Quincy Jones believes that when you’re making music, you should always leave 20 percent of space for the Lord to walk through the room. In other words, you should always leave room for the magic to happen. The archival footage in which Jones explains this strategy is aired in the Netflix documentary, ‘Quincy’, which details his life and career in the entertainment industry. Quincy Jones is an American record producer, film producer, composer and arranger. He produced ‘The Color Purple’ and has worked with everyone from Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson. He has received 80 Grammy nominations, 28 Grammys, and is one of only 18 Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony winners. And he has had me thinking about this line, from this documentary, for the last couple of weeks. He has had me thinking about this line in the context of life. While Quincy Jones may have burnt out multiple times throughout his career - while recording more than 300 albums and 2,900 songs - he seemed to always allow room in his life for the magic to happen. I don't just envy the man, but the time in which his career blossomed.
In an article for Wired in 1997, Michael H. Goldhaber proposed a “radical theory of value”. He declared the currency of the new economy wouldn’t be money, but attention. In 2020, the very people responsible for many of the social media channels that fight for our attention and destroy our sense of space, proved Goldhaber right. In ‘The Social Dilemma’ - a documentary released on Netflix a few months ago - former tech executives declared that if you weren’t paying for the product, you were the product. Or, more specifically, your attention was the product. Most people I know massively reduced their time on social media after watching it. If they didn’t, it was because they were too terrified to watch the documentary at all. As we live in an attention economy, where our minds are constantly torn between notifications and growing to-do lists while we hedonistically pursue other people’s highlight reels, there is little space left for the Lord to walk into the room. And if there is, we tend to fill it. Our days are spent in a state of endless productivity, running toward a blurry goal which never seems to arrive. The year of 2020, however, has proved to many of us that we want to carve out enough space in our lives for the magic to happen. We’re ready for the Lord to walk through the door again.
This space is something Jenny Odell writes about in her book, How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, which was a favourite of Barack Obama’s in 2019. Odell is a multidisciplinary artist who teaches at Stanford and the book encourages us to spend less time on the internet and more time tending to the lives which are right in front of us. It is essentially about how to “hold open that place in the sun”. The artist encourages us to question not only the attention economy, but the treadmill of productivity we have been told to endlessly run. “I see people caught up, not just in notifications but in a mythology of productivity and progress, unable not only to rest but simply to see where they are,” she wrote. I saw myself in that sentence. “Life is more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimised,” she continued. “Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognised not only as an ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.” The most appealing part of Odell’s argument is that she doesn’t encourage us to delete social media and join a cult. She doesn’t want us to leave convention, because that would mean nothing is forced to change outside of ourselves. Instead, she encourages us to live in a “state of permanent refusal”. In essence, to ‘do nothing’ a little more; to scroll, to endlessly strive, a little less. “We have to be able to do both,” she wrote. “To contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back.” If we work differently within the system, we may eventually change it.
When I began reading How To Do Nothing last week, I messaged a photo of the cover to my boyfriend. Three minutes later, he replied: “We suck at that.” On Saturday, as I sat by the beach on a rock in the sun reading, I failed to sit still and proved him right. As Odell declared on the first page, “nothing is harder to do than nothing.” And in an age of perpetual productivity, working in a system that rewards it, it only becomes more difficult. Yet it pays to try. On that rock, holding open that place in the sun, I began thinking about Quincy Jones and that 20 percent. I began thinking about the words Bill Murray famously declared, which are really an ode to Odell’s entire premise. “I try to be available for life to happen to me,” Murray said. “We’re in this life, and if you’re not available, the sort of ordinary time goes past and you didn’t live it. But if you’re available, life gets huge.” As Odell suggested to those spending much of their time and money using technology to live longer or - potentially - forever: “I humbly propose a far more parsimonious way to live forever: to exit the trajectory of productive time, so that a single moment might open almost to infinity.” For those who pay attention know that’s where the magic lives.
Some related (and unrelated) recommendations:
Obviously, How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell.
This article, up on The New Yorker, is on the rise and fall of 'getting things done' and entirely relevant to our discussion this week.
This column on how to live like an artist (without being an artist) was pure brilliance. By Heather Havrilesky for The Cut.
I thoroughly enjoyed this article by Waleed Aly in The Monthly exploring cancel culture and woke politics. (Paywall)
I thought his Sunday Life column by Jamila Rizvi on the endless in-between that we are living in was brilliant.
Highly recommend the Quincy documentary on Netflix. Also, The Social Dilemma if you're one of the 12 people who haven't watched it.
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