignore the obvious? What of risk? What of romance? In the privacy of night there's the opportunity to try out an idea without announcing it to the world. Whether that idea is a new melody line in a sonata or the potential to construct roads to romantic liaisons, the innate privacy of darkness suggests a measure of anonymity, and thus confidence. We become agents for our own ids, artists and super-spies everyone. There's risk, there's darkness, but there's also a constant awareness that soon, soon, night ends. The Sun also rises, and what we create in nighttime spaces has the potential to live and thrive through the day.

"Nighttime," as the great Ray Charles once put it, "is the right time."

-MS

PS -- Yes, yes, here's where the good people of 1AU ask our dear readers to share what you've read with friends and colleagues. And here's the place where you think, "Oh, sure, one more imposition of my precious time." Well, we're asking. It's something we value above rubies, above gold: if you like an idea enough to give it a moment's thought, then consider giving it a measure of freedom. When you share an idea with another person, you release an idea to grow freely in the world. Like what you see? Set it free.

BE BRAVE WITH TIGERS IN BOATS

What do we want when we ask people to help us with things we can't do ourselves? Usually we're looking for precision, like the kind we may ask of a surgeon before the anesthesiologist sends us for a nap. Oftentimes we're looking for elegance, as when the architect who's designing that addition to your home comes up with a clever way to catch the morning sunlight without adding additional cost. Sometimes we're looking for stimulation, like when you listen intently to endless demo recordings trying to find that perfect band to play at your wedding without spending a fortune. But how often are we looking for something that's genuinely new?

For many people religion reinforces what's already familiar, what's safe. Art reminds us about our humanity, what moves us to create. Plenty of people will say that religion has been the inspiration for countless pieces of art, but even though history proves this to be true, I think it's an intellectual red herring. The profound power of familiarity should not be taken as a proof of reality.

Ang Lee tries to touch this in his masterful cinematic adaptation of the book Life of Pi. In the story two Japanese investigators question the protagonist about his tale of an extraordinary ordeal at sea. Lee stages this scene brilliantly, placing the main character in the center of the frame, seated upright in a hospital bed, nothing but a white wall behind him as the camera pushes in slowly. Without visual context, we're forced to listen to the story without artifice, without distraction. Free of external stimulation, the story meets our own, private preconceptions of reality head on, and we're faced with a mirror to our own view of reality.

If you haven't read the book or seen the movie, it's about an almost impossible-to-believe tale of survival, a boy and a tiger surviving for months alone in the vast Pacific Ocean. Color, sounds, high drama, and intense introspection propel a fully visceral experience. The boy telling his tale to the Japanese investigators does not present himself as an incredible witness, but his story nonetheless does not resonate truthfully. For the investigators there are no analogues, and of course, there is no evidence. Therefore it simply cannot be believed, even as the main character tells it calmly and with surprising dispassion.

The power of the scene comes from a feeling we've all had. It's tough to accept a bold idea that doesn't at least resonate with experiences and ideas we've had before. Anything genuinely fantastical is always threatening. Star Wars got crummy reviews in it's initial showing; no one had seen anything like it before. Remember that Apple commercial a decade ago, when the wizards of Cupertino started to turn the company around? “Here's to the crazy ones,” it began. We all smile knowingly because we intuitively understand: all inventors of genuinely new ideas are nuts until they're proven sane. The message to take from these examples should be a clarion call to listen, to see, to be brave. There have been adventurers who've gone beyond the horizon and by their bold actions taught us to take heart, to be not afraid, or, if we cannot fathom that kind of bravura, at least not to be daunted.

But you're thinking, "I'm a suburbanite. I do quality assurance for a kitchen remodeling business. What's brave about that?"

Don't miss this. It's not the narrative trappings of brave tales that makes them brave. When you ask someone to listen to you you're asking them to trust you. When you actively listen to someone else, you're implicitly committing yourself to be open to what he or she has to say. In that transaction the seeds of a brave existence germinate.

Try love. True and genuine love is always the high wire creative enterprise where stabilizing familiarity requires endless reinvention, discovery, and risk. Complacent expectation is the death of love, just as a lack of familiarity denies the potential for intimacy. If you replace the word love with art, you get precisely the same thing.

So? Art = love? Is that the message? Or is it love= art?

Perhaps it doesn't matter.

Maybe the important message here is that you may not be asking the right questions of yourself. When we ask ourselves what we want when we ask people to help us with things we can't do ourselves, we're allowing ourselves to think creatively. Still unsure? Remember: when we open ourselves to thoughts and experiences we cannot entirely control, we open the doors to creativity. That makes everything possible.

