Learning Today: May 20th 2011. Celebrating The Proud And Invisible Professional Songwriters

Eg White. Al "Shux" Shuckburgh. You've heard their music in your car, hummed along to their words in the shower. Just who are they again?

These men are professional songwriters. Pop stars--it turns out--don't actually have enough time to write their own material, so they hire other people to do it for them (a lovely example of the increasing division of labor, by the way.)

No doubt it' efficient. Here's the wonderfully named Eg White on his process.

Sometimes I get two hours. Someone comes over at three, we have a cup of tea, chew the cud for a bit, go: 'All right, shall we write a song?' And by six, they've gone home and we've fucking done it. Chasing Pavements, that took two or three hours.

Efficient, sure. But there's something dreadfully unsatisfying to know that many of the songs making up the soundtrack to our lives were made this way--like work. We want our art to be the product of pure feeling, not the product of a guy trying to get a paycheck. When the market gets involved, we feel like our art has been compromised somehow.

Tangent time. This is one of the reasons for the snobbery of modern art. There's plenty of fantastic and appealing commercial art. But since it turns a profit, we're hesitant to call it real art--'high' art. True art is the art that could not survive the market--the art that must be supported by museums and art schools, rather than by people actually buying it and hanging it on their walls.

Well I think that's an awful way of looking at art. The test of art is in our experience of art--how we hear the song, how we see the painting, how we read the novel.

So tonight when you open up iTunes, raise your celebratory beverage of choice to the invisible professional songwriters, those shadowy men who make the music we hum along with.

Source: "Write me a hit by teatime: the world of professional songwriters." The Guardian, May 17th. Via Mefi.

Garfeild, In Media Res

Holy cow, this is the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. Maybe just because of the reference to Final Fantasy 3. But regardless. I think that this single video is the essence of the internet: snarky, obscure, and totally funny if you are one of the 2% of the adult population who get all the jokes.

Here's the website--with better quality videos, too.

What's The Meaning? What's The Point?

The big question: What’s the meaning of life? Put it another way: Why are we here on earth, towards what purpose? If we dare answer our answer will embarrass and disappoint. We are here to reproduce, we might say. We are here to recognize Jesus Christ as our personal savior. We are here to experience eating a flourless chocolate cake.

But wait, even by trying to answer the question – what’s the meaning of life? – we’re jumping the gun a little bit. It may be helpful to look at what we actually mean when we look for a meaning to life. What is it that we’re looking for?

We can find meaning in our everyday actions easily enough. For example, I work so that I can get paid. My work has a reason – money. A more complicated example: The painting is beautiful because the colors are chosen well. (Why this reason is more complicated than the previous, I will leave to the reader – this essay is too packed already). Either way, we can posit meaning for things by seeing them instrumentally, as means to an end. But then we get into a problem so simple it’s boring: if we se everything as defined by something else then we are caught in a circular argument. While it seems sensible to say that I work to make money; why do I make money? Why – to buy stuff. Well, why do I buy stuff? These questions can go on forever. Unless we consider intrinsic good. That is, good that’s good just in itself. There seems to be a point where either you must find a transcendent meaning or else recognize meaning as a tissue-thin bankrupt concept reserved for the illiterate masses.

This is not academic. We want a deeper meaning that transcends our everyday meanings. We work, eat and strive – and we want to understand this working eating and striving as being important. And we need a meaning. More often than not, we will not be satisfied by worldly reasons: we need to find intrinsic or transcendent meaning. I see religion as a smorgasbord of transcendent meaning.

But just look at the variety of transcendent meanings that are proffered to us, and you realize that there is something deeply unsatisfying about any of them. No single explanation for the meaningfulness of life seems, by the lights of the evidence at hand, to be any better suited to a life than any other. We choose one, it seems, randomly. And so the question “What meaning has our lives” becomes a question that makes us laugh at ourselves, say something ironic, and keep on living our lives. We recognize that we’re not going to be able to answer the question satisfactorily, so we tend not to hold up our answers for criticism or thought unless some crisis forces us to.

Yet it is not like we have given up hope for a transcendent meaning. We’ve just stopped expressing our hope. And so we stop being open and critical about what meaning we give our lives.

I believe that there can never be a transcendent meaning to life. That the sensations, events, and stories that build our lives are without meaning beyond the human world. The world is chaotic, there is nothing even close to a providential supernatural order to the universe. Everything beyond human understanding is blind colorless accident, neither good nor evil, nameless and cosmic and ineffable.

Which is not to say that I don’t think life has meaning. I think it does. But it’s just a human meaning, not a transcendent meaning. We force the chaotic explosion of our senses to make sense through acts of story-telling and memory. And it is through these actions that we make our own meaning. There is no other meaning. And that’s okay. But to recognize that is to recognize a fundamental humbleness about the things we think as important.

To make that last point make sense, I’m going to have to flesh out what I mean by telling stories. Which I will do right now, if you manage to hold tight.

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How do we go about making a story out of the events of our lives? Let’s look first at how we remember a particular experience. Out of a mass of sensual data – out of the storm of sights, sounds, smells, and thoughts that assault us every second – we pick out only a selection to form a memory.

I will pick out these sensations with some story in mind. If I have dinner with a friend, and am angry with him, I will remember sensations that back up my feeling of anger. I will give particular credence, say, to his annoying laugh, or to my discomfort. If I am very happy with him, I will chose a different cast of sensations. The point being, what is remembered and what is relegated to forgetfulness depends on what story I want to tell. Memory, far from being some objective recording device, is more of a collaged art-work, a coherent story patched together from a selection of available material.

So, in my reckoning, the very texture of all lived experience is already marked by the will towards narrative. There is no meaningful sensation that we have that comes to our consciousness free from its dependency on story. More importantly, once sensations are understood as more than mere sensations – when we begin to consider them, not as flashes of light or whiffs of air, but as meaningful occurrences like a movie, or the scent of coffee in the morning – we must consider them within the context of the story they are attempting to tell.

So we are creatures driven by the desire to make a narrative of the world, to string together the random occurrences of life in some sensible, artistic string.

But the problem is that often we mess up in our attempts at making a narrative of our experiences. For instance, we can craft a narrative out of a situation that isn’t really appropriate – by selectively choosing particular sensations instead of others, or by self-delusion. Don’t think that this is some silly academic problem, here: think of a boy who has a crush on a girl, and will imagine every little thing the girl does as evidence that she, too, has feelings for him. These narrative delusions are perhaps easy to spot when they are so drastic, but they happen to in innumerable, small and subtle ways: when we are pissed off at the world and take a cashier’s tiredness as haughtiness, when we consider the weather as a mirror of our souls, when we are having a good day and imagine the birds are singing for us.

But even if we succeed in making up narratives that are sensible to ourselves and others, which fit in with the rest of our communities’ reckonings as what makes an acceptable narrative – that is, if we manage to imagine our lives in a more-or-less sensible manner – we have only done half the work in front of us. What’s even more important, and vastly tougher (and a subject for another essay) is how we can make good stories, not just serviceable stories.

But back to the question at hand. Why do we mess up so much? Well, because we are naturally in a bind, as far as existence goes. We like to posit order to things, and reasons. Why? Well, because when we look at the things in our lives and assume that we can rationally understand what they’re doing, we can better interact with them. It’s a super useful tool to have. But the problem is that while we can find small-scale and medium scale reasons (that rock fell because somebody pushed it; she dumped me because I didn’t brush my teeth) we eventually get into a reasoning dead end when we butt our heads against more profound levels of understanding: what’s the reason for It All!? And the sad truth of it is, that the world itself is without reason. Reason only exists within human beings. Something without human interpretation – without a human looking at it and understanding it – that has nothing of reason to it.

But we want things, everything, to have a reason. When we have a bird shit on our heads or are not accepted for a job, it’s hard to accept that as a random meaningless event mostly outside of our control. We want to ascribe meaning to it. The trouble being, that the majority of the things that happen to us are either meaningless or their meaning is obscured to us. We walk into a restaurant and are served by a rude waitress. We would like to understand her rudeness. Maybe she doesn’t like us, maybe she’s a bitch. But the meaning of her mood is most likely forever obscured to us, and therefore resists subsumation into a narrative. This works for large-scale events far better than it does for quotidian ones: it is one of those constant questions of human life why people who are good and kind and constant are not rewarded by the world, while rapacious, mean, and nasty people end up sitting on piles of gold coins, laughing maniacally. Well, it is only a question if you believe that the universe has a meaning above-and-beyond that which human understanding ascribes it: that is, it only becomes a problem if you believe that there should be some reward for goodness, some meaningful pay-off for somebody’s actions.

It may not be terribly comforting to think of your life as having no meaning. I believe that understanding that the only meaning a life has comes from inside it provides a person for an opportunity to consciously craft their own lives, and arrange their sensations, doings, beliefs, and things in an artistic manner.

But that question – we’ll hold off on it for a while. What I want to talk about right now is how this need to make everything into a narrative can actually make people’s lives largely incoherent – or at least inflexible.

Look at how the narrative drive of much of born-again Christianity works. Every random event has meaning by virtue of that event leading to a precipitating revelation in the believer’s life. Lo, and they are saved from the life of sin etc. And their life afterwards is portioned out into careful measured regions of sacred and profane, and while some things may be most definitely good and other’s evil, the real comfort of such overwhelming belief is not of holiness, but of meaning. The evil is not merely insensible, or accidental. It is evil. The good is not just expedient or pleasurable. It is holy. It is immensely comforting, because it explains every single moment of a person’s life, it fills each moment with meaning.

But the problem from this perspective will be apparent to anyone who has fallen on the foul side of the equation: there is a certain rigidity in this zealous meaning that renders the true believer somewhat stubborn, epistemically. But it is this epistemic rigidity that is the comfort of extreme belief.

This applies, not only to born again Christians, but to fundamentalists of many stripes: Marxists as well as Jihadists: Punk kids and heroin addicts as well as gurus and hippies.

The real lesson to be drawn is not that these fundamentalists are evil or annoying or wrong – but that their methods of making memory is not as useful as other methods. In being so strict, they loose out on a flexibility that can give a more flexible thinker comfort and joy. Soon I will write an essay that details another kind of belief and memory fixation: an artistic, or liberated, memory.

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So, to sum up my point: We search for transcendent meaning for our life. But there is no such thing as any particular transcendent meaning. Instead, we construct our lives as great stories. But we have choice as far as these stories go. So there are better and worse ways to organize a life. That’s all.

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Comments welcome, of course. You know – if you made it this far, you deserve to lay a comment down, just to humor us all.

On The Small Genius Of Everyday Things

When we make our first attempts at a task, our efforts inevitably botch. The new graduate enters the office on the first day, a teenager scribbles her first, shaky lines of poetry, a barista tries to steam milk for the first time: we will fail before we succeed. Yet through practice, hard work, grace, talent and intelligence we can slowly improve ourselves. A child's crayon scrawl will become handwriting - more study renders handwriting calligraphy. Through effort what was messy becomes art.

There is no distinction in kind between the work of art and the work of labor, only a difference in quality. Somehow everyday activities when refined, buffed, and perfected, when their elements are arranged by a careful perception, become more than their merely useful inartistic counterparts. Their meaning spills over from the merely practical, and into the sublime. A man may tell you his opinions about some political problem; but listen to a great orator and that opinion is joined with an aesthetic pleasure that unites a practical goal with an aesthetic joy.

And then, as art is itself a polished version of everyday activity, art itself can be improved upon and become genius. Now, if art provides aesthetic pleasure in addition to a practical goal, genius is a special embodiment in which form and pleasure feed off of each other.

Of course, not everyone can be a genius. Most people who think that they're geniuses - who have the gall and the self-possession to admit out-loud to friends associates and benefactors that their mind and energy are great-souled enough to mark them as one of the blessed - are just assholes. And yet we all and orient our lives by genius' stars, and head off into the deep knowing that we probably will never reach a shore, but that our journey will be useful yet, just for trying.

