Blog | The Work of Jarrett Fuller

The New York Times has a great profile on George Lucas and his desire to return to more personal “art-house” films and retire from the commercial films he is known for. I’ve been thinking about this separation between commercial work and personal work lately, after reading this interview with Nick Knight where he says there is no difference in the work he does for himself and the work he does for clients. This piece on Lucas seems to suggest the same thing:

But you wonder if this view — the commercial versus the personal, the blockbuster versus the experimental art film — is as reductive as the 1970s model. In fact, Lucas has always made personal films, just not in the traditional sense. The very first time Lucas showed “Star Wars” to friends, with World War II movie dogfights standing in for the unfinished effects, Spielberg is reported to have said, “That movie is going to make $100 million, and I’ll tell you why — it has a marvelous innocence and naїveté in it, which is George, and people will love it.”

We inject ourselves into all the work we produce, whether it’s for ourselves or for someone else. The line between commercial and personal isn’t as definite as it sometimes seems.

Jonah Lehrer has a great piece on why “creative geniuses” still have failures (Dylan’s Down in the Groove or Steve Jobs’s hockey-puck mouse). Quoting Nietzsche:

Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration … shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects…. All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.

Being a creative genius is more than just having making things. You also need to have the ability to sort those things and sift through to separate the good from the bad. So that raises the question, how do you learn to separate those things? In short: take a break, step away, don’t let yourself get too close:

[W]e have no idea which ideas are worthwhile, at least at first. So the next time you invent something new, don’t immediately file a patent, or hit the “publish” button, or race to share the draft with your editor. Instead, take a few days off: Play a stupid videogame, or go for a long walk, or sleep on it. Unless you take a brief break, you won’t be able to accurately assess what you’ve done.

I absolutely loved everything about this piece from Susan Cain in The New York Times on the importance of solitude in the creative process. If I were to describe how I feel in a paragraph, it might be pretty close to this:

[T]he most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this idea of solitude and being alone with your thoughts. I think this can mean taking time away from your team/collaborators to collect your thoughts or write and think, but I also think this means getting away from social media—closing Facebook and Twitter and getting away from blogs for a while. I’ve been doing this more recently and have found and have found it hugely helpful in my work and life.

Related: William Deresiewicz’s Solitude and Leadership

Counterpunch has a profile on jazz pianist Keith Jarrett. If his last name wasn’t enough to make me like him, he’s also from Allentown, PA and I’ve played his new album, Rio dozens of times since it released earlier this year. I especially liked this part where Jarrett discusses the limitations of the piano:

Rio opens with a squall of dark chords, pounding against each other, like a contrapuntal storm sweeping over the Amazon forest. The turbulent swirl eases, giving way to a luminous sheen of blues melodies, warm and sinuous. Jarrett’s touch is light and assured, with distinctive resonances of two of his heroes: Bill Evans and Bud Powell. Still the chromatic shadings of Rio have a horn-like quality, something akin to Wayne Shorter’s soprano sax. Indeed, Jarrett has often said that he is frustrated with the limitations of the piano, that he’d like to transform it into a more expressive instrument, such as a guitar or sax.

“Saxophone players have influenced me more than pianists,” Jarrett said. “And if you think about Sonny Rollins or Ornette Coleman or Coltrane, they’ve got a voice, they have this freedom, and they’re not percussive. They can play a river of notes and it doesn’t matter what the number is. So when I’m playing piano I don’t want to hear the attack as a percussive attack. I’m listening to this flow. That’s one reason the piano can make me mad.”