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Dirty Tricks

February 4th, 2010 · → 1 Comment

photo credit: dbking via Creative Commons

They were played on Nixon. They were played on Senator Mary L. Landrieu. Sacha Baron Cohen used them in Borat. I’m talking about dirty tricks. In a citizen-journalist-famous-for-15-minutes way, they are back. They’ve even been called a legitimate tool of “investigation.” (“Honey, I was using this nanny cam to investigate the babysitter and it caught you with the pool boy. Care to comment?”)

Quick review. When Richard Nixon made a speech one time in LA’s Chinatown, a prankster named Dick Tuck arranged for adorable children to hold up signs saying “Welcome” in Chinese. Only the signs really said, “What About the Hughes Loan?”, a reference to a controversial loan Howard Hughes made to Nixon’s brother. Nixon was furious and reportedly tore up one of the signs. More recently, James O’Keefe III, a 25-year-old guerrilla videographer, was accused with three other men of seeking to tamper with the office phones of Democratic Senator Mary L. Landrieu. Apparently, the four impersonated repairmen to gain entry to the office of the Louisiana senator.

O’Keefe called his deception an “investigation.” You might argue that impersonating repairmen was gonzo journalism, an act of civil disobedience or a new way to dig for the truth. Digging for the truth – by lying about who you are. Give me a moment to think about that.

In this regard, I am not an angel. In Greece once, with one foot on the dock and another on a boat, I handed a police officer a dummy videotape so we could get the real one out of the country. When I worked for NBC and Fox I wore a wire a couple of times. We conferred with network lawyers before we tried anything like that. When I wore a wire I made a point of saying that everything spoken was on the record. We did those kinds of recordings in states where you didn’t need the consent of the other party, so it was legal. We also didn’t trespass where we didn’t belong. We followed the rules, and listened to the network lawyers, but we knew if we screwed up it would be our asses in a sling, not theirs.

Rougher game now. Fuzzier boundaries. You have Borat and O’Keefe. As a documentary guy I noticed a big change after Borat. People were suspicious about interviews. Was I going to hoax them like Borat, punk them like Ashton or trick them like Colbert? These days, people want to screen an interview before it airs. I feel that old slippery slope under my feet: If I show them the interview they will talk about their hair or why they hadn’t had that mole removed. Suddenly we’re not talking about the story, we’re talking about their performance. The interview becomes performance art.

Lady Gaga, Sacha Baron Cohen and James O’Keefe are all in the same game – entertainment. In their brand of performance art you get to lie, impersonate people and wear funny outfits. I like entertainment, but if you’re wearing a funny outfit, the only people who consent to an interview with you are other entertainers. A closed-loop system. Get ready for Lady Gaga to anchor CNN.

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Thunder Thunder Thunder ThunderCats

January 28th, 2010 · → 4 Comments

A writer from the UK contacted me recently with the news that he is writing a book about ThunderCats. I wrote four scripts for the series, which later became a beloved media fetish object. (“Honey, what are you doing with that plush toy?”) The writer wants me to reminisce about cartoons and recall stories of my writing cohorts. Well, some are dead, others had out of body (and mind) experiences, and still others are perfectly happy today, procreating, creating fiction and shopping.

There was Bill Overgard. I met him once: I remember only a leather jacket and a puff of smoke; a man of mystery. I had no idea he was a comics icon, a veteran of 31 years of drawing Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, and a protégé of Milton Caniff who assisted Caniff on Steve Canyon. Bill wrote screenplays and novels, and when his scripts for ThunderCats came in I had no clue how we were going to get the animators to turn his adventurous works of literature into cartoons.

Every ThunderCats script was reviewed by a psychologist to be sure it would be a positive experience for the young viewer. It worked! If you check the statistics during the period the cartoon aired, you’ll see that murder rates went down, school attendance went up and SAT scores went through the roof. When kids weren’t scoring really high on their SATs or busy not committing crimes they were peeing their beds, scared to death with nightmares of Mumm-Ra, the bad guy of ThunderCats.

When I look back I wonder: Why did I get that job and why was it useful? Why did my writing journey include furry superheroes? Here’s a little story:

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer, went to Reed College for six months and then dropped out. He slept on the floor in friends’ rooms and returned coke bottles for the five-cent deposit. He decided to take a calligraphy class. He learned about serif and san serif typefaces, the varying amount of space between letters and what makes for great typography. He found it fascinating and had no hope of it ever having any practical application in his life.

