Tag: creativity

The Sin of LUST

dannygregory11 Comments

Ironically, the classic bio of my favorite painter is called Lust for Life. But lust is a sin that has sabotaged loads of great artists too. Lust is any intense sort of intense and uncontrolled desire — be it for sex, food, drugs, money, fame, power or freshly-poured, frosty lager. Society loves to depict the artist as a lusty, carnal creature — snorting, boozing, copulating, and then self-destructing at 27.

Uncontrolled. Undisciplined. Lust replaces thoughtfulness with raw impulse. You cave in to self-destructive abandon. Instead of doing the necessary work you are distracted. Instead of drawing the model, you drool on him.

Lust makes you myopic. It distorts your normal perspective and gives you tunnel vision, tuning out everything but the object of your desire. And what you see is not real. It’s a thickly veiled concoction of your fevered mind.

Perhaps you are slender and celibate and sugar-free and believe lust is a sin that doesn’t apply to you…

At the heart of sexual lust is a form of depersonalization. Instead of seeing people as human beings, they become sex symbols. Lust for money isn’t about acquiring the things you need. It’s about the symbolic value of wealth, the illusion that it will provide security and satisfy all your needs. You want gazillions you’d probably never spend.  Lust for power makes you ruthless, disconnected from the effects of your actions, reduces people to symbols, to pawns on your board. Mwahahahah!

Lust turns reality into abstraction, turns people into symbols, replaces authentic needs with insatiable hunger. And an artist who cannot see or feel or connect is lost. An artist who only deals in symbols cannot find her way to truth.

Lust is obsessiveness. Lust is abstraction. Lust is infantile, sacrificing your higher goals to your basest weakness. Lust is lost in the future, a future of quelled desire that may never come, a future you cannot control.

But creativity requires control. Control over your skills, your materials, but most of all over your vision of the world you are creating.

Perhaps you are slender and celibate and sugar-free and believe lust is a sin that doesn’t apply to you. But look deep and honestly within and look for those impulses that cloud your objectivity, that distort your actions, and color your perceptions.

Really, what about you? Do you lust for perfection? For acknowledgement? For a Winsor & Newton Series 7 Kolinsky Sable Pointed Round #10 watercolor brush with a seamless, cupro-nickel ferrule (list $499.99)?

Fifth in a series on seven deadly creative sins.

The Sin of ENVY

dannygregory14 Comments

According to Dante’s Purgatorio, if you get sent to hell for the sin of envy, demons will sew your eyelids shut with wire. Ouchy. You get this iron mascara treatment because you spent your days on Earth getting a kick out of seeing others in pain. Now, you just get to see total blackness and writhe around on a spit.

Envy isn’t just garden-variety, green with jealousy. It’s meaner. Envy means you don’t just resent someone else’s good fortune — you want to take it away from them. It’s not enough to wish you’d made that great painting. You have to rip it out of the frame and jump up and down on it. In other words, you need to become a critic.

Envy is another sin born of fear. It begins when you see someone else making something great. Instead of just enjoying it, you feel threatened by it. The monkey whispers in your ear: ‘You could never do that. Ever.’ So you get out your knives.

One response to this fear is to dismiss the accomplishment. The artist was obviously just lucky. Or some sort of con man. She was born into a talented family. He sucked up to the top gallery owners. She has a famous boy friend. He will be forgotten in a year.

When you are envious, you set yourself back. Instead of learning from greatness, you run from it. You swaddle yourself in hostility. You withhold any kind of generosity or support. Your refuse to collaborate. You refuse to learn.

You don’t see how much work it takes to be successful. You don’t see how to acquire skills, connections, vision, happiness, all the things you really want. You are so afraid of losing, of failing, of falling  behind, of being called out, that you lash out and destroy.

You sew your own eyes shut with wire.

And while the biggest victims of envy are the envious themselves, they can also cause loads of collateral damage along the way. Maybe you’ve been a victim of someone else’s envy. See the critic for the scared, myopic monster he is and you’ll be able to understand what his critique really means and defuse its impact.

