Rules for Mavericks E-Book

Phil Beadle

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 186

Beschreibung

Rules for Mavericks: A Manifesto for Dissident Creatives by Phil Beadle is a guidebook to leading a creative life, to being a renaissance dilettante, to infesting your art form with other art forms, to taking a stand against mediocrity, to rejecting bloodless orthodoxies, to embracing your own pretension and, most of all, to dealing with your failure(s). 'If you make any stand against power, then power will stand against and on you. And it will do so with centuries of experience and techniques in how to do so effectively: you will be painted as barbaric, dismissed as stupid and insane, be told to know your place. Most of all, you will be termed maverick.' This genre-flouting manifesto is written by someone who has achieved and has failed in more than one field. As a Guardian columnist, award-winning teacher, award-winning broadcaster, author, editor, singer, songwriter, producer and public speaker, Phil Beadle knows a bit about leading a life producing good work across a variety of platforms. In this elegantly written book he glides and riffs around the idea of maverick nature, examines the processes of producing good work in creative fields and broaches the techniques that orthodoxies use to silence dissident voices. It is a 'how to dream' book, a 'how to create' book, a 'how to work' book and a 'how to fail productively' book; it is an examination of the many accusations that any dissident creative will face over a long career stirring things up, a guide to dealing with these with grace and a study in how to make creativity work for you. Rules for Mavericks is for anyone who wants to live and work more creatively and successfully. Contents include: Introduction: 'maverick nature', 1 Rules, 2 Starting off, 3 Failure, 4 Creativity and the process of production, 5 Work, 6 The realm(s) of appearance, 7 Performance, 8 Change, 9 Renaissance dilettantism, 10 Writing (and reading too), 11 On being reviewed.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR RULES FOR MAVERICKS

Rules for Mavericks is irreverent, stimulating and absorbing. There’s a mixture of humour and wisdom on every page. It’s an insight into how thinking like a maverick can have practical benefits. Phil Beadle writes in a way that is personal and therefore easy to relate to. He demonstrates how deciding to think and behave like a maverick can change your work and personal life for the better.

Rod Judkins, author of The Art of Creative Thinking  

Phil Beadle is one of the most important voices in British education. His latest book is not just about the true nature of the word ‘maverick’. It is about perhaps the most important educational gift we can give, namely the courage and curiosity to truly be ourselves and not apologise for it. Maverick, as he explains, is a label often stuck on people who dare to challenge convention. It is not something they necessarily chose for themselves. But convention can never adequately describe us. Our deepest hopes and dreams are far too profound for it. Obsequious deference to convention can never really make great scientific breakthroughs, create great art or stand against tyranny. Nor can it speak to the hunger for learning in any child. It is a prison all of its own. Phil is not just some provocateur or agitator, as much as those who fear mavericks might like to belittle him with that cosy and ill-explored label. He is allergic to bullshit and he speaks for freedom against a mediocrity that can ruin lives.

Ben Walden, Artistic Director, Contender Charlie  

Voices in the wilderness are seldom heard with clarity. This book is the exception. Mavericks can’t be made, but they can be given the space and support to fly in the face of conformity with alacrity. Phil Beadle wears the badge conferred on him with uncomfortable reticence, but delivers a message in tune with his original thinking, emphasising the importance of straying from the flock whilst hiding in full sight of the wolves. Sometimes controversial, but never less than eye-opening and thought-provoking, which is what any self-respecting moderate demands of their mavericks. As society careers towards ever-narrowing options in a disenfranchised democracy designed to govern from the top down, polemicists become ever more important voices: a rule book for railing against the top might just be the most useful tool of all. Read it and build with it.

Pete Wilkinson, Director, The Jerwood Space  

The successor to Camus’ The Rebel, Phil Beadle’s Rules for Mavericks rocks, dips and swerves like no other book of this type ever has. It is a true original, combining anthropology and philosophy with a new way of looking at our world. It is revolutionary in scope and speaks not solely to intellectuals, but to all of us. The clarity of Phil’s writing opens up the closed and high grounds and lets us all in to the palace of intelligence. This is no mean achievement and the book is more than a must-read.

