Photo credit: Rocky Schenk.
For over four decades, Van Dyke Parks has worked as singer, lyricist, composer, arranger, producer, and sessions player on an astonishing assortment of projects, collaborating with everyone from Randy Newman, Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt, and Bruce Springsteen to U2, Laurie Anderson, Frank Black, and Joanna Newsom. His own albums, starting with Song Cycle (1968) up through Moonlighting: Live at the Ash Grove (1998) have cemented his reputation as an eclectic, inventive songwriter and performer. Parks is perhaps best known for his work as lyricist on Brian Wilson’s legendary SMiLE, which was begun in 1966 as the follow up to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and released nearly four decades later in 2004.
In addition to all this, Parks has been composer and arranger for numerous movie and TV scores, and has written three adaptations of the stories of Brer Rabbit, published by Harcourt Brace — Jump!, Jump on Over!, and Jump Again!
Van Dyke Parks on the Web: vandykeparks.com, Old Koton Industries
Cecil Vortex: Is there anything you’ve found that helps get you into a more creative mode?
Van Dyke Parks: Yes — smoking is good. Smoking is very helpful. But it’s deadly, so today is my second day without smoking. I stopped smoking on Sunday, having smoked for years.
I think that smoking is a very good thing to do — it’s got the association with the Indians; it’s a peaceable thing. But like much else that the Indians gave us, we abused the privilege. And so, in my case I must simply stop. I’m too old to smoke. But I do believe that nicotine provides a great creative thrust….
In all the work I do, throughout my life, I’ve emphasized how fortunate I am to have people around me, and I kind of confirm what my father once said to the school at Andover when they asked if I showed any signs of creativity. My father wrote a letter to them as they were considering me for admission to that school; he said, no, my son has no creativity, but he has reactive abilities that are phenomenal and very useful. I resented that, perhaps — that my father said that. But I have found basically that it could be true, that I have a reactive ability.
I’ve always characterized myself in press and so forth as the “beta participant.” But in fact, now that we’re alone, I can say without fear or bravado, that I feel humbled and validated that you would ask me about the creative process. It’s almost as if I am a creative person. And I think all of that is just due to the fact that I have a great work ethic. I hammer at it. I sweat bullets. I pursue it. Wanting real talent, I compensate for it with something far more precious — sheer will.
I remember when I was a child in New York, I went to see a play by William Saroyan. I happen to know his wife through a live television show I acted on as an obedient boy. At any rate, I met Saroyan. And I asked him about the creative process. I wanted to know because I was so stunned by his work — he presented a vision of California that helped lure me to California in my later adolescence. And he talked to me about “getting the cat up the tree” — getting something to happen and resolving it, and so forth. And I asked him about how inspired he must be, and he said no, no, it’s all due diligence. Everything is just absolutely irrational tenacity.
CV: In terms of that tenacity, are there any mental tricks that you rely on to get the work done?
xx-temp-files
An Interview with DyAnne DiSalvo
Photo credit: Brian Butler.
DyAnne DiSalvo has written seven children’s books and illustrated over forty, and has worked with numerous authors including Beverly Clearly, Mary Pope Osborne, Jean Fritz, Jane O’Connor, Patricia Reilly Giff, Jean Marzollo, and Amy Hest.
Her trademark theme of helping neighborhoods has been featured on “Reading Rainbow” (Uncle Willie and the Soup Kitchen) and in theater productions (City Green). She received a Congressional Commendation from the State of New Jersey for her book Grandpa’s Corner Store. Awards for her illustrated work include the Society of Illustrators’ “best of children’s books” for 1986, 1987, 1991, and 2000. She’s currently working on The Tree Wars, a novel based on the heroic preservation of a historic site of trees in Haddon Township, New Jersey.
In 1995, DiSalvo was chosen as one of thirty international artists to study in Barga, Italy, at the “Mostra di Incisioni.” She also plays rhythm guitar for the power-pop rock band, Smash Palace, which tours internationally and has had songs featured in movies including Who’s Kyle, starring Gary Oldman, and the independent film The Meeting.
We spoke by phone in February 2007, with snow still on the ground.
