Original tweet here.

“You can’t understand the blues until you’ve had your heart broken, and you can’t understand disco until you’ve had group sex on Ecstasy.” – DJ Harvey

When I moved to New York City over a year ago, my guitar made the cut: It joined a pile of things I brought with me that I wasn’t sure what to do with, like the blender (someone kept stuffing it deep in my luggage regardless of my attempts to ditch it) and the iron (the wrinkles flatten once a shirt is on anyway, right?).

“I’ll play this again.” I eyed the instrument. The guitar became a fixture in my New York City closet, a prop, a piece of black wood strung with nylon, undoubtedly out of tune. It rested between shirts on hangers and a basket of laundry. I stored it somewhere I would have to see everyday, that is, if I wanted a change of clothes.

It was the same guilt-ridden strategy someone might use to be healthier: Place the fruits and vegetables in the front of the refrigerator so you feel shitty reaching around them. Install the pull-up bar under the bedroom door, engulfed in shame each time you walk under without doing one, just one. The best motivation for getting better at something is reminding yourself each day that you still aren’t.

The guitar sat there. And sat there. The skills acquired from lessons I took in high school years before — rotting away. “I’ll start playing again. When I have time.” I never made the time. I didn’t have a reason to.

II.

“The Blues are a mystery, and mysteries are never as simple as they look.” – BB King

I recently visited Brazil, a country with a rhythm. The language, the way people eat, walk and dance, they all pulse to a beat. I tapped my hand against my side walking down the street, or gently drummed my fork against my plate after I finished a meal. The rhythm was hard to ignore; It was a rhythm ingrained in the culture.

In Brazil, I listened to music with a common rhythm. Not a Brazilian rhythm, but connected similarly. The bands and artists included the the Yardbirds, the Jeff Beck Group, Led Zeppelin, Cream, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Mike Bloomfield, the Rolling Stones, the Black Keys, and probably a few more.

I listened to these artists hundreds, maybe thousands of times before, but I never noticed their shared foundation: the blues. The connected rhythm of Brazil helped me rediscover the blues and its genetic foundation in rock and roll.

III.

“Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.” – Jimi Hendrix

When someone gives me an unsolicited music recommendation, I ignore it. I need to discover music on my own for it to mean something. There is a sense of accomplishment in the conquest. You invested time into  seeking a sound; The search happened naturally.

“You need to listen to this guy. He’s bluesy, ” or so I’ve been told in my past 20 or so years as a music listener by friends, family, and record shop owners (the latter of whom I’d also consider friends and family by my sheer gratitude for their ability to locate that one album I wanted at the bottom of a crate), but always ignored. The blues in my mind was something…dated. A type of music no one played anymore. It was irrelevant.

The artists I listen to the most are blues artists. I wasn’t paying attention. I had to figure this one out on my own to defeat my ignorance.

IV.

“If you don’t know the blues…there’s no point in picking up the guitar.” – Keith Richards

I picked up my guitar for the first time since high school a few months ago. The Brazilian rhythm helped me notice how even a complex web can share a simple foundation, like rock and roll and the blues. Discovering the blues seemed like a good way to get started again, a reason to pull the guitar out of my New York City closet, tune it, and play it. The blues was the foundation I was missing.

Recently, I’ve forayed into music production. Specifically, DJing. I’ve always been the “music guy” in my circle of friends, casually claiming the title of “DJ” at parties. Developing an ear for how people react to different forms of music and studying the psychology behind it, it was appropriate to learn DJing beyond clicking tracks on iTunes.

The “DJ” is different things to different people: The radio DJ, or Disc Jockey, plays records, chats about songs, and engages in an open dialogue with his listeners. The wedding/bar-mitzvah DJ is an MC and party host, rather than the guy who plays the music. The DJ/producer (the type I am studying) expresses himself solely through sound. The DJ/producer mixes, scratches and blends records, using the turntables as an embodiment for instrumentation.