Jim Douglas, author of Tokyo Nights

Are where you are nice to people who have been nice to you. There have been a good few people who have been nice to me. I thank them and in particular IAN GILBERT and JIM HICKEY. I’d also like to thank CHRIS ROBERTS both for his writing over the years and for agreeing to write the foreword to this book (Chris is the Godhead of British music writing and author of Idle Worship, the best book ever written on fandom), Safia Aidid for giving us permission to quote her quite brilliant article and also DAVID BOWMAN for being open minded enough to be convinced.

MAVERICK, LIKE GENIUS OR LEGEND, HAS OFTEN BEEN OVERUSED, DRAGGED OUT OF CONTEXT TO SIGNIFY ANYONE OR ANYTHING THAT GOES AGAINST THE GRAIN, HOWEVER TIMIDLY OR SELF-SERVINGLY. Phil Beadle’s Rules for Mavericks resets and reaffirms the sterling significance of the term. Now, more than ever, we need it to mean something. In an era when the ever-bursting babble of instant mass communication has politicians portraying themselves as their polar opposites in order to score points and light entertainers profitably passing themselves off as bohemian rock and roll rebels, the true MAVERICK must not die out.

As Beadle writes herein, “No one will discover you. They’re all too busy doing what you, yourself, should be doing: trying to discover what is special about themselves. It’s nobody’s job title (but your own).” Similarly, nobody can really tell you how to be a MAVERICK or precisely what one is. Neither can anyone tell you how to exude charisma. But if you’ve got it in you it can be coaxed out. Being (a) MAVERICK may be perverse, but correctly channelled it could propel you further along in the board game of life than any number of sensible and considered moves. Creativity, despite the vacuity of most Hollywood-style believe-in-yourself follow-your-dream platitudes, is an inexact science and an art with an impulsive heart.

In what we still somehow call ‘the post-war years’, the great mavericks have been bold enough to dance to their own drum but savvy enough to snare the popular imagination. I was lucky enough to interview David Bowie four times and can confirm that he ‘had’ ‘it’. The balm of charm, the greased wheel of appeal. HE WORE A LUDICROUS AMOUNT OF BOOKISH LEARNING LIGHTLY AND HAD A FURIOUS ONGOING INTEREST IN THE NEVER-MOTIONLESS NOW.

The first man to convince me that ‘the Internet’ was going to be a big deal, he famously and incontrovertibly looked uncannily younger than his years, at least until what a very Welsh and very drunk Dylan Thomas might have – had he been lifted clumsily out of context – dubbed the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, Blackstar ones. As a teenage fan grown up, I’d stare at him across the table or room and note how he might have changed his hairstyle or dress sense – he never looked like his most recent photo – but that he was indisputably David Bowie. THE FREE MALE, UNIQUE. HE’D BRIM WITH IDEAS, ABSURDLY ARTICULATE AND ENGAGED COMPARED TO MOST POP STARS, OR COMPARED TO MOST HUMAN BEINGS. He was either very interested in and stimulated by the conversation you were having or supremely adept at pretending to be. Whilst some of that may, of course, have been practised showbiz schmooze, the life force was genuinely strong in him, the aura attractively alien. He was making the absolute most of every second on Earth.

So it’s little wonder that throughout his matchless career he was able to suss out and surround himself with the best talent. And, prior to that, he had the guts and garters to shrug off early misfires and frustrations and pitch himself headlong into the Ziggy Stardust role, which no experienced manager or industry expert would have recommended in a zillion years. He didn’t so much tear up the rule-book as incinerate it and fly on the fumes.

