“You only have to look at your children’s drawings or listen to the odd little phrases they coin to know that man is born with a creative urge. Yet sadly, most people lose this urge as they grow older.
Many ‘primitive’ societies seem far wiser than us in the way they nurture this quality. For example, I have in my home some masks and statues from New Guinea, tapa cloths from Samoa, and aboriginal paintings. Artists like Picasso learned much from this kind of art, and the artistic impulse – seen in acts like body painting and tattooing – seems more widespread in their communities.
But we ‘civilised’ folk in pursuit of such worthy ends as direct marketing allow this inherent ability to atrophy. We have come to think only a special, gifted few can be ‘creative’.”
– Drayton Bird, British direct marketing guru, in ‘The birth of an idea’ from his book Commonsense Direct Marketing
14 October 2008
10 October 2008
Toumani Diabaté
Toumani Diabaté is from Mali (West Africa). He plays the kora, a 21-stringed traditional Malian musical instrument. The music from the kora, whether solo or accompanied by a band or vocals, is so melodious that, some say, it can transport the listener to the seventh heaven.
Toumani Diabaté is represented by World Circuit Records, London. You can buy his CDs from, or listen to his music on, their website. To listen to his music, choose any of the 3 albums displayed at the bottom of the screen and click on the ‘listen’ link.
You can also watch a video of Toumani Diabaté’s performance on YouTube here (4 minutes of bliss) and a short intro to playing the kora here.
[Citation: World Circuit Records; YouTube.]
Toumani Diabaté is represented by World Circuit Records, London. You can buy his CDs from, or listen to his music on, their website. To listen to his music, choose any of the 3 albums displayed at the bottom of the screen and click on the ‘listen’ link.
You can also watch a video of Toumani Diabaté’s performance on YouTube here (4 minutes of bliss) and a short intro to playing the kora here.
[Citation: World Circuit Records; YouTube.]
08 October 2008
The Daily Beast
Tina Brown, British-born but now American citizen, former editor of famous magazines like Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, talk-show host and winner of many journalism awards, has launched her very own news website called The Daily Beast.
What is The Daily Beast?
According to its website (and in Ms Brown’s own view), “It’s a speedy, smart edit of the web from the merciless point of view of what interests the editors. The Daily Beast is the omnivorous friend who hears about the best stuff and forwards it to you with a twist. It allows you to lead the conversation, rather than simply follow it.”
The name of the website was chosen by Ms Brown from her favourite novel: Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, a satire on London’s Fleet Street, home of the British press.
Visit The Daily Beast here.
What is The Daily Beast?
According to its website (and in Ms Brown’s own view), “It’s a speedy, smart edit of the web from the merciless point of view of what interests the editors. The Daily Beast is the omnivorous friend who hears about the best stuff and forwards it to you with a twist. It allows you to lead the conversation, rather than simply follow it.”
The name of the website was chosen by Ms Brown from her favourite novel: Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, a satire on London’s Fleet Street, home of the British press.
Visit The Daily Beast here.
30 September 2008
India’s future
Here’s an excerpt from an article, India’s future, from the Economist Intelligence Unit ViewsWire dated 29 September 2008, which ought to give us, every Indian, something to think about (that is, if we aren’t thinking about it already):
“How will the rest of the world react? As India acquires the means to shape the global economic and geopolitical landscape, its leaders will face a familiar dilemma. Like rising powers in the past, India is keen to expand its influence in line with its increasingly global interests — but it needs to do this without provoking a backlash from currently dominant countries or being caught up in rivalry with other emerging powers.
How India manages its rise — and how the rest of the world responds — will have huge implications for the country’s stability and growth prospects. One potential obstacle is geopolitical: India needs to promote regional peace and stability in order to have a strong claim to be a major world player. But South Asia is an especially tough neighbourhood. India shares borders with countries that are embroiled in civil war (Sri Lanka), have just emerged from civil war (Nepal), or are under military or military-backed rule (Myanmar and Bangladesh). Civilian rule has recently been restored in Pakistan, but the political scene there remains fragile and a destabilising Islamist insurgency is gathering steam. This leaves China as India’s least volatile neighbour — but China, which is helping to build ports and quasi-military facilities in Pakistan, Myanmar and Bangladesh, is also India’s chief geopolitical rival.”
The entire EIU ViewsWire article, India’s future, can be found here.
“How will the rest of the world react? As India acquires the means to shape the global economic and geopolitical landscape, its leaders will face a familiar dilemma. Like rising powers in the past, India is keen to expand its influence in line with its increasingly global interests — but it needs to do this without provoking a backlash from currently dominant countries or being caught up in rivalry with other emerging powers.
How India manages its rise — and how the rest of the world responds — will have huge implications for the country’s stability and growth prospects. One potential obstacle is geopolitical: India needs to promote regional peace and stability in order to have a strong claim to be a major world player. But South Asia is an especially tough neighbourhood. India shares borders with countries that are embroiled in civil war (Sri Lanka), have just emerged from civil war (Nepal), or are under military or military-backed rule (Myanmar and Bangladesh). Civilian rule has recently been restored in Pakistan, but the political scene there remains fragile and a destabilising Islamist insurgency is gathering steam. This leaves China as India’s least volatile neighbour — but China, which is helping to build ports and quasi-military facilities in Pakistan, Myanmar and Bangladesh, is also India’s chief geopolitical rival.”
The entire EIU ViewsWire article, India’s future, can be found here.
25 September 2008
Nothing Twice
Exactly two months ago today, a friend and colleague of mine made one of my wishes come true.
