The Intimacy You Get From Practicing

Flamenco guitarist and Zen practitioner Ottmar Liebert, from “Intimacy Through Practice,” Buddhist Geeks Podcast, September 13, 2010:

There’s a part of practice that I think is inherent in all different practices. The type of concentration, the familiarity, the intimacy that you get to whatever you’re practicing, whether it’s archery or Zen or music or how to make a perfect pancake. You won’t get there unless you get intimate with the subject. You only get there through practice. As you become more intimate, you know more about it, where you can say “This batter is too liquid or too solid or too warm too cold. It’ll act this way.” All that comes only through practice. It comes  up often in conversations with my friends about how people go about life these days, that they’re really not willing to practice anything.

The other day we got to talking about jeans. There’s only one of the old fashioned wooden looms in America. I think it’s actually in Raleigh, North Carolina. All the other ones were shipped to Japan, and that’s in the ‘50s. And that’s where you  get the superior denim because people are willing to make things by hand and become intimate with it. Whereas a lot of people in the United States or in Europe will just go, “I’d rather buy ten pairs at Walmart than buy one pair of really good jeans, even though the really good pair will probably outlast the ten pairs they buy at Walmart.” So, there’s a lack of that—you might say depth—that comes from not practicing, from not practicing a craft.

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Raleigh Denim

Raleigh Denim: Handcrafted in North Carolina from David Huppert on Vimeo.

Going Down the Road

“"Oh, there's many a time you're just going down the road at O-dark-thirty in the morning and you just start thinking about a particular pattern."

~ Long-haul trucker Dave White, on his newfound passion for quilting, “Idle Pastime: In Off Hours, Truckers Pick Up Stitching,” Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2010

 

[Thanks Kit!]

An Experience Beyond Thought

"Poetic craft is a carcass, a sham. If poetry doesn't come as naturally as leaves to a tree, then it better not come at all…A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it's to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery."

~ Ben Wishaw as John Keats in Jane Campion’s Bright Star

Bright Star
by John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

Recognition

I liked how the top Oscars were awarded last night. Having a pantheon of previous category winners, each carefully matched with a nominee, was a satisfying blend of grandiosity and tenderness. It did ride a fine line between cool and awkward, but the words of praise from the respected role models with established reputations were more moving and memorable than most of the acceptance speeches. I was moved by the reactions of the nominees. I can’t think of any other consolation prize that has allowed participants to walk away with such affirmation and dignity.

What a curse it must be for the entire world to know you crave something that you do not get. Most of us are fortunate to experience a significantly smaller circle of praise and embarrassment.

We live in a niche market world now. It’s a silly tradition to select one performance from the year and pretend it was the best. If you see movies outside the mainstream, you know that many truly artistic performances go unnoticed by the majority. So much talent never finds a large audience.

But we like to build pedestals. I’m not sure that’s an entirely bad thing. Around the time of the presidential election, I heard Harry Shearer talking about how he can’t do worthy impersonation of Barack Obama until he figures out who Obama is impersonating. It’s true, isn’t it? Consciously or unconsciously, we are all emulating the people we admire.

My favorite acknowledgment last night came from one acting goddess to another. Sophia Loren said that Meryl Streep’s name has become synonymous with the highest standards of her craft. It made me think about how much influence we really do have in creating the perception of ourselves in the minds of others.

Who would you most want to summarize and approve of your efforts and accomplishments?

What would you like your name to mean?

What one thing could you do today to increase your odds of ever finding even a small audience of respect?

Something About My Life that I Already Knew

“I love to read a book which, not only I enjoy, but suddenly they say something about my life that I already knew but I’d either forgotten it or I’d never framed it that way. As a friend of mine calls it, it’s the Oh factor. You feel like you’ve been punched in the stomach. That’s right or I never thought of it that way or whatever it is. So when I’m writing, a lot of the time I’m writing not necessarily to elicit the Oh, but to say to the reader, Have you ever thought about it this way? I don’t know if this is the right way or this is going to lead to the right way, but have you ever thought about it this way? And if that leads to the Oh, then I’m happy.”

~ Jonathan Carroll, in conversation about his new novel, The Ghost in Love, with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm (12.04.08)

“We first meet the Angel of Death in a local cafe as he takes a meal with ghostly Ling. But Death plays only a peripheral role in all this. As he explains to Ling, Ben's fate ‘is out of our hands. Plus, we're fascinated to see what will happen to him now ...’ You'll be fascinated too, if you're alive to the experience of immersing yourself in the most seriously entertaining writing of the day…Whatever the genre, Carroll creates novels so fascinating and intelligent and seriously delightful that no other writer in English can touch him.”

~ Alan Cheuse, from “Death’s Absence, Writ Large and Small,” All Things Considered (12.09.09)

I Don't Have the Faintest Idea

“I’m very much of the school of sitting down with the blank page or the blank screen and going through an agonizing process of admitting that I don’t have the faintest idea of what I could write a novel about. It never begins with a concept or with a story. It tends to begin with a point of view and then I have to discover whose point of view is delivering these visual impressions. With this book, the second chapter of the published version was originally the first chapter and all I had of it were a series of really moody visual impressions of Lower Manhattan at Lafayette and Canal in winter. And I didn’t know who was the camera. And so I had to—in some way that I don’t really consciously understand—I had to interrogate that material and out of it I got my Russian-speaking, Cuban-Chinese kid, Tito. Then I had to discover his backstory.”

—William Gibson, discussing his book Spook County on KCRW’s Bookworm

Serve the Story

“Don’t do it if you don’t love it, and be enthusiastic about your work. Really invest it with everything in your being. Do what has to be done. If you have to get up at 2:00 in the morning because an idea strikes you, get up at 2:00 in the morning and don’t wait until you get up at 6:00 or 7:00 or 8:00. Do it when it’s there. Be alive to your career. Be alive to the story. Stories deliver themselves in their own way and in their own time and if you’re not there to receive it, you miss it. It’s gone. Be there. And be there continually in your writing. Be a conduit. Don’t think it’s you making it. Be aware that you’ve been given the gift of the story. Serve the story.”

—Bruce Joel Rubin, Learning from the Masters (The Dialogue Series)

Practice

I am a dancer. I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes in some area an athlete of God.

To practice means to perform, in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

I think the reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol of the performance of living. Even as I write, time has begun to make today yesterday--the past. The most brilliant scientific discoveries will in time change and perhaps grow obsolete, as new scientific manifestations emerge. But art is eternal, for it reveals the inner landscape, which is the soul of man.

- Martha Graham, I am a Dancer

Basic Facility

“You have to really stick with it. You gotta really put in three or four years of apprenticeship just to get some basic facility with it.”

- Paul Attanasio (Screenwriter: Quiz Show, Donnie Brasco, Sphere, The Sum of All Fears, The Good German, The Bourne Ultimatum, East of Eden; Producer: House) on discipline and the craft of screenwriting.

The Artist's Job

"[The artist's] job is not to present merely the external life of his character. He must fit his own human qualities to the life of this other person, and pour into it all of his own soul. The fundamental aim of our art is the creation of this inner life of a human spirit, and its expression in an artistic form."

- Constantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares

No Content

"You can ask me anything you want about acting and I will try and answer. But if what you want to know about is fame and celebrity, then I can't help you. Because the whole celebrity thing has no content to it. It's not valuable, it's not meaningful, it's not anything. It's not real."

~ Julianne Moore