CONTENTS

Title PageDedicationAcknowledgementsForeword by Chris RobertsPrologueIntroduction: ‘maverick nature’1.rules2.Starting off3.Failure4.Creati>ity and the process of production5.Work6.The realm(s) of appearance7.Performance8.Change9.Renaissance dilettantism10.Writing (and reading too)11.On being reviewedAnd finally ...BibliographyAbout the AuthorCopyright

    Power works through management and control. It draws you into its field and makes you play by its rules, giving you forced choices within the confines of the only options made available to you. It sustains itself by opening up impossibly tiny spaces for inclusion, disciplining you until you are made to fit, while leaving the structures of exclusion intact. It operates under the facade of acceptance, masking the refusal, the resistance. Inclusion in these instances exists only to reinforce and diversify the never-changing norm.

Safia Aidid1

1 Safia Aidid, ‘#After Cadaan Studies’, New Inquiry (4 December 2015). Available at: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/after-cadaanstudies/. Thank you to Diane Leedham for drawing this to my attention.

PROLOGUE

The conscientious objector refused to fight. He did not agree with war itself and with this war in particular. He would only be a medic, so the army made him a medic on the front line. He lasted three days before an enemy bomb decapitated him. “He was suicidal anyway,” they said.

In 2015, a precisely articulate young female Somali graduate student at Harvard who describes herself as, and is, a radical Muslim feminist, wrote the quote on the opposite page, a dizzyingly impressive paragraph in response to lessons learnt when she attempted to challenge some of the orthodoxies of her own specialist area, Somali Studies. Sometime previously, she’d noted publicly that her realm of study was not overly populated by authorities on Somali culture who spoke from the authority of belonging, and she argued (both forcefully and well) with the aid of a Twitter hashtag #CadaanStudies2 that having voices with intimate insider knowledge of the culture being dissected might add at least a little of the flavour of balance to the discourse. To Aidid, much of the debate around Somali Studies was tainted by (what she satirised as) the “expert colonial gaze”,3 and she attempted to address this issue publicly at a high-level conference in Scandinavia. Her conclusions about her experiences say much to anyone considering taking a dissenting stance against any orthodoxy. In her case, this was specifically about how “history has structurally positioned Somalis as objects of knowledge rather than its legitimate producers”.4 Finding herself closed down and the subject of subtle accusation, she concluded with righteousness and with passion:

This is how power works. It seeks to silence and discredit the individuals who challenge it. It seeks to order the terms of discourse and engagement. It seeks to dismiss analysis as unproductive, unconstructive and unacademic. It seeks to frame critique as emotional, angry and aggressive. It does all of these things in order to put you back in your place for daring to speak.5

Following her experiences of speaking at the conference, she found herself subtly caricatured as “the raw Somali, the rebellious native bent on destruction, the angry, emotional, irrational Somali woman spoiling the party for the detached, objective, serious, academic researchers”.6 In short, Aidid had taken a dissenting stance against the entrenched position of an orthodoxy, and that orthodoxy’s response was (in her view) to silence through discrediting: covertly informing her that she was not talking in the correct language or playing according to the prescribed and appropriate rules; that her analysis was invalid because her tone was somehow unacceptable.

The orthodoxy had kindly, and with feigned grace, consented to allowing her a voice, for a prescribed time period, within a set space, within set rules, and that orthodoxy had ruled or decided that she was behaving in a petulant and ungrateful manner. She had been in receipt of every opportunity that it was in the gift of the orthodoxy to present so that she might put her case. Now could she please either express the appropriate gratitude and be assimilated, or desist from making quite such an ugly and unnecessary noise because the game was being ruined.

The subtext here is that the orthodoxy regarded itself as having accommodated her ‘anger’ and, in doing so, should have neutered her dissent.

Nothing had changed, of course: the river continues, always and ever, along the same path – only with new bits of assimilated grit, the waterlogged corpses of principled argument dissolving quickly in its flow. But she had been ‘allowed’ a ‘chance’ to speak. The glittering but worthless bauble is presented, always, to the ‘savage’, who is then required to go away and lose themselves, transported by its pretty colours. Aidid’s stand for her culture’s right to tell its own truth had obtained only the exact amount of the veneer of accommodation and respect that might be weighted as being ‘enough’ for the orthodoxy to continue entirely unaffected by her argument. Her stance, you see, was MAVERICK, and it was greeted with many of the standard responses and techniques that any MAVERICK stance receives: “discrediting”, “ordering the terms of discourse and engagement”, “dismissing analysis”, “framing critique as unsubtle, under-nuanced and overly emotional”.

