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I have been following Lou Beach’s work since the 70s. He is a master illustrator. This book of marks his mastery of words. Each story is told in 420 characters or less and is every bit as vivid as his artwork. These are word pictures and I doubt that any two people would see the story the same way in their mind’s eye. Each story was posted as a status update on Facebook. Each entry is a short story in its own right.

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You may peek inside of this book on Amazon.com or read excerpts at 420characters.com While at the website you may listen to readings by Jeff Bridges, Ian McShane, and Dave Alvin.

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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2011: Lou Beach takes the prize for best Facebook status update on nearly every page of 420 Characters. Most of us find it difficult to reduce the day’s events or our current emotional state to just 420 characters with spaces and punctuation, yet Beach manages to tell entire stories within these strict confines without losing anything you’d expect from a story with no character limit. These micro-stories range from funny to tragic to absurd, illustrated by Beach’s original artwork and collages. Taken separately, they’re the stories of dreams, both broken and realized; of relationships healthy and strange; of disillusionment and contentment. Taken together, they’re the story of life–or lives. Though there aren’t any overtly recurring characters, the stories still combine into a powerful cohesive whole that’s just as fun to read straight through as it is to read in chunks of 420 characters or less. –Malissa Kent

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Today’s post contains a discussion on why multimedia is not likely to save the commercial photography industry and what may.

In a previous post, I wrote about the 70,000 or so advertising agency people who are out of work and do not know what to do. Many are spending buckets of energy to get jobs similar to those they left and have discovered those jobs no longer exist. So if that affects you or someone you know, it is time to take different actions.

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Change everything, except your passions.

Voltaire

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The use of the term art medium is , to say the least. misleading,

for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium.

It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of

ideas, thought, experience, insight, and understanding.

Edward Steichen

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Multimedia is not a Panacea

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Photographers frequently ask me what I think of the multimedia market?

Some photography pundits emphasize multimedia as being the savior of the commercial photography business. Photographers are encouraged to get into the multimedia markets.

Multimedia is not a market. It is a medium in the same ways that the Internet, magazines, newspapers, movies, poor old television, etc. are media. Media are ‘devices’ for disseminating information, culture, news, entertainment, sales messages, and much more.

Multimedia has been around for at least forty years. It simply means using two or more combinations of media to tell a story. When I first entered the business, the technology consisted of nothing more than racks of carousel projectors, dissolve units programmed with tape, some footage, a script, a narrator, live actors, a script, perhaps some live entertainers or speakers. The applications were for sales meetings, new product introductions, motivation, public relations, etc.

As a young producer/director I was responsible for new business, client contact, proposal writing, sussing out a story, hiring scriptwriters, still photographers, cameramen, editors, choreographers, recording studios, sound engineering, and an array of other technicians. The producer/director was the orchestrator. Being a producer/director opened the door for me to the advertising world.

It is not enough to learn multimedia technology. In fact, it is probably mandatory. However, if a photographer is only a technician, s/he will be competing with thousands of people who have already entered the field and the tens of thousands about to arrive believing it is a panacea. The competition will be keen. It is unknown how much work will be available. Technical expertise is important but it is only part of the picture.

Those who will offer multimedia assignments, include art buyers and others who assign still photography and those learning new media themselves .Television commercials, sales meetings, trainings, in-store promos, etc. may be media or applications themselves. I believe a large part of the market will come from corporate direct.

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Multimedia Requires Storytelling

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Still photographers need to learn a very different way of storytelling. They need to learn how to direct and to produce multimedia. They need to think sequentially. According to Albert Maysles one of the greatest and most original American documentarians, “A documentarian finds stories where none seemed to exist.”

My concern is that so many still photographers believe they ‘should’ learn multimedia as a survival action rather than having heard the calling.

Vision is a calling. A calling is an inner urge or a strong impulse, a passion, some believe a calling may be divinely inspired. How will the world be a different place as a result of your visit on the planet? What is your calling? What is it that you feel the urge and passion to bring into being no matter what?