Ten years later he was designing the Mac computer and it all came back to him. The Mac became the first computer with beautiful typography. Other manufacturers copied the Mac and that’s the reason we have all these fonts and we’re not writing in courier; because Steve took calligraphy.

It’s easy, of course, to connect the dots looking backward. Going forward, well, we’ve built life’s road and we’re walking along it. We’re always preparing, but what are we preparing for?

My ThunderCats journey didn’t have a map. In 1986 we’d just had our first child, I needed a job, my father knew a guy who knew a guy and I found myself in a room with Jules Bass, Arthur Rankin and Peter Lawrence. I couldn’t have predicted how they would teach me about visual thinking, a skill I use every day, and also about being a superhero, a necessary thing for any journalist.

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It Works Because You Say So

January 21st, 2010 · → 8 Comments

My doctor gave me six months to live. But when I couldn’t pay the bill he gave me six months more.
-Walter Matthau, actor

You go to a doctor. The doctor gives you a pill. You get better. Then you find out the doctor gave you a sugar pill and you got better anyway.

You might have gotten better without bothering to go to the doctor at all. Or it could be the Placebo Effect. This has some folks in the UK pretty ticked off.

On January 30, a group called 10:23 is protesting an English drug store chain’s decision to sell homeopathic remedies. Boing Boing carried the story that 300 unbelievers across the UK are each planning to swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic pills. It’s a mass “overdose” intended to show that the homeopathic remedies are nothing but sugar pills and fake medicine. The event should be interesting, particularly if any of the protesters go into a sugar-induced coma.

Homeopathy is based on three central ideas: First, the Law of Similars: whatever causes your symptoms can also cure them. If you can’t sleep, try caffeine. Second, the Law of Infinitesimals. When you dilute a cure in water, it gets stronger. Third, the Law of Succussion, which states that each time you dilute your cure in water you are to tap the bottle to “potentize” it. Homeopaths believe this allows the water to retain the memory or vibration of the cure.

If you believe in homeopathy, this information is unbearably exciting. If you don’t, it sounds like superstitious nonsense and “magik” from 1796, which is when homeopathy was invented by one Samuel Hahnemann.

What if it’s not about what’s in the pills at all? What if their potency is predicated upon the intent of the user, the mystique surrounding the pills, or the package they came in? In 1955, an anesthesiologist named Henry Knowles Beecher said that a drug or doctor’s success is due to the patient’s expectation of a desired outcome. His research suggested that more than 30 percent of the time, patients felt better when they believed the treatment was going to make them feel better. Subsequent researchers say Beecher’s research was flawed, but there’s no denying that when people in white coats and medical degrees on the wall say reassuring words, people feel better. It also works when the people are wearing feathers and a loin cloth if that’s the cultural norm of what a healer looks like.

Expectations are powerful: Reference a puzzling study from the 1920s. A research team wanted to know if making factory lighting brighter would improve worker productivity. It did. But then worker productivity also improved when researchers made the lighting dimmer. The secret? The workers came to expect that any change would make them more productive, no matter whether they could see or were working in the dark.

We’re still in the dark regarding the Placebo Effect. It might prove to be the real mechanism for understanding healing energy based on intention and belief. It might be a vestige of old superstition and “magik.” It certainly reveals a lot about how people heal.

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Listen to Me

January 14th, 2010 · → 2 Comments

Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema

Yadda yadda. Is that what you hear when someone is speaking? Or maybe it’s the trombone in those Charlie Brown specials. You know, when the parents or teachers talk: wah wah wah. If that’s the case, you’d suck as a documentary director.

Listening is an art. Ask any hostage negotiator, professional mediator or marriage counselor. I’ve been in the offices of a few back when Bush was president – not the hostage negotiators, just the marriage counselors. Their advice mostly is to listen to your partner complain until sap runs from your ears and your head catches on fire, and then you have to put out the fire with a cup of cold coffee and listen some more. (Note to self: I remember those marriage counseling sessions did not go so well.)

Still, there is remarkable power in telling your story. Director Heather Ross demonstrates this in her excellent film Girls on the Wall, which screened in Hollywood and will be seen on PBS stations. In the film, Heather interviews some really hard case inmates who happen to be girls. They talk about the robberies and murders they’ve committed. They tell stories of abuse and addiction. But mostly, they heal. This is the most remarkable part of the film: You become a witness to inner change, and that change is initiated by the act of storytelling. The women of the film tell their stories to Heather, and in a theater workshop they are attending in the lock up, and they are transformed into leaders, they get connected to their families, they experience emotions they’ve hitherto locked down tight.

