Colbert Interviews Maurice Sendak
January 28, 2012 Leave a Comment
A fantastic two-part interview with Maurice Sendak.
The Context of Creation
January 25, 2012 1 Comment
During a discussion about the evolution of music last week a buddy recommended that I watch a TED talk given by David Byrne in 2010 entitled, How Architecture Helped Music Evolve, a subject Byrne is clearly very interested in if you recall his Playing The Building Project. I watched it and you should too, but simply put, Byrne is talking about how the environmental conditions effect or determine the qualities of the product. Sounds a lot like how nature works. In this case, how the venue (concert hall, arena, bar) determined the musical styles that were produced there. It’s about context.
Byrne sort of concludes by asking whether, creative expression is influenced more by context than what traditional romantics might believe. I love this because I think the same is true with technology. For example, the electric guitar was invented to allow musicians to be heard in front of larger crowds, not for guys like Jimi Hendrix who eventually came along and did unthinkable things with it. So, in a way it seems like creative expression is sort of contained.
This, then got me thinking about how it feels like the live music experience, which I personally feel like is undergoing a sort of resurgence, hasn’t benefited from a re-imagined or updated architecture. Even new venues (one was recently built near my house that will host all sorts of amazing bands this year) haven’t been modernized in any way. The design and layout are the same and more focus goes into the placement of concessions than crafting a space that allows for emotional connection and sensory immersion. So, I’m now wondering what the concert venue or, more appropriately, concert experience of tomorrow might look like.
Any ideas?
George Lucas Isn’t Your Dad
January 22, 2012 Leave a Comment
Bryan Curtis wrote a great article for the New York Magazine about George Lucas and his new film Red Tails, which premiered in most theaters this weekend. However, the part that really got me was the analysis of the relationship between Lucas and the hardcore Star Wars fans:
What the blistering fan reaction illustrates is one downside of Lucas’s naïve style. By persuading us to drop our snarky defenses and embrace his fables, Lucas had forged a bond with fanboys like no filmmaker, outside of Spielberg, before or since. (Adjusted for inflation, the three original “Star Wars” movies and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” still rank among the top 20 highest-grossing movies of all time.) But naïveté is a fragile emotion. When Lucas goes back and futzes with his mythology — has Greedo shoot first or creates a goofball like Jar Jar Binks or makes Indy uncool by sticking him in a refrigerator — he isn’t just messing with beloved movies. He’s telling fanboys the naïve belief they gave to him was misplaced.
“What more could one ask for than to have one’s youth back again?” Lucas once asked his biographer, Dale Pollock. Now imagine it being yanked away. If the fanboys had become like the studio to Lucas, then Lucas, to the fanboys, had become the man who breaks the bad news about adulthood. He’d become their dad.
I’ve always been conflicted about the the anger that fanboys have towards Lucas since he began tinkering with the films. Their his movies. Go make your own masterpiece. But, as a lifelong fan of this saga, every edit and change he makes, is like a small wound to that inner child I work so hard to keep alive and Curtis nailed it.
[Image via NY Mag Slideshow, "George Lucas, Hitman"]
How Technology is Impacting Art and Culture
January 19, 2012 1 Comment
Last night I watched, PressPausePlay, a documentary that addresses how technology is impacting our culture and it’s art forms. The film primarily focuses on music, arguing that greater access to better technology is making it easy for anyone to create art. But, at what cost?
They interview a variety of thought-leaders and artists, including Seth Godin, Andrew Keen, Moby, Bill Drummond and a bunch more.
I have to say, author, Andrew Keen, as always, makes some startling but compelling points about the cultural dark age he believes we’re heading towards. Keen postulates that technology and social media are leading everyone to believe that they’re an artist of some sort. The result is a sea of mediocrity that obscures the ability of the limited number of truly talented individuals in this world to shine through, ultimately destroying our beloved art forms when the world eventually becomes accustomed to sub-part art. Pretty ominous stuff.
However, I don’t agree with this. My first thought is, how can more people creating, building and making things possibly have a negative outcome on our society? Art, when practiced diligently, can lead to self-actualization, a greater appreciation of life and an overall sense of purpose.
Furthermore, and perhaps more compelling, is that the democratization of art and culture should be more effective at bringing the high quality work to the surface, not less, as Keen argues in the film. Allow me to explain. No more than 15 years ago, record studios and the radio stations determined what music you got to hear. If you had adequate buying power, you could drop 15 bucks on a band’s CD. Now with sites like iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud and countless others, you can listen to tons of music for free without having to make a financial commitment of any kind.
