Problems, Solved. (an interview)
What do you do?
I solve problems.
How?
Creatively.
Creatively?
I generate a solution no one's thought of before. Some people prize "out of the box" thinking, whereas my claim is that there is no box.
And?
And it works. I've had more success with high-end clients than I could have ever dreamed of. And I did it without compromising my principles or being forced to work for ass-holes. People know I will solve their problem if I believe enough in their authenticity, and they will pay me for it. Well, I might add.
Interesting. And so how did you get your start offering this "service"? Is this the sort of thing you can go to school for? Did you apprentice with another "creative problem solver"?
Nothing of the sort. I went to art school, just like everyone else. I studied design, and on the side I studied theory, improvisation, anarchism. I had a two-year obsession with Portland-area noise music, and a one-year obsession with Hakim Bey. I ran track and got in fights with my mind. I got a "C" in sculpture because I thought art was meaningless, and I had a drawing professor who drank beer in class. It was crazy.
So how on earth did you go from a typically middle-class liberal arts education to wearing black suits and flirting with the techno-jet set? At what point did you go from slovenly jeans and loud weird music to "doing the sketchbook dance" for corporate clients in hotel bars? How did you get to design an island, for God's sake?
Another good question. I'm still trying to "unpack" that one myself. I think my troubles, so to speak, all began when I went to work for the philosopher [clears his throat]. I was surrounded by geniuses, and at times, given the right amount of caffiene and obsession, I was pulling genius out of my ass as well. The "Einstein enema", as we called it then.
You did?
Ok [sheepishly], maybe that was just me. The point is, I was swimming around in a painfully fertile Cambrian stew of excited, creative lunatics with connections all over the place I'm still finding about to this day. It was a very dense ganglion to pile upon, that's for sure.
And then...?
And then nothing. One second I'm outlining fonts and packing up .tiffs and .jpegs for printers and HTML guys, the next second I've got $500,000 in the bank and six cars. Three of which, I should remind you, were top-of-the-line eco technology.
What?
Ok, they weren't all mine. Most were for jet-setting famous friends who wanted me to pull a "Salamone" on them.
Is this when you started the animated word paintings? The story spray? The fuel-passion hyperbole engines?
One thing at a time. To back up for second: I got obsessed. Very obsessed. Where once I delved into theory, or grew 8 billion art ideas out of a spiral-bound, I was suddenly augmenting that with business thinking, which to me was heady, black-magick stuff.
Really?
Really. You don't know how hard it is to concentrate on business plans for someone like me playing mental video games all the time, but it was. For someone like me, tracking numbers and imbibing intractable economic models was akin to a meditation. To the Nth degree. And I've done meditation, I know all about it. Business thinking was completely alien to me, like learning to speak Robot Martian in a zero-G field with nothing but Aeron Flippers and an Expression Tail to use for communicating. It was this entire alternate dimension I knew nothing about, but once I'd cracked a few of its codes and explained a few of its key ideas to myself...
Boom: creatine imago-strategy.
Strategerie -- I prefer the G.W. Bush version. But yet, that's the idea. You combine an already dangerous imago-intellect with some infectiously potent biz-memes, and you've got a Purpose Potion ready to rock things. And indeed I did.
And you pretty much came out of nowhere.
Indeed. It was crazy: I'd never imagined myself succeeding so much. As an Enneagram #4, I'd long ago resigned myself to mild anomie and dissappointment. To win was scary. People suddenly gave a shit. Luckily, it didn't get too out of hand. I did the GQ interview, but that as far as I went into the high-visibility A-list.
It wasn't something you wanted to delve into.
Exactly. It's not something you can win, at least not until I take it on later in my career [makes note to self]. For now I'll stick to consulting greenmobile companies, hanging out with hyperfoodists, and spitting in the face of the people who pay me to do it. I'll write linking screenplays, play blog tennis and Photoshop alley gambling, but no bluehair supermarket shelves for me. The minute my animated face is sharing People-space with Jennifer Garner's daughter, I'm finished.
