Art from the Outskirts

Archived from September 9, 2008

Take a man with a half a century’s experience in writing with no college degree who admits he’s not that good — he just works tirelessly at his craft. Mix in a feverish imagination for all things living and beyond. The result is the legendary man with a library card named Ray Bradbury. In this 2001 Lecture entitled An Evening with Ray Bradbury, the sci-fi maverick discusses the importance of universal ideas, hard work and what can only be described as reading everything.

Uploaded by YouTube member uctelevision

Write from the Outskirts!

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Wired Magazine’s Brian Little shows how made homemade Lego ice cube trays (though, I don’t think one can called them ice cubes as it were).

Check ou all the action here!

Stay tuned for more whacked-out links from the Outskirts!

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*Calling all bloggers, artists writers editors and all creative people* I’m looking for opportunities to write articles, interviews, transcriptions and books. Please contact me at the comment box for more information.

Thanks,

Mike

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You always dreamed of one when you and your little brother would play Back to the Future in the basement back when you were ten. But now the wondrous world that is Metacafe brings you an actual hovercraft. All you need is some wood, some tools, a trash bag and a leaf blower! Well… kinda.

How to Make a Hovercraft - Click here for the most popular videos

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Regular posts return tomorrow.

Archived from February 4, 2009 at Waxing Poetically.

Cummings in middle age

“To be nobody but yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.” - E.E. Cummings

The poet known for his distinctly grammarless and structureless style speaks to what most of the human race may say is a society’s undeniable tendency toward unity structure, rules and regulations. The very definition of civilization is very often that which has been tamed of its spontaneity, stripped of its need to break out of the bonds of whatever group mindset it may be in at a given point. Race, gender, religion, nationality, size, shape and number are the labels that tend to define a group or even an “individual.” If any person should dare to break the cycle of similarity, that person is often jilted to outer limits of Any Place, Planet Earth and thought to be, as fate would have it, a non-conformist - the anti-label label. That person is a stranger to the normal ways of doing things and generally just an “odd thing” to be appreciated for its frankly visible freakishness.

Scenario: Matt has a job interview a with local business firm. He prepared ahead of the interview with a brilliant resume and questions and some answers to the questions he thinks the interviewer is the most likely to ask him. He has researched the firm and sees they are very keen on punctuality, so Matt plans to arrive early to the meeting. He presses his best suit and tie: The tie is combination of blue and black stripes matching perfectly against almost all the rest of his outfit - shiny, black shoes included. But his shirt is a bright racecar red and clashes and contrasts flagrantly against the rest of his clothes as if it had just been coated with a house painter’s hand while the painter had painted the inner walls of Matt’s living room as if Matt had somehow gotten in the painter’s way on the way to his interview.

When Matt arrives, he is calm and cool-minded and eager to make a good impression. He sits down alongside a few other male candidates all dressed in black suits, a few staffers too. All in the room are immediately drawn to Matt’s bright, red shirt as some workers around the office begin to murmur amongst themselves. One young woman lets out a faint chuckle while others just stare at the shirt for a few short but palpable seconds. Finally, Matt is called in for his interview. He his sits in the HR office in a chair near the door. The interviewer closes the door and sits down to begin the interview.

“Mr. Devlin you seem to be highly qualified, the interviewer asserts.” Recent MBA, you seem hardworking…. But I’ve got to tell you…” The interviewer clears his throat with a loud eh-hem. The folks you’re up against are pret-ty good as well!”

“Really?” Matt raises his eyebrows in reply.

The interview rolls on as per usual with all the expected Qs and A about Matt’s previous employment and Matt rattles out questions about daily duties and such. Suddenly, the interviewer is caught in trance. His eyes are locked onto Matt’s shirt. He quickly snaps himself back to reality.

Well, anyhow, we’ll be in contact by Friday morning,” the interviewer says getting up from his chair to shake Matt’s hand.

“Thank you, Sir! Have a good day,” Matt replies with a smile.

Upon Matt’s exit from the room the interviewer thinks to himself, “Holy Jeez! What in the hell was that shirt!” The shirt has just cost Matt the job of his dreams.

Here is an illustration of the conformity of a society being so well woven into a culture that it has cost a brilliant and savvy business man his ideal job. Matt is fully qualified for the job in all aspects but his shirt; and because that shirt choice was a departure from the norm, his interviewer decided to opt for a more color-coordinated candidate. There is not really any logical reason for Matt’s not being chosen other than the fact he is dressed differently from all others in the firm. In reality, Matt’s outward appearance has no baring whatsoever on his skills as a human being and yet, the interviewer places and enormous emphasis on it. In this climate, Cummings’ dare to be different is not only difficult, but detrimental as well even if the circumstances are in fact completely absurd.

Wax freely.

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Regular postings will return tomorrow. For now please enjoy this tasty treat from December 2, 2008 (with minor alterations)

Also featured at Waxing Poetically.

Ben Fountain was an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law school, when he decided he wanted to write fiction. The only thing Fountain had ever published was a law-review article. His literary training consisted of a handful of creative-writing classes in college. He had tried to write when he came home at night from work, but usually he was too tired to do much. He decided to quit his job.