--MS

PS -- Yes, yes, here's where the good people of 1AU ask our dear readers to share what you've read with friends and colleagues. And here's the place where you think, "Oh, sure, one more imposition of my precious time." Well, we're asking. It's something we value above rubies, above gold: if you like an idea enough to give it a moment's thought, then consider giving it a measure of freedom. When you share an idea with another person, you release an idea to grow freely in the world. Like what you see? Set it free.

THE VAGARIES OF SUSPENDED ANIMATION

… and no, I'm not talking about cartoon characters who haven't been properly processed on the render farm.

I doubt this will be the last posting I ever make about air travel. The act of trusting your physical self to a metal shell of some sort, often surrounded by people whom you might not ordinarily even think to notice, is strong evidence to me that life only has meaning by force of will. Travel by plane particularly amplifies this phenomenon because at the beginning and end of almost every flight, you pass through the churning mass of humanity surrounded by generic, anodyne establishments shilling for unnecessary consumer goods and carbohydrates. This thing called travel has nothing to do with walking from one place to another.

Travel by car is entirely the same and entirely different. If you're driving alone in a city or town, you're isolated in a metal and glass bubble even as thousands of other bubbles pass perilously close at high speed. There's little you can do but actually operate the car. In fact, you'd better not be doing much else if you're the person behind the wheel!

Assuming you're driving with others, the experience shifts, but only a little. It's only in cars that we willingly choose to sit so close to other people in largely immobile states for extended periods of time. Even people we love don't generally tolerate suppression of their own movements when they're seated close to us. But here in the artificially imposed stillnesses of travel by modern mechanical means ideas flood in.

Artists hate restrictions, yet it's through restriction that artists often find their greatest inspirations. Some artists never travel at all. Some travel incessantly, wandering the physical world as much as they travel the world of ideas. But the very concept of travel alone fuels the creative soul, through inspiration, through exasperation, through anxiety, through epiphany. Travel is the act of willingly restricting yourself in order to move through space to a place where you may discover new freedoms. Through restriction, we find openness.

I struggle sometimes to keep a steady rudder beneath me on travel days, and the reasons are not what you may think. It's not just from getting up at odd hours, or schlepping luggage, or suffering the indignities of security queues: travel days always present a strange tension between the spontaneous generation of ideas and the nearly comical inability to do anything with those ideas while getting from one place to another. Travel days torment me with infinite lives not taken, with roads skittering off into uncharted stories that I can only glimpse through the window of my train or plane or rickshaw. The instant freedom afforded by travel bangs squarely into the rigid realities of inevitable plans already made. Spontaneity crashes into obligations; dreams meet practicalities. I experience alternatives, I invent possibilities, I dream.

Then I wake.

By definition travel requires movement over distance. In covering that physical distance, travel over many outcroppings of aesthetic terrain seem to stop. Except for an elite sliver of society, travel becomes an equalizer. Low-end material surroundings juxtaposed against endless streams of humanity place the wealthy and the weary in close proximity, and often it's impossible to tell the players apart on sight. Everyone wears comfy shoes, everyone obsessively checks the time. People may have vital things to do when they reach their destinations, but in the time in-between waypoints, there's a dislocation of creative acts. Reduced to nothing more than outward action through space, travel upends aesthetic momentum.

And all of this is to say, I relish a good trip. I marvel at the flood of new ideas that often rush in, sometimes while I'm ordering a cheap cup of coffee in an airport or in a shop on an anonymous highway exit, and sometimes days after I'm back home reflecting on what's transpired. Suspended animation yields kinetic force. By moving through the real world we learn how to create new abstractions of it, bit by bit, mile by mile.

--MS

PS -- Yes, yes, here's where the good people of 1AU ask our dear readers to share what you've read with friends and colleagues. And here's the place where you think, "Oh, sure, one more imposition of my precious time." Well, we're asking. It's something we value above rubies, above gold: if you like an idea enough to give it a moment's thought, then consider giving it a measure of freedom. When you share an idea with another person, you release an idea to grow freely in the world. Like what you see? Set it free.

DRY

Sometimes the well runs dry. Sometimes clouds block the sun. Sometimes the air hangs heavy, like wet laundry on a line.

Whoa, that was close. I thought the scene might not come together.

Sometimes it's hard to get down to work, make meaningful use of limited time, do anything productive. One of the great, terrifying, vicious circles threatening creative lives is the risk of grinding away at something that doesn't yield much worth saving. The effort to create anything useful expends precious energy and focus no matter what you're doing. If the experience yields limited value, it becomes harder to spend similar resources a second time, a third, a fourth.

It's hard enough to put out the effort when things are going well. Work…takes work.

