This is an e-mail I got over the weekend, seeking advice.  I asked Steve, the writer, if I could respond in a blog post since his question is of a kind that I get asked much more than any other:

Hey Sean, I need some words of wisdom from you on how I can get my own art career going and on track. I am working in an office right now – Fraud detection analyst for a Mastercard issuing bank.

In short, I have lost my sense of humor, and each day seems to lack a sense of purpose.

I have been watching as you’ve grown and progressed, and realized that we both have the same 24 hours in a day to work with.

I need some words of wisdom from you in this regard. I used to have a wicked sense of humour. I want it back.  I want to reclaim it.

-Steve

Hi Steve!

Thanks very much for writing.  I am flattered that you would come to me with a question like this.  I thought all weekend about your question and I thought of a catchy way to explain how to find what you’re looking for.

It’s all about The 3V System: Values, Vision, and Vehicle.

Values

First, you have to know what you stand for. You have to know what’s important to you, who you want to be, what you want for yourself.  Be opinionated, keep high standards, and surround yourself with people who inspire you instead of people stuck in the same rut as everyone else.  You don’t want comfort in forgetting your cares, you want to be uncomfortable enough to take action.

Vision

Your vision is the effect you want to have on the world.  It doesn’t have to be earth-shatteringly huge.  It could be as simple as a word of advice for the people around you.  Care passionately about what’s important to you and you’ll start spotting places where there is a bit of class, taste, or beauty missing that only you can fill in.  That’s what art is for.

Vehicle

Your vehicle is the form in which your vision expresses itself, and the arena in which you explore your values.  You need a vehicle because otherwise the ideas inside you collect dust and eventually disintegrate.  Whatever you feel is the best expression of your talents and your vision whether writing, drawing, speaking, or any other outlet, you need a project to get passionate about.  This will give you something to look forward to while you’re doing the things you’d rather not, and it will provide the means and opportunity to get to know yourself better so that you’re more of the real you in all areas of life.

The hardest part is making the time for your vehicle.  There are a million and one perfectly good excuses for why you have no time for it.  You get home from work, unwind, prepare dinner, check in with the world, relax a little bit, go to the gym if you’re on your fitness game, and next thing you know it’s time for bed again.  That’s the routine.  That’s also how the Universe finds out who is serious and who is just phoning it in.  Most people want everything to be in place, but I’ve always been a big fan of just jumping in and seeing what happens.  Besides, at this stage what have you got to lose except for some of your sleeping hours?

I started seeing the microscopic, incremental day-to-day changes that the workaday world was having on me and that’s why I stopped showing up to work to be an Artist with no plan, no money, and no idea how I was going to pay the rent.  My way is hard and sometimes it’s not very fun, I’m not going to lie.  But for me it’s about what’s going to make for the most interesting story to tell at the end of it all.

I hope his helps.  Keep me updated on how it goes!

-Sean

Beyoncé VS Avril

This is the first match up on the site.  Seriously?  This ain’t even a fair fight.  I’m sure Avril is lovely, but Mrs. Jay-Z is in the elite division.  She’s a timeless icon in league with Rita Hayworth and Audrey Hepburn, and you’re putting poor little Avril up against her in the first round?  There isn’t even a discussion to be had.

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Carrie Underwood VS Katy Perry

Another one that’s not even a question.  Carrie Underwood is pretty in a conventional way, but she’s not sex symbol material for me.  I mean, I get that middle America has a difference of opinion on this than I do, but I’m street.  And Katy Perry’s riding that line running between cute and sexy that has done me in in real life more than once.  Katy Perry all the way.

The photo below looks so much like a girl I know IRL that if it was her Facebook profile pic, I would be asking her when she posed for it.  Katy Perry: If you also want to know if I want to smoke a bowl with you, the answer is “yes”.

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Bianna Golodryga VS Sarah Silverman

I didn’t know anything about Bianna Golodryga before seeing her name here, but it’s not hard to beat Sarah Silverman.  Sarah Silverman is a sex symbol for those dudes who want a woman to wear the pants in the relationship and be treated like a piece of shit.  You’re supposed to get over that in your early 20s, but I am saddened as ever to be reminded that some of us never do.  Bianna Golodryga wins this one by disqualification.

