What’s On Your Desk? With Joe Case
Note: What’s On Your Desk? is a series of interviews with friends who are doing interesting things. The dialogue always starts off the same way, by asking the subject to describe their workspace. The third in our series is with Joe Case, the director and photographer living in Los Angeles. I met Joe when we were roommates in a study abroad program in college and we quickly became friends. We went on to live together in the Corktown section of Detroit after school, where our next door neighbor was a working dominatrix. Yes, those were interesting times. Joe’s ability to actively manage the work/life balance always impresses me and his endless well of creativity is inspiring. He’s probably the most levelheaded friend I have; in an alternate universe he would be a well-qualified bomb defuser for the FBI.
1. What’s on your desk?
Currently on my desk is an assortment of nomadic gear. The center of it is my very loyal G4 powerbook which has held up surprisingly well for its age. It still handles video editing and After Effects after all this time. Next to that is an M-Audio firewire audio interface with some Alesis monitors plugged into it. 4 external hard drives that have traveled with me a lot. One crashed and I am hoping to revive it because it wasn’t backed up. One more smaller hard drive with my last film on it, a beginner’s German book, some German flash cards from the 50s or so (they contain all these really archaic social references and phrases). A wire “inbox” basket, a David Lynch postcard from his artwork exposition at the Cartier foundation in Paris, with some special words from a special person on the back, a sunglasses case, Spring 09 issue of Filmmaker magazine, a can of orange air therapy spray from Trader Joe’s, a usb hub, pens, sharpies, an aluminum water bottle and a slew of post-it notes which are a mix of script notes and personal philosophy reminders.
2. You’ve lived more places in the last year than anyone I know, from Paris to Los Angeles. How do you manage to focus on getting work done with that much mobility? It seems like it takes months for me to get my desk sorted out, or maybe that’s just the excuse I give myself.
Mobility isn’t really the issue, it is more a lack of home base. Most of my work before was based in mobility - traveling and shooting, etc. Which I love of course, and then I had the home desk where I would do more personal work. But I can’t say I am good at mobile multitasking, if that is the right term. When I go somewhere, I am pretty absorbed into my surroundings and getting my mind to do anything else than explore the environment is tough. For example, once I said yes to go to Serbia for a fashion assignment while dealing with another deadline for a writing thing. I never say no to visiting a new place. We get to this new fantastic place and everyone goes to dinner, but I say I have to stay back to finish this thing. It just felt unnatural and I had to force myself. I am looking out of the window at this street filled with strange Russian cars I had never seen before, and I just wanted to walk across the street and buy a water to see what the people in the store looked like. Meanwhile I am getting text messages from the other photographer I was working with saying “you should have come to dinner, the chicken is insane and endless, and the girls are ridiculously hot and friendly.” When I travel I always take my stuff thinking I am going to get some other work done, but I never do. I just get too caught up in where I am.
That said, staying productive during a huge relocation like I had is nearly impossible. I didn’t get any real work done for months after I moved to LA because I didn’t have a desk or home base. I was staying with friends, and house sitting, etc, just bouncing around. Couldn’t get a damn thing done because I didn’t have a private place I could leave my stuff and come back to everyday. I need a place where the work stays, and I can leave and come back to it. Otherwise it just all floats away. Especially because my biggest task now has no clients or deadlines, so self discipline is absolutely essential and a skill I am working hard to improve on. But nothing really got done until I had a room with desk in it and a lock on the door that was all my own.
3. At what point do you feel at ease and ready to do your work? Do you start your day with email or try to plow through some tasks first?
Preparing to be ready to do your work is a delusion. Distraction is the most addictive and insidious drug there is. I know, I am an addict and deal with it constantly. I think the only way to do it is ruthlessly shove everything off the desk except the task and just tackle it. My most productive hours are very early morning. Once the world wakes up, I am out getting high on distraction like most people. My best routine is to get up really early (6am-ish), go for a walk perhaps, make coffee and just start plowing. Get through your essential work by like 9-10am. Problem is, it is tough to keep that routine.
