Finding a creative job in Portland

I end up being asked for my insights from time to time, so here they are, in my official jobhunting in PDX post. I'll edit this post periodically as I think of new things.

Firstly, tweet tweet tweet. Portland is one of the epicenters of Twitter use, and every interactive agency, ad agency, creative company in town is on Twitter. So get yourself a twitter account and follow anyone at any company that looks remotely connected to what you want to be doing. Participate in the community: ask questions, share insights and information, and help people out. There are a bunch of good blog posts on Twitter use and etiquette, I'll edit them in here as I find them. Short answer: Get on Twitter. Lazy answer: search twitter for "jobs Portland" Better answer: Get on Twitter and participate.

Which leads me to: blog. Twitter is a great place to share your blog, so you can keep a blog about your personal and professional work/insights/challenges, and then tweet your posts. Keeping a blog creates a larger context around your resume (which you will also have on your blog) and your reel (which you will also have on your blog), and gives people some sense of you as a person. Portland is a small town, so personality matters (see participate in the community above).

I guess before you do any of these things, get interested in the kind of work that's being done here. There are a ton of interactive and advertising agencies in town, so get familiar with who's here and what they do, which means doing some research. Also, because it's a small town, sending out your reel and waiting is a poor strategy. Be proactive, be visible, be accessible.

Also: PDX mindshare is a great job posting and networking resource. LinkedIn is a great place to form and maintain professional connections.

That's all I have for now. :-)

ASIFA whatnot

So, as I think I mentioned, we're working on the Mary and Max event on the 3rd. It's very cool, because we have a Q&A with the director afterward.
We're also taking first steps toward hosting a Drinking and Drawing in January, and you know that's my baby.
I'm also thinking of my Laikans, and talking with the chapter about maybe having an event focused on freelance animators in Portland. What's the climate like, how does it work for people who are doing it, what are the resources, etc. Maybe a panel discussion and a resource fair? There are a bunch of resources out there, but I'm not sure how well known they are. I'd be willing to help pull something together if people were interested and wanted to connect in that way. So I guess what I'm saying is that, if you're interested, let me know and I'll see how the chapter feels about it.
I have to say, I love how informal the ASIFA people are compared with the SIGGRAPH board. The SIGGRAPH board had a lot of formal behaviors, like making motions and seconding them, and formalizing meeting minutes... it's nice to be able to kind of skip all that and just talk things through together.

And, as I said just nine months ago, I am so sorry for the loss of the wonderful, talented, good-hearted peeps at Laika. When they move on, the Portland animation community will have suffered a tremendous loss.

Jack Kerouac

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

The Way We Live

by Kathleen Jamie

Pass the tambourine, let me bash out praises
to the Lord God of movement, to Absolute
non-friction, flight, and the scary side:
death by avalanche, birth by failed contraception.
Of chicken tandoori and reggae, loud, from tenements,
comittment, driving fast and unswerving
friendship. Of tee-shirts on pulleys, giros and Bombay,
barmen, dreaming waitresses with many fake-gold
bangles. Of airports, impulse, and waking to uncertainty,
of strip-lights, motorways, or that pantheon -
the mountains. To overdrafts and grafting

and the fit slow pulse of wipers as you're
creeping over Rannoch, while the God of moorland
walks abroad with his entourage of freezing fog,
his bodyguard of snow.

Of endless gloaming in the North, of Asiatic swelter,
to launderettes, anecdotes, passions and exhaustion,
Final Demands and dead men, the skeletal grip
of government. To misery and elation; mixed,
the sod and caprice of landlords.
To the way it fits, the way it is, the way it seems
to be: let me bash out praises - pass the tambourine.

Bric a brac

Well, it looks like I'm a board member of ASIFA Portland. I have to admit, it seems like it will be fun- I don't have, you know, a Real Job like an elected member, and they are a pretty laid-back bunch. So we'll definitely be putting together another Drinking and Drawing- I may not be hosting this one, but I'll show 'em how it's done. :-)

Personally, I'm going through a few transitions- I can't tell if this is baby steps toward major progress, or just sidesteps as I work out a few things. One thing I've been really focusing on (and it was going well until tonight) is delineating my time- I need my work day to end, period, at some specific time, and the rest of my life to commence. I tend to drag work stuff around with me all the time, and it's poor stress management and doesn't let me focus on other areas of my life that need attention. So even if it's just for an hour or two at night, I need it to officially stop. I've been hitting a gong in my apartment, and it's funny but it helps.

I'm reading Locke's Essay on Understanding. Delightful writing style- he starts out so self-deprecating, with just a few of his humble observations, and then commences to thoroughly, systematically, demolish any competing opinions. Funny how we take the whole tabula rasa argument for granted now, and wrap it into nature vs nurture- when he wrote this stuff, it was really groundbreaking.

What's coming up? Cre8Con, for one. I'm not sure I can afford to go- it's so much more expensive than it was last year, and my job just spent a fortune to send me to Siggraph. Too bad, too- I got a lot out of it last year. Also Art Spark, BackFence PDX, OMPA Industry Night, and Dr. Sketchy. So if you're a creative type, September has a lot to offer.

Madmen

by Billy Collins

They say you can jinx a poem
if you talk about it before it is done.
If you let it out too early, they warn,
your poem will fly away,
and this time they are absolutely right.

Take the night I mentioned to you
I wanted to write about the madmen,
as the newspapers so blithely call them,
who attack art, not in reviews,
but with breadknives and hammers
in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.

Actually, they are the real artists,
you said, spinning the ice in your glass.
The screwdriver is their brush.
The real vandals are the restorers,
you went on, slowly turning me upside-down,
the ones in the white doctor's smocks
who close the wound in the landscape,
and thus ruin the true art of the mad.

I watched my poem fly down to the front
of the bar and hover there
until the next customer walked in--
then I watched it fly out the open door into the night
and sail away, I could only imagine,
over the dark tenements of the city.

All I had wished to say
was that art was also short,
as a razor can teach with a slash or two,
that it only seems long compared to life,
but that night, I drove home alone
with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart
except the faint hope that I might
catch a glimpse of the thing
in the fan of my headlights,
maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp,
poor unwritten bird, its wings folded,
staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.