Archive for December, 2008

I went to a live performance of G. F. Handel’s Messiah recently. It was amazing, despite the fact that out of everyone in the choir and orchestra, nobody was being paid to perform. That could go to show just how greatly inspired Handel was when he wrote it. But I think it also says something about the performers’ dedication to good art.

I remember hearing the history of the word “Amateur” at some point this last year. (It could have been on NPR. It would be pretty easy to look up again.) But what stood out to me was that an amateur was originally someone who had such a love for a particular field that he or she ended up being practically an expert, albeit an unpaid one. A few centuries ago, it would have been the amateur botanists who would make the most groundbreaking discoveries about what herbs do what, and they would be the ones you’d go ask when you had a migrane. Or to call the town troubadour who would play his music at everyone’s wedding and everyone’s funeral, out of sheer love of creating music, an amateur would have been an accurate and honorable title. Amateurs, at one time, were the best at what they did.

It wasn’t until recently that the word has taken on a negative connotation. You call the contractor an amateur when he puts your window in crooked. Arrogant professionals call others amateurs when they don’t make as much or aren’t as successful as they are. Maybe that’s the nature of language, to morph and evolve over time. But what if it wasn’t so shameful to be known as your town’s most talented, yet unprofessional, artist/writer/painter/mechanic/opera composer?

Wall Street may be in a panic, but my time here on main street in Reedley gives me a different story to tell.  Everywhere I turn I run into someone starting a business or looking for a new idea.  It seems that faith in the kind of jobs available from big companies is inversely proportionate to the excitement I see on the faces of would-be entrepreneurs.

Surely our economy has fundamental underpinnings, and people starting new businesses during an economic slowdown carry overused cliches like ‘cautiously optomistic’ on the inside of their jacket pockets.  But for every societal shift or market change, new ideas and new service potential follow close behind.  When people cut back on driving because of higher gas prices, bicycle shops and shoe stores do well.  When mothers stop buying disposable diapers, diaper services and specialty retailers step in to fill the need.

Starting a business is hard, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.  And I suspect that there are some fundamental flaws with the assumption that most new businesses don’t survive.  (Chief among those flaws is that it’s never been academically studied and proven.)  Business is another opportunity for exercising creativity.  And here in Reedley, new and creative services and niches will be popping up for the next several years.  The choice is yours: will you watch and see, or jump in and try?

A night out at the movies is the best. Especially opening night of a film, when the theater is full of strangers all gathered around a united interest: to be impressed, and possibly touched, by the movie they payed good money to see.

The Day the Earth Stood Still opened Friday night, and we were all there to see the same thing happen, which is the same thing we always go to the movies – any movie – to see. We wanted to be emotionally moved. At the very least, when we watch a movie, we want to see and hear and feel things that we otherwise wouldn’t be experiencing if we had stayed at home and, I dunno, dusted our shot-glass collection instead.

Y! Música, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

Friday’s science-fiction blockbuster was directed by Scott Derrickson, who, like myself, graduated from Biola University’s film program in Southern California, albeit over a decade before I took my first “Intro to Mass Media” class. But rather than discuss that particular movie (if you want to read reviews, go to IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes – there are more than enough people out there telling you what to think about a film) I want to touch on something Scott Derrickson mentioned one time about the nature of cinema. This comes from a class I had in the Fall of 2004 which he taught, and everything I say from here on out, except for the final sentences, is paraphrased from memory (because out of laziness I don’t feel like digging out my old notes).

Cinema, although scarcely over a century old, is the world’s 5th Great Art. And at the risk of offending classical purists, art historians, and enthusiasts of the other arts, it may be the greatest of them all simply because it embodies all the others. The Four Great Arts, which have been around for so long it’s hard to imagine a time when they didn’t exist, are Visual Arts, Literary Arts, Theater, and Music. They are the four pillars which, for millennia, have upheld with force and faithfulness mankind’s need to creatively express himself.