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Christina Hendricks VS January Jones

This is the most epic match-up in the tournament.  This is Andre the Giant VS Hulk Hogan at Wrestlemania 3 – the greatest match you’re likely to ever see.  It’s not just that they’re two of the most gorgeous women currently on the scene, but you have the added drama of their being co-stars on Mad Men, one of my favorite TV shows ever.  This is the sex symbol equivalent of Pacino VS DeNiro in Heat.  Further complicating the issue is that their styles are so different that they don’t lend themselves to comparison.  Yikes.  Let’s do some further analysis.

Christina Hendricks gets an early lead for the red hair and her rack.  January Jones sashays her way back into the game with her grace and classic beauty, tying the game with less than a minute to go.  Christina Hendricks does that coy blink thing and wins it in sudden death overtime.

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Heidi Montag then VS Heidi Montag now

This one goes to Heidi Montag because she followed me on Twitter.  Or maybe it was her manager.

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Anne Hathaway VS Rachel McAdams

The Nerd ‘net is ablaze with discussion over who is more suited to the role of Black Cat if that character were in a Spider-Man movie, A or R.

If this were a discussion about acting chops, Rachel McAdams would get it in an instant.  Even if it was about who I think would be cooler to invite into my party posse when we go take over Shake A Tail, it would come up McAdams.  And I really want to give her a pass on this one for the hometown love, but Anne Hathaway has just got the va-va-voom thing going on for me so to Ms. Hathaway it goes.  Even though I wasn’t for an instant buying the age-reversing process in Get Smart as an explanation for why she was playing Agent 99.

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Jessica Alba VS Jennifer Aniston

Jennifer Aniston reminds me of Mariah Carey in that she had a really natural, real-person charm when she first hit the scene, and has since morphed into a plasic diva.  Jessica Alba, on the other hand, appeared all over town in those tearaway Good Luck Chuck posters with the ice cream.  Jessica Alba probably wouldn’t make it to late in the tournament, but her first round match is a breeze and she wins it easily.

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Eva Mendes VS Sienna Miller

Even though Eva Mendes looks just delicious, her trouble in her first-round match-up is that I don’t go for that skinny-pretty-blonde combo often but when I do, I go for it full force.  Further, Sienna Miller gets Sean cred for playing Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl.  As yet I have not seen Ms. Mendes dressed like a 60s party girl which is the look that makes me go “Hello!  We haven’t met…”  Sienna Miller takes it in an unexciting, low-scoring game.

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Just when I was wondering where Scarlett Johansson was, I discovered that past winners are not eligible.  That means that neither are Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Jessica Biel, Halle Berry, or Kate Beckinsdale.

See the full tournament here

What do you think?  Would you have made the same picks?

In this week’s Monday Meditation, I am going to share with you a hard lesson that I learned about content creation. I try not to write from the point of view of “don’t do what I did”, and only be proactive, but an innocent tweet got me thinking about the importance of creating content.

NEVER STOP PUMPING OUT CONTENT

Here is a tweet sent out last Friday by one of my favorite Twitter peeps, Scott Stratten of un-marketing.com - @unmarketing on Twitter:

“Community, sponsor, content. Content builds community, sponsors want ur community”

Gary Vaynerchuk, author of Crush It, also stresses the importance of content creation as the foundation of building community online.

When I first started my career as an artist, I instinctively knew that content is king. With no education and no money, I knew that I would have the edge if I was more prolific than the other guy. I pumped out photocopied comic books like crazy, and quickly developed a style, an audience, and a modest business.

DON’T REST ON YOUR LAURELS

But then my first taste of real success came. I signed a development deal with a production company for a TV show, entered into a publication agreement with a comic book publisher, and went to work for a late night TV show helping them launch a spin-off comic book and rebranding the show for the web.

Surprisingly, all of these deals brought my content creation and being prolific to a halt, costing me time and ruining my momentum.