Your Healthy Diet of Content
January 16, 2012 Leave a Comment
I talked about Todd Henry’s, Accidental Creative in a post about defining your work style not that long ago. Having completed the book, I am now going back to indentify the areas in my own creative, strategic and on-going learning process that need the most work.
A section that I found to be particularly useful was Henry’s chapter on “Stimuli”. It goes about the way you’d expect. You are what you consume. If you read and watch garbage, your mind will be filled with the same.
So, given the overwhelming flow of fantastic books, articles, blog posts and research studies baiting the curious mind, how do we sift through it all to ensure optimal inspiration and benefit across a variety of disciplines, relevant both to our professional and personal interests? Furthermore, how do knowledge workers consume the material that will benefit them the most at solving the critical problems they’re faced with everyday?
Ultimately we’re looking to expand the mental framework with which we use to understand and interpret the world. So, as Henry points out, make the box bigger, and you’ll be more likely to synthesize information from disparate reaches of our world in your own problem solving.
Henry offers some helpful recommendations which I’ll supplement with some of what I’ve come across during my own research and personal experience.
First, what’s the basic blocking and tackling you need to do to stay up to date in your field? Henry refers to this as the mental vegetables in your content diet. These are the websites, magazines and writers that you need to be following weekly or even daily to ensure you’ve got all the information you need. For me, being a strategist in marketing, these are sites like PSFK, Harvard Business Review, Ad Age, Mashable, etc. This should account for around 25% of your reading.
Key Tech Trends for 2012
January 12, 2012 Leave a Comment
frog design published a nice piece two days ago on their blog, compiling the thoughts of many of their top creatives, strategists and executives regarding key technology trends for the coming year. Few firms have the credibility right now of frog, so I encourage you to head on over and read the post in it’s entirety. A few of the trends they identified stand out as being particularly salient for businesses and agencies, across a variety of specialties, so I’ll summarize and build-on a few here.
Many theorists speculated that our sense of “Place” would diminish in significance with the rise of digital technologies, however, as many of the trends tip toe around, “Place” has never been more important. Cities are obviously in vogue (perhaps permanently) and our digital devices make unlocking their ultimate potential more accessible than ever. Innovations that expand the connection between our digital device and the physical space will continue to grow faster than we can imagine.
As Ficklin, Tuttle and Richardson attest, the computing experience will continue to become more personal or “human” as it were. The obvious developments from 2011, as they identify were Apple’s Siri and Ford’s Microsoft Sync, both imperfect in many ways but no less, important steps in the development of a more sensitive interaction between human and computer.
One trend of particular interest, is Thomas Sutton’s identification of the Quantified Self. Made possible by data aggregation platforms that will couple information from technologies like Nike+ and Jawbone’s Up band, providing users with a more integrated understanding of things like their overall health, in this case, further enabling insights and suggestions that are more and more specific, nuanced and in turn useful.
Television and Our Connection to the Anti-Hero
January 5, 2012 Leave a Comment
A couple weeks ago, NPR released a great piece about the rise in popularity of TV’s anti-heroes. While short, it identified an interesting trend in how we’re gravitating toward stories with darker, less morally-defined characters. The topic itself is extremely interesting as it can be examined through so many different cultural lenses.
From award-winning shows like Mad Men and it’s famously self-indulged Don Draper to Dexter with it’s lead serial killer bearing the same name, to shows like Boardwalk Empire with Nucky Thompson, Breaking Bad with Walter White and so many more, you can’t help but notice that the recipe for success for the modern-day drama is a morally-ambiguous anti-hero.
But, let’s take a look at why this recipe is delivering in spades.
The anti-hero is not a new type of character. They’ve been popularized since spaghetti westerns like the “Man With No Name” or even “Dirty Harry” (Eastwood seems to have had the role locked down), as well as classic comic book characters like Punisher and the Hulk. The anti-hero has a long history in modern literature as being somehow damaged, and searching for redemption by any means necessary.
Artist Profile: Josh Keyes
January 3, 2012 Leave a Comment
Over the holiday, a buddy turned me on to Josh Keyes. He’s a Portland-based artist schooled at Yale and the Univ. of Chicago. In his words, his art: “is a hybrid of eco-surrealism and dystopian folktales that express a concern for our time and the Earth’s future.” Indeed.
My buddy showed me a print of his “Stampede” painting, which measures 22″ x 48″ and the level of realistic detail that he applies towards the figures in his drawings is staggering. Unfortunately, the photos I have here do little to demonstrate it, but there’s a great element of literal detail reminiscent of classic anatomical art in his work that gives it great balance and believability.
Anyway, love the work. Head on over to his site to check it out. Thanks Kyle.
Living On A Stage
December 13, 2011 Leave a Comment
The NY Times had a piece last Friday about how social media and frequent sharing has seeped into the world of climbing. The article was entitled, On Ledge and Online: Solitary Sport Turns Social. It used, world-renowned climber Tommy Caldwell as an example of how climbers are using social media and always-improving mobile technology to keep their followers abreast to the details of their conquests.
As an avid climber myself, I have been captivated by Caldwell’s multi-year quest to climb the Dawn Wall on Yosemite’s El Cap, 20-some pitches of 5.13-5.14 climbing on a nearly featureless wall.
But, I’ll resist the urge to geek out and get on to my point. The article focuses on the potential effect that freqeuent sharing through social media has on the mindset of the climber. The crux of the article (no pun intended) is this:
“In the last six years, more climbers have started engaging in almost-live updates from the mountains,” said Katie Ives, the editor of Alpinist magazine. She says she worries that “instead of actually having the experience be the important part, it’s the representation of the experience that becomes the important part — something is lost.” David Roberts, a writer and climber, said from-the-route media “introduces a fatal self-consciousness” to a climb. It removes the “blissful sense of being alone out there.”
This is great stuff. When climbers are interacting with their fans through Facebook and other channels they’re removing their focus from the present moment, and into, as Ives says, a more representational state of consciousness. [Note: we should probably give Tommy a break, he was, after all, sleeping on the side of a 3,000 foot wall for 16 days.]
But, what’s really important here, is that this state of existence is real for everyone who chooses to live a digital life. Whether we’re at a concert, out to dinner, or catching a ball game, we’re tempted to capture that experience and/or provide some commentary about it. No matter how you look at it, we are removing ourselves from living fully in the present moment.
The question though becomes, what effect, if any will it have on us as humans over time? Since the invention of the camera, man has been stepping out of the present in an effort to preserve special moments. Furthermore, research has shown that preserving memories through keep sakes like pictures tends to increase the strength and positive affectations that we associate with them, which in turn adds meaning to our lives.
So, could our incessant documenting and sharing be somehow beneficial? Since the invention of Twitter, I’ve certainly noticed that after reading or watching some piece of content, I’m much quicker to explore my mind for unique thoughts, insights or perspectives to pair with the link I’m sharing. Not necessarily living in the present, but I doubt this sort of critical inquiry could be harmful.
I certainly don’t have an answer for this. But, would love to see some longitudinal research that tracks the emotional states and overall quality of living for heavy social media users versus non-users.
Thanks for reading. Any thoughts?
[image courtesy of Brett Lowell/Big UP Productions] 
A Word On Presenting Your Ideas
November 30, 2011 Leave a Comment
During a pitch yesterday to a prospective client, it dawned on me how crucial it is to present ideas or opinions in a) compelling, b) organized and c) digestible ways. All too often we come up with great solutions, that fall flat when our enthusiasm prevents us from sharing them in a logical and emotionally-compelling fashion.
While, an entire book could be written on this topic (and many have, including the hugely popular Made To Stick, by the Heath Brothers, which I haven’t read) this is a blog and so I’ll share a quick series of questions that will help to organize how you present ideas in the future. But, in reality, it’s not any more complicated than this.
- What’s the insight, reality, or problem that your solution or idea is addressing? This will prepare the listener for what they’re about to hear, while providing the reasoning and background behind your thinking.
- What’s the idea? This should be a short, emotionally-charged summary that takes no more than a few sentences. People’s attention spans are short, so this explanation should follow suit.
- How will it work? This is where you can dive a little deeper into not just the ‘how’ behind implementing or bringing the idea to life, but also expand on some of the details regarding what the idea or solution actually is. It’s never a good idea to go into too much depth during your initial explanation, where the purpose is to generate excitement and create a sense of possibility. Instead, if possible, address the nuances and finer details here.
- What will the result be? After expounding on the details, it’s always a good idea to bring your listener back to the end result or that sense of possibility. In my case, at a marketing agency, it’s often about the potential that an idea holds for the brand on a larger scale.
The best pitches, regardless of how planned or even informal they may be, will simultaneously strive to appeal to the listener’s emotional and rational minds. And, don’t be mistaken, this format doesn’t just apply to presenting ideas in the traditional corporate sense. They can be used when asking for a raise at work, making a statement at a PTA meeting, or just trying to convince someone of your point of view.
