bad banana blog

Silly Walks and Creative Ruts

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.

Via Creative Creativity. Image via.

A Byproduct, Not a Goal

What is art? It either is or it isn't. Let Paul Rand explain in this excellent video (5:43).

Via Bobby Sattler.

Warhol's Time Capsules

 

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.

Via Ephemera.

What An Artist Has To Say

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.

Check out the whole interview here.

Disney's Biggest Little Hit

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.

Via TAG Blog.

"A Herald of the Conceptualism..."

Robert Rauschenberg, American pop art rebel, dies at 82.

Bach's Regal Logo

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.

Bold and Cold

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.

Via Contemporist.

The Mexican Suitcase

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.

Disney's Folly

Disney's new movie, Enchanted, is opening today to glowing reviews.
    This latest Disney princess movie is really a send-up of the entire Disney princess movie genre. It's a genre that got its start exactly 70 years ago next month. The very first full-length animated movie with sound, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was, and still is, a creative masterpiece.
    It was a movie idea Walt Disney had been playing around with since his teenage years in Kansas City. Like many of Disney's big ideas, bringing this dream to life almost ruined him. It took more than three years, 750 artists, and a troubling $1.4 million to create Snow White. Naysayers predicted doom and actually took to calling the project "Disney's Folly." Even Walt's wife and brother begged him to cease production of the movie. Instead, Snow White opened to rave reviews and went on to become the highest grossing picture of its day.
    Not all went perfectly, however. Nervous about recouping his huge production cost, Walt felt he needed to drum up some opening day publicity. So he hired some little people to dress up and dance around on the marquee outside a New York theater. To fight off the cold winter air, Disney provided his dwarfs with a few bottles of alcohol. The dwarfs got drunk, tore off their clothes, and hurled insults and empty bottles at the people passing below.
    Take a minute to watch the original theatrical trailer for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Be sure to take a close look at the 36-year old visionary who was risking both financial and personal ruin to bring a fairy tale to life.

Mailer vs. McLuhan

Norman Mailer passed away Saturday at the age of 84. Here he is in 1968, squaring off with Marshall McLuhan on the Canadian television show The Summer Way. The Prophet of Hip versus the Prophet of the Media. This half hour of conversation and debate touches upon the role of the artist, how technology is changing mankind, the alienation of man, and the quest of identity through violence. It's a fascinating give and take even more relevant in today's information-overloaded age. Speaking of violence, McLuhan is such a condescending windbag you can't help but wonder why the fiery Mailer doesn't punch him in the nose. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and enjoy.

The Synthesis of Form and Content

Here's an excellent short film created for Paul Rand's induction into the One Club Creative Hall of Fame last month. It's an entertaining combination of Rand's visual work fused together with his own spoken words. A great primer on what graphic design is and isn't, straight from a creative master's mouth. Four minutes well spent.

Via Boing Boing and Adland.

A Poor Tortured Soul

American master of the macabre, Edgar Allen Poe, passed away 158 years ago today.
    On October 3, 1849, he was found in the streets of Baltimore, unresponsive in a gutter near a low-rent tavern. He was wearing someone else's clothing. His black wool suit had been replaced by old clothing, worn out shoes, and an old straw hat. He was taken to the hospital where he lapsed in and out of consciousness, occasionally screaming the name "Reynolds!" (Historians have no idea who this person is, if indeed such a person ever existed.) He remained in a disturbed, delusional state until he died on the morning of October 7. Some sources say his final words were "Lord help my poor soul!"
    Poe had not been well for a long time. Since the death of his young wife in 1847, he had been slowly slipping into depression and madness. With his heart broken, Poe attempted suicide in 1849. The above photo was taken that year (he was 39).
    All of this happened just a few short years after Poe wrote A Tell-Tale Heart, a classic short story of the Gothic fiction genre. You've probably read it. But take a few minutes to watch this animated short film from 1953. Narrated by James Mason, it's even creepier and darker than the story. Don't believe me? It was the first cartoon to receive an X rating by the British Board of Film Censors.
    So continue the countdown to Halloween by enjoying this Gothic animated short. And be sure to raise a glass today to the poor tortured soul who wrote the original story.   

Radiohead Meets Buster Keaton

Today is Buster Keaton's birthday. A couple of days ago, Radiohead announced they will soon be releasing a new album online. So take five minutes and celebrate both of these pop culture superstars with this nice little video mashup. If you're not all that familiar with Keaton's work, you'll get a good glimpse into his brilliance here. Keep in mind that he wrote, directed, and performed all his own stunts in these scenes. Plus, he made his own hats.

