Artists and accountants are not always motivated by the same forces, but there are often more crossover forces between artists and accountants than first glance might suggest. Clearly this is a matter more about aesthetics; I cannot fathom a life in accounting, but I’m sure glad I know a good one when I need her to sort things out. Success for artists, accountants, and everyone else too, is often a function of figuring out how to get something completely done.
Read MoreYOUR INSTRUCTIONS: RATE, REVIEW, SHARE
Some things simply don’t rate very well in the ten minutes after then pop into existence. But in a world seemingly powered by social media uber alles we seem to regard all qualitative assessments only in relation to the positive metrics defined by the title of this blog.
EQUIVALENCY
Is there one form of creative expression that genuinely rises above all others? Are there creative enterprises that have greater value than others, or is everything equivalent to everything else? Does my poem outweigh your selfie, and honestly, who cares in the first place?
Read MoreCLEAR-EYED MEMORIES OF DARKENING SKIES
It’s always in retrospect when we discover the moments in our lives that matter. Life experienced in real time doesn’t easily enable us to contextualize our feelings or the relevance of experience. Only memory and its academic sibling history grant lasting gravitas to events, or sentimentality, or sadness, or joy to events.
Read MoreTHE AMATEUR MOVE
The amateur move is to abandon a project when it’s hard to know how to complete it well. The amateur move is to say you don’t know how to find a conclusion, how to find more energy to finish a long simmering project, how to cut out parts that you know, deep down, simply gotta go.
Read MoreBANDERSNATCH
Bandersnatch asks us to question our own autonomy, much like the main character himself questions how and why things are happening to him in the film based on inputs from viewers, the unseen puppet masters.
Read MoreMANIPULATION
To develop creative work is to manipulate. The creative process has less to do with quantification than it does with intuition. To be creative is to feel something rather than calculate something, and feelings are always subject to change.
Read MoreMAYBE THE DONKEY IS THE HERO?
Hollow efforts to declare that windmills are dragonsspends the character’s precious life not on morality or values, but on deluded self indulgence.
Read MoreACTIVE VS. PASSIVE
An intentional screen is often an active screen, but that doesn't make it a good example of active voice.
Read MoreA PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE MADNESS
Creators create because they must, and the styles in which they pursue their perfectly acceptable madness are intimate functions of delivering them to someplace sublime.
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