Art and Climate

I really ought to blog about making Good Omens (we're in week 4 of shooting) and making Anansi Boys (starts shooting next week), and about the astonishing Ocean at the End of the Lane play at the Duke of York's Theatre in London (and now that I've said this, I know I will) but yesterday I spoke (via Zoom, because of Covid Protocols) at COP26, the Conference of the Parties on Climate Action, and I thought I ought to just put what I said up here. So it doesn't get lost.

Art is how we communicate. Art began when we left marks to say we were here. 

The oldest art we have is the 200,000 year old handprints of Neanderthal or Denisovan children, on the Tibetan Plateau, making marks with their hands because it was fun, because they could, and because it told the world they had been there.

The human family tree has been around for millions of years, Homo Sapiens for a much shorter time. We are not a successful branch of the tree, because, unless we use our mighty brains to think our way out of this one, we don't have a very long time left.

We need to use everything at our disposal to change the world, and show that we can compete with the ones who were here before us. And by compete I mean, not make the world uninhabitable by humans. The world will be fine, in the long run. There have been extinction events before us, and there will be extinction events after we’ve gone.

When I was young I wrote a short comics story about the use of the planet Earth as a decorative ornament. It was about our tendency to destroy ourselves. Back then, I worried about nuclear war: one huge event that would end everything. Now I'm worried that we are messing things up a little at a time, until everything tips.

We who explore futures need to build fictional futures that inspire and make us carry on. When I was a kid, it was going to the stars that was the dream. Now it has to be fixing the mess that we've left behind, and not just walking away, leaving the Earth a midden.

We need to change the world back again. And that will take science, but it will also take art. To convince to inspire and to build a future.

We need to reach people's hearts, not just their minds. Reach the part of their hearts that believes it's good to plant trees for our grandchildren to sit beneath. Reach hearts to make people want to change, and to react to people and organisations despoiling the planet and the climate in the same way you would react to someone trying to burn down your house, while you are living in it.

So that 200,000 years from now, children can leave handprints in clay, to show us that they were here, and because making handprints and footprints is fun.

Labels: art, climate change

House thoughts, and some unanswered questions on art and commerce

It's a very strange process, moving into a new house. In my case, the worst of the moving in has been done. Now all that remains is details, hundreds upon hundreds of details. Details and details and details and, occasionally, small disasters. Yesterday, the heating stopped working. The heating stopped working because there was two inches of water in the cellar, because a water treatment pump could not keep up with the combination of rain and snowmelt that was already filling all the drains, and so backed up. I have good friends and they made everything okay, with pumps and knowledge of fixing things.

(I do not really have a lot of fixing things knowledge. And while you may want to read a book by me, you do not want me to put up your shelves. Trust me on this.)

I went into New York overnight, finished writing a very much overdue introduction in my hotel room, emailed it off moments before I fell asleep, had a Really Cool Secret Meeting this morning, and am typing this on the train back, the Hudson river grey and, on the far bank, distant leafless hills and cliffs. I want Spring to begin.

I'm currently pondering whether or not to write a short story for a company. They've asked me to write one. I can write whatever I like, as long as I put their product in it and do not show their product killing people horribly, or even nicely. It would be a fun, interesting project that would pay well.  To make things more interesting, I've already mentioned their product in a novel, I like their product, and I can see where the story would go.

But I'm not sure. I'm going back and forth on it.

I loved doing last year's project for BlackBerry, mostly because it felt like they were a patron of the arts. They gave me a very open brief ("What would you like to do on social media?") and let me go off and do it. They gave me a BlackBerry, and I promised I'd use it for a year. They made short films which I loved, about writing and inspiration and creation.

(And I just noticed that the BlackBerry Keep Moving videos have become unlisted on YouTube, so here they all are, in case anyone needs them. The fourth is my favourite.)



(As a note here: when the year was up, I wanted to stay with BlackBerry as a phone platform. I really liked it, and kept finding myself frustrated when I'd use iPhones or Android phones, but I was grumpy about the lack of apps. They gave me a Z30. It's a wonderful phone (here's the USA Today write up.) But y'know, like they said in the USA Today review, no Yelp and no Netflix.

But then, a couple of weeks after I got the Z30, they released the latest operating system, 10.2.1, which also now natively runs Android apps. I archived on my old Android phone any Android apps I wanted on the Z30, bluetoothed them over to the BlackBerry, installed them, and now use Yelp and Netflix and Audible and such on the BlackBerry with abandon.)

But the BlackBerry project, while it was done for and with the assistance of BlackBerry, never meant I had to put a BlackBerry into a story. Which made me happy. Now I'm trying to figure out why that would have felt like crossing a line in the way that the Nokia phone (which, if I were writing it today, would be an iPhone) in the first chapter of American Gods does not. And what that line is. And why it troubles me.