The comic book publisher delayed and delayed and delayed and then went out of business before anything by me got published. The network wanted to see another edition of my underground cinema event, but the production company spent a year writing Word documents. Working on the late night TV show, a lethargic and complacent corporate culture meant that I only got to do about a quarter of what I was hired to do.

For the two years that all of this was going on, I wasn’t sharing my vision, nor creating content around my passion. I was caught up in other people’s schedules, other people’s priorities, and other people’s goals, instead of continuing to do what attracted those opportunities to me in the first place. I was sacrificing my momentum and the community I had built, putting my success in other people’s hands. I treated my business like the game was over and I had won.

I learned the hard way that it never gets easy.

In fact, the demands on your creativity and problem-solving increase with the scope of your challenges.

This is why it’s so important to create content around what you’re passionate about – you need that high level of passion to get you through when it gets really tough. Lucky for me that I’m so stubborn and single-minded about being an artist.

I was as confused as everyone else on Twitter when I noticed that Bill O’Reilly was a trending topic this evening. If you watch the video above, you will see why.

In this clip from the Talking Points portion of his Fox News program, he takes issue with the adulation Michael Jackson has had poured upon his memory in the last couple of weeks. I have to admit, O’Reilly does make a point that I have thought myself, in that it is the very same media that tried to rip him apart while he was alive that is now hoisting up on a pedestal. And it’s not just the media, it’s everyone.

I think there’s a collective guilt thing at work here. Everyone made Michael Jackson a punchline because he was an easy target and now that he’s dead and no one gets the chance to atone for their behavior, guilt is driving everyone to want to polish his image so as to protect his legacy, in the hope that our society’s collective sins against the man will be forgotten.

I get O’Reilly pointing out the media’s hypocrisy. But to slam the man for his contributions to society? To say that he was ‘just’ a world-class entertainer? It seems like if a star doesn’t make any apparent effort to better the world beyond sing or appear in movies, we leave them alone but as soon as they try to use their wealth or fame to improve the world in some way, we jump down their throats.

I remember Creflo Dollar going on CNN and getting attacked for having a nice house, despite all of his charity and ministry work. Look what happens every time Bono tries to attract the world’s attention to some cause. As soon as you try to do anything, nothing is good enough. If Michael Jackson wants to spend a few bucks on himself, even a few hundred million bucks, what business is it of Bill O’Reilly’s? It’s Jackson’s money! He’s contributed so much already that he can’t enjoy the fruits of his labor? If I had $100 million, spent $90 million and gave $10 million to charity, I wouldn’t get commended! I’d get taken to task for whatever I spent the $90 million on.

Better journalists than I am have already demonstrated elsewhere how Bill O’Reilly composes his talking points based not on what he believes, but on what will stir up controversy. And that’s why the Twitterverse will not succeed in their campaign to have O’Reilly fired: he’s an asshole on such an epic scale that people can’t help but comment on it. Strong work, Bill. Strong work.

I thought redesigning the Super Party website was going to be a simple matter of making zip-a-tone dots and drawing lightning bolts but that is not the case.  I’ve been up so late drawing elaborate little minature typewriters and sunglasses.  I was in the middle of inking some elaborate 3-D cursive script that almost looks like the words are written out in toothpaste and I almost wished I had it in me to take a short cut but no, I have a vision and I can’t stop until it’s done.

In the plus column: I love creating these things, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to look bomb when it’s done.

Web development Toronto (sponsored link)

Good one, America.  President-Elect Barack Obama.  We’re all very proud of you.

First of all, you put up two really great candidates.  Obama-maniacs went nuts like the world was going to come to an end if McCain had been elected, but everyone forgot about how he was such a darling of the media in the recent past on account of his ‘maverick’ status.  The poor guy got it in his head that he needed Bush’s crowd behind him to win, and started losing himself trying to woo them.  But the whole world is lucky for the fact that no matter who won, there would have been a good president.

Second, there was none of the nastiness that typically characterizes your elections.  I am more media-saturated than I have ever been, and I saw almost no really ugly attack ads until the last week or so.  There was definitely nothing like the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth or whatever they were called in 2004.  Both John McCain and Barack Obama conducted themselves well and the campaign mostly brought out the best in everyone.