Fascinating. Now, if I may, a bit more about the Process, if you please.
Of?
Of getting from A to B. In the early days, and now.
Like I've always said: caffiene X solitude = boom. Genius X biz-memes = bang. Indie-rock consiousness X leveraged networking = zowee. I come from a long line of shipbuilders, and we've all but one concern: is it seaworthy? Is it viable? Can people live on it? Does it add value?
Which you discern by...?
By testing. By tentative missioning. By setting up and tearing down memetoplexes, by courting adventure capitalists, by doing usability scenarios on the Feasible Few. That, and relentless time macro-managing. I'm obsessed with it. Time X appropriate action = motivation. We invented a form of cognition which constantly asks: "which of my tasks do I really feel like doing in the moment?" We learned a long time ago to get out of the way of our obsessions: they drive the business, and the businesses.
Hmm, interesting. But I'm still not getting what I was assigned to get: how did you do it? How did you bootstrap so well?
It was a series of obsesso-vacations pointed in the right direction. The "sketchbook dance" is a loaded weapon, so some work needs (and needed) to be done on discerning the focus at first. It's like building stuff with dynamite, getting creative with TNT. Set those blasts off in the right place, and you've got a new nickel mine, or a spacious recreation canyon, or a drop-dead gorgeous hydroelectric facility. Fuck it up, and you've got earthquakes, floods, pollution, and blasted fingers. It took me a while to learn this, but at last I did: my creative problem-solving obsessions are both my greatest blessing and my most devious curse. The trick was figuring out how to amplify the former, and disarm the latter. That activity has been my true life's work, so to speak.
Life mastery.
Yes, but more so... more than that. "Mastery" is so one-dimensional, and linear. It suggests an endpoint, and a focus.
But you do have a focus!
Ah [smiling], so it would seem. In 1-D at least. We'll switch gears here though. It was like I was riding around on a pack of beasts, and had to get them coordinated in the same direction in order to move earth and gouge farms tracks-- dig? [Snickers.] To do that took a lot of effort, combined with using those very skills to point the way further. Once I had posited "creative success" as a real and actual-existing Omega/Telos point, the gameshit was on. I really had to take every step necessary to put myself in the mindset on a daily basis. I had to cultivate in my awareness a crystal-clear magnificence of what my life could be , and then act on it.
And?
Well, needless to say I did it, and I built some lasting friendships with some affluent people along the way. For the longest time I'd envied and villified the rich, but at a certain point I saw the humanity behind the fancy clothes and brand-new gadgets and top-heavy bank accounts. I was just lucky to find the humanity in such players, to whom I owe everything. They were patient, they explained the biz-memery to me, they advised me into high-leverage positions and even did some of my promotion for me. But still...
Yes.
I know it sounds arrogant, but a lot of was still me. I got in this fight with the world, I'd been doing it for a long time, and I came to know its moves and out-foxes very well. And by "world", of course, I mean my "self" and everything surrounding it. I came to see it as this one unitary object with which I had to work, thus resolving the subject-object/self-other split. I considered it to be this one flowing, total-living thing, which "I" could step into and manipulate at will. In so doing, fear dropped off like a fat camper sheds cellulose, and to be honest, it was fun, and I had a blast. Even more so now.
Would you dub this a "mystical" experience?
[Shouting] I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU'D CALL IT! [Calming down] For me it was everyday living, the craziest, stinkiest video-game I've ever played. If Kubrick did video games, it would have been my life.
What does that mean?
Meaning: long stretches of nothing-silence-boredom and contemplative landscapery, remixed with all manner of drama and intrigue and plot twists and insane characters and rational resolutions and hard-winning inspirations clawing for victory throughout the mountains of compassion.
Explain.
