WHAT DO YOU LOVE: And how do you show it?

I was driving back to Virginia Beach for Easter by myself. The solitary road trip has become a joy recently mostly because it gives me time to freely let my mind wander. On this particular trip I noticed something. But first, a memory...

Back in high school I remember driving my '93 Buick Century around the 757 sporting stickers from my favorite bands while blasting them through the stock speaker system. And I wasn't alone. Everyone seemed to rep an artist or group or groups along their bumpers, trunks, and rear windows. Dropkick Murphys. Blink 182. Dave Matthews. 311. Sugar Ray. Everyone had someone and wanted others to know it. You'd see a band you loved and would roll up next to the person at a light, give an understanding nod and turn up your respective speakers. It was a community of fans united through temporary automotive tattoos.

But during my Easter road trip, I noticed that no one seems to do this anymore. When I started thinking about the cause, I came up with a theory. In our culture of digital immediacy where no one seems to own complete records from an artist or group, much less an entire catalog, we seem to have lost the devotion to artists that we had just a few years ago. This is a tragedy. And it's a trend that the music industry is noticing as well. Records are becoming more a collection of singles than a cohesive group creating a sustained emotional journey through 50 or so minutes of listening.

My charge to you is: Support artists and buy complete albums. Experience art and don't settle for immediacy. Buy CDs. Buy vinyl. Fall in love again. And shout it loud.

REQUIRED READING: Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto For Growth.

I recommend this to just about everyone.

It's a collection of bullet point thoughts from a world renowned graphic designer named Bruce Mau. While he wrote it to encourage and educate other designers, I believe that it can go a long way to influence how you do anything. Read this, internalize what you will, and use it to help you take those mental photographs. I have some that I quote almost daily. I'd love to hear which ones you identify with (perhaps post the numbers in the comments field?)

So, without further interruption, Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto For Growth:

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.

12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

17. ——————————. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.

18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.

19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.

21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.

24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.

25. Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our “noodle.”

28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.

29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between “creatives” and “suits” is what Leonard Cohen calls a ‘charming artifact of the past.’

31. Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.

32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic– simulated environment.

34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea — I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up

something else … but not words.

37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces — what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference — the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.

HOLIDAY AT THE SEA: Creating mental photo albums

We are in a constant state of absorption. Constantly taking things in through each of our senses. This is done for the most part subconsciously and without much apparent consequence. My challenge to you is to train yourself to pay closer attention. To learn to let particular things take a more significant presence in your consciousness. An easy way to start is by asking, "Why does this matter?"

But why should I care?

Living this intentionally is an invaluable aspect of my creative process. The more I can learn about, experience, internalize, the easier it is to solve a particular problem or create a work of art or writing a piece of music. One way to describe it is through the anatomy of nocturnal animals. Their eyes are larger in ratio to their size than animals that operate primarily during the day. This is the way I think about myself, as if my mind's eye is slightly larger to allow more in. But enough about me, what does this mean to you?

The principle is pretty universal. If you distill it down, what I'm talking about is simply a way to get more out of your own experiences and applying it to create deeper understanding of future experiences.

Try thinking about it like this.

When you go on vacation, you tend to take pictures of the places, the people, the experiences. These pictures get catalogued and put away so that when we come back to them it's easier to recall the memories, feelings, and emotions of the moments.

Now, what if you were able to take photographs (physical or mental) of your whole life? Being able to catalogue experiences in mental photo albums and recall them as needed. Sounds exhausting, right? It can be at first, but after some practice I've found that I can collect the important parts quickly, catalogue them, and recall them later when I am presented with a certain challenge. Again, we do this naturally, I'm just challenging you to do so intentionally.

Por ejemplo:

I recently had a conversation with a furniture craftsman about how he has begun an apprenticeship with a pipe organ maker. The way he spoke about the process of crafting this massive instrument was beautiful. How techniques applied to crafting a pipe organ were unlike anything he'd encountered in furniture. But while he was ultimately worried about the literal profitability of such a craft, I tried to show him how such training could only positively influence his own design and fabrication process. How would knowing how to build a pipe organ influence the way he built a chest of drawers? How beautiful would his next knife box be when it is crafted with the same precision as the sacredly iconic instrument?

