“We tend to think of creativity as something artistic—the quality that produces masterpieces. But it’s actually an important part of just getting everyday stuff done. It’s what allows a programmer to complete her first line of original code, a product manager to identify a new market for an existing product, and an elementary-school teacher to find an entertaining way to teach subtraction. And when it comes to situations as different as these, constraints seem to improve our performance.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Even As Streaming Becomes Easy And Popular, Piracy ContinuesAnd Hollywood Is Prosecuting
“Pirate content is back in the news with a court case by the Motion Picture Association, which represents Disney, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Studios and Warner Bros, against nine Irish internet service providers or ISPs.”
The Artist’s Job Now? Radical Empathy
“Radical empathy, as I define it, is the act of reaching out with an open heart and mind, even if we feel the person or community we are reaching out to is undeserving of such openness. It’s the notion that, if we swallow our own hurt long enough to extend empathy to our opposition no matter what (that’s the radical part), we will establish connections capable of yielding far greater fruit than any amount of soap-boxing or condemnation ever will. Radical empathy is how the artist and arts institutions will foster communication and connection across communities. Radical empathy is the artist’s new job.”
Steven Spielberg – Genius From The Perfectly Ordinary
“From a certain angle one can see Spielberg as one of those archetypal children of the mythic suburbs, cheery on the outside and nervewracked on the inside, a myth on which his own films have worked variations time and again. So much of his early trajectory feels so generic.”
Any Connection Between Literary Quality And Money?
“No level of affluence will ensure that you write a worthwhile book. Consider the laws of the literary few: Having lots of money confers status but having very little confers legitimacy, which offers a different kind of status; having too much is unseemly yet so is having none. The rich and the poor collude in believing that the amount of money you inherit or make means something about your moral fiber, the quality of your art. What will we do when we find out it doesn’t?”
Barbara Gelb, 91 – O’Neill Biographer, Playwright, Journalist
The original biography, “O’Neill,” which they started when they were in their early 30s, clocked in at 964 pages, but was energetically paced and chock-full of interviews with O’Neill’s ex-wives, friends from his boyhood and seaman days, and the real people on whom his dramatic characters were based. The book, published in 1962, became a best seller.
The City Los Angeles Might Have Been
There are the cities we have. And then there are the cities we might have had if only they had been been built. It’s probably no surprise that with all the imagination running rampant in Los Angeles, there are many fun proposed projects that never got built. Here are some of them…
LA Cracks Down On Pay-To-Play Casting Workshops
“The Los Angeles city attorney cracked down on Hollywood’s pay-to-play casting workshop scene on Thursday, announcing cases against five prominent casting firms and 25 individuals allegedly involved in schemes that violate the Krekorian Talent Scam Prevention Act, a rarely enforced state labor law.”
Hollywood Women Gather To Say Things Have To Change In The Biz
“Frustration was in the air at the Makers conference, where hundreds of women gathered for three days in Rancho Palos Verdes to network and hear female celebrities and luminaries speak. Just weeks after the Women’s March and the inauguration of a president who has bragged on tape about sexually assaulting women, Hollywood women in particular were openly critical of the way they’d been treated in their professional lives.”
The New Robots That Are Making Vinyl Records
“The first new record-pressing machines built in over 30 years are finally online. The brainchild of some Canadian R&D guys with a background designing fancy MRI machines, the Warm Tone record press is everything that its vintage counterpart is not: safe, fast, fully automated, reliable, run by cloud-based software, and iOS-controlled. These $195,000 whiz-bang machines, the homegrown product of a Toronto company called Viryl Technologies, are the next-gen record presses our 21st century vinyl revolution has been waiting for.”