Today I'm writing about a different kind of struggle. Doing good work is one thing, and comes with costs just as much as it comes with rewards. But as everyone know who makes things for a living, work does not always come in the door when it's convenient. It comes when it comes, sometimes borne on the backs of winged horses, sometimes borne by tired mail carriers holding wrinkled manila envelopes. When they both show up at your door at the same time, you'll discover the merits of your mettle. Especially if your phone is ringing at the same time.

By all means, a huge crush of work suggests that something must be going right. Business accelerates only when business likes what it's getting. Business always flows where the action is. As we like to say, it's a good problem to have.

Then it happens. It feels as if the thread suspending the Rock of Eternity above your head has snapped. Super powers or not, you've got nothing left. Whatever the world wants isn't happening. The good ideas have vanished; the will to find them fled. What's more, you suddenly can't seem to recall what it was that exhausted you so much in the first place. You're crushed, burned out like a match, bleached and rough like an old cattle bone drying in the high desert.

It's too easy to expect that a big whack of work must also come with promises of plum payment. Money is the great manipulator, and so often creative people find themselves chasing it to the detriment of doing good work. Sure, sure, if it weren't for getting paid in the first place, creative people would have an even tougher time pursuing what they do, but it's easy for the pursuit alone to consume the potential of doing work substantial enough to sell. Too much work can force a reduction in value in each little bit produced. But to abandon the endless call of "just one more thing" is often to harm your own future for the sake of a little rest, a little solace in the here and now.

What's to be done? Is there anything, anything at all? Does this slow-motion lethargy, this stiff, dulled, insensate mass you've become ever find new fuel again? The world, once banging at your door seems to have run off to the next shiny thing like paparazzi at a rope line looking for celebrities.

Solutions elude. It's true that this is far from the worst of all problems to have in the great big world, but in the microcosm of your own life, it's a problem that doesn't offer easy outs.

At nighttime, air settles down as the planet cools. Springtime prompts the flight of fireflies. You watch, hardly appreciating their soft lemon glows fading in and out.

Then one alights on a branch, one on your hand, one on the fencepost in your backyard. Exhausted, you simply watch. The bugs blink, on and off, looking for love.

In the quiet space of observation, it occurs to you that money is not the reason why you're a creative person in the first place. You're creative because you have to create. It's part of being alive. It's your glowing light in the night, looking for love, and there's nothing you can do about it.

You feel the first drops of rain and think to yourself, It's good just to stand here feeling water from the sky. The colors of deepening blue night expand into infinite, peaceful shadow. Here and there golden flares of hopeful fireflies signal to each other, "Hey, I'm full of life."

Then you get an idea.

-MS

PS -- Yes, yes, here's where the good people of 1AU ask our dear readers to share what you've read with friends and colleagues. And here's the place where you think, "Oh, sure, one more imposition of my precious time." Well, we're asking. It's something we value above rubies, above gold: if you like an idea enough to give it a moment's thought, then consider giving it a measure of freedom. When you share an idea with another person, you release an idea to grow freely in the world. Like what you see? Set it free.

SILENCE

In the great cacophonous, chattering clatter of the world, I've come to value silence. I do not value it above sound, just as I do not value clarinets more than violins, nor cherry pie over pizza pie. But as a frame of consciousness, as a describable quality that may be invested in a day, a moment, in an intentional space, silence becomes a surprisingly powerful and moving state of being.

Do not be misled. It's far too simple to regard silence is a mere absence of sound. The world is a noisy place. Children talk, birds squawk, cars honk, printers balk. Sound surrounds us. It informs us, carries us. Music becomes the apotheosis of organized sound, and as such defines its great potential. Language in its many spoken forms simultaneously joins us to each other and transmits information of all types. We define the boundaries of space and time by the sounds around us. In your own home you know sounds unconsciously, communicating subtle, vital details of your most intimate space. The heating element on that old coffeemaker emits a tiny tick as the metal subtly expands after it's been on for a while. The spring hinge on your front door squeaks in a certain way on the last third of its arc. The floorboards under the carpeting at the top of your basement stairs groan every time they tolerate the weight of a person standing there.

Sound is neither good nor bad. In its different manifestations, we are in constant dialogue with it, sometimes provoking it into existence, sometimes adapting based on what it tells us.

It's often intentional, too. It must be, because the natural state of the world is noisy, vibrant, loud. By seeking out moments of silence, or appreciating them when they're encountered, we avail ourselves of the creative person's most powerful tool: transformation. We must transform the world to make it quiet, and the act of transformation from any one state to another inevitably affords discovery through unexpected refraction.