The Unedited Kerouac

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publishing of Jack Kerouac's masterpiece On the Road.
    The video clip above shows Kerouac conversing with Steve Allen on live television before reading a passage from the book (to Allen's piano accompaniment, no less). Even if you're not a big Kerouac fan, take five minutes to watch the clip. Listening to Kerouac is a totally different experience than trying to read him. It may give you a new appreciation. And the interview is pretty interesting, too. Kerouac refers to his three-week writing binge, his famous "scroll" manuscript (shown here), and his amazingly succinct definition of the term "beat" (a term Kerouac, himself, coined).
    The truth is, Kerouac spent a long time thinking about his book and noodling with various passages before sitting down and typing it out on that scroll. His process wasn't quite as spontaneous as he would like us to believe. And Viking Press demanded numerous revisions and edits from Kerouac before they published his book.
    To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary, however, Viking just released On the Road as it exists on the original scroll. The only editing is from the hand-written edits made on the scroll by Kerouac himself. Original names are used. The content is a bit more raw and sexually explicit in places. And there is not a single paragraph break. Not one. If you're a Kerouac fan, it's a must-read.
    By the way, the original On the Road scroll is on the road itself. It's currently finishing up a stay in Lowell, Massachusetts before going on display at the New York Public Library September 28. The scroll will stay in New York until February 15, 2008 before heading to Austin, Texas. You can see the full schedule here.

Video via Make the Logo Bigger.

Allen Ginsberg: Drawings and Inscriptions

Inspired by a newspaper article I read last week, I went online looking for some of Allen Ginsberg's drawings and book inscriptions. I found a wonderful gallery right here.
    I think there's an interesting parallel between these drawings and Ginsberg's poetry. With these inscriptions, he was creating quick, hand-written, wild images in a formal, typeset book. Yet the poems in those books began the exact same way. Quick, hand-written, wild words on paper. In a way, the inscriptions complete the circle.
    Be sure to check out this great online resource for all things Allen Ginsberg. You'll find more of his artwork, as well audio clips of Ginsberg poetry readings, actual manuscripts, video clips, and more.

Hello, I Must Be Going

There sure has been a lot of media coverage commemorating the 30th anniversary of Elvis Presley's death. But another pop culture icon passed away just three days later; on August 19, 1977. Take a few minutes to enjoy the amazing creative talents of Julius Henry Marx. Like Elvis, the world still knows him by a single name.

The Importance of Being Startled

Back in early June, I mentioned on this blog that I was going to kick off the summer by re-reading Ray Bradbury's classic novel, Dandelion Wine. A wonderful book about youth and old age and the passing of time. I also wrote about finding a little insight into Bradbury's creative process in the book's introduction. You can read the post here.
    Today, I said goodbye to the unofficial summer season (the kids go back to school tomorrow) by finishing Farewell Summer, Bradbury's sequel to Dandelion Wine. It was published late last year; 55 years after the publication of Dandelion Wine. Like the end of summer itself, it's bittersweet.
    But just as my summer started off with Bradbury's introduction, it ended with another surprise insight into Bradbury's creative process. Here are three passages from the afterword in Farewell Summer:

The way I write my novels can best be described as imagining that I'm going into the kitchen to fry a couple of eggs and then find myself cooking up a banquet. Starting with very simple things, they then word-associate themselves with further things until I'm up and running and eager to find out the next surprise, the next hour, the next day or the next week.

The bottom line here is that I am not the one in control. I do not try to steer my characters; I let them live their lives and speak their truths as quickly as possible. I listen, and write them down.

Surprise is everything with me. When I go to bed at night I give myself instructions to startle myself when I wake in the morning. That was one of the great adventures in letting this novel evolve: my instructions at night and my being startled in the morning by revelations.

What wonderful insight into a prolific creative mind. And what great advice. How many of us go through life trying our best not to be startled?

A Good Idea Plus Modest Expectations

Today is Paul Rand's birthday. The father of modern branding would have been 93 years old today.
    Thirty-five years ago, Rand put the finishing touches on one of the most recognizable logo designs in the world today. It's practically unheard of for a logo to be used, unchanged, for that length of time. That's the genius of Rand. Not only is his IBM logo still in use, his famous marks for Westinghouse and ABC are still being used decades after their creation, as well. His UPS logo was only recently overhauled (to the dismay of many design enthusiasts who believe the original is still better). His Enron logo would still be used, if, well...
    The genius of Rand is that he made so many of his designs look "easy." Simple isn't easy. Simple is extremely hard. Don't believe me? Take a look at the IBM logo through the years. Rand's subtle genius is unmistakable.

