creativity/machine

I’ve only just found out that Helmut Newton has died at 83.

I’m frantically busy planning a course and finishing off some outstanding articles, all without my sexy home PC which has some fried hardware and is in the shop, so I haven’t had much time online lately.

Nevertheless:

From Empty Bottle, a vigorous, and highly Romantic post-punk blogging manifesto well worth reading. You’ll have to go read it as I’ve quoted only a teeny bit, but it’s the bit that resonates most with my belief that there is something very interesting about contemporary amateur production - something more than a “revival” of an earlier, more productive time. Stavros the Wonderchicken says:

Write well, write badly, whatever, just create. If you are saying things that stir people, they will respond.

If you can’t write well, write with such passionate muscularity that people stand back and go ‘whoa!’ Make things, reach out to people. If you write well, keep doing it, and get better, and don’t kiss ass for personal gain. If not, just go, bash that keyboard, make a hideous, amateurish squall, one to which, if it has some kernel of glorious truthtelling, people will respond. The mass amateurization of nearly everything is good. If you’re a gifted amateur, the world will beat a path to your, er, door.

To which I would add: and never mind if the path to your door remains overgrown with weeds - be process-oriented, people.
Yet again, thanks to bloody Anne for finding better stuff than me. Which is starting to get mildly embarrassing.