Silence is different than our ordinary moments. Quiet spaces generally require effort. They must be created, or at least they must be pursued. There are different levels of silence. Sit in a quiet space for a few minutes, and you're likely to hear the sound of a distant ticking clock, rhythmically texturizing the space. Does that clock intrude, or does it remind you that there is no other sound? Silence is like that. It presents questions even as it offers opportunity.

Every day older, I'm aware of silent times more and more as they remind me of my own silent future, an inevitability that continues to approach no matter what I do. It approaches us all, and perhaps it's because of death's ultimate arrival in stocking feet that we spend so much time talking, singing, tap-tap-tapping out rhythms, as if to convince ourselves--prove to ourselves--that it's not here yet.

Silence offers clarity. As a condition that doesn't easily happen without intention, it provokes a byproduct of internal reflection. In a quiet space, along with your own thoughts, clarity of mind is all you have. For many, that clarity provokes fear more than anything else. No doubt it's the fear of clarity that sends many into endless pursuits of stimulation, of noise.

I'm not opposed to sound, even loud, raucous ones. To be so opposed would be akin to rejecting tarragon or garlic for no good reason. I may avoid putting garlic on my peanut butter sandwiches, but applied to other things, garlic is wonderful. Same for sound of wide and varied type. I cannot live without music. I love the chatter and thrum of a New York City sidewalk, the electric vibe of a movie soundstage, the steam and clinking buzz of a cool coffee shop with vital conversations mixing all around.

But with time's relentless evaporation seemingly accelerating, I discover a certain wholeness and rationality in silence. Then: irony. In quiet spaces, I find the whole world for me opens as an artist, a creative person. It is then I hear the music I want to write, the lines of poetry I want my characters to speak, the sounds of revolution and passion and humor that I hope will take up residence in my work as an artist. In silence, I am reminded how much I do not want to live there, even as I find a great desire to visit quiet spaces regularly.

That's because for me, silence often provokes the chorus of the universe to sing.

-MS

PS -- Yes, yes, here's where the good people of 1AU ask our dear readers to share what you've read with friends and colleagues. And here's the place where you think, "Oh, sure, one more imposition of my precious time." Well, we're asking. It's something we value above rubies, above gold: if you like an idea enough to give it a moment's thought, then consider giving it a measure of freedom. When you share an idea with another person, you release an idea to grow freely in the world. Like what you see? Set it free.

SCREEN KISS

You know they're just actors. It's fiction, after all. They're not really in love. Nonetheless, many, many people closely guard memories of their favorite screen kisses, proxies for embraces they wish were their own.

Not you? Perhaps you're more of the heroic type. Perhaps you imagine yourself clipping the red wire four seconds before detonation. No doubt the batteries in your walkie-talkie are long since dead, and you're unable to get help from the demolition experts back at HQ.

Not quite right? Did you see yourself as the girl with the winning piano performance in front of a hostile audience? Did you see your teenage nemesis grudgingly stand with respect when you took your bow?

Fiction gives us raw material for vital thought experiments, while simultaneously presenting us with a forked decision tree. The fictional circumstances into which we project ourselves offer distraction and respite from day to day realities. That means they can either become permanent blindfolds as we're never going to find ourselves with orchestral scores rising behind our actions, or they can show us constructive alternatives to the lives we're already leading. How we imagine ourselves will always be the first step in creating selves capable of living lives we value.

Not every thought experiment needs to be a positive, constructive one. The safety of fictional experimentation can serve as safety valves so that we don't traffic with dangerous trade. Simultaneously, it is precisely because of fictional invention and experimentation we may discover ways to remake our immediate present and long term futures.

The the rain falling around our leads is rarely cold in a Hollywood screen kiss, just as the grime covering the police officer's face when he snips the bomb wire always looks stylishly rogue. It's not necessary to aspire to last minute rescues or endless romantic clinches, but as a viewer you still have a choice. You can let these images bounce off your retinas, eternally imprinted as lives you will never lead, or you can choose to transform them into metaphors, by which they may come to influence some momentary, vital moment when your own life requires depth of feeling or decisive action. And if there's one thing you know, everyone in the entire world will be called upon at one time or another to make a vital decision or clarify a deep feeling.

Here's looking at you, Kid.

-MS

PS -- Yes, yes, here's where the good people of 1AU ask our dear readers to share what you've read with friends and colleagues. And here's the place where you think, "Oh, sure, one more imposition of my precious time." Well, we're asking. It's something we value above rubies, above gold: if you like an idea enough to give it a moment's thought, then consider giving it a measure of freedom. When you share an idea with another person, you release an idea to grow freely in the world. Like what you see? Set it free.

