Brilliant Corners

It was a hard choice of which of Laure Nollet’s sketchbook drawings to include in this Inspiration post. So many colors and drawing styles and subjects. Some seem freehand, while others use a pasted-in photo as a starting point. Many more in the “pen” set at Flickr and on her website: volume

Flickr user hine has posted some images of her newest crafted digital camera case. The idea is great, but it’s the execution of the camera case that puts it over the top. All the small details were thought of, including a button on the top to signify the shutter release. So, so cute!

This is just one of the excellent items that hine has crafted. There are loads more neat things in her crafted set. Some of the items, including (at the time of this post) one of camera cases, are for sale on her Etsy shop.

Another watercolor and ink piece by Wil Freeborn. I love his sparse use of watercolors in his sketches. He’s not trying to cover everything, but instead picks a few things here and there to highlight. I love the effect.

A while back, Wil offered to send some of his Moo cards to anyone who emailed him. I occasionally come across the cards he sent and keep telling myself to make some for myself.

Mattias Adolfsson recently posted the final version of a large piece he’s been working on. If you look through the archives on his site, you can see how he’s been posting its progress over the last month or so. It’s interesting to see how others work. He’s also quite prolific and seems to post a new drawing every other day or so.

And if you haven’t seen Mattias’ baroque Star Wars series, it mustn’t be missed: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. I think my favorite is Boba Fett from the fourth post. Wonderful stuff.

This “strange map” of the courses of the Mississippi river was the impetus for redesigning my weblog (for the 50th time). I wanted to start posting illustrations, art, photos, or whatever I come across that inspires me in some way. I can’t recall if this map appears in any of Edward Tufte’s books, but it certainly belongs in one if it’s not.

Here is a little more information about the map, from the site I linked to:

When looking at this map and seeing the jumble of ancient riverbeds - imagine all those shifts sped up: the Mississippi is like a shifting snake, twisting to find its easiest way down to the Gulf. These shifts occur every thousand years or so, especially in the lower parts of the river, through a process known as delta switching, or avulsion: when the river flow is slow, the sedimentation clogs the river channel and it eventually finds another channel. This process is by no means ‘historic’ (i.e. ‘over’) – from the 1950s onwards, the US government has worked on the Old River Control Structure, meant to prevent the Mississippi from switching to the Atchafalaya River channel.

It doesn’t look like Alexis Venet has been posting to his weblog for very long, but I love the illustrations he’s shared so far. Wonderful colors, and they’re all fun and whimsical.

Okay, maybe Jeff isn’t that famous (yet!), but his solo music project, Myopic, is featured on NPR’s “Open Mic” program. I played in three(!) separate bands with Jeff many, many years ago. Way to go, Jeff. The music is wonderful.

I’m only around halfway through Michael Azerrad’s book Our Band Could Be Your Life and two things are becoming more and more apparent as I complete the book.

One, there are a lot of bands I never gave a true listening to. Of the many bands covered in the book, I have only listened to a few: The Minutemen, Sonic Youth, and Fugazi. I have heard _of_ all or most of the other bands mentioned in the book, but for some reason I never picked up an album of theirs. I now want to own the full catalog of Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Black Flag, Minor Threat, Mission of Burma, and The Butthole Surfers. And I haven’t even finished the book yet.

Second, I’m inspired. Damn inspired. Spending months in a cramped van or car traveling the country, city to city, sometimes playing for an audience of five for one thing only: doing what they love, making and playing music. Yes, bands have been doing this for ages, but the case with many of the bands in this book is that they were playing music that wasn’t popular at all. Punk and hardcore bands faced harassment from the police, the clubs, and by the population at large.

In order to get their music heard, they created their own music labels, booked their own shows, and played the PR game with radio stations and zines. The networked amongst themselves, promoted each other, and worked menial jobs so they could eat, since they often made no money from the music they played. It was all for the music; that was what was most important. They didn’t wait for anything to fall into their laps. They had to work hard for everything.

Oh yeah, and that photo at the top; that’s me from years and years ago playing in a band called Tarlo. I’m rockin’ the Telecaster in the basement of a music store in Wichita Falls, TX. We opened for a band that played Metallica covers. The photo was taken by my good friend Chip Somodevilla, who has since moved on to taking pictures of more famous folks.

In the latest Giant Robot magazine there’s an interview with the artist Dan-ah Kim and she answers a question about the recurring theme of kites in her artwork.

My father has been making kites for ages–the Korean-style ones with strips of bamboo and rice paper. We’ve been making and flying them for as long as I can remember, and my father once told me that people who fly kites have a lot of promise since they’re always looking towards the sky.

Wonderful.

I can’t tell you how many weblog posts on motivation that I’ve read, filed away, and then completely ignored any advice they may have had. Just today I came across “Overcoming a Loss of Motivation” at Pick the Brain:

How many times have you started a new activity (such as a personal project or exercise routine) with a burst of enthusiasm, only to see that initial momentum evaporate? This often leads to depression and causes us to give up prematurely.

Well, how about this: how many times have I been lazy and never even reached the point of starting something new? Too many times, believe me. There is some decent advice at that site, but I often think that there’s no hope for me. Well, maybe that’s being a little over-dramatic. Perhaps it’s just that there isn’t any advice out there that truly applies to me, and my quirks.

I think that part of my problem is that I too often get tied up in the implementation of what I’m supposed to do. For one example, while I was reading Getting Things Done I spent more time thinking about how I would approach its organization principles instead of actually Getting Things Done. I eventually just gave up on that process, and I’m still without any decent organization on my tasks. It seems I’d rather waste time surfing about the net than actually hunker down and start–much less finish–some new project.

One of the best motivational quotes I’ve come across in all the books and articles and weblog posts I’ve read on the subject, is this one from William Zinsser in his book On Writing Well:

Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.

It doesn’t get any more direct than that. And to start things off, I just now bought the domain name for the “Web 2.0” application to beat them all. Well, probably not. But I think it’ll rock.

I think I’ve redesigned this weblog more times than I’ve actually posted anything here. If you come to the site you’ll see yet another layout. How long I’ll stick with this one is anyone’s guess.

Although I haven’t been writing anything here, I have been posting elsewhere. I started another weblog (crazy, right?) to help kick start and keep track of my more creative output. You can see it here: http://creative.brilliantcorners.org/. I’m not posting all that much more over there, but for some reason I felt like I need to keep those kinds of posts separate.

Also, to help motivate me to get on my new bike more, I wrote and set up a simple bike-ride tracking app over here: http://biketripper.brilliantcorners.org/. Sadly, I haven’t been riding my bike as much as I like, as you can see from the sporadic entries. As it warms up a little bit here, hopefully that will change.

And thanks to this post, I’ve added in the MetaWeblog API posting ability so I can post something here with MarsEdit instead of using the ugly online posting screens I wrote. Now, if only I can get some decent comment spam protection built, I’ll (probably) finally be happy with this weblog app.