February 2012
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Jeremy Lin
Lin’s best work, though, took place when no one was watching. Whether it was with the Warriors or during three assignments with the team’s former Development League team in Reno, Nev., he impressed with his tireless approach.
“They talk about a Kobe [Bryant], who will come in and work on one move for an hour,” Smart said. “This young man would do the same thing....
January 2012
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“My cup may be small, but it is from my own cup that I drink.”
– Joaquin Rodrigo
December 2011
2 posts
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“I reread in order to remind myself how good you have to be in order to be any...”
– Edmund White
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Barely a month after his 22nd birthday, the British reporter, novelist and pop critic Nik Cohn hunkered down in a cottage in Connemara, on Ireland’s craggy western coast. It was the spring of 1968. Political storms were whipping up in Prague and Paris and America. Connemara couldn’t have been farther away from it all, and that was the idea: writing 10 hours a day, no distractions and no breaks,...
November 2011
9 posts
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Haruki Murakami, The Art of Fiction No. 182
When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself...
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“I would rather be an artist than a careerist. I would rather impress my image...”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Haruki Murakami
For [Haruki Murakami] that means waking between 4 & 5am to write. After about 5-hours in front of the keyboard (writing or no writing) he runs 10 km. And after that he spends a couple of hours in a record shop thumbing through the jazz section for rare vinyl. Next, he has some free time for hobbies. For him it might be swimming some laps. Then it’s back to his office for a few hours of...
5 tags
Lady Gaga
And I watched it over and over and over and over and over. And I looked at all the parts that I liked and all the parts that I didn’t like … and I said, ‘OK, maybe this part, if your breath control was different, and here, maybe you should try this step…’ I study everything that I do to become better all the time at my craft.
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“In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
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Edward Weston
For what end is the camera best used? The answer comes always more clearly after seeing a great work of the sculptor or painter…that the camera should be used for the recording of life,, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether polished steel or palpitating flesh.
October 2011
4 posts
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Antonio Cromartie
“Dude’s always studying film,” Revis said. “Sometimes, he tells me to look out for this, look out for that, and I’m like, ‘Whoa, how did you see that?’ ” The week before the Jets played New England, Cromartie analyzed every play from his first four games and graded himself on elements like footwork and hand placement, which emerged as a focal point of his off-season training. During the lockout,...
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Haruki Murakami
“Full time,” for Haruki Murakami, means something different from what it does for most people. For 30 years now, he has lived a monkishly regimented life, each facet of which has been precisely engineered to help him produce his work. He runs or swims long distances almost every day, eats a healthful diet, goes to bed around 9 p.m. and wakes up, without an alarm, around 4 a.m. — at which point he...
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Ernest Hemingway
His style was later said to have been influenced by Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, journalism, and the forced economy of transatlantic cables, but he had his own poetic gift and also the intense desire to give to the reader the full and true feeling of what happened, to make the reader feel it had happened to him. He pared things down. He left out all that could be readily...
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John McPhee
The thing about writers is that, with very few exceptions, they grow slowly—very slowly. A John Updike comes along, he’s an anomaly. That’s no model, that’s a phenomenon. I sent stuff to The New Yorker when I was in college and then for ten years thereafter before they accepted something. I used to paper my wall with their rejection slips. And they were notmaking a mistake. Writers develop slowly.
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Toru Takemitsu
My music is like a garden, and I am the gardener. Listening to my my music can be compared to walking through a garden and experiencing the changes in light, pattern, and texture.
September 2011
9 posts
7 tags
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Maria Curcio
I used to marvel at the acuteness of her aural perception. She would sometimes stand with her back to the piano and say: “I think your left wrist is rather high.” How she could do this without seeing my hands, used to puzzle me until I realised that for her there was no division between music and technique. A “beautiful sound” was of little interest to her - what she...
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Over the years, [Clay] Shirky has developed a seminar called Social Facts, whose syllabus progresses from sociological dilemmas facing groups irrespective of technology (tragedy of the commons, prisoner’s dilemma, etc.) to the specific challenges facing groups online. By the end of the class, students are asked to think like designers-if you wanted to change an existing space, or create a new...
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Degas: More Than Just a Ballet Master
In the fantastic “Dance Lesson” on loan from the National Gallery in Washington, the composition comes even closer to a photographer’s way of organizing space. Wide areas unencumbered by detail on the wall and floor, contrast with the figures concentrated along a diagonal axis rising from the lower corner left up to the top corner right. Nothing like it had been seen before Degas. The painter’s...
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Anne-Sophie Pic: The Illusionist of French...
Once she has the mix of flavors right in her head, Ms. Pic goes to her cooking school on Tuesday mornings with her second-in-command. The school is closed then, so she has the run of the stainless-steel kitchen, with the Gaggenau appliances all to herself. She is meticulous in preparing to taste the test dish. She wears no perfume, so no scent will disrupt her senses, and she always cleanses...
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“Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who spent many years in a concentration camp during the Second World War, wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning that everything in life can be taken from you except one thing: your freedom to choose how you will respond to a situation. I think what determines your quality of life is how you relate to the realities of your life. If you choose a way that’s stressful...
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“[Edgar Degas] once said that, were he to start an art school, it would be in six floors of a single house. Beginners would start with the model on the top floor. As students developed, they would move down, floor by floor, until they reached street level; to consult the original model, they would have to climb the stairs each time. Art for him was not just about memory, it was a Platonic...
August 2011
2 posts
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I once watched a television interview with a great violinist. The interviewer asked him to describe a typical day. The musician said he read scores over breakfast, then composed music in the morning, thought about music during a walk, practiced the violin in the afternoon, played in a concert in the evening, met with musician friends to play together, then went to bed dreaming of the violin. The...
