Thoughts on art, and drive

[pecunium]

I've been thinking about Cliff Burns.

He makes an argument that those who don't suffer, and strain and live in terror of failure, aren't "artists," and are stealing from those who do.

To which I say, nonsense. Art isn't a zero sum game. It's a meritocracy (for proof, it has, as tnh says, lots of funny looking people).

As Bill Rostler said, "Quantity of effort does not equal quality of product." Someone who does photography as a casual hobby is still a photographer. She may be good. She may not. She might get a few great pictures, and a whole lot o' crap. So what?

She's not taking money out of my wallet. If she sells it, so what? People buy my stuff because they like it. I'm not Capa, or Weston, or Brady, or Decker I'm me.

Maybe I'll look at some "dillatente's" work and find something I like. I'll internalise it, and my craft will grow, my "art" will get better.

I've spent a lot of time and effort learning the "grammar" of photography. I didn't do it for anyone but me. I didn't suffer for it. Some do, that's fine. Some don't work at it, at all (the woman who took the gold in '84, in Air Rifle [for which I tried out... didn't make the cut, I'd have needed a career day, but I was good enough to get a slot at the trials, but I digress] had only been shooting 18 months), they are naturals.

None of that makes them any less a photographer (or painter, or writer, or cook, or, or, or).

Which led me to thinking about cooking (I think about cooking and photography almost constantly. I eat every day, and I look at things every day).

I became a photographer by happenstance. It was a requirement for my studies in journalism. My father (whom I'd just met, but that's a whole 'nother story) bought me an N2000. It didn't change my life (not right away, anyhow).

On the other hand, I know when I became a cook, or rather I know what it was which set me on the path.

It was two things, butter, and black pepper.

When I was a child, we ate margarine. My mother, in my mid-teens, re-married. Marty, ate butter.

I never ate margarine again.

I've never cared for pre-ground pepper.

Sometime, in my mid-late teens, I was eating a piece of meat, it was a little less done than I preferred (at the time I was a just short of well-done kind of guy, dressed with salt, and perhaps worchestershire), I added pepper; from the grinder at the table.

Uff-da. It was a revelation. From there on out, the way spices and foods worked with each other became a thing to investigate, to explore, to play with.

I read books, tried recipes, strove to recreate things I'd eaten in restaurants.

So those two moments, close in time; at an impressionable age, turned me into a cook.

I'll toss out a question (I don't do this sort of thing often, so bear with me); what similar things have happened to you?

When/where/what changed some aspect of the things you do, added an abiding passion to the things you do/love/enjoy?

And why? What was it about that moment/experience, which altered your sense of wonder?

Comments

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

Before I discovered contra dance, I engaged in physical movement because it was a way to get around, or because I thought I had to in order to maintain my weight, or because I was forced to by gym class. I had always thought of myself as utterly lacking in athleticism of any sort. Then I found my local contra dance community and I found that I could enjoy movement for its own sake. I could feel the flow of the dance, feel the music flow through me, just turn my brain off and dance. I have actually had transcendent experiences while dancing contras.

By contrast, I tried western club squares a few years ago and didn't find the same thing happening. There are potentially hundreds of calls to memorize, and they more or less make up each dance as they go along, requiring you to recall and execute any particular move, which may sound or look extremely similar to at least one other move, at a second's notice. There's no turning the brain off, at least, not for me. I learned that I can appreciate this style technically, but that I worry about not being able to keep up, not remembering the moves, and ruining it for everyone else. It's not transcendent for me. My husband, though, really digs it. Perhaps it's instructive that I am a liberal arts person and he is an engineer. :-}

Learning to love to dance really helped me learn to be more present in my body, to appreciate what it can do. I've found that to be very healing.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

When I went on an exchange to Vassar I was told that all essays had to be typewritten (in the UK in 1986 handwritten was still the norm and a typed paper would have been looked at with suspicion as possibly plagiarized).

Then they said,"we have no type writers but we do have computers". As it happens I was a touch typist which is unusual for UK college bound kids but my mother had been a typing teacher. As it also happens, I had failed the "computing course for historians" the year before.

But needs must.

I discovered I was dyslexic not careless.
I discovered my pain and panic over writing was related to years of being told off for messy handwriting.
I discovered that a geometric thinker and a word processor are a match made in heaven.
I turned into a compulsive writer.

My brain still seizes up if I pick up a pen. I'd rather have a manual typewriter than ever use a pen, ever again. Writing has become one of my great pleasures although I have as many problems as anyone else about getting started (guess what I should be doing this morning?)

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Yes.

The thing you need the mad focus and drive for is *improving* beyond your point of native ability. Which is a good thing for even natural-born genisues to do.

I have *always* been pretty good at this writing thing. I came by it almost reflexively. I've been writing down stories since first grade, literally.

But I didn't start to really learn my trade until I started directed practice, and learned how to learn. I don't want to be pretty good at it; I want to be pretty good among people who are pretty good. And that's a different thing.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

The word processor/geometric thinker thing? So true. Although I often resort to paper and pen simply because I used them almost exclusively until I was twenty, and because when I am writing draft for myself, it actually sometimes helps not to be able to sit there and moves stuff around in a paragraph until it kind of makes sense. Longhand, I can toss it at the page, and fix it when I type it in.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

And having said that, I'm not sure I can answer the question. I remember reading Watership Down at the age of six or so, and being absolutely boggled by it, confused and entranced. And then rereading it about 25 more times before I turned fourteen. By the third or fourth time through, I had probably figured out what was going on in the book. It left me with a taste for books other people thought were way over my head, and eventually I learned the skills to parse them.

That, more than anything, turned me into a reader.

I don't know what turned me into a cook.

And I seem to have come into the world a writer. Sometime early on, somebody told me that people, actual real people, wrote down stories. And then I knew what I wanted to do.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

It wasn't the seasoning, it was getting drafted into the kitchen by my aunt, who teaches developmentally disabled kids to cook. I was put through some various kitchen assistant tasks, and the next week, I just decided to make something, to improvise. And by golly it worked. It wasn't the best thing I've ever made, but it was something that I followed no written instructions to create. It was just my knowledge of how food cooks.

To this very day, I'm happiest when cooking from a bunch of ingredients I've found in someone's kitchen without a formal recipe. It's like improv jazz.

Which makes sense given how I love listening to jazz musicians improvise during solos.

The other thing was actually 'being in a relationship' with someone. For the longest time I thought it was impossible, until I realized that no matter how had you work, with some people, unless you let them define the game, they won't be happy. Finding someone who honestly wants a partnership and is willing to work for it and work on it is the only 'trick' to having a good relationship.

[webzombi.livejournal.com]

I'm crazy, but everybody nowadays is...so...

[momwolf.livejournal.com]

I learned to cook early, in self defense. My mother was a terrible cook and neither of my grandmothers knew where the kitchen was. I watched my best frinds Mom cook at age 10 and discovered that food could actually be enjoyable. I've been cooking ever since.

[vanmojo.livejournal.com]

Seriously, TK, you have got so much more important and wonderful things to contemplate than some self-important crank who clearly lends too much credence to the voices in his head...

mojo sends

[feonixrift.livejournal.com]

When I cut out wheat and discovered that it was possible to eat, and cook, meals that didn't make me nearly hurl. I'd been sick from every single meal I had for many years, both due to allergies and due to my mom's horrible horrible cooking. It was even better when I realized that food could taste good.

New-bought clothes, and gardens actually watered, and cleaning methods that don't poison me... For me it's the whole world. There's so much fascinating ability to not get slaughtered by existing, and so much of it is actually *pleasant*.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

But I don't.

I do have more important things to do than trying to "save" him, but looking at what it is that makes me who I am... that's the "self examined life" and that's worth doing.

TK

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I don't think everyone can. Would I have become a cook, as I am now, without that? Probably; but somehow (looking back, 25 years from the events) that seems to be the contaminant which caused the solution to crystalise.

TK

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I was, probably, predisposed to becoming a decent cook. I was taught my first bits of cookery at 5. I am a curious fellow (in so many senses of the word).