I can't. But the point is this: I stopped hating my limitations, and started hacking and working around them. The "lifehack" meme was very powerful for me back then. I saw my main source of employment to be that very thing: hacking life, ripping it for source code, re-combining for sustainable activity, breathing new life into old algorhithms. I took those solutions, those out-foxings, and started selling them. I spent three hours on researching some basic e-business technology, and that 3-hour investment won me millions in my first year alone. Suddenly, everyone wanted one of my lunatic creations, and I found myself in the impossible position of rebelling against my own rebellion. The cycle happened again and again (and still does): they'd pin my down, I'd wrestle free and escape, only to generate something even more amazing, for which they'd pay and pay and pay. Me: a fledgling creative writer, a failed novelist, and sometimes-ok flash designer: I was making wagon-loads of crisp bill appear like magic.
And you did what with it?
Invested in my future of course. Paid off my family. Supported various people, hired the lunatic artists I've been working with until this day. Did some nude modelling, started three bands, but mostly worked on perfecting my workspace, which I soon came to call the runway.
And how did that work?
The idea is simple, really: energy capture. I began to see my creative prob-solver as an endless natural resource, and in my downtime I set up "buckets" with which to capture it. There were weeks where I couldn't go near a computer, but thanks to some forethought, I had easels and brushes and paints and canvas and pastels laying around everywhere. That's how I came up with the "cross country series", for one.
Which became...
The movie, yes. It was thanks to these buckets, to these channels and irrigation systems that I'd set up, that I could take advantage of all the creative energy pouring down from inside of me. It turns out that even that was a very creative act, in the end. Daring to leverage my "20% spike", and building upon that. By being authentic, by being a mensch, I could sleep with the fact that I was making a lot of money. I knew deep down that I could only allow myself such successes if I had a plan for using that "money capture" technology (my career) to help others. There were all these rich people with money just laying around, and they didn't know how to put it to good use. So I -- we -- did that for them. Nothing could be more satisfying in this life. Nothing.
So it wasn't really a Robin Hood sort of move?.
Not really, since most of these investors were my friends. All I did was give them a vision, and a way to get it spent. It was really quite remarkable.
Mr. Salamone, thank you for your time. [extends hand]
[Shakes hand] No problem -- any time!
I solve problems.
How?
Creatively.
Creatively?
I generate a solution no one's thought of before. Some people prize "out of the box" thinking, whereas my claim is that there is no box.
And?
And it works. I've had more success with high-end clients than I could have ever dreamed of. And I did it without compromising my principles or being forced to work for ass-holes. People know I will solve their problem if I believe enough in their authenticity, and they will pay me for it. Well, I might add.
Interesting. And so how did you get your start offering this "service"? Is this the sort of thing you can go to school for? Did you apprentice with another "creative problem solver"?
Nothing of the sort. I went to art school, just like everyone else. I studied design, and on the side I studied theory, improvisation, anarchism. I had a two-year obsession with Portland-area noise music, and a one-year obsession with Hakim Bey. I ran track and got in fights with my mind. I got a "C" in sculpture because I thought art was meaningless, and I had a drawing professor who drank beer in class. It was crazy.
So how on earth did you go from a typically middle-class liberal arts education to wearing black suits and flirting with the techno-jet set? At what point did you go from slovenly jeans and loud weird music to "doing the sketchbook dance" for corporate clients in hotel bars? How did you get to design an island, for God's sake?
Another good question. I'm still trying to "unpack" that one myself. I think my troubles, so to speak, all began when I went to work for the philosopher [clears his throat]. I was surrounded by geniuses, and at times, given the right amount of caffiene and obsession, I was pulling genius out of my ass as well. The "Einstein enema", as we called it then.
You did?
Ok [sheepishly], maybe that was just me. The point is, I was swimming around in a painfully fertile Cambrian stew of excited, creative lunatics with connections all over the place I'm still finding about to this day. It was a very dense ganglion to pile upon, that's for sure.
And then...?
And then nothing. One second I'm outlining fonts and packing up .tiffs and .jpegs for printers and HTML guys, the next second I've got $500,000 in the bank and six cars. Three of which, I should remind you, were top-of-the-line eco technology.
What?