I had been pining for Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry for a long time now when this friend announced his trip to Poland with his Polish girlfriend. I jumped at the opportunity and requested him to obtain an anthology of Wislawa Szymborska – with dire consequences to his life upon his return, should he fail to fulfill this request.
Of course, he had no idea who Wislawa Szymborska was. So, he couldn’t see the meaning in my threat, until his girlfriend enlightened him on Polish literature – and my sincerity. After all, Wislawa Szymborska is something of a Polish national treasure, apart from being a humanist and a renowned writer.
Happily for me, on 25 July 2008, this colleague and friend of mine handed over a brand new hardcover copy of Nothing Twice (Selected Poems) – an anthology of 120 Wislawa Szymborska’s poems, both in Polish and in English (translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh), published soon after she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.
This means, although Wislawa Szymborska has written only 250 or so poems so far in her life, not only are they magnificent enough to lead her to her Nobel Prize, but also most of them are contained in this collection. For all those interested, here’s the poem from the title of the anthology:
Nothing Twice
Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.
Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.
No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.
One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.
The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?
Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to say
Today is always gone tomorrow
With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.
[Nothing Twice, a poem by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh - from the anthology Nothing Twice (Selected Poems) by Wislawa Szymborska, published by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Poland, 1997.]
I thought today would be a good day to post something on Wislawa Szymborska as this friend and colleague of mine is leaving today to join another agency.
I had been pining for Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry for a long time now when this friend announced his trip to Poland with his Polish girlfriend. I jumped at the opportunity and requested him to obtain an anthology of Wislawa Szymborska – with dire consequences to his life upon his return, should he fail to fulfill this request.
Of course, he had no idea who Wislawa Szymborska was. So, he couldn’t see the meaning in my threat, until his girlfriend enlightened him on Polish literature – and my sincerity. After all, Wislawa Szymborska is something of a Polish national treasure, apart from being a humanist and a renowned writer.
Happily for me, on 25 July 2008, this colleague and friend of mine handed over a brand new hardcover copy of Nothing Twice (Selected Poems) – an anthology of 120 Wislawa Szymborska’s poems, both in Polish and in English (translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh), published soon after she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.
This means, although Wislawa Szymborska has written only 250 or so poems so far in her life, not only are they magnificent enough to lead her to her Nobel Prize, but also most of them are contained in this collection. For all those interested, here’s the poem from the title of the anthology:
Nothing Twice
Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.
Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.
No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.
One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.
The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?
Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to say
Today is always gone tomorrow
With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.
[Nothing Twice, a poem by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh - from the anthology Nothing Twice (Selected Poems) by Wislawa Szymborska, published by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Poland, 1997.]
I thought today would be a good day to post something on Wislawa Szymborska as this friend and colleague of mine is leaving today to join another agency.
20 September 2008
Lost formats
Dimensions: 4 x 2.5 x 0.4 inch
Storage Capacity: 60, 90 and 120 min.
Manufacturer: Norelco (Philips)
Know what this is? It’s a 2-dimensional image of a compact cassette which was (and, in some places, still is) used to store music. Once, this type of media for recording and storing music was popular, but now, with the digital revolution in full swing, the compact cassette is (almost) dead.
According to Experimental Jetset’s website, the compact cassette was “introduced in 1966 as a convenient way of recording and playing music in home and car. In 1982 it overtook the LP’s dominance after Sony’s popular Walkman was introduced, but was surpassed by Philips’ CD (compact disc) in 1993.” Of course, a great deal has changed since then and, as things are, even the CD will soon disappear into oblivion.
You don’t need great brains to know this, and may even find this information redundant and irritating, but you may be (at least, I was) surprised to learn that an Amsterdam-based graphics studio, called Experimental Jetset, is doing all it can to preserve for posterity what it calls ‘lost formats’ such the compact cassette.
Experimental Jetset seems to have 64 such ‘lost formats’ in their archive at present. These 'lost formats' can be found on their website.
17 September 2008
The panda’s preference
“…according to Megan Owen, a conservation specialist at the San Diego Zoo, there is a possible evolutionary explanation for the panda’s seemingly foolish preference for bamboo: lack of competition. When pandas split off from the bear lineage about 3 million years ago, tasty and nutritious cuisine like meat, fruit, and nuts may have been difficult to obtain while bamboo was ubiquitous — a wide-open ecological niche. So there were two choices: Exert some serious effort to get the good stuff, or munch away on a seemingly inexhaustible supply of woody grasses.
The panda accommodated its vegetarianism with a few physical adaptations — enlarged chewing muscles (those adorable jowls), their famous ‘thumbs’, and a slightly modified digestive system (though still far more similar to a carnivore’s than to an herbivore’s). But the most notable adaptations were behavioral. Pandas must minimize energy expenditure in every aspect of their lives: limiting locomotion and mating periods, having a low surface area-to-volume ratio (i.e., being fat) to conserve heat, and sleeping as much as possible.”
[Citation: Reproduced from Could Pandas Be an Evolutionary Mistake — or Proof of an Intelligent Designer?, an article by Lizzie Buchen in Discover magazine, published online on 5 August 2008.]
The panda accommodated its vegetarianism with a few physical adaptations — enlarged chewing muscles (those adorable jowls), their famous ‘thumbs’, and a slightly modified digestive system (though still far more similar to a carnivore’s than to an herbivore’s). But the most notable adaptations were behavioral. Pandas must minimize energy expenditure in every aspect of their lives: limiting locomotion and mating periods, having a low surface area-to-volume ratio (i.e., being fat) to conserve heat, and sleeping as much as possible.”
[Citation: Reproduced from Could Pandas Be an Evolutionary Mistake — or Proof of an Intelligent Designer?, an article by Lizzie Buchen in Discover magazine, published online on 5 August 2008.]
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