MAVERICK, you see,

2Cadaan is what Somali people call those who are from different cultures.

3 Aidid, ‘#After Cadaan Studies’.

4 Aidid, ‘#After Cadaan Studies’.

5 Aidid, ‘#After Cadaan Studies’.

6 Aidid, ‘#After Cadaan Studies’.

You do what you are. You’re born with a gift. If not that, then you get good at something along the way. And what you’re good at, you don’t take for granted. You don’t betray it.

Morgan Freeman1

You. HUMAN. You.

Person holding and reading a book that didn’t sell particularly well, at a particularly irrelevant millisecond of human history, at which, most likely no other person is holding the same book. You are on page 5, which tells you what the book is about. You are, in all probability, the only person reading this page at this point in time, being disappointed by the fact that this first page tells you that the book you are holding is predominantly about failure: what to do with it; how and why you should rush towards its embrace; what to do when that embrace becomes too crushing; what to think of it; how to escape its comfy cardigan (if you may).

You, friend – like me and like everyone I know and, certainly, like every successful person I have ever known or heard of – YOU, FRIEND, KNOW OUR DEAR COUSIN, FAILURE, WELL ENOUGH, TOO WELL. YOU MAY HAVE BEEN SHACKLED FOR VASTLY TOO LONG TO HER UNDESIRED, UNWARRANTED HAVERSACK OF PEBBLES AND JAGGED STONES; YOU MAY CARRY HER AROUND WITH YOU DAILY, HEAVILY; YOUR SCHOOLING MAY HAVE GIVEN YOU THE MESSAGE THAT SHE IS YOUR BIRTH RIGHT, PERMANENTLY YOURS TO HAVE, YOURS TO HOLD; you might even have begun on

little more than astrology given a somewhat shitten veneer of respectability by association with ancient Greeks.

You are probably not a bigger failure than this author, nor is it likely that you will have been in receipt of the derisive see-saw mockery of the word “loser” as many times. At the relatively exalted age of 33, I was living in a cold water flat in midwinter with neither the light nor heat of anything more than a candle, with only the fake middle-class bonhomie of Radios 4 and 3 performing their roles as unsatisfying company, the un-illuminating golden light of a quarter bottle of whiskey being the only thing stopping me from freezing to death. At 33 I lived in the most dangerous area of London and walked daily to my work (as I had no money at all) – four miles away – in the second most dangerous area of London: in a tempest of rain, in broken shoes, with neither umbrella nor coat. At 33 I was a pathetic fool cowering beneath a window, fearing the visit of the bad men. They visited. At 34 I was homeless again.

I am now 51 and not a failure any more in my own mind nor in the minds of others. Now the pointing fingers they point, and their laughing owners they laugh, dismissing the paltry stack of accomplishments both “obsolete and small”2 that I’ve “shored against my ruins”3 with three syllables, the plosiveness of which accidentally match the ugliness of their intent: they sound out the following symbol of debatable idiocy – ‘Maverick’!

‘MAVERICK’, you see, is not a title you award yourself – it is thrown at you by others.

‘MAVERICK’ will be thrown at you by others if you meet certain conditions: the first of which is that you do not ever seek it. The second is that you will (always, ever) have an entirely ambiguous relationship with the badge. It is always ambiguously intended, after all.

It is not a title you award yourself. A true maverick does not seek (and has only rarely ever sought out of brutal upset or out of bloody mindedness engendered by that upset) marginalisation – they’ve always regarded their ideas as having some unarguable logic, a degree of mainstream appeal and a hooky enough chorus – and will be initially offended by the award. Your first experience (or memory) of the word may be of your own pathetic, stuttering reaction to its intended assault: a memory of standing, your sweating spine stuck to the back of a grey shirt as you retreated, under fire, into some bland institutional wall having been in receipt of its tepid accusatory slaughter for the first time.