Once you get on the distraction train, you are on it for the rest of the day. Your mind is already on that path. Checking a little bit of email, cruising a blog, perusing the news all seem like harmless little things that you can jump back to your work from, but your focus is already compromised. You’re done. You think you can get off the train whenever you want, but you can’t, it is non-stop service to the end of the day and a dull guilty feeling for not having gotten enough done.
Of course when I say “you” I mean “I.”
4. One of the facets of your working life I find most interesting is that you’ve done so much personal work for your own film and multimedia projects and also a lot of client work, yet all of it ties together. How do you manage to keep clients happy while also putting your own fingerprint on things? Seems like a tough balance
Hmm. That is a tough one to nail down. That line is hazy. I think the majority of my work thus far has been personal work. I think they tie together in that I have always been motivated from the exploration standpoint, whether that be subject matter, technique, etc., or the really just having a new experience for myself. If it is something I haven’t seen or done before, that always warrants a yes response. So whether I am doing it for me or for someone else, that exploration element can be there and has been the motivating factor. The other side of that is that after I get the exploration reward, I tend to leave it behind, which has resulted in a lot of fragments. I have generally lacked or haven’t paid too much attention to the feedback and reaction aspect, which I think is crucial as it helps give you a picture of your fingerprint. You go through those phases of saying “yes, this is what I do, this is who I am, it is awesome,” and then “what the hell do I do? who am I? I got nothing to offer.” The creative waves. The exploration motivation gave me a lot of experiences which are creative material. Now I am going through all these fragments and things and piecing them together again to give myself that necessary image of my creative fingerprint. This is actually something I am dealing with quite a bit right now as my move to Los Angeles was for the purpose of building a more lucrative career, so the client side of it is quite important and you have to know what you offer.
One thing I know certainly doesn’t work is trying to figure out what people want and mold yourself to that. I have done that and it always fails. Conformity is death, but that pressure is always whispering in your ear. I think if you are in a creative field and you actually have creativity, then that is what you have to offer and that is what people want from you. They want your fingerprint on things. So I don’t really see the balance issue. I think the way to success is knowing what your fingerprint is, and being confident in that product. As soon as you start to compromise that, you become less desirable. I mean, your job is to be the creative person. People hire you to tell them what works and what is good. It sounds messed up, but it’s not. Once you start asking “What do you guys like, what do you want, I can do whatever you guys need,etc.” then all of a sudden you aren’t the creative person. Of course, there is a collaboration. Clients come at you with a need and a destination. Your job is to get them there how you know how. So, I think fingerprint is what makes clients happy. But maybe I have been living in a charmed world of personal work, ha ha!
5. I think the notion of “knowing what your fingerprint is” is right on the money. Your fingerprint is something that you receive on your first day on earth. Going back to that is pure, without alternative and entirely yours. What advice would you have for people who are starting out who are looking to find their fingerprint?
Well, I think your fingerprint is only visible in the rear view mirror. So to discover it you just need to start covering as much road as you can. You need to be open to wherever that goes and not hold on to some rigid idea of “what you do.” I think people confuse what they want to do with what they actually do, and this is the first big trap on the road to creative endeavor. You simply cannot define yourself and your fingerprint by what you plan on doing or what someone else does. You need to explore. You need to put yourself up against different backgrounds. You need to fail forward. You need to explore dead ends, have things crumble, pick up those pieces and use them on something else. You need to identify the people you admire then rip them off to see how their stuff feels. You need to just chug through a lot of things. Then you need to be ready and open to the results, whatever those may be, because they will probably surprise you and they might not be as sweet as you imagined. And then you need to not identify with that, because it is in the past. A fingerprint is something that is left behind. It is evidence that someone was there. Which leads to a more operational definition than a stylistic one. You can’t predict exactly what it will look like, but you know you will leave it behind and it won’t look like that of anyone else.
Maybe “knowing what your fingerprint is” is not the right phrasing. Knowing that you have one is paramount, and you must have confidence that it is valid. I know that I have dealt with “fingerprint insecurity” - that feeling that what you do isn’t anything unique and all that, but that is a movement killer and creativity is movement. You need to keep moving to find out what it is you do.
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