Tag Archive for 'artists'

Director Frank Capra: My Great American Hero

Published on September 2, 2010 in film. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

It’s not just that  Frank Capra is a great director or that his movies are a big part of why I want to make movies. Both points are true, but it goes beyond that.  Ever since I saw his films as kid, there was a part of me that wanted to somehow find my way into the Capra world. I didn’t realize this until a few months ago, at least not consciously.  Until then that wish was hiding somewhere in the back of my mind,  subtly influencing my choices throughout the years.

Time Magazine cover: Aug. 8, 1938.  (Cinema: Columbia’s Gem, written as You Can’t Take It With You was coming to theaters.)


To those of you who are already starting to fidget in your seats, I see you! Well, I don’t, but I’m imagining that I can, and it looks like you might spill your coffee if you keep it up, you impatient cinema enthusiasts, you.

Not to worry, I am going to talk about Frank Capra’s movies.  I went back and watched as many of them as I could find, including the documentaries.  I read his interviews and his autobiography. I even read his critics.  But, I’m also going to talk about how his movies affected me.

Art is meant to have an impact on its audience, after all, so why try to sterilize the subjective experience out of the discussion?  If you prefer straight analysis, I suppose you could read Cahiers du Cinéma or something equally pretentious, I mean prestigious.

Poster for It Happened One Night, 1934

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With that said, what are some of the qualities that make Capra’s films so special?  There’s  playfulness for starters.  Mr. Capra began his career writing gags for the silent-era comedians, and he’s carried that comedic training into the films he directed.   Some comedy-oriented performers and directors dismiss the value of what they do.  Not Frank Capra.

“Comedy is fulfillment, accomplishment, overcoming.  It is victory over odds, a triumph of good over evil,” he explains.  He saw great merit in making people laugh, and so he worked diligently at his craft.  Maybe that’s why his screwball comedy It Happened One Night was the first film ever to win an Academy Award for both Best Picture and Best Director.

Photo credit: flickr.com/uw_digital_images, 1909

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In the Why We Fight series of documentaries that Capra directed during World War II, prominent Nazis and Japanese adversaries are described as being “humorless men.” Them’s fighting words, at least to Capra; To be humorless is to be villainous in Capra’s movies.

Consider: Mean ole Mr. Potter in It’s A Wonderful Life doesn’t bother with jokes. He’s too busy with financial concerns.

In Hole in the Head,  Frank Sinatra plays a fun-loving gambler who struggles to take care of his son.  He makes mistakes, but we’re meant to root for him. Sinatra’s more responsible, but sullen brother, played by Edward G. Robinson, is the antagonist.  About his reckless brother whom he has spent most of the movie condemning, Robinsson finally concludes, “he’s broke, but he’s not poor. We’re poor.”  The ending leaves some hope that even the uptight brother will learn to love and play.

Indeed, rediscovering playfulness is essential for any Capra heel who wants to turn good. In Riding High, the dad is the humorless business tycoon who stands in the way of the young lovers getting married, but he eventually grows tired of being the stuffed shirt.  With previously unseen jubilation, he tells his guests that he’ll be running away with the young couple. Then he dances triumphantly to their car.

An even better example is found in You Can’t Take it With You.  This time Edward Arnold plays the baddie who happens to be—wait for it ladies and gentlemen—another heartless, money-minded man.  He puts the squeeze on a hard-working family, but in the process he gets to know the father of the house.

Arnold eventually reveals that he used to once play the harmonica, Capra’s way of telling us that he wasn’t always such a bad guy.  When he’s moved by the strength of character that he sees in the family,  Arnold renounces his selfish ways.  That happens shortly after he receives a harmonica as a gift.  By the end, Arnold is all smiles, playing music with the rest of the family.

Photo credit: flickr.com/uaarchives, 1917

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To prepare for this post, I even forced myself to watch Frank Capra’s made-for-TV science documentaries. I remember the awfully boring science videos I was shown in school, and I was not keen on re-experiencing them.    I looked for something potentially more exciting to do … like flossing.  If I skipped the videos I could do quite a bit of flossing, after all, and that way, for the first time in my life, I could go to the dentist without being embarrassed when the flossing questions come up.

“Tell me, Mr. Savides, when was the last time you flossed?”  ”Just yesterday.” “I see. And how long did you floss?”  ”Two and a half hours.”  That would shut him up, don’t you think?  It could have been a glorious triumph for me, but it was not meant to be.  I watched the Capra documentaries, and consequently I am still embarrassed by flossing questions.

My flossing sacrifice was not in vain, however.  While my dentist might disagree, I think I made the right choice.  The science videos were not just informative but personable, imaginative and even amusing.  The one I enjoyed most was “The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays.”  It features puppet versions of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens,  and my favorite, the intoxicated Dostoevsky presiding over a mystery-writing contest.

Debonair scientists make a case that their scientific inquiries about cosmic rays should be up for consideration.  They show cartoon sequences to explain their research, while my boy Dostoevsky pours himself more vodka and struggles to stay awake.  I learned more science from those videos than from several humorless, strictly academic lectures that I’ve endured throughout the years.

Photo credit: flickr.com/library_of_congress

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Another aspect of Frank Capra’s work that I admire is his love of America.  He was born in Sicily, and he came to America as an immigrant.  His family was poor, and I imagine even discriminated against, but Capra never lost sight of how good we have it here.   His affection for America is sometimes revealed by a subtle reference to a national pastime like baseball.    In some of his best work, though,  (films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, Why We Fight, and It’s a Wonderful Life come to mind) defending what’s right about America is a central preoccupation.

I still get chills whenever I hear some of the speeches from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  Here’s one of them: “Just get up off the ground, that’s all I ask. Get up there with that lady that stands for liberty, take a look at this country through her eyes if you really want to see something, and you won’t just see scenery—you’ll see the whole parade of what man’s carved out for himself after centuries of fighting and fighting for something better than just jungle law, fighting so’s he can stand on his own two feet—free and decent, like he was created—no matter what his race, color or creed.  That’s what you’ll see. There’s no place out there for graft or greed or lies or compromise with human liberties.  And if that’s what the grown-ups have done to this world that was given to them we’d better get those boy’s camps started fast and see what the kids can do, and it is not too late because this country is bigger than the Taylors, or you or me, or anything else.  Great principles don’t get lost once they come to light.  They’re right here.  You just have to see them.”

Photo credit: flickr.com/cornelluniversitylibrary, 1888

Some of Capra’s critics accuse him of creating a sugar-coated view of the country.  They sneeringly describe it as Capracorn, but their critiques are unfair.  Capra shows the bad along with the good.  In State of the Union, one politician in power spots one of the good guys and asks his friend, “”How did he get in here?  He’s honest.”   Sure, Mr Smith Goes to Washington showcases idealism, but that idealism is put through the fire and mocked by the film’s gaggle of world-weary cynics. It prevails only after battling to survive.

In fact, that film was met with outrage and protest when it was first screened in DC.  The politicians and press representatives were displeased that it portrayed their professions as being susceptible to corruption. Capra didn’t turn a blind-eye to America’s flaws, but he still believed in and celebrated its potential. As proof of that, he named his production company Liberty Films, and used the Liberty Bell as the logo.

I wish more of today’s hipsters would show gratitude for the freedoms their country provides, even as they address some of the problems they see in America.  Unfortunately, these days it’s basically uncool to talk about love of country, especially if you’re an aspiring creative type.  Be that as it may, Frank Capra offers a reassuring example that you can be both an engaged patriot and a successful artist.

What’s more, Capra didn’t support his country with just empty words.  At the height of his success as a director, right when the US began fighting in World War II, he contacted the Army to help with the war effort.

He committed to making several films to show his countrymen why they had to fight the German and Japanese oppressors.  That meant giving up a significant amount of time that could have been spent doing more profitable or prestigious projects.  When was the last time you heard of a contemporary celebrity doing something like that?

Photo credit: flickr.com/library_of_congress, ca. 1905-1910

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If my imagination is right, then you’re starting to look a little too serious, diligent blog reader. Well, I guess it is serious stuff, and you’ve been reading for a while without encountering  any more attempts at humor.  (Depending on your perspective, that might be a blessing.)

However you may feel about the matter, I want to do something about it. That’s why I hired a few mimes to help me with the jokes.  But you know, it’s not working out so well; they’re not saying anything.  Maybe next time.

In my defense, I guess I could mention that my dog ate my jokes, at least the funny ones.  I don’t have a dog, but if I did, I’m sure he would have eaten pages of jokes by now. Assuming that these jokes in question involved some thought, which is admittedly a big assumption, then the theoretical dog would be in the unusual position of having thought for food.  I’m not sure what that means, but presumably there are philosophers out there trying to find out.  For now, let’s just keep on marching.

Poster for It’s A Wonderful Life, 1946

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Think back to the scene in It’s a Wonderful Life where a desperate George Bailey goes to Potter to borrow some money.  Uncle Billy had misplaced $8,000 dollars, but when Potter interrogates, George takes full responsibility for the mistake. I recall thinking something like, “Oh, so that’s what it looks like when a good man is facing a crisis.”I don’t often get to see intimate displays of integrity in the real world, so I’m captivated whenever Capra gives me the opportunity to do so in his films.

