Bill Simmons is hands down my favorite sports writer. He's funny, he's irreverent, he's topical, and maybe most importantly, he speaks the vernacular of the fan. The "eye test" is a big one when you read Simmons' writing or listen to his podcasts. That is to say, if a sportsman looks like he sucks, he probably sucks, no matter what the media or basic statistics claim. At the same time, he's a big proponent of advanced metrics, which are statistics that take a lot of context into consideration, creating statistics that are often more in line with those "eye tests."
Last week, Simmons held a podcast with Patton Oswalt, who is easily one of my favorite comedians. Oswalt was on to hype his book, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. One of the topics the book covered, and that Simmons and Oswalt went on about at length, were the struggles of the comedian in the 80s and 90s, and how niche comedy has found a place thanks to the Internet and Twitter. The pair agreed, the open nature of consumption of art is a capital letter Good Thing.
To an extent, I agree.
We'll come back to this after the jump.
Like I said last week, Mondays are my television day. As I type this, I'm prepping my weekly live-tweets of Chuck. I fully admitted last week that Chuck and my other Monday show, Gossip Girl, are not terrific works of art, but I still enjoy them. Last week I took that base and talked about how we grow with our serial art. But there's another aspect to why we forgive the flaws of things like Network TV and summer blockbuster movies.
Let me give you one more example before I just jump into it.
I had a college professor who took a moment to speak with me about songwriting. He said that there are essentially two schools to writing lyrics: there is the classic method, where you try to write something poignant but universal, and then there's the intensely personal school, where you are trying to appeal to no one but yourself.
There's a purity to the second form, of course. Writing or painting or movie making or songwriting for no one but yourself can give you the freedom to determine what directions you find to be your own strengths or weaknesses and, maybe more importantly, the freedom to determine what kind of art makes you proud of creating.
But when you force yourself to try to create something that communicate with others, you're doing something special: You're imposing limitations. Like when you write music that speaks to everyone, like when you tell comedy that appeals to pop culture and counterculture, like when you create television for the networks instead of for cable.
Limitations are the great secret weapon of art. They cause you to think about the art you're attempting to make in more innovative ways and, perhaps more importantly, they give you unique problem solving skills; in that Oswalt/Simmons podcast, they talked for a long time about how Steven Spielberg's best movies have come when he had strict limitations (technologically on Jaws, time-wise on Catch Me if You Can).
Thinking of my own work, I realize that when I was younger, I moved towards self-serving art. I tried to create art only for myself. It was a Good Thing: it helped me realize the kind of art I wanted to create, the kind of art that would be satisfying for me. But by viewing the idea of commercial success and universal appeal as an artistic limitation rather than as "selling out" or some other such nonsense, I've realized that I am attempting to create something that will ultimately be more satisfying, both to myself, and to generations to come.
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