Heather, like many good directors, becomes a catalyst for change, by simply holding listening space for the speaker. There’s a lot that goes into documentary work: stamina, an heroic undaunted strength in the face of challenge. But the biggest production skill just might be listening: You ask questions and you gotta hear what people are saying.

In Jacqueline Novogratz’ book “The Blue Sweater,” she tells the story of returning to Rwanda after the genocide and listening to survivors, sometimes for hours at a time. She witnessed how these survivors were able to move beyond a terrible inner hurt. She writes about how she empowered people just by listening to them.

On the SHELTER blog, the companion piece to a film we’re making about shelter, we’re started featuring interviews with people who are homeless or transitioning from homelessness. We’re also meeting the game-changers who are coming up with ways to address homelessness. As we do these interviews I can endorse Novogratz’ experience. Simply giving people the opportunity to talk empowers them. Why is it enough, then, just to be heard and acknowledged?

Freud figured that one out. At first, hypnosis was his preferred technique, and he soon found out that prone people were liberated from linear thought. Later, he dropped hypnosis, but kept the couch. He had discovered that talking was a powerful agent of change.

There’s a picture of Freud’s couch at the beginning of this post, and it looks pretty comfortable and kind of bohemian. If you want to see people change, and be lucky enough to get them in your film, you want to start with a comfortable couch, at least figuratively speaking. Then all you need to do is ask good questions and listen.

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Cameron’s New Consciousness

January 7th, 2010 · → 4 Comments

Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema

Have you heard about the new world consciousness arriving by 2012?

According to experts:

a) A worldwide natural disaster will occur, directed by Roland Emmerich, only this time the special effects will be really happening.
b) A return to the Utopian world of Avatar, only this time you won’t need 3D glasses because it really will be in 3D.

Which will it be? The answer in a moment.

If civilization ended tomorrow, would this create a new consciousness? Let’s see. There’d be fewer people. We’d live close to the land and close to each other. When we wanted to create art we’d just pick up some squirrel dung and make shapes to stick on our cave walls. See, I don’t like this scenario already. You can forget culture altogether: Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Henri Rousseau duly noted, people like to form groups and kill other people. Also, why would Nature start cooperating with human aspirations and goals? It hasn’t so far.

Rousseau, the painter among the three sages mentioned above, got it right. Sure, he did “The Dream,” showing a woman communing with nature on a comfy divan, but he also painted “The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope,” which is more like it.

Nature looks nice but can be brutal, and if the world goes primitive it won’t be pretty.

The good news is that the leading edge of the new age is already here, and like most great changes, it’s gradual. In Hollywood, it’s not just Jim Cameron dreaming of a future guided by the wisdom of Gaia, the Earth mother. c3 Conscious Creatives is dedicated to creating more conscious media, and John Raatz of the Visioneering Group is finding new ways to distribute what he is calling Transformational Media: Media that shows how people change and uplifts humanity. Bob Ballard runs the Hearts of Fire Project, which is intended to empower homeless people through artistic self-expression. He sees homeless people not as helpless people, but instead as those on the vanguard of a new culture expressing what’s really important in the world: love, community and connection. “The homeless can teach us that people are important, not what people have,” he says.

Change means that onetime fringe values are entering mainstream culture. Michael Cera can discuss silent Vipassana meditation on the David Letterman show, and Letterman can sound genuinely interested. James Cameron can do a $230-mil (maybe more) movie that glorifies respect for the Earth and millions embrace it. Only the critic from the New Yorker didn’t seem to get the Gaia message, dismissing Cameron as a hippie thinker with a huge checkbook. Cameron may be that, but good thing his message was heard by many.

Oh, the answer to the quiz? There isn’t one. The Mayans may have been great predictors of the future, but the fact that their calendar ends in 2012 means only one thing. Time to get a new calendar.

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500 Words

December 24th, 2009 · → 3 Comments

Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.

photo credit: Sally_12 via Creative Commons license

The most challenging thing about writing this blog is not the deadline every week, nor is it generating the snappy content, nor putting an edge on the sharp wordplay. It’s the damn title. 500 words is a cruel master. (Thursday is OK, though.) Some readers have noted that this writer often fails to hit the 500 word mark. Not this time. The word count is on, the clock is ticking, and I’m writing about writing about 500 words. But not about 500 words. Exactly 500. So here goes.