Ok, they weren't all mine. Most were for jet-setting famous friends who wanted me to pull a "Salamone" on them.
Is this when you started the animated word paintings? The story spray? The fuel-passion hyperbole engines?
One thing at a time. To back up for second: I got obsessed. Very obsessed. Where once I delved into theory, or grew 8 billion art ideas out of a spiral-bound, I was suddenly augmenting that with business thinking, which to me was heady, black-magick stuff.
Really?
Really. You don't know how hard it is to concentrate on business plans for someone like me playing mental video games all the time, but it was. For someone like me, tracking numbers and imbibing intractable economic models was akin to a meditation. To the Nth degree. And I've done meditation, I know all about it. Business thinking was completely alien to me, like learning to speak Robot Martian in a zero-G field with nothing but Aeron Flippers and an Expression Tail to use for communicating. It was this entire alternate dimension I knew nothing about, but once I'd cracked a few of its codes and explained a few of its key ideas to myself...
Boom: creatine imago-strategy.
Strategerie -- I prefer the G.W. Bush version. But yet, that's the idea. You combine an already dangerous imago-intellect with some infectiously potent biz-memes, and you've got a Purpose Potion ready to rock things. And indeed I did.
And you pretty much came out of nowhere.
Indeed. It was crazy: I'd never imagined myself succeeding so much. As an Enneagram #4, I'd long ago resigned myself to mild anomie and dissappointment. To win was scary. People suddenly gave a shit. Luckily, it didn't get too out of hand. I did the GQ interview, but that as far as I went into the high-visibility A-list.
It wasn't something you wanted to delve into.
Exactly. It's not something you can win, at least not until I take it on later in my career [makes note to self]. For now I'll stick to consulting greenmobile companies, hanging out with hyperfoodists, and spitting in the face of the people who pay me to do it. I'll write linking screenplays, play blog tennis and Photoshop alley gambling, but no bluehair supermarket shelves for me. The minute my animated face is sharing People-space with Jennifer Garner's daughter, I'm finished.
Fascinating. Now, if I may, a bit more about the Process, if you please.
Of?
Of getting from A to B. In the early days, and now.
Like I've always said: caffiene X solitude = boom. Genius X biz-memes = bang. Indie-rock consiousness X leveraged networking = zowee. I come from a long line of shipbuilders, and we've all but one concern: is it seaworthy? Is it viable? Can people live on it? Does it add value?
Which you discern by...?
By testing. By tentative missioning. By setting up and tearing down memetoplexes, by courting adventure capitalists, by doing usability scenarios on the Feasible Few. That, and relentless time macro-managing. I'm obsessed with it. Time X appropriate action = motivation. We invented a form of cognition which constantly asks: "which of my tasks do I really feel like doing in the moment?" We learned a long time ago to get out of the way of our obsessions: they drive the business, and the businesses.
Hmm, interesting. But I'm still not getting what I was assigned to get: how did you do it? How did you bootstrap so well?
It was a series of obsesso-vacations pointed in the right direction. The "sketchbook dance" is a loaded weapon, so some work needs (and needed) to be done on discerning the focus at first. It's like building stuff with dynamite, getting creative with TNT. Set those blasts off in the right place, and you've got a new nickel mine, or a spacious recreation canyon, or a drop-dead gorgeous hydroelectric facility. Fuck it up, and you've got earthquakes, floods, pollution, and blasted fingers. It took me a while to learn this, but at last I did: my creative problem-solving obsessions are both my greatest blessing and my most devious curse. The trick was figuring out how to amplify the former, and disarm the latter. That activity has been my true life's work, so to speak.
Life mastery.
Yes, but more so... more than that. "Mastery" is so one-dimensional, and linear. It suggests an endpoint, and a focus.
But you do have a focus!