And finally, you made the right decision.  Your election of Barack Obama was throwing in with the future.  A few haters have commented that people from around the world have no place taking any pride in Obama’s election.  But if we’re all going to come together and say “We’re all Americans now” in a moment of tragedy, why not for something positive?

We’ll be watching you for the next four years with great interest and enthusiasm.

And now enjoy a little ditty from Lee Dorsey!

Lee Dorsey – YES WE CAN

Download audio file (leedorsey_yeswecan.mp3)

That title is a sample that starts the track Biggie Got the Hype Shit, the Notorious B.I.G. song that predates Party & Bullshit.

Last night I was sitting on a patio (sponsor message: speaking of the patio, they could maybe use some new patio furniture), having a conversation that I find myself having over and over again these days.  This conversation is about how eventually, one of the major movie studios is going to make a movie about hip hop that is going to be every bit as epic and high-concept as Ray was, or any major biopic that got it right.  Hip Hop is the most dominant force in pop culture since The Beatles.  With so many people who have been so influential all packed into a relatively small area (the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn) at one time (the 80s and early 90s), it is inevitable that someone is going to make a movie about that place at that time.  The question becomes which rapper is this movie going to be about?

It has just come to my attention that Fox Searchlight Pictures is, right now, making a Notorious B.I.G. movie.  It is set for a 2009 release.  It’s called Notorious and it is being directed by George Tillman Jr. I’ve watched a couple of the production’s video blogs and the people involved seem really determined to get it right.  I’m excited, but trepidatious.

When Walk The Line came out, the failing of that movie – according to Johnny Cash fans I know – was that the whole thing about Johnny Cash was his voice.  Joaquin Phoenix doing Johnny’s voice just didn’t play with the true fans.  It’s the same thing with Christopher Wallace.  A big part of his appeal was his voice, especially in his manner of speaking.  Can Jamal Woolard pull off B.I.G.’s distinctive timbre?  I’m not even talking about the rapping, I just mean conversational speech.

As for the rest of the casting, it looks like they’ve got a bunch of people who can at least pull off the physical demands of their portrayals.  I am especially intrigued with Antonique Smith as Faith Evans (and even just intrigued with the woman generally after seeing her in a Beatles t-shirt.  Zowie!)  Getting Angela Bassett for Biggie’s mom was a nice boon.  Speaking of Ms. Bassett, whatever happened to the talk of Shakespeare’s Macbeth starring her and Laurence Fishburne?

New York Magazine has posted a review of the Notorious script and they are not hopeful. They think that the scope of the movie is too big.  With Biggie’s managers and mother all involved, it might be a case of too many cooks.  Christopher Wallace means something very profound but different to each of them, and there’s no way to please everyone.  I remember reading Spike Lee’s production journal for Malcolm X, and the trouble he had with all of the various interested parties who each had their own interest in how Malcolm was portrayed.  But at the end of the day, Spike had to take all of their opinions under advisement but then go off and do his own thing.  There is the potential for Notorious to play like Man In the Moon where it wasn’t a story so much as a re-enactment of a series of moments from the man’s life.

But I hope New York Magazine is wrong.  I am a huge Biggie fan.  I mean, HUGE.  This is just about as exciting for me as it would be if they were making a Beatles movie.  So now we wait, and we watch.  We watch the production video blogs, we watch the press, and we watch to see if this movie lives up to B.I.G.’s legacy.

And as a special treat for all of the Biggie lovers who don’t know what I’m talking about when I tell them about the Ready to Die O.G. Edition, here you go! Some of the alternative mixes are not as good as the originals, some are better. But the collection is worth downloading even just for the bonuses, including the aforementioned Biggie Got the Hype Shit, the highly-energetic Come On with Sadat X, and even a freestyle about Pepsi.

I’m gonna get a little more personal on this one. I had a topic prepared for this week’s Monday Meditation, but I’m gonna put that off for now and get into some deeper-level theory.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS MULTI-TASKING

Timothy Ferriss and his book The 4-hour Workweek are a major influence on my thinking right now. His and Raymi‘s are the blogs I keep an eye on day in and day out. Anyways, there’s a thing in Tim’s book where he calls bullshit on the idea of multi-tasking. I ran with it and I’ve been getting so much more done because of it.