As Mark Twain once said, “If I had more time, I would have made it shorter.” Brevity is not only the soul of wit, it’s damned hard and it’s slow work.

Ernest Hemingway once became known for writing a six word epitaph:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Sad, even brutal, but surely effective and short. And nobody really knows if he actually wrote it, but I’m buying it for now. So did the editors of a book called “Not Quite What I was Planning,” a collection of six-word memoirs. Yes, just six words to capture an entire life. That’s worse than Twitter’s 140 characters and it has to be meaningful. Here are a few who had a go at a six-word memoir:

“Nobody cared, then they did. Why?” -  journalist Chuck Klosterman

“Well, I thought it was funny.” – Stephen Colbert

“Brought it to a boil, often.” -  chef Mario Batali

“Fix a toilet, get paid crap.”  – from a plumber

“Cursed with cancer. Blessed by friends.” -  nine-year-old Hannah Davies

“Yes, you can edit this biography.” -  from Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia.

If I had to write my six-word biography on a nametag, I would write, “I’m not really a nametag guy.”

If you want to get fancy, you can look at six-word memoirs that contain palindromes, that is, words that read the same way forward as they do backward. Racecar. Deed. Radar. Madam.

One of the most famous is, “A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.” It describes Theodore Roosevelt, the driving force behind the Panama Canal and it reads the same to the front as to the back. Sadly, it’s seven words. No good.

We could look to Demetri Martin, comedian and palindrome constructor, who wrote a poem that is a palindrome, and is titled with a palindrome. It’s called, “Dammit, I’m mad.” (Check it out – same way backward as forward.) Alas, that’s only three words, unless you say it twice, “Dammit, I’m mad, dammit, I’m mad,” and that’s getting a little emphatic.

Creating a palindromic six-word memoir is too hard, and anyway I can feel my 500 word limitation breathing hard behind me, as though we’re running a 10K together and I’m the pacer. I see the finish line ahead, so I will leave you with my six-word memoir for the year.

Enough of 2009, bring on 2010.

500 Words will be on vacation next week. See you in 2010. Happy New Year everyone.

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Fundraising the Honest Way

December 17th, 2009 · → 4 Comments

super8_cam-4834Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.

If you’re making a film you want the biggest budget possible. (“I can’t live without at least one crane shot. I get depressed otherwise. Now get me a latte, tall, with crispy foam.”)

So one morning you wake up, make your own damn latte and start plugging in numbers into a spreadsheet (or an abacus if you’re low budget) and you end up with a budget for a $15 million indie movie. Then you realize you don’t know enough rich dentists to finance that, so you cut the budget so a rich used-car salesman might be able to finance it. Then you realize that the car industry has tanked and your lean budget isn’t roadworthy. Your suspicions are proven right when you pitch the five mil picture to some used-car salesmen and they start asking you for money. The meeting is getting embarrassing, so you excuse yourself and go cut your budget again.

This time maybe you get the film in at $1.2 million. The latte line item has been slashed, along with the fake blood and alas, there are no cranes. You take this budget to a potential investor and make your presentation.

He says, “If I invest in your film, how will I get back my money?”

Since you don’t know the answer, you go with distraction. “Hey, isn’t that pigeon over there wearing a superman outfit?” You’re desperate to buy time, so you say, “You’ll get your money back in six months!” That sounds  good. But it wouldn’t be true. “What I meant to say is you’ll get your money back in three months!” That sounds even better and of course it’s a bigger lie.

Then you come up with the perfect thing to say: “Keep your money in your pocket because the film market has tanked and I have no idea how I’ll pay your money back.”

Your potential investor starts looking a little crabby. You say,”We’ll borrow the money from a bank, if we could find a bank that would loan us money. Maybe if we sever a limb and hand it to the bank officer on a bed of lettuce and promise indentured service. I will also throw in one of my children as collateral.”

The meeting is getting awkward. The investor corrects you. “Banks are not taking children as collateral anymore. New regulations.”

Will banks take pets as collateral? Yes, but only if they were once owned by celebrities.

You can’t go there. Then you realize something. You have a responsibility to make a film that fits the market. This concept was addressed in an All Cities networking meeting I attended and it came up again this morning at a meeting with a smart producer’s rep.

