Time may be running short for holiday gift orders, but at the very least you can head into the new year with your very own creative master t-shirt, tote, or pillow from Reckon. My buddy Chris Weige—poet, blogger, and silkscreen artist of the stars—can set you up with anything from a Joe Strummer onesie to a Frank Zappa pillow. Find your favorite creative master in comedy, music, philosophy, art, film, or television. And if you can't find the creative inspiration you're looking for, Chris takes special orders. Tell him Tim sent you.
Comic genius John Cleese sat down for an interview a few years ago and had a lot to say about creativity and the creative process. I keep coming back to this passage, where he discusses the importance of whim...
I knew a wonderful teacher once—a tutor. He tutored my
stepsons and my elder daughter. He said to me, "Always start where the
energy is." People make an awful mistake by starting where the energy isn't. If
you're feeling very world-weary—and sometimes we're all in that
boat—you have to sit down with something that's going to engage you.
That doesn't mean you just switch on the TV and watch a cartoon, but it
does mean asking, What would be fun? Maybe take a piece of paper and a
pencil and start drawing silly things. Go for a walk. Just sit very
quietly watching your breathing. Anything. Just allow the whim to get
you going. Now, you can't do this all of the time; it's too disconnected. But I
think in that particular frame of mind, when you run out of energy and
motivation, I think you have to go right down to the instinct, right
down to a whim. I'm coming up on 60, and I'm wondering where my life will begin to
go. I need to take a slightly different direction. I talked to a very
wise man, and he said, "If you're trying to find a new direction, don't
plan it, because this [pointing to his head] has been planning your
life up to now. You can't plan something new with the same old
apparatus." He said, "Leave a gap. Leave a space, and just do things on
auto for a while. Just see where these whims take you." It's like creativity. You have to follow it without knowing where
you're going. If you try to control where you're going, you're back in
the same process. It's like asking a piece of machinery that's broken
to mend itself.
Andy Warhol would have turned 80 on Wednesday. Here's something you may not know about him. During the last thirteen years of his life (1974-1987), Warhol kept a cardboard box by his desk at all times. That's where he would toss all the ephemera that passed by his desk—the photographs, newspaper clippings, fan letters, business and personal correspondence, source images for artwork, telephone messages, and anything else that might clutter up the desk of one of the world's most famous artists. When a box got full, he sealed it up, labeled it, and sent it to storage. Today, 610 of these cardboard boxes are housed in the archives of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Amazingly, more than 450 boxes have yet to be unsealed. Warhol came to see his time capsules as a form of conceptual artwork, capturing the mundane details of his life and the culture around him in standard size cardboard boxes. The oddest finds so far? A pizza, a slice of birthday cake, and a 2,000 year old mummified foot. You can read more about this amazing treasure trove of ephemera right here.
There's a nice little interview with Pixar's Andrew Stanton over at Groucho Reviews. Of course, he talks about his latest directorial effort, Wall-E, which opens this week. But as the individual who oversees the development of all Pixar features and shorts, it's his view of testing movies that really caught my eye. Or, more accurately, not testing movies...
We never think of who are audience is. We always just made the movies we want to see. And I'm just immature enough. And everybody else here is just immature enough that we figure that anything silly and juvenile, you know, is probably gonna cover for the kids. ...But frankly, if I started to try and guess what other people want, i would make a bad movie. One of the things that was a revelation to us in Toy Story is that we hit a real wall...because we were constantly trying to second-guess or give what the executives wanted at Disney. And when we...almost were threatened to lose the whole job, we spent a couple weeks alone and just said, "Screw it. We have nothing to lose. Just go with what we want to see." And that became what you know as Toy Story now. So we've learned ever since then: "I'm just gonna go with my gut. I'm going to trust it." That's why I go see other filmmaker's movies. I don't go to see them to try and guess what my demographic is and what I want. I'm not a pollster. I'm not someone—I'm not a number. I'm a person. And I want to go see what an artist has to say.
It was 75 years ago today that Walt Disney and his team scored one of their biggest hits. Three Little Pigs, released May 27, 1933, hit a huge nerve with America and the world. In the middle of the Great Depression, the animated short spawned unprecedented merchandise sales. Sheet music. Pig dolls. Big Bad Wolf dolls. The public simply couldn't get enough of it. Amazingly, the short was even promoted above many of the feature films it was paired with during its long run. Today, Three Little Pigs is still amusing to watch, but hardly feels radical. That's because it heavily influenced everything that followed, including all of the famous Disney features. Compared to animated shorts of the time, however, it practically jumped off the screen. The use of color. The catchy music. And, most importantly, the personality of the characters. There was a dimension and roundness and weight to the pigs, especially, that was lacking up to that point. Like the pig that took the time to build a house right, Walt Disney and his team took the time to build this simple little animated short as solidly as possible. As a result, an entire empire would be built upon it.
Friday is the 323rd anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach's birth. To many, J.S. Bach was to music what Shakespeare was to English literature and Isaac Newton was to physics. Take a moment to listen to some of his timeless music this weekend (much of which, amazingly, was considered a bit old-fashioned in its day). Also, take a moment to admire his beautiful logo. The middle graphic above is the seal he used to mark all of his personal papers and compositions. It contains the letters JSB superimposed over their mirror image, as shown in the bottom graphic. Gorgeous.
The Richard B Fisher Center for The Performing Arts at Bard College (Annondale-on-Hudson, New York) as captured by Yoshie231. Like many, I have a love/hate relationship with Frank Gehry's work. If you haven't seen Sydney Pollack's Sketches of Frank Gehry, however, you need to rectify that situation. It's a fascinating look into Gehry's mind and process.
Robert Capa hung out with Hemingway and Steinbeck and, between poker games and heavy drinking, snapped a few photographs. He once said: "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." And when it came to the Spanish Civil War, Capa got close all right. Real close. His fearless, front-line photography created both a sensation at the time and a model for all combat photographers to come. Now there's a new sensation regarding Capa's work. The photographer's long-lost "Mexican Suitcase," considered by some to be the mythical holy grail of photography, has been found intact. Containing thousands of negatives from photos taken during the Spanish Civil War, the case (actually three cardboard cases) had been left behind in Capa's Paris darkroom when he fled to America in 1939. The photographer went to his grave believing the photos had been destroyed by the Nazis. You can read more about how the case was passed along, forgotten, then ultimately handed over to the Capa estate in this wonderful New York Times article. Historians are rightfully giddy. For starters, the rolls of film may finally end the debate on whether or not some of Capa's most famous photos, like the one of the soldier getting shot above, were real or staged. Capa swore the shot was real, but lingering doubts have persisted.
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