Ah [smiling], so it would seem. In 1-D at least. We'll switch gears here though. It was like I was riding around on a pack of beasts, and had to get them coordinated in the same direction in order to move earth and gouge farms tracks-- dig? [Snickers.] To do that took a lot of effort, combined with using those very skills to point the way further. Once I had posited "creative success" as a real and actual-existing Omega/Telos point, the gameshit was on. I really had to take every step necessary to put myself in the mindset on a daily basis. I had to cultivate in my awareness a crystal-clear magnificence of what my life could be , and then act on it.
And?
Well, needless to say I did it, and I built some lasting friendships with some affluent people along the way. For the longest time I'd envied and villified the rich, but at a certain point I saw the humanity behind the fancy clothes and brand-new gadgets and top-heavy bank accounts. I was just lucky to find the humanity in such players, to whom I owe everything. They were patient, they explained the biz-memery to me, they advised me into high-leverage positions and even did some of my promotion for me. But still...
Yes.
I know it sounds arrogant, but a lot of was still me. I got in this fight with the world, I'd been doing it for a long time, and I came to know its moves and out-foxes very well. And by "world", of course, I mean my "self" and everything surrounding it. I came to see it as this one unitary object with which I had to work, thus resolving the subject-object/self-other split. I considered it to be this one flowing, total-living thing, which "I" could step into and manipulate at will. In so doing, fear dropped off like a fat camper sheds cellulose, and to be honest, it was fun, and I had a blast. Even more so now.
Would you dub this a "mystical" experience?
[Shouting] I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU'D CALL IT! [Calming down] For me it was everyday living, the craziest, stinkiest video-game I've ever played. If Kubrick did video games, it would have been my life.
What does that mean?
Meaning: long stretches of nothing-silence-boredom and contemplative landscapery, remixed with all manner of drama and intrigue and plot twists and insane characters and rational resolutions and hard-winning inspirations clawing for victory throughout the mountains of compassion.
Explain.
I can't. But the point is this: I stopped hating my limitations, and started hacking and working around them. The "lifehack" meme was very powerful for me back then. I saw my main source of employment to be that very thing: hacking life, ripping it for source code, re-combining for sustainable activity, breathing new life into old algorhithms. I took those solutions, those out-foxings, and started selling them. I spent three hours on researching some basic e-business technology, and that 3-hour investment won me millions in my first year alone. Suddenly, everyone wanted one of my lunatic creations, and I found myself in the impossible position of rebelling against my own rebellion. The cycle happened again and again (and still does): they'd pin my down, I'd wrestle free and escape, only to generate something even more amazing, for which they'd pay and pay and pay. Me: a fledgling creative writer, a failed novelist, and sometimes-ok flash designer: I was making wagon-loads of crisp bill appear like magic.
And you did what with it?
Invested in my future of course. Paid off my family. Supported various people, hired the lunatic artists I've been working with until this day. Did some nude modelling, started three bands, but mostly worked on perfecting my workspace, which I soon came to call the runway.
And how did that work?
The idea is simple, really: energy capture. I began to see my creative prob-solver as an endless natural resource, and in my downtime I set up "buckets" with which to capture it. There were weeks where I couldn't go near a computer, but thanks to some forethought, I had easels and brushes and paints and canvas and pastels laying around everywhere. That's how I came up with the "cross country series", for one.
Which became...
The movie, yes. It was thanks to these buckets, to these channels and irrigation systems that I'd set up, that I could take advantage of all the creative energy pouring down from inside of me. It turns out that even that was a very creative act, in the end. Daring to leverage my "20% spike", and building upon that. By being authentic, by being a mensch, I could sleep with the fact that I was making a lot of money. I knew deep down that I could only allow myself such successes if I had a plan for using that "money capture" technology (my career) to help others. There were all these rich people with money just laying around, and they didn't know how to put it to good use. So I -- we -- did that for them. Nothing could be more satisfying in this life. Nothing.
So it wasn't really a Robin Hood sort of move?.
Not really, since most of these investors were my friends. All I did was give them a vision, and a way to get it spent. It was really quite remarkable.
Mr. Salamone, thank you for your time. [extends hand]
[Shakes hand] No problem -- any time!
posted by Paul S. at
1:23 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home