The imparted wisdom is this: Look at the market. Study the films that are like yours. Find out how they were budgeted and how much money they took in. (IMDb and Box Office Mojo work well for this and you can also check out PBS’s Current.org Pipeline listing.) You can see what your film might actually make. You can decide if you’re willing to make it on a budget that could actually return investors’ money. Huh. I believe the term for that is honesty.slate-0331

Here are some of the films I’m looking at in my own research.

(500) Days of Summer. Domestic Gross: $32,391,374

What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? Domestic Gross: $10,941,801

Run Lola Run. Domestic Gross: $7,267,585

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Swadeshi

December 10th, 2009 · → 8 Comments

Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.

used via Creative Commons license

photo credit: purplejavatroll via Creative Commons license

Around the holiday season more and more people are thinking about trying some swadeshi. It sounds like a crazy-ass office party dance or maybe something spicy to eat. (“I’ll have the swadeshi and a mango lassi.”)

Swadeshi isn’t either of those things, though it might inspire a crazy-ass dance or two. Swadeshi means self-sufficiency. It was a key part of Gandhi’s strategy to free India from British rule. Today, there’s a new kind of swadeshi with online social activism.

London-based Vinay Gupta is hitting the nail on the head with his social action social networking site Global Swadeshi. He has a great proposal for saving the developing world. Cost: Only $60 million. That’s “only” because, as he points out, that’s just half what it cost to make the movie “Batman and Robin.”

Which would you rather do, make a forgettable comic book movie with Arnold Whatshisname, California’s Governator, as Mr. Freeze or would you rather save the developing world twice over?

batman_and_robinWhile you’re thinking about that, let me tell you Mr. Gupta’s $60 million idea. He wants to make television programs for farmers and people who live in slums – 200 hours of “science telly” as he calls it. What topics does he have in mind? Not misbehaving housewives or Tiger Woods’ habit of texting about his carnal conquests or crashing White House parties. No, Mr. Gupta wants to do programs on how to grow more food and how to stay alive with better water, basic sanitation and basic medicine. I’m no television programmer, but f your viewers are at risk of starving to death, a show about how to grow more food might rate pretty well, ya think?

While I’m mulling over how Vinay Gupta might raise 60 mil, and how he might figure out how to give away laptops on which to play his science telly programs, I’d like to note some other forms of e-swadeshi. At changemakers.com you can learn about inspiring people who are re-imagining activism on the web. act.ly is an application that allows you to inspire people to get out the word out about your cause on Twitter. ForwardTrack is an online tool that lets you promote and track your message as it makes its way from person to person. You get cool interactive maps to see how far your message is spreading.

Charity Focus is an online forum for you to volunteer your skills to help non-profits (and if you run a non-profit, it’s a great way to find volunteers.) Be The Change, Inc. wants to inspire and promote the idea of social service. GOOD magazine has an online presence that is dedicated to social action. And get this, the guy who co-founded Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has launched a wiki site to provide user-driven information for homeless services in Tampa.

There are lots more, including the now-venerable MoveOn.org, but those few examples make it clear that e-activism is growing fast and relatively cheap to implement. Try some. And if you must do a crazy-ass dance at your office party, at least you’ll know not to call it a swadeshi.

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Making Money in Yogaland

December 3rd, 2009 · → 2 Comments

live-1020494Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.

Yogaworks has opened a new studio in New York, at the corner of Broadway and Grand Street. It’s got bamboo floors, showers with impressive pressure, electronically-locking lockers and walls painted in restful Ralph Lauren colors. The only thing missing? People. On the two days we went there there were few students. What’s wrong with this yoga picture?

Disclosure: I’m not going to rag on Yogaworks too badly. They gave us two free classes. But I think the empty studios are symptomatic of a pricing and marketing approach that is not working. For you non-yogis, bear with me, because this will become a metaphor for monetizing the web, particularly web journalism. (Metaphors, like yoga positions, can be bent a lot.) Ready? Ok, take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

The new Yogaworks in New York is built on a gym membership pricing plan. They want you to pay a monthly fee plus initiation, just like Crunch Gym or Spectrum. It’s a common model in NY and I suppose the Yogaworks brain trust figures they’ll grab some gym rats seeking to convert their sweat into salvation. But it’s old school.

They don’t want walk-ins – they just want your money. Up front. I’m supposed to be hearing “Om” when I walk into a studio, but at Yogaworks Soho I hear “pay me now.”

