On the side of the house, Vive uncharacteristically reluctant to school a peacock on that whole “pride cometh before the fall” thing.
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. • Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. • Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. • Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. • Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. • You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. • Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. • With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
— Max Ehrmann, 1927
For some reason I was just thinking about this short piece, so I poked around YouTube and found it. It’s from the 2005 film Nine Lives, which is a collection of nine ten-minute films about nine different women. I remember enjoying the film and its short stories, and being absolutely floored by this one. And from what I’ve read, Dakota shot this in one take.
Outstanding.
NOTE: This was taken off YouTube; the video above is incomplete. I’ll keep an eye out for it.
Via the serious eats community, a list of ten iconic ’80s foods and some corresponding commercials. Ah, the inconvenience of stabbing your straw through both sides of a Capri Sun at recess.
Off the top of my head, I’d also like to throw out Alba 77, Donutz cereal, and the Taco Light. For more ’80s flashbacks like this, check out this monster thread.
At a recent Flash conference, Jonathan Harris offered some constructive criticism with regards to the Flash medium as a form of expression. He’s completely hit the nail on the head, quite literally verbalizing the thoughts that have been going through my brain in recent years as I’ve found the majority of Flash content, while mechanically well done, to be disproportionately heavy on fluff and sadly light on substance.
Jonathan points out:
New mediums tend to evolve in more or less the same way. They tend to begin with a spark, a technical innovation, usually coming from the fringe, often from the world of science. At first there are just a handful of practitioners of the new medium, experimenting with and testing it. Photography, film, and the Internet began this way.
The second stage is an awkward adolescence, defined by lots of groping. Businesses grope with how to use the new medium to make money. Hobbiests grope with how to use the new medium to have fun. Artists grope with how to use the new medium to say something about the world.
In the third stage, a number of visionaries and virtuosos emerge, who have learned the new medium so completely that it has become an extension of themselves, and they are then capable of using it to produce incredible beauty, insights, or riches. Robert Frank, Stanley Kubrick, or Steve Jobs would be good examples.
When I look at our medium, not just Flash but the broader world of online self-expression in general, it seems to me that we are still in the awkward adolescence.
And:
Language is basically a system for expressing ideas.
There are all sorts of languages. There are obvious ones like English, Spanish, and Mandarin, and less obvious ones like dance, music, photography, film, politics, and programming.
Learning a language is important. Without a language you cannot say anything, and I believe it is important for us as humans to speak and to say something.
But languages can be dangerous too, for they can become addicting, and it can be easy to forget that learning a language is not enough.
Once you have learned a language, then comes the far more difficult and far more important moment when you have to decide what to say. And this might be the only decision that really matters.
Otherwise, you can end up like the schoolboy who spends his whole life memorizing the dictionary, occasionally forming the odd sentence, sometimes a paragraph, but never a poem or a play, not to mention a novel.
When I look at the Flash community today, I see too many of us who are stuck like that schoolboy.
And then:
I define a masterpiece as a beautiful idea, fully realized, taken as far as it can go.
In my view, there have been no masterpieces yet in the online world, my own work included. Time might prove me wrong, as masterpieces only reveal themselves with time, but this is my sense.
With a number of notable exceptions, most of the work I see coming from the Flash community is largely devoid of ideas. There is great obsession with slickness, surface, speed, technology, and language, but very little soul at the core, very little being said.
I believe that in the long run, ideas are the only things that survive.
Leaving us with questions to ask ourselves about our creative work:
Can it make someone gasp or cry?
Does it feel as special as a love letter?
Does it truly represent our time?
Will it still feel relevant in 25 years?
Does it say something that’s never been said before?
Does it compare to the masterpieces of other mediums?
Could it have gone further?
EXACTLY.
