31.3.09
Sing It With Me!
This is undoubtedly my favourite Tom Waits song. (The rest of the concert, available as a podcast from NPR, is equally excellent.)
Labels: video
23.3.09
“…I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative, but what we do know is: if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. By the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity; they have become frightened of being wrong. […] We’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make, and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said: ‘All children are born artists. The problem is how to remain an artist as we grow up.’ I believe passionately that we don’t grow into creativity; we grow out of it – or, rather, that we get educated out of it.”
—Sir Ken Robinson on creativity in education, as heard at TED
Labels: quote
20.3.09
I Am Writing This Down
In six years, I want to be at a small, close-knit design agency doing work I can be proud of for clients and causes I care about. I will work hard to make this happen.
(You know, I’d like to think this isn’t going to be something I’ll look back on and be all “Dude, what happened?”)
Labels: note
18.3.09
17.3.09
15.3.09
“To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatise, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse.”
—Paul Rand, in Design, Form and Chaos
Labels: quote
Go listen to this fascinating talk by Malcolm Gladwell on the “phenomenon of prodigies and late bloomers in art”. You might like to jump straight to the transcript (PDF) or read a related piece by Gladwell in The New Yorker.
Labels: link
14.3.09
“CNBC could be an incredibly powerful tool of illumination for people that believe that there are two markets. One, that has been sold to us as long term. Put your money in 401(k)s, put your money in pensions, and just leave it there. Don’t worry about it, it’s all doing fine. Then there is this other market – this real market that’s occurring in the back room, where giant piles of money are going in and out, and people are trading them, and it’s transactional and it’s fast. But it’s dangerous, it’s ethically dubious, and it hurts that long-term market. So what it feels like to us – and I’m speaking purely as a layman – it feels like we are capitalising your adventure by our pension and our hard earned [money] – and that it is a game that you know is going on, but that you go on television as a financial network and pretend isn’t happening.”
—Jon Stewart in a scathing takedown of CNBC and Jim Cramer, as heard on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Labels: quote
10.3.09
The New Yorker profiles Tony Gilroy, the screenwriter behind Michael Clayton and the Jason Bourne films.
Labels: link