Do you have a natural marked innate urge for artistic accomplishment? That is a definition of talent. Talent and calling must be present to sustain a career as a professional artist.

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Some Storytelling Essentials

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The graphic novel as a model for multimedia storytelling

The following excerpt is from Will Eisner’s classic book Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative

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Will Eisner 1946

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The telling of a story lies deep in the social behavior of human groups — ancient and modern. Stories are used to teach behavior with the community, to discuss morals and values, or to satisfy curiosity. They dramatize social relations and the problems of living, convey ideas or act our fantasies. The telling of a story requires skill.

In primitive times, the teller of stories in a clan or tribe served as entertainer, teacher and historian. Storytelling preserved knowledge by passing it from generation to generation. This mission has continued into modern times. The storyteller must first have something to tell, and then must be able to master the tools to relay it.

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The Story Itself Abides

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…A story is the narration of a sequence of events deliberately arranged for telling. It is kind of like reporting an event except that the storyteller controls the events. All stories have a structure. A story has a beginning, an end,and a thread of events laid upon a framework that holds it together. Whether the medium is text, film, comics, or any combination of these elements, the skeleton is the same. The style and manner of its telling may be influenced by the medium, but the story itself abides.

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Basic Principles of Storytelling

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…A story may begin as an abstraction. At this point, it is still a lot of thoughts, memories, fantasies, ideas, floating around in one’s head waiting for it to find structure. It becomes a story when told in an arranged and purposeful order. The basic principles of narration are the same whether told orally or visually or both.

The story form is a vehicle for conveying information in an easily absorbed manner. It can relate very abstract ideas, or unfamiliar analogous use of familiar forms of phenomena.

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A Good Place to Begin: Tell Your Own Story

Themata

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How Your Earliest Childhood Memory May Forecast a Life Theme

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I am a reader of autobiographies, journals and letters between people who interest me. I recognized a phenomenon while reading the Letters of Georgia O’Keefe. There she described her earliest childhood memory. She recalled being kept in her dark bedroom before the age of two. Her mother would bring her outdoors on sunny days and place her on a patchwork quilt. Young O’Keefe remembered the great joy of watching the ways the light changed the colors of the quilt. This triggered something in me and I ran to my library and started pulling books off the shelf.

I found an interview with Mike Tyson. He said, “The first thing I remember is being a naughty little boy of two. My father threw me into my crib. I pulled the arms and legs off all of my dolls. It was orgasmic.”

Next I found a letter by young Albert Einstein to a colleague. He wrote about his earliest childhood memory. Albert had no clear memory of his father before the age of five. He caught some childhood disease. His father took the day off from work and spent the entire day with him. Father Einstein brought his son a compass. They spent the day trying to figure out why the needle always pointed in the same direction.

O’Keefe, Einstein, and Tyson remembered incidents which forecast their life themes. Since then, I have found dozens of examples.Hundreds of my clients

I recall my own memories. I see a corner of a room in a house I moved from just before I turned two. There was a Victorian painted porcelain light switch on the school green painted wall. I saw a table which held a Tiffany lamp and an upright telephone. The interpretation was fast. My life is about communications and turning on lights. My early childhood memory confirmed my life purpose. I am a compassionate teacher who helps others turn on the lights.

What is your earliest childhood memory and how does it forecast your life theme? How might you turn your life adventure into a multimedia presentation?

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Watch Examples from a Variety of Non-Fiction Storytellers (Each Image is a Link)

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Capturing Reality A National Film Board of Canada presentation of brief interviews with 33 documentarians

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An Interview with Albert Maysles

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Salesman – a 1968 documentary classic by Albert and David Maysles (Here is 9 minute segment)

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Help Gail Mooney and her Daughter Erin Kelly Open Your Eyes 2010

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Stavit Allweis’ Photographic Novel in Progress was funded through Kickstarter

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When I saw this poster this afternoon, it was one of those ‘I wish I had written it’ moments.