Essentially, a Capra hero is a man of character who faces the temptation of giving up his ideals, of selling out in the name of convenience. George takes a cigar from Potter before deciding not to yield.  In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Jefferson Smith’s mentor Senator Paine pleads with him to compromise for the sake of advancing his career. When Longfellow Deeds is betrayed by the city gal he tried to help in Mr. Deeds Comes to Town, he questions his small-town values and considers giving in to the vultures who want his money.

Promotional material for The Strong Man, 1926

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The absence of just one man of principle is enough to turn a charming Capra town into a vice-ridden slum. That’s what Bedford Falls would be without George Bailey.  We see hints of that even in Capra’s silent film The Strong Man, which stars the wonderful, vastly underrated Harry Langdon.  In that film, the town hall becomes a decadent vaudevillian house when the local authorities accept bribes.  A title card explains: “Justice and decency had fled before the new law — money.”  Only the minister refuses to sell out; he leads the town in opposing the gangsters.  Eventually order is restored and the town hall becomes a place of justice once again.

It’s not an accident that the minister is the restorative force.  There is an undercurrent of faith throughout Capra’s work. Jefferson Smith is encouraged to look to a higher power when he despairs.  In both It’s a Wonderful Life and Meet John Doe, the hero is rescued from tragedy on Christmas day.  As if that weren’t symbolic enough, the dialogue in Meet John Doe goes so far as to associate the hero with Christ.

Photo credit: flickr.com/library_of_congress, 1942

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The Why We Fight documentaries set up two opposing worlds, the free world vs. the slave world,  similar to how St. Augustine sets up two opposing cities in his theological masterpiece City of God.   In the free world,  leisure-minded men and women care about each other, order their own lives, and worship God as they please.   In comparison, the slave world deprives its citizens of choice and aims to “take children from the faith of their fathers and teach them that the state is the only church and the head of the state is the voice of God.” (What is a modern-day example of a political leader who gets the messianic treatment from his followers, whose image is plastered everywhere as if it were a religious icon?  It does sound familiar…)

In his autobiography, The Name Above the Title,  Frank Capra talks about how being director means that he has the opportunity to talk to millions of people in the dark for hours at a time.  Dictators kill for that kind of access, and so he feels a strong responsibility to make it count for good.  ”My films must let every man, woman, and child know that God loves them, and that I love them, and that peace and salvation will become a reality only when they learn to love each,” he writes.   Wow, thanks for that Mr. Capra.

Photo credit: flickr.com/kevharb

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Maybe that’s why I’ve never been demoralized by watching a single Capra film. I can’t say the same about many of today’s contemporary artists, but they probably don’t share Capra’s esteem and affection for his audience.

To be fair, this is an issue I struggle with as well. Looking back, I’ve acted in one or two shows where my character had  more swearing than I’d prefer.  I didn’t think about it at the time, reasoning that the story had some merit and that I needed to get  experience,  but maybe I influenced some of the audience to be less civil with their speech.   This is not to say that artists should avoid any questionable material, but there is something to be said about considering how your work will affect others.

The tricky thing with drama is  that it deals with vice and human frailty.  If you don’t show it at all, then you aren’t telling the truth.  But if you show it in such a way as to glamorize it, then you risk corrupting the audience.  Somehow Capra found a way to deal with corruption, violence, sex, despair, deceit and greed without losing a sense of innocence, but it’s not an easy thing to do.

Harry Langdon and Joan Crawford in Tramp Tramp Tramp (directed by Harry Edwards), 1926

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What if you’ve already lost your sense of innocence, though? You’re not alone.  At the beginning of this post, I mentioned how I secretly wanted to inhabit Frank Capra’s cinematic realm.  Who wouldn’t want to be a part of a world where most characters radiate folksy charm and goodness, the mothers and fathers love each other, the kids are rambunctious but cheerful, and everyone knows each other by name, even the maids and taxi drivers.   The only problem is that I knew even as a youngster that Capra would not have cast me in his films.  I was too tangled up inside.

My family did the best they could, but there was a bit of screaming when no one else was around, and I didn’t handle it well.  In school,  I was the chubby kid who didn’t know how to defend himself, so people picked on  me to the point where I’d come home crying and count the number of days left in the school year.  (I’m better at defending myself now.  If possible I’d prefer not to fight, but I don’t fear conflict.)

Photo credit: flickr.com/library_of_congress, 1941

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Anyway, I chose to let those sour ingredients ferment inside my heart, and slowly I grew up a little crooked.   I tried to hide the things in my soul that weren’t as they should be by being a good student and striving to get the outward appearances right.  Sometimes, I even tried to be earnest like Capra’s actors,  but I came across as muddled and disingenuous. When you can’t even be honest with yourself about who you are, then it’s much harder to convince others of your sincerity.

Lamentably, there are still things I do on occasion that don’t mesh with the Capra ideal.  I’m doing the best I can to live better, but it still stings to admit that.  Now and then when I’m confused about how to handle a challenge in my life, I’ll ask myself, “What would Capra do?”  To admire someone but to know that you probably don’t live up to all of his standards is a conflicting experience, to say the least.  Still, I have reason to think that I wouldn’t be entirely scorned by Capra.

Meet John Doe and State of the Union both feature men who sold out but who are struggling to redeem themselves.  Lest you think I’m reading too much into the films, consider Spencer Tracy’s quote from State of the Union, “I sold out to them, but get this straight, I am no lamb led to the slaughter.  I ran to it.”  Still, just like Gary Cooper in Meet John Doe, Tracy gets to set things right after he acknowledges his errors.  Capra believes in second chances.

The last movie Capra made was Pocketful of Miracles, which is a remake of his earlier Lady for a Day.  The story involves a gangster who is given the chance to help a beggar lady by getting his goons to act like high class people.

Getting lowlifes to appear cultured can be part of a director’s job as well, and maybe that’s why Capra liked the story enough to revisit it. (If you don’t know what I mean, try spending a little more time around actors!  I’m saying that as someone who has, on a few rare occasions, gotten paid to act.)  It’s possible, though, that Capra connected with the story because it offers even a gangster the chance to become a decent person.

Photo credit: flickr.com/uw_digital_images, ca. 1929-1932

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The decisions Capra characters make in the past aren’t nearly as dramatically significant as the choices they make in the present. I’d like to think that is Capra’s way of offering hope to those of us who have already lost our sense of innocence but are trying to rediscover it.

In the course of preparing for this post, I ran into another instance where I found myself wondering what Capra would do.  It came after watching Glenn Beck’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial.  After seeing it and hearing about the criticism he received, something inside my heart told me I should defend him.  I did not wish to do so.  Every time I speak out politically I threaten my ability to work in the film industry, since a strong majority of filmmakers think differently than I do.

I’ve spoken out before, but this time it felt like there was more at stake.  This time I had a sense that I was close to attaining something very dear to my heart, something I’ve pursued for months and even years of my life, and that I might ruin things by speaking up.  Maybe it was just my imagination.  I don’t know, but the things I sense tend to have some connection to reality.

Angrily, I pushed the idea of defending Glenn Beck away, but a voice in my head kept asking me what Capra would do.  The only way to avoid that question was to give up on this post.  I tried that too, but I kept coming back to the same question.  Avoiding the question in the name convenience is not the Capra way, after all.

Finally, I answered: Capra would do the right thing because it was the right thing to do, regardless of the cost. But I still had a way out: I wasn’t entirely sure that defending Glenn Beck was the right thing to do.  I asked God to make it clear if I should speak up, and God made it clear (at least as clear as anything can be that involves divine revelation, which is to say that there is still room for doubt and that pressing forward still involves faith, but I got more than what was statistically probable).

I did defend Glenn Beck, and I don’t know what will happen because of that, but I might not have made that decision if it weren’t for the influence of Frank Capra, a man I’ve never met. As Clarence Oddbody the Angel might say, “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives.”

Photo credit: flickr.com/george_eastman_house, 1945

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I’m still praying that things will work out.  If you’re up there reading this Mr. Capra, then I could use your help.  I’m not Catholic, but I’ll campaign to get you sainted, if the secret wishes in my heart come true in part because of you.

Since Frank Capra preferred the popular over the pretentious and liked to end his films with a stirring bit of music,  I think these lyrics from Lee Ann Womack’s song are a fitting way to end this Capra tribute:

“I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance

Never settle for the path of least resistance

Living might mean taking chances

But they’re worth taking

Lovin’ might be a mistake

But it’s  worth making

Don’t let some hell bent heart

Leave you bitter

When you come close to selling out

Reconsider

Give the heavens above

More than just a passing glance

And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance

I hope you dance.”

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons, 1943

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Thanks for reading, and God bless.

(If you’ve enjoyed reading this post or some of the others I’ve written, consider signing up to get my posts by email.  You can do that by clicking here.  I don’t write every week.  I only write when I have something worth writing and after I’ve spent some time considering my subject and finessing my thoughts.  If you’re following along by email, you’ll know right away when I have a new post waiting for you, whether that’s next week or a month from now.)

