Adrian’s Microblog

Was reminded of Sara Bareilles cover of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which then led me down the path of finding one of her newer tunes: She Used to be Mine.She is a powerful talent.

The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from. —

Lynda Barry (via austinkleon)

I’ve been trying to actively cultivate more boredom in my life recently as a result of this phenomenon.

I need to circle back to annotate this more, but suffice it to say, really enjoyed this video by Kirby Ferguson entitled, Everything is a Remix Remastered. It’s the compilation of four video installments he did in 2010/12, but which is still equally relevant today, containing some great insights into the creative process, as well as implications for the digital age.Hope you enjoy!(Bonus material: He also recently released a Everything is a Remix: The Force Awakens edition – also great viewing.) :)

This is a pretty neat design for a versatile garment bag from the folks at Hook & Albert.They also have an interesting 3-way carry-all, and a reversible portfolio.

austinkleon:

Kirby Ferguson returns to his series on creativity, originality, and copyright, Everything Is A Remix, with an episode on Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  If you haven’t watched the original series, do that first: I was working on the early beginnings of Steal Like An Artist before the first episode of Everything Is A Remix dropped, but it immediately became an influence. When I was writing Steal, I sort of used EIAR as a jumping off point—if we know that everything is a remix, how should we sort of set up our lives and our practices? Steal was my attempt to answer that. (Kirby and I had an hour-long conversation at SXSW 2012 you can listen to here.) My favorite part of the original series was this illustration, which laid out what Kirby thinks are the 3 basic elements of creativity: Kirby sees them as individual tools that you can use in remixing — his critique of TFA is that it was a little too heavy on copying, not enough transforming and combining.  (It’s been most helpful to me personally when I think of copy/transform/combine as a more linear process in creating: copying is how you learn and assemble your artistic alphabet or vocabulary, combining is when you start to stick your influences together, and transforming is when you stick the right influences together and the seams of your Frankenstein monster disappear and you wind up with a whole new monster entirely.) An appendix to Kirby’s latest installment has some fun examples from the book The Art of Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Of copying: And combining: But the most interesting part of the new episode to me is this new chart, which suggests that there is a kind of commercial/artistic sweet spot between the familiar and the novel: Filed under: steal like an artist

(via Tim Ferriss shares how to master any skill by deconstructing it | The Next Web - YouTube)

When you thwart what’s real about you in order to keep creating content for financial need, you’re just not gonna make it. You’re not gonna keep going. You have your number. It’s very dangerous to be liked by more people than should like you. It’s bad for them, and it’s bad for you. There’s gonna be a shock down the road for them, or you’re gonna dilute yourself and take yourself to a place where you can’t live with who you are. I think that you make an honest account of who you are and you live with the results. The results will be appropriate to who you are… If you’re saying things just to piss people off, then I don’t know why do it. If you’re saying things just to please people, that’s a short-lived victory. But if you just say the things you believe, and the things you like to say, and that mean something to you — if you stay close to the gut — then everything will work itself out. — Louis C.K. (via austinkleon)

Apparently I’m on a Tim Ferris quote run.(via alyssa)

Tim Ferris demonstrates how he uses an Aeropress to make a cup of coffee.

Take risks and you’ll get the payoffs. Learn from your mistakes until you succeed. It’s that simple. —

On Tim Ferris’ desk

Also there: “Do one thing everyday that scares you.”

I think I could totally get behind this product – The Slow Watch. It does seem that presentation of time would also shift perception, and trickle over into state of mind, and thus action.Oh, and if I had my choice, the Slow Mo 08.

This is one of my favorite songs, and James Smith on Britain’s Got Talent in 2014 sang it in a fresh new way that’s captivating – check it out!

A humorous reminder that “design” can go too far - it’s not an end in itself. :)Or as Papa Francis said, “It is not enough to seek the beauty of design. More precious still is the service we offer to another kind of beauty: people’s quality of life, their adaptation to the environment, encounter and mutual assistance.” LS 150.

“Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.” -Lord Acton

Markdown Primer

Pretty amazing to watch this SpaceX rocket land on such a small platform in the water – quite an engineering feat, and kudos for them sticking to it even through failures.