We all like to talk about how we’re such great multi-taskers. We wear it like it’s a badge of honor. “Oh yeah, I’m a great multi-tasker.” But you are only ever actually doing one thing at a time. Multi-tasking really means that you get distracted constantly. You never get to actually focus on any one thing. Multi-tasking really means that you are the centre of a galaxy of unfinished projects and unrefined ideas.

I AM NO DIFFERENT

When I first started writing these articles, talking about productivity in the context of being an Artist, it made me clue in to to a few ways that I needed to take my own advice. Do you ever feel like you’re at the centre of a galaxy, and all of the stars are those important but not quite urgent tasks that never seem to get done?  I’m talking about those ones that each seem pretty easy – write a letter, mail off a package, research the answer to a question. Those aren’t so difficult.  But all together, it’s a big job that you’re saving for when you have the time for it.

DON’T DO A LOT IN A DAY

Based on Tim Ferriss’ suggestion of keeping a daily to-do list limited to a small number of critical tasks, I implemented a new policy: a 3-item to-do list.  If I’ve got more than than three things to do, they spill into the next day.  If I can’t come up with three, I have to dream some more up.

Here’s how it works: You have the day’s three items written on a sticky note, stuck to your computer screen, before bed the previous night.  You go to sleep knowing which one you’re going to start on when you wake up, and then you don’t do anything else – no email, facebook, myspace, phone messages, nothing – until you’ve completed that first job. Then check your correspondence.  But after you start one of your other jobs, don’t take a break until after it’s done.

IT’S COMPLICATED, HOW EASY IT IS

Here’s why three is the magic number: it’s enough items that you can feel like you’ve actually done something, but few enough that you’ll really feel like a jerk if you can’t do that many.

I tried experimenting with five and categorizing them, but that just complicated it unnecessarily.  With three jobs, you can always squeeze three into a day even if one gets out of control.  When it’s five, what if two of them don’t go smoothly?  There’s more of a risk of the system backing up.

Keep a pad of sticky notes on your table at all times (I like the yellow, ruled ones).  As you encounter something that needs doing, jot it down as a to-do for the next day.  If you receive an e-mail that will require some thought in it’s reply, write that reply down as an item.  Don’t just add it to the imaginary pile of correspondence in your head.

THIS IS HOW YOU MAKE THE TIME

Sometimes your next day is already filled up and something that’s not as urgent gets bumped.  Or you’re putting it on the list for two days down the line. The thing is to break everything down to actions and writing that down. ‘Write e-mail to so-and-so’ is a very clear and defined task. Not much to think about there.  ‘Respond to all e-mails’ is too broad.  It’s a concept and not an action.  It will always be one of those things you’ll get to on some imaginary occasion when you have the time for it.

This is what making time is all about!  Get on enough of a roll, and you’re getting your three items dinged off in record time for days at a stretch, leaving you all kinds of time for leisure and dreaming.  At the end of the day, that’s what success is all about.

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I went to see The Dark Knight on opening night (extra special thanks to my homey George for the hook-up!) on the Imax screen. Overwhelmed, I knew that I had to see it again to give it a proper assessment.  Then I got my hands on a copy of it to watch at home and spent pretty much all of last weekend unable to extricate myself from the movie’s world.  Now that I’ve seen it a few times, deconstructed it, reverse-engineered it, and savored my favorite scenes over and over, I realize that it’s not just great.  It’s breath-takingly beautiful, graceful as a ballerina, and will be one of those benchmark movies that we judge others against for decades to come.

For all of the comparisons to Heat and GoodFellas, I am mostly reminded of Natural Born Killers.  Both movies share a go-for-broke fearlessness in their vision of a world in which what we’re seeing is real.  They go way over the top, but bring the story in for such a skillful landing that you not only buy it as possible, but probable and even likely given the right circumstances.  Batman Begins showed us Batman’s world in a way that made it feel absolutely real.  The Dark Knight shows us the real world pushed to an extreme where Batman makes perfect sense.

