I was on the treadmill this morning, watching the Tour de France (which, in and of itself, could be a full blown blog entry filed under “Oddly Motivated”. The stage had just ended and I was about to step off the apparatus, when I happened upon this advert from the Versus Network (formerly Outdoor Life Network). Everything comes together in this ad: the copy is beautiful, the music soaring, the visuals and editing are spot on and the voice over is read to perfection. I ran an extra mile in its honor. Tour de France, meh. 2 minute ad… inspired!
I don’t make halftime speeches very often. Okay, never. But if I did have the opportunity I’d just give this speech. And, yeah, I’d take full credit. Why does my team need to be confused over authorship with a 20-point deficit to overcome?
This is a nice little article from a nice man with a nice talent for drawing. Something about his story reminds me of a portion of my own, and maybe just everyone pursuing a bit of fine art in their lives. He describes his sort-of happenstance way he came across his career, drawing for theater, dance and music rehearsals. And then says, “It could never happen for anyone the way it happened for me… it was all an accident.” Only that’s just sort of the thing, isn’t it? All creative careers happen that way, being an artist is opening yourself up to situations you wouldn’t otherwise come across. Yes, that particular set of events might never happen again, but equally strange ones do every day to people just like him. The key is to be like him… open to it. Read on:
Funny guy and finder of all things sports and Michael Mann, Hirp, sent me this first of a five-part video essay series on the latter. Watching it, it dawned on me that the only way to really describe Mann is through video, his contributions to film haven’t been so much in the intellectual but in the visual, you need the clips, and the accompanying score, to tell the story. What this essay does well is contextualize his work and describe exactly what his contribution is in the same kind of fine detail that Mann himself employs. The thoughts could be described faster, and in far less than 5 parts, but then how would you truly enjoy every. gory. detail?
Have fun. And when you’re ready for part two, here’s that.
I’m sure as you get older you learn to romanticize the imagery of your youth. Certainly, that is the subject of many a song, novel, script, poem, probably even architecture, dance and other things, like how you parent. Down home this past week, I travelled through my own ghostly playgrounds and flashes of images past seeped through in flickery, Proustian, Christopher Walken in “Dead Zone” kind of way. No coincidence, then, that I’d wander upon this video today, looking like memories I didn’t know I had and, who knows, maybe they are mine, it’s hard to tell the difference anymore. The band is new (Bibio), the look is old, but the effect is nothing less than stunning and has me lost in a daze of childhood school days of overhead projectors, endless educational videos and banal things seen for the first time. It defies description, I am only glad that certain artists are able capture small pieces of it so I don’t feel crazy when the flood comes.
The site is called Curatorialist, but although I kind of know what that means, I’ve never really bothered to explain it, in full. Maybe because it’s more of a process than a thing. I have a particular way of finding things. It involves, usually, reading something, but sometimes seeing something, or hearing something. But that is not usually the thing that ends up making it here. I am looking for something, I just don’t know exactly what it is until I find it. It echoes the way I write, draw and photograph. The beginning is never the end and, usually, the beginning is even erased. The first sentence, the first lines, the first shot — by in large, nobody ever sees those. I am, in fact, mostly embarrassed by them. When I write, the first thing I write is mostly something trite or said before a hundred times. I self-loathe over those first lines, written or drawn, all the time. I know others do, too. Working past those initial knee-jerk thoughts is where the work comes in – and the struggle.
Curatorialist is the process of finding something through that darkness. Stumbling onto it through a form of study that I invented when I was a kid, in school. I found it hard to stay on track with books and my mind wandered. However, study time was study time, so I fished around in my room until some kind of connection was formed. I might have a book report to get done, but it was rarely that book that helped me write the report. My inspiration happened when I wasn’t looking at it, but listening to the radio, thumbing through encyclopedias, Time Life books or just day dreaming. The ability to make the two things connect was out of necessity – time was running out. It was either that, or fail.
I came across this Leonard Bernstein-conducted version of it and listened in awe (it was performed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an amazing side story in and of itself – another hour gone), particularly to the vocal amazingness of Shirley Verrett. That lead to me more videos of her and then wondering what the hell they are singing in Ode To Joy (something I’m embarrassed to say I’d never looked up – the filling in of embarrassing gaps in knowledge is a major energizing force in my process). That lead to reading about Beethoven’s life. That lead to Schiller’s life, the poet who wrote Ode To Joy (actually just called “To Joy”). Somewhere in that reading, I discovered that another of Schiller’s poems was also put to music. Beethoven chose Schiller’s poem because it was great. That was a harder path for him because, in the process of adapting it for music, the challenge would be harder (how do you improve upon greatness?). His darkness.
I’m out on vacation this week, but I had a really great photo shoot yesterday with friends Nadia and Charles. Incredible people take incredible photos. Check them out:
I haven’t even seen it and I know it’s interesting. Just the premise alone is worthy of spending some time on. I will be furiously hunting for re-airings of this show, so I can get the full story, but until then, I’m watching these little clips on the PBS site. Everything from scientists studying how birds make songs, to songwriters getting scans of their brains to Bobby McFerrin discussing the different roles music has between cultures. One of my favorite books ever is Steven Pinker’s “The Language Instinct,” which opened my mind to the inner workings of the human brain and redefined cultural standards for how we think about linguistics, which influence many parts of Western thinking. Coincidentally, or not, this show is called “The Music Instinct” and it seems to be further proof that humans are more amazing, by design, than we give ourselves credit for. We have a cultural bias to believe that you have to work hard to become creative, but in fact, it seems to be in us from the get go. That’s a great, hopeful, thought and could mean a lot for the field of education, if they were paying attention. It is, after all, PBS – can we get these people to talk to those people?
I took a test when I was really young, I think in pre-school. Back in the 70’s they were always testing us for one thing or another. Among other optical illusion, this image was on the page, with the caption: “Which line is longer?”
I got it wrong. In fact, I got just about every question wrong on that test. All the other kids were a little older and wise to these kinds of visual puzzles and figured most of it out. I remember a couple kids and the moderator sitting around trying to explain to me why the two lines were the same size and I couldn’t get it. Couldn’t see it. Besides scarring me for life with mindfucks (another byproduct of the 70’s), it also began a fascination of the visual world. I remember later on spending hours watching a pencil refract as it entered a glass of water.
This is just a fun thing to do while you’re thinking of other stuff:
