Connections

Is it 2025 yet?

Enjoy the Silence

I’m winding down the New Year working remotely, very remotely, in rural Maryland. There are no helicopters hovering outside my window. No sirens wailing across the Brooklyn Bridge. Only the muted whoosh of an occasional four wheels slowly waking the precipitation resting on the road outside.

What it sounds like outside my apartment on any given day

Subconsciously, I’m gearing up for what I expect to be an arduous year ahead. Every presidential/congressional election year brings with it a cacophony of arguing, baiting, screaming and general intolerance as many people you would not hire for your own company struggle to control the rights and spending power of our entire country. My head hurts already.

With the stakes so high (when are they not?), it’s hard not to get pulled into the fracas. Do more! Yell louder! Intuitively, I feel like 2024 is a year to be quieter, at least for me. I don’t think social media is a particularly compelling way to win an argument. Rather, it largely exists fueled by extreme opinions that antagonize and anger people, thus keeping them engaged and, well, online.

The end of the year has always been a good time for me to take a step back from everything and try to take a more objective look at whether certain people, things, and activities are the best use and investment of my time. Do these people/things make me better? Do they bring me joy? Do they help me grow?

Collectively, it’s led me to focus on two things as we begin 2024:

1) Choosing in-person communication over virtual whenever possible

Over the last year, I’ve traveled across the country, attending author events and writer conferences, and the experience has been invaluable to me. That interpersonal connection with other creatives has had a foundational effect on my life, and I want to make sure that continues.

My new preferred mode of communication

2) Spending more time experiencing culture itself

This one has been tougher for me because usually, most of my free time is spent reading submitted manuscripts for Winding Road Stories at the expense of reading already published books, listening to new music, visiting museums, and experiencing the theater. If the art we create is the collection of our influences, I want to those influences to be of the highest quality of thought. With that in mind, I’ve been more carefully curating the art I experience in a given week and doing so at a more ambitious pace.

The one constant I’ve had in my life at any age is that art of all kinds has helped me grow, learn, and become a better version of myself. Creating always brings me great comfort, and I have a feeling I’m going to need that comfort in the tumultuous year ahead.

The Artist’s Way

“No matter what your age or life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.” – Julia Cameron

I have always been a proponent of The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron’s program for removing the blocks on your creativity. Every year, I try to reacquaint myself with The Artist’s Way. There are two main pillars of The Artist’s Way that are non-negotiable in Cameron’s estimation.

1) Every morning, before you do anything else, sit down and write out three pages in longhand about anything you want. Absolutely dump your anxieties and fears on the page. No one else is going to read them, including you. But it primes the pump to remove the psychic waste so that the good stuff gets to the surface a little more quickly.

2) Once a week, take yourself on an artist’s date for at least two hours. It’s a guilt-free time for you to immerse yourself in something that’s not your own work. It could be a trip to a bookstore, a movie, a museum, whatever strikes you. If we create art from the well of our subconscious mind, the artist’s date refills that well. (Sometimes, I cheat and bring a friend on my artist’s date. Please don’t tell Julia.)

I’ll be sharing some of my artist’s dates here. If you have any interesting ideas for artist’s dates, especially in New York City, please leave them in the comment section below.

Read Me – A few books I like

The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

In the last few years, I’ve become fascinated with the cross-pollination of art. Through interviews, every time Rick explains his process for working with musicians, I find it inspiring, and there’s so much you can apply to writing and authors. I’m grateful he expounded on some of these ideas in this book.

Bowie at the BBC: A Life in Interviews by Tom Hagler

David Bowie is my creative hero (more on that next week). I saw the cover in the bookstore and immediately tucked it under my arm. A woman in the bookstore said, “That was fast. You’re not even going to look inside?” I said, “Don’t need to. I want to save that magic for later.” This book contains a series of interviews David did over the years with the BBC.

If you’ve never heard these songs he recorded with the BBC, they are some of my favorite versions of his music.

Tony Visconti: Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy

It was only natural to put the previous books together and pick up the autobiography of Tony Visconti, the Brooklyn native who produced several of Bowie’s albums, including his final masterpiece, Blackstar.

Found Treasures

This is a great Julia Cameron interview with Brian Koppelman. If you haven’t listened to Brian’s podcast, The Moment, it’s always a wonderful conversation about creatives and their art.

Great authors on the importance of public libraries

One of the best things I’ve done is to eliminate investing any time in sports talk in between games. All the unnecessary conflict removed from my life has brought me an enormous amount of space and clearer thinking. The only exception to this rule has been my friend Michael Lombardi’s podcast on the NFL, the GM Shuffle. No one breaks down the mindset of a football organization in real time better than Michael, and I feel as though a lot of what he talks about in terms of leadership and team building is valuable in other aspects of life as well.

Hat tip to Billy Oppenheimer for including this in his newsletter, but in this clip, John Mayer talks about creativity as being something you need to sit down, focus on, and almost force into existence. I would take it one step further and say that if you can limit that forcefulness to blocks of time, it will be less all-consuming when you are struggling to create. It doesn’t mean you’ll be less creative outside of those blocks of time, but it helps prevent negativity and self-doubt from creeping in.

The process of forcing things into existence is one of the many reasons I love the Get Back documentary about The Beatles. He keeps pulling at the threads until he finds something magical.

Law & Order creator Dick Wolf donates 200 works of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art

My old friend Stan Fischler, The Hockey Maven, is 91 and still going strong, covering the game he loves.

The annual Twilight Zone marathon is coming to the SYFY Channel on December 30^th!

Much love to everyone doing the Polar Bear Plunge in Coney Island on the 1^st.

“My New Year’s Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace."
― Patricia Highsmith (New Year's Eve, 1947)

If you’ve never read Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1995, it is a rabbit hole you need to jump into with both feet.

Have a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year! Until next week…