MAGPIE
FORK [ Five Pounds ] [ Issue One ] [ January 2011 ]
ONE FOR SORROW TWO FOR JOY THREE FOR A GIRL FOUR FOR A BOY FIVE FOR SILVER SIX FOR GOLD SEVEN FOR A SECRET, NEVER TO BE TOLD EIGHT FOR A WISH NINE FOR A KISS TEN FOR A BIRD YOU MUST NOT MISS.
CONTACT thoughts@twoforjoy.com MAGPIE MAGAZINE Number 17 De Beauvoir Road Hackney N1 4LT EDITOR Celia Darling SUB EDITOR Charmaine Fowler ART DIRECTOR Charlie Gobblehype ADVERTISING Advertise@twoforjoy.com CONTRIBUTORS Harrison Smith, Dan Srokosz, Adam Phillips, Scott Edwards, Britney Spears, James Norgate, Carla Sambells, Pippa Jupe, James Drayson, Peter Jones, Faye Blackmore, Ryan Phillips, Richard Blackwood, Logan Sama, D Double E. The views expressed in Magpie are those of the respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2011 © Magpie magazine.
As creatives it is our job to get ideas, that’s what we are paid to do. We search for inspiration all around us; at the hairdresser, on our way to work, eavesdropping on conversations on the bus, looking at other creatives’ work, having a nap, smoking, having sex even - yet we all know that sometimes these ideas just do not arrive and we hit a wall known as creative block. Not ideal really. So here is where we step in with an abundance of inspiration. Not by way of actual ideas but instead, ways of acquiring them. As human beings we are designed to work in patterns - hence the ability to walk, navigate stairs and the like but this also means we look for the same ways of doing things such as searching for ideas. Trying out new ways can lead to new inspiration along with some fun times. Celia Darling - Editor
www.twoforjoy.com
FUN GAMES TO PLAY WHEN BORED OF THINKING [No 1] HOPSCOTCH First take a piece of chalk or other removable substance - use your charcoal if you’re really arty. Draw a square big enough to fit a foot in, then draw another two squares touching the first square directly on top of it with both squares sitting with the middles right in the center of the single square. Repeat this until you have ten squares. Draw numbers in each square starting at the bottom. Take a small throwable object, such as a penny. Throw this penny at the squares. Hop and jump alternately with one foot in each square until you reach the square the penny has landed in. Go back the same way. Now your playmate can have a go.
[3]
Food for Thought
Intoxicated Ideas
0 1 3 3 2 2
9 8 0 8 6 8
Meeting SAGMEISTER
PAUL ARDEN - How to Think The Opposite
Here's an Idea
Get Your Spotify AAT!
ADRIAN SHAUGHNESSY Is there such a thing as creative