From the WLS Archives: Stuart Saunders Smith’s Angels, at the Nief-Norf Festival, June 2011.
John Cage Interview (excerpt)
Music for Dancers folks: this is a video containing one of the quotes I dropped in class on Monday.
Coffeeshop Commandments
If you know me, then you know that my personal standards for coffeeshops are high. (Phoenix, AZ’s Cartel Coffee Lab ruined me; everything they make is delicious.) I make no apologies; if you’re going to sell me coffee for more money than it costs for me to make it at home, you had better either make it better than I do at home, or make things that I can’t make at home (i.e., professional espresso, etc.). The following is not an all-inclusive wishlist, but it does represent the price of entry to my wallet on a regular basis:
1) Beans for espresso should be ground to order. An airpot of brewed coffee sitting around is alright (although grind-and-pour-over to order is SO much better), but any decent espresso shot or espresso-based drink isn’t gonna fly unless the beans have been ground within, oh, the last minute or so. You won’t get decent crema any other way.
2) Milk (or half-and-half, or soymilk) should be properly steamed. This does not mean that you stick the wand in a small metal pitcher of milk and fire steam into it until it gets hot. It takes technique, but the reward is absolutely worth it—instead of hot milk with a top layer of stiff, meringue-like foam that will never ever get friendly with espresso crema (Starbucks, I’m looking at you), properly steamed milk will have legions of tiny, supple foam bubbles all throughout it. For whatever reason, properly steamed milk tastes sweeter and richer, and does amazing things when poured into espresso in the right proportion, depending on the drink you ordered (i.e., a real macchiato vs. a real cappuccino vs. cafe latte). Latte art (those cute little leaf or apple designs that some baristas can pour into your espresso drink) is not mere vanity; it is impossible to pour latte art with badly steamed milk, so the art is essentially the barista’s guarantee that they know what they’re doing.
2a) Two Bad Signs regarding your local shop’s milk-steaming chops: a) if they ask how much foam you want on your drink (remember, properly steamed milk does not have a separate foam component); b) no latte art, or worse—stiff, unyielding foam on top of a cup.
3) If I’m going to stay, a proper cup or mug and saucer should be an option. You’ve got real plates for your $3 muffins, so I know you’re already washing dishes back there somewhere. Step up with some ceramic cups. (Not to mention that it’s impossible to present a proper macchiato or cappuccino in a to-go vessel.)
4) Good coffeeshops adhere to standard coffee nomenclature. (STARBUCKS, I’M LOOKING AT YOU.) “Skinny” means to make it with skim milk, not to sub in all your sugar-free syrups for normal ones. A real macchiato is concentrated espresso-and-milk bliss, and caramel is nowhere expletive near it. There is no such thing as a real cappuccino in a 20-ounce size. And so on.
4a) Rule #1 of Good Coffeeshop Citizenship: DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, use Starbucks lingo in a non-Starbucks joint. (You know, “Frappuccino,” or “Grande,” or “Caramel Macchiato.” It hurts just to type it.) Kittens die when people do that s***.
There are, of course, other things needed to create a full-on coffeeshop crush. (Got tables-and-chairs and easy chairs and couches? Reliable Wi-Fi? Enough power outlets? Complimentary self-service water? Do those $3 muffins taste better than generic foodservice product? Is your music quiet enough to keep conversation easy? etc.) These guidelines are first-round coffeeshop criteria.
From the WLS Archives: Failure is Now Cheaper
The more I listen to creative people discuss their work, one common thread that emerges is that you have to do lots and lots of work before the quality of the work begins to approach the quality of your taste, i.e., a lot of the stuff you do at the beginning will not be so good, and you’ll know it’s not so good, and you have two options: you can stop working (as many people do), or you can push through and keep working, pushing each piece of work closer and closer to excellence, closing the quality/taste gap more and more. In some very good YouTube videos, Ira Glass discusses this at length.
(Personal moment #1: my father is a very bright and honest man with a quiver of aphorisms which he takes up when a teachable moment arrives. A favorite was:
A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?Saddish news #1: the gap will always be there— all of us are working to shrink it as best we can.)
So, to get where you want to go, you’re going to have to generate a certain amount of material that’s not up to your own snuff. (Saddish news #2: for a while, most of what you generate will fall into this category. If you immediately begin pleasing yourself greatly, you’ll want to investigate the possibility that a) you are gifted on the level of a Daniel Tammet or Willie Mosconi, or b) your means of self-evaluation are not sufficiently incisive.)
(Personal moment #2: my father spent (and continues to spend) most of his working time in finance. The fact that I knew what EBITDA* stood for when I was 12 may have some impact on the following analysis of the situation.)
