Forms of Ambition
I don't use my personal YouTube account on my work-assigned computer. This has its drawbacks: nothing gets preserved, nothing gets saved, I’m the mercy of what the algorithm wants to throw my way. One odd advantage to this friction: when my browser decides it’s time for an IT-mandated upgrade or a surprise cookie deletion, my YouTube front page becomes a clean slate. This is when I do what I call “goosing the algorithm,” where I run as many videos I like in as many tabs as my poor work laptop can handle at one time (with the sound muted, obviously). The idea is that it keeps the recommendation engine on its toes; what will the oracle offer me after a steady diet of Jon Bois videos, live Ween bootlegs, stationary hauls, guitar rig rundowns, Criterion Closet videos, videos about spelling and fonts and decentralizing the role of your phone in your creative life? There are worse ways to pan for gold.
One of the nuggets this method has yielded is the channel of Evan Monsma, a young Midwestern maker with a flair for the junky, the janky, and the jury-rigged. He builds shelves out of scrap wood, camera rigs out of spare parts, and injection molders from drill presses. He’s also a videographer and scores his own videos. His mix of rolled-sleeve creativity, broad interests, and unpretentiousness reminds me of Wade Nixon aka Dankpods, the similarly down-to-earth Australian drummer/torturer of automobiles/chronicler of obsolete tech.
A week ago, Evan posted a video challenging his just-south-of-30,000 followers to do something creative every day in October. Hardly a novel idea (Kleon has also championed doing something to this effect several times), but something about the way Evan frames it—“nothing complex, nothing super high-pressure,” just something to keep the creative muscles loose—makes it approachable. Don’t drive yourself up the wall making a perfect thing; just make a thing. One small thing a day for a month.
It doesn’t even have to be thirty-one of the same thing. On the 1st, I wrote two verses of a song about the seasons going out of phase; it still sounds like three Mountain Goats songs spot-welded together. Yesterday, I wrote this very post. Today? Who knows. I don’t want to fence myself in. Like Wade and Evan, I have a few different things I’d like to do (though mine involve about 100% fewer sawblades and oil changes). I’ll try blogging a bit more. I want to restring my crappy beginner guitar and learn Leonard Cohen’s not-so-secret six chords. I want to take the Polaroid I got at Value Village for ten bucks out for a spin. I made a zine for a friend recently and was amazed at how invigorating it was to do. There’s a stack of postcards next to my desk begging to be sent. Scrabble, like every Scrabble player will tell you, can be as creative and beautiful as chess, but this specific kind of creativity and beauty falls outside the parameters of “something small every day.”
What I really want to work on is that long-gestating sci-fi poetry manuscript that I’ve been putting together piecemeal for the last few years. But I fear I’ve stalled out because I may have set the bar too high for myself in terms of emotional ambition; I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that I think I’ve written myself into a corner I don’t have the skill or heart to escape.
Maybe I’ll feel more up to the task by the time Halloween comes around.