...

Getting ready for the Art Speigelman conversation at Bard on Friday. We plan to talk a whole lot.

The Symphony Space "Selected Shorts" night on May 7th has now sold out. The only other event I'll be doing in New York this year is the Big One -- the Carnegie Hall event on June 27th. (You do not want to miss this: it's the same thing that sold out Sydney Opera House, with FourPlay String Quartet and me).

Which reminds me. One final TRUTH IS A CAVE.. night has been added to the world. Edinburgh, Sunday July 6th. As they say on their website:

Created for Sydney's renowned Graphic festival, this haunting tale of adventure, revenge and treasure, told as a hybrid between a storyteller, an artists and an Australian string quartet is playing five performances only - Carnegie Hall in New York, the Warfield in San Francisco, two sold-out shows at London's Barbican, all leading up to this very special night at Usher Hall.

Here's the Usher Hall tickets link.


Ayelet Waldman asked me if I could mention that she has a new book out, and I will, and not just because I have not yet written my speech for her daughter Rosie's Bat-Mitzvah: It is called Love and Treasure. That's the Amazon link, and here's the Indiebound.

...

oops. This sat on my computer for 36 hours. In the meantime, Spring has definitely sprung. Deer are frisking through the woods and platoons of wild turkeys are self-importantly strutwaddling up and down the drive. I hope Spring heard me grumbling, and decided it was time to turn up.

Labels: art, Blackberry, cellars, commerce, Keep moving, New York

The Art of Asking

In a day and a half over half a million people have watched this talk, at the TED website and on YouTube.

 I am so proud of her. Really: I've never been happier than when I watched her get a standing ovation, and watching this video go viral is an absolute joy.

It was hard, sometimes, over the last six weeks, while she worked on her speech. Genuinely rough, sometimes: it was like having a third person in the marriage. There was me, Amanda, and there was Amanda's TED speech, and she was spending a lot more time with her TED speech than she was with me.

Initially I was grumpy and jealous and I felt left out, and then, once I heard her give an early version of the speech, I got caught up in the fun of watching her craft it (and watching her figure out how to get it down to 12 minutes), and toward the end I was loving the process of watching her give her speech to college kids and to our friends and just to me and Anthony, and when I got a cold I even banished her from the house for a few days, because I didn't want her speech being derailed by sickness...

Then we went to TED, and it was all worth it. She went on between Sergei Brin and Larry Lessig and she gave her speech. The people who came up and congratulated her over the next few days were people you've heard of, the ones who make the world different.

And when someone came up to me that afternoon and said "You must be Mr Palmer", I said, Yes, I supposed I must be, and I beamed like a madman.

Watch the speech.

It's called The Art of Asking.

When she was working on it, I thought it was about her Kickstarter, and probably applicable to musicians,  but hearing people talk to her about it, and watching it go viral, I realised that it's about so much more than that.

...

(I'm in the UK right now for a couple of days. I've just been the Keynote Speaker at the Cambridge WATERSPRITE Student Film Festival.  Today I'm going to be in London with the BlackBerry film crew looking at paper stock and such things for the Calendar of Tales. Tomorrow morning is the NEVERWHERE Radio 4/Radio 4 Extra Press Conference and I get to meet BERNARD CRIBBINS. Proper Blog entry SOON.)

Labels: amanda palmer, art, Asking

Now up! Read a Calendar of Tales. And make ART.

ROUND TWO BEGINS...

Here's a video that the people at BlackBerry (who are the patrons of this project) made of me ten days ago, on the two days between the tweeting out the questions and the writing of the stories.

If you go to http://keepmoving.blackberry.com/desktop/en/us/ambassador/neil-gaiman.html you will be able to read or download a free PDF of all twelve of the stories I wrote in three days of madness last week: over 9000 words of tales, each one very different, each one inspired by a reply to a question I'd twittered to the world.

The next stage is art. I made stories inspired by replies, now I want the stories to inspire art. Something we can make a calendar out of -- an online one, perhaps a paper one as well... Go to the website to find out how.

I tried to write stories that would make pictures in people's heads. I hope I succeeded.

Yours nervously,

Neil

Labels: A Calendar of Tales, art, Authorial nervousness, Blackberry, Keep moving

Trust me, I'm a Doctor * (*Honorary, of Fine Arts)

This needs a proper blog entry all of its own, but I am running around like a mad thing, so as a stopgap, here's the Commencement Address I gave yesterday to the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Everything I could think of that someone starting out on a career in the arts right now might need to know.

Labels: art, commencement address, make good art, speech