Creative Headspace #7

Stories about the power of creative connections and how to make room in your mind for things to unfold.

• Some friends invited us to a screening of short films selected by the Sundance Film Festival. Some of the films were interesting and others were quite strange. The most memorable part of the evening was a trailer for a full-length film called Thelma, starring a 92-year-old actor playing a 92-year-old character. The story is about how an elderly woman falls for a scam and sends money to some scam artists — and when her family takes this as a sign that Thelma can’t live alone anymore, Thelma takes matters into her own hands to get it back. The trailer was hilarious.

• A month later, Thelma came out, and on a Wednesday night, the same friends asked us at the last minute if we wanted to go. We did.

• The film was outstanding. It was well-written, clever (there are a lot of visual references to Mission Impossible and other action movies), funny, and also timely, poignant, and profound. When I got home, I Googled the scriptwriter, Josh Margolin, because I wanted to learn how he came up with this idea. Why this story, why this idea? Turns out it was based on a real-life incident with a beloved grandma, who didn’t go after the bad guys with a gun in a golf cart, but sounds like she had that kind of energy.

• That same week, I started reading a book called Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker, which I wrote about in this post. It was recommended by a friend of mine who is a mathematician, but also a deep thinker about a wide range of topics. He doesn’t often recommend books to me or anyone else, so I was a tad bit skeptical. I got the sample pages on Kindle to see if I liked it.

• I was immediately riveted, not only by the topic but by the whole conceit. Bosker embeds herself in the New York art world to try to understand it and to try to learn how to see like an artist. She takes on a variety of art insider jobs (gallery assistant, artist assistant, security guard at the Guggenheim Museum) and asks provocative questions — about the nature of beauty, why so many art galleries deliberately try to discourage the public from coming in, and how to have a meaningful experience when looking at art. It’s a funny, beautifully written narrative that got me thinking about the world of publishing and some of the strange conventions we all follow.

• Curious that I had never heard of a book I enjoyed so much, I Googled the writer. I wanted to learn how she came to write this book. Why this story, why this idea? Turns out she is a journalist who has a habit of asking provocative questions and following up on them in a big way.

• A week or so later we went to a play called Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground by Richard Helleson. My husband purchased the tickets, and I kind of just went along, not really sure what I had agreed to. The set-up of the story is so good: “It is 1962 and The New York Times Magazine has published its first list ranking the American Presidents in order of greatness. Pondering his placement on the list, Eisenhower looks back on his life.” The one-man performance by Tony Award-winning John Rubenstein was engaging, wholly believable, and thought-provoking in a totally different way than Get The Picture. It got me thinking about ego and history and, of course, the question of what makes a president (or anyone) great.

• When I got home, I Googled the writer because I wanted to learn how he came to write this play. Why this story, why this idea? I spent about twenty minutes searching online and couldn’t find an answer — most reviews of the play mentioned the famous actor at the center, not the writer. The few write-ups I could find on the writer mentioned his previous presidential play (about Lincoln) but nothing personal about his reasons for writing, nothing that satisfied my curiosity. I was disappointed.

• And then I recognized the pattern — in part, because one of the questions that Bianca Bosker raises in her book is what role context plays in our enjoyment and understanding of a piece of art. Why don’t we simply experience the way a painting or a sculpture or a video makes us feel? Why do we seek to know anything about who the artist is, or what statement they intended to make, or even what materials they use to make their art? The answer is that while I love experiencing great writing in all its forms (movies, books, plays, newsletters, articles, all of it!), the loop is never complete for me until I understand something about the writer. I’m desperate to know why people create. How do they know that any given idea is the right idea? How do they commit to it?

  Where this wandering ends

• It doesn’t. I will never stop wondering why. To me, that’s the real story.

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