Working Through Consulting to Creative People
A blog by psychoanalyst Michael Jolkovski who looks at music ensembles, businesses & creative teams and other examples of human nature at work and play.
There is a common theme to all of this. I promise.
On April 1st
Via Kottke I have discovered spaghetti book club, which features book reviews by children. I happened on this review of Alice in Wonderland that contains the killer line
Another reason why I enjoyed reading this book is because it taught me not to be afraid of dreaming
which pretty much made my day. If an artist helps us not be afraid of dreaming, they’ve done their job.
On March 8th
I’ve found it pleasant to play around with the concepts of hacking, bricolage and tinkering as different words for a crucially important mode of human operation. It helps me to think about creativity and what talent really is.
The comments from my prior post on the topic have been helpful, including some made privately. Thanks, Hacker News, for the traffic spike.
Dexter Nyamainashe of Zimbabwe: Hacker Supreme
Mr. Nyamainashe grabbed my attention today (via BoingBoing) as exemplifying hacker greatness.
Most of the comments disagreed with my idea: “Nonsense — the vast majority of human culture is the antithesis of hacker culture“. This made me consider the terminology. The commentator didn’t elaborate, but I imagine he takes “hacker culture” to mean a culture in which transgressive ingenuity is valorized — perhaps as seen in subsets of MIT or the early days of the Homebrew Computer Club — and that he might say the majority of culture in all places is in the thrall of convention and fear, the “antithesis” he decries. If this is his meaning, I concede the point. Read more »
On March 7th 1 Comment
Following up to a comment to this post, There is certainly the sentiment that it’s better to make a statement and quit than fade away. Long-lived bands are always subject to complaints from their fans that it’s not the same, etc. Metallica is a great example of a band whose fans seem to include an army of whiners. Do Metallica fans like anything Metallica has ever put out? (I think the real complaint is “you’re not young any more and neither are we and it’s your fault”).
I prefer to think of this as a creative problem, especially for groups who fill stadiums when they are young. What do they do with themselves as they grow up? There are a lot of ways to play it, and I don’t feel the need to prescribe how they should go. My big point is that when bands implode from their toxic social dynamics, this creative problem and creative choice is taken away from them, and that’s a shame. Maybe they’d do something interesting with it. Read more »
On February 27th 6 Comments
At a tech-business event where I was talking with people about the dynamics of creative groups, a fellow offered that we are becoming a hacker culture, meaning that young people are prone to alter or repurpose software and devices to their liking, to evade DRM and copy protection and generally make things work the way they like.
He’s right– but this isn’t new at all. Sociologist Claude Levi-Strauss spoke about the concept of bricolage, which is usually translated as tinkering or using what’s available to create a new thing. Hacking, in other words. Levi-Strauss posed this as a basic process in the creation of culture. Read more »
On February 26th
Because I have to think about things for a few weeks. For example, I have some choice thoughts about the TED talk by Liz Gilbert on Genius. But so does everyone else. And by the time I have my thoughts worked out, it will be as quaint and distant as Jimmy Carter’s cardigan. The internet will give a collective “meh“.
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