Imagine you are a doctor. Let’s say you have known you wanted to be a doctor ever since you were a little kid, attended many years of school to become a doctor, and experience the greatest possible level of joy and fulfillment in your life when you are practicing medicine. However, let’s say that the society in which you live expects doctors to work for free. Occasionally doctors can secure gigs that pay, but it’s normal for doctors to hold down other jobs so that they can support themselves enough to practice medicine. As such, a typical day for a doctor could include: getting up early, enduring a long commute, spending 8 hours in an office working a job that consumes energy yet doesn’t stimulate intellectually, grabbing some dinner after work, and THEN performing open heart surgery at night.
This is what it can feel like to be an artist, especially in New York City.
Of course we need doctors and they perform a very important job…but so do artists. And we need artists, too. Yet it has become the accepted norm that most artists must work a support job in order to survive. This reality can be frustrating, depressing, and is something I think about a lot when I realize that yet another week has passed and I have poured far more energy into my “support job” than I have into my writing. I recently ran across a great article by Emily St. John Mandel on The Millions that explores this very topic.
I should've known what I was in for with this poster...
I’ve just returned from an incredibly enjoyable breakfast at The Smith with a good friend that I haven’t seen in some time. We caught up a bit and discussed our lives in the city a couple years post-film school. In our catching up, I told her about a screening I went to yesterday for the much anticipated film New York, I Love You. I felt that after a solid 15 hours after my viewing of this film, I’d be calm enough to discuss it rationally and gently encourage her to wait until it comes out on DVD before seeing it. Instead, a certain rage and fury came flying out of my mouth along with flecks of my ham, Gruyère and egg brioche (okay, that last part was a lie – I just really wanted to relive my breakfast in any way possible). Riding on the success of Paris, Je T’aime, this collection of somewhat cohesive short films was expected to be vignettes of people’s lives accented by the essence and nuances of the city. In some cases, it turned out to be a complete mockery of what Hollywood thinks this city is and in others, it may as well have been Random City in Middle America, I Love You.
May I also point out that there was no storyline featuring a black character? Or a gay character? Asian characters were only the most overused stereotypes – cab driver, hooker, laundromat owner. The movie was shameless in its portrayal of New York. Did a tourist make this film? At one point someone actually says, “This is why I love New York – moments like these.” Unlike most feature length situations, this project has multiple directors and multiple writers to blame. Brett Ratner (who was at the screening for a Q&A afterwards) was one of them. His short was probably one of the most enjoyable – based on his real life high school prom night. Though Ratner is an alumnus of NYU, he did his growing up in Miami so the original story is Floridian… other than the story taking place in New York and a rather unnecessary voiceover discussing how many drug stores there are in New York, there was nothing very New York about it.
Well, then what was I looking for, you might ask? If I’m going to complain so much, how would I have fixed it? Read more »
The Expressive Intelligence Studio blog has a new post up about the roleplaying card game Magic: The Gathering, which made me feel nostalgic in an odd sort of way. Because while I did enjoy the game in its heyday, I had a very different experience with it because I never actually bothered to learn the rules of the game. I was inspired by the art on the cards and bored by the scoring system, and so instead came up with a new set of rules entirely (which I don’t remember at all now). I taught them to my friends and we played informal tournaments with each other at home, at school, wherever.
Like pretty much everyone ever, I have a certain fascination with my childhood, largely in part because I had no qualms whatsoever about turning up my nose at the so-called rules and inventing my own. No matter how silly or irrational they may have seemed. And because of this fearlessness (or, if you like, naiveté), the artifacts of my childhood consist of horribly-drawn comics, short stories plagiarized from my favorite novels, and scripts for movies I planned to make, camera be damned. I even convinced some of my friends to participate in an original musical about gang warfare, which wasn’t a fraction as hilarious to me then as it is to me now. Sure, I might not have had the necessary knowledge to write about such a subject, being a preteen girl from the suburbs of New Jersey. Sure, I might not have been the best candidate to compose the original score, not being able to actually play any musical instruments. But who cared? I was going to write as much of the musical as I could, and rehearse with my friends as much as I could, and have a blast doing it.