Visit this site to see some amazing innovative green design products.

I contacted them for permission to post the message.

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Hi Ian,

Thanks for getting in touch. It was a pleasure to check out both your website and your artwork.

Based on your testimonials, it sounds like you have really created a positive impact for numerous people.

Thanks for offering to put the manifesto and plug for Holstee on your site — that’s very kind!

We are in the process of making Manifesto posters available in our shop in the next week.

Hand silk-screened onto recycled elephant poop paper.

Perhaps, if it is something your visitors would be interested in, I could make a special coupon for visitors from your site?

Best wishes from NYC!

Dave Raparvar

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http://www.holstee.com

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For the past three weeks or so, I have been posting 1501 Quotes Questions & Pondering on the Creative Process at my Facebook Group Page. I invite you to visit the group and sign up as a member. This is an opportunity to enter into dialogue with a wide range of people. You may post artwork based upon the quote. Add to the collection by posting quotes from your own collection on the FB discussion page. Think of each entry as an idea stimulator.

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When the Japanese mend broken objects they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold, because they believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful.

Barbara Bloom

Installation Artist, Curator, Photographer, Designer

b. 1951

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For a synopsis of the book that accompanied The Collections of Barbara Bloom, by Barbara Bloom, at ICP.

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Photograph, paint, draw the face of a wrinkled elder. While you are working, imagine each crack filled with gold. How does that vision change the ways you see the subject? How different would our culture be if we valued elders this way?

Men are not born, but fashioned.

Desiderius Erasmus

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Albrecht Durer the Elder, Self Portrait, Silverpoint, Early 1500′s

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Ways to Engage Your Prospects Without Becoming a Bore

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Bore: A person who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.
Gian Vincenzo Gravina

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A bore is a fellow who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.
Henry Ford

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One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore…

and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.

John Updike

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The worst thing about a bore is not that he won’t stop talking, but that he won’t let you stop listening.

Author Unknown

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Copyright © 2010 Thomas Lee

Heartstormer Thomas Lee lives in Bozeman MT.

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Me Me Me ME ME ME! And then I…

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Are you a bore or a listener when you interface with prospects, clients, networkers, and others? Are you asking enough questions that allows the other person to share? Do you let them know that you heard them by paraphrasing what they share with you? For example, “What I heard you say is…” Or do you enter someone’s space and begin talking about yourself before you even sit down?

Here are some tips that will help you be liked in the process of building relationships with the people who can give you what you want.

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Show Up
Make the Meeting About the Other Person
Ask Questions
Be Caring
Be Fully Present
Listen
Get Information
Give Information
Laugh a Little
Dare to be Different
Develop Loyalty
Be a Little Mischievous
Remember Details

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Ask creative questions that are challenging, caring, interesting, informative, open-ended. Creative questions often begin with What if…? How may we…? In what ways…? Who are…? Why…? These kinds of questions are filled with a variety of answers that will help you get to know the other person. Each question leads to dialog. Do not ask questions that may be answered yes or no. Practice keeping control of the interview. Do not give your power away. Hold back from handing your portfolio to your prospect for as long as possible. Get them talking about themselves. Repeat what you heard your prospect say to confirm that you understand and to let them know you are listening. What I heard you say is… It is okay to take notes.

Make a list of ten creative questions that you may ask to learn more about your prospect and to get them sharing about themselves. Here is a starter list of advertising related questions (Please make up your own):

What if we were to collaborate on an assignment? What would you want me to know about you? What would you want to know about me?

What if you could change one thing about the agency business, what would it be?

What if you knew who the right photographer was to do a job even before you created the final concept? Have you ever worked with a photographer the initial concept phases of an ad.

Pretend that advertising has been banned by congress. What kind of work would you do? How would you go about doing it?

What if the next print ad you did demanded the highest level of innovation? In what ways would you want to collaborate with a photographer?

