Posts tagged cultivation and creation

Donald Miller, author of 2003's Blue Like Jazz, has come out with a new book and is now on a speaking tour with my good friend and former roommate Susan E. Isaacs, author of Angry Conversations With God. International Arts Movement is co-sponsoring their stop in NYC on 10/22. I can't wait.

books, cultivation and creation, humor, memory, movies, story, traces of god

Christy:

The saddest thing about life is that you don’t remember half of it. You don’t even remember half of half of it. Not even a tiny percentage, if you want to know the truth. I have this friend Bob who writes down everything he remembers. If he remembers dropping an ice cream cone on his lap when he was seven, he’ll write it down. The last time I talked to Bob, he had written more than five hundred pages of memories. He’s the only guy I know who remembers his life. He said he captures memories, because if he forgets them, it’s as though they didn’t happen; it’s as though he hadn’t lived the parts he doesn’t remember.

I thought about that when he said it, and I tried to remember something. I remembered getting a merit badge in Cub Scouts when I was seven, but that’s all I could remember. I got it for helping a neighbor cut down a tree. I’ll tell that to God when he asks what I did with my life. I’ll tell him I cut down a tree and got a badge for it. He’ll most likely want to see the merit badge, but I lost it years ago, so when I’m done with my story, God will probably sit there looking at me, wondering what to talk about next. God and Bob will probably talk for days.

I know I’ve had more experiences than this, but there’s no way I can remember everything. Life isn’t memorable enough to remember everything. It’s not like there are explosions happening all the time or dogs smoking cigarettes. Life is slower. It’s like we’re all watching a movie, waiting for something to happen, and every couple months the audience points at the screen and says, “Look, that guy’s getting a parking ticket.” It’s strange the things we remember.

One of the great surprises in writing Culture Making was how much I ended up talking not about creating but cultivating culture. We need to give much more weight to the "tending and keeping" of culture than we usually do in our innovation-saturated world. Matthew Crawford suggests that there is, in fact, something a bit creepy about a world that urges us onward to "what's next."

consumerism, craft, cultivation and creation, matthew crawford, work

Andy:

[T]here is a whole ideology of choice and freedom and autonomy, and . . . if one pays due attention, these ideals start to seem less like a bubbling up of the unfettered Self and more like something that is urged upon us. This becomes most clear in advertising, where Choice and Freedom and A World Without Limits and Master the Possibilities and all the other heady existentialist slogans of the consumerist Self are invoked with such repetitive urgency that they come to resemble a disciplinary system. Somehow, self-realization and freedom always entail buying something new, never conserving something old.

I love the premise of this piece: you're the editor of the world's coolest, hippest, tastiest music magazine, but your preteen daughters love Hannah Montana. What to do? What I love even better is the culture-making themes here: the only real solution to deficient culture is better culture, in this case Brandi Carlile. And best of all, being exposed to Carlile's intelligent, soulful, honest music has inspired a 10-year-old budding songwriter. Go Jordan! Go Brandi! And go Dad.

consumption, cultivation and creation, family, music

Andy:

[When] our 10-year-old Jordan started to sound a little like the snotty teenagers she was watching on TV, Hannah Montana and Wizards were outlawed. Soon after, we were fortunate enough to be guests on the Cayamo [singer-songwriter cruise ship], and I made the family a mix of Cayamo artists for the drive down—Lyle Lovett, Patty Griffin, Kathleen Edwards, Over the Rhine, John Hiatt. But it was Brandi Carlile they kept wanting to hear. By the time we saw her concert, my girls knew most of the words. At Emma’s ninth birthday party (a lock-in at the Paste office) she cranked up “The Story” for her friends like it was the latest Miley Cyrus hit. The requests for Radio Disney stopped, and I overheard Jordan telling her friends she doesn’t think Cyrus is a very good singer anymore.

So when Brandi recently came within half a mile of our house last week to play a pair of intimate performances at Eddie’s Attic, I took them to the early show. It was the first real club concert for my kids. Eddie’s has a no-talking-during-the-performance rule, and my usually very loud children abided. . . . They mouthed all the words except when they couldn’t resist singing along. When Brandi started clapping, they clapped. When Brandi told the audience to stand, Emma stood up on her stool with her hands in the air.

Jordan wrote her first song a couple of days after the show. She won’t sing it to me yet, but the lyrics are great. She began guitar lessons earlier this year and is headed to girls rock camp this summer. Emma is saving up her money for a guitar now. When they think of a future rock star, the image is of a down-to-earth Carlile instead of a glammed-up Ashley Tisdale.

Towards the end of Buying In, Rob Walker looks at perhaps the most intriguing contemporary movement of resistance to consumerism: the DIY and crafts movement. I'll have some final thoughts tomorrow on how far this really goes in offering an alternative to the consumer culture, but there is something winsome and encouraging about people who have decided that they'd rather be creating culture than just consuming it.

consumption, crafting, cultivation and creation, rob walker

Andy

:

To many participants, [crafting] is not a new shopping trend or even an art movement. It is a kind of consumption revolution, a community based on celebrating individual creativity and artisanal skill—and rejecting mass-produced goods. Like the brand underground entrepreneurs such as Barking Irons and the Hundreds, the DIY practitioners prized their independent, nonmainstream status. Crafters, however, often postioned their efforts as not just an alternative to or a luxurylike refinement of mass consumer culture, but an overt challenge to it.

“Crafting is a political statement,” Jean Railla, the founder of GetCrafty.com, argued in the first issue of a magazine called Craft, which appeared in late 2006. “With globalism, factory labor, and sweatshops as growing concerns, and giant chains like Starbucks, McDonald’s and Old Navy turning America into one big mini-mall, crafting becomes a protest.” Railla, whose 2004 book, Get Crafty: Hip Home Ec, placed self-made goods in the context of third wave feminism and a “bohemian” identity, returned in the new magazine’s second issue to argue on behalf of “the punk of craft.” Reiterating the political and “antiauthority” aspects of the “ethic of Do It Yourself,” she mused: “In the age of hypermaterialism, Paris Hilton, and thousand-dollar ‘It’ bags, perhaps making stuff is the ultimate form of rebellion.” . . .

[And yet . . . ] Grounded in commerce, the DIY movement not only accommodates consumption and even marketing, it depends on them. It’s not opposed to the meaning of objects, it’s about the meaning of objects.

Woolf argues that a good reader needs to approach a text as a co-creator rather than a simple consumer or even a critic (though keep reading her essay ... eventually the time arrives to mount the judge's bench).

critique, cultivation and creation, england, horizons of the possible, literature, reading, writing

Nate

:

Reading is a very complex art - the hastiest examination of our sensations as a reader will show us that much. And our duties as readers are many and various. But perhaps it may be said that our first duty to a book is that one should read it for the first time as if one were writing it.

One should begin by sitting in the dock with the criminal, not by mounting the bench to sit among the Judges. One should be an accomplice with the writer in his act, whether good or bad, of creation. For each of these books, however it may differ in kind and quality, is an attempt to make something. And our first duty as readers is to try and understand what the writer is making from the first word with which he builds his first sentence to the last with which he ends his book. We must not impose our design upon him; we must not try to make him conform his will to ours. We must allow Defoe to be Defoe and Jane Austen to be Jane Austen as freely as we allow the tiger to have his fur and the tortoise to have his shell. And this is very difficult. For it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings Heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision.

Graffiti (whether the restroom kind or others) sits on this weird junction between creation and vandalism, between anonymity and community. In this particular case, something undertaken primarily to reduce business expenses wound up making a space not just for alternative cultural expression, but for better—and self-improving—forms of community: "the clerk also told me that the men had cleaned up their language quite a bit in five years. The tone of their scribbles had changed from gross and inappropriate to polite and sincere."

business, community, cultivation and creation, graffiti, horizons of the possible, profanity

Nate

:

During a long road trip between California and Missouri, I stumbled on a gas station on Interstate 40 in Adrian, Texas, that had come up with an ingenious way of protecting the walls of their restrooms. In an effort to reduce the number of times the restrooms needed to be painted, someone came up with the idea to tape sheets of butcher block paper to the walls. The sheets were inside every stall and on the walls in both the men and women’s restrooms. On the top of each piece of torn white paper was written “Please tell us about your trip”. What followed on every sheet were stories about why people were traveling across the country. Some stories were sad, some were happy, some were angry. The whole gamut of emotions was posted on these sheets. (I wish I had a picture.)

The amazing thing was that the real white walls of the restroom were not defaced in any manner, not one piece of graffiti.  After asking at the checkout who came up with the idea, the clerk told me that, to clean up graffiti, the owners had been stuck with a painting the walls of the restrooms twice a year. Since they had put the butcher block paper up five years ago, they had never painted the restrooms.Yet they remained clean and sparkling white. Obviously, the management nudged the public for everyone’s benefit.

By the standards of Internet time, this op-ed was written ages ago (14 November), and critiquing it now is like a late hit in football. But there is a fundamental fallacy here that is, if not timeless, then enduringly relevant. Why is it that the only ways Michael Kinsley—by all accounts a talented and creative man—can imagine to get out of the economic crisis are more spending or more saving? Why does he completely omit any reference to the most deeply human, and also the most economically productive, thing we can do? We don't have to define our lives either by how much we save or how much we spend. We can embrace the call to collaborate with others to create something new that adds economic value, among other kinds of value, to the world. That is what will bring us out of the current slump into real prosperity: people who aren't shoppers or hoarders but creators. It is a measure of the power of consumer culture that Kinsley doesn't even mention that as an option.

consumerism, cultivation and creation, economics

Andy

:

Without consumers to lead the charge, an economic recovery will be hard to achieve. And yet everyone agrees that we need to start saving more. So should I buy that coffee maker to stimulate the economy? Or should I save the money in order to “grow” the economy and provide for my own old age? I can’t do both. . . .

