Formalisms and emotion

When I saw the White Stripes at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney, in early 2004, I was in the midst of my MBA. Constantly in the background of a full-time MBA program is the question, "Who am I?" in the sense of, "What am I good at?" and "What am I going to do for my next job?" The class I'd related to the most in my degree so far was, of all things, Basic Accounting. I had a really good teacher, and I did really well on the final - got into one of those states where you're so absorbed in an activity that you lose all sense of time, got all my balance sheets to balance, was confident in my answers.

The White Stripes at the Enmore was one of the best concerts I've ever, ever been to. It was the tour supporting the Elephant album which is still my favorite. Just Jack and Meg. But transcendent. He played the whole history of music on his one guitar, and you could hear how all the notes and melodic lines fit together and it was like Mozart, like Bach, like Hendrix, like the ghosts of all old blues masters playing through the fingers of a young scholar. I was transported, I was moved, I wanted to dedicate my life to doing something as profound and wonderful as this.

What I settled on that night was that I should do Accounting as Art. I should learn the structures and rules and logic of it, but then transcend beyond and be able to express the art in it.

What has actually happened is that I am learning to play blues guitar, just like Jack White. I have a teacher who knows enough music theory and is enough excited about it that he can explain chord structures and origins and relationships to me, and he himself specialized in blues-based rock and roll, and I live three hours from Chicago, and so I am immersing myself in blues theory, and I'm going to learn it well enough that I can express my emotions through it and make art. Who would have thought? But the inspiration I felt that night at the Enmore is still driving me, except just in a way that is much more directly related to the thing Jack White was doing.

p.s. When we did an exercise at a Marketing conference for work in April, on personal branding, the words that came back from my peers to describe me echoed what my Existentialism teacher had written on a paper back when I was a Sophomore in college - and I'm sure I've told you there here before as well. Reasoned Passion. That's the essence of me. Rock and roll guitar, with a teacher who knows lots of music theory, is the perfect medium to express these qualities. More than Accounting, I think.

p.p.s. And yes, it didn't escape me when I was writing the above that if you start to do art with Accounting, you end up either Enron or Lehman Brothers. So rock and roll guitar is a better bet anyway.