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Focusing X-rays on faces in seven of da Vinci’s masterpieces, including the Mona Lisa, Dr Walter’s team found that the artist would first paint in the basic flesh tones. Then da Vinci applied up to 30 incredibly thin strokes of glaze above the flesh tone—many just a few micrometres thick. Glaze is mostly translucent, but da Vinci would also slip in small amounts of pigments, such as manganese and...
July 2011
2 posts
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It is not the right angle that attracts me, nor the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. What attracts me is the free and sensual curve—the curve that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers, in the body of the beloved woman.
— Oscar Niemeyer quoted in “Dreaming of Brasilia,” WSJ. Magazine, July / August 2011
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But [Annie Sophie] Mutter has evolved from mere goddess into something much more interesting — one of the hardest-working musicians on the planet. And her approach to the Mozart sonata — which she’s scheduled to perform tomorrow night at the Kennedy Center — is a prime example. She has spent much of the past 18 months immersed in Mozart’s world, studying the...
June 2011
2 posts
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No. The writer doesn’t need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper. I’ve never known anything good in writing to come from having accepted any free gift of money. The good writer never applies to a foundation. He’s too busy writing something. If he isn’t first rate he fools himself by saying he hasn’t got time or economic freedom. Good art can come...
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In the universe of urban design, it can be difficult to keep score of who has influenced whom. [Amanda] Burden frequently travels the country and the globe, constantly taking photographs, and she reaches for her scrapbooks to show off the places that have served as inspiration. Tivoli Gardens, the popular Danish amusement park, shaped her thinking for the newly rezoned Coney Island; in Paris, the...
May 2011
4 posts
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My modus operandi—or M.O., as they say down at the station house—is to read everything authors have written and much that has been written about them in the effort to discover what they have attempted to achieve in their novels or essays or poems. I try to trace lines of development, find preoccupations, locate (where they exist) obsessions, analyze literary strengths and weaknesses, and...
“If you don’t study yourself, you’re not getting a true idea of how you look.”
– — “Bunny” Yeager, photographer, model
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I am not a designer, I am just a cook. When you imagine a dish, you picture it complete in your head—you feel the consistency of the raw materials, you see the colors, you taste it in your mind, you lay all the elements down on the plate according to a vision that is just yours. And this is exactly what turns a good chef into a great chef. A dish is music—it will only last 30 seconds,...
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Wired: So, where are you headed? Are you trying mostly to understand human creativity? Or are you trying to replicate it?
Hofstadter: Well, you catch me in a tricky dilemma here. I want any computer program that my students and I work on to delight me with its cleverness. I want it to outclever its programmers. But at the same time, if after 10 or 20 years of work my program composed a great...
April 2011
3 posts
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[John Updike] said it was the only way he could keep his desk clear. But of course it was not that at all. This was a highly organised mind with boundless creative energy. He could turn in 1200 words of fiction in a day, write a review or an essay, and still address his correspondence. — Ian McEwan, speaking about John Updike
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Takeshi Shikama is a resident of Tokyo who built with his own hands a mountain lodge in a forest with trees he felled. For the past decade, he has sought refuge there to commune with and to photograph nature. Most of these dark, haunted images of trees, woods, fields and flowers are exquisitely printed on 11-by-14-inch hand-coated platinum palladium Gampi paper. The thin, ecru paper is also...
March 2011
4 posts
The ability to “read” a medium means you can access materials and tools created by others. The ability to “write” in a medium means you can generate materials and tools for others. You must have both to be literate. — Alan Kay
“The tools (as usual) are neutral. It’s up to us to insist that onscreen reading enhance, not replace, traditional book reading. It’s up to us to remember that the medium is not the message; that the meaning and music of the words is what matters, not the glitzy vehicle they arrive in.” — David Gelernter
“As I lay in the intensive-care unit, having almost died, I was filled with enormous remorse for the things I hadn’t painted. I thought to myself: You knew you were an important painter, a major painter, but you threw it away. I have resolved to never put down the paintbrush again.” —David Gelernter
The one thing I learned from all my years at The Washington Post is how social reporting is. It is really about talking to people, having people tell you things. That will always be the most efficient and useful way of finding out new and interesting things. You have to expose yourself to as many interesting people as you can. There’s no shortcut for that kind of process. — Malcolm...
February 2011
2 posts
“Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and...”
– Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s eulogy for his brother Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
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“I remember spending my days almost dizzy with loneliness and feeling like I’d sold the family cow for three beans.” — Douglas Coupland, reflecting on the writing of his debut novel.
January 2011
2 posts
“Every man has his own patch of earth to cultivate. What’s important is that he...”
– José Saramago
“Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down; but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies, frequent coffee houses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent.”
— Steven Johnson
December 2010
2 posts
“When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. so create.”
— Why the Lucky Stiff
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“To me, buildings can have a beautiful silence that I associate with attributes such as composure, self-evidence, durability, presence, and integrity, and with warmth and sensuousness as well; a building that is being itself, being a building, not representing anything, just being. The sense that I try to instil into materials is beyond all rules of composition, and their tangibility, smell, and...
November 2010
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“Think of the abundance of a cherry tree’s blossoms in the spring. We celebrate its abundance of blossoms. You don’t look at a cherry tree in the spring and go, ‘Oh, my goodness. How many blossoms does it take?’ It’s not very efficient. You know, thousands of blossoms, just so that a couple of them can turn into cherry trees, is not very efficient. But it’s highly effective. And...