An Ode to the Super Genius of Pixar

Published on April 11, 2010 in film. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

In case you’re wondering, the title was inspired by a comment that Andrew Stanton made on the DVD extras for Pixar’s A Bug’s Life. He was explaining that their movie involved so many technological marvels that it should be released as the super-genius edition.  I hope Mr. Stanton won’t mind too much that I borrowed his phrase to celebrate his company.

If the title did not already make this point abundantly clear, I have no intention whatsoever of writing an unbiased, scientific-sounding piece on Pixar. You see,  I am very much biased in favor of the company. Pixar was one big reason why I dedicated a few years of my life to the study of computer animation.  (There was also a fairytale and a girl, but that’s a whole other story.)   I don’t have a successful career in that field as of yet, and even if I never do, I’m certain that when it ends for me here on this earth,  Pixar will be one of very few companies that had a defining impact on my life.  That’s worth writing about, don’t you think?

Photo credit: flickr.com/thomashawk


You know what else is worth writing about?  Going 10 for 10 in box office hits. Every single movie that Pixar has made achieved enormous financial success.  Name another company, whether film or otherwise, with that kind of track record.   I can’t think of any.

If a company can produce one hit after another in a competitive industry where failure is, according to the statistics, the expected outcome, then there must be some magic in the web of it, as our friend Shakespeare might say.  I wanted to learn about that magic, and so I began to study the company.

I’ll mention a few references at the end that go over the history of Pixar and some of their interesting business practices, but I’m not going to rehash all that here.  I’m more interested in trying to get to the soul of Pixar by looking at the work they’ve produced.  After all, you can know the history of a person without really knowing who he or she is.  Companies are no different.

To prepare for this admittedly daunting task, I re-watched every single Pixar DVD, including the shorts, commentaries, documentaries and all the extra features.  I have also read and listened to books about the company as well as technical discussions that Pixar employees have given at places like Siggraph, Computer Graphics World, fxguide, and so on.

The movies, though, are the essence of what Pixar does, and that’s where I’ll concentrate.   With that said, let’s dive in!

It’s Not (Just) About the Benjamins

“If we had approached this only from the standpoint of marketing, maybe this movie would not have been made. But that’s not what interests anybody at Pixar. What interests us is, Does this sound like a great story?”  That’s Brad Bird, the director of Ratatouille, talking about his movie with Entertainment Weekly.  Now that he mentions it, I guess rats handling human food is not the most obvious concept for a blockbuster.

That’s not the only time that Pixar avoided the obvious route.  Wall Street analysts predicted that Up would hurt Disney’s profits because it did not have any compelling characters that make for good action figures.

Not enough people would pay money to go see an action-adventure cartoon about an old man in a house, they snidely insinuated.  Pixar won the argument by creating a crowd-pleasing, Academy-Award-winning film that made us care about a type of character who is normally ignored in  cinema.

Even though kids make up a significant part of Pixar’s audience, the filmmakers behind Up resisted the temptation to over-explain.  Instead, they tell the story of Elie’s death almost entirely in montage, and it’s one of the best montages in recent film history.

Sure, that took longer  to do and cost more money, and you don’t have to work that hard to keep most kids engaged.  Still, Pixar goes the extra mile.  They budget trips for their production people in the name of inspiration:  For Cars it was a roadtrip across the country.  For Finding Nemo it was scuba-diving in the ocean.   On Up, they flew in their artists to a remote location in Venezuela by helicopter.

Every Pixar movie comes with at least one short and a few documentaries.  When the company is feeling particularly generous, you also get games, short-stories, Easter eggs, and fun character-gag reels.

These extras take months of time to produce, and yet most people would still buy the Pixar movies without them.  With all the added value that they offer in their productions, you would think that Pixar would charge more for their movies, but they don‘t.

Photo credit: flickr.com/adrianhon

As it turns out, 4 of the 10 Pixar films have plots that question the pursuit of profit for merely the sake of profit. In Cars, the driving motivation for Lightning McQueen is getting the Dineco sponsorship.  He literally drives across the country to get it, but when he learns to care about others he realizes there are more important things in life than getting the right sponsor.

In WALL-E, the humans have devolved into consumer blobs in part because the company Buy N Large encourages them to buy lots of things as often as possible.  If you’ve ever had to work with just-make-the-bar-graph-go-up types, check out the Buy N Large featurette on the WALL-E disc.  It might make you laugh or cry, depending on how close it is to your experience.

Remember Monsters Inc? That’s about a company struggling to make bank by scaring kids.   The owner Mr. Waternoose complains that it’s getting harder and harder to scare kids, so he partners with the bad guy to make a more sinister scare extractor.

When Sully and Mike Wazowski realize that laughter is more powerful, more profitable, than screams, they transform the entire company’s business practices.  The workplace appears drab and lifeless  when scaring is the goal; when laughter reigns, the environment becomes one of celebration.

A company that makes money by scaring people: what might that represent? I don’t know.  Hmm.  Could that be … Hollywood?  There are definitely  movie companies who are ready to do anything to make a quick buck, even if that means debasing human dignity and pandering to people’s basest instincts.

Pixar, though, has had enormous financial success without resorting to the use of strippers, gruesome mutilations, and f-bombs.  They’re such capable storytellers that they don’t need those things to keep an audience engaged.  Do you know who isn’t that versatile?  David Mamet!

(Yeah I said it.  Mr. Mamet does write interesting plays, but it would be nice to see him expand his vocabulary beyond the f-word, the beloved colloquial variations of a man’s reproductive organ, the thesaurus entries for  ‘scheme,’ and the cosmopolitan variations of ‘money.’ Hey, Shakespeare didn’t have resort to swear words every 12 seconds to sustain dramatic tension, so it is theoretically possible to do even when writing a play.)

There is value in exploring the darker sides of human life, but dramatically that’s sometimes the easy way out. Besides, what if that exploration encourages corruption in others and makes society worse as a result?  Is it worth it? I don’t know.  I wrestle with that question as a writer, as a moviegoer, and as an imperfect person who aims, but doesn’t always succeed, at living a good life.  But just because a question is difficult to answer, doesn’t mean it is not worth asking.

Anyway, back to Pixar.  One of my favorite scenes in Monsters Inc comes when Sulley sees the devastation that his scare tactics have caused his now cherished little Boo.  He tries to explain that he is just doing his job,  but Boo doesn’t understand that.  All she knows is that someone she once trusted caused her pain.

In that moment, you can tell that Sulley is starting to question the things he does just to turn a profit.  If only more people in this world would do that.

Photo credit: flickr.com/sutekidane

Let’s go back to Ratatouille.  One of the bad guys in that movie is Skinner.  He’s taken over Gusteau’s once great restaurant and is trying to squeeze every dollar out of the brand by coming up with derivative products like frozen, microwavable burritos.  Yeah, that’s kind  of like … what was it again?  Oh yeah: Disney, when they were looting their own classic film library and cranking out direct-to-video sequels that suffered in quality.

Supposedly that’s what Disney tried to do to Pixar when profiteer-in-chief Michael Eisner was running the Mouse House, and if my history is correct, the Pixar-Disney dispute was happening around the time that Ratatouille was being developed.  Coincidence?

A Family that Plays Together

Another thing about Pixar that’s hard to avoid noticing is how comfortable the employees are around each other.  In one DVD after another, the directors are seen joking around with the writers, producers, and animators.

Think that’s no big deal?  When was the last time you shared a laugh with Jim in accounting?  If you are Jim from accounting, when was the last time you had a bonding moment with Steve from IT?

Most of the time, big companies are broken up into separate departments and those departments rarely interact with each other, at least not in any meaningful way.  “Did you get the memo?” does not count.

Photo credit: flickr.com/oldpatterns


Not so at Pixar. For one thing, their building was specifically designed by Steve Jobs to encourage random interactions as people walk to their desks.  Also, let’s consider Pixar’s operating principles.  Two out of three  involve collaboration.  Here they are:

1. Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone.

2. It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas.

3. We must stay close to innovations happening in the academic community.

Isn’t it interesting  that a company so dependent on bleeding-edge technology doesn’t list technology first?  That’s because Pixar puts more emphasis on finding the right people than on finding the right ideas, as Ed Catmull re-iterates in one interview after another.   (Of the original Pixar founders, Mr. Catmull is the technical genius.  Steve Jobs is the business wizard, and John Lasseter is the chief creative.)

It’s not just about finding the right people. It’s also about making sure that they work well together as Pixar’s HR executive Randy Nelson explains.  Adding the right person to the team should be like adding 1 + 1 to get 10.

If all this talk about the value of people was just standard HR corporatespeak, then there’s no way that you would see the casual spontaneity between the artists in the documentaries.

Being in a stressful environment with a very talented, but very opinionated, group of artists is not a surefire way to attain happy-go-lucky bliss.  Just ask anyone who’s ever worked on a film or a play.  Yet somehow Pixar has woven a sense of camaraderie into their culture that overcomes the strain of production.

The culture of playfulness is key. At Pixar, there are games and dress-up days.   The animators elaborately decorate their cubicles in whimsical styles, and even the boss gets in on the action.  Although John Lasseter is one of the most powerful men at Pixar, he has no qualms about conducting interviews in his toy-covered office.   You can see pictures of the fabled office at imagineeringdisney.com and julesbianchi.com/blog.

