Monday, November 24, 2014

More Quotage

I just happened across a musing on the necessary materials for creativity that exactly mirrors what I've observed myself:

"The first law of creativity: The act of imagination depends directly on the richness and variety of a person's previous experience because this experience provides the material from which the products of creativity are constructed.  The richer a person's experience, the richer is the material his imagination has access to."

This is from the writings of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, discussed in a post HERE at Keith Sawyer's blog Creativity & Innovation.

Mind you, a huge heap of building materials is not, in itself, enough to imagine building a creative house... The desire to build, the energy and time to build, and curiosity and wonder are even more important.  Only look at the vast numbers of richly experienced people who have never used that experience creatively.

Monday, November 17, 2014

Design Quotes

I like quotes.

Little nuggets of thoughts to turn over and examine.

These often lead to long monologues as you decide what you yourself think about the topic or to further reading, to research, and to then figuring out what you yourself think on the topic.  (Simply making the quote into a coffee mug or bumper-sticker rather short circuits that process, yes?)

Today's quotes...

From a webcast of the story "Edge of Your Seat" on the radio show 99% Invisible  this quote from architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, "A chair is a difficult object.  A skyscraper is almost easier."

Mies's Barcelona chair - Public domain image from Wikimedia


And from the book, Bambi vs. Godzilla: on the Nature, Practice, and Purpose of the Movie Business a snippet, a definition only, by David Mamet, "...entertainment, which is to say tincture of art..."

Tincture of art = art extracted by alcohol.

Lovely.

Not completely true, of course, but plenty truthy enough for any entertainment-artist's coffee mug.

Monday, November 3, 2014

And Here I Am...

...Taking forever to write the next blog post.

It's been distracting here is what.

My show, The Explorers' Club is being built in Fort Worth (need to go see that soon) and I'm consulting with a theater on possible new digs.  My guest and I went to the Women of WaterTower's fun n' fancy Halloween party (dressed as 2/3 of a coven in flower-bedecked pointy hats).

It's been all Fall stuff going on here: sweater-weather, a visit to the Dallas Arboretum to see the pumpkins, and Halloween itself with it's Jack-o-lantern carving, punkin seed roasting, and actual Trick-or-Treaters!... followed by the inevitable eating-the-rest-of-the-candy ritual.

Is there anything as nice as Candy Corn?



Happy Fall!

BTW A good funny/scary horror/ghost Halloween read is:

Great Halloween - or anytime - read HERE

An entertaining, clever, and horrible-yet-funny novel by Grady Hendrix , published by Quirk Books that will be especially appreciated by anyone who's ever shopped at a certain Scandinavian big-box furniture store.