DyAnne DiSalvo on the Web: dyannedisalvo.com, smashpalacemusic.com
CV: Your creative output is pretty striking, with dozens of children’s books to your name. Is there anything that you attribute your productivity to?
DD: Well, I try not to judge myself. I try to be “my own best friend.” [laughter] Which is a lie. But I try not to get too wrapped up in the difficulty of the moment because I’ll just wallow in that for as long as I like, feeling bad for myself. So what I do is, I read. I play music. I have conversations with my friends about poetry or writing or whatever they’re working on. I walk my friend’s dog. I travel a lot. Whatever fills up that time. And I’m always thinking about my story, whatever I’m doing, as I’m doing it. And I think that’s incredibly helpful. I just allow myself to never lose sight of my art-piece and to live life.
CV: Do you ever worry about burning out?
The Against the Day Deathmarch, Week 13
13 weeks in now, fellow lit folks dropping all around us. Good folks. Strong folks. We march on.
Like I think pretty much everyone, the Quaternions wore my marching toes down to a nub, but I liked Bradh’s take on it in the comments: “I read the maths like a foreign language: just to enjoy the rhythms of the words.”
Things started to get a little zippy with Kit and Günther’s duel (“how lucky to have provoked your quarrel here, in the dueling capital of Germany”), the return of Lew, Lew’s encounter with the hanging man, gas traffic, and then Kit, Foley, and the mickfest. By the time we met the “jelly doughnut” man, it was like being handed a new pair of sugar powdered socks.
If you get a chance, take an amble back in time to one of the early posts. I wandered through Week 2 this morning, tipping my invisible hat brim to lost companions — calliscrapy, buffo, Ms. Maggo, AnemicPrince…. We’re down to around 14 hardy souls now. We few, we proud, we folks who get to enjoy lines like “a dog was howling at a moon no one could see, perhaps imagining that, summoned repeatedly enough, it would appear with food of some kind” and names like “Gus Swallowfield” and “Willi Dingkopf.”
Tuesday 5/1: Part Four’s within reach, so let’s lunge for the bottom of page 693, where I for one plan to howl hungrily “at the unexplained and unresponsive moon.”
(which is to say…. please use this thread to comment on anything up to page 693. Aim to finish reading that part of the book and to comment on it here by end o’ day next Monday)
Pugnax!
-Cecil
An Interview with Jonathan Coulton
Photo credit: Emily Rawlings.
Jonathan Coulton sings songs about workplace zombies, ennui-afflicted clowns, self-loathing giant squids, and devotees of a certain Swedish prefab furniture store. In 2005-2006 he recorded and published a new song every week as a free podcast called “Thing a Week.” A few of these songs have become full-fledged internet smashes, including his folky cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back,” a visual ode to Creative Commons called “Flickr,” and “Code Monkey,” the anthem of software designers everywhere.
Coulton releases all his music under a Creative Commons license that allows for file sharing and copying, as well as non-commercial derivative works. And his community of fans has rallied around him to generate airplay on hundreds of podcasts, create a library of music videos, and even set up gigs through Eventful.com.
In addition to his singer/songwriter work, Coulton produces a weekly interview podcast for Popular Science Magazine as their Contributing Troubadour.
Jonathan Coulton on the Web: JonathanCoulton.com, Thing a Week Podcast, PopSci Podcast
Cecil Vortex: In the course of the year you spent working on Thing a Week, did you develop any techniques that seemed to help you tap your creative side?
Jonathan Coulton: I wish I could say that I developed a sure-fire strategy for writing a song. That’s one of the things I was hoping would come out of Thing a Week — that I could somehow discover a process that worked every time. But it was always different.
I spent a lot of time walking and riding my bike, mumbling under my breath, making up lines about things I saw or thought of. Ideally, one of those lines would be interesting enough to stick with me and grow into something. Sometimes I would get inspired early in the week and the song would sort of write itself. Other times I would think and think all week, and Friday would find me with no good ideas.