PULSE

In your sharpest suit, or that fabulous dress you never get to wear, you're coming down the elevator. It's nighttime, and you never even saw this event on your own horizon, popping up as it did at the last minute. This thing you're going to, this hard-to-believe-you're-even-here moment, suddenly puts you in orbits with people and experiential opportunity that you couldn't possibly have predicted. Yet here you are, and what's more, you're ready for it. How you carry yourself tonight will determine how tomorrow proceeds.

The elevator slows. The door chime chides you to let go of the breath you didn't realize you were holding. You listen closely, and hear in your ears…

…your pulse: thumping as make your way down the gravel covered highway shoulder, headed for the green fluorescent glow of the truck stop. That stupid car: you've been trying to ditch it all summer. Here it is a chilly, late October at two in the morning, and the smoke seeping from your hood like fumes from the nostrils of a fat and lazy dragon remind you how much you've got to make a change. You knew you shouldn't have left so late in the first place, but that's totally besides the point of still having that stupid hatchback at all. Of course, how can you possibly replace the car with that dead end job of yours? How are you going to get out from under when can barely find the time to get your day job done in the first place? You can't leave--you need the work--but you can hardly get something new started while doing your day job.

But first, you have to walk another mile in the thin Autumn air, with the grim hope there's more than just a pimply adolescent behind the register, hope you can solve this mess before the sun starts to creep up the sky. It's hard to know if it's your walk or the furnace in your chest that has your…

…pulse racing. This is the moment, the one you told yourself you were trying to make happen. Months of planning, of meetings, of negotiations behind the scenes, and now they want to hear about your development idea. Striking a balance between cool, steely confidence and strong, muscular command turns your skin to aluminum, sets your finger tips to painful tingling, dries out your eyes before you realize you haven't blinked in a full minute. This is the chance of a lifetime, the moment you told yourself you wanted, but success in the next few minutes will mean nothing but hard, high pressure work. Of course, failure in the next few minutes will mean a return to everything you tried to escape, what came before, what was unambitious, neutral, ordinary. Success promises the toughest opportunity. Failure promises everything you already know. In your ears you hear your own…

…pulse.

It's that part of your life that tells you you're alive in the first place. It's the thrumming engine of something you're trying to build, the thumping drum of romantic embraces, the defining sound of the future imploring your to lean forward, lean in to your life, try, try, try.

Your pulse is the reassuring sound of your own engagement. It's the journey, not the destination, although it sometimes calls attention to itself at the moment of truth. It's the blood of invention, the reminder of life, the tap, tap, tap of water wearing away hard stone.

It reminds you that what you're experiencing right now is real. Some people lose the ability to feel it any more, to hear it, even to listen for it.

Don't.

--MS

PS -- Yes, yes, here's where the good people of 1AU ask our dear readers to share what you've read with friends and colleagues. And here's the place where you think, "Oh, sure, one more imposition of my precious time." Well, we're asking. It's something we value above rubies, above gold: if you like an idea enough to give it a moment's thought, then consider giving it a measure of freedom. When you share an idea with another person, you release an idea to grow freely in the world. Like what you see? Set it free.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENT

At 1AU we do not manufacture widgets. We do not develop actuarial spreadsheets based on risk assessments of teenage driving habits. We do not order fresh produce for a chain of restaurants displaying cartoon characters on the menu. Therefore, the first, natural assumption is that we are suspect and unreliable in asserting the value of developing skills that have little to do directly with profits or productivity.

I will assert the opposite and attempt to demonstrate why.

The Common Core Standards refer to an initiative developed by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center). The well-intended goal of this initiative was to develop curricular guidance for schools to teach vital components of primary educational goals at the highest possible standards. The most recent Standards call for a marked increase in non-fiction reading, replacing much of the fiction and poetry that up until now has constituted a substantial portion of student literary exposure.

Here's why. The reasoning goes that we now live in a largely data centric society, that instruction manuals and data-based informational sources have become the warp and weft of our days. The sentiment was summed up in a speech last year at the New York State Education Building by David Coleman, the President of the College Board and one of the authors of the new standards proposal.

“Forgive me for saying this so bluntly, the only problem with . . . [that] writing is as you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a [expletive] about what you feel or what you think. What they instead care about is, can you make an argument with evidence, is there something verifiable behind what you’re saying or what you think or feel that you can demonstrate to me? It is rare in a working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.’ ”

Can I argue with this? Do I dispute for a moment anything implied or overtly stated about the realities Mr. Coleman describes of the grown-up, post primary school world? Not for a second. His assertions are not in dispute. But even here, as I agree with his statement as one of fact, one of my central arguments appears against his overall proposal. Simple refutation of facts is not in itself adequate to overcome all arguments. Aesthetics require support, but they also require justification, usually in the form of metaphoric representation that appeal to some basis of common values held by the adjudicators. Simply being able to counter an argument does not, in and of itself, define a strong counter-argument.

