Meta-horoscope
February 3, 2011
(via Information is Beautiful)
Thought-provoking interview with Coppola at The 99 Percent blog.
I read Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen over the holidays. It’s not terribly ground-breaking, as the whole book could probably be summed up in the adage that good old-fashioned hard work produces results. Aside from that, these are the things I noted while reading it, which I will try to keep in mind at work and with my own resolutions and creative projects: Read the rest of this entry »
If our eyes are always looking for weakness, we begin to lose the intuition to notice beauty.
—Jay O’Callahan, speaker/storyteller, quoted in Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen
The lasting impact of Expo 67 will be in the dramatic object lesson we see before our eyes today—that the genius of man knows no national boundaries, but is universal. [...] Anyone who says we aren’t a spectacular people should see this. We are witness today to the fulfillment of one of the most daring acts of faith in Canadian enterprise and ability ever undertaken.
—Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson at the inauguration of Expo 67. More from the 1967 TIME article here.
Beautiful article over on Design Observer about the influential 20th-Century Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen. He’s definitely someone my novel’s main character admires, especially when talking about the TWA Terminal of JFK International: Read the rest of this entry »
Via TED, this is like my mindfulness class in a nutshell (less the meditation practice):
Srikumar Rao says we spend most of our lives learning to be unhappy, even as we strive for happiness. At Arbejdsglaede Live! 2009, he teaches us how to break free of the “I’d be happy if…” mental model, and embrace our hard-wired happiness.”
Fascinating thought-piece on Slashfilm about the self-reflexive nature of contemporary Hollywood film.
Cinema has entered a new dawn. It arrived a while ago, actually, and you may not have even noticed. I’m not referring to the recent surfeit of remakes, sequels and adaptations, or the rebirth and subsequent profusion of superhero movies, or even the resurgence of 3D. No, I’m talking about the evolution of a burgeoning subgenre in cinema: meta films, aka movies about movies. Whether you’ve seen it or not, these self-reflective satires, parodies and homages have become a recurring staple of the aughts, and slowly but surely, the landscape of modern cinema is changing because of them.
I finally signed up for a mindfulness meditation course to begin later this fall. Read the rest of this entry »
From a beautiful reflection in Maisonneuve about the crumbling Turcot Interchange in Montreal and what we ought to do about it. I wish I could have seen it then…
When Montreal’s Turcot Interchange opened in 1966, no one had seen anything quite like it. Floating one hundred pillared feet above the ground, its concrete spans swirled and swooped through the air, finally coming together in a knot of jaw-dropping proportions. It comprised over seven kilometres of road and spanned an area of seventeen acres. Underneath its four levels of overpasses and elevated ramps, boats floated on the Lachine Canal and trains chugged with freight. In an especially futuristic touch, two continuous bands of fluorescent lights glowed from the highway’s walls. Driving on it, the city unfolded before you: a skyline studded with smokestacks and steeples and the slow blink of the Farine Five Roses sign. More than a mega-project, the Turcot was a modernist victory cry.
The Turcot still inspires, but, like any relic of a bygone era, its sheen has worn away.