While I am thrilled beyond compare that I can (fairly) confidently say that I’m a better writer now than I was at 10 or 12, and that my ideas now actually come to fruition, I feel like there’s something I’ve lost. Read more »
When I was an emo teenage writer, I would always say that I was a lot more prolific when I was sad. I could never find something interesting to writing about — let alone force myself to write — if I was content and happy.
Now I know that procrastination is often the main thing holding me back from writing (see tips on “how to actually get some writing done“). For my style of writing, which features healthy doses of self-deprecating humor, a little distance is needed. If I’m too “in the moment” of despair, all I can do is write to attempt to resolve. Why am I feeling this way? Why do people suck? Why can’t I get out of this slump? Once the melancholy has passed, I can write in a way that’s less self-conscious. And I tend to think that being able to make fun of yourself is a key characteristic of a good writer (or a good person, I suppose). Read more »
Sometimes not writing is just as important as writing, and when I don’t want to write I remind myself of this simple and profound Buddhist principle: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” There is value in embracing emptiness rather than just trying to fill it with random available crap. Of course sometimes I’m just deluding myself and procrastinating….screwing around with half-strangers on Facebook. But sometimes something really is working inside of me that isn’t ready to take form quite yet, and if I try to tell it what its form is supposed to be then I don’t like the result. It’s false. Forced. Awkward. Like trying to shove a 20-pound cat into a 5-pound box. Read more »
I’m a little stunned by Tom Hodgkinson’s recent article in the New Statesman called “Don’t sell me your dream,” in which he (figuratively) stamps his feet, acts like a cranky old man who doesn’t understand technology, and wags his finger at those that do. If Hodgkinson wasn’t so thorough in explaining why exactly he hates technology so much, I’d be convinced the whole thing was satire.
If his article wasn’t meant to be a joke, much of his reasoning certainly comes off that way. He gives all the standard reasons for hating technology: it’s distracting, it’s rude, etc etc. I’ll grant him those. Sometimes I wish I could live a life totally disconnected, too, and not have to think about who’s emailing me, or writing on my wall on Facebook, or about what my friends are doing on Twitter. But at this point, and especially as a journalist-slash-writer-slash-artist, I’ve accepted it as a necessary evil. To ignore it, let alone actively detest it, is foolish.
But there were 2 points in particular that really bothered me. Read his reasoning, and my responses, after the jump. Read more »
Maaaaybe I’m biased because Serenity/Firefly is one of my favorite films/tv shows (mmm Joss Whedon). But really, think about it: a little-sci-fi-tv-show-that-could gets cancelled, then gets turned into a little-sci-fi-movie-that-could, then has the chance to get turned into a space station! (Sort of.) What a great way to pay homage to both the series and its dedicated fans. Read more »
Imagine you are a doctor. Let’s say you have known you wanted to be a doctor ever since you were a little kid, attended many years of school to become a doctor, and experience the greatest possible level of joy and fulfillment in your life when you are practicing medicine. However, let’s say that the society in which you live expects doctors to work for free. Occasionally doctors can secure gigs that pay, but it’s normal for doctors to hold down other jobs so that they can support themselves enough to practice medicine. As such, a typical day for a doctor could include: getting up early, enduring a long commute, spending 8 hours in an office working a job that consumes energy yet doesn’t stimulate intellectually, grabbing some dinner after work, and THEN performing open heart surgery at night.
The 
When I was an emo teenage writer, I would always say that I was a lot more prolific when I was sad. I could never find something interesting to writing about — let alone force myself to write — if I was content and happy.
I’m a little stunned by Tom Hodgkinson’s recent article in the New Statesman called 
This could have been really cool.