Fourth in a series on seven deadly creative sins.

The Sin of PRIDE

dannygregory13 Comments

In the 21st century, it’s more difficult to see “pride” as a sin. We think of LGBT pride, Black pride, national pride, Bono singing “In the Name of Love.” Isn’t that song about Martin Luther King — surely he wasn’t a sinner?

Here’s a different take on pride. Actually let’s call it ‘hubris’ so no one gets confused.

Hubris is about insisting on your own greatness. In fact, that’s why Lucifer fell from heaven and ended up on the dark side. He insisted that he was greater than the rest of the crew.  But, Kanye not withstanding, most creative people seem to have a problem with low self-esteem, not grandiosity.

But whereas they would never say that they are better than others, they insist that their work be. They judge their art too harshly, dismissing what they produce with contempt.They demand a higher standard than is reasonable, possible, necessary. They are absolutely intolerant of anything but perfection. It’s hero or zero. Whatever misses the mark gets binned.

If you can’t accept your own normal human weakness, isn’t that hubris? If you are completely intolerant of your own mistakes, isn’t that vanity? Aren’t you saying you can and should be perfect? If it’s a sin to judge others that way, why doesn’t the same apply to how you look at yourself?

If you are unwilling to be vulnerable, you are limited by fear. Overwhelming fear of any form of weakness, of being irrelevant, of being rebuked by others, of falling even slightly below the mark, can prevent you from taking chances. If you are so wary of falling on your face that you won’t take risks, you will never achieve anything great, no matter how high your standards.

Do great work, please, and be proud of it. But don’t let perfectionist, monkey pride stop you from expressing your real, human self.

Third in a series on seven deadly creative sins. Incidentally, and I say this with all due humility, the original list of seven deadly sins was written by Pope Gregory I. Probably no relation.

The Sin of GLUTTONY

dannygregory23 Comments

Gluttony means consuming way more than you need. And it’s a great way for the monkey to distract you from your creative path.

Walking through a museum and snapping a picture of each painting you pass, then hurrying on to the next. Signing up for classes, then never bothering to show up and do the work. Why start that painting when you and your credit card could while away the afternoon at the art supply store? Easier to amass more drying tubes of paint, teetering piles of empty sketchbooks, basket-loads of supplies for crafts you doesn’t have the time to master — than bypass the monkey and get to work.

Gluttony means valuing quantity over quality. And we live in times of more, more, more, where there’s always a new distraction, a new treat popping upon our phones. Why do they call it a Facebook feed, d’ya think? Because it stuffs our troughs with trivia, 24/7. We consume bytes instead of being in the moment and appreciating the wonder and beauty around us already. We are gluttonous with our time and yet stingy with it too, wasting it rather than investing it in the self-improvement and habits that can bring us the things that will truly satisfy our hungers.

Gluttony is a sin of lost control. Like Lust, it drives out of our minds, to places we don’t recognize in the mirror. We automatically grab for more entertainment, more stimulation, more consumption, faster, longer, all of which distract us from our purpose, our skills, our deepening experience as human beings. We are unable to ignore the buzz in our pockets, the dings on our night stands, we drool and reach and feast.

Creativity is about creating something new, adding to the world of beauty, not just taking and acquiring.

Gluttony stems from fear. We are afraid of exposing ourselves, standing naked as we are. Afraid of being vulnerable. We cloak ourselves in a thick protective layer of shopping bags from Abercrombie & Fitch, Dean & DeLuca or Windsor & Newton. We need distraction from our true selves, from loneliness, from inadequacy, from being who we are.

The solution is to make more, rather than take more. Pull your excess art supplies off the shelf and give them to your local public school. Turn off all electronics a day a week and fill your time with songbirds and wind. Unsubscribe from distraction and sign up for a healthy diet of starving artistry. It won’t kill you, it’ll fill your soul.