The one thing I did learn was that even the good songs have a point when they feel awful — for me there’s always this deep valley of self-doubt when it seems like I should stop writing and abandon the idea. But sometimes even the songs that started with bad ideas would have a very strong finish, and I would find that I’d pulled something really great out of nowhere. Not always — there were certainly some songs that never really got good. And I think that’s an important part of the process too — you’re going to write some clunkers for sure, but you’ll never really know unless you write them. Starting a song is easy; finishing it is a lot harder.
CV: How did you stay focused and productive, particularly on those days when you were feeling a little less inspired?
Kurt Vonnegut
In seventh grade I read Cat’s Cradle, my first Vonnegut book. I remember standing in front of the class and giving a book report. I played a newsreporter delivering the play-by-play from the book’s closing scene (“a tragedy today, here in the beautiful island of San Lorenzo…”). There was an ad in the back of all those Vonnegut paperbacks that said, essentially, bet you can’t eat just one, and they were right.
No books, aside from Steve Martin’s Cruel Shoes, had a bigger impact on my brain in middle school and high school. I’d sometimes hear folks disparage Vonnegut’s novels as lightweight, comparing them unfavorably to, say, Catch-22. That always seemed off-point to me. These weren’t book you were supposed to roll around in for a month. They were a different kind of beast. Thin, portable devices that delivered high voltage electric telegrams direct to the nervous system. And if you read them in a certain frame of mind (and most especially at a certain age), they really did change the way you saw the world.
If you’re planning on reading a Vonnegut book today, may I recommend Sirens of Titan? Or perhaps God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater? Or mebbe Slapstick? Or what about Bluebeard? Oh, who are we kidding? The book to read today is Mother Night.
Mother Night, a book so gigantically good that when I finished it back in freshman year of college, I hopped up, flung it down the hallway, and scrambled out to the street to recover with some New York City air. And see, if it had been Catch-22, I might have really hurt somebody.
Kurt Vonnegut 1922-2007
Happy Dyngus Day! At last!
Dyngus Day is finally here! And you know what that means — beware kids sporting pussywillows and water guns. Especially if you live in Buffalo or South Bend.
In an almost entirely unrelated development, So-Called Bill was angered by advertising over the weekend, which reminded me of this marketing copy I found on the box for Rob Reiner’s Rumor Has It, starring Kevin Costner, Shirley Maclaine, and Jennifer Anniston:
At last there’s a movie for everyone who’s ever looked at the eccentrics and oddballs in his or her family and wondered who are these people?
Like until now, we were left to ask, “Doesn’t anyone else have a crazy uncle who thinks the Theodore Roosevelt part of Mount Rushmore is making googly eyes at his wife? Am I the only person in this whole country with a quirky family? And if I’m not alone, why doesn’t anyone make a movie that finds comedy in those sorts of situations?”
And then — at last! — along comes this groundbreaking film. And now you’re not alone anymore. At last! At last! Grrrr.
Speaking of bad things, here’s what may be the worst pick-up line ever: “Either this place smells like really good Indian food, or you smell like really good Indian food.”
An Interview with Natalie Marrone
Photo credit: Stephanie Mathews.
Natalie Marrone received her Master of Fine Arts degree in choreography from Ohio State University in 1998. That same year she founded The Dance Cure, a contemporary, all-female dance company based in Columbus, Ohio, and began her field research on southern Italian folk dance. Her work has been recognized by the Congress on Research in Dance, the National Dance Educators Organization, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, the Italian Folk Art Federation, the World Dance Alliance, the American Italian Historical Association, and OhioDance.
Ms. Marrone has served on faculty for ten years in higher-education dance programs and as a guest choreographer and master teacher for universities, public schools, national commercials, live television, and professional academies. In addition to her work with The Dance Cure, she’s currently the jazz dance director of New Albany Ballet Company and recently developed Dance Decisions Inc., a new business that coaches young dancers through the process of choosing a university dance program.
Natalie Marrone on the Web: The Dance Cure, Dance Decisions
Cecil Vortex: Where do you find the inspiration for your choreography?
