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Scott Belsky on How to Avoid Idea Plateaus

Scott Belsky on How to Avoid Idea Plateaus

Grapefruit: Yoko Ono's Poems, Drawings, and Instructions for Life by Maria Popova “A dream you dream alone may be a dream, but a dream two people dream together is a reality.” In 1964, more than a decade after the publication of her tender story An Invisible Flower, Yoko Ono collected a selection of her poetic meditations on life in a small but whimsical book published in Tokyo in a limited edition of 500. More than thirty years later, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings by Yoko Ono (public library) — part irreverent activity book for grown-ups, part subversive philosophy for life — was republished, with a new introduction by Ono herself. A dream you dream alone may be a dream, but a dream two people dream together is a reality. AIR TALKIt’s sad that the air is the only thing we share. MIRROR PIECEInstead of obtaining a mirror, obtain a person. MAP PIECEDraw an imaginary map. CITY PIECEStep in all the puddles in the city.1963 autumn Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. Share on Tumblr

Street Fighter: The Movie — What went wrong The flight to Thailand was long. Stephen de Souza wished it were longer. Over the previous decade, from 1982 to 1992, de Souza had established himself as a screenwriting wunderkind. Most screenwriters can't land one blockbuster; he had a baker's dozen to his name, including Commando, The Running Man, 48 Hours, Another 48 Hours and Die Hard 1 and 2. As a bona fide hit-maker, the writer had amassed enough creative capital to do what so many successful screenwriters aspired to before him: become a director. Months before the flight, the snub-nosed and thick-spectacled fortysomething signed his first director's contract. De Souza hadn't cast the female lead. The role couldn't be played by just any woman. You get one shot at being a big-budget, Hollywood director. De Souza flipped through the airline's gratis magazine and glanced at his watch. Who you know The Capcom executives were in a hurry to have the first film ready by Christmas 1994 — roughly a year away. And that's when it happened.

Five Lessons From a Work-In-Progress Screening The Purple Onion At the end of 2012, Matt Symanowski penned a guest post for us on the development of his feature, The Purple Onion. Now, as he’s finishing the final cut of the film, he sends us this follow-up detailing one unusual step along the way: screening the film to a large audience at Cinequest as a work-in-progress. Below are his five pieces of advice for any filmmaker on improving a cut using audience feedback. — SM The Cinequest Film Festival invited us to screen our debut feature film, The Purple Onion, long before it was even completed. Seeking new insights and wanting to gauge audience reactions, yet hesitant to expose ourselves to criticism, we went ahead and prepared questionnaire forms. These are the five take-aways from this experience. 1. I had been editing on and off for seven months after wrapping the shoot. 2. People will write all kinds of things about your film if you invite them to do so. 3. Early on, I wanted a Balkan brass themed musical score for the film. 4.

Malcolm Cowley on the Four Stages of Writing: Lessons from the First Five Years of The Paris Review by Maria Popova “The germ of a story is a new and simple element introduced into an existing situation or mood.” The kind of literary voyeurism that concerns itself with why great writers write and how, exactly, they go about it has long held especial mesmerism to aspiring authors and voracious readers alike. In 1953, a trio of literary enthusiasts founded The Paris Review. Spearheaded by George Plimpton, who edited the magazine from its founding to his death in 2003, it forever changed the face of literary journalism with its singular brand of incredibly in-depth, borderline existential conversations with beloved authors on the art and craft of writing. Five years later, they published the finest of those interviews — featuring such literary luminaries as William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, and James Thurber — in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series (public library). Malcolm Cowley There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story. Georges Simenon

Codex Seraphinianus: History’s Most Bizarre and Beautiful Encyclopedia, Brought Back to Life by Maria Popova “You see what you want to see. You might think it’s speaking to you, but it’s just your imagination.” In 1976, Italian artist, architect, and designer Luigi Serafini, only 27 at the time, set out to create an elaborate encyclopedia of imaginary objects and creatures that fell somewhere between Edward Gorey’s cryptic alphabets, Albertus Seba’s cabinet of curiosities, the book of surrealist games, and Alice in Wonderland. Now, for the first time in more than thirty years, Codex Seraphinianus (public library) is resurrected in a lavish new edition by Rizzoli — who have a penchant for excavating forgotten gems — featuring a new chapter by Serafini, now in his 60s, and a gorgeous signed print with each deluxe tome. In an interview for Wired Italy, Serafini aptly captures the subtle similarity to children’s books in how the Codex bewitches our grown-up fancy with its bizarre beauty: Thanks, Willy Donating = Loving Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. Share on Tumblr

Life Begins At Incorporation Are corporations people? Is birth control a sin? Can the president kill you with a drone strike? In this essential collection, Pulitzer Prize Finalist Matt Bors mixes the best political cartoons from his prolific body of work with 15 essays to answer the most perplexing questions of our time. From wandering the halls of a church-run haunted house in Ohio to meeting in Afghanistan with victims of America’s War on Terror to speculating on the secret lives of homophobes, Bors ridicules the people and problems plaguing this fair nation. Note: This purchase comes with a free digital version as well. 240 pages Full color Virginia Woolf on the Language of Film and the Evils of Cinematic Adaptations of Literature by Maria Popova “The eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think.” “Cinema, to be creative, must do more than record,” Anaïs Nin wrote in 1946 in the forth volume of her diaries. But the question of what this elusive, quintessential creative duty of cinema might be long predates Nin’s observation. In the spring of 1926, when film was still young and silent, Virginia Woolf found herself at once captivated and concerned by the seventh art and penned an essay exploring its perils and its promise. Woolf begins with a reserved meditation on the nature of moving images, which at first glance appear to speak to our most primitive underpinnings and invite a strange kind of cerebral resignation, but upon deeper reflection serve as a lubricant between brain and body: Woolf considers the escapist nature of the cinematic experience, and the comforting safety that lies in that escapism:

The Surrealist Chart of Erotic Hand Signaling by Maria Popova “You think no one understands / Listen to my hands” In the early 1920s, Surrealism emerged as a new cultural rhetoric and aesthetic rooted in using the element of surprise to open up new frontiers of the imagination, blending the playful with the philosophical. A Book of Surrealist Games (public library), originally published in 1991, is part activity book for grown-ups, part essential art history, featuring word and image games that the surrealists — including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Pablo Picasso (to a degree), Max Ernst, and André Breton — developed to create their written and graphical art. Among them is this (very not safe for work, but then again so was the entire decade) erotic hand signaling chart, a naughty adaptation of the standard American Sign Language manual alphabet: First person to adapt this into an animated GIF gets a piece of candy. UPDATE: Reader Jamal Qutub did the honors: Donating = Loving Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter.

Useful New Free Fonts For Designers To Download And Use There are many typefaces options out there, complex and different in styles, and it can be difficult to choose one for a project. How do you actually do that? Firstly, you will have to imagine the impression of the audience, what they will think about it, if it’s appropriate for them and useful in the context of your design design and target audience. Secondly, you can’t forget about the basic things that you should look for in a font, legibility and readability. After going through these first two steps, you’ll be thinking about aesthetics. In the end you’ll see that the personal choice of a font is not a personal choice anymore, and the actual concept is minimized. I wrote this big description for how you should use a font because I received feedback from some of my visitors who were saying that they loved a certain font and used it in their websites, brochures, business cards etc. The article contains 49 new free fonts and I hope they will be useful to you. Jura Calendas Plus Satellite

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