Second in a series on seven deadly creative sins.

The Sin of GREED

dannygregory21 Comments

Creativity, like songbirds, can be bought and sold. But songs sound differently from behind the bars of a gilded cage, when sung for a supper.

Greed makes artists compromise. They follow trends rather than their hearts.  They measure success in sales rather than in the call of their souls. They agree to distort their work to fit corporate agendas and market demands. Greed turns originality into predictability into a worthless tin horn.

Ironically, greed rusts the very things that made an artist’s work valuable in the first place. Greed transforms artists into celebrities, hogging the limelight, addicted to fame, prisoners of their egos, and detached from the pure, original source of their creativity.

Greed distorts and cripples the true purpose of art, turning the fruits of personal expression into a mere commodity. An artist’s heart-felt response to the world shrivels into a rich man’s prized asset, garnering millions at auction, then hidden away, another coveted diamond on a dragon’s hoard.

The opposite of greed is generosity.

Greed prevents artists from sharing their work with the world, afraid it will be poached. Rather than joining a creative community, inspiring others, collaborating, teaching, sharing their insights and lessons, greedy artists hide in their studios, squirreling away their work, waiting for the best offer. They refuse to support causes, to contribute their creativity, to reap the benefits of selflessness.

Greed clouds perspective, skews values, saps generosity.

Greed is a symptom of fear.

When you are afraid of being deprived, you hoard possessions against any possible future famine, no matter how remote. When you are afraid of being passed over and neglected, left to shrivel and die, you hoard attention. Afraid of competition, you crouch on your mountain of toys so no one else and play with them. Afraid of being taken advantage of, you refuse to open the door to others. Afraid of being vulnerable, you amass a pile of any stuff than could be a bulwark or a weapon. You bank your work rather than letting it see the light of day and of possible critique.

Greed blocks your way. Generosity and creativity clear it.

First in a series on seven deadly creative sins.

The Month of Sleeping Dangerously

dannygregory18 Comments

A month ago, I stayed up several hours past my normal bedtime then went to Queens to board a plane. After midnight, we took off and I stayed more or less upright in a middle seat surrounded by several people with sketchy notions about personal hygiene for a bunch of hours until we landed in Paris. It was noonish in France but about 6 a.m in my head.

I had a cafe au lait from a vending machine, then three hours later flew to Basel, Switzerland.  Some lovely people met me at the airport, drove me to my hotel, then took me for a long walk  and some snacks by the Rhine. They explained the general concept behind the mass transit system, pointed at the tram stop and walked me back up to my hotel.  It was 9 PM in Basel. It was somewhere between 3 PM and 3 AM in my head.

The next morning, my phone, my ipad and my laptop all sounded their alarms. Apparently, it was 6:30 am in Basel.  In my head, it was coffee time. At 7 AM, I was on what I really, really hoped was the tram to the International School of Basel. I spent 45 minutes staring at the tram map, crossing all appendages, and praying in German, Italian and French. At 7:40, I detrammed and walked into what I hoped was the school I’d be visiting for the next week. A few minutes later, the teacher who was my host gave me more coffee and led me into the school auditorium where I would address 600 students and their teachers. I did a good job, I think. They applauded raucously while I stifled a yawn and calculated that it was about 2 am in New York.

For each of the next five days, I worked with several hundred children from the ages of 3 to 11. They had loads of energy. I absorbed much of it and increased my caffeine consumption quite alarmingly.  On a couple of nights, I took a half of one of the old Valiums I’d found under the sink in our bathroom. When I did, I slept till it was time for the breakfast buffet. When I didn’t, I read books and watched Swiss late night TV.

After the school day ended, I gave talks to staff or parents or visited an art museum. I had a magical experience on an ancient ferry boat. One night, I ate Wiener Schnitzel. Another night, I got a sausage roll at the supermarket. I avoided fondue, imagining it coming back to haunt me at 4 AM Basel time, 10 PM in New York. On my last night, I went with some friends to eat dinner in Alsace Loraine. That’s in France. In the restaurant, some children came up to our table. They had been in my drawing classes at the school. I pretended that I remembered them well and told them to make sure to visit me in New York.