But I want to tell you that genius is within our reach. The problem is that we fail to recognize the potential for genius in the simpler parts of our life. Can't we be geniuses of friendship? Why don't we recognize the genius in an easy life? There may be a genius in listening, in eating, even in breathing?

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John Dewey argues in Art As Experience that there is no real distinction between high and low art and the lived experience of our daily activities. In fact, the aesthetic experience is only beautiful because it follows the form of our lived experience: we arrange our lives' meaning from the scattered material of our daily experiences, and art does the same, but arranges its collage of colors and people in a way that is especially pleasing. Indeed, we can and should turn an artistic eye to our own life, to our own crafting of our days. But art, we think, is something that is impractical, removed from the commerce of life, done for its own sake and hidden away in museum galleries and the avant-garde, abstracted away from real life, hung on rich people's walls, inaccessible to the common mob who lack the developed minds and eyes that can appreciate the rarefied heights of culture. No, Dewey says, art is everywhere. Rather than being separate from everyday experience, art is just a really well done type of everyday experience. And once we realize that we can start to take the lessons that artists and art provide us with and apply them to our own lives: looking at our actions with the same lingering sensitivity we would look at a Picasso or read a Dostoyevsky.

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Before the American Revolution, pretty much everybody thought of work as a curse, something that people would only do if they were coerced into doing it. The gentleman who thought of themselves as the representatives of society were lucky to be free of work, in part so their great sensitive minds could better appreciate the real refined beauties of art, politics, sport and science. But after the Revolution, people began to find a joy in work. Gordon Wood, in his The Radicalism of the American Revolution, quotes John Adams as saying:

"We define Genius to be the innate Capacity, and then vouchsafe this flattering Title only to those few, who have been directed, by their birth, education and lucky accidents to distinguish themselves in arts and sciences or in the execution of the what the World calls great Affairs." But if we apply the title of genius to all those above the median, then, said Adams, we will find that "the world swarms with them." "Planting corn, freighting Oysters, and killing Deer" - these were among the "worthy employments in which most great Geniuses are engaged."

As the Founding Fathers looked out into a freer, more egalitarian society, they realized that the Liberty they fought for - of finding a vocation, of crafting a life - need not mean a freedom for work. That work itself, that rude hunting and fishing could be genius.

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Look at the cashier scanning your food in the supermarket, the call center staffer working long hours in an Indian business park, a college stoner cutting class to doodle in his art book - we would denigrate these tasks, we would hold them below our aesthetic appreciation, and call them common and flat. They probably are. There is probably little joy to squeeze from those moments. But in doing so, we deny the human potential for infinite improvement. Why can't there be geniuses scanning groceries?

Buddhism points to a more dramatic expression of this point. In paying so attention to the act of breathing, Buddhist meditative practice encourages its adherents to improve upon the most basic and constant act of their lives. If you could develop a genius for the breath - a breath that was enjoyable, loving, aesthetic - then what act of genius could compare? The breath is always with you, it never leaves, if it can be improved upon, then everything else in a life would also be improved upon.

And we can improve upon everything in our lives. I think that with enough effort, we can turn our everyday experience into something finely crafted, something that speaks to us in the same way that great works of art speak to us. If this beauty doesn't seem too convincing, then I think the converse is scary enough to be convincing, too: imagine a life lived blindly, ugly, in which every action was done merely for some end, so that the actual lived moments of each day were as useful and as beautiful as a rusted metal cog in a large continuously profitable machine. Recognizing the potential for genius in our everyday actions, then, can make our lives not something of commerce, but something of art.

Growing Up

Before I had my first kiss, before I got drunk at my first party, before I’d ever made a meal from scratch or paid a bill or got a haircut I liked; when I was an awkward young boy who mostly just thought about the eruptions of pimples on his face and fostered a guilty suspicion that somehow I was different from everyone else, that I was weird, and I believed that this unspeakable weirdness irrevocably quarantined me from peers – back when I was twelve or thirteen and was slowly becoming me: I listened to Leonard Cohen and read Milan Kundera, artists who I only realize now were my initiation into the mysteries of adult life. I would memorize their stories of doomed love affairs and baffle myself at their philosophies. In childhood I had been able to parcel out the world into neat packages. There were the good guys and the bad guys, and the stories were simple, whole, and sweet. It would be underestimating Cohen and Kundera’s influence on me to say that it was from them that I realized how compromised and complicated the world really was; they did so much more, they introduced me to the visceral sort of human struggle I would spend the next ten years or so trying to come to terms with. In their stories people hurt each other not because they were evil, but because that’s what people did. Life hurt. And I was stunned by that realization.

