three cents: the method, the radness

1. a thing about money
You never know what's going on with other people and money, especially when it comes to emotions. Someone could look really successful to you, and they're actually living off credit cards; or they're okay financially but they are anxious about it all the time. A person could be living like a starving artiste and then suddenly they buy a giant house and it turns out they have parents with money. Ya just never know. Yet we (by which I mean humans, and perhaps especially creative-leaning humans) compare our achievements to those of others all the time without seeing the complete picture. And we can be hard on ourselves. The other day my partner ran into a friend, a San Francisco native who is married to another SF native and has a kid and makes a pretty decent salary in a do-gooder type of field. They were talking about buying a home—specifically, the impossibility of it—and the friend said, It's just really hard to remember that it's not my fault that I can't do this thing. It's not a failure of mine that I don't earn enough or have enough money to buy a home in my own city. But it's hard to remember that it's not my failure. 

Over the past couple of months at my "day job" (which is so much more than that phrase implies, hence the scare quotes) I have had the insane fortune of working with Iggy Pop while he guest-designed the Spring edition of the magazine. In the course of working on the issue, I learned that Iggy (Mr. Pop?) didn't really have a lot of money until the 1990s. I repeat: the godfather of American punk, founder of The Stooges, seller of gazillions of records, didn't have money until the 1990s. Here's an interview from The Guardian with Iggy and Josh Homme in which Iggy talks about how his financial anxiety is still alive and well: 

Do you think about your legacy?

Iggy What I think about is feeling I’m going to blow it. I have this picture of myself in some little old people’s home with a bunch of other old geezers, and a flannel robe with holes in it, waiting for somebody. Even 15 years ago, my accountant was saying: “You will never be poor, don’t worry.” But I do worry. I worry constantly. It drives me nuts.

Is that good for the music, if it keeps you hungry?

Iggy This is true. [Michel] Houellebecq has a great line where he says: “Money is an excellent motivator for a great piece of art.”

Josh As long as it encourages risk. Safety equals death. If you reach a certain status, or age, or a monetary thing, people play it safe, they lose the plot, they quit on themselves, they copy themselves. They’re afraid.

I mean, fuck Michel Houellebecq, but it's a good interview. I never cease to be startled that even someone who is so legendary—someone who changed the artistic game so completely and powerfully that it's sort of hard to grasp his influence now—still worries about money. Iggy Pop still worries about money. This man grew up in a trailer park in Michigan and screamed and strutted and fuck-you-ed his way into being one of the raddest, most influential artists of a particular era and culture, he survived (literally) when many of his peers didn't, but he had difficulty paying his bills until he was in his fifties. I'll refrain here from overstating the obvious (such as "yo, that's kinda messed up, Capitalism!") and just say:

May we all remember this next time we are being overly hard on ourselves about not having or owning or earning enough money. It's not your fault. It's not Iggy's fault. Bootstraps are nasty little stranglers, and they're difficult to sever even when you know they're false constraints.

Semi-related: I need to plug Zoetrope: All-Story for a moment (the aforementioned "day job"). Seriously, you guys, why are you not subscribing to this magazine? It is The Best, an opinion I held decades before I began working there. Each edition of the mag features excellent new short fiction paired with design by a different guest artist. And it's $35 a year. A year. And it just keeps getting better and better (unlike many literary stalwards of the 90s) and it's diverting and intelligent and gorgeous and oh, c'mon, just subscribe, Iggy Pop designed it fer chrissakes.)

2. a thing about creative work
My friend and #goal human Lydia Kiesling sold her novel! (See the fifth paragraph here, and can we please stop saying "buzz," publishing industry?) Huzzah! I was so inspired by Lydia's ability to finish a novel draft in what seemed like about ten minutes to those of us observing (which is not to say that she didn't work her tucchus off, just that she did so very successfully) that I decided to adopt her accountability method: a spreadsheet. It's a very simple spreadsheet (which is good, because I hate and am bad at spreadsheets, don't @ me) in which you track how many words you write every day, even on days you don't write, and you also track why you didn't write, if you didn't. Here's a reenactment of Lydia and I talking about it at lunch a couple weeks ago: 

—so, i'm doing your spreedsheet thing
—yeah? 
—yup. "day, words written that day, and excuse for not writing any words, if applicable"
—Forget novels, we should do a nonfiction book proposal and be like "how to finish your novel using OUR PATENTED FOOLPROOF METHOD" 
—"THE SPREADSHEET METHOD" 
—"THE SPREAD SPRINT" 
—"SPREADSHEET YOUR WAY TO LITERARY FAME AND FORTUNE" 
. . .

Anyway, we're gonna be millionaires. 


3. a thing about love 
Gotta go back to Iggy on this one. My intern sent me these screenshots from Jim Jarmusch's new Stooges doc, Gimme Danger, and I would like to maybe not wait until my seventieth birthday to feel this way:

Aw, Mr. Pop.


linkage:
"We need the guys who have no profit motive and want to replace the NEA out of the goodness of their rich bastard hearts." Lydia interviewed me about Scratch and money and literature for The Millions. It's a smarter conversation than the one reenacted above, I promise. 
  Kara Walker reconsiders her personal brand. 

"I learned how to take an emotionally charged loss and process it in a way where I could make something. I grew as a person, but also as an artist." Paul Madonna, quintessential chronicler of San Francisco life, has been evicted. I feel exhausted and sad. 
 
Also, I went to Iceland for a week and it was awesome and I recommend it without reservation or cynicism. This is the website I visited most frequently during my voyage. Romantic, I know.
 
events: 
I'm trying not to travel right now because book-tour and Iceland took all my money and vacation days, but I do have a few events comin' up in the Bay Area:
 
This Friday, April 28
Poetry for the People is 25 years old! I'll be in discussion with Kima Jones at UC Berkeley.

Thursday, May 18
"Story is the Thing" at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, with me, Elizabeth McKenzie, Shanthi Sekaran, and other local authors telling stories about "finding home." There will be wine. And Kepler's is conveniently located right next to the MP CalTrain station, so come on down, Bay Area!

Sunday, May 21
Oakland Book Festival! I'll be moderating two panels, one Scratch-related and one with Zoetrope: All-Story. Exact times tba. 

By the by, don't you think that Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living would make a great graduation gift for the creative writing student in your life?! (Please note that I said "great" and not "falsely uplifting and overly romantical about writing in a way that bridges on irresponsible." It's a rare thing.) Get a signed copies for all your creative peoples here.

Lustin' for life, 
MM