The DJ/producer is the most technical of the DJs, and requires a basic understanding of music theory. The tool-set of the DJ/producer includes, at minimum, two turntables and a mixer. The turntables play the records and the mixer controls which record(s) protrudes from the speakers at which volume, and with what quantities of treble and bass.

Learning to DJ is like learning an instrument. The process has dragged painful nostalgia of when I first picked up a guitar, and the frustration of training my hands and ears congruently. The ear training feels foreign, even to a regular music listener:

1.) Count the number of beats.
2.) Mentally organize the beats into packets of bars.
3.) Choose the perfect cue, mix and drop points.

The steps need to be processed simultaneously, which the hands then react to.

When I DJ, it feels like I’m training exotic areas of my brain. It’s taken months of practice to regularize tasks that I remember appearing simple when I was an outsider. Consider record mixing, one of the most basic maneuvers of a DJ:

1.) Choose two tracks within an overlapping 10-12 BPM range.
2.) Play one track while cueing the other.
3.) Adjust the pitch so the tracks have matching BPM.
4.) Prepare the cued track for the mix.
5.) Drop the cued track on the first beat of the bar.
6.) Repeat.

The goal should be to have two separate tracks that sound like a single track: A unique-to-the-DJ, live, remixed song.

The DJ can take a rock-and-roll track, transition to a hip-hop track, and then again to an electronic track, all while making it sound like the song never changed. The DJ allows his audience to enjoy the ambiance of social environment with his sounds serving as a backdrop to the social interaction. In a room of music, the DJ is in control.

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The Ronettes’ Be My Baby is the most sonically pleasing song I’ve ever listened to. It’s an instant mood-enhancer.

A piece of art is successful (the second part) when the artist’s perspective resonates with an audience in a way that’s understood, even if it differs from the artist’s intention. However, the process of creating art (the first and often less examined part) is selfish: the artist produces to provide himself with a clearer, stronger, deeper perspective of his own life.

As an extreme example of a process-driven artist, consider Henry Darger, a recluse with a negligible public occupation as a hospital janitor who led a secret life as a writer and artist. A custodian during the day, Darger produced a 15,000 page work of fiction, a 5,000 page autobiography, a 10-year weather journal, a 10,000 page novel and a collection of diaries, paintings and illustrations in his spare time. Indifferent to result, Darger’s work did not emerge until after his death. He’s heralded to this day in museums and recognized as a prime example of outsider art.

Art allows for process because it is malleable. An artist can take bits and pieces of life conditions and experiences, often confusing and overbearing to reality, and weave them into a neat, linear narrative on a canvas. The painter chooses from a pallet of colors, patterns, symbols and textures, and arranges them into a painting. The musician uses instruments, samples and production techniques, layering sounds into a song or album. The writer — and this is especially true of the fiction writer — tells a story using language, characters and emotion reflecting pieces of our own lives.

The process of creating art, regardless of its result, can bring us one step closer to understanding our own reality.

Big, hairy audacious goals also sound like hopeful bullshit, especially when proposed as:

Change the world. Help people live better lives. Do stuff that matters. Make things people care about.

At best, they are a marketing ploy. At worst, they are a scam. In reality, they fall somewhere in between. It’s mock, or imitation motivation. Big, hairy audacious goals provide a glimpse — just from their description — of a possible, but never measurable big picture. It’s that grandiose thing you’re working towards, but rarely hit. An imaginable prize. They are for the dreamers.

Ironically, these motivation techniques hide the reality of accomplishing a goal. Reality is a painful process. A process requires patience — the patience of enduring the drudge of repetition, practice, deadlines and adversaries. Audacious goals cloak the existence of this process.

The opposite of setting audacious goals would be living and strategizing in stark reality. Realists, rather than dreamers, are inventive — not emotional like the dreamers. Realists are grounded and anticipatory of the process. They avoid audacious goal setting, because audacious goal setting softens any chance of accomplishment.