Mr. Coleman is correct that our society requires sophisticated skills for processing primary source material and analyzing complex data for many ordinary, daily transactions. While I risk sounding like a naive, shoeless idealist, I would say that part of this reality is the tragedy of the new standards proposal. In a society that has largely become an endless, sometimes bloody chase for capitalistic success, the texture and emotion and deep wisdom of lives often expressed most trenchantly through literature have been largely overshadowed. It's as if society has tacitly adopted a philosophy that enterprises separated from making an efficient buck are also things that no one wants to hear about.

Has society decided suddenly to deny the value of poems? Of song? Are famous works of art in and of themselves valuable for what they express or must they be able to become merchandisable as greeting cards and tchotchkes to have measurable value? Is there a value to being emotionally moved that transcends money? I love my children intensely, but if they were reduced to their measurable value, I'd want them out of my life today.

More and more it feels like we chase capitalistic enterprise like hamsters on endless wheels. Everyone works all the time, endlessly refining to-do lists that never grows shorter. Mr. Coleman's assertion and the standards he represents is only one more capitulation for a society to abandon its best parts.

I find this ironic. Movie tickets still get sold. Episodic television continues to be vastly popular. Music of various types continues to croon and wail and enchant. Are we to believe that the skills necessary to live in a world filled with feeling should just accrue without direction, gradually like dust settling on a quiet window sill? Are we to pretend that the wisdom of literature––the characters that have affected us, who have become our private rudders through countless challenges in life--are to be abandoned like old walking sticks? That would be tragic. How many times have we all considered chasing giant white whales in our lives, only to reflect ruefully on the fate of Melville's captain? How often have we met the same phonies that Holden Caulfield met, considered his choices, considered differently for ourselves? Do Orwell's political observations in the guise of fiction give us political pause? Do we recall Laura's pluck and enterprise in that little house she lived in on the Missouri prairie? Do we find moments of quiet reflection before making vastly profound strategic decisions like Ender Wiggin? Do we live with the Fools of Chelm, or are we those fools ourselves?

I would hate to leave these questions, and the profound wisdom imparted by the stories and characters that examine them, by the side of the road, supplanted by spreadsheet analysis and diligent abstractions of white papers. Is it good to read Martin Luther King's original Letter from a Birmingham Jail? Absolutely. Primary texts present vital windows on culture, on critical thinking, on the tangible world. But should we dismiss the value of literature in lieu of fact-based media? No. We do so only at the peril of losing humanity's passionate engine to pursue goals that transcend daily labor. Literature is not a luxury. It's a function of humanity's quest to understand itself, one person, one saga, one moment-- big or small, smooth or rough, quaint or grand--at a time. When publisher Tim O'Reilly asserts that he "doesn't give a [explicative] if literary novels go away. They're an elitist pursuit," he eats the intellectual seed corn of the society that cultivated his media behemoth. The novel as a form is elitist? What hubris have we so deeply absorbed that we're willing to erode an essential wellspring of our moral formation, our shared cultural experiences, of lives we do not have to live but from which we can nonetheless learn so much? Do we dare to consider ideas beyond what we can quantify numerically? It's as if to say that immediate, quantifiable utility is the only thing that defines value, if it doesn't speed up the churn, it isn't worth the effort. Think this is a new trend? No. There's a reason Gene Roddenberry made Spock half-human. Logic alone is not enough.

While 1AU Global Media makes no bones about being a business proposition founded and staffed almost entirely by artists, it's commonly known that one of our unusual specialties is the ability to translate complex science, technology, economic, and other conceptually challenging subjects into imaginative and engaging media products. We not only need to be confident with the science itself, but we also need to be capable of a surprisingly diverse list of technological tools, from sophisticated software packages and original code development, to a dizzying array of hardware employed in the service of making easy to digest media. As a company we would be nowhere without robust scientific literacy, earned the hard way. But we would also be nowhere without the very things that a life suffused by literature ultimately conveys.

Years of working on behalf of NASA, NOAA, and other federal agencies put me and my colleagues in close contact with world-class scientists and researchers. This is a serious crowd, and a brainy one, and I don't think anyone would argue that the jobs they do are anything less than the categorical height of academic or professional achievement. Nonetheless, one of the most common inspirational sources I've heard from many in this serious, analytical, extraordinarily non-fiction crowd is their early exposure to science fiction literature, often headlines by the goofy, inventive, ethically challenging and satisfying world of Star Trek.