So what do we do? The nearest thing to an actual plan seems to be something like this: stimulate first, to avert various short-term disasters, and then — at some signal from the Treasury Department — turn around and start saving like mad, to avert various long-term disasters. In other words, we need to get back our consumer confidence, and then lose it again.

The article also includes the important qualification that cultural offerings still have to be good—indeed, the goodness of Kim or Anna Karenina is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

cultivation and creation, horizons of the possible, literature, oprah

Nate

:

One of the commonest complaints by cultural doomsayers is that nobody reads good books any more. Yet in the past two years, the Oprah Book Club in America recommended Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and three novels by William Faulkner—good by any standard, and they all made the bestseller lists. This year, Waterstone’s, which owns over 300 bookshops in Britain, asked two celebrated novelists, Sebastian Faulks and Philip Pullman, each to choose 40 titles and write a few words of recommendation. The chain then piled copies of the books on tables next to the entrances of its main shops and waited to see what would happen. Faulks and Pullman hardly dumbed down their choices: they included Fernando Pessoa’s “Book of Disquiet”, Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim”, and Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in Style”. The sales increases for these books over the same period the year before were, respectively, 1,350%, 1,420% and 1,800%—clear evidence of latent demand. If you offer it, they will come.

A few weeks ago I enjoyed the New Yorker's article about video game designer CliffyB, presenting his opus "Gears of War" as an intriguing combination of close-second-person shooter violence and an emotionally nuanced backstory (though after actually watching the Gears of War preview, rather than just reading the prose, had me less intrigued: it's still a pretty steep shooting-to-nuance ratio). Maybe I'd do better investigating the cultivation-games described in this profile of "the Walt Disney of game design," Shigeru Miyamoto.

cultivation and creation, games, gardens and cities, play

Nate

:

One day Miyamoto was tending his garden.  He was in awe at the process of planting, growing and harvesting and the general admiration of the beauty that can arise out of the garden.  This is when the crazy idea of making some sort of garden-influenced game came to mind.  As cheesy and boring as it may sound, he did not end up with a design reminiscent of literally watching grass grow on your TV screen.  The end result was Pikmin, a title where the player plants and harvests little flower creatures.  You play as Captain Olimar whose job is to keep all the Pikmin alive, safe from the large bugs and animals that inhabit the planet.  Quite a far cry from the shoot-to-kill mentality, eh?

A few years after bringing an evolved sense of gardening to gaming, Miyamoto oversaw the advent of Wii Fit, a new interactive way to bring health into the fold of non-traditional gaming.  So instead of playing a version of creation on screen, the player would literally be working out, which in and of itself isn’t new or innovative, but bringing it into the fold of interactive games is more than admirable.  Even the joy of playing music is made simpler, a-la Guitar Hero or Rock Band, in Wii Music - a simpler way to enjoy the beauty of making music than even the aforementioned blockbusters.

I ended up covering two topics in much more detail in Culture Making than I had expected when I first conceived the book: family and food. We simply cannot talk reasonably about culture without addressing these core elements of it. In this article, one of the most important I have read in the past several months, Michael Pollan makes a plea for leadership from the next president in changing America's relationship with its food. I hardly know which section to excerpt—they are all important, not least the idea of restoring farming as a viable and valuable occupation in the minds of youth and young adults. My only caveat would be that a memo to the president, as well-thought-out as this one may be (one might quibble with any number of minor points), is no substitute for starting right where we are, right now.

cultivation and creation, family, food and drink, gardens and cities

Andy

:

The choice of White House chef is always closely watched, and you would be wise to appoint a figure who is identified with the food movement and committed to cooking simply from fresh local ingredients. Besides feeding you and your family exceptionally well, such a chef would demonstrate how it is possible even in Washington to eat locally for much of the year, and that good food needn’t be fussy or complicated but does depend on good farming. You should make a point of the fact that every night you’re in town, you join your family for dinner in the Executive Residence — at a table. (Surely you remember the Reagans’ TV trays.) And you should also let it be known that the White House observes one meatless day a week — a step that, if all Americans followed suit, would be the equivalent, in carbon saved, of taking 20 million midsize sedans off the road for a year. Let the White House chef post daily menus on the Web, listing the farmers who supplied the food, as well as recipes.

Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population.