The next afternoon, I flew to Rome. I spent four days with Jack, eating pasta, drinking beer, drawing domes and walking everywhere. I stayed in an airbnb in a 15th century Palazzo. The day I arrived, they decided to renovate the hallways.  Each morning at 7 AM, Italian men would make sure I was awake and pound away the five hundred year-old plaster with hammers and chisels.

I dream about being late for  buses, trains, planes, ocean liners, dentist appointments and giving speeches before the UN in the nude.

On my last night, before I was to leave for a 7 AM. flight, the neighbors had a five hour coop board meeting on the landing outside my door. At 10:30, I stood in the doorway in my underwear and made every pleading gesture I could think of to communicate my wit’s end. Italians understand gestures and despair and, by 11PM, they had packed up their ashtrays, card tables, and folding chairs. I considered taking the last half Valium but then imagined sleeping through the alarm and decided to tough it out.

I rarely set an alarm because I often wake up before it rings, sometimes a minute before hand. At other times, I wake up every hour wondering if it had gone off. I dream about being late for  buses, trains, planes, ocean liners, dentist appointments and giving speeches before the UN in the nude.

One middle seat later, I arrived at JFK. As per my new self-employed habit, I took the subway home from Queens. My dogs were glad to see me, Jenny was at work. It was 2:30 PM in New York. It was 8:30 PM in Rome. I stayed up till Jenny came home, had dinner, and pushed it till 10 PM EST. Then I slept, sort of, till morning.

Two days later, we took a plane to Austin, Texas. the plane was slightly delayed and we took off at one in the morning EST. That’s 7:30 AM in Rome and midnight in Texas. I don’t remember when we got to our hotel or where we got up in the morning but we started our drinking early and then got on a bus to our friends’ wedding at about 5 PM, Texas time. The bride was from Dallas, the groom from New Zealand, so there were pyramids of  beers and wines and shots and we danced until the wee hours We couldn’t get a flight out on Sunday so we decided to stay at the hotel at the airport to get an early start. The car picked us up before 5 am and we caught B6794, leaving Austin at 6:20AM.

My plan for the next weekend was to drive five hours, alone to New Hampshire to shoot a new set of videos for Sketchbook Skool. Then the media started predicting the first massive hurricane in two years heading our ways. Reviving fears of Hurricane Sandy, (we and much of NY were without electricity for ten days and my sister’s house was trashed), I decided to cancel the shoot.  The hurricane never materialized so we spent the weekend hanging out and drinking too much on Saturday afternoon with a friend visiting from Virginia.

I spent thirty minutes trying to remember Christian Bale’s last name. Blaze? Blade?  Bartofski?

Each night I would wake up at 8 AM. … in Rome.  Only problem, I was in New York and it was 2 AM.  But I am used to getting by on the occasional rough night of sleep. I come from a long line of bad sleepers. My mother generally rises and walks around like making tea each 4 AM. My grandfather took a schlurp of brandy and a Lunesta every night and he lived to be 98. It can get a little crunchy at 3 PM but, by 4 PM, I am usually filled with vim again and motor on till bedtime.

Not this time.  The effects of my peripatetic ways finally caught up with me. I wasn’t sleepy. I’d just lost my mind. 

One night, I woke up so I could spend thirty minutes trying to remember Christian Bale’s last name. Blaze? Blade? Bartofski? Then I tried to remember all the people who had worked for me at my last job. I spend all day, every day with them till just two years ago but I couldn’t remember who any of them were. Slowly, I worked my way cubicle by cubicle, remembering first names, then finally, surnames. That took me till dawn illuminated the NYU library across the street.

When I fell back asleep, I dreamt wildly — about apocalypses, unscheduled presentations, oncology visits, police investigations.