I'm not proposing that Star Trek is great literature, nor that it should be placed in school curriculums. But I am suggesting, by means of counter argument, that without a fictional frame, the vitality of the many scientific and technical muscles cultivated by rigorous higher education would not be nourished by the grounding humanistic principals that give life meaning. Achievement, profit, growth: they mean nothing without values, ethical reasoning, beauty, and justice. Humanistic skills can only be cultivated by intangible consideration; they are not reducible to objective tests. They are three dimensional.

1AU Global Media is a business. We are capitalists, after all; that's the world in which we live, and (thank you very much) things are red hot in that department. We're very grateful for the opportunity to make a living by living creative lives, and with no apology we intend to continue to be wildly successful capitalists going forward. So much of production and media consulting reduces to extremely complex engineering, accounting, project planning, technical analysis. The pace is fast, the skill set complex, the learning curve endless. But I would profoundly lament the loss of young artists entering the professional world who weren't fueled by passions cultivated by literature and the deeply intimate experiences it can instill. I would be unable to mine delicate, deep veins of meaning in the purely mechanical world of non-fictional texts. I would miss the spark that life demands for it's own continuity.

That leads me back to The Common Core Standards. They present an educational framework that's well intentioned and based on measurable outcomes, namely test scores for parsing certain classes of non-fiction texts. To some critics, Mr. Coleman suggests that not everyone understands the intentions of the Standards, that they are not exclusive, that 30% of all reading should still be left to literature in school. My problem, besides a banal debate about percentages, is that intentions matter most and many educators simply won't see the forest for the trees.

To cite Mr. Coleman's example, the world may not be looking for a compelling account of your childhood, but I would argue that an employee who not only knows how to write one, but also how to reflect on childhoods he or she has encountered in books is better capable of interacting with real people in the real world. Because unless Mr. Coleman and his cohort are proposing that productivity and profitability themselves are the highest goals of human interaction, I suspect that Mr. Johnson's reflections on childhood share certain commonalities with Mr. Smith's reflections of his childhood, too. Now that they're both adults, they have to figure out how to publish their company's monthly widget production report collaboratively, and they have to decide if chasing the White Whale represented by their biggest competitor's widget output is also a good business plan.

If only they had read Moby Dick.

--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.

REN79HEXQQ74

YEAR ENDER

The Mayan prediction of apocalypse has come to pass. What could possibly be weighing on your mind?

This time of year things simultaneously slow down and speed up. Theaters fill with expectant popcorn munchers eager for escape, while countless Lego sets rise above millions of carpeted floors, earnestly striving for architectural transcendence. Productivity in workplaces across the nation slows down unless you're in the catering business. Families spend time reacquainting themselves with others who share the same living spaces, a temporary relaxation of modern academic and occupational pressures inducing an odd temporal rift in the space time continuum.

Artists especially look back and look forward, sometimes in the same glance. Here at 1AU, we're reflecting on a great year. As a team, we've grown in ways that can only be described as exciting. Technical capabilities are razor sharp, and creative invention has never been more keenly honed. We completed some thrilling projects in 2012, expanding our roster of clients in the process, and developing relationships we're confident will have long lives ahead of them. 1AU staff appeared at numerous public speaking events, too, getting great audience reactions and a flurry of new connections. Plus (you don't mind if we boast for a moment, do you?) it's always fun to speak at events where your team's work is up for an award.

2013 promises continued growth along this path. Members of our team are already booked for several great live presentations in the coming year. More importantly we're deep in pre-production for a range of thrilling new projects, some flat, some round, some online, all inventive and engaging.

Trends in the industry suggest that the extraordinary era of change and transition in modern media will only intensify and expand. Movie ticket sales continue along a hard-to-predict curve; television as we know it is the same as it ever was, while simultaneously fresh and new, too. Mobile media clearly has become the newest solution for everyone's media needs, both upscale and down, but as everyone knows, what looks like the "new normal" may only stay that way as long as the next new thing hasn't appeared yet.

But here's the one thing we're confident will remain consistent: 1AU Global Media will be out front. For me, I continue to take great, humble satisfaction in getting to work with such a great team. I'm inspired, I'm reinvested, and I'm grateful. As we work on new pieces for a wide variety of government, corporate, and private clients, we're also developing our own projects in-house. (More on that in coming months!) As a company, I'm emboldened to dream big dreams, confident that we'll not only persevere, but create products with value, meaning, and clear voices.

We're looking forward to an exciting new year, and in this space you can expect to see more news of our exploits, as well as regular thoughts about world of creativity. We're also looking forward to hearing from you. If you're a current client, a possible client, just a fan or a friend, or perhaps you found us by happenstance on the Infinite World-spanning Interwebs, please drop us a line, either in our comments section or via email. You too…can GO FARTHER.

