(Video link here.) This video of artist and musician Brian Eno is full of interesting ideas about the creative process. The best, to us, is right up front in the first 1:44 minutes:
I think one of the things art offers you is the chance to surrender, the chance to not be in control any longer. Now if you think about it, most of the encouragement is to take control. What we like doing —and that’s the reason we enjoy sex, drugs, art and religion— what we like doing is surrendering. They’re really all ways of losing ME. They’re ways of losing yourself.
…The biggest mistake is to wait for inspiration. It won’t come looking for you. It’s not so much creating something. It’s noticing when something is starting to happen. Noticing it and then building on it and saying OK. That’s new. That hasn’t happened before. What does it mean? Where can I go with it?
If you can’t draw as well as someone, or use the software as well, or if you do not have as much money to buy supplies,or if you do not have access to the tools they have, beat them by being more thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is free and burns on time and empathy.
Change contexts when you’re stuck. Draw wrong-handed and upside down and backwards. Find a good seat outside.
Stop trying to be cool: it is stifling. read more…
As a spring snow storm sweeps through the midwest, it seems fitting to post these wondrous snow paintings by artist Simon Beck along the frozen lakes of Savoie, France. He creates the beautiful geometric patterns, some as large as 3 soccer fields, by plodding through the snow in snowshoes for hours at a time. How long the transient artworks last depends on the weather, although Beck often redesigns patterns as new snow falls; sometimes a work will go unfinished. Beck’s motivation seems entirely improvisational:
The main reason for making them was because I can no longer run properly due to problems with my feet, so plodding about on level snow is the least painful way of getting exercise. Gradually, the reason has become photographing them…
(Video link here.) Professional skydiver Erik Roner asked himself a question he’d wondered for a long time: what would happen if he sky-dived with an umbrella? Then he tried it, just to see what would happen. A man after our own improvisational hearts.
Question the “rule(s)”…
…ask “What would happen if…?
…and then TRY YOUR IDEA OUT!
Sometimes you break new ground, and sometimes you RE-discover what someone else already figured out, often years before… read more…
Nearly 100 feet below Second Avenue in Manhattan, workers have been blasting into bedrock to build a new subway line in New York City, slogging through mud and muck daily. Yesterday, when a worker lost his footing, a frigid mud akin to quicksand began to swallow him up, creating an extraordinary rescue challenge and daring improvisations by the Fire Department. In the end, it would take an amalgam of improvised solutions: ropes attached to mechanical advantages, a backhoe, a manual griphoist machine and scores of firefighters crouched in the slop digging out the man by hand to finally release him from earth’s grip. The New York Times’ report headlined To Save a Life, a Tug of War With the Earth is riveting. Here’s an excerpt:
“It was a hell hole,” said Lt. Rafael Goyenechea, a paramedic who quickly reached the worker and stayed by his side for more than four hours. “I was definitely worried throughout about possible drowning.”…
Three firefighters suffered injuries during the rescue operation, including one who was hurt after getting stuck in the same mud that held the worker hostage.
….Battalion Chief Donald F. Hayde, who directed the rescue for the Fire Department, said he had never faced a more daunting rescue.
“It was the most difficult technical rescue I have seen,” he said, noting that around 150 emergency workers were called the scene.
In the end, both medical workers and firefighters had to improvise a solution for a problem none of them had ever encountered — mud so thick and viscous that it simply could not be cleared away.
“We basically had to try every different technique we have been taught,” Chief Hayde said. read more…
Ed White of Gemeini 4 (1965!) during the first American EVA i.e. extra-vehicular activity, done by an astronaut outside of a spacecraft beyond the Earth’s appreciable atmosphere. The term most commonly applies to a spacewalk.
This is what we’re really all doing in some way, right?
(Video link here will take you to exactly the right point.) We love Fred Rogers’ —the famed Mister Rogers’ — perfect, illuminating acceptance speech for the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 24th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards.
Rogers presents a simple 10-second practice that will shift your view, and provide you with a tool you can carry around throughout the day. (It starts at 1:27 seconds, or click the video link to go right there.) read more…
Over the past several months, Pixar’s former story artist Emma Coates‘ 22 Rules of Good Storytelling has been flying around the web. Although we find it to be excellent advice for writers, we found annotating it made it even better: a list of fine life principles for any creative soul. Our favorite:
No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
Here’s our annoted list made simply by substituting words specific-to-writing with more general ones.
