find a new way of working

Since I planned to discuss a recent documentary about Brian Eno, I began writing this by drawing an Oblique Strategies card. Lo and behold, I pulled the most famous one of all:

I shuffled pretty thoroughly—what are the odds? This is the card everyone mentions when they explain these cards and how Brian Eno uses them in his work. My real mistake was not just picking a card I liked and pretending it was random. When am I ever going to learn a little showpersonship?

Next time. Moving on.

Last month, I took the family to see Eno, a "generative" documentary about the legendary musician and producer:

Rich with access to hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage and unreleased music, [Eno] employs groundbreaking technology to accomplish something that’s never been done before: a feature film that’s never the same twice. Hustwit and creative technologist Brendan Dawes have developed bespoke generative software designed to sequence scenes and create transitions out of Hustwit’s original interviews with Eno, and Eno’s rich archive of hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage, and unreleased music.

As we took our seats, a title card identified the version of Eno we were about to see by its date (August 18) and location (Film Forum). This reinforced the fact that we were about to see a unique version of the documentary. Throughout the film, each new sequence of related clips began with a shuffling animation, reminding us that the following segments had been randomly selected according to an algorithm.

Did we enjoy the documentary? Absolutely. Can I recommend it? Sadly, no, since I can't know whether you'd see any of the bits I liked. Sure, you can risk it, but you might end up watching a pile of garbage: Eno formatting some hard drives. Eno cleaning his synthesizer. Eno picking his nose.

Blame generative art, which, like life, is like a box of chocolates.

What I can do is share a few elements that struck me from our version:

• Eno stopped performing live because he hated touring with a band. He couldn't stand wasting all that time in a hotel room before each show instead of making music. (This was before you could use GarageBand to produce songs on an iPhone.) To paraphrase Eno, "You spend twenty-three hours preparing for the twenty-fourth." As usual, his creative intentionality stuck with me. Eno thinks very strategically about how art gets made. It got me thinking about all the areas of my creative practice with a low ROI.
• When asked why he worked with Eno, David Bowie pointed out that Eno didn't contribute much musically when in the studio. He didn't play instruments or do much work behind the mixing board. Instead, Eno's contribution was philosophical. He spurred everyone else, above all Bowie himself, to approach the album more creatively. Clearly, Bowie found this contribution worthwhile.
• In a more recent clip, Eno tells us he's taken up intermittent fasting, less for the health benefits than to squeeze more useful working hours out of each morning. This seemed to me like a very Eno thing to do. Similarly, Eno always puts creation first, making new music before allowing himself to read, watch, or listen to anything else.

My favorite part of the documentary which, again, may not be in the version you see, was about the disconnect between the feeling you have when making something and its ultimate quality. Eno recorded "Spirits Drifting" for his album Another Green World while convinced it was completely worthless. At the time, he had no sense of what he was doing with the song or why he was recording. He desperately wanted to quit, but he had to finish the album before running out of money for studio time. So he finished the recording, in tears the whole time: "The only reason I'm doing this is because I have to," he thought. The track and the album have since outlasted many of his other works, let alone the vast majority of recorded music between 1975 and the present.

I've experienced this disconnect as an editor and a writer too many times to count. You really can't trust your intuition about the work while you're making it. If anything, you encounter more resistance when you're onto something interesting than when you're grinding out something forgettable. You just have to trust yourself enough to keep going, tears or no tears.

Ultimately, we all flourish with different creative processes, and the process that suits one project may not suit another. That's why it's so important to experiment with new approaches regularly, and to pay attention to how other people do their own work.

On the "MacGruber" episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, SNL writer John Solomon recalls discovering that people write in different ways. He joined the show assuming that writing a comedy sketch took seven or more hours. He soon saw people dashing them off in three. It had never occurred to him there were other, equally valid ways to get the work done.

Chalk Eno's artistic longevity up to how he challenges himself and his collaborators to work in new ways. Thanks to him, we now have a new way of making documentaries: generatively. It may be a dead end, but it's barely been explored and may offer vast creative possibilities. Are there new, "generative" ways of writing books? Newsletters? Being creative about your work matters as much as being creative in your work.

This takes vigilance. Ruts may be dull, but they are so incredibly comfortable.