Film is like the intersection of those Four Arts. First and foremost, cinema is visual. “Show, don’t tell” is the overused phrase, but it’s no less true now than it was when Buster Keaton stood oblivious to the falling building behind him only to survive by a conveniently placed window frame. Additionally, cinema is literary. When you’ve got a Somebody, and they have to do Something, well…you’ve got yourself a story. Add to that story all the subtleties of metaphor, irony, drama, satire, tragedy, allusion, poetry, comedy – not to mention the spoken word – and you’re looking at literature, just not confined to the printed page. Furthermore, cinema is carried to us through theatrics, where we are asked to forget that the actual people we see are acting, and instead to believe that they are really incarnations of the fiction (or non-fiction). And lastly, cinema is musical. Of course, since the advent of “talkies” they have almost always had a musical score to bring power to the ideas on screen, but even before that, films were inviting music to be a part of their existence through the live performances in the moviehouses during showings. One might make a case that even completely silent cinema is so rhythmic, relying so much on the flow and meter of the scenes, that the essence of music is all but built into the celluloid. Regardless, modern musical scores and soundtracks make up for 50%, at least, of the overall effectiveness of a film. (Just try muting your favorite movie of all time and see how interesting it still is.)

Cinema has taken the Four Arts and, over the past hundred years, found a way to combine them, changing them each so much that the new artform which resulted could not be categorized any longer by any one form, and so a completely new category was born. Films.

Movies may yet have more elvolving to do, but the form is solidified. We love it so much as the art that it is (I know I do) that even when people couldn’t find work during the Great Depression they still paid admission prices, and we’ll keep paying for the experience even after tickets have soared above $14. We can’t get enough of the experience, so flickery and magical, like a wizard’s looking glass. Alfred Hitchcock, one of the magicians of cinema himself, knew exactly what we wanted: “A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theater admission, and baysitter were worth it.”

So, I’m realizing more and more what my problem is. I want to be a creative person but hate putting the effort into becoming one. I was born to parents who believed in me and valued musical instruction. They thought it would be a good use of their money to spend twenty dollars a week for six years on piano lessons. I still remember walking up those stairs to Yamaha Music School here in Reedley right off of G Street. When I found out how much money they had spent on those lessons when it came time for me to buy my first car I about died. Didn’t they know their son wasn’t going to be the next great anything? I mean really. I’m no Bach, Sigur Ros, or even Hannah Montana.

Something in me just really hates the idea that music should be hard, and loves the idea that music can come naturally. But music is just like any other language in which you want to become fluent; it flows freely once you’ve learned it’s pragmatics, syntax, and semantics.

I still try to cheat though. My wife told me about two months ago that I spend a lot more time buying musical stuff than actually playing it. It’s so true. It’s a lot easier to buy something that feels creative than work on something that is creative. But when was “The Creative” anything you could ever purchase? 

So, starting now, I’m making a resolution. Every-time I feel like selling my internal desire to be creative and pawn it on something or someone that has already produced something creative, I’m gonna remind myself there is no dollar amount I can pay that will lay claim to someone else’s work. What I should spent my time doing is mastering my craft. I should be forcing myself to learn the notes of the fret-board I carelessly push my fingertips against. I should actually try for a change instead of simply settling. I’m tired of settling. I need a community of people that will tear me away from gizmos and gadgets and convince me that I have something to offer the world that can never be produced or bought with a bank account.

Community and creativity hava a lot more in common than the letter C. For starters, there are other letters they share, like i, t. And sometimes y. I could even be missing some others, especially if you spell the words in your own creative language.

Other things, like an audience for a movie screening, or a crowd for a mosh pit, really make the whole experience worth it, don’t they? For both the creator and the observer. Now, of course, there are those artistic creations that were never intended to be seen by anyone at all, like those bricks they discovered while renovating a cathedral that had ornate paintings, and clearly not by mistake, on the side facing the wall and mortar.

But let’s consider that kind of art the exception to the rule. And that rule being: Creativity really, really, really, really wants to be shared with others, in community. And, of course, the one doing the creativitying would prefer a community who is supportive and eager for the art, or photos, or songs, or brownies. I would go so far as to say the artist’s community is the oxygen that stokes the flame of his or her creativity. Sure, there’s the kind of artist who is a totally reclusive loner in his studio in the woods, but I would bet you he has some kind of social outlet for his art, even if it’s a mangy pet. And if not, that is the beginning of the end of the creative spirit. With nowhere to truly exhale, it dies of self-asphyxiation.

Creativity must be shared. Uniqueness must be made known. On the micro level, that’s interrupting your writing to say to your wife, “Listen to this…”. On the macro level it’s sending a space probe out into the cosmos with fragments of the human experience engraved on a gold record, just in case the thing called Community is much bigger than we think.