Wrong
Why do I like this thing? Why do I believe this is the way? Is it something that I've decided for myself?
(Transcript)
So, interesting thing about this American life.
This American life is run uh, a little bit like a co-op.
So everybody, generally speaking, makes the same amount of money, including Ira Glass himself.
They all make the same amount of money.
According to him.
So it's because of that, that there's a lot of tape out there, of Ira, just talking, because the way that he makes extra money is by going and doing speaking engagements, right?
So you'll have an evening with Ira Glass, at the 92nd Street Y, and stuff like that, or such and such person, interviewed by Ira Glass, he's out there, making money, getting that paper, as one might say.
And it's in the middle of all these various sort of speaking engagements that he does that he said something that a lot of creative people turn to, when they're looking for some sort of guidance, some sort of level of inspiration, right?
And he talks about when you're 1st starting out, and he talks about how you use your taste to guide your creative journey, right?
And he says that when you're 1st starting out, you have this fantastic taste.
And the work you're doing doesn't add up to the great taste that you have.
And so you constantly work towards trying to get to a point where your taste matches the level of work that you're doing and really the key in the end is to just keep working and do lots and lots of work and eventually your work gets to this point where it matches your taste.
I think it's good advice.
And I think it's it's simple, and it's it's easy to understand.
It really does have the most important core concept with any artistic endeavor is that you just need to keep working.
Keep working, keep working, keep working.
It can't not get better, right?
And I've considered that unassailable, really, for a very long time, until just a few days ago.
Uh, Joshua Rothman.
In the New Yorker.
He's got a regular column called Open Questions.
And in this very short column, you can read it.
He's talking about a couple of books, and he's talking about the idea of taste, right?
And he wrote something in this very brief piece that is kind of sticking with me.
So I'm thinking through it.
Here I go.
Here's the quote.
The world is always telling you what to like.
As a result, taste is suspect.
When are you expressing your true self, and when are you allowing others to reshape you?
Visit one beautifully appointed Brooklyn apartment, and you'll admire the owner's taste.
Visit 10 identical apartments, and you'll wonder if having perfect taste actually means having none at all.
There's this idea out there that a lot of people like to stay away from, this idea that free will does not exist.
One of the aspects of this argument is that with every move you make in the world, with every thing you think, with every action you take, you are, at that moment, being influenced by about 10,000 outside forces.
Your upbringing, that book you read, that commercial you just saw, all of these exterior forces, are constantly putting pressure your thoughts and your actions.
How, then, could you or anyone have free will?
And then there's that really nasty Einstein quote, right?
If the moon were sentient, it would be 100% convinced that it was choosing to revolve around the earth.
Anyway, you can go real deep into the hole.
Does free will exist thing, if you want to, me personally, it's something that you can never really prove, so I don't spend a lot of time with it.
But that idea that you are secretly, unbeknownst to yourself, being changed and influenced by something.
Does call something like taste into question.
Why do I like this thing?
Why do I believe this is the way?
Is it something that I've decided for myself?
Or is this something that has been delivered to me by some sort of, I don't know, subliminal message from such and such thing?
Sticking to your guns as hard as an artist.
You have to be, well, they say you have to be fearless, but no one's fearless, everyone's constantly terrified, you have to sort of sojourn despite the fear, right?
And because of that, you are a ship on the ocean, and the instruments that you use to navigate the ocean need to be unassailable.
They need to be something that won't fail you.
And according to Ira, that thing that won't fail you is your taste.
But then along comes Joshua Rothman, in the New Yorker, saying taste itself, is suspect, because where does it come from?
Do you think something won't work because of something someone else told you, or do you really and truly believe that?
It's not a lot of fun to think about, because you want your thoughts to be your own, and you want your impetus as an artist to be your own.
But is it?
I will admit that throughout my life, there have been things that I've sort of clung to as an artist or storyteller or whatever you want to call it, that I have eventually discarded, left by the wayside.
I realized that this thing that I was using as a rule, was not, in fact, a rule, but someone's idea.
And ideas aren't rules.
I think the real quick example of that is in audio drama, there's the idea of a framing device.
You're listening to this story, and it's fiction, and it's dramatized.
Why is it only audio?
And there are some people out there who think that you need to always, with audio drama, come up with a reason why it is only audio, which is why you have a lot of audio dramas out there that are just like the tapes of this person.