I don’t remember when I first saw footage of John Lasseter’s office, but it made quite an impression.  It’s the reason why my cubicle looks like this:

I figured if it’s OK for Mr. Lasseter to surround himself with child-like things that inspire him and make him smile, why should I worry if people think my desk is a bit different from that of the typical employee at Canon?  Seeing little reminders of things that matter to me is sometimes enough to get me through a long day.  As an added bonus, management avoids my desk when giving bar-graph powered tours of the building.

Speaking of management, the Pixar guys bring their playfulness even to the meetings they have with their bosses.  In particular, I’m thinking about the Fleabie bit they did to show the Disney people what they were doing, at a time when a lot of the executives didn’t understand the computer animation process.

Instead of doing a PowerPoint presentation, they partnered a flea puppet with John Lasseter, who does an impression of a Japanese actor dubbed in broken English.  Oh that Lasseter, such a ham, but who wouldn’t want to have him for a boss?


Not Too Big to Fail

Failure is not an enjoyable topic to discuss.  Most folks  prefer to talk about how unconditionally awesome they are.  Pixar is 10 for 10, so if anyone has earned bragging rights, it’s Pixar.  Yet, that’s not what Pixar does.  They make it sound like catastrophic failure is just around the corner, and they have to do everything conceivable to avoid it.

“Every Pixar movie at one time was the worst motion picture ever made” John Lasseter explains to Entertainment Weekly.  What a humble thing to say for a company that repeatedly does 100 million dollar business.  Note too that fresh off of their triumphs with Toy Story 2 and Monsters Inc, they brought in Brad Bird, a Pixar outsider, to direct The Incredibles. They explained that decision as a way of avoiding complacency.

When speaking with Variety, Mr. Lasseter even suggests that making it safe to fail is a critical reason why the company prevails.  Doing a speech at Stanford’s business school, Mr. Catmull reiterates that success hides potential problems that need to unearthed.   On the WALL-E extra features, Andrew Stanton explains that only if Pixar management doesn’t” see you fall off your bike, then they get nervous.”

Do you get it?  This is idea is so hard-wired into the company that it surfaces everywhere you look.

Photo credit: flickr.com/tim_norris

To give a sense of how far this kind of thinking goes, consider the Incredibles DVD.  They show you their hair and cloth tests that went badly, and they do it with a laugh track.  My computer animation capabilities are nowhere close to those of Pixar animators, but I can tell you that when you are up late for several nights in a row working on a shot that doesn’t come out right when rendered, laughing about the situation is not the default response.

Instead, violence against the treacherous machine starts to seem very appealing.  No, I’m not a domestic computer beater, but I have called it some vicious names, for which my computer might require long-term counseling.  (See, I did learn something from David Mamet’s plays!)

When Pixar can laugh while showing us mistakes that probably cost them weeks of time and thousands of dollars, we can conclude that failure is a familiar enough concept that the company is entirely comfortable with it.

If They Only Had a Heart

All of these things are incredible qualities, but if Pixar didn’t consistently use technology to touch our hearts, I wouldn’t care.  Yet I do end up caring, about toys, and monsters, and robots, and grumpy old men.

When you’re dealing with something so technical, you have to pour a lot of love into it, otherwise the sentiment gets lost in translation.  To paraphrase the Apostle Paul, if you show all kinds of marvels on screen, but have not love, your film is just clanging sounds and flickering celluloid.

I’m convinced that the core Pixar creatives are not just extremely talented artists but also people with extremely big hearts. You see it in the way Andrew Stanton discusses his film WALL-E, how it’s really about the way love conquers our rational programming, or when he explains that the idea for Finding Nemo came from a moment with his son:  Mr. Stanton was so busy trying to protect and educate his son that he missed the chance to just enjoy his company.

Photo credit: flickr.com/seandreilinger

Or consider John Lasseter.  As he was reaching the height of his career, he took a year off and spent the time traveling with his family.  He did that after his wife warned him that if he didn’t slow down, he might wake up and discover that his kids had grown up without him.  From that experience, he developed Cars.

If you want to make something that isn’t a soulless product, you have to put a bit of yourself into it, sometimes even the parts that hurt. That’s not easy to do, but the Pixar guys aren’t afraid of doing that very thing.

I work hard at what I do.  Sometimes it means I get very little sleep, but so far, I haven’t made the progress I’d liked to have made made.  That kind of thing can sting if you let it get to you.  That’s another reason why I’m grateful for the Pixar films.  They remind me that there is more to life than getting the stats or being the top toy, that being excellent at what you do is important, but it’s not nearly as important as caring about the people in your life, and that the seemingly mundane moments of life can be just as meaningful as the fantastic ones, if your heart is in the right place.

In the Toy Story 2 featurette, John Lasseter tells a story that almost brings him to tears.  He’s at the airport, and he sees a kid waiting for his dad.  The boy has a Woody figurine that he’s proudly holding, waiting with anticipation for the chance to share something special with a father that he hasn’t seen for a while.  To John Lasseter that’s proof that the characters don’t belong to him anymore, and that’s reason enough for him to keep making great Pixar films.  You don’t react like that if you don’t care about your audience.

It’s that kind of affection that makes me go and watch every single Pixar film that comes out.  I can’t say that about any other film studio.   Like the kid on the tricycle in The Incredibles, I’m waiting around for the next Pixar movie, because I want to see something amazing once again.  To infinity and beyond, Pixar!

Pixar resources:

How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity (a feature in Harvard Business Review written by Ed Catmull)

splinedoctors.com (animation tips and podcasts from Pixar animators)

To Infinity and Beyond (my favorite of the Pixar books)

The Pixar Touch (a more business-oriented take on the company’s history)

Upcoming Pixar (a fairly comprehensive blog about Pixar developments)

Feel free to add to the list.

 

It takes me a little longer to write the kinds of posts I prefer to write, and sometimes my schedule gets complicated, so I can’t promise to have new posts available on a consistent schedule . That’s why I encourage you to sign up by email. You can do that by clicking here.

If you’re following along by  email, you’ll know right away when I have a new post waiting for you.  It is very easy to unsubscribe, and you won’t receive anything unrelated to my blog.

Lastly, if you appreciate my writing, why not write a comment or share the post with a friend? It would encourage me to keep sharing some of my heart with you.

As always, thanks for reading and God bless.

Awe-Inspiring Revelations from Chicago Architecture

Published on June 21, 2009 in art. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I begin with a confession: I’m no expert on architecture.  I have studied it only briefly while taking an advanced art-history class in high school. I was so inspired by the architecture I saw when visiting Chicago on a recent road trip with my sister, though, that I felt compelled to write about it.

In case you’re wondering, I did take a couple of pictures while in the city.  (Actually I took more than a 150 shots in the city, so maybe that goes beyond what most people mean when they say “a couple.”) Even with all those pictures, I still don’t believe I did justice to the city’s architecture. Much of the charm of good architecture comes from a building’s pleasing relationships to its surrounding space, relationships that are best discovered by moving around and through that space.  This kind of thing is hard to capture in a two-dimensional image.

Still, I’ll include some of my shots throughout this post to give you some context, and I hope, a faint impression of my admiration for the city.  To see more of the pictures from my road trip, you can check out my road-trip flickr set.

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I haven’t visited a city that has so much architectural variation, elegance, and inventiveness from one block to another. There are great buildings in almost every major city in the world, certainly.  In Chicago, though, all you have to do is walk a few feet in one direction to discover more magnificent buildings derived from entirely different architectural styles.  It’s astonishing.

Being astonished, I was curious to learn more about the men and women who commissioned the buildings I admired.  After all, it seemed like a reasonable exchange for the visual splendor I was provided.  How peculiar that those people, and the companies they represent, earned my interest without a single we-are-awesome billboard or a generic, corporate poster (the kind that is intended to inspire but destined to deflate).

By constructing buildings whose aesthetic appeal is hard to measure in terms of profitability, these architectural patrons subtly persuade me that they have good taste and care about more than just easy-to-measure metrics that affect profitability.  In response, my admiration grows.

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Do you think, oh diligent bean-counter, that this growth of admiration might increase the chances that I’ll do business with the company in question? I think so.  That kind of influence is hard to measure, I will grant you that, but that doesn’t make it less valuable than the factors that are easier to track.

I’m not getting paid to write this post by the city of Chicago.  Nor am I trying to gain favor with any architect friends or even with the world-famous Rod Blagojevich. I am writing out of admiration and a desire to share that admiration with you.  That’s what happens when you do extraordinary things, when you aren’t being corporate: Others will speak fondly of you and the things you offer even without having strong incentives for doing so.  But if everything you do is about only expanding the bottom line, then don’t expect others to talk about you unless you somehow affect their own bottom line.

For various reasons, people in Chicago chose to produce awe-inspiring buildings and civic spaces.  Out of appreciation for their efforts, but without being prompted to do so, I wrote this post.  If my words make you curious about Chicago, then maybe you’ll plan a visit in the near future.  Maybe you’ll become more curious about the city, but you won’t go for another 10 years.

Perhaps you won’t ever visit, but you’ll mention the city in a positive way to someone else who will visit, in part because of your comments.  There are lots of positive possibilities that could stem from an initial decision to build a magnificent building, many of them involve cold hard cash, but good luck measuring that stuff.

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Now let’s get back to the architecture.  Essentially, you can reduce even the most complex of buildings to an arrangement of simple shapes that are repeated or varied across an enclosed space, but this simplification fails to capture the magic of those special buildings that make us marvel.

In my mind, great architecture is a reminder from God of the potential greatness in each of us. Great buildings grab us by the lapels and dare us to believe that we too are like them, not cheap and disposable things as the sometimes petty and demoralizing moments in our lives might suggest.  Rather, we are individuals with a potential to do substantial and resonating things.

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Could you work at a building like the Wrigley Building and do less than your best, without feeling that you have somehow shamed the building you inhabit?  I could not.  For some reason, cookie-cut-out cubicle farms do not have that same effect on me.

Here’s another thing I admire about great architecture: The success of a building depends in part on how well it serves the needs of the people who use it. A building that prevents the workers it encloses from doing their jobs properly is not a building whose design is worth celebrating.  The same is true about a house whose design is so chaotic and impractical that it incubates frustration in its inhabitants.

More so than other art forms, the architecture that seeks acclaim must balance the poetic ideals of its creator with the needs of the people for whom it was created.  Architects who ignore these considerations will see their buildings scorned and eventually demolished.  If you are a narcissist who cares only about your own magnificence, no matter how distasteful or harmful it may be to others, you will have a better chance of having your work canonized by producing vulgar paintings or pretentious films.

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Chicago’s architecture helped to solidify my belief that the value of any art, whether architecture, painting, performance, sculpture, music or film is determined by how it affects other people.  An artist can have the grandest ideas in the world about his art, but if his work doesn’t broadcast his ideas or his heart to others in some way, then his art is significant only in his mind.

Producing great architecture is expensive, I know.  Not everyone can afford to produce buildings that go beyond functional concerns.  Still, you don’t have to use architecture or lots of money to do what I’m describing. Just create something special for others that doesn’t exist merely to generate more money or status for you. (It doesn’t cost anything to take down ugly posters of bar-graphs and factory-assembled quotes!)At the Art Institute of Chicago I saw an art piece that I would have easily dismissed in the past.  It featured a pattern projected onto a wall that would change as you move in front of the projector.  Two youthful guests of the museum were dancing around together at this exhibit to see what kinds of bizarre patterns they could create.  A few others had gathered around to watch, and the couple’s playfulness was contagious enough to make some spectators smile. 

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That’s when I realized that the value of the exhibit was not in it’s technical accomplishment but in its ability to encourage playfulness and bring people together. Kind of neat.  Here’s another example of that kind of thing: In the evenings at the beginning every hour, the water in the Buckingham Fountain, located in the heart of Chicago’s Millennium Park, becomes a colorful spectacle accompanied by music from the nearby speakers.  (Chicago doesn’t charge you a dime to see this or its beautifully illuminated cityscape.)

I mentioned bean-counters in the beginning of this post, and now I’m going to use a bean to end this thing.  (It’s my attempt to go organic. I care about the earth. I do.)  Actually I’m talking about the Cloud Gate sculpture, also in Millennium Park, that bears a striking resemblance to a gigantic silver bean.

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When I first heard that this was one of the most popular landmarks in the city, I concluded with dismay that this was another example of a modern trinket triumphing over a timeless masterpiece.  Still, I was curious enough to pay “The Bean” a visit.

Then I understood: it was a gigantic bean-like sculpture that also happened to be highly reflective. That means all those who approach it will see curvy and sometimes distorted reflections of themselves.  It’s sort of like taking those crazy mirrors in fun houses, making them a hundred times bigger, and turning the exhibit into a communal experience.

My former scorn now abolished, I could not resist the urge to set aside temporarily my sense of (pseudo) sophistication to join my fellow Bean enthusiasts in taking a picture of my reflection.  And so, I was a little happier that day.  Without worrying about how it will benefit you, dare to create something that has a similar effect on others, and you too can make the world less corporate.


How the War of Art Can Help Us be Less Corporate

Published on February 7, 2009 in art. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

This written conversation pertains to a book I finished a few days ago called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Like other good books I’ve read, it is filled with ideas that have stayed with me and taken on a life of their own as I’ve wrestled them into my view of the world. I want to share with you how those ideas can help us become less corporate, but first let me  reiterate in a new way about what being less corporate means and why it is a good thing.  

To do that, please allow me a confession: I face an ongoing battle in my mind about the merits of advocating a less corporate existence. For one thing, I work for Canon and I hope to work for and with other companies in the future, and there is a real possibility that my thoughts may come off as anti-business. They are not.  

I am very enthusiastic about businesses, big and small, that help people to improve the quality of their lives, learn, and make positive contributions to society. As I’ve explained before, I don’t fight against businesses but against the banal, thoughtless, and evil things that businesses, organizations, and people do to interfere with our chances of becoming the radiant individuals we were meant to be. 

I place a significant value on honesty in my life, but even more so in my writing. There are a lot of rough edges and murky spots in my life, and these stains on my soul are things that I’d rather not face moment-to-moment. I try, but I don’t always have the courage to do so with dignity and fortitude all the time.

My hope is that if I write with an honest and open heart, I will get better at living with an honest and open heart on a daily basis. Here’s another way to phrase that: I’m trying to be less corporate, but there’s this fear that haunts my mind.  It suggests that I accomplish nothing more with my writing than convincing the world that I am crazy or not worth hiring. 

 

Ancient of Days - William Blake

Ancient of Days - William Blake

 

 

Also, my inner accountant likes to remind me that this kind of writing takes longer to do and it depletes time that could be used to do or find more paying gigs or to at least schmooze for the sake of recognition and career advancement.  As a somewhat related side note, if you want to see me at my most corporate, bring me to a networking event and trick me into thinking that my potential for success depends not on being myself while striving for excellence but in finding the right people who can advance my career if I win their favor. The devil’s minions have used that trick on me more than one occasion, and unfortunately it can still work all too well for them.

I think Mr. Pressfield would describe these doubts I have as the resistance I face in my own personal war for art. (See, it wasn’t a pointless digression after all.) For me, writing about this stuff is something I have to do.  It helps me get closer to what I’m supposed to do with my life.  

I can’t explain why. It is just something I know to be true, at least I know as much when I’m writing. When I’m not writing, I doubt and find reasons not to do more writing or more of the creative projects that sing to me from the depths of my heart, begging for attention even as I try to muffle them.

By now some of you might think I’m a little insane , but some of you, I believe, know exactly what I’m talking about. You can relate; so can Mr. Pressfield. The art he advocates doesn’t pertain to a few cliched talking-points about the value of the humanities in our lives. No, his is the art that pleads with us to pursue our own unique calling, our reason for being put on this earth that only we can discover.

Presenting his case, he writes this: “Unless I’m crazy, right now a still small voice is piping up, telling you as it has ten thousand times, the calling that is yours and yours alone.” Did you hear that voice whispering as you read that? I did.

So what is less corporate about the book and it’s ideas? First of all, Mr. Pressfield writes from experience. He has written books like The Legend of Bagger Vance and Gates of Fire, both of which are well-regarded best sellers. In other words, he’s not writing just for a paycheck.

He’s also not afraid to define the enemy in bold terms. He calls it resistance, a force inside and outside of us that gets in the way of our God-given purpose. Corporate thinkers do not like this. They care more about conforming, about being agreeable, about avoiding conflict.  How can you live up to other people’s expectations and be like everyone else while also seeing a menace both inside and outside of your tribe or yourself? You can’t.

That’s why corporate people don’t talk about such things. They prefer to tell you that you can be anything you want to be and that the customer is always right. The customer isn’t always right, and as Mr. Pressfield explains “ We can’t be anything we want to be. We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny.”

About that idea of having a special purpose, a destiny: it’s a strange one isn’t it? And yet it still resonates with us in a way that corporate pie charts and bar graphs do not. I’m fairly certain that our lives have more significance than the amount of profit we generate for Sony, but it’s hard to see that sometimes with all of the distractions and desires that consume us.

Accepting the idea that my life may have a greater meaning than just the sensations of the moment is one thing, but it is another thing to believe that even the irritating guy at the office, and the high-school kid who makes life miserable for others, and the dropout who posts stupid videos on YouTube all have a special purpose in this world that they may or may not achieve. Did He who made the lamb make thee?  Indeed Mr. Blake, indeed.  

When I think about people like that long enough, it becomes harder to reduce them to simple character types, to talking, breathing adjectives who are there only to serve my ends. It makes me wonder what things would be like if everyone was as complex as I am.  (Here’s a secret: I think they are.)

 

Jacob's Ladder - William Blake

Jacob's Ladder - William Blake

 

 

To discuss pre-programmed purpose for our lives in any meaningful way without acknowledging God somehow is virtually impossible. Sure enough, Mr. Pressfield admits that he believes both in God and in a metaphysical reality that transcends the truth of our daily existence. Does he care that metaphysical thinking is out of favor with today’s prominent intellectuals?  Of course not.  Only corporate thinkers care about such things. 

You are free to conclude that only measurable results matter. Forming your own opinion  is a respectable thing, something I celebrate even when the perspectives in question conflict with mine.  Today’s technological world of quarterly reviews, productivity stats, and page clicks certainly fuels and validates that kind of thinking.  

