2024 03 27
Sun reflects off a building on my morning walk with a dog we’ve been watching. Chicago, Illinois. February, 2024 © Clayton Hauck
Everyone is talking about this book that unlocks your creativity. You likely know the one: The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. While, yes, I’ve read it and do find it worthwhile, I tend to be suspicious of things that everyone seems to be talking about. That said, it doesn’t matter where your creativity comes from or what motivates you to make the work, so long as you’re making it (so please use my affiliate link to buy a dozen copies of Rubin’s book for all your friends).
On the topic of making art and finding inspiration, this video (below) popped into my feed and pushed me to write about it here, per my blog rule: if I consume a video on youtube which I like I must create something relating to it here. The ying and the yang of creative time management, or something like that.
Bronques was a sort of rival/colleague of mine a few decades back in a time we both had popular nightlife photo blogs (his far more popular than mine). For me, that era of going out many nights, making photos, and then posting them online for anyone to look at was formative to me. Connecting Bronques’ video to how it relates to this is the idea of shutting your brain off when creating. Back when I was doing everyoneisfamous.com, there was very little big picture thinking going on. I was on auto-pilot each night, doing my best to make fun and compelling images people might want to see and then posting them as soon as possible without any hesitation fueled by what people might think of them, or me, or whatever! These days, I try to live by this same mentality but getting old weighs on you in so many ways, and I often find myself, as an example, second-guessing what to post on Instagram. This is far from the locked-in and confident artist approach I am now putting more effort into attaining.
Last night (while sitting on the couch, not partying), I was served a tweet showing a live stream of musician Deadmau5 reluctantly watching a fan-created vocal track, which he ended up immediately loving and using on his album. The fun takeaway for me, aside from the obvious one in that the internet enables this sort of thing to happen in the first place, was how instantly Deadmau5 knew what he was hearing was it, even though he’d need to modify some annoying filters the stranger on twitter had used. It’s that built-in level of taste or vision that sets people apart. How exciting it is when someone both has a strong opinion about something they made being beautiful and you agree with them that it is!
Consuming ideas, consuming art, wasting time. These aren’t necessarily bad things so long as you then take what you’ve consumed and turn it into something new. “You waste years by not being able to waste hours” was a line in an audiobook I was listening to this morning, which further connects into the theme of this post. Doing nothing is a good thing as it allows your brain time to work, being free to think and ponder or do a livestream on twitter with your fans.
We all have brilliance inside of us, it’s figuring out how to best communicate yours that is the challenging part.
-Clayton