When tablets first came out, everyone was wondering if they could ditch their laptop, but it was a new category of device, not a replacement. Until now…Microsoft Surface Pro pulled ahead of the iPad in providing laptop functionality in a tablet form, and giving customers what they wanted. I think Apple awoke to this late, and is working to regain ground, but this latest release shows they’ve picked up the challenge. And from all appearances, are delivering magnificently. The keyboard design is better (closer to the screen), the screen is better (follows same color schema as movie industry), the Apple Pencil is unrivaled in degree of interaction, and it’s actually more powerful than most laptops on the market.I think this’ll definitely be my next upgrade, and maybe even sell my existing laptop to migrate to this form factor.In any event, check out the video describing the new experience, and what Apple is calling “an uncompromising vision of personal computing for the modern world”. I think I agree.

Finding a good series to watch on Amazon Prime is a great reward, Over the last couple years, here are ones I’ve enjoyed, and hope you might too:–Covert Affairs: CIA agent–Warehouse 13–Suits–Band of Brothers

austinkleon:

John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings A good deal of this book is nonsense, which I think Cage himself knew (“I don’t give these lectures to surprise people, but out of a need for poetry.”), but then again, I like nonsense, especially if it’s the right kind of nonsense. (Kay Ryan once said “nonsense is extremely close to poetry… nonsense operates by rules.”) And, in fact, like his music, a lot of these lectures were composed with rules, Cage using chance operations to compose them. (“I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / that is poetry.”) The book begins with this wonderful thought: Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.   Those three sentences alone could change your life. (Read them again.) Or this one: It is not irritating to be where one is / only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else. This sentence, too: We have eyes as well as ears, and it is our business while we are alive to use them. Here’s his story of visiting a “sound-proof” chamber: There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music. Cage sprinkled the book with little stories and Zen parables, “playing the function that odd bits of information play at the ends of columns in a small-town newspaper.” These are my favorite parts of the book. Here’s one: After a long and arduous journey a young Japanese man arrived deep in a forest where the teacher or his choice was living in a small house he had made. When the student arrived, the teacher was sweeping up fallen leaves. Greeting his master, the young man received no greeting in return. And to all his questions, there were no replies. Realizing there was nothing he could do to get the teacher’s attention, the student went to another part of the same forest and built himself a house. Years later, when he was sweeping up fallen leaves, he was enlightened. He then dropped everything, ran through the forest to his teacher, and said, “Thank you.” That’s another big lesson with Cage: if you want to hear something, you’ve gotta keep your mouth shut. If you keep your mouth shut, things will happen. Elsewhere, outside the book, he told a similar story about his own life: [O]ne day I got into [a cab] and the driver began talking a blue streak, accusing absolutely everyone of being wrong. You know he was full of irritation about everything, and I simply remained quiet. I did not answer his questions, I did not enter into a conversation, and very shortly the driver began changing his ideas and simply through my being silent he began, before I got out of the car, saying rather nice things about the world around him. Here’s another favorite of mine, about dumpster-diving: George Mantor had an iris garden, which he improved each year by throwing out the commoner varieties. One day his attention was called to another very fine iris garden. Jealously he made some inquiries. The garden, it turned out, belonged to the man who collected his garbage. A story about Arnold Schoenberg and his eraser: I was studying with Schoenberg one day as he was writing some counterpoint to show the way to do it, he used an eraser. And then while he was doing this he said, “This end of the pencil is just as important as the other end.” It’s a lot easier to “get” Cage when you know a little bit about Zen Buddhism. (A good book that explores this is Where The Heart Beats.) I like how much Cage talks about boredom: [T]he way to get ideas is to do something boring. For instance, composing in such a way that the process of composing is boring induces ideas. They fly into one’s head like birds. This is an idea he got straight from Zen: In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting. He said when your ears are “in connection with a mind that has nothing to do, that mind is free to enter into the act of listening, hearing each sound just as it is…” I like how he describes art as “a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play.”   This play, however, is an affirmation of life — not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord. His fascination with the I Ching and chance operations led him to emphasize that not-knowing is one of the keys to making art.  when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that I know nothing He quotes Robert Rauschenberg: I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing. And: There is a reduction of the ego that is essential to doing the work: Some more parables. About freedom:

Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression “free as a bird,” Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, “You know? They’re not free: they’re fighting over bits of food.” On standing in line: Standing in line, Max Jacob said, gives one the opportunity to practice patience. Probably not for everyone, but a very interesting read. Filed under: my reading year 2016

I’ve thought about doing this before, but never actually did. I’m glad someone did though, and really enjoyed hearing his tale.James Veitch, sharing what happens, when you reply to spam. Enjoy. :)