Realistic, grounded goals also lack excitement and artistic vision, missing the opportunity to motivate yourself or an organization beyond short-term accomplishment, especially when proposed as:

Write one song per day for the next week. Increase sales by 10% with more advertising. Donate $20 per month to a child in Ghana.

The reality and dream spectrum should be balanced, rather than abided to one way or another. The drudgery of reality should be alleviated by a sense of some bigger, more audacious goal. And, the visionary goal setting should be balanced by a clear idea of process — the painful, tedious, less exciting steps in getting there.

Alfred Hitchcock is an example of an artist who reached for emotional, audacious goals while conscious of the drudgery of moving towards them. He was aware that the backbone of his art — stories — had their limits in reality, while still visualizing the bigger, emotional impacts of creating a film. He was anticipatory of the pain, or lack of fun, that resulted in accomplishing even a portion of the audacious goal.

“A story is simply a motif, just as a painter might paint a bowl of fruit just to give him something to be painting. Once the screenplay is finished, I’d just as soon not make the film at all. All the fun is over. I have a strongly visual mind. I visualize a picture right down to the final cuts. I write all this out in the greatest detail in the script, and then I don’t look at the script while I’m shooting. I know it off by heart, just as an orchestra conductor needs not look at the score. It’s melancholy to shoot a picture. When you finish the script, the film is perfect. But in shooting it you lose perhaps 40 per cent of your original conception.”

The realist sees only the drudgery, often not looking beyond it. The dreamer can see only the prize. Dreamers don’t think their ideas all the way through, relying on chance and the acceptance of petty mistakes. Realists consider only process, eliminating flow, natural reaction and instinct. Goal setting requires discipline — both audacious goals and an expectation of the gritty process — rather than just grasping today’s reality or reaching for some distant fantasy.

I’m not old enough to remember this city, but from what I’ve learned, Times Square in the 1970s and 80s was banal, beaten to the brim, filled with junkies, sex shops and crime.

The artists and intellectuals — avoiding the pitfalls of eroding midtown — took their hobbies elsewhere. A second cohort of the Beat Generation emerged as young, ruminating artists left to find a place in the city to call home.

They chose to move downtown and New York’s formative renaissance began.

Downtown presented an empty canvas: undeveloped economies, bustling streets with virgin sidewalks, alleys waiting for graffiti and clubs soon-to-be filled with punk-rock and hip-hop. The arts flourished because there were no rules.

The downtown terrain was sprawling enough to suit an incoming of new settlers while empty enough to personalize. Some of our greatest art — still recognized today — was produced in downtown New York during its creative boom.

The evolution of New York’s subculture is a natural process, and downtown isn’t what it used to be. The city has been gentrified, cleaned up and settled by families. It lacks the rugged, do-it-yourself culture it was built on. Yesterday’s graffiti artist has been replaced by today’s stroller pusher. The artists left for newer, emerging habitats.

Where is the counterweight to today’s mass, consumer culture?

Is the internet the new downtown?

DJ / producer Mark Ronson told a story recently on a music panel that made me consider those questions. Mark was asked about his creative process in developing and producing a pop single: does he deliberately attempt to devise a piece of music that will appeal to large audiences or does he wait for an idea to strike before hitting the studio?

Mark’s story and response brushed on both:

Amy Winehouse, Mark’s collaborator in 2007, had proclaimed to him that “they want to send me back to rehab!” Mark, taken aback, responded, “No, no, no!” Mark had an idea, immediately followed by a studio session and a first stab at the track’s 1960s-style production.

The result was Amy Winehouse’s majorly successful track “Rehab,” produced by Mark Ronson. A casual conversation about Amy’s drinking problem turned into a catchy, soulful piece of music awarded five Grammys including Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

At the end of the story, Mark explained that his creative process was not sitting down and forcing himself to create a sound that would be popular with the masses. He simply creates music that is appealing to him when the moment strikes. At times this occurs as a result of a conversation or experience; other times it happens while he is in the studio producing other music.