What if we were living in a Utopian world where each person could choose the kind of work they want to do? What kind of work would you do if money was not an object?

If you could make one improvement about how photographers try to get your attention, what would it be?

Let your prospects know that you know something about them and that you have chosen them as prospects. Let them know you are interested in them:

I want to work with art directors who are not only interested in great ideas but who can sell them through to their clients. I want to work with risk takers. Etc… (personalize this) I saw what you did when you were still at Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe. How in the world did the agency get the client to approve the idea?

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All my art is in some way about other art, even if the other art is cartoons

Bob Kessel

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I was delighted this morning when Bob Kessel friended me on Facebook.

I have been aware of his illustrations in The New York Times,

The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek,  and many other national publications.

I did not know his fine art work which is in numerous private and museum collections.

His artwork revisits the works of old and modern masters.

Kessel’s work is amusing, intelligent, beautiful, graphic, bold,  and more.

His collection of quotes called Artists on Art represents his illustrative style.

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Bob Kessel’s Fine Art

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Girl with Pearl Earing by Bob Kessel

After Vermeer

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Herring by Bob Kessel

After Van Gogh

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Limited edition prints and original art by Bob Kessel • Email:  b.kessel@snet.net • Phone: (860)334-9438

All images in this post © Copyright Robert Kessel

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When you come to the fork in the road, take it. Yogi Berra was right. Well, sort of. If we keep walking, we will be faced with new forks in the road. It may be time to make new choices. We are unlikely to be presented with an opportunity to double back. Commit to your passions. Carry them in your backpack. Dare to take the next step on the ‘road-of-the-I-do-not-know.’ I believe that the expression, If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there is a distortion of the truth. It suggests that living without goals is aimless. I create a life of adventure, discovery and manifestation. I co-create a world where people are safe to bring what they love and what matters into being — by being a compassionate teacher and expressive painter. That is my mission; not a goal. When I chose a path and stay on mission, there is rarely any remorse. SIGH!

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The speaker stands in the woods, considering a fork in the road. Both ways are equally worn and equally overlaid with un-trodden leaves. The speaker chooses one, telling himself that he will take the other another day. Yet he knows it is unlikely that he will have the opportunity to do so. And he admits that someday in the future he will recreate the scene with a slight twist: He will claim that he took the less-traveled road…

…Ironic as it is, this is also a poem infused with the anticipation of remorse. Its title is not “The Road Less Traveled” but “The Road Not Taken.” Even as he makes a choice (a choice he is forced to make if does not want to stand forever in the woods, one for which he has no real guide or definitive basis for decision-making), the speaker knows that he will second-guess himself somewhere down the line—or at the very least he will wonder at what is irrevocably lost: the impossible, unknowable Other Path. But the nature of the decision is such that there is no Right Path—just the chosen path and the other path. What are sighed for ages and ages hence are not so much the wrong decisions as the moments of decision themselves—moments that, one atop the other, mark the passing of a life. This is the more primal strain of remorse.

Thus, to add a further level of irony, the theme of the poem may, after all, be “seize the day.” But a more nuanced carpe diem, if you please.

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Robert Frost (C. 1910)
b. 1874 – d. 1963

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Two roads diverged in the woods, and I

I took the one less traveled by,

and that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

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The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

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SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Frost’s Early Poems.” SparkNotes LLC. 2002. http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/frost/ (accessed June 21, 2010).

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When I change, you change!
Vekamanda

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This simple-sounding phrase has the deepest and most far reaching implications. It means that you don’t have to wait for the most troublesome people in your life to mend their ways or get out of their rut, or alter their attitude toward you.

Change yourself and they cannot remain unaffected by it. Test this principle in the smallest way – smile at someone and see what happens. Does their expression remain the same? See if in this minuscule way you can demonstrate the powerful truths of human behavior.

When I change, you change. It may help you see how the principle works in much larger ways, with people close to you, people important in all aspects of your life – boss,employee, wife, husband, friend.

