“The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions. The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right–enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways–the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up. In fact, they may even be the most essential part of the creative process.”
Tag: 02.01.12
Film School-As-Deeply-Seductive-Drug
“Film school can be a cruelly Darwinian place, with the push-and-pull of competition and friendship, multiple layers of contest and reward, and a rigid hierarchy in which some write and direct and others find themselves unloading trucks and picking up coffee. Students want to be clever, perfect, special, the best. Competition infuses and informs every aspect of the experience.”
Mixing Rodin And Breakdancing
Choreographer Russell Maliphant was moved to create his Rodin Project by his visits to the sculptor’s museum in Paris. Yet he realized that his typical fluid style didn’t capture the size and weight of Rodin’s bronzes. He found a solution to this problem at, of all places, a London street dance festival.
Liberté, Egalité, Hostilité – Do America’s Political Battles Have Their Roots In 1789?
Garry Gutting argues that “we have never gotten over the French Revolution. The revolution introduced the basic liberal idea that government must be fundamentally democratic … We all, in principle, share in the power to govern ourselves. But this idea led (or, at least, was feared to lead) to a much more radical one: that everyone should have an equal share in power.”
A Dance Critic Watches Josephine Baker
Judith Mackrell looks at the few, short surviving video clips of Baker at work – and is thrilled at how Baker animates and subverts her often stereotyped material with wit, precision, keen timing, and her “rare freedom, vigour and joy.”
Damien Hirst With Your Spot Paintings, Eat Your Heart Out
“The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama transformed a completely white room, including furniture, into a spectacle featuring her signature dots, helped by children who visited the exhibition over two weeks and placed brightly coloured stickers throughout the installation.” (Much more fun than Hirst’s rigid grids.)
Can Italy Change Italy?
“When I first came to Italy thirty years ago, there was a lot of talk about change. It was always located in the very near future, but never quite in the present. The paradigm almost everybody accepted was that of an “abnormal” and in some respects archaic society on the brink of becoming normal and modern, falling into line, that is, with the powerful democracies of Northern Europe–as if there were something natural about their models.”
Digital Forensics – Reconstructing The Artist’s Process
“Born-digital materials allow access to these kinds of revisions, and the timing, much more than paper drafts would have.”
Writer Paulo Coelho: Please Pirate My Books!
“The more often we hear a song on the radio, the keener we are to buy the CD. It’s the same with literature. The more people ‘pirate’ a book, the better. If they like the beginning, they’ll buy the whole book the next day, because there’s nothing more tiring than reading long screeds of text on a computer screen.”
Writer Sues Weinstein Company Over Royalty Payments For “The Reader”
Bernard “Schlink, who filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday, claims he is entitled to between 2.5 percent and 5 percent of gross receipts from the film, which won Kate Winslet an Oscar for best actress, based on a $1.5 million option deal he signed in 1998 with the Weinsteins’ former company Miramax.”