09/09/07
Text: Scott Indrisek
Photographers: Beardandglasses
Think of it like Lent for atheists—you give up something that you depend on (chocolate, cigarettes, kinky sex) and in return you gain a new perspective and a fresh understanding. The practice isn’t solely useful for kicking our vices, however. For those facing the horror of the metaphorical blank page (or canvas, 8-track, film reel, etc.), sticking to self-imposed rules and regulations can often provide that all-important shove out of a creative rut. Lars von Trier knew this when he threw out non-digital cameras, polished soundtracks and other crutches in the race toward a brighter, lighter Dogme future, but this sort of constricting regimen isn’t solely for the crazy Danes. There’s a simple paradox at work: sometimes tying yourself down can be the trick to freeing up just about everything.
Who knows, for instance, what it is that compels a man to draft an entire novel without recourse to the letter ‘e’? Georges Perec (who did just this in The Void) is dead, so we can’t inquire of the French experimental novelist directly (nor can we ask him how many times he might have punched the wall in rage, dying to type out agonie or colère). Sometimes it’s a negative rule that can nudge the creative process in a unique direction—a firm commandment not to do something, whether that’s using a certain letter, color or cinematic technique. In other instances, abiding by the rules of a difficult and time-consuming process are what keeps an artist honest—it’s why 35mm photography will never really be killed by digital, and why there’s still patience for agonizingly inefficient practices like lithograph and metal etching.
HOW TO BE SAVED BY A GARBAGE PIANO
Let’s say a deadline is what you need: a firm, unbendable, take-no-prisoners deadline that will mercilessly bitch slap away your lack of motivation. Here’s a completely made-up statistic: 92.8 percent of all creative people are terrible procrastinators who will only complete work when someone or something is forcing them to, with dire physical violence as the punishment for laziness.
Perhaps members of this imaginary majority themselves, New York favorites Bishop Allen decided to record and release an EP every month in 2006. “The project was born out of intense frustration,” says frontman Jason Rice, who also starred as the starry-eyed musician in Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation. “After touring behind our first record, we started trying to record a follow-up. We worked on the same twelve songs, day after day, month after month, for over a year—for some reason, we couldn’t finish them.” Their writer’s block was cured, amazingly, by a rather crapulent and decrepit piano they found on a Brooklyn street. The band used the recovered instrument for songwriting, “to resuscitate it at first, then for the sheer joy of playing.” An unexpected change of pace altered Bishop Allen’s entire process, and eventually the previous dozen, unformed tracks were abandoned. “We remembered what we liked about making music. The songs started to pile up—nothing complete, just fragments, observations and ideas—and we started to realize how much we liked working on new things.”