And yet, history’s great thinkers and creators, people like Socrates, Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Kant, Goethe, Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Frank Capra, Dr. Martin Luther King, George Lucas, and J.K. Rowling, among others, would reject the idea that a merely materialistic view of things is good enough or all there is.  It is possible that you are wiser than those men and women, but it is just as possible that you are not.  With that in mind, perhaps you should not be so quick to discredit the things you cannot understand, especially when those things have survived the test of time.  I too will do likewise.  

To his credit, Mr. Pressfield builds his case without statistics.  Statistics and citations have their place, but sometimes they become a handicap that corporate types use to avoid appealing to a person’s own inner sense of things.  Do you really need a survey to know what’s right to do in the moment or to conclude that the iPhone is a well designed product?  Only if you’ve forgotten how to trust your own instincts.

The only point of contention I have with Mr. Pressfield’s excellent and inspiring book is his claim that “Creation has its home in heaven.”  I would be more comfortable saying that Creation often but not always comes from heaven.  

Call me judgmental if you like, but I don’t consider Hitler’s Mein Kampf or the Saw movie franchise to be divinely inspired creations.  As I’ve explained before, artists can produce corporate and evil stuff just like anyone else, but this is a small dispute with an otherwise inspiring and life-affirming book full of resonating truths.  

If you want to make the world less corporate by focusing in on your own special purpose for being on this earth, I cannot recommend this book enough.  

Business and Design Lessons From Malcolm Gladwell

Published on January 21, 2009 in business and design. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

If you wish to carve out a corporate existence for yourself, you will probably avoid showing others a new way of seeing something. Doing that is risky, unproven in profitability, and more conflict-prone than the old tried-and-true methods approved by the  powerful and the influential. Corporate fellows avoid the above-mentioned adjectives in the same way that unrepentant alcoholics avoid AA.  (This applies even to the indie-rock scene kids who slavishly follow the fashion dictates of their hipster overlords in the name of assimilated nonconformity.) Malcolm Gladwell is not one of those fellows.

Les Saltimbanques at the Races - Picasso

Les Saltimbanques at the Races - Picasso

In his book Outliers, he challenges the idea that someone’s success is determined almost exclusively by his or her own efforts.  Mr. Gladwell still argues that individual effort matters: he insists that successful people need about 10,000 hours of practice to become masters  of their craft. Still, the book spends more time discussing the role society plays in encouraging and nurturing the success of outliers, the superstars in their fields who are exponentially mre skilled than their colleagues.  That kind of non-conventional thinking makes the book worth reading, but I want to focus on a specific quote from the book that hasn’t been as widely discussed.

Here’s the quote: “Autonomy, complexity,  and a connection between effort and reward are the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.” If there is a better way to describe an uncorporate job, then I haven’t heard it.  As it happens, it’s also a helpful framework for discussing great design.

Few things deaden my enthusiasm for a job more than an employer who tells me exactly how to do my work.  Yes, every business and design assignment has its standards and protocols.  Nothing wrong with that, but why insist on making me or my coworkers read from a script or do things exactly like you do?  Machines need to be micromanaged, competent people don’t.  Instead, why not tell us what results you want, give us some flexibility in pursuing those results, and reward those of us who best achieve those results?

One of my worst experiences on a design job involved a client who wanted to tell me exactly what elements I should use for a poster and where they should go.  I don’t mind that kind of thing if a client has design instincts that are as good, if not better, than my own, but that was not the case with him. He relished the clip-art aesthetic.  I’ve had enough of those experiences that I now reserve the right to refuse to do work that I find ineffective in conception.  The customer is not always right, and life is too short to do ugly design.

Designers, artists, and employees in general have their own unique perspectives and abilities that they desperately want to share with you. Why not seek to discover and use those abilities to your advantage, so that you can accomplish whatever specific tasks need to be done?  You’ll get more interesting and more valuable results while keeping your employees more engaged.  I understand there this a place for procedure.  Deviating from it can involve some experimentation, and not all experiments succeed.  Still, the potential for discovering a friendlier, more appealing, more efficient, more profitable way of doing things, seems to be worth the risk, don’t you think?   Not convinced? Well, which would you rather have in your house: a Picasso painting or a generic photograph with a caption about corporate excellence?

Maxalot - Joshua Davis

Maxalot - Joshua Davis

Take a look at the above design by Joshua Davis.  This kind of visual complexity is something in which he specializes.  Maybe you’ve seen some of the ads he’s done for companies like Motorola? (If you like his style, you can see more of his work at joshuadavis.com.) In any case, is there not something compelling about this kind of complexity?  We are inclined to look for patterns in the complex, to discover a sense of order and harmony that transcends the chaos in our world and gives it meaning.  Too much complexity is an overwhelming, frustrating experience, but without enough of the stuff, we lose interest and don’t stay fully engaged.  No wonder Mr. Gladwell sees it as an essential ingredient in fulfilling work.

You could also say the same thing about a good design, which is after all, a pleasing arrangement of complex elements that serve functional or aesthetic purposes. Too simple a design conveys half-hearted apathy.  On the other hand, if you add too much complexity, then you produce something that interferes with its own functionality.  To pull off this balancing act with elegance and style is the real trick of the thing.

And now we get to the connection between effort and reward.  Notice that Malcolm Gladwell did not say the connection between effort and the amount of money earned.  It’s a pernicious corporate assumption that everyone does things simply for more money. Some people just want to see that their efforts earn them respect or affection from others.  Whatever the payoff may be, people want to see it come eventually, or they’ll stop working as hard or stop working altogether.  From a designer perspective, that means users may give up on a product, protest a policy, or ignore a poster that demands too much effort or attention without giving back enough rewarding functionality.

The volunteer who helps out at her church probably doesn’t want money for her efforts.  And yet, if she continues to give her time to serve others but gets no appreciation or sense of making a difference in return, she will probably stop helping at some point.

The local actors I know don’t care so much about getting paid big bucks or becoming famous (at least not all of them), but they do care very much about giving performances that are well regarded in meaningful productions.  They also care about connecting with other actors and earning their respect.  Taking away those things and you could jeopardize their future dramatic endeavors.  I’ve done a little bit of acting myself (I’m not a great actor, but I enjoy learning and going through the process), so I know how hard it is to face rejection after rejection without hearing, on occasion, about how someone was affected by your performance, big or small.

Conversely, if you want the world to be a less corporate place, be sure to pay people for the efforts that bring you satisfaction. One of the owners of the Boot, an Italian restaurant in Norfolk, Virginia known for a vast beer selection, hearty meals, and great music, told me about his visits to a nearby, upscale comic-book shop called Local Heroes.  He aims to buy something from the store every few weeks, because he believes the area deserves a place like that.  I feel the same way about the Boot.   I want to reward them for their efforts, so that they will continue to find satisfaction from staying in business.

Support the things you cherish with money if you can, but an honest, heartfelt thank-you is cheaper and sometimes more appreciated. Comments on this blog have helped me see that others value my efforts, and so I  continue writing, instead of merely looking for more ways to make money.  On some difficult days a few kind, thoughtful, or grateful words have made all the difference to me.  Knowing this, I look for every opportunity to offer a sincere and unique expression of gratitude to others whose efforts I appreciate.

Find ways to include autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward in the work you do, the work you ask others to do, and in the things you create, and you’ll be doing your part to make the world a less corporate place.  (By the way, thanks for reading this.  I really appreciate it.)

The Designer vs. the Artist: Who’s our Uncorporate Champion?

Published on December 29, 2008 in art and design. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Good designers and artists make the world less corporate in their own unique ways. Their creations inspire, provoke, and engage us, and for that I am grateful.  I aim to do the same with my work, and I like learning from people who are better at achieving my own goals than I am.

Still, the potential for making things more corporate exists for both artists and designers.  I talk a bit about how to avoid being a corporate artist here.    In this post, I’ll look at some distinctions between a designer’s mentality and an artist’s, and how they can contribute to or fight against corporate thinking.

Essentially a designer is someone who creates things with a strong consideration for the end-user’s experience. A good web designer thinks about how easy a site is to navigate and how pleasing it is to read.  A graphic designer aims to capture his audience’s attention with just the right visual elements for the represented message.   Someone who designs products pays attention to how  functional, elegant, and costly the product will be to customers.

gmail

Gmail is my email provider of choice because of how intuitive it is to use and how elegant it is in its simplicity, but I can assure you that it was neither intuitive nor simple for the Google engineers to design.  They didn’t make an application that was easy for them to build or that gave them the best chance for self-expression. Rather they put emphasis on creating something that was easy for me to use and to customize based on my own aesthetic preferences.

Amazon.com didn’t think about what kind of return and shipping policies would be most convenient for their business managers.  They thought about what would be most convenient for their customers, and so they designed policies that allow for a 30-day exchange period, free shipping for purchases over $25, and friendly customer support.  (The one time that I had to call Amazon support was for a shipping mistake.  The mistake was my fault, but Amazon still offered to replace the item if I couldn’t get it recovered.  They corrected the shipping address so quickly that it was a non-issue.)    That’s why they get a lot of repeat business from me.