Much of the attention the movie is getting centers on the acting.  Everyone’s going nuts over Heath Ledger, but I found Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon to be the stand-out performance here.  But Gary Oldman is always great, and Jim Gordon is not at the centre of the phenomenon of this movie.  The Joker is.  Some have tried to make the case that the attention Ledger’s performance is getting has more to do with his death than the actual job he did.  Bollocks to that.  Cesar Romero’s is the best screen representation of The Joker as portrayed in the comics, but Nolan’s and Ledger’s is an absolutely perfect characterization of The Joker as he would be if he were a real guy.  And this brings me back to my Natural Born Killers comparison.

I used to love to talk about NBK with people who didn’t like it.  The most common criticism of it was that it offers its loathesome protagonists as heroes.  I then point out that the genius of it is on the social commentary level where it makes the point that if Mickey & Mallory happened for real, in the age of Marilyn Manson on the radio and Geraldo on TV, it would happen exactly as depicted in the movie.  And then those characters became genuine cultural icons. Tributes and homages appeared across various media, as couples dressed up as Mickey & Mallory for their first Halloween together.  I don’t even want to get into the real-life copycat crimes.  I’m getting back to The Joker, I promise.

To get the most out of The Dark Knight, you need to have been following the various viral websites that comprised the greatest marketing campaign for anything, ever.  There were websites for everything from Gotham’s transit system to the newspaper to the 24-hour news network, complete with a weekly magazine show featuring characters from the movie as guests (all of the websites were ‘defaced by The Joker’ a week before the film’s release).  I’m surprised that no other reviews have mentioned the brilliance and skill in how, via these websites, they started telling the story two months before the movie even came out.  At the beginning of the movie, when Batman asks Jim Gordon if he trusts the new District Attorney, you know all about him because you followed his campaign and landslide victory on the internet.

But that’s all small potatoes compared to what they did with The Joker’s own site.  For over a year leading up to the release of the movie, ‘The Joker’ had people sign up to join his organization and then he gave them orders over the internet.  It was a big series of flash mob events, the grand finale of which led participants to their local cinema to be the first to see the film’s trailer.  The campaign had rabid fans appearing in cities all over the world, in Joker make-up, often in large gatherings.  And that doesn’t even touch on the number of people not taking part in the campaign who painted Joker make-up on themselves in their Facebook profile pics.  And this is where The Dark Knight one-ups Natural Born Killers.  Oliver Stone held a mirror up to society so as to raise alarm to the fact that we live in a world where people might identify with Mickey Knox – an anarchic psychopath.  The marketers of The Dark Knight not only encouraged us but offered us incentives to declare full-on allegiance to The Joker – an anarchic psychopath.

In Frank Miller’s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, a big part of the story involves young people, without a more appropriate role model, falling under the influence of the villain.  Within the world of the movie The Dark Knight, I imagine that The Joker would likewise inspire a host of followers, copycats, and imitators, and would probably even use the internet in much the same way that the movie’s marketers did.  I thought that this would have been something worth exploring in the movie.  That is, until I realized that they didn’t need to because they had already done so BY MAKING IT HAPPEN IN REAL LIFE.  How much more of a nudge would it have taken, were this much power and influence in the hands of an artist with a slightly more anti-social creative vision, to push those Joker-philes to a place where life imitates art in ways that we don’t even want to think about?  And if that were to happen, you’d have to wonder what kind of force would emerge to stop them.

People have been saying for years that superheroes are our culture’s Greek Gods, and their adventures in comic books and movies are our mythology.  As technology has improved and the audience has grown accustomed to ever-higher levels of believability, movie-makers have been able to inch ever closer to putting us in a world where Batman and Spider-Man are real.  Marvel and the studios they were affiliated with were the leaders in this arena, but Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk each fumbled in their own way.  Each served as little more than a step in setting up the eventual big team-up movie, taking the audience for granted.  DC Comics and Warner Brothers have not only given us an all-time classic with The Dark Knight, they’ve gone and innovated the artform to a point where we can barely tell the difference between their world and ours any more.

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