You should minimize the cost of this failure, because you’re about to buy a lot of it. You’re spending your time and energy, which are finite resources, to get this failure. Get it as cheap as you can.
Happy news: here are two helpful things that will radically lower the cost of your failure, and they’re both within reach.
Aid to Cheap Failure #1: The Internet. The cheapest collaboration/publication/research tool ever invented by human beings. Say you wrote an article. Want to publish it?
1a) Reproduce that article on paper many times over (hello Kinko’s), mail it to as many appropriate magazines/journals/periodicals you can think of, wait around for a while, and receive tons of rejections. (high financial/personal costs) x (failure/success ratio) = pretty darn high.
1b) Register on tumblr or a similar service, start typing, tell all your friends and colleagues, and see what happens. (very low financial/personal costs) x (failure/success ratio [same as before]) = much much lower. I’m still buying about as much failure, and it’s still not much fun, but I can afford to keep buying it long enough for it to start paying off in terms of better-quality work. (I picked this option, as you can tell.)
The transaction cost works the same from the research side— you can hope that the article you’re looking for appears somewhere in a $6 magazine or $45 journal, or you can hope it’s at your local library, or wait for inter-library loan— or you can search for the topics that interest you online. Neither is perfect, but one is way cheaper.
Cory Doctorow talks about this at length in a lecture he gave at Cambridge. The whole thing is worth a read, but YouTube has a pertinent excerpt up:
Aid to Cheap Failure #2: Higher education (of whatever flavor: community college, junior college, university, grad school, etc.)
I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to spend most of my beginning creative time failing, I’d really like to do it somewhere where I’m not also relying on my creative work to pay the rent. Not that higher education is necessarily inexpensive, but it provides you with an environment where you don’t *need* to nail it the first time. It also provides you with a small army of people (aka faculty) who will give you information that will save you from having to learn some things by trial and error. TRIAL AND ERROR IS AN EFFECTIVE BUT PAINFUL AND EXPENSIVE WAY TO LEARN.
College can’t come close to teaching you everything you need to know. But it does allow you to work out the kinks/fall on your face/make your mistakes so that when failure becomes expensive, you’ll need to buy only small amounts of it to get your success. I wonder if this could be expanded into…
A THEORY ON THE MACROECONOMICS OF CREATIVITY
Later on (say, after graduating), I’m still pouring in large amounts of t/e/i/r, but I’m getting less failure for my efforts. This is because failure is more expensive and I can afford less of it— if I fail now, instead of just being frustrated, I get frustrated AND lose money from low ticket sales AND renting the hall AND paying the musicians, say. But, because the supply of failure currency has tightened up, the price of success per unit failure has gone way down. Same t/e/i/r input with less failure and more success. This is good because a) I’m learning and improving, and b) who wants a lot of failure hanging around? I’m going to buy it all up ASAP so I can sell it all off as soon as I can. (Incidentally, this is also why starting new careers or new large projects in adulthood can be as scary as it is— you’re going back to purchasing large amounts of failure in your new venture at a point in life when failure is very expensive. Lots of adults make it cheaper by…you guessed it…going back to school.)
Throw yourself in the deep end. Go out and fail. Interrogate the failure. Go out and fail again. Get a hug when you need one. Go out and fail again. Keep doing work. Enjoy the success. Go out and fail. Stay warm.
And thanks, Dad.
*EBITDA = Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization
Awesome interview with Laurie Anderson
As I gear up for the coming semester, it’s nice to read about art and artists and see what other strategies people have come up with for working.
From the WLS Archives: On Aphorisms
This is an old blog post from NoiseGarden, but Guitar Craft aphorisms are always there, and always useful!
UPDATE: Ack! Had to fix the link; the aphorisms page moved, because it looks like Fripp is no longer actively maintaining Guitar Craft. (The old link went to a page that said: “Guitar Craft no longer exists.”) The new link is to The Orchestra of Crafty Guitarists, who are carrying on (with Robert’s blessing, I imagine).
“One thing I find very helpful is having a resource where I can quickly go and get a small but pertinent piece of advice about art and creativity. While the advice is generally not as good as the advice I’d receive from a live human, this resource would be available 24/7, whereas people sometimes need to sleep.
My favorite is the aphorisms page at Guitar Craft. Guitar Craft was started in the mid-1980s by King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, and what started as a course in guitar technique broadened to become applicable in almost any way you choose to use it. The aphorisms touch on truth with speed and precision, and they’ve been very helpful to me. If you want another one, you can just refresh the page.
It’s worth checking them out. (The one that came up just now was, “Sometimes no answer is an answer, especially when the answer is no.” Not always sunshine and smiling bunnies, but useful.)”
