The Art of Messing Around

Hey y’all,

This conversation with Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering, happened because of my response to a single note she posted:

This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, because over the years I’ve noticed just how many pieces of creative work start off as a joke, or a lark, or just goofing around. (Also, a lot of these ideas are prominent in my next book, Don’t Call It Art.)

I wanted to share 10 highlights and thoughts from our conversation:

1. The creative spirit is not just something you have, it’s something you enter into.

This is something I wrote about in my letter, “entering into the spirit”:

For artists, we get to play at Halloween all year. That veil between the material and the immaterial stays razor thin. Every day, we get to step into our costumes, don our masks, perform our rituals, and enter into the spirit.

But to do so, we must surrender our need to be good. And show up and surrender it over and over again. Day after day, keeping the channel open, getting out of our own way.

Hence my belief in “silly rituals.”

2. Whatever comes after the phrase “Wouldn’t it be funny if…” is probably something you should take seriously.

Matt Farley (more about him in my letter, “On quantity and quality”) writes really well about this in his creativity guide, The Motern Method:

Sometimes in a conversation, you’ll hypothesize about a creative idea by saying “wouldn’t it be funny if…” followed by a description of a very ridiculous idea. It’s an idea that no self-respecting person would ever devote a lot of time to.

But if you learned that someone had done it, you’d be curious about it, right? Of course you would. You’d bring it up in conversation with friends.

Do that project.

This also a great way to generate stories. One of my favorite stories to read this time of year is John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” (I love listening to Anne Enright reading it.) It’s a story about a guy who is at a pool party and basically says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I just swam home?”

In a journal entry, Cheever played around with “what if” scenarios while he comes up with the story:

The Swimmer might go through the seasons; I don’t know…. Might the seasons change? Might the leaves turn and begin to fall? Might it grow cold? Might there be snow? But what is the meaning of this? One does not grow old in the space of an afternoon. Oh, well, kick it around.

“Kick it around.” Sounds a lot like messing around…

A collection of kids taking things (too) literally

3. Take things literally.

The poet Mary Ruefle once said,

“I will take anything figurative literally and anything literal figuratively, which is almost the definition of being a poet… You just… you hear things wrong. It’s a twist.”

Kids are super good at this!

4. “Gatherings are the creation of a temporary alternative world.”

This is something Priya said that really grabbed me, because it is exactly what we’re trying to do with art — we’re trying to create a world.

Here’s how Brian Eno puts it:

I think when you are working as an artist, you are always world building. You are creating a world.

It might be a huge world like George Orwell’s “1984” — that’s a whole world completely thought out. And when you read that book, you decide to live in that world for a time, and you decide to experience the feelings of living in a world like that.

Because the wonderful thing about art is that it isn’t dangerous. You can live in that terrible totalitarian world, and then you can shut the book and go and put on a Fred Again song or whatever else you want to do.

I’m always sort of trying to find something that suddenly makes me think, “Oh, there’s a different kind of world. I’ve never been in a world like that before.”

5. A gathering has a creative tension between surrender and control, order and chaos, leading and following, etc.

Priya says the question for a gathering is how much you curate the experience and how much you leave open to the participant. This is the same kind of creative tension that exists between artist and audience. (A favorite talk of mine that is sort of on this topic is Derek Sivers’ “Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy.”)

6. Tyler the Creator: “Create like a child, edit like a scientist.”

You create with the nonsensical spirit of a child at play, and you come back and edit with your laser-brain logic.

7. Jokes contain a huge amount of creative potency.

Ian Leslie (author of the wonderful book John & Paul) wrote a whole piece about why musical breakthroughs emerge from fooling around. My favorite bit is about Radiohead’s “Creep”:

In 1992, a group called Radiohead were in a studio in Oxfordshire, attempting to crack their debut single. The sessions weren’t going very well. None of their songs hit home, and their producers weren’t impressed. While rehearsing the group played a song the group’s lead singer, Thom Yorke, had written years before, just to loosen up. It was called Creep. The producers loved it, but Yorke informed them that the melody and chords had been lifted from The Air That I Breathe by The Hollies.

When the sessions continued to fail, the group was reluctantly persuaded to record Creep, just to see how it sounded. The group’s lead guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, thought the song was so lame that he decided to fuck it up by hitting some ridiculously grandiose thunderbolts on electric guitar during the verse, and power chords during the chorus. Greenwood, who thought he was killing off the song with a joke, had unlocked its hidden majesty. As Yorke observed later, that guitar is the sound of the song slashing its wrists: “Halfway through the song it suddenly starts killing itself off, which is the whole point of the song really. It’s a real self-destruct song.”

“Creep” became a huge hit, of course, and the rest is history. And the joke comes full circle with this Patrice O’Neal bit about locating the heart of why white people love the song so much:

8. Throw a better party!

To quote Jonathan Richman, “We need more parties in the U.S.A.!”

9. Put on a mask so you can tell the truth.

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
—Oscar Wilde

10. The best hosts are amazing guests. (And the best writers are amazing readers.)

Priya said this lovely thing at the end:

If all of this sounds overwhelming, I think one of the ways you can deeply also grow the world you want to be in is be a really amazing guest. Choose… what you want to grow. Choose where you want to show up… [If] the bar is too high think deeply about where and how you spend your attention and energy and how you show up…

And I had to jump in and say:

One of the ways that you can enter into the world you want to be in is to be a great fan… Be a good reader, be a good listener, be a good watcher. When you share your enthusiasms with stuff you’re taking in, you are part of the world you want to be in and you also create a space for people who like that stuff to gather with you.

Priya asked me if my newsletter had a title (it doesn’t) but the more I think about it, it’s funny that her book is called The Art of Gathering, because a title for this newsletter could be, The Gathering of Art. (At least, that’s what I’m trying to do.)

xoxo,

Austin