There will be times when it is directed at you, and the thrower of the javelin might be of the distorted mind that the missile they are hurling is a sharpened compliment.

When we are children we attempt to assert our individualism for a while, until we are educated out of it and accept – albeit grudgingly – that we must at least TRY to fit in. As adults, we try to fit in (though we might still make some base claim towards iconoclasm predicated around our taste in novelty socks). Mostly, though, we try to fit in. We conform to what is expected of us by those who might either tut-tut at us or blithely destroy our futures if we refuse to obey the rules.

And yet, at the same time as we are joining in with the twelve statutory choruses of the Company Song, a diminished part of us understands that the lyrics are risible and the tune has a top note resonant of fascism; a further, less developed part of us may secretly wish it was us being pilloried in stocks for refusing to “smudge the air”4with devotionals to a god who, like his many distracted cousins, manifests only rarely, and even then only to the palpably insane.

Usually, though, we do not have the guts to stand out for the sake of ‘truth’. We may well recognise and quietly applaud the bravery of those who do, even going so far as to attend their funerals at which we’ll half-heartedly lament their fatal weakness( es), but in defining them as ‘maverick’ we throw a word in their direction that we ‘think’ they might appreciate and that we hope will show them our generally all too well hidden sense of kindredness, all the time blissfully only half-aware that this word is one of the chief tools any autocracy uses to discredit those who would stand against such.

“You learn how things are working from what happens to those who challenge how things are working.”5 If you make any stand against power, then power will stand against and on you. And it will do so with centuries of experience and techniques in how to do so effectively: you will be painted as barbaric, dismissed as stupid and insane, be told to know your place. Most of all, you will be termed ‘maverick’. As such, you have no real spurs as a maverick if you are not heartily sick of being described as one. You are not a real maverick if you do not understand that the wages of refusing to conform can be punitive indeed. You are not a real maverick if you want to be a maverick. It is not a choice, it is a dictate; and if that dictate is undeniable, then you will pay for it.

Let’s look at the accusation. What does it mean? Or, rather, what motivates this accusation? In bald answer to both questions, It might be thought to be a marginally politer explication of the word ‘weirdo’. This is how power works.

There are a few people (and these are generally (stuck) in their late teens) who identify themselves as being a ‘weirdo’, and whilst in the bosom(s) of faked social nicety that are most workplaces or political arenas, we cannot openly label someone who doesn’t fit easily into the realms of normative sludge with this signifier (it is deemed offensive), we use another seemingly more innocent epithet to mark anyone who seeks, incomprehensibly, to distance themselves from the ever lowering norm. While they know the wages of refusing to conform are punitive indeed, they are equally aware that the wages of conformity are a lifetime of debt you will never pay off and an existence that no one in possession of any marketable intelligence might possibly dream of.

Eventually, after long years (or decades) of having been identified by this grotesque lapel badge of a word, of trying and failing to fit in, you might finally give up seeking the worthless acceptance of the dull and, instead, seek to reconcile yourself to being distanced from acceptable norms. You might wonder how, given that you cannot escape the pointing finger of the word’s assault, you might try to be as good an outsider as you might possibly be. You might choose, given that the mainstream rejects you, to live the best version of life on the margins that you are able to. The question is: if you are to be identified as left field, then how do you do this as well as you might? And that is what this book is for: to help you turn pariah status into something that works for you. If you are unable to conform, then – you may as well face it, brother – you are unable to conform. You see no value in convention, for, indeed, there is no value in it. You will have to find a way outside of the path of the MEAN average.6

A true MAVERICK has the opposite of Stockholm Syndrome: we have no positive feelings towards our jailors. It is freedom, above all, that the MAVERICK seeks: the freedom to think the things they want to think; the freedom to reject bloodless orthodoxies; the freedom to refuse any version of uniform; the freedom to THINK like an artist, LIVE like an artist, to BE an artist.

This word might have been spat at you in the first instance with a mild expletive attached, the intent of which is to mock, to belittle, to infer and to confer tarnish, as in, “Oh! You’re such a bloody MAVERICK