Dan Wakefield, Creating From the Spirit

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Could it be as simple as that? If you trust others, will they trust you? If you stop being critical, will others stop criticizing you? If you stop showng expected work, will people stop giving you the expected response? If you surprise yourself, will others be surprised? If you set yourself on fire, will others find you more attractive? If you stop marketing yourself as a category artist, will others stop trying to place you in a pigeon hole?

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Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875-1926

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And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle that tells us we must always trust in the difficult, then now what appears to be the most will become our intimate and trusted experience. Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act,  just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps Everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
Rainer Maria Rilke

We live in difficult times. We carry a heavy load of anger. We battle with entitlements. We place blame on others. Who firightens you? What frightens you. What actions may you take bring your passions into being, no matter what?

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Augustus Rodin (1840-1917 )

Photograph (C. 1907) by Edward Steichen (1879-1973)

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Rilke was Rodin’s secretary for a while, and Rodin one day advised him to go down to the zoo and try to see something. Rilke did and spent some time watching a panther. Rodin respected seeing, the ability to observe, to use the terrific energy of the eyes, to pay attention to something beside one’s own subjectivity. Rilke understood that his own poetry lacked seeing, and he wrote nearly two hundred poems in about six years in an effort to sharpen his seeing. Through that labor, Rilke pased to a new stage of his art.

News of the Universe, Robert Bly

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The Panther
Rainer Maria Rilke
In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris

From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted
that it no longer holds anything anymore.
To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand
bars, and behind the bars, nothing.

The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride
which circles down to the tiniest hub
is like a dance of energy around a point
in which as great will stand stunned and numb.

Only at times the curtains of the pupil rise
without a sound…then a shape enters,
slips through the tightened silence of the shoulders,
reaches the hear, and dies.

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How are you like the panther? How are you like Rilke? When do you make time to sit still and observe? This afternoon go to the zoo, a park, a beach, a… Then sit and observe. Meditate on it. Breathe in and Breathe out. Listen to your heartbeat. Show courage. Love what you see. If you hear voices in your mind, command them to go away or perhaps it would be interesting to listen without judgements. Do this for at least an hour. When you are finished, write in your journal, draw, photograph, create.Use the energy of your eyes.

Let us hear your comments. Did you do this exercise? Did you discover the essence of what you observed? Did you turn a dragon into a princess?

Please follow this blog by clicking on the ‘follow’ button in the right sidebar.

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Sleep Mower — Somnambulist Series

Steve Widoff

Copyright © 2009 Steve Widoff

The somnambulistic series is a fictitious look at sleepwalkers.

Sleepwalkers arise from the slow wave sleep stage in a state of low consciousness and

perform activities that are usually performed during the day.

These activities can be as benign as sitting up in bed, walking to the bathroom and cleaning,

or as hazardous as cooking, driving, extremely violent gestures, grabbing at hallucinated objects or even homicide.

Steve Widoff, Heartstormer

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Don’t Go Back to Sleep

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the door sill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don’t go back to sleep.

Rumi

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I am fascinated by what it takes to stay awake in difficult times. I marvel at what we all do in times of transition — how we resist, and how we surrender; how we stay stuck; and how we grow. Since my first major open experience — my divorce — I have been an observer and confidante of others as they engage with the forces of their own suffering. I have made note of how the fiasco and failure visit each one of us, as if they were written into the job descriptions of being human. I have seen people crumble in times of trouble, lose their spirit, and never fully recover. I have seen others protect themselves fiercely from any kind of change, until they are living a half life, safe yet stunted,

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But I have seen another way to deal with a fearful change or a painful loss. I call this other way the Phoenix Process — named for the mythological phoenix bird who remains awake through the fires of change, risen from the ashes of death, and is reborn into the his most vibrant and enlightened self. For now, we only need to understand it as an alternative to going back to sleep.

Elizabeth Lesser from Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

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