Turning Pro

Chaos is creativity’s alpha and omega. Ten pages of trash for one line of treasure. Some artists do better, and most never even find the one. Maybe they quit on page 9, maybe they don’t even try again.

Sometimes I wish I could just sit down and have the words just flow out of me. Some writers can do that. One fired synapse from thought to keystroke.

Me? It took me two fucking hours to write the above. That’s not typical, but it occurs when I’m not in my element. Probably why I’ve been having trouble blogging lately. Everything about my situation is the direct result of me purposefully taking myself OUT of my element.

Before I left Kansas City, I joked with my friends, “I can’t talk right now, I’m busy forgetting where I came from.” But that’s not too far off. I wasn’t where or who I wanted to be, so I decided to change. And despite the influx of experience, writing lately is a total grind, because I’m less certain of my words.

Now I realize: That knife’s edge is exactly where I want to be.

So a grind it is.

McNulty: I can see why Daniels cringes every time you open your fucking mouth: you’re a supervisor’s nightmare!

Lester: I’m just following the thread.

–The Wire

If you’re a parent, teacher, or government official, maybe you already know the word I’m talking about, probably dread the sound of it, and assuredly pay lip service to its importance.

But before I get all reflective, check out this video clip, which is a funny and useful take on the issue (skip ahead to 7:00 to see what I’m talking about):

What to take away from this (besides Louis CK being a good stand-up):

You can’t answer a kid’s question, they don’t accept any answer. A kid never goes, “oh thanks, I get it.” They fucking never say that. They just keep coming, more questions–why, why, why–until you don’t even know who the fuck you are anymore at the end of the conversation.

It’s no wonder children are discreetly ushered away from the question: Why is the tip of the spear against cognitive dissonance. But once we’re herded into confronting something we don’t understand or buried under layers of rationalization or wrong assumptions, this is where we falter. Literally, in this state we feel discomfort as a psychological response. In these situations, we often don’t ask why in order to find things out.  Instead, we are looking for an affirmation of our existing beliefs. What does this mean?

It means that in effect, people seek to make the most important, most human question of all rhetorical. What a monumental waste. And by the time we reach adulthood, we are just as conditioned to ask nonquestions as we are to accept nonanswers:

“That’s our policy.”

“It’s the law.”

“We’ve always done it that way.”

As a child, were you ever satisfied by because I said so? If you or your organization can only argue from authority or tradition, ask yourself how you got there, and if you have the will to change.

Or would you rather not hear the answer?

Some recent ones:

1. In a sweltering military surplus store in the middle of Fucking, Nowhere, where an old man was showing me the proper way to cinch an army duffle.
2. Trying not to get submitted in a matter of seconds by a Pan Am grappling bronze medalist. And failing.
3. Murph Pup chewing up my condoms. At least they weren’t used.
4. Prepping food for grilling with our director. Eating steaks and drinking the Kansas City beer I brought, bullshitting with the crew. Right before Jeff shoots me in the back with a BB gun.
5. 

Yeah, there may be a logical reason for each of these:

1. I needed the duffle for sandbag training.
2. I’m learning MMA.
3. Murph will eat anything that’s not [this space intentionally left blank].
4. Jeff tends to be around living things that are wounded, or dead things that were made so recently. Neither by coincidence.
5. Louisiana may be known as the “Sportsman’s Paradise,” but even a capital-S Sportsman takes a backseat to the Lord in Shreveport.

But even when there’s a sensical chain of events leading to a surreal moment, it’s always nice when you realize one for what it is.

Friday morning, Tucker, Greg (another assistant of his), and I were having hamsteak and eggs for breakfast, as Tucker talked about what it means to be a pro. Here were a couple of his main points, and I’m paraphrasing here:

“Games are won in practice. It’s about doing it when it doesn’t matter–when no one’s watching. Because that’s what makes you great when it does matter. That’s what makes you a pro. There’s a reason Michael Jordan is world-famous and nobody’s ever heard of Earl ‘The Goat’ Manigault, even though he was a better basketball player. Jordan was a pro, and The Goat wasn’t.”

“What’s the difference between the mediocre and great? It’s usually not talent. I’m not the greatest writer or businessman or filmmaker or whatever, but it doesn’t matter because I work the hardest. Let’s say you’re faced with 10 important tasks. A loser will do few or none of them well, an amateur might do 5 or 6 pretty well but do ‘just whatever’ on the rest and let them slide. A pro will step up and hit all 10 out of the park, and then do the same thing with the next 10.”

This reminded me of a scientist I read about in A Short History of Nearly Everything:

For all his success, Rutherford was not an especially brilliant man and was actually pretty terrible at mathematics…he wasn’t even particularly clever at experimentation. He was simply tenacious and open-minded. For brilliance he substituted shrewdness and a kind of daring. His mind, in the words of one biographer, was “always operating out towards the frontiers, as far as he could see, and that was a great deal further than most other men.” Confronted with an intractable problem, he was prepared to work at it harder and longer than most people and to be more receptive to unorthodox explanations. His greatest breakthrough came because he was prepared to spend immensely tedious hours sitting at a screen counting alpha particle scintillations, as they were known–the sort of work that would normally have been farmed out.

This rings true in any job, any sport, any pursuit–but as I’ve learned over the past week, especially when making a movie. For instance, I never imagined casting strippers all day would be in any way exhausting. And let’s be clear: I was just a fly on the wall, trying to absorb the interactions and process. I didn’t have to make the precise evaluations of a producer or director or casting director.

Speaking of which, when you think PRODUCER, what do you picture? I bet it’s not prolonged discussion over bathroom fixtures and sofa pillows. Think about how much trouble people have just decorating their house. Now you have to keep the house within the taste of a character, then coordinate it with the character development of others, while making it consistent with the themes and evolution of the entire film. Now multiply this over several locations, many vastly different from one another, and then weave in all the practical considerations of money, time, negotiations, and the logistics of filming.  Everything is nuanced, everything counts, and every aspect of the film can be infinitesimalized as far as the artists want to take their art. But you can only manipulate each of these tiny segments so far, or you’ll warp the aesthetic curve of the film. That’s the producer’s job: to see the atoms and the universe.

Well, good ones anyway. The pros. The rest mail it in. This is mind-boggling to me, because even shitty movies require considerable time and resources to produce. As aggravating as that is, I have to remember that the same rules apply–3 out of 10, 6 out of 10, whatever–it’s just on a mammoth scale.

Followup to: Suffer Fools Gladly

My favorite blog comment ever:

Erg. I’ve skimmed through a few of these. Obtuse 26 year old fumbling through self-discovery with the depth and breadth of insight of one of Jack Johnson’s more polished lyrics. Seriously, you have written so much and said so little. You clearly have not suffered for your knowledge- it is a shiny trinket. You have completely fallen in love with yourself for finally engaging in the act of looking. You have, a few times, dipped slightly beneath the surface of linear mundanity which lubricates most interpersonal exchange, and you have such a hard-on about it. See how the man of limited creative facility clings to the writings of Steve Pressfield, hoping that his lack of technical mastery can be offset by a swollen compensatory ambition reeking of plebianism! In a truly insidious way, this might be the most offensive blog on the web. Assuming that a future individual post is sufficiently lacking in blather to merit a specific response instead of an overarching condemnation of you together with your ostentatious enterprise, expect the lofty cadences of my voice to comment thither and yon. Overarching condemnations, however, may well be forthcoming, depending on my inclinations.

To be incontestibly certain, while he could’ve eschewed the effrontery, his markedly unterse writing catalyzed a bandwidth spike the likes of which thesaurus.com had never seen, thus establishing a heretofore chromodynamic paradigm.