Readings for October 8, 2023

Andrew Eldritch from Sisters of Mercy begins his Creative Independent interview rather unmercifully:

What kind of advice do you have for aspiring artists?

The first thing to say is that you can aspire all you want. Only one percent of you will be working as opposed to just aspiring. So maybe you should learn some stuff that’s more broadly useful. That’s helped me a lot. I’m very fast with Photoshop, Illustrator, and I’ve learned some contract law. I can read a balance sheet if I have to.

Eldritch is absolutely correct, in my experience. He’s not merely saying that creative types should have skills to fall back on — in the very next exchange he says he had no plan B when he started his band — he’s saying that in order to make it as a working creative, you’re going to need to know how to do the things that shore up your creative work. As a freelance writer and editor, I need to know how to do my accounting, how to market my services, how to understand the contracts I’m sent, and how to build my website. As an author and publisher, I had to learn book layout, marketing, and design skills. When I can, I hire others for this work, but I’m able to do all of it proficiently, and some of it I even enjoy. No one needs to know all of this to begin a creative career, but you’ll find yourself needing to pick up skills as new projects and phases arise. It’s one of the benefits of having these unconventional paths, in my opinion.

Claire Tuna introduces the idea of the craft movie in this essay—a movie that shows how someone learns to do the thing they want to do: becoming a jazz drummer in Whiplash, nailing the triple axel in I, Tanya. Tuna also discusses the lack of STEM in movies about STEM. Writers and directors handwave the math and science, assuming that audiences don’t know and don’t care to know anything about what makes the geniuses of Good Will Hunting or The Imitation Game or Hidden Figures so incredible. We’re just told they are against a backdrop of blurry equations. Moneyball is a notable exception, since the math is quite clearly explained throughout the movie.

All of this is to say that Tuna’s essay is actually about Oppenheimer, which I have not yet seen. I do plan to see it, first because I told my friend Matt that I would watch it with him when it’s streaming using the giant image from my projector. Second, I like STEM movies, even when they are light on actual STEM stuff. And I’m coming into it knowing quite a bit about Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, so I will have Opinions. I know that Barbieheimer was the pairing of the summer, but I’m going to suggest a double feature of Oppenheimer and Asteroid City, a fine but not excellent Wes Anderson movie set at a postwar science fair in the desert.

The New York Times has an interesting piece about how an artist’s work changes over time, in this case, Marina Abramovic’s performance art. “Imponderabilia” involves a naked man and woman flanking a doorway, staring impassively a each other, while visitors pass between them. When the work debuted in the 1970s, there was no choice: you had to squeeze awkwardly between Abramovic and her partner. In its current iteration, as part of a retrospective of her work, there’s another doorway people can take to move through the galleries—and they usually choose to use that door. It’s an interesting question of how a work might change with changes in culture, and how culture changes around a work. Those changes themselves are interesting. As Abramovic says,

“If there’s an earthquake, if electricity stops, if somebody walks into you, it’s all part of the work,” she said. “And if nobody passes, that’s still part of the work.”

I got my COVID booster recently. I’m lucky that it doesn’t make me ill or even really tired. I get kind of fidgety afterward, actually. I don’t know if it’s a purely biological reaction to something in the shot or if it’s a learned response. I remember standing in line at the convention center with hundreds of others in 2021, getting the shot, waiting my 15 minutes, and walking into the spring sunshine with such hope. I wonder if my feeling jazzed after every COVID booster is a learned response to that first series of two jabs.

In any case, Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their foundational research on mRNA vaccines. It’s already made a massive, life-saving difference in our COVID response, and there are mRNA vaccines for things like malaria on the docket. Kariko and Weissman did much of the work without much support—little funding, few lab assistants, hardly anyone taking notice. So it’s vicariously gratifying to see their determination pay off in both real-world applications and prizes at the highest levels.

When I was in high school, I had a summer job at a local bank. I worked upstairs filing checks. Yes. Not only were there checks in circulation—thousands of them every day—but we filed them in drawers by account number. When you called the bank about a check, you got our department, and we would look up the physical piece of paper that you signed to check the amount or the date. This was boring work, but also tidy and satisfying. And it left lots of time to talk as we filed: gossip about the tellers downstairs, the class trip to France I was saving up for, and Mariah Carey.

This was the early days of Mariah, when she was singing adult contemporary torch songs and wearing boring outfits. The woman who ran the department could not stand when she hit those high highs, usually at the end of a song, no matter how fervently I argued for her artistry. I can only imagine how perturbed she was by Mariah’s turn to hip hop; I was long gone and graduating from college by then.

And now there is a book about Mariah’s artistry by Andrew Chan. He chose to focus the book on her voice as an instrument rather than her biography or even her songwriting skills. He explains why in a recent interview:

Maybe this is rigid or old-fashioned, but I tend to think that, while it’s important to consider an artist’s intentions and her biography, that information should never crowd out the sensory, textural, emotional qualities of the aesthetic experience. At a certain point, the art has to be given space to stand on its own.

His interviewer, Emily Lordi (who is writing a book on Whitney Houston), notes the cultural narrative that those with good voices are merely born with it, that it takes no effort to be as good as these two women. Showcasing a natural-born talent, as opposed to a honed craft, is vain, Lordi says:

You say in the book that flaunting this kind of voice is almost like a supreme act of vanity, like preening. But I love this idea of just letting your light shine, not hiding it.

Women in particular are often accused of flaunting it, whatever that gifted “it” may be, and vocalists are even more often accused of diva behavior. But this reminds me of someone operating in a completely different sphere at a completely different level: Rosie Hughes, leading scorer for the Wrexham women’s football team. The latest episode of Welcome to Wrexham introduces the world to Rosie, who says she gets shit sometimes for amazing feats of scoring, like multiple hat tricks in a single game. But she says she’s not trying to show off or rub it in anyone’s face when she celebrates every one of her many goals: “I’m just happy for me.”

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