The Selfish Meme

The commonly understood moral of the story of Icarus is to play it safe, to obey authority.

In his new book, The Icarus Deception, Seth Godin makes the case for forging your own path, pushing beyond what is expected, and connecting with other humans by making your art–whatever it may be. 

Excessive conformity is a soul killer

In this video, Jaron Lanier talks about how we interact with digital stuff which is primarily in two ways.

The first adds something novel and truly beautiful to the world, like the internet. The second, much like today’s social networks, lures us into a “regimentation scheme,”  spawning an incredible wave of conformity that in the long term, restricts us and stops us from inventing ourselves.

Think tweets. Think status updates. While we can’t do without them today, what kind of impact will they have on us in the long term? 

O Henry on good storytelling

” This is William Sydney Porter speaking, better known to you, no doubt, as O. Henry. I’m going to let you in on a few of my secrets in writing a short story. The most important thing, at least in my humble opinion, is to use characters you’ve crossed in your lifetime. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. All of my stories are actual experiences that I have come across during my travels. My characters are facsimilies of actual people I’ve known. Most authors spend hours, I’m told even days, laboring over outlines of stories that they have in their minds. But not I. In my way of thinking that’s a waste of good time. I just sit down and let my pencil do the rest. Many people ask me how I manage to get that final little twist in my stories. I always tell them that the unusual is the ordinary rather than the unexpected. And if you people listening to me now start thinking about your own lives, I’m sure you’ll discover just as many odd experiences as I’ve had. I hope this little talk will be heard long after I’m gone. I want you all to continue reading my stories then too. Goodbye, folks.”

The heart of Coppola

Behind every great film is a great ‘Making of…’ :)

August 15, 2012 was the 33rd Anniversary of the U.S. premiere of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness.

Joseph Conrad’s story is about a boat captain named Marlow who travels along a river deep into “the heart of an immense darkness” in order to find a man named Kurtz. One of the many themes of Heart of Darkness is the idea that a person can lose their mind the further they travel away from civilization into the unknown.

This theme is paralleled in Apocalypse Now and by Coppola’s own journey in completing his most personal film. The documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse is a compilation of Eleanor Coppola’s interviews, on-the-set footage and secret audio recordings of her husband at his most exposed moments. Coppola’s many struggles included an unfinished script, Marlon Brando showing up overweight, typhoons destroying entire sets and Martin Sheen having a heart attack during production.

The above cut is a mix of Orson Welles’ reading of Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now and the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.

The future of books

I enjoyed watching this student documentary on an intensely debated topic, the future of books/reading/print. Is there, as the documentary suggests, a chance that printed and digital books will find a way to co-exist?

As an avid reader/collector of printed books I often wondered what the fuss was really about. Surely the sensory experience of reading a printed book would always override the convenience + smarts of its digital counterpart? Plus, let’s not forget the joy of rummaging through a book store/library and finding a book that you can’t wait to read.

That was till I bought myself an iPad and discovered the Kindle app. The last 12 books I have bought have all been digital. Many of them, copies of printed versions.

So how and why did the switch happen?

The truth is, in my case, the trade-off point between sensory & convenience was really low. It just needed a nudge and I’d tip over :) 

I underrated the convenience + smarts bit; to have any book you desire at the convenience of your fingertips, while reclining on your lounge chair, instantly, is pure bliss. Access to the dictionary and annotations help too.

Second, and here’s the interesting bit, I found myself consuming more, reading more of the digital editions than i would of the printed book. I do not know if this is a universal phenomenon or one that has been adequately researched. Or it’s something that’s just peculiar to me. Could it be that by plugging into a device, I was actually plugging ‘out’ of distractions and focusing on just one task, reading words off a page? Maybe, and this may sound a little inhuman, the sensory experience itself was another distraction. I was feeling more, reading less. 

As is evident, I haven’t figured it out yet :) But at this point digital editions are working for me. Perhaps things will come a full circle one day and the paperback/ hardbound edition will make a comeback into my life.

But co-exist? I really doubt if a library, at least mine, will be running with both.

The future belongs to the curious

A video short on the most underrated virtue of them all, a personal favorite, curiosity.

You just can’t have enough of it :)

As the narrator in the video says:

” It all starts with a question. It dosen’t matter what you ask, just that you ask.”

mobylosangelesarchitecture:

Moby talks to Tumblr Storyboard about his Los Angeles Architecture Blog.

Storyboard is a regular collection of features highlighting talented creators and their work, as found within and around the massively diverse Tumblr community. Produced by the Department of Editorial, these stories are told with words, pictures, video, music, charts, animation, or any other voice these creators choose to speak with.

Copy, transform, combine

Is remix culture all that bad? Or it lies at the center of every piece of creative that we produce?

Kirby Ferguson’s must watch docu-feature goes on to prove exactly that. Told in four parts, it is a story worth visiting, and re-visiting, as i did this past weekend.

In essence what Ferguson is saying is that there is no such thing as an original masterpiece. The films demonstrate in exquisite detail how everything from Led Zeppelin to Star Wars and from art to technology, not to mention science is based upon hundreds of uses of other people’s creations. 

While telling this story, Ferguson lays down the three laws of creativity: copy, transform & combine. And to me that’s the highlight of the series.

In our collective urge to worship originality, we tend to debunk ideas born out of a more obvious culture of remix. We tend to also debunk the maxim that no ideas are really original anymore as lazy thinking.

Perhaps its time for us to revisit this approach and acknowledge the fact that transforming and combining too is an art, and worthy of admiration or emulation.

Here are the links to watch part 2, part 3 and part 4.

To know more about the series,  read Neurobonkers’ super review and this Kirby Ferguson interview.

p.s. the first 2 mins of part 3 where Ferguson talks about social evolution really is about the way memes work as well :)