A Letter to Mike
A few confluences gathered today to point me in a direction. It was a welcome sharp stab in the right direction after a few months of muddled fog of happy distraction, but distraction nonetheless, jerking the wheel at just the last moment when the hairpin turns veers into view. It came in the form of an email, followed by a manifesto.
Sitting in my inbox about a week and a half ago was a small polite email from a student, who, for the sake of anonymity and brevity, I’ll call Mike.
Mike’s email came to me through a good friend, and Mike was looking for a little advice, which, if I actually took a look at my life and career, is so laughable as to start looking under rocks to see if Ashton Kuchner was having me on. But I’m not so self-examining, and Mike was an earnest guy who had something of a dilemma that I found some kinship with, because I found myself with a similar conundrum.
Let me reiterate again that Mike has been very gracious in accepting the facts as I laid out to him, and he seems like a very bright guy, and I want in no way to impinge this gent: he seems like a focussed and ambitious dude. However, I found it my job, always a filthy task, of disabusing him of some of his more fantastical notions about what it was like to be in the creative biz.
Mike really wants to be a line producer (no offense, Mike, but god knows why – I pray you flee the film industry as soon as you realize who, in fact, signs the checks. But I digress.). But Mike went to school for illustration. And so Mike’s initial plan, as I understood it, was thus: have the breezy, lucrative career of an illustrator, as a day job, and in the meantime, at night, work on the line producer career, eventually scuttling the illustration career when you can make a go of being a producer full-time.
It is at this point, if you are in fact an illustrator, that you conversely laugh without joy under your breath and take a drag of your Gauloise, or just shake your head and continue to pick at that scab on your arm.
It is an insane plan, but it is an insane plan built around very noble aspirations, and who can fault Mike for that? My response, in part:
Your one oversight in your plan – and keep in mind, I tell you this with full respect for what you do, and as a fellow brother in the visual guild, a honorable pact – is that both being a line producer, and being an illustrator are very, very, very hard things to do. You have chosen a path (or perhaps more appropriately, it has chosen you – I have always believed we can only really do what we do, and everything else is just fooling ourselves) that hundreds of thousands of young people around the world also desire. Some of these people, I suspect, are much worse than you. Others, I also suspect, are probably better. The real rub of being in a creative field, unlike our more comfortable compatriots in other fields like mechanics, or engineering, or medicine, is that, for some reason, everyone else thinks that they can do it, too.
This poses a bit of a problem, namely, that the competition for every single job is absolutely cut-throat. Having worked in Hollywood for a time, and having friends who bore the suffering of trying to get acting roles, I can say with some confidence that, if not harder than the aspirations of young actors, the dreams of a young illustrator or aspiring producer is at least as difficult. Happily, there are a few surefire aces you have up your sleeve. One might be outrageous talent, but, in full disclosure, I have seen extremely talented friends fail miserably. Another is being well-connected, which is nice if you have it, but most folks don’t. And lastly, and this is the one that most of us poor schlubs that have managed to eek out a small amount of success have relied on, is pure, unadulterated, dogged persistence.
Mike took this all in stride, and I think I made an impression, at least in the vague right direction: Mike took some time, and then decided to pursue the line producer thing, which, besides the above caveat, I fully support. He paid me a high compliment, namely, that I didn’t “beat around the bush”, in his own rather archaic phraseology, and that I told him things that most other professors and mentors didn’t. I gauged from Mike that the form of advice he had been receiving was a common form of very unuseful utopian visions about “true art”, and “anything is possible”, especially within the narrow confines of academia. I think I caught a whiff of relief for my rather blunt but honest assessment. Please by this unique type of compliment, we both went on our merry way.
A day later, a hermenautic web group I’m a part of reminded me of the existence of underground cartoonist Gary Panter. I know that sounds odd to say, that anyone should need to be reminded of a piece of knowledge they knew, but it really works that way sometimes, I’ve found; Gary Panter made a great impression on me years ago, and then, for some reason, he got shoved into the archives. And after being reminded of him, I did a little research on him, and stumbled upon something marvelous that everyone else older and smarter than me has known about for centuries. The wonderous and prescient article of declaration known as The Rozz Tox Manifesto.
The Rozz Tox Manifesto was a screed written by Panter in 1987, and is a bit long to reproduce here, but there’s a few gems that sum up the tone:
+ Beautiful and effective communicative marketing and aesthetic media are not innately evil: merely seductive. However, seductive aesthetics and media are prone to undermine common sense and vision in a capitalistic culture
+ It is unfortunate and unacceptable what vile and lazy do-nothings are given unwarranted credence for mouthing such foul and mean clichés as ‘rip-off’ and ‘sell-out.’ They have no understanding of our economy and the time it takes society to go. Confess and shut up! Capitalism good or ill is the river in which we sink or swim. Inspiration has always been born of recombination.
+ Waiting for art talent scouts? There are no art talent scouts. Face it, no one will seek you out.
+ Law: If you want better media, go make it.
The Rozz Tox made a great impression on a one Matt Groening, who took it’s lessons to heart and proceeded to shove his strange visions of family life into every concievable nook of American culture. I myself credit The Simpsons as a major influence, as do most people my age, I suspect, whether they know it or not. Reading through Rozz Tox made my brain click a few times, and a few times more, until a strayed back to Mike, and his poor conundrum.
The link is thus: I suspect, should Mike have proposed coming up with a bizarre cartoon family and an attempt to stick their faces on everything from lunchboxes to underwear to his mentors, his professors may have have pushed back and urged him to Create Great Art instead. It’s not too much of a stretch: the same folks who could, with a straight face, urge Mike to go ahead and try and be an illustrator during the day and a line producer at night have little real concept of what the hell is going on out here in the trenches.
As artists, we are told it is bad to make art for money. Only acceptable is to make art as the pervasive, unique, and media shattering hammer to smash the perceptions of the squares! Then finally, when the heaping wreck of the well thought of is smoldering at your feet, is it acceptable to light your cigarette from the smoldering ashes in smug yet disinterested celebration.
Yes, please, more Gary, tell ‘em how it is, that getting paid to draw pictures by clients is more than impressive, because when someone else’s job is on the line, it actually means something. Do I feel a combination of guilt and shame at my outsider status, the illustrator-before-artist, the artist that went to film school? You bet. Does it come through on this blog? I sure hope so.
Take shitty jobs to follow your goal, don’t get too comfortable, don’t buy too many toys, don’t take yourself too damn seriously, be gratified that you actually get to do something creative with your day while most poor slobs have to shovel shit for a living, do not ever fucking give up, and most of all – just because you got paid for it doesn’t mean it’s not art. Don’t forget, kemosabe.
Well said, well said.