I had only started to get the first aches of crushes: daydreaming about taking girls I’d barely spoken with on dates and kissing them and having sex (this fantasy all the more passionate for how unclear sex actually was to me) and I could already see that something was growing in me that I couldn’t contain or satisfy. I couldn’t stop thinking about girls. And I could get any girls. That middle ground of sexual frustration was, to me, an uncharted span on the map of life. I had read nothing about it, seen no movies about it, everyone on TV looked so assured and witty when they talked about love. I must be different, broken, wrong.

And then I started listening to Leonard Cohen. Cohen knew where it was at. Just look at these two stanzas from the song Take This Longing:

Your body like a searchlight
my poverty revealed,
I would like to try your charity
until you cry, "Now you must try my greed."
And everything depends upon
how near you sleep to me

Just take this longing from my tongue
all the lonely things my hands have done.
Let me see your beauty broken down
like you would do for one your love.

These words meant nothing to me at the time, but I could intimate that they were important. There was a clue to my frustration in the puzzle of Cohen’s love affairs. I knew that when I could understand them and feel a connection to them, then I would have somehow broken out of my childhood, although I couldn’t express it like this at the time – I just, to be fair, pretended to know what Cohen was on about, and left it at that. So I listened to the album over and over until I had memorized every line, every image. I can sing along to the whole thing, even today.

And underneath all this emotional longing, there lurked beneath Cohen the figure of the messianic prophet. That there was, beneath the texture of loss and love, a deeper love, a religiosity that as a purely secular young whelp I could only indulge in by not admitting what I was doing, by singing along, but not listening to the words that I sang.

Milan Kundera brought me into the same world of sex and mysticism, but he spoke in a learned lilt that I recognized immediately as a style, as cool. His stories were chock full of that same heady and opaque burble of sex and infidelity; but he also built his stories around people philosophizing, trying to crack the veneer of life to find some meaningful core. His characters, for all their emotional backstabbing, were not just petty players in an afternoon soap opera. I mean, they were that – but they also moved around a world of ideas. And while I was shocked by the ideas themselves, I was more shocked by the idea that you could think vigorously about how to live your life. That you could have ideas. I knew then that I would unlock that door to adulthood and the frustration, the confusion, and the compromise would be illuminated by something richer, something I could not have before expected: art.

Maybe a year or two after I first discovered Cohen and Kundera, after buying more albums and more books, I started writing myself. And looking back at my early attempts at fiction and poetry, while of course I feel the requisite embarrassment at everything you’re meant to be embarrassed about: the clumsy technique, the self-importance, the mawkish melodrama; I am more struck by how back when I somehow decided that I wanted to writ, I was speaking with a voice that I had cadged from Kundera and Cohen. In some ways, those early attempts at stories outshine a lot of the work that I did when, dizzied by drugs and adolescence, I fell in love with my own sonorous voice; or even worse – the stuff that I wrote in College that tried to tackle the Big Ideas which turned out as bad as you could expect. Those attempts at fiction failed because their intentions were impure. I wanted to write them to show how good a writer I was, to show how much intelligence I could bash against my emotional problems. My early work – and the work of Cohen and Kundera who inspired it – seem to me something purer, inspired by the love of the story, by the love of art.

I’m thinking about this now because a couple of weeks ago I stumbled on The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the library and picked it up. A week after that I was trolling through a friend’s music and picked up the first Leonard Cohen album I ever had. So there I was, here I am, reunited with the works that started it all. And it feels odd to look over my shoulder and see me ten years ago listening to the same music, reading the same books, and to feel a continuity, and a growth.