Various designers have their own styles and sensibilities, but the good ones are all still user-oriented.  Can you imagine one of Google’s or Apple’s designers getting rewarded for designing an interface that not only baffled you, but left you demoralized and unproductive for days at a time? Would it make a difference if these hypothetical designers wrote long and boring essays about what they were thinking when they created the hellacious, unusable interfaces?  Of course not, and yet there are artists out there who would consider it a professional triumph if their work had the effect on you that I described above.

Why?  Being an artist involves more emphasis on personal expression than being a designer, and the effectiveness of self-expression is sometimes evaluated based on whether it affects audiences in any observable way. Nothing wrong with that.  Artists can use their imaginations to paint pictures or tell stories that grow from their own experiences in this world.  Done honestly and with skill, that can help us better understand and appreciate our own lives.

Problems develop when artists buy into the absurdly stupid, corporate idea that they can and should express themselves in any way they wish and completely ignore how that expression will affect other people. Nero considered himself a consummate artist, using his power to gain forced acclaim for his music and staging maniacal torture  and killing procedures.  He was rumored to play his lyre and sing wildly as Rome burned, entranced perhaps by his own exquisite artistry.  ( Peter Ustinov played Nero in the 1951 film Quo Vadis, and it’s one of the best depictions of a mad, self-absorbed, and heartless artist that I’ve seen on film.)  Do you wish to be like Nero, dear artists? If not, then be so good as to think about the sentiments of others as you promote yourselves and produce your work and carry on as artists do.

A former artist friend once told me that I didn’t understand her as an artist when I asked her to be more straightforward with me.  Distorting the truth is not artistry, sweetie.  It is called being dishonest.  Sleeping around with everyone in town is not “artistic freedom.”  A more appropriate phrase for that kind of thing is “being a whore.”   (I am just as guilty of this kind of thing when I drink more than I should, influenced by the mistaken, corporate idea that artists need alcohol to produce compelling work.)  It’s a tricky thing to find the right balance between self-expression and self-restraint, but it’s worth trying.

photo from flickr.com/onkel_wart

photo from flickr.com/onkel_wart

Artists, and non-artists alike, including me, have their own vices that they struggle against, but most people don’t use their job status to justify their vices.  Artists shouldn’t get a golden get-out-of-jail-free card just because they’re artists.  They affect others in good or evil ways just like the rest of us. To believe otherwise is to perpetuate narcissistic, corporate thinking.

So far I’ve come down harder on artists, but designers too can err on the side of corporateness.  Just like the chaff  that surrounds the wheat, there are ugly and hard-to-use things out there, trying to drown out the well-designed stuff.   Sometimes it’s because a designer tried to imitate stylish fads instead of discovering what works for the task at hand.  Or maybe it is a matter of designing with an emphasis on low cost over quality.  Or perhaps someone just lacked the drive to put in the work needed to get polished results.

Those are all definitely corporate conditions, but most designers would not consider the above examples to be definitive characteristics of good design.  We sometimes hold up our artists to different standards, though.  Our museum curators, after all, put up literal pieces of shit on display and celebrate the artistic accomplishment, the glorious self-expression involved.

Still, good artists offer unique points-of-view that come from the deepest parts of their souls. They can illuminate problems, encourage us to dream and marvel at the world we inhabit,  help us to understand and appreciate each other, and illuminate the hidden inner, demons inside of us.  Designers sometimes approach that territory, but they don’t dig as deep.

A movie made by a bunch of designers runs the risk of becoming shallow eye-candy driven by what designers think people want to see and not on drama that resonates with greater truth.  Not wanting to displease his intended users, a designer too may be less inclined to introduce ugliness or dissonance to make a greater point, and yet it is hard to get a complete sense of our lives without taking into account the ugly and the dissonant.

Obviously deliberate ugliness is very different from ugliness due to half-hearted or incompetent design work.  It is also worth pointing out that an artist is more prone to overuse dissonance or ugliness by overemphasizing the value of any kind of self-expression, no matter how depressing or misanthropic it may be.   Still, the complete absence of dissonance or at least a healthy acknowledgment of reality’s constraints is an obvious characteristic of all things corporate.   Now you know why those corporate training videos full of false smiles and exaggerated enthusiasm are so awful and hard to watch.

What the world needs is more designer artists, creators who care about the recipients of their work and the effect it has on them, but who also create by refining their own abilities for self-expression  instead of relying only on trends and templates.  I will try to be that kind of creator.  Will you?

If you’re up for the challenge, then we can make the world a less corporate place together.

The Mysterious, Illusive, and Tricksy Nature of Giving

Published on December 23, 2008 in giving. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

(My apologies for the delayed arrival of this post.  Normally I publish a new post each weekend, and do I value consistency and dedication.   With that said,  this is a time of year that asks much from me and you, and avoiding other people and holiday festivities merely to update this blog on time strikes me as a tragically corporate mistake.  For your patience, I am grateful)

If there is any better way to determine the condition of someone’s soul that doesn’t involve their attitude toward giving, then I don’t know what it is. That’s probably why some people put considerable effort into disguising their true sentiments about giving. On the outside, they may be smiling , but in the privacy of their own hearts, they might be hiding obligation, or guilt, or manipulative attempts to get what they want.  Others give out of deeply held convictions and genuine affection, wanting nothing in return. It’s not easy to tell what is behind the giving, but then who said it was easy to see a soul as it is and not as it wishes to be seen.

photo from flickr.com/peturgauti

photo from flickr.com/peturgauti

As counter intuitive as it may seem, sometimes the giving involved in charity work is more selfish than the giving involved in being excellent at work. In some circles, doing community service is the best way to gain status and influence. I prove this with the fading bruises I carry from the disdain of girls too preoccupied with missions work to treat me with respect. But then again, on more than one occasion, I volunteered to do community service for the sole reason of meeting girls. (It didn’t work so well; it rarely does when your heart isn’t in the right place.)

It is corporate thinking to assume that everything done on a volunteer basis is noble and good, while everything done to make money is selfish and base. A good employer will pay you based on the results you achieve, so that you have an incentive to aim for excellence.   And yet, there are various ways to measure performance, but I don’t know of any system that can accurately track every time an employee or business does more than what the job requires.

Think about the friendly, sincere smile given to the customer who won’t leave any feedback or the way someone spends extra time and effort to get the details right that most people won’t notice. Those kinds of things don’t show up on the annual employee reviews, but some employees still do those things because they want to share kindness and excellence with the world.

Consider also the restaurants that give you larger-than-expected portions or replace the tablecloths and flowers at every table, not just every day, but every few hours. These restaurants could make more money in the short-term by keeping the portions small and opting for plastic flower decorations, but they take pride in giving their guests great atmosphere and a satisfying meal experience.  In the long-term, those are the very details that distinguish a restaurant and help it find loyal patrons and financial success, but corporate thinkers tend to avoid this kind of long-term logic and focus only on short-term profit margins and other easily measured statistics.

I’ve read plays like Othello and seen films like the Lord of the Rings several times, but each time I discover something new, and those discoveries surprise and delight me.   That only happens when artists like Shakespeare, Hieronymus Bosch, Mozart, and almost everyone at Pixar labor to put elements into their work that most people won’t notice, but they put them in anyway out of a love for their craft and for the particulars of the things they create.

In every Canon digital SLR, even in the entry-level ones, there’s a handful of features that customers will not appreciate unless they have a strong background in photography.  Since some consumers lack the experience needed to appreciate such features, Canon could get away with not including them and selling the cameras for a greater short-term profit.  But, Canon takes pride in giving optical excellence to the world, and that’s one reason why I’m proud to work for Canon.

photo from flickr.com/andycastro

photo from flickr.com/andycastro

The artists, craftsman, employees, managers, and entrepreneurs who strive to give the world more than what is expected from the jobs they perform, not out of an exclusive desire for profit, but out of a love and appreciation for excellence, give in a truer way than the self-righteous crones who sometimes pollute the  halls of the non-profit organizations they serve.   Intention is everything, and the ones who give best, whether they be volunteers or paid professionals, are the ones who would still contribute their gift even if God were the only one watching.

That kind of uncorporate giving doesn’t concern itself too much with how it will be measured and paid back right away.  Rather,  a sense of faith that some good will come of the effort, guides the gift into fruition. Here’s the secret though:  If  a worthy gift is given with good intentions, rewards will come whether in financial profit or in a new relationship or in sense of accomplishment, whether in this life or the next, but if you give only to get those rewards, then you’ll never see them.

When you stop and think about it, isn’t a good part of the charm about Christmas decorations found in the fact that they involve a little bit of effort beyond what is expected in daily life?  Lights, wreaths, and Christmas trees don’t have to be there, and yet they are, and so they become friendly beacons of goodwill to all who see them.  What if people took extra steps to spread a sense of celebration and kindness throughout the year?  Wouldn’t that be inspiring in a similar way to Christmas at its best and maybe even in a similarly profitable way?

In the nature of disclosure, I should mention that my own attitudes toward giving vary drastically from day to day. Just think of the vast disparity between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and you’ll get the idea. Some days, I regret to report, my attitude toward giving is essentially this, “well I’d rather burn in hell then help that no-good, dirty, rotten son of a biscuit. (I don’t usually think about biscuits in this context, but for the sake of civility, I’ll take some artistic liberties with the truth. Rest assured though, merry gentlemen and good ladies, the sentiment as a whole is an all too accurate transcription of the thoughts that plague me in my darker days.)