The final, evolved Rand design. 1972-Current

The first Rand design. 1956-1972

Pre-Rand. 1947-1956

The first IBM logo. 1924-1946

Rand once said: "Design is so simple, that's why it's complicated." Anyone who has struggled with designing a logo knows exactly what he means. Rand also once explained that: "Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations." Oftentimes, as designers, we ignore that last part. Perhaps if we had the discipline to embrace modest expectations, our work might still be relevant forty years from now.

More Than Talent

Jasper got it right. The paintings posted yesterday were created by Janis Joplin.

    I am constantly amazed at the versatility of so many famous creative individuals. Perhaps I shouldn't be. Truly creative people tend to be curious, empathetic, energetic, flexible, and open to inspiration whenever it strikes. Many move into the arts instinctively, dabbling in areas before finding their true calling. Janis sang in coffee houses in order to pay for art supplies. She planned to be an artist and fashion designer. Destiny had other plans. A door was opened and she walked through it with confidence and originality. That takes more than talent. It takes guts.

    I caught just a bit of Live Earth over the weekend. Eh. It dawned upon me that most every big concert like this craves a moment like the one below, where a practically unknown Janis Joplin simply destroys the Monterey Pop Festival. It happened forty years ago this summer. Her first album wouldn't come out for another few months. She walks off the stage a superstar.
    Take five minutes and watch her performance. Yes, that's Mama Cass (herself a superstar) sitting there in the audience, mouth agape, mesmerized. You will be, too.

Can You Name the Artist?

Two of the lesser-known pieces from this world-famous artist's impressive body of work.
    First person to name the artist in the comments section will be identified and lauded in the follow-up post.
    I'll give you three hints: 1) The artist is a woman, 2) The artist is no longer living, and 3) One of these hints is a lie. Go ahead, give it a shot.

In the Company of Immortals

David Ogilvy would have turned 96 years old today.
    He was a college dropout. A failed chef. An abysmal farmer. A mildly successful door to door salesman. And one of the greatest minds in the history of advertising. He literally wrote the book on the subject.
    In honor of his birthday, I offer up a few choice quotes:

The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.

Many people—and I think I am one of them—are more productive when they've had a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, I'm far better able to write.

The secret of a long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.

Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won't think you're going gaga.

Don't bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals.

    If you follow me on Twitter (or if you've run into me elsewhere online), you'll notice I use an old picture of Ogilvy as my avatar. Personally, I think he would have been very excited about the Internet. During his retirement, he wrote so many letters from his castle in France that the local postmaster got promoted in rank and received a pay increase. Sounds like a social media junkie to me.

In a World of Ideas

Dean Kamen just may be the most creative individual living today.
    I'm not going to bother regurgitating his bio. (If you want to learn more about him, please check out this wonderful article from Make in 2005. It's definitely worth a read.)
    Instead, I'm going to point you to Kamen's commencement speech at Bates College just last month. In his address, he explains to these newly minted graduates that the world has undergone a profound change. Up until now, all of human history had been about acquiring physical things...to the detriment of your neighbor. According to Kamen, the world is no longer a zero-sum place.
    Here's a key excerpt:

We're moving from a world of stuff; from the idea that there's a finite amount of gold out there, a finite amount of almost anything out there. Throughout all of history, people fought over stuff: land, fuel, stuff. But in your generation, most value that will be created isn't stuff anymore. It really is ideas. The Internet is an abstraction, and the value of Google exceeds the value of all the car makers. In a world that's about ideas, it's not a zero-sum game. You don't have to win by someone else losing, where you have the gold or oil or water, and somebody else doesn't.
    In a world of ideas, you all create and share those ideas and everybody has more ideas in the end, whether it's a cure for cancer, or a way to make water drinkable, or a way to make energy that's non-polluting. And whether you like it or not, you are moving for the first time into a world where ideas matter more than all the stuff there is. But those ideas have to come from educated people and they have to be used as a tool and not as a weapon. That's the biggest change that's happening.
    We're also facing a world where finally people are realizing we're all going to succeed together. In this world where it's not a zero-sum game, where four billion more people creating new ideas will make us all richer, not compete with us to make us all poorer, the leadership of the educated will help the rest. It is a world where ideas matter, where the educated people can lead and help and be cheerleaders for everybody else instead of being competitors. It's a world where the rate of change for the positive could exceed anything you can imagine.

You can read the whole speech here. Inspiring.
    By the way, beyond his creative brilliance, Kamen shares a commonality with Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, Frank Lloyd Wright, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. Yep, all college dropouts.

Hat tip Signal vs. Noise. Photo from Make.

Artist. Scientist. Genius. Nutjob.

Samuel F. B. Morse. Proof positive that creativity often lies at some pretty strange intersections.

