Recommended: Make Art Make Money

Art fuels more art. The simple act of getting my ass down to the seat tends to do more for my creativity than nearly anything.  And yet, sometimes just moving those few feet to the desk or the coffee shop can seem easier to put off for just "a few minutes".  So I always try to supplement my off times, my idle moments, with books about art, or artists, and ways to cope with the challenges of creativity.  

The book I am loving right now is Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career by Elizabeth Hyde Stevens.  

It explores the successful ways that Jim Henson was able marry art and commerce, much of which involved the "art as gift" philosophy.  The basic idea behind it is that art, by its very nature is a gift.  And yet, those creating that gift need to be able to support themselves in order to continue creating.  It's a basic truth, that for the creator, most of the financial gains from that art go right back into making more. And more often than not, the one who creates will put more effort, more time, and more money into it than is "wise" in a business sense of the word. Henson both epitomizes this, and made peace with this. He was able to keep the message of his work pure even though he was commodifying and selling likenesses of his characters.  The work never became about making money. The money was always to make more and better art.  Without The Muppet Show you could never have had The Muppet Movie, without which you could never have had The Dark Crystal, without which you could never have had The Story Teller, and so on.  This is true not just on a financial level, one funding the next, but on a creative level.  The artistic achievements and new understandings reached in one project made the next one possible.

One of the passages that I found particularly inspiring discusses Henson's 1972 television special The Muppet Musicians of Bremen, in which four mistreated animals escape their miserable masters to seek a new life. Hyde Stevens uses this work to parallel the creative struggles Henson was going through.

     Chased from his home, Leroy [the donkey] finds himself alone in the world, pulling junk that                

     "ain't worth nothin". He doesn't seem very lucky at all. But he can be. 

     Enter the frog. 

     Leroy laments his condition to Kermit, who happens to be sitting on a fence. "I'm on the road

     to nowhere," he says. "I gave ol' Mordecai eighteen years of hard work, and what do I have to 

     show for it?"

     Kermit points at the wagon.

     "It's mighty hard pullin'." The wagon, he thinks, is nothing but a burden.

     Kermit tells him he also has a tuba.

     "You mean this big kinda twisty funnel thing? I don't even know what it's fer!"

Kermit shows the donkey how to change his perception of his lot in life, that the things he views as a burden can actually be a salvation. The same can be said for every artist. We spend out lives trying to hide our injuries and imperfections and show only what we have decided is worthy. Doing this is like "a dancer, dancing with one hand behind her back" as my former acting teacher used to say.  Sharing the wounds artfully, allows intimacy between artist and viewer, and opens up a whole new pathway to explore, one that's likely to be very fertile territory because it is at the heart of what we are most passionate about.

Hyde Stevens continues:

     Henson's shoestring budget resulted in Kermit being fashioned out of the fabric from his

     mother's old coat, and that intern spawned the look of a thousand Muppets. His work in

     commercials [something Henson had very ambivalent feelings about] led both to a healthy

     workshop budget and eventually to Sesame Street, who's producers were trying to use the power    

     of commercials to teach. It couldn't be predicted from the outset, but each part led to the next part,  

     and eventually it added up to staggering success when Henson started to see the shape it might

     take.

     Henson may not have chosen his career up until 1958, but he was able to turn burdens into

     strengths. "Take what you got and fly with it," Henson said. Most of us simple don't know what 

     we've got.

Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career began as a series of essays published in , and these were later expanded to become a full exploration of Henson's work, and lessons from that way of working that we can use today.  It's available from Amazon.com, and is a steal at $9.19

         

     

                        

The Jim Henson Exhibit At MOMI

We all have artists of our "age". People who were working at the right time to find our eyes, to meet our minds and shape us.  For me, Jim Henson came at that time.  Now, admittedly, it's a wide swath of time.  He began working in the fifties and continued into the very late eighties, and it's complicated by the fact that while he worked in a medium that is considered "kid's stuff", he never considered himself an artist for children alone, so his work was AND wasn't meant for me.  And yet, I saw Sesame Street in its earlier years, when it was a huge success, but not yet the monument it would become.  I saw The Muppet Show when it first aired, and my family was in line with a lot of other family members on the opening weekend of The Muppet Movie (we barely made it in as the line wrapped around the theatre).  I watched Emmett Otter's Jug Band Christmas whenever I could catch it on HBO, and The Dark Crystal several times at the theaters.  There was a theatre called the Village IV that played it, and they also had someone come and paint their windows with scenes of some of the more fantastical films.  I watched all the Henson films, made sure I was home to watch The Story Teller and The Jim Henson Hour.  He is, to encapsulate it, the artist for my generation.  His was a message of unification, of love, and of changing the world for the better one person at a time.  He made fun of people, yes, of our foibles and follies, but always from the perspective of one who experienced those follies and foibles first hand.

It's a message, and an aesthetic, and a sensibility (this nostalgic, vaudevillian sentimentality mixed with an earnest need to comfort and enlist the dreamers of the world in his mission) that had a strong impact on me.  And yet, I had never seen an exhibition of his before.  I had been in Austin and missed the Sesame Street exhibit at the Lincoln Center, missed the first exhibit that came through the MOMI, and not been to Atlanta to the permanent exhibit. So I was really looking forward to the new permanent exhibit at the Museum Of the Moving Image, which was years in its arrival.  But then when it came? I didn't rush there. I didn't want to be annoyed with people, irritated by them and their inane comments about the work, annoyed by the crowds.  It would have felt opposed to the intent of the exhibit, and poisoned my first glimpse. It was a sacred experience, the first visit, and had to be well timed, ad well planned.  I waited more than a month, and then, last Sunday as the doors opened for the day, I headed in.  

I don't want to spoil the experience with mountains of pictures, as people coming to the museum should be able to feel they are taking a journey that no one  else has, but I do want to tease it, and share.  

I would recommend that anyone coming read about Jim Henson before you arrive, because this collection does a wonderful job of cementing the story of his life and work, and of highlighting the experiences of the companions and fellow visionaries that joined him on his path. You'll see the harness that Carrol Spinney wore to perform Big Bird, you'll see Fran Brill's "elevator" boots that raised her up to an equivalent height of the men she performed with, and you'll see script revisions by Jerry Juhl, muppets performed by Richard Hunt, Jerry Nelson, Dave Goelz and Frank Oz, designed and built by Bonnie Erickson, and by Don Sahlin.  You'll see renderings by Brian Froud, and you'll get glimpses of the impact Jane Henson had on Henson's life and art (although her impact is so ingrained and ethereal, its difficult to physicalize). Speaking of Jane, thinking back on the exhibit she is a very quiet but constant presence, especially in the early work represented. As the exhibit grows, I would love to see temporary exhibits share the space, and a closer examination of Jane Henson and her work and influence is well-deserved.

 In a way, visiting the Henson Exhibit was like visiting New York City for the first time.  I saw a world I had loved as long as I can remember, that I had always read about, watched, that had permeated my psyche, and yet, prior to seeing the physicality of it, it didn't feel truly "real" to me.  Graspable.  This exhibit allows people to get up close and see that these people and animals existed in more than two dimensions, and at the center of their artistic mission and purpose was a creator, a performer, a dreamer, a business man and a leader.  Someone who may not have been comfortable in all of the roles, but who stepped into them to help make his world a reality, one that we could all share.

It's time to Dim The Lights...For Now

It looks like the most recent incarnation of "The Muppets" on has bitten the dust.  I admit, I'm a little surprised.  Upon its debut last fall, while receiving mixed reviews from the fans (and from right wing mothers), was pretty well received by the "average consumer".  Ratings were good.  But apparently, they weren't good enough, and, so they dismissed their show runner and hired a replacemtn to steer the show in a new direction.  I, unfortunately, never saw what happened with the new show runner, if the new direction was better than the original, because I didn't make it that far in the series.