In Santa Monica, several new studios have opened within blocks of each other. YogaCo, Bhakti Yoga Shala and Yogis Anonymous work on a different pricing plan. You pay what you want. No membership, no set fee. Walk-ins are ok. You may not get a fancy shower (actually at YogaCo, you do) but you get a sense of connection with the teacher because you are paying him or her directly. They’re not working for a corporation; it’s a collective. Donation-based yoga is an old model from India, and truth be told, the teachers don’t profit unless they get bodies on the mats. That’s because they rent the space from the studio owner, and the students are reimbursing the teacher for that rental. More students, you profit. Less, you’re in the hole. It’s a problem similar to that faced by online journalists and other content providers. Hey, what’s that sound you’re hearing? It’s the creaky gears of my metaphor turning.

Think about all that’s free to the user on the web: Google, Twitter, Facebook. Successful? Google had $21.9 billion in revenue last year. Facebook, with 300 million users, just turned profitable. Twitter? Get back to you on that. Point is, free access works on the web and it can be monetized. Free services like Pandora and last.fm have ads, but you can pay to get rid of them.

Walter Isaacson, a smart fellow, has advocated the subscription model for online newspaper content. But you lock off access, you lock out users and you get the empty studio syndrome.

My metaphor is flawed, of course. Netflix is a successful subscription model with a low price point, and yoga teachers don’t make enough money unless their classes are packed. Imagine, however, if they tried some of the web’s dumber ideas to generate cash? How about pop up ads projected on the wall during class? Or the teacher who casually mentions that she loves Manduka brand mats? Weaving ads into content is even happening on Twitter. The next Tweet you read may be a plug, which is beyond irritating. Just thinking about it, I might have to do a yoga class to calm down.

All the same, I’d rather buy my yoga salvation like music on iTunes – pay as I go, no subliminal ads, no subscriptions.

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Time Suck

November 26th, 2009 · → 1 Comment

Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.

We’re getting ready for Thanksgiving – which for the first time will include vegetarian choices. That got me thinking about the vegetarian body – is it built differently from the meat-eating kind? This link has the answer, even though it can be a bit of a time suck.tumblr_kt407eJ2lg1qz4s3wo1_500-2

I often look at Szymon Błaszczyk’s blog when I’m looking for inspiration. But it also works when I want a time suck. He led me, for example, to this great image of a phantom bike.

I’ve tried to convince myself that wasting time is a fine way of seeking inspiration. But for that to work, you have to convince yourself that you’re wasting quality time. You need a really high-pressure vacuum time suck.

Letters of Note is the place to read original letters by the likes of Van Gogh and one by Kurt Vonnegut written when he was a private in the US Army, captured by Wermacht troops and imprisoned in an underground slaughterhouse called Schlachthof Fünf. On May 29, 1945 he wrote a letter to his family describing how he regained his freedom when his German guards simply walked away. If you’ve read Slaughterhouse Five you’ll recognize that scene – it’s straight from true events described in Vonnegut’s letter.

If you like stories, Reddit.com has something called “IAmA” – you get to list what you do and invite questions and comments about it. For example, you can read a Q and A about what it was like to be a agent for the Chinese Public Safety department doing domestic surveillance.  If you like failure, there’s the popular Fail blog.

Moving on to some eye candy, there’s a store in the Netherlands with a website you can’t stop watching. All the products in the catalog move and interact with each other, and if you care about Flash animation, you might just have an online nerd-gasm.

ffffound.com is another feast for the eyes. Once you start looking, it’s hard to stop. It’s got a tennis court that would be pretty hard to play on.ec634e3f41f6fb16511bd7e98f2a15f381d55292_m-2

By now you’ve realized that we’re on a road leading to other roads leading to still more. Want a map? Peggy Orenstein wrote a piece in the New York Times titled “Stop Your Search Engines.” It was all about stopping what has spun out of control here – linking one search to another until you find that darkness has fallen, nobody has made any dinner and it’s somehow already 2010. Orenstein suggests an application called “Freedom” that actually blocks your access to the internet so you can get things done.

Restriction = freedom is actually a yogic concept, but no way I would be able to write anything without distractions.

I looked at a little application called MyTexts that takes away everything on your screen but what you are writing. It’s beautiful if you like the feeling of turning your $3000 computer into a $50 typewriter. The same company, however, makes a blog editor that I’m using to write this, and its simplicity does help.

Seeking simplicity at an information banquet can be tough. As Peggy Orenstein puts it, “The promise is of infinite knowledge, but what’s delivered is infinite information, and the two are hardly the same.”

Is it Friday already? Time to make a turkey sandwich.

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