“I was tremendously apprehensive,” Fountain recalls. “I felt like I’d stepped off a cliff and I didn’t know if the parachute was going to open. Nobody wants to waste their life, and I was doing well at the practice of law. I could have had a good career. And my parents were very proud of me—my dad was so proud of me. . . . It was crazy.”

He began his new life on a February morning—a Monday. He sat down at his kitchen table at 7:30 A.M. He made a plan. Every day, he would write until lunchtime. Then he would lie down on the floor for twenty minutes to rest his mind. Then he would return to work for a few more hours. He was a lawyer. He had discipline. “I figured out very early on that if I didn’t get my writing done I felt terrible. So I always got my writing done. I treated it like a job. I did not procrastinate.” His first story was about a stockbroker who uses inside information and crosses a moral line. It was sixty pages long and took him three months to write. When he finished that story, he went back to work and wrote another—and then another.

In his first year, Fountain sold two stories. He gained confidence. He wrote a novel. He decided it wasn’t very good, and he ended up putting it in a drawer. Then came what he describes as his dark period, when he adjusted his expectations and started again. He got a short story published in Harper’s. A New York literary agent saw it and signed him up. He put together a collection of short stories titled “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara,” and Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint, published it. The reviews were sensational. The Times Book Review called it “heartbreaking.” It won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award. It was named a No. 1 Book Sense Pick. It made major regional best-seller lists, was named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews, and drew comparisons to Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Stone, and John le Carré.

Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief ” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight. - Malcolm Gladwell in his New Yorker essay “Late Bloomers” October 20, 2008

I, like Mr. Fountain, received a calling so to speak a bit later in life than most my age. Like probably many of you, I had big dreams growing up. There were so many things I wanted to do, to be, to make. Early on at the age of eight or nine I wanted to make toys. Then, for a couple of years, I fiddled with the idea of broadcasting. Voice-over work became my passion’s fruit of choice, but that dream soon fizzled away with a teeny, little, nagging demon of voice modulation called puberty - suddenly my Mickey Mouse was turned to “Mickey Moose” before I could say “genitals.” So my sights turned to computers. I liked them, thought they were cool and I had a pretty awesome collection of video games in my bedroom, so it seemed the next logical step. Several years and a few flunked math courses later, that dream flew out of the window too. College came and in first two years or so, I decided to get a bit creative. My list of classes included TV Production 1 and 2, Ancient World Literature, Contemporary Poetry, History of Rock [Music], and Theatre but also Cultural Anthropology, Prehistoric Life and even a Quantum Physics course I’ve since forgotten the name of for good.

With my mind all ablaze with curiosity, I graduated from junior college in 2002 with a Plain Joe Liberal Arts Associates degree and absolutely no further clues as to what I wanted to do with my life. I took a year off, deejayed a bit, dated an Autism programming specialist, explored religion, and developed a screenplay. The year somehow morphed into a year and a half only for me to find that my college of choice had lost my transcripts. I re-sent them and was placed in my handicapped accessible dorm in the fall of 2005 during which time I hosted my own radio show, joined a poetry club, met the love of my life…. Oh yeah, and I obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Media Management after flirting with the idea of getting an MBA in Marketing. I now stand (or sit due to my wheelchair) before you one and a half years into a career in freelance writing… I turn 28 this month.

I have money… not a lot but I have it. I moved back home to help myself with getting my career started. My lady and I are going strong and she knows there is a ring in her near future . Above all this, I’m very, very, happy!

Never give up!

(Read Gladwell’s full essay).

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Patricia Zapata shows how one woman’s junk mail is another’s artwork.

Art from Junk Mail - video powered by Metacafe

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Also featured at Waxing Poetically

Elizabeth Gilbert on Rethinking Creativity

Elizabeth Gilbert suggests that creativity should not kill you.

“Elizabeth Gilbert: A new way to think about creativity”

Uploaded by YouTube member TEDTalksDirectors

Wax creatively on the Outskirts

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“Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole. This appears in works both of the useful and the fine arts, if we employ the popular distinction of works according to their aim, either at use or beauty. Thus in our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim. In landscapes, the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer creation than we know. The details, the prose of nature he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendor. He should know that the landscape has beauty for his eye, because it expresses a thought which is to him good: and this, because the same power which sees through his eyes, is seen in that spectacle; and he will come to value the expression of nature, and not nature itself, and so exalt in his copy, the features that please him. He will give the gloom of gloom, and the sunshine of sunshine. In a portrait, he must inscribe the character, and not the features, and must esteem the man who sits to him as himself only an imperfect picture or likeness of the aspiring original within.” Ralph Waldo Emerson excepted from “Art” (1841)

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was many things: a poet, an essayist, and by profession a Unitarian minister. But in this 1841 essay, titled only “Art, Emerson tells why he feel it is the first and last job of every artist to create meaning where there once was a void - to try the emulate the perfect image in his or her mind and translate that person’s soul’s expression of the intangible, unknowable thing which only the medium and the art can express while both fall quite short of their intended glory. He interestingly asserts, ” Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself…” and therefor every creative moment, movement and insight is fleeting and art is simply the constant chase toward that moment, each time moving closer to the ideal while still so far from it.

(Read the full essay here).

Emerson from the Outskirts!

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