Artist
An accomplished portrait painter early in life, Morse would later become the world’s very first portrait photographer.

Scientist
Morse succeeded where the greatest scientific minds of the previous 100 years had failed—by inventing the electric telegraph.

Genius
Morse uniquely understood that the key to the telegraph was a simple, convenient code. So he created one.

Nutjob
Morse believed his code should be kept out of the hands of European kings because they were conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government through an elaborate international plot involving the Vatican.

Original thinking is rarely easy to classify or neatly packaged. And, as is often the case with truly inventive people, you have to take the bad with the good.

The Surprise Was Total and Lovely

I happened across this passage in the introduction to Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine:

This book, like most of my books and stories, was a surprise. I began to learn the nature of such surprises, thank God, when I was fairly young as a writer. Before that, like every beginner, I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes it eyes on eternity, and dies.
    It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties I floundered into a world-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head.
    I would then take arms against the word, or for it, and bring on an assortment of characters to weigh the word and show me its meaning in my own life. An hour or two hours later, to my amazement, a new story would be finished and done. The surprise was total and lovely. I soon found that I would have to work this way for the rest of my life.

I love the process he describes here. It's so random and reckless. And fast.
    In a previous post, I wrote about how Bradbury is a big believer in filling his brain every single day with stories, books, and poems. He never knows when his brain might call upon something he read in the past to influence something he is writing today.
    These next few days, I'll be filling my brain with some Dandelion Wine. I can't think of a better way to kick off the summer season.

(Graphic courtesy of my talented friend RECKON. Be sure to check out his art and literary figure shirts here.)

The Pop Art of Harold Edgerton

An electric strobe popped in an MIT laboratory and the door to an unseen world was kicked wide open. Pop. A drop of milk refracting into a crown. Pop. A bullet ripping through an apple. Pop. The collision of a foot and a ball. Pop. Pop. Pop. Today, many of Dr. Harold Edgerton’s amazing stroboscopic photographs have achieved pop art status. But this unassuming electrical engineer from Nebraska never set out to make art. He simply wanted to satisfy his own curiosity.
    "Don't make me out to be an artist," Edgerton once said. "I am after the facts, only the facts."
    The National Geographic Society lists Edgerton as one of the fifteen most influential inventors of the twentieth century. Yet his iconic photographs are exhibited in prestigious art museums and exclusive galleries worldwide. Few trained artists, let alone scientists, achieve that level of artistic success.
    Edgerton summed up his unique creative and scientific journey this way: "The experience of seeing the unseen has provided me with insights and questions my entire life."

Here are four questions, then, to ask yourself about your creative journey:

Are you searching for answers...or questions?
If it's answers, you might be disenchanted with what you find. Edgerton, on the other hand, was always pleasantly surprised. And always learning.

Are you searching for limelight...or insight?
Edgerton's work is powerful because he was the first to (literally) shine a light on the unseen world around us. He craved truth, not fame.

Are you following your plan...or your curiosity?
Your intended destination may be a new business concept or a breakthrough ad campaign, but the journey could end up taking you elsewhere. Open up to it. "Elsewhere" can be the place where greatness is waiting.

And finally...are you too focused on the seen?
Even a drop of milk can be amazing if you look at it in a new way. There are unseen opportunities around you. There is inspiration to be found. Slow down and take a fresh look.

Learning From the Master

I've already written about the pioneering television work of comedian Ernie Kovacs in a previous post. Below are two commercials he created for Dutch Masters cigars as part of his network show. 
    Keep in mind, these commercials are live. Everything, including the interesting camera angles (can you see how they did the shot between the cowboy's legs?), the fun special effects, even the on-screen graphics, were done in front of a live studio and national television audience. I mention the studio audience because Kovacs was forced to have one by the network. While other shows in the fifties were performed primarily for the studio audience (assuming the home audience and the studio audience were the same), Kovacs pushed the medium. His show was meant to be viewed through a television set. Many of his unusual effects and pioneering skits would have made no sense to the studio audience. He hated having a studio audience. Kovacs even went so far as to print "ADMIT ONE PASSING STRANGER" on his studio audience tickets.
    In an era where TiVo and DVR and other technologies allow us to easily skip through the commercials, networks and advertisers can learn something from this early pioneer. Be relevant (Kovacs loved cigars and his audience knew it). Be interesting (Kovacs put the same desire for groundbreaking work into his ads as he did the rest of the show). Be entertaining (the products played a role, but the main purpose of the skit was always to entertain). Be transparent (Kovacs wasn't hiding the fact that his skits were ads).
    Can't a show like Saturday Night Live do this today?

A True Creative Dynamo

Today, March 6th, is the birthday of the great Orson Welles. He would have been 92. There are so many reasons why I find Welles to be one of the most interesting and dynamic creative forces of the twentieth century.
    Here are just a few of his accomplishments:
    He founded his own highly successful repertory theatre and radio troupes. He singlehandedly reinvented stage theatre with his writing, acting, directing, and technical innovations. He gained worldwide fame with his legendary War of the Worlds radio broadcast. His directorial cinematic debut, Citizen Kane, is today hailed by many as the single greatest and most influential movie of all time. He would win an Oscar for the screenplay and a nomination for Best Actor (to this day, he is still the only actor to be nominated for an Academy Award in a debut performance). He was featured on the cover of Time magazine. He dated Billie Holiday. He went to Spain and fought a bull.
    All before his 26th birthday.

    So...what have you done lately?

Creativity, Failure, and Inspiration

Yesterday, I took a pilgrimage of sorts while in Kansas City, Missouri. I wanted to get a picture of this building, which housed Walt Disney's very first animation studio. Right there, on the second floor, Walt and his crew laboriously handmade their Laugh-O-Gram films. Walt would have been 21 years old at the time. By then, he had already experienced a lifetime of setbacks. He had been fired twice (once for "not being a particularly good artist'), and his first business venture (a commercial art studio) had ended quickly and in bankruptcy. Disney's Laugh-O-Gram studio didn't fare much better. It declared bankruptcy in 1923, barely one year after its founding. A few weeks later, Walt left Kansas City to go live with his brother Roy in California.
    The lessons learned in this modest building reverberated throughout Hollywood for decades to come. Disney's Laugh-O-Gram employees, including the legendary Ub Iwerks (top left), would go on to personally create or supervise the creation of the world's most beloved characters--including Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, of course, but also Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Sylvester the Cat, Yosemite Sam, and the Pink Panther.
    This building was also the site of a very fortuitous meeting. One night, while working late at the studio, Walt encountered a mouse eating some crumbs by his wastebasket. He put that little brown mouse in a cage on his desk and, over time, taught the mouse tricks. He would draw circles on his drawing board and the mouse would run inside them. He grew quite fond of that mouse on his drawing board. Before leaving for California, Disney took that mouse to his backyard and set him free.
    Years later, that mouse would repay Disney with some much-needed inspiration.
    Take a look at these Laugh-O-Gram films. They're fun, though not great. But that's why they're so interesting.
    After all, had Walt Disney succeeded in Kansas City, there would never have been a Walt Disney.

"The Fun Was in Trying"

That's how New York Times columnist Jack Gould explained the wacky, twisted, and sometimes psychedelic world of Ernie Kovacs. A true pioneer, Kovacs saw television as a technology to be exploited for laughs. While other comedians simply took their old vaudeville sketches into the studio, Kovacs explored the vast possibilities of this new medium. He created elaborate sets for gags that lasted but a few seconds. He tilted backgrounds and cameras to create gravity defying visuals. Books sang, water flew upwards, and visuals and sounds were combined like never before (he even won an Emmy for a full show with no dialogue whatsoever). In Kovacs' world, there were no rules. Take the above clip, for instance. Three minutes of show-closing credits. The boring made visually interesting. And many of those fun techniques (live television, by the way) still feel fresh today. Sadly, Kovacs died in a car crash 45 years ago. If you're a creative professional (or aspire to be one), do yourself a favor and check out this original, creative master. And learn from his inventive, carefree methods. Sometimes the fun is in trying.

The Power of the Pause

I just got around to watching the PBS American Masters episode on Bob Newhart. Awesome. If you only remember Bob as an old guy wearing sweaters on network TV, I urge you to check out his first two albums (personally, I had always been a huge fan of his Abraham Lincoln/Madison Avenue routine). His comedic genius, while apparent in his television sitcoms, is on full display in his stand-up routines. Anyone who writes or deals with communication should study his work. Minimalistic. Brave (embracing uncomfortable pauses). Original (a solo straightman). And, most importantly, really funny. He treated his audience with respect and let them fill in the silent pauses themselves. Truly great advertising is based on the same principle, but I'll save that for another post. Listen to a few samples on iTunes, but buy the full album (including the Abe Lincoln routine) from Amazon.

The Creative Process—Chris Ware Style

Chris Ware is an amazing comic artist. Perhaps you saw his covers (five in all) for the New Yorker this past November. I've just finished reading two more of his ACME Novelty Library books. Touching, funny, and sad. Complex, in both drawing style and story. He recently spoke at the University of Nebraska and talked a bit about his creative process. Take a listen here (skip to the middle if you're short on time).