I didn’t have Alzheimer’s. Or lupus.

When I was fully awake, my memory returned intact. But my mood grew worse and worse. I became blue, then deeply sorry for myself, then downright bleak. I couldn’t write a blog post, couldn’t do a drawing, couldn’t think of an idea. I guess I looked sort of okay, but inside I was a basket case. (Way more than usual.) Not me.

 I had weird aches and pains. I felt like I’d sprained my ankle. My stomach was constantly rumbling and sour. My teeth didn’t feel like they fit properly in my jaws.

Finally at the end of the week, I slept. Deeply, dreamlessly, untwitching for nine hours. Straight. Unmedicated. Flat out.

And then, only then, did I realize what had happened.

I didn’t have Alzheimer’s. Or lupus. I wasn’t going insane. I was just sleep deprived and a wreck after a rough month. I had to recharge.

What stuck me most was that it didn’t feel like normal tiredness. I wasn’t yawning and dragging around. I went to the gym. I went to bed at 10. I avoided coffee.  I seemed normal and functional. But I was losing me. It was like half of my brain, my imagination. my judgement, were carved away. I was functional, mobile, but a zombie.

Sleep is crucial. Sleep is lovely. And I am making it a priority. I’ll be traveling quite a bit over the next few months but I’ll be a lot smarter about it.

ZZZ.

This post was just a way of blowing out the cobwebs, stretching the old grey matter and warming up the carpal tunnels.

Okay, that’s all for now. Hope I didn’t put you to sleep.

La vita bohemien!

dannygregory16 Comments

Ten years ago, I illustrated a book called A Writer’s Paris by Eric Maisel. It’s about why/how you could/should move to Paris, at least  temporarily, to fuel your artistic impulses. It worked on mine — Eric’s publisher paid for Patti and me to spend a long weekend wandering around Paris and making many of the drawings that would fill the book. What a time!

I’ll be honest, I don’t remember the book’s argument in detail. I was irritated that the publisher thought to combine my drawings with some collage artist’s work and so I couldn’t read the final version of the book with an open mind. That peevishness notwithstanding, the basic premise of Eric’s book came back to me as I sat here in the Piazza Benedetto Cairoli with my Macbook on my lap. I’ve been in Rome for less than forty eight hours, but the magic of a different continent, city, culture, place and pace is already working on me.

piazza-cenciAt Jack’s suggestion, I didn’t book a hotel room but found an AirBnB just a few meters from the door of his school. It’s a fourth floor walkup in a 15th century building with a giant front door key and iron shutters I swing open each morning to flood my room with sunshine. As I sit here in the Piazza across the road, I hear the tram rattle by, the chuckle of an accelerating Vespa, the doo-da, doo-da of the carabinieri, and snatches of Italian wafting over from the men on the next bench, smoking and joking. I’m not in Kansas anymore.

Being in a new place always open my eyes and ears. Everything is unfamiliar to some degree, a degree that inspires my record in ink to be deeper and fresher. My travel journals contain the richest pages on my shelves, the most experimental, the most free. Each day in a new city is both energizing and depleting. I strain every hole in my skull to suck in more and more information and end the day wrung out and deep in sleep.

jacks-alley
Hanging out with my boy in his new city makes my imagination run wild. He lives and works in a gorgeous old building, a 15th century villa with frescos on the 16 foot ceilings and huge windows flung open upon mouldering terra cotta walls and stone alleyways strung with phone wires. His bed is narrow and hard but he has his own studio, bigger than our living room, with a checkerboard marble floor and walls filled with sketches and pages pulled from the old Italian magazines he buys at the flea market. A few blocks away is a park full of Roman ruins, fenced and gated to protect the hundreds of ferrel cats who’ve made it home. The Jewish Quarter is full of street markets selling big blocks of mozzarella and cadres of prosciuttos in chrome slings waiting to be shaven. Jack has learned to make pasta from scratch and to order a cornetto and a cappuccino with confidence.

He has less than a year till he graduates. But something in me tells him not to worry, to take it slow, to revel in this season in Italy, that it will be something he never forgets. Last week, he and his classmates traveled to Abruzzo and put on a performance in the earthquake ruins of a tiny village. Next week, he heads to Venice to sleep on a boat. I tell him that for the first year or two, he can keep his needs modest, can earn money here and there, can work on being a man of the world rather than a slave of the wage.

roman-viewI spent a year in a garage in LA. And then I came back to the Manhattan haunts I had commuted through for decades, a new perspective on the same streets. It would be nice to have a garret here in Rome. Or to couch surf across India like Prashant. Or to get a cabin in the woods or a minihouse I could pull behind my car. It’s hard to eat leftovers  with  the same relish, but certainly New York is the kind of place I can have creative reawakenings, just like Eric’s Paris or Jack’s Rome.

Going somewhere fresh and rich and living just for one’s art for a period, that’s something every creative person should try, methinks. Forget the pressures of income of language and culture and history, just for a month or two, long enough to rearrange the pieces and shake the monkey back into his hole.

I don’t know that I need an adventure so complete, to completely pull up roots and repot on foreign soil. More likely, the many trips I have planned over the next few months will suffice. Next weekend, I’ll be in Austin. Then to Prague, Doha, Reykjavik, maybe Hanoi too. Shifting perspectives, fresh pages in my travel journal, the search for adventure, new faces, new menus, new conversations, all adding up to a big thick deck to shuffle and deal myself out another winning hand.

Kid energy.

dannygregory7 Comments

The VR thing is a little hokey but I love the way Keane talks about drawing and creativity. He’s like a big kid with a cool new toy.

Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

dannygregory19 Comments

This is annoying as hell. My dogs, Tim and Joe, are obsessed with the trash chute in our vestibule. Whenever I drop a bag of garbage down the chute, they go nuts, growling and barking and trying to leap up and into the chute in pursuit of the disappearing bag. This has been going on for years. In fact, it’s so obsessive that whenever we open the garbage can in the kitchen or even the dishwasher next to it, they go scrambling to the chute, waiting for something that’s just. Not. Going. To happen. It’s a habit, a pure, Pavlovian habit.

Habits can be a pain, like biting your cuticles or forgetting to floss, but they can also be a real boon to a creative person. They are a little subroutine we can plug into to our neck-top computers to make sure we draw or write or play the dulcimer on a regular basis, a basis that will make us more skilled, more expressive and happier with our work.

Habits have three basic parts. First, there’s what I call ‘the Spark’. That’s the event that triggers the habit. In my dogs’ case, it’s anything to do with throwing out garbage. Garbage in, the madness begins.

Next, there’s the habitual behavior. In this case, running like a lunatic across the apartment and gnashing your teeth at a small steel door in the wall.

Third, is the reward. Tim and Joe never actually get the reward which must be diving down the garbage’s burrow to throttle it deep in the ground (they are dachshunds after all, bred to kill badgers in their lairs). Or maybe it’s just the thrill of the chase.

In any case, think of those three steps in setting up whatever brain program you want to write. Let’s say you want to find time to draw on a regular basis but the monkey voice in your head tells you to watch TV instead. So let’s create a habit. 1. Put your sketchbook on the coffee table next to the remote. When a commercial comes, (spark), grab the remote, mute the TV, pick up your sketchbook and draw whatever’s in front of you (your feet, your coffee table, your slumbering Rottweiler, scenes from the commercial on the screen)  (habit) until you fill you up your sketchbook with awesome drawings (reward).

Think of other sparks you could link to habits. Every time you make a pot of coffee (spark), draw the view out the kitchen window (habit). Every time you sit on the toilet (spark), draw on a sheet of toilet paper (habit). Every time Donald Trump says “Mexican”(spark), draw your neighbor’s Chihuahua (habit).

Or, subscribe to my blog (sign up in the column on the right) and get an email three times a week when I post (spark), and do a drawing based on my featured image (habit). That will be rewarding for us both.

Greasing the daily grind.

dannygregory16 Comments

 

I’ve always found it exciting and a bit chilling to read about the typical day on the life of an artist I admire. They invariably go something like this:

“I spring out of bed at 5 a.m., throw some Ethiopian into the french press, and swim in the Atlantic for 45 minutes with my Rhodesian Ridgeback, Horace. Then, still wet, I sit down at my 1928 Smith Corona and write for four hours or 4,000 words, whichever comes first. I pause to eat 200 ml. of fresh sheep yogurt, steel-cut oats and Lebanese dates. Then, 100 push ups.

“Next, I allocate 43 minutes to email  my editor, manager, publicist, agent, mistresses, and fans. When the tibetan sand clock that the Dalai Lama gave me gongs at noon, I walk down to an exclusive boîte on the main street of my quaint, artisanal town to eat lunch at my regular table with one or two of my equally famous artist friends.

Then I stroll home and have a two-hour nap, a massage, a high colonic, sex, two Bolivian chocolates, and return to my studio…

“Then I stroll home and have a two-hour nap, a massage, a high colonic, sex, two Bolivian chocolates, and return to my studio where I write until my housekeeper serves dinner which I eat with twenty of my closest friends and several cases of wine bottled by some aristocratic boyhood pal, then a few lashings of espresso and off to bed where I read some Keats, wash down a handful of Lunesta, adjust my satin eye shade, and dream about tomorrow’s work.”

Making art takes work. For some of us, it is our work. Work without a boss, or a quota, or a time clock. And that kind of job can be very hard to keep up. That’s why artists establish routines, to get them off their duffs and into the studio. We need to be motivated by something to put down the remote or the opium pipe and saddle up.

The only one who will make us do what we do — is us.  Sure, editors can give us deadlines in return for advances and gallerists can schedule gallery openings but we know deep down that we can always buy more time if we whine. No one can fire us.

For the last few months, I have pledged to myself that I would post something here three times every week, on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday at 7 am. I have written several zillion posts here over the years but this is a bit more structured. I made this pledge because a deadline of some kind would keep me more productive than just waiting for inspiration, desire, and schedule to converge. I haven’t been utterly slavish about this pledge as you may have noticed but it has kept me reasonably committed.

The key has been to establish a proper routine about it, besides this slightly guilty feeling in the back of my head that I should sit down and write something. I like to do it early, before the press of the day has begun, when the streets are quiet, Jenny and the hounds are still in bed, and I have yet to read any emails or NY Times editorials  that could clutter or influence the flow. I awake with a vague notion, then make a few false starts, and soon the mechanism clicks in and the sentences spool out.

If you stay up until all hours kicking the gong and chasing chorus girls around Montparnasse, it’s a lot harder to rise with the dawn…

Starting one’s days productively takes structure. If you stay up until all hours kicking the gong and chasing chorus girls around Montparnasse, it’s a lot harder to rise with the dawn, so it’s helpful to be a little disciplined about what you do all day long, even when you aren’t creating. Eat protein, read actual books, don’t watch the Tonight Show. Repeat.

And just because my body is sleeping, my brain doesn’t get to punch out. If I mull for a minute or two about what I want to write in those minutes before sleep, it’s much more likely that I will wake up with the first sentence sticking out of my brain like the beginning of a roll of Scotch tape.

The art-making process can be mysterious but it can also be somewhat controlled. You can set a wakeup call for the muse if you give yourself a predictable program, an armature to build your work on.

I’ll write more about this next time. Which reminds me of another tip: never leave your work 100% completed at the end of the day. Park on the top of the hill, leaving half a sentence or a partially drawn face, so the You of Tomorrow can pick up the work in progress rather than wrestling with a cold start.

To wit: I will always remember what Andy Warhol said to me one evening in The Odeon, “Danny, old boy, never mix chickens, ball bearings, and…”