So I ask you:

What are you taking pictures of?

What are you studying?

What are you listening to?

What are you looking at?

What are you watching?

What advice are you taking?

What advice are you rejecting?

What souvenirs are you keeping?

What are you making time for?

This isn't stopping to smell the roses. This is deciding to let things influence you.

RECOVERY: Hi. My name is Wes and I have a problem.

This is meant to be a confession, an apology, and an encouragement.

Music has been an integral part of my life since about 1994. That's when I started discovering music for myself. Finding artists/bands that would continue to influence me even today. It took me a while to build up my filters on what was worth my time and what wasn't. I went through a lot of phases, a lot of bad records, and some artists that I'll keep with me forever (while writing this, I am listening to Green Day's Dookie). But somewhere along the way I became a snob.

I was listening to everything I could get my hands on. As long as it was considered underground. Bands that only a handful of people even knew existed. When I got to JMU it got worse. I started running with the WXJM crew which only exasperated my symptoms (ruthlessly judging, analyzing, dismissing people based on a perceived lack of any real knowledge, etc). And I was happy. Wallowing around in the mire of self righteous fickle fandom.

But then one day my shallow world was torn apart. Listening to music with a girl I was dating at the time and truly cared about, I stumbled upon the nearly complete discography of Dave Matthew's Band. I don't remember the exact words or tone, but I don't know that it would be possible to be more condescending. I'm sure I found some Sub Pop artist nearby and started listening to that which changed the subject. Months later, I found out that she deleted her entire collection of Dave because of what I said. I was heartbroken. I had made someone turn their back on an artist they cared about. And do so for my approval. Who am I to grant approval for personal taste? What office did I hold that could give me the right to dictate someone else's feelings?

Since then, I have tried to refocus. Instead of trying to get everyone to conform to what I think to be great music, my goal is to simply see people become passionate about what they are listening to. I want you to know why you're listening to what you are listening to. Even if that reason is silly. That's why I am against the idea of the guilty pleasure. The term itself admits to you feeling judged. Don't. Love what you love. And love it well. I think Kylie Minogue is great. I have no problem with you knowing that I own Justin's live DVD from Madison Sq. Garden (and watch it frequently). That cheesy pop stuff does it for me sometimes. And if you can't get enough of Dave Matthew's Band, that's great! But own it. And make no apologies.

I want you to take 2 things from all of this.

1) Listen to suggestions on what to listen to. From friends and even strangers. Listen to them with a grain of salt that is proportional to your speakers, but listen to them. Everything you listen to was suggested to you by someone else, so pay attention.

2) Immediately dismiss any judgement for listening to what you listen to. No person should have the authority to turn you from something you care about. (unless it's Insane Clown Posse)

So, even if we have absolutely nothing in common musically, I hope that we can at least share the joy that what fills our ears provides.

THE VOICES IN MY HEAD: Listening to your work

I started drawing at about 3 months old. It's true. Since I was the first born son, I was also the first born guinea pig. So at 3 months old, sitting quietly in my high chair, my mom set a few crayons and a yellow sheet of construction paper in front of me and watched. Without any instruction, I instinctively picked up a crayon and pressed it to the page. The resulting scribbles are still framed in my parents bedroom.

I kept drawing. Picking up little tricks from illustration book authors such as Ed Emberly and Lee J. Ames. And since I was homeschooled, I never received any formal art training until a friends dad (who was an architect) had a few guys over once a week to give us some basic instruction.

It wasn't until I arrived at JMU (Duuuuukes) that I really got into art. Drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, music, design, anything that would give me the ability to get what was in my head out into the world. The professors kept encouraging us to listen to our work. Obviously, I thought this was insane. But after a few semesters, I started to understand what they meant.

When you're working in any medium, you usually start with some sort of idea. It could be a memory, a dream, a copy of someone else's work (this is completely legitimate and highly recommended). But once you start, you will immediately digress. It could be small, it could be huge, but no matter how hard you try, you'll never get it exactly right (the sooner you learn this, the sooner you'll be able to enjoy the making of things). Those moments of digression are vital to the creation of the final product. And in those moments, your creation speaks to you.