Right?
This is the audio diary of the scientist creating the thing.
Stuff like that.
And for a while, I sort of thought, yeah, that makes sense.
You need a framing device.
You need a reason why it's audio only.
And so what you'll see with the 1st things I made, like live from the zombie apocalypse, or Omega station, those were framing devices.
One was a radio show, the other one was communications between space stations.
And that's what you were hearing.
But then when I started doing Midnight Burger, I thought to myself, why?
I mean, why do I need this?
Why do I need this?
It's audio because I say it's audio.
It's audio because of what you get to focus on.
It doesn't have to be audio for any real reason in the story.
That was something that I was regarding as a rule.
As a rule of taste, let's say.
And it fell by the wayside.
Where did that come from?
I don't know that it came from me.
But I did see a lot of audio dramas out there, all of which were through a framing device.
And in my mind, I thought this is the way.
This is appropriate.
But it wasn't.
So your taste, according to Ira, this thing that you used to navigate your creative life, can be flawed.
It's not unassailable.
It's not a constant.
Which means You can lead yourself down the wrong path using this.
Tool that you thought couldn't fail you.
The rules by which you are using to judge your own work can be called into question.
Now, that doesn't have to be a big deal.
The tools that we use to make it through the world, don't have to be perfect.
They can get you, at least in the right direction.
But when you're trying to see through the fog, when you're trying to get a true sense of the direction that you need to go.
What is the unassailable thing?
What is the thing that will never fail you?
And I think the only thing is desire.
What you want to do, even if there's this part of you that says this is wrong, you still have this desire to do it.
Maybe your taste is telling you that something is stupid.
But your desire to do it is still strong.
In the last episode, I talked for a 2nd about artists and how artists can be sometimes considered to be notoriously self-interested, which is absolutely true.
I wonder if.
Because your desire is the only thing that won't fail you, is that maybe a reason why so many artists are self-interested bastards, is because the only thing they have in the end is that desire, their own personal desire to do this thing.
And taste, in the end, is subjective.
Our desires rarely survive contact with reality.
You have a desire to be a billionaire, but reality is right there, stopping you from being that.
And maybe that's what this taste is, this taste that iverglass is talking about is what happens when your desire as an artist comes into contact with reality.
You have this desire to do something, and taste says, no, don't do that.
Is that.. A good force to have.
There are a lot of artists who don't actually know how good their work is.
There are people who spend their lives talking for a living and hate the sound of their own voice.
Is this their own idea of taste attacking themselves?
Like an overly active immune system. Trying to attack a foreign body.
Because an interesting desire, an interesting impulse, as an artist can often be regarded as a foreign body, something to be attacked.
You'll do something new or try to do something new as an artist, and voices will come to life saying, you can't do that that way.
And a lot of heroic artistic stories out there revolve around someone who, everyone told to stop, and they didn't, they defied taste.
So what does this leave us with?
We have within ourselves, this standard that we use to judge the work that we make.
And we quite often view this voice as unassailable.
It's inside your head.
How could it be wrong?
And what Joshua Brothman proposes is that it can be wrong.
That this voice in your head may not be coming from in your head.
The call might actually be coming from outside the house.
Is this voice that you've used to guide your art, is it flawed?
Has it been influenced?
Okay, so that's a lot of thinking out loud that I just did.
So how do we boil this down?
There you are.
You're sitting there, and in front of you is something that you just created.
You are, as per usual, judging the shed out of it.
Consider for a moment. That the voice that you have in your head, that voice you use to judge your own work, that that voice could be wrong.
In fact, that voice might not even be yours.
It is entirely possible that you don't know what you have in front of you.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hated Sherlock Holmes.
Led Zeppelin hated Stairway to Heaven.
John Steinbeck hated the grapes of wrath.
Tchaikovsky hated the nutcracker.
Franz Kafka hated basically everything he wrote.
Something that you created is sitting right in front of you.
Consider for a moment that it's time to set it free.
Set it free of the judgments you've placed upon it.
It's okay to be critical of your work.
It's okay to approach your work with an analytical mind.
As long as you consider, for one moment, that that voice in your head telling you that your work is not good enough yet.
It could be very stupendously, amazingly.
Wrong.
-j