It’s that special time of year again, where no matter if you’re a follower of Tarvu or you have been touched by his noodly appendage, you suddenly find yourself needing to do a bunch of stuff involving buying cards and going to parties.

This is a time of year where it is just hard to get things done. It’s dark and cold, and the excitement of a new year is just around the corner. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been finding it difficult to apply my butt to the seat and get down to work recently! Whatever the reason for my procrastination, it has meant that this is the first year I’ve been on top of my christmas card list. Huzzah!

The other thing about this time of year is that you have to go out to parties and meet people. You might think that you can stay in and get more work done, but you’ll probably end up eating cake in front of the TV and feeling miserable. I’m probably speaking from personal experience here, but I know I’m not alone in dragging myself out only to have an unexpectedly nice time.

And then I fucking hated it.

I messed around on the site for about three hours, filling in an endless questionnaire (which was kind of fun) and generated the above graph. It reminded me of the time that I went for a job interview at a Subway Sandwich shop, and they tried to see if I would be a good employee by asking me multiple choice questions. Just like after that interview, by the time I finished clicking an appropriate number of questions my brain went all squishy and useless.

Then I went and drew in my notebook for twenty minutes, and I felt loads better. I cannot stress how much better this simple activity made me as opposed to my digital socialising. Crazy, right? Who knew the introverted, artistic, unadventurous person would actually enjoy doing something that didn’t involve repeatedly clicking a mouse.

In my day-to-day life, it’s very unusual for me to even see a woman under 50, let alone talk to one, so it was nice to see that the wider world still contains people my own age. But the sort of online site that involves putting up a picture of you (Facebook, Google+, and dating sites) seems to totally do my head in, and part of my continued recovery is learning to avoid what does that. Still, I did get a nifty graph out of it.

This is pretty tempting. You see, I’ve been reading and researching into creativity – what it is, how we use it, and where we get the sense of what we want to do when we are being creative. One of the most interesting books in this area is a book about improv, the drama school thing of “making stuff up”, which is talked about at length by Keith Johnstone in his book “Impro“.

“As I grew up,” begins his book, “everything started getting grey and dull.” Johnstone asks why we change from playful children to locked-down adults, and unpacks that shift from creativity to sober adulthood. He lays a lot of blame at schools, and I have to agree with him; I have never had a good learning experience at a school, college, or university. In fact, what I am doing today (writing, drawing, and making jokes), is stuff I was either told I couldn’t do, or I was actively told not to do.

So I’m pretty mad about my schooling.

If you do any research into art history, it soon becomes apparent that the people who are the best in their field are the people who started young. What our education does is set people up to have an understanding of many fields, but a specialisation in none – great if you’re going to be a manager, but crap if you want to specialise as a tradesman.

Of course, I couldn’t leave school at 14 and train to be an artist. I had a friend who left school at that age and trained to do carpentry for building sites, and he’s doing pretty well for himself. But there was a slot for him to drop into; there was a route for people to become tradesmen, like he did, but not a route for people to stay creative.

I find myself wondering if the current glut of stand-up comics is made of people not suited for the median-style management education, who have both intelligence and creativity but are taught to reject more traditional forms of expression as childish. Without being able to use any other media than language, where else would those people turn but comedy? 

“It’s a consumer riot. These people are completely depoliticised, obsessed with consumer items yet too poor to buy them. When that frustration comes to the surface they’re not going to know who or what to take it out on, so they attack everything. Our culture fashioned these people into consuming morons, it’s not surprising when they act like violent morons when they can’t get what they want.”
Darren Cullen, Artist, 2011

UPDATE:

“When you’ve been told there’s no society, why would you care about other people?”
Tony Evans, football editor of The Times, 2011

You can’t really list your distractions until you know what your work is. I once knew a guy who was an impoverished musician; for as long as I’d known him, he had been short of money. I’d regularly see him busking in town, and his clothes went through various states until they could best be described as “threadbare”.

One day he turned to me and said “money’s getting a bit short. I might have to go back to my old job – being a dentist”. Colour me every fucking shade of surprised! Steve, the genial musician who lived on nothing, had what I’d been looking for; the secret entrance to pots of cash and a steady career. Before he’d just been another guy on the same economic strata as me; now I saw that he was slumming it.

Of course, I was wrong.

“I just couldn’t take all the kids crying because of me”, he said. “I spent all day doing kids teeth, and they all hated me at the end of the day. So I quit”.

Steve wasn’t a penniless musician out of choice. He had walked away from one of the most profitable careers around because his distractions came at a base level of humanity. A level that he couldn’t ignore. I think a lot of distractions really function at this deep level, and that the things we use to distract ourselves are just tools.

Most of the time, we just don’t want to fail at doing something. We don’t want to make something ugly or clunky, something not perfect, and so we end up reading the paper or watching the TV rather than putting in the hard work to make something beautiful. That’s what I’m doing now; I’m not writing a short piece about distraction, I’m distracting myself, because when this is finished, I have to pick what my work is going to be.

This would be like me writing a history of the miners strike, using only reports from The Sun as a a reference.

Corporations have become the sole arbiters of cultural ideas and taste in America. Our culture is corporate culture. Culture used to be the opposite of commerce, not a fast track to ‘content’- derived riches. Not so long ago captains of industry (no angels in the way they acquired wealth) thought that part of their responsibility was to use their millions to support culture. Carnegie built libraries, Rockefeller built art museums, Ford created his global foundation. What do we now get from our billionaires? Gates? Or Eisner? Or Redstone? Sales pitches. Junk mail. Meanwhile, creative people have their work reduced to ‘content’ or ‘intellectual property’. Magazines and films become ‘delivery systems’ for product messages.But to be fair, the above is only 99 percent true.

From Tibor Kalman’s manifesto, “Fuck Committees“.

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

from “Moby Dick”, by Herman Melville, 1851

Goopy, mainly.

This might be something they teach in Missionary School – “when their mouths are full, they’re ready for Jesus!” – but I managed to pull out a few facts from her. She stood out from the other missionaries that had accosted me (unsuccessfully) in the streets, because she wasn’t a lantern-jawed white guy. Sister Anne, it turned out, was from Hawaii, was going to be in the UK for 18 months, and got Mondays off.

To be honest, I felt a bit sorry for this young woman, so far away from home and at such a weird time in her life. My early twenties were a mess, and being forced to spend a year and a half (or two years if you were a man) away from my friends and home probably wouldn’t have made it any less messy. But mainly, I felt sorry for her having to spend all that time in Bedford.