On The Decline Of Western Civilization And Why It's Not Actually All That Bad

I was in the kid’s section of the bookstore a couple days ago with a girl, and as she showed me her old favorite books – Bread and Jam For Frances being, I think, her most-super favorite, although by the time we left she’d pointed out a veritable stack of favorites – my mind kept on touching on the magic of reading. Now, before you get disgusted and go do more important things on the internet, I’d like to make it clear that I’m not going to be some namby-pamby pretentious defender of reading: one of my friends here in Boulder works at the local Borders, and told me that “One of my co-workers is really cool, forty, has read everything – and he compares working at Borders with the priesthood.” Yeah. That’s not going to be me. The only thing that the priesthood and Border’s books has in common is (insert funny joke here).

There is, despite all the pretensions, a definite magic to reading. And it starts when we’re young. There is something primal, basic, and invigorating about stories. We shape our lives through the stories we tell about ourselves, and I don’t think it would be overreaching to say that when we, as little snuggly balls of children, demand to be read a story for the umpteenth-billion time, we’re really in part learning how to tell stories about ourselves, make ourselves up.

But once we start to read for ourselves, the magic really fleshes itself out. In the intense privacy of reading – in which we are alone with only our book and our thoughts - we are able to try on new stories, stories that we’d never be able to try on with our parents around. When we read those first young adult books, the ones with impotent crushes and even more impotent writing, we’re also finding a place where we can start to be ourselves without parents, without friends, without anything else but ourselves.

Now that I’ve given – what? – two hurrahs for reading, I have to say this: artsy writers right now have, by and large, gotten it wrong. There is a sense, in such a nice capitalist utopia as ours, that for anything to be art it must be motivated by wholly non-commercial reasons; it must be born far away from the mercantile demands of the crude mob. And so art is rarefied, abstracted from people’s everyday experience, inaccessible, and just bad. Why? Because if it was entertaining – how could we know it was good?

Just look, take a nice long look, at Damien Hirst. His famous work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is about the most pretentious, cynical piece of crap ever crapped since Piero Manzoni canned his crap and sold it for the current price of gold. It's also known as a female tiger shark preserved in a tank of formaldehyde. The idea is that it is daring, conceptual, et cetra. But the idea is actually this: It is not pleasing, and yet it is valuable, so it must have some other sort of value to it above and beyond those values we know it ourselves to have – a conceptual, if not aesthetic value. We get into a sort of Emperor’s New Clothes moment here. Because if everybody is chirping about how the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets are so wonderful, or how Damien Hirst’s art is so fantastic, and you’re sitting there, a wide-eyed young undergrad, and you think: well, these people must know better than me – they being teachers and everybody else – and you’re likely to nod and say, yes, those rotting hunks of opaque jargon are, well, good artsy profound pieces of human creativity and wonderment. And then, because you need to write an essay about it, you’ll expound on your view until, forty years down the track, you’ll have been eating the offal of art and thinking it fine French dining - and writing even more convoluted apologies to get yourself tenure.

And this is even worse in literature. There is a lot of good stuff out there – David Foster Wallace and Marilynne Robinson, for instance, are gods on earth – but the whole act of writing and reading has this sense hanging over it that it shouldn’t be fun. Because it’s art.

Now look at all the wonderful stuff on TV: Deadwood, Firefly, Arrested Development, Seinfeld, The Sopranos – and the list goes on. Just because it’s entertaining, doesn’t mean it also doesn’t have to suck.

Not that there’s nothing more than entertainment. A really fantastic work of art can have an effect that goes beyond entertainment: Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, does something more to you than Jonathan Lethem’s Gun With Occasional Music. Even though both are entertaining, Gilead leaves you feeling like you have had a deeper – for lack of a better word – experience. An experience that has somehow rung the bell of life more true, has sounded better its depths, has provided a sort of comfort against the strains of our daily energies. And not a lot of TV – even the best TV – can do that. And no TV show has yet done that task with any particular consistency.

But the distinction is not between high art which you need some special training to recognize and low art which is like Hostess Cupcakes, it tastes good but makes you fat and lazy; no, the distinction is between what you enjoy, what brings you understanding, what you find beautiful - and everything else. Not too complicated, eh?