I don’t believe creativity has an off / on switch. Creative, right-brained people are naturally wired to always be “on.” I do believe, however, that certain environments and states of mind are necessary in enabling the creative process.

Mark Ronson may not sit down and tell himself to “create a popular song,” but he was able to use a random slice of conversation with a talented alcoholic as inspiration for a multiple Grammy winning track. The hours of work, brain power and actual creative process took place in the studio, which you can guarantee was controlled, deliberate and practiced, unlike the spark of inspiration.

Take another example involving Steve Jobs: during a trip to India in 1974 he experimented with LSD, later calling the experience “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” A writer has even said that “thinking differently — or learning to Think Different, as a Jobs slogan has it — is a hallmark of the acid experience.” Similar in theme to the story of Ronson’s conversation with Winehouse, Jobs’ experience with LSD was an inspiration for his later work while unrelated to the actual process of creating.

Inspiration for creativity is cheap and can be found anywhere, whether through conversations with an alcoholic, experimentation with LSD in India, or more conventional means. Creative production, on the other hand, is only as valuable as the person’s willingness to sit down and act on it.

My inability to simplify, or habit of unnecessarily complifying, is an anxiety inducer. Expressing a well-thought idea simply is a complex process. Assuming an idea has bounced around the neurons, that single idea fought numerous other ideas before traveling to the tip of the tongue. Those ideas that express themselves have overcome intellectual hurdles, or what can feel like anxiety, to reach tangible expression.

My ideas live inside my head, often best expressed through writing as opposed to speaking, because I can move at a tempered pace. My habit for complexity has splintered certain of my capabilities, causing not only anxiety, but uncertainty surrounding my own ideas. It’s forced me to take blame for others’ mistakes because I’ve failed to express instructions in a way that made sense to anyone else besides me.

I sympathized with John Mayer’s reluctance to embrace simplicity that he described in the recently published Playboy interview, even though it causes friction with himself and his relationships. His overthinking, anxiety and inability to express ideas simply, he claims, have given him everything.

As soon as I lose that control, once I have to deal with someone else’s desires, I cut and run. I’m pretty culpable about being hard to live with. I have had a good run of imagining things into reality. I’ve got a huge streak of successes based on my own inventions. If you tell me I’m wrong or that I’m overthinking something, well, overthinking has given me everything in my career. I have a hard time not looking at anxiety disorder as being like an ATM.

The key to leveraging a trait that would otherwise be considered a character flaw is to recognize it and understand its limits. People often try to alleviate anxiety or remove it all together. But, my strategy is to control it and leverage it where it’s advantageous. I’ve learned to live with episodes of anxiety because it’s proven to be a more preferable state than simplicity. Without it, I’d feel dull, even with the extra mental distress.

Creativity falls into a category of traits often claimed but rarely defined. My observations tell me this happens for three reasons:

One, the word has sex appeal. Similar to “entrepreneur,” it’s become marketable and desirable for someone to claim he is a “creative,” even if he’s not. The second, most authentically, is communicated by someone who creates things while lacking the acuteness to articulate what he is creating. The third is communicated by someone who claims a creative philosophy, but is ignorant to communicating his reasoning.

The distinctions play a role in the unique war occurring between the opposing poles of popular culture: art and marketing. I categorize art as original work derived from the hands and minds of the second and third distinctions. Historically, art has generated new cultural movements. The subsequent mass marketing is a collection of messages recycled from the original art, often developed by individuals in the first distinction.

Both art and marketing can, and do, stand on their own, but are more effective when combined. For instance, for a painting to reach mass appeal and commercial success, it needs to be created by the artist, while most effectively marketed by a second party, such as a museum. Likewise, a marketing campaign will prove influential when its guts have been created by the unique work of an artist.