Cooking is play. I've likened it to jazz. One has a theme, and one riffs from there. Hell, most of La Varenne is how to make different dishes out of the same "meats" by varying the sauce.

Bearnaise is, after all, hollandaise, with tarragon, black pepper and a splash of cognac.

My first piece of, deductive, cooking, was trying to replicate a recipe which had been lost. It took me three years. I made a lot of "second-rate" dill bread, which was eagerly eaten, until I figured out what was missing. Then it took me another little bit to realise just what I needed to do to make it as I wanted (which was different from what the original recipe called for).

Now, I just have to outline, and then write, and then pitch, the book which says all that, in a way that someone else can use to discover it for themself.

TK

[delicata77.livejournal.com]

This is a great question.
I think that the gardenia plant in my parents' backyard turned me onto scents at a young age. I would pick off a really amazing bloom and just inhale for hours. As an adult I found out about aromatherapy and started collecting oils and making blends for people and myself and have been loving every minute of it.

Another thing that has enhanced my life was reading. I taught myself how to read when I was 4 because I wanted to. I just remember thinking, "I cannot wait for my mom to read this to me, so I am going to figure it out!" And I did and I have no idea where my life would be now if I had not done that for myself.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Yes, contra is like that. Especially at the Knoxville contradance weekend, where they run 8 sets(!) at the Saturday-night dance, and it's packed enough that when the call is "down the hall in a line of 4," the people on the ends can reach out and hook up with the next set, and suddenly you're going down the hall in a line of 32 and feeling this incredible sense of connection to everyone else in the room...

I like to call it "the most fun you can have in a vertical position." :-)

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I had exactly the same revelation as you the first time I had real butter instead of margarine. It was on a high-school French Club field trip to a restaurant that served French dishes. I don't remember anything else about what I ate that night, but (like you) I never ate margarine again.

Things that changed the way I saw something in my life... one of them would be discovering that Mercedes Lackey only wrote the lyrics to her filk songs, and other people wrote the melodies. I'm a pretty decent lyricist, but not that much of a composer -- and I'd been measuring myself against the likes of Julia Ecklar and coming up very short. The idea that I could actually collaborate with someone for music to my lyrics was incredibly liberating, and set me on several years' worth of a writing spree that's never been equaled since.

(Off-topic... this is Lee from ML. I've seen you comment on various of my friends' posts, but had not until now associated you and your LJ userid. I've added you; feel free to add me back or not as it suits you.)

[athenais.livejournal.com]

In second grade I heard a few musicians from the Seattle Symphony perform at my school, and I knew instantly that I was born to be a musician. I had a few set-backs as my father disagreed on my choice of instrument (violin). Then in eighth grade choir I heard Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus" and I fell passionately in love with classical choral music. No one could deny me my instrument as a singer, and I taught myself to sight read so I could get into the music program at the UW. Getting my acceptance letter was the happiest moment of my life.

I have a feeling getting a contract for my first novel will rival it, but there's no defining moment for writing, or for photography. They're just hobbies that gradually became fascinating enough to pursue diligently.

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I love when all the lines of 4 join together, or when you're doing one of the dances where the other couple is in the middle doing something while you're on the outside waiting, and then someone from the next line over grabs you for a quick swing or gypsy.

I haven't been to the Knoxville weekends, but I go to NEFFA every year that I can, and it's great for that sort of connected feeling...everyone's there to dance, have a good time, be friendly, flirt a bit...it's happy-making.

My first husband and I used to joke about it being like going on a date with 200 people. :)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yeah. The same. I liked writing in school. Got on the paper, went to college for journalism, started taking pictures.

Kept at both of them.

I could, probably, live without them.

But to not cook? Retro me Satanas.

TK

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Ok, I'll bite, what is it which made the connection of one thing to the other... ah, wait, the pointer I gave Elisabeth, right?

TK

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Yep. I moused-over the link, looked at the URL, and said, "Oh!" I've enjoyed reading you in ML, so that provided the impetus to add you here.