Natalie Marrone: Eighty percent of the time, the music is what feeds me information. It may not be the music I wind up using, but for me, any kind of inspiration starts with a visceral response to sound and wanting to move to that sound. And the sound isn’t always a beat, although I love rhythm and using polyrhythm. When a soundscape comes on that’s speaking to me, it’s almost like I have a socket and it plugs in and I know that I need to go from there.…
One of the things that always inspires me is a person’s story as it’s written on their body — especially as it’s written on their face. I might not have a job soon if this Botox thing continues. [laughter] I look at people. I look at their physical shape and I look at the way they move. And just for an instant I can almost be inside their being. It’s always something about the story in the lines, the wrinkles — the story of their life is written there. I need to sit at the local coffee shop and just look at people and watch them walk. And feel their walk.… The other thing I really need is in-nature time. I get a lot of sensibility about movement just from the wind sometimes or from sensing the path of wet leaves underneath my feet.
CV: Are there any other day-to-day activities that you’ve found helpful?
Legends from My Childhood, #5
Fourth grade was peculiar.
I’m not sure this really happened.
And maybe it was just because I was
living in Holland at the time and it
was some kind of a Dutch thing. But anyways,
in gym class that year
instead of having
a regular teacher like
I had in third grade
I had a large, floating gym teacher head whose
body was
on fire.
When he blew his whistle
the room would fill
with sparking downy flotsam.
****
Legends from My Childhood, #5, card art by eb.
An Interview with Ze Frank
Welcome!: This interview is part of an ongoing series of chats with artists about their creative process. You can find the full set of interviews, including musicians Van Dyke Parks and Jonathan Coulton, and SF Chron columnist Jon Carroll, all at www.about-creativity.com. You can also subscribe to future interviews here. Thanks a lot for dropping by, -Cecil
Photo credit: Scott Beale / laughingsquid.com.
In 2001, Ze Frank achieved net notoriety when a birthday party invitation entitled “How to Dance Properly” became an early viral video. This spark led to zefrank.com, home of a host of projects, including interactive flash toys, animations, essays, videos, and a wide variety of collaborative ventures. Over fifty million people have visited zefrank.com to date. From March 17, 2006 to March 17, 2007, he wrote, produced, and starred in The Show with zefrank, a wildly creative online daily video program.
Frank’s an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Parsons School of Design, and SUNY Purchase. As a speaker at events like the TED conference, PopTech, and Flash Forward, he covers topics ranging from the new creativity to contagious media to airplane-cabin safety cards.
We spoke in February 2007 as his year-long run on The Show neared its conclusion.
Ze Frank on the Web: zefrank.com, The Show with zefrank
Cecil Vortex: Are there any techniques that you use in your creative process that help you generate new ideas?
Ze Frank: Self-awareness is one of the big keys. If you read a lot of the psychology literature on creativity, one of the only real, solid correlations with being able to shift your creative output is the belief that you can change it. So for me — I think I picked this up in a Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi book — I’ve spent a long time just trying to figure out the kind of cycles that I go through, trying to pay attention to the different kinds of states that I find myself in.
There are times when I feel like I’m craving what I call unsolvable problems, and I have the kind of energy you need to move forward into uncharted territory and brave that side of things. And then there are other times when that seems like the most difficult chore in the world. So I’ve also gotten pretty comfortable knowing when I need to pick up solvable problems. Programming definitely fills that void for me. Also illustrating, doing little illustrations, things like that. This is a long-winded way of saying that I think I’ve got a range of techniques that feed into how I’m feeling at that particular moment.
CV: Do you have any day-to-day habits you rely on?
Legends from My Childhood, #4
“They used to call me ‘Gentile Joe'” he said.
‘Cuz my name is ‘Joe Gentle.’ I loved the Jews. Oh sure.
I loved the Jews and the Jews loved me.”
Pulling out tinted photos of foxy showgirls from the ’30s.
“The ladies, the ladies. Oh sure.”
Stacked instruments
music stands and guitar picks
dirty music sheets for sale
dog at his feet and
three 17 year-olds he was
charming us now.
We loitered and listened to old stories
put across with a lewd twinkle just right.
“Here, have a patch cord,” he said when we moved to leave.
“Have a drum stick.” I still have that drum stick.
****
Legends from My Childhood, #4, card art by eb.