All the best for a great new year! ...from the team at 1AU Global Media, LLC

PS -- Next week will be pretty quiet here on the blog. Perhaps a word or two, perhaps a picture. But we're just taking a short break. Plan to make us your regular Monday check-in again starting January 7!

Try Poetry

Sometimes things that look easily categorized actually belong under their own heading. For example, does anybody really regard the millions of jangly ditties beeping out of endless cell phones as music? The fact that ringtones can be notated using the same graphical language as songs, symphonies, and spirituals does not make them categorical kin. They may both be "musical", but the description of something is not the same as a thing's actual identity. How we categorize things helps us keep them organized in terms of their value, but categories themselves do not confer value.

Language is like this. While just about everyone can dash off a grocery list--or at least dictate it into their smartphone app-- it's probably fair to say that mustard, pretzels, and laundry detergent hardly constitute award-winning prose. (I'm guessing there's a small portion of our readership who recall the famous scene in Norton Juster's classic "The Phantom Tollbooth". I'm talking about the time when court ministers to King Azaz the Unabridged spout the names of favorite foods in the town square, followed immediately by bountiful platters of the same.) Yet this very same language, prosaic nouns and verbs arranged with precision, becomes the tangible flesh and bone of literature.

Grocery lists have their place; they help you remember what to buy. I don't need extensive description, delicate metaphor, or surprising characterization to remind me to pull a quart of milk off the shelf. But when I'm making a movie, mixing a soundtrack, taking photographs, or leading a rehearsal for a live event, it's not enough just to stick together a string of words, sounds, or pictures. No matter the medium, the challenge is always the same. Of all the many choices possible, even if those choices are unattainable dreams, the job always comes down to synchronizing vital choices into larger context. That arrangement of options, that selection process demarcates the intangible boundary between poetry an an ordinary jumble of words on the page.

This process takes moxie and a surprising amount of energy. In fact, sometimes this process takes nerves of steel. Most creative acts have finite production clocks. No matter how self-indulgent an artist or creator of any other type, one thing's for certain: life runs out. On a more down-to-Earth, day-to-day level, schedules and budgets also run out. When creating something, the pressure to complete the job often acts like it's own gravitational field. Complaining about gravity doesn't make it any easier to leap tall buildings just as wishing for clarity and artistic inspiration doesn't make delivery schedules any less agreeable.

In a more literal sense, poetry as a construction of language often has a tough time coexisting amid the ordinary thrum of grocery lists and e-mails to your child's guidance counselor. With its intended precision, poetry functions differently, communicates more precisely, strikes the ear more powerfully than the many conversations and advertisements and newscasts and tennis lesson schedules we more regularly consume. No matter how much we say we're interested, sometimes the saturated clarity of a poem is more intense than we're prepared to experience. Imagine if everyone you met-- lover, friend, acquaintance, and stranger-- came up and gave you a hug. Sometimes Mcluhan's medium for conveying a message matters a lot.

The challenge remains the same, no matter the medium. Music, movies, poetry, cooking: adequacy will always be enough to get by, but excellence demands something more. Excellence demands critical decisions delivered without infinite amounts of time.

Perhaps we should practice more. Perhaps part of the process is making sure that we give ourselves license regularly to reflect on intentional aesthetic thoughts. We should multitask less and listen to music more, without doing three other things at the same time.

Now here's a bizarre, but essential inversion. Remember my charge at the top that cell phone ring tones were not music, that just because they could be reduced to musical notation did not mean they were equivalent? It was a trap, dear reader: a trap to make a point. While I don't regard cell phone ringtones as music, per se, I do understand that quality is an attribute that can appear anywhere, in anything. Quality is the process of reaching for apotheosis, never actually arriving, of course, but reaching, reaching, reaching nonetheless. Whether we prefer one type of craft over another is not precisely the debate here. I find most ringtones to be little more than sonic indicators telling me that one person wants to speak with another. But even for the decidedly disposable craft of ringtones, I suppose I must also grudgingly acknowledge that there's such a thing as better or worse examples of the craft. Ultimately that's what may best define the essence of a poetic experience. If good words in intelligible order communicate, perfect words in sublime order also communicate. That they say more than the value of the literal words themselves is the reason they matter. Acts of creation lift the spirit, and the best acts make spirits soar. But even disposable acts, intentionally selected, can get you to answer the phone.

--MS

PS -- To our regular readers, please take 20 seconds (or thereabouts) and retweet, cross post, or otherwise pass the link for this blog and it's 1AU Global Media home onto your readers and friends! Call it karma, call it kismet: we'll just call it cool! Cool?