It’s no coincidence that the days where giving seems distasteful to me are the more hellish ones of my existence. The oppressive nature of my own selfishness consumes me and the passage of time becomes an awful, screeching, never ending torment. How much different are the rare days where I re-discover and rest in the love that medieval thinkers called the celestial music of the spheres, the love of God that keeps the planets in harmonious movement and powers every true instance of tenderhearted affection and brotherly love.  In those moments I can give graciously and unselfishly, without regard for whether my efforts will be appreciated or reciprocated.

I wish I could give like that more often, but my own concerns about my future and  career  and carefully crafted image, my insecurities and aches and dark spots, cloud my capacity to give in that way for too long.

photo from flickr.com/brungrrl

photo from flickr.com/brungrrl

Still, in those few moments where I can give as I should, the universe appears right and good and beautiful. It’s hard; it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done but also one of the easiest, depending on my state of mind, to give like Jesus gave and still gives. I don’t know if I’ll ever get it consistently right, but it’s not a bad thing to try in this magical time of year, where we celebrate the birth of Christ, the greatest giver of gifts that the world of men has ever known.

Merry Christmas everyone, and may God bless us all!

How to Avoid Being a Corporate Artist

Published on November 17, 2008 in art and storytelling. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

(Normally, I aim to do updates every Saturday, but this is a subject that means a lot to me, and it took me a little longer to get things right, or as close to right as I could manage.  Sorry about that. The length is also a little longer, so you can get the main ideas from the words in bold if you prefer.)

A corporate artist is not an oxymoron. It’s what a creative-minded person can become when he or she pursues fame, money, or passing fads instead of the deepest things in his or her heart. That’s a tragic thing, but sadly it’s not an uncommon occurrence.

At its best, art inspires and enlightens.  It helps us understand each other, and it reveals the problems in our societies and the evil in ourselves.  A great piece of art encourages us to do and dream great things that are worthy of its company.   That’s why it makes me sad to see creative types become corporate artists who screw up the world in uniquely monstrous ways.

Plumbers do important work that requires training and specialized knowledge, but I’ve never a met a plumber who  puts his soul on display when fixing the sink.  (Perhaps there is such a plumber out there, and if he exists, I’d love to watch him work.)  In contrast, artists I admire, whether musicians, actors, writers, or painters, captivate me by putting at least a sliver of their souls into their work. It’s hard enough to show that part of yourself to the world, but it’s even harder to do when faced with potential rejection, criticism, and exploitation that comes with the territory.   If you think this is easy stuff, try going to work completely naked, and do your job while everyone else stays fully clothed.

"Ballet Class" by Edgar Degas

Ballet Class by Edgar Degas

I’m not trying to be provocative.  There is a point to the nudity.  It is not gratuitous, and so it meets my criteria for use here.  (I apply the same criteria when considering the merit of nudity in art.  It’s like Madeleine L’engle writes in her book Walking on Water, “A painting of a nude body can glorify the wonder of incarnation, or it can titillate and degrade.”  With that said, dear Hollywood friends, you don’t tend to err on the side of wondrous incarnation very often, so be careful.)

Anyway, I believe we were meant to live in harmony, with our hearts naked and exposed to each other. They were once naked in the Garden of Eden, were they not?   There was nothing to hide from each other, so Adam and Eve could be themselves without hiding behind lifeless, corporate facades.

Good artists do what they can to slowly nudge us back toward the harmonious state of being that was once found in the Garden. But it is hard to live with an open heart, whether professionally or just in general.  Try sharing that light long enough, and some vultures and villains are sure to notice it, and they’ll try to stomp it out or consume it for their own selfish ends.  There’s a real risk that these dark forces, whether outside or inside a person, will turn an artist corporate.

Take another look at the painting above.  Look at how lovely the ballerinas are, but the dark gentleman on the right isn’t very interested in their overall beauty.  He’s a little more preoccupied with a certain part of the ballerina’s body.  His compatriot in the picture doesn’t appear to be much more noble.  Note also the disturbing blotches of black that frame the dancers, trapping them in their confined space.  When these kinds of dark forces infect artists, they corrupt them and turn them into horrific variations of Britney Spears, who is perhaps the ultimate corporate artist.

Yes, Britney is a talented dancer, she looks hot, and she’s making a lot of people a lot of money, so what the hell is wrong with that, right?

I’ll tell you.  Instead of helping me better perceive truth and beauty, corporate artists like Britney Spears try to sell me on sex, popularity, and mass produced sounds and movements. I get a cheap thrill, but each time I indulge I’m trading against the possibility of future lasting happiness with a girl who has character, who doesn’t sell everything  to anyone who will make her famous.  You see, the more I listen to Britney Spears, the less convinced I am that there are still attractive girls with integrity out there.  That’s why I’ve stopped listening to Britney Spears.

It’s so easy for us in general and for artists in particular to do things just to validate our egos or to scratch a burning impulse or to overcompensate for insecurities. I’m just as guilty as anyone of that kind of thing.  When I treat a lady like she’s a mere source of physical gratification, I am taking away something from her that she could better enjoy with a man who truly loves her.  Maybe she’ll never get married, or maybe her future relationships won’t be as sweet because of the way I used her up.

Whatever the case may be, I’m ripping the social fabric, the unseen threads that keep our society cohesive, when I act only to satisfy myself.  With the wrong focus and the right circumstances, I too could become the ultimate corporate artist, but that’s not something I want to be.  Knowing that is half the battle.

I don’t want to come up with a list of dos and don’ts for art.  I’m just asking artists to stop making decisions just to make more money, build up street cred, or do anything for the sake of doing work.  Instead, dare to build a career by bringing the depths of your heart to light. I’m not arguing that every piece of art has to be full of eternal meaning.  There is a place for light romantic comedies, singable pop songs, well choreographed dance routines, scary films, and mystery books.  Still, all of these things can be presented using good taste within the context of a moral universe, or they can be built out of a narasistic, chaotic framework that is filled with pandering to the basest human instincts. William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alfred Hitchcock could convey a moral universe even when exploring darkness.   Can you?

When you undertake whatever creative ventures you pursue, dare to stand for something.  Just because so many modern artists mistake vulgarity, cheap thrills, and chaos for artistic technique doesn’t mean you have to go along with that.

I don’t mind profanity when used with restraint to make a point, but if you use it in every other sentence, I start to suspect that you are compensating for a limited vocabulary.

Also, Grace Kelly never did a super-skank stripper movie for the sake of getting more exposure to new audiences, or for proving herself as an actress, or for whatever the preferred PR phrase is these days.  I think she still did OK for herself, don’t you?  She was attractive, but she maintained a sense of class, and that is much more alluring, much more sexy, than any of the shiny, transparent strings and sequins posing as clothes that the mass-produced Britney clones wear these days.

I’m sorry ladies and gentlemen, but you can’t be everything to everyone. A writer may get acclaim for writing both family dramas and perverse sex books, but to me he is no longer someone with enough integrity to avoid writing a reprehensible book.  He’s just a corporate climber, doing anything for more money, power, and fame just like everyone else, and that will make me less likely to buy his next book.

Again, I don’t object to depictions of vice in art as long as the depiction is not the gratitious, glamourized selling point of the production.   There are prostitutes, thieves, and murderers even in the Bible, but they don’t get the glamour girl treatment, now do they? Context and purpose behind depicted vice can make all the difference.

The folks who come in to see your self-loathing play or art exhibit probably won’t know that you’ve been trying to get a break for months and months, or that you were going through a difficult divorce when you wrote that ultra-violent misogynistic film.  All they know is that they worked hard all week, faced their own difficulties, and gave you some of their money and/or time so that they could be entertained, inspired,  enlightened, or engaged by what you have to offer.  Do you really want to be the one who demoralizes them, with a reprehensible role in a reprehensible production just because you were desperate to get whatever work you could get? Is that really what you want your legacy in this world to be?

I can’t tell you what you should and shouldn’t do with your art.   You have to listen to your own conscience for that kind of thing.  But don’t be so selfish and so corporate as to not take into account how your “art” will affect other people. If a plumber’s shoddy work caused physical injuries to others, we would ask him to make amends, or we’d put him out of business.  And yet if an artist’s work strains the social fabric by encouraging infidelity and violence against the innocent, while driving people away from their God-given sense of dignity and faith , we smile and talk about the bold artistic choices involved.   That’s nonsensical corporate talk, worse than the stuff that comes out of the most corporate of meetings.

I used the word “Being” in the title instead of “Becoming” or something altogether different, because you can stop being one thing as soon as start being something else.   Just like anyone can choose to become a corporate arist by thinking only about themselves and their money and fame, anyone, even Britney Spears can choose to start being a true artist who creates from the heart and does so out of love for others.

America was once a land that inspired others with the noble sentiments found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Now we send the world works of hateful bloodlust, porn designed as story, and vulgarity masquerading as art.  Let’s fight to change that.  If you’re an artist, then make meaningful stuff.  If you talk about art, don’t celebrate reprehensible stuff just because it’s popular. Together, we can make the world a less corporate, and a more beatiful, more harmonious place.