Today’s original art is reflective of today’s mass marketing and media, rather than the other way around. Consider the following two examples:

The Banksy-influenced street artist Mr. Brainwash currently has an exhibit displaying colorful pop portraits in a spacious New York warehouse reminiscent in style of Andy Warhol, including quirky prints of Obama, Kate Moss, Keith Haring, a taxi cab in a toy box and broken record outlines of pop figures Slash, Jay-Z, David Bowie and Sid Vicious. Mr. Brainwash leveraged existing, pre-marketed trends, repackaged them and resold his art to an existing culture and new audience.

Or, take the Significant Objects project, where writers develop original stories around insignificant objects, crowning them significant, subsequently selling the items on eBay for more then they are “worth.” The objects, often just everyday items, increase in value because of the original narrative wrapped around them. Similar to the Mr. Brainwash exhibit, an existing culture has been repackaged, redesigned and recycled for a likely new audience.

Art has become so recycled and repetitive that one meme’s high quickly fades until the next hit. Today’s artist isn’t an individual; he’s been reduced to another, for lack of a better word, remixer.

Present culture is faced with a cyclical dilemma: Artists aren’t starting trends, they are repackaging them. Mass marketing, to its benefit, has become so relevant that it’s viewed as inspiration by today’s creatives. With any period of inflection–a loophole exists. There is a rare opportunity to lead a wave of artists that create the culture, rather than simply reflect it.

Who will be part of it?

I suspected that Entrepreneur’s Disease might be not just a correlated affliction, but a condition springing out of the very nature of the entrepreneur itself. I’ve heard over and over again that “startups will consume your life. No, really, they’ll totally consume your life, and you can’t even envision the extent of the utter completeness with which every non-startup aspect of your existence will be decimated and the earth beneath it salted.” Sounds like the victims of Entrepreneur’s Disease have not just heard that but embraced it, internalized it and loved it.

As unappealing as the life of someone in the heady midst of Entrepreneur’s Disease might superficially sound to me — and probably sounds to many readers — I must admit my unquashable attractions to (a) bold, audacious moves, (b) complete self-determination, whether it leads to success or failure, (c) endeavors the odds are against and (d) the amassing of fuck-you money. Especially (d). So I probably front like I understand entrepreneurship less than I actually do.

Colin has become one of my favorite voices on the internet and is an emerging star through his four quadrants: broadcasting / interviewing, writing / essayism, film / video and sound / music. Subscribe to his blog and listen to his interviews if you don’t already do so. Here are a handful of my favorite pieces and respective quotes:

What It Is

“I’ve realized that charting one’s own course in terms of other, previously-charted courses hurts as much as it helps. As much as claiming that you’re working toward becoming like Joe Icon satisfies others’ questions about your slightly unconventional aspirations, it’s no recipe for originality.”

Thoughtspace

“I’d submit that this all comes down to clarity, the condition that keeps the junk outside the brain’s purview and the meaningful stuff inside. Clarity demands the absence of sonic, visual, informational or personal noise.”

Less

“I also prefer a multiplicity of small, minimally-designed spaces, both aesthetically and intellectually. I fear not that my next place will have too little room, but too much; I worry not that I will have too few possessions to my name, but too many. My dream is to have several available dwellings, absolutely no larger than I require, in select locations across the globe.”

Cargo Cult Creation

“To reiterate what’s been written before: don’t think what they thought, think how they thought. Don’t do what it does, do it how it does it. Don’t think of what it’s about; think of how it’s about it.”

Buffering, Please Wait

“I call this “the buffer.” In this specific case I mean the financial bulwark between you and the dole line, but the importance of the buffer in all resources cannot be denied. Amassing a sizable amount of cash on hand for the proverbial rainy day, coloquially referred to as “fuck-you money” (FYM) — not an expression original to me, though I do use it all the time — is a goal toward which I work.”

I also like his interviews with Philalawyer, Merlin Mann, Ben Casnocha and Andy Mckenzie.