The voice will be soft at first. It will manifest itself as a nagging feeling of discontent. You'll avoid it. Don't. Apply the rules of crossing the street, stop, look, listen. Ask yourself, what is making me feel like this is wrong? Forget all the doubts instilled in you by bad influences and trust your gut. Forget about your preconceived notions on how it's "supposed to look". And just dive in.

Eventually, you'll get to a point where you are so comfortable with this process that it is like having a conversation with the piece. You suggest something, a pen stroke, a focus adjustment, a chord, a color, and the piece will respond. And you go back and forth, tweaking, breaking, erasing, rebuilding, until the most important word is spoken by both parties, "finished".

"Queen Anne" 2007

CREATING COMMUNITY: 5 Questions

This is one of my favorite games. It's actually not much of a game but more of a way to get to know a person. It can be someone you've known for years or for days. It makes no difference.

This game started the day before a road trip I took with Blaine Lay (Blaine always introduces the characters of his stories with their first and last name, so I will follow suit). Blaine's car stereo was on the fritz so to pass the time he proposed we come up with 5 random questions to ask the other and answer ourselves. No topic taboo, all answered in complete honesty. So we spent the evening coming up with our unique list of queries and met up the next day to begin our trip.

Basic reuniting chit-chat started the car ride. Both of us knew that we didn't want to start until comfortably on the highway. So until then, we paid our dues to small talk.

We took turns. Blaine asked a question, I answered, then he answered the same question. Then I asked, and so on. Now, Blaine and I have known each other since 2004 and I would say, in that time, we have come to know each other very well. These questions though brought us an insight into each others lives that would be difficult to achieve otherwise. And here is why:

It wasn't because we asked particularly difficult questions, some were pretty deep, but that's not the point. The point is, we were given an opportunity to be vulnerable with each other. For example, one of the questions was, "Which parent are you more like? Which character trait do you share that are good? Which character trait do you share that isn't?" Now, I'm not going to get into the answers, but you see, it gave us an opportunity to not only talk about our strengths but also about our weaknesses. Something guys do far too little of and yet can be one of the most beneficial conversations two guys can have. The follow up question, "If your life was an animated movie, what creature would represent you? and what would the scene you are currently in be called?" A pretty innocuous question, but one that gave us an opportunity to frame our current situation in the context of our lives. (FYI: I think I was a monkey and Blaine, a bear)

Blaine and I still play this with a different list every time we know we'll have some extended time between the two of us. And it's something I look forward to every time.

So next time you're planning to spend 1 on 1 time with a friend, think about assigning a questions list. It doesn't have to be 5 and they don't have to be soul searching. Just be able to answer anything you ask, and most importantly, be honest.

MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD: Papermate Ultra Fine Flair

Having a good pen is crucial.

I remember back in middleschool when I got my first Flair pen. The black fluted marker with a point just narrower than a new Sharpie. A great true black ink (unlike the squiddy purple of most felt tips). Plus, when they started dying, you could get some great gray halftones. I would save my dying Flairs and mark them with beige masking tape, not as a leper, but as a war hero. Almost all my work in middle and highschool contained Papermate ink.

The only problem, as my hand developed, became more refined, the pen tip didn't. So the search began for my upgrade.

I found some great candidates, and used them often, but never quite found the respect I had for the Flair. Until...

Order From Horder was an office supply store on the Downtown Mall. A seemingly immovable object of fine stationary and writing implements. But one day they posted a "going out of business" sign. I went in and browsed the pens one last time. And there, next to my familiar friend was something I hadn't seen before. It was like the day Wendy's announced the vanilla Frostie®. A slick white version with the words "ULTRA FINE FLAIR" imprinted on the side. I instantly grabbed all they had (which was sadly only 5) and rushed to the register. Paid cash. And was reunited with my old friend. Both of us a little older, wiser, and more focused on the task at hand.

The last one is sitting next to me now. Since I don't like to buy things online (I'll save that for another time), I'll wait till I see another batch in a store somewhere and hopefully have enough cash to buy them out again.