Craig Mod has a beautiful blog at craigmod.com. Craig is what I would call a generally very interesting person. He writes about his travels – he walks a lot, about photography. His blog inspired me to start writing longer form blog posts again.
Craig manages a few very interesting newsletters. I can recommend all three.
I was not just a little annoyed when I finished A Curious Mind. I wrote a summary on the title page: “Summary: Be curious and do a lot of names-dropping.”
The book is quite entertaining but far from the books that normally get a #1 New York Times bestseller.
Grazer tells us about his curiosity process: his inexhaustible drive to visit people he admires, mostly very famous people, and have inquisitive conversations with them. (Except with Edward Teller, one of the inventors of the hydrogen bomb, who does not want to talk to Grazer and it portrayed as a single minded unpleasant person.)
A huge pile of names-dropping forms the basis of Grazer’s stories. He meets the greats of the world and all of them becomes his friends. It is annoying at page 30, and becomes unbearable throughout the rest of the book.
If you are interested in movies and Hollywood, you may find it all interesting, but for someone searching for the curiosity learnings it is hard to digest.
Curiosity gives meaning to life. It makes you pay attention to others. I gives you a determination to act.
Neuromancer is an unavoidable read. A classic. The beginning of the books reminds me immediately of the first scene of Bladerunner. The Sprawl indeed is referenced by Sonic Youth (The Sprawl on Daydream Nation) – I had read somewhere they were influenced by the cyberpunk writers.
Where is the beauty in these fabricated, technology-dominated futuristic worlds? Societies dominated by drugs, tech, criminals, violence.
An amazing book, forward referencing many SF movies that followed. The creators of The Matrix heavily borrowed from Neuromancer, just to mention one.
I always carry a camera with me. Even in the car. Admittedly that is dangerous, but it can also be rewarding. Yesterday I caught this picture.
Mark Frauenfelder is my favorite inspiring nerd (well meant) and I find him greatly inspiring. Here he talks about how making mistakes accelerates learning.
Boing Boing is a site he founded, The Magnet is a great newsletter of his, Recommendo is another great site.
Catching the Big Fish is such a great book. It consists of small stories about ideas, meditation, creativity, film making and other things in David Lynch‘s film making life. The tone is wonderfully light. Condensed advice for the living. It is a massive source for inspirational quotes, and I just thumbed through to get to these.
Sometimes restrictions get the mind going. If you’ve tons and tons of money, you may relax and figure you can throw money at any problem that comes along. You don’t have to think so hard. But if you have limitations, sometimes, you com up with very creative, inexpensive ideas.
Little fish swim on the surface, but the big ones swim down below. If you can expand the container you’re fishing in – your consciousness – you can catch bigger fish.
It would be great if the entire film came all at once. But it comes, for me, in fragments. The first fragment is like the Rosetta stone. It’s the piece of the puzzle that indicates the rest. It’s the hopeful puzzle piece.
In Blue Velvet, it was red lips, green lawn, and the song – Bobby Vinton’s version of “Blue Velvet”. The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it.
The no-BS guide to opening a bottle of wine and pour from it.
I tried reading On Photography by Susan Sontag. The book was recommended to me as a must-read for photographers. I will not doubt it is a classic analysis photography, but my mind seems incapable of absorbing the sentences.
The book analyses why people make photographs, what it means, how it relates to other art forms, how people pursue photography. And more, like an article about Diane Arbus’ work.
I find the theoretical analysis quite problematic, being a photographer myself. While taking pictures I do not want to (nor can I) philosophize about the picture-taking itself. I don’t want to know. I want to think as little as possible about the process, but focus on the act, on the picture. Of course I have a frame of reference. But it’s somewhere back in my head, in the unconscious probably.
I put the book away about halfway through. I feel defeated.
In mijn jeugd was sneeuw in de winter niet zo ongewoon. Deze winter nadert een week van sneeuw en vorst, en dat leidt tot nogal hysterische voorzorgsmaatregelen. Treinen en bussen rijden niet meer. Mensen slaan voorraden in. De regering waarschuwt ons met een code rood alarm.
Voor veel andere plaatsen, zoals Scandinavische landen, Rusland, staten in Noord-Amerika en Canada, zou de sneeuw die wij krijgen een babywinter zijn. Als zij op zo’n klein beetje sneeuw zouden reageren als wij, zouden hun plaatsen het grootste deel van het jaar onbewoonbaar zijn.
Ik haalde mijn oude sneeuwlaarzen uit de kast en ging een (foto)wandeling maken. Halverwege de wandeling merkte ik dat mijn laarzen begonnen te lekken. Een beetje onderzoek leerde me dat dat niet zo vreemd was. De rubberen zool van mijn laarzen moet in de loop der jaren in de kast helemaal zijn uitgedroogd. Grote scheuren in de onderkant van de ene laars, een groot gat in de andere.
Vonnegut:
