Hi Everyone,
I hope you had a lovely Memorial Day Weekend.
Here in New York City it was rainy and cold. Those who know me know that rainy and cold is not my bag so I stayed in Saturday and Sunday.
The view was nice though:
Podcast
The podcast is going well. It is now available on all major podcast platforms.
You can subscribe on Apple here and Spotify here or search for “The Creativity, Education, and Leadership” podcast on any other platform.
I enjoy doing the interviews. It’s a combination of creating a curriculum of speakers on topics I find interesting and catching up with old friends who are doing cool things.
More importantly I’ve identified areas for making the podcast better. To wit:
1) Release one podcast a week, on Thursdays, rather than two a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
2) Have shorter, more focused conversations that drill down on one topic.
3) Edit the podcast more, taking out the less interesting parts of the convo and, perhaps, removing the “umms” and pauses that people tend to naturally produce.
If you have any other feedback/suggestions for making the podcast better please send them my way by replying to this email :-)
Episode Recap
I think the last few episodes have been some of my best:
Blake Howard, of One Heat Minute fame (Vulture article here), and I go deep on Miami Vice (2005), beginning with an analysis of the pic below, and the other films of Michael Mann. We discuss why Mann loves James Cameron’s Avatar so much, how Mann’s experience at UW-Madison in the sixties may have shaped his worldview, and the critique of capitalism that is buried in so many Mann films. Episode link: Apple here and Spotify here.
Ethan Brooks, of The Hustle, and I talk all things newsletters. Ethan explains the three ways to monetize a newsletter (don’t worry, no plans to do that here for the foreseeable future), the most important component of any successful media platform, and why he defines trust as “consistency over time.” Episode link: Apple here and Spotify here.
Ivory Johnson, a former student of mine who is now a history teacher at Simmons High School, and I talk race relations in the Mississippi Delta, what it’s like teaching at the high school from which you graduated, and what my first day of school was like at Simmons. Episode link: Apple here and Spotify here.
Most Popular Podcast Episode
The most downloaded episode remains my conversation with MacArthur Fellow Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter tracking down cold case murders from the Civil Rights-era. Episode link: Apple here and Spotify here.
Coming this Thursday
Tyrell Lisson, creator of the podcast The Band: A History, and I do a deep-dive into the myth surrounding The Band (much of which stems from Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece The Last Waltz), why Levon Helms’ voice was so spectacular, and the creation of the song “Out of the Blue” (which is my favorite song by The Band).
Here’s The Band, joined by The Staple Singers, singing their biggest hit, “The Weight,” from The Last Waltz. Levon is the first singer.
Ninety versus Sixty (Book Update)
In my previous life (and, probably, future life) I was a documentary filmmaker. I’m proud of the films I made, particularly the three that touched on race and class in Mississippi.
SHOWTIME won both the Audience Award and the Best Mississippi Documentary Award at the Oxford Film Festival.
The South Will Rise Again went viral on YouTube and Vimeo and was used, for several years, in various college and university classrooms across the country. It also won the Best Mississippi Documentary Award at the Oxford Film Festival.
Ten Dollars an Hour was the first film I made and, probably, the film of which I’m the most proud. Watching it today, the technical aspects of the film are rough, especially the sound design, but story-wise it holds up well. It was made under a tight time-frame as part of a documentary film production class at the University of Mississippi. I was entering a closed world, the white fraternity system at the University, doing investigative journalism, and shooting and editing a film, all in one semester. The legwork alone, to arrange to film and interview at the Sigma Nu house, home to Eli Manning when he was student, took a while.
As much fun as it is walk down memory lane with these film projects, the point is, as I’m working on my memoir about coaching basketball in Namibia, I know there comes a point in any creative endeavor where you’re unsure how much work remains.
The question I ask myself is, “Am I ninety percent done or only sixty percent done?”
The writing has gone well, I have a manuscript I’m happy with, I have an excellent reader/editor who provides specific and useful feedback, and yet…
Am I ninety percent done and just need to do some line editing and copy editing and hit “Publish” on Amazon’s Kindle platform?
Or, am I sixty percent done and need to add another chapter or two, explain more about my background and how I came to Namibia, and rearrange the structure of the piece?
Ninety percent done can still take a while. In filmmaking it is fine-tuning every single edit (literally by the 1/24th of a second), mixing the sound, adjusting the volume of each clip, etc. In writing, it is honing each sentence to diamond precision, checking and correcting every last piece of punctuation, and the rest.
Sixty percent, on the other hand, is still lost in the woods, unable to see the big picture or understand what’s working and what’s not working.
Another metaphor I think about is, as a writer you’re kind of a paleontologist, unearthing the bones of an extinct dinosaur buried in your subconscious. At some point, you think you know what you have, what remains you have discovered, and what you need to do to find those few final bones. And then, in that final discovery process, you realize, whoa, these are the remains of a different creature altogether, a much bigger beast, and there remains much work to be done.
I’m in the space between those two places.
Specifically what I’m struggling with is the balance between describing what is happening on the court/during the games and sharing the more universal life lessons, centered around the practice of meditation, that I learned along the way. My goal is to make the book accessible to everyone, not just basketball fans or coaches.
The good news is there’s no deadline. I can take as long as I like to work through it.
Part of that working through is setting the manuscript down and not looking at it for a week or two. The subconscious mind, the same one I’m excavating, is much better at figuring this stuff out than the conscious mind.
I interviewed the author John Griswold for the podcast (it will be up in three weeks) and John referenced Norman Mailer’s conception of writing as the “spooky art.”
I think the spooky part is our subconscious. We don’t know where our subconscious gets its ideas, or solutions, but generally we know that it does.
I guess what I’m saying is, our subconscious is a spooky dinosaur.
So, whatever it is you are working on, are you at ninety percent done or only sixty percent?
Have a great week,
Ben
Twitter/Films/Podcast
P.S. I’d like to grow the readership a bit. Right now I’m at exactly 190 subscribers, of whom about two-thirds regularly open (and presumably read) a post, which is a great “open rate” in the world of e-newsletters, so thank you. If you know someone who might be interested in thoughts/conversations about writing, creativity, education, coaching, and/or leadership, please forward this email along to them :-)