When I saw the preview, I was pretty excited.  It was fresh, it was different, and it was modern.  The muppets take on "The office comedy of manners" genre?  I'm in.  And yet, when I saw the first episode, I didn't feel that it quite lived up to its potential.  It was just another "The Office", but with versions of the muppets, slightly altered to fit into this format.   It was like an animated series that had no need to be animated.  The muppets were not needed here.  By the second and third episodes I was watching to support the company, to make sure it was as successful as it could be so that more projects with the muppets would be greenlit.  I was not watching for my own enjoymen.  Watching the show had become a duty, a fan's obligation. I became lax in my viewing, and lagged way behind, never quite catching up.    

Why didn't it work?  A lot of friends that I'd talked to mentioned "how mean the muppets were to each other", and it's true.  They are dismissive of each other, they mock each other, and the sitcoms writers expect the audience to laugh at their failures.  Fozzie and Scooter got particularly rough treatment, being written as "losers" in a way they never had before.  In a way, the muppets at their core, ALL of them, were underdogs.   But they had also always been optimists, dreamers who didn't let their current circumstances get them down.  And news flash-  the muppets have always been kind of mean to each other.  There were "hamhock" jokes tossed about, blatant name calling, karate chops, upstaging, heckling.  Loads of it. They were part of the slings and arrows that the characters faced.  But what they had also always had, was a gigantic overwhelming larger than life love of "SHOWBIZ".  All of them loved what they did, in spite of what it cost them emotionally.  And Kermit, because he felt responsible for all of these misfits, struggled and corralled to make that dream come true for them.  The muppets always reflected ourselves, our struggles to find purpose, and we commiserated.  And the product of their struggles was what we got to cheer, and enjoy.  This kooky, off-beat nostalgia.  I mean the show wasn't desperately grabbing for relevence.  It was a vaudeville show, in the seventies, highlighting novelty songs from the turn of the century, for chrissake.  

  

And then, something happened, and it happened before the death of Jim Henson.  The muppets realized their own success.  They became products, they became "cute", and they capitalized on it.    And they have struggled ever since.  And recently, in a desperate attempt to keep the relevance they won in the new films (which incidentally was a huge hit because it appealed to the Gen X Nostalgia for them) they mutated themselves into this genre.  

And Miss Piggy???  At heart, she, like Fonzie and Kermit and the rest, had always been an underdog.     She was never "on top", but always fighting for the recognition she felt she deserved.  Sure she was angry, but it came from a place of resentment.  It was resentment at being under appreciated and misunderstood- unrecognized for being the star she thought she should be.  It was that very essence, what Frank Oz was eluding to when he said that Miss Piggy was "A truck driver who thought he was a woman".  She was a fish out of water.  And then, sometime in the eighties, Miss Piggy, the character who played the television persona (how's that for meta?) realized that America appreciated her.  And the grande dame act started to come from a different place.  It was now coming from a place of privilege.  But she never lost her heart, until the most recent Muppet Movie, and this new show.  Which have taken the "Actress behind the character" and made her, the character.  

This show needed to make her an underdog again, and aware of that.  Losing her frog, seeing her leap through hoops trying to win him back would have been very satisfying, and if she hadnt done it with such a sense of entitlement, she would have.  If she had lost her job at the talk show, been demoted, and then had to fight her way back up, she would have seemed quite so mean -spirited and smarmy as she came to be perceived.  Yes, she could be bitchy, but that was the frosting on the cake.  It had never really been "the cake".

And now the show has been cancelled.  And, while I'm always sad when the Muppets aren't a rousing success, I now have hope that they will go back to the drawing board and try again, and maybe next time ( and there WILL be a next time) they will get a little bit closer to what it was that made us all love them.