You admire a characterperson for trying more than for their successes.
Simplify. Focus. Combine characters elements. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
What is your character are you good at, comfortable with? Throw yourself the polar opposite at them. Challenge themyourself. How do theyyou deal? read more…
Cara de Silva sent alerted us to Smithsonian’s wonderful Jane Goodall Reveals Her Lifelong Fascination With…Plants?. Here is a particularly illuminating chunk, about a tree (which has come to be one of the most commented on subjects by our readers). If you don’t have time to read it all at once, it’s worth bookmarking:
Just over ten years after 9/11, on a cool, sunny April morning in 2012, I went to meet a Callery pear tree named Survivor. She had been placed in a planter near Building 5 of the World Trade Center in the 1970s and each year her delicate white blossoms had brought a touch of spring into a world of concrete. In 2001, after the 9/11 attack, this tree, like all the other trees that had been planted there, disappeared beneath the fallen towers.
But amazingly, in October, a cleanup worker found her, smashed and pinned between blocks of concrete. She was decapitated and the eight remaining feet of trunk were charred black; the roots were broken; and there was only one living branch. (see far right of photo, below). read more…
(Video link here.) This tiny gem of a film comprised a curious and moving Op-Ed in a recent New York Times by filmmaker Anthony Sherin. The story of how Sherin came to make it, as well as the story documented in the film are pure improvisation: responding to the moment, not knowing what the endpoint would be.
Making this film was pure serendipity. After a January snowstorm in New York City, I decided to do some work on another film, in my home in Washington Heights. But as I approached my desk, I thought I heard a piano plinking. I looked out the window and saw a piano on the curb below. I was mesmerized by the pattern that emerged. Passers-by would slow, stop and play. Some played well. All day long they collected and dispersed, and into the night they measured, shoved and deliberated the piano’s fate. (If it stayed on the sidewalk, the city could have issued a fine.) I was riveted. Pianos have histories. No one who stopped seemed eager to leave it behind. Their thoughts were obvious: Can we take it? Who abandons a piano? Is it worth anything? read more…
(Video link here.) A couple of years ago, we wrote about the discovery of a trove of photographs by Vivian Meier, who, while working as a nanny in Chicago and New York during the 50′s and 60′s, was secretly photographing the cities’ street-life during her time off. It was not until years after her death that her enormous body of photographic work was found, quite by accident, in a battered trunk bought at auction.
Maier was private, eccentric, and determined in her pursuit: a true artist committed to her singular vision, which she quietly funded through her work as a nanny. Her work is an evocative and incisive record of a time long gone, and of a truly improvised life. She is a fine role model for those doubting the possibility of leaving anything meaningful in the world because they are constrained to take paying work they don’t love. Viviane did what she loved ANYWAY, in her spare time, and left a signifigant legacy behind.
Here’s a trailer for a film about the astonishing story of the discovery of her work and her mysterious life. We can’t wait to see it.
(Video link here.) About 6 months ago, we got an email from Merete Mueller, a friend of a friend who was just finishing up a film about the Tiny House Movement.
The film, “TINY: A Story About Living Small” follows Christopher Smith and my attempt to build a tiny house from scratch with no building experience in the mountains of Colorado. It also explores the lives of other Americans who have downsized their lives into houses smaller than the average parking space.
We’re interested in innovative design and environmental sustainability, but most of all, we’re interested in “Home”—how we find it and how we know when we’re there, the small, strong details that make us feel comfortable and at-ease in a place.
Through homes stripped down to their essentials, the film raises questions about sustainability, good design, and the changing American Dream, and what we REALLY need to live well and happily. It’s also the story of Merete and Christopher embarking on a project without knowing what they were doing; they could LEARN what they didn’t know. And did. (TINY just premiered at South by SouthWest, an independent film festival. Way to go!!!!)
We already love the film for this wise nugget:
For some people bigger isn’t necessarily better.The world gets a lot bigger when you begin to have more cash and time. read more…
Found on …Found, the great, full-of-amazing-things National Geographic Tumblr of images from its archives in honor of its 100 birthday: Alexander Graham Bell and Mabel kissing within a tetrahedral kite, October 1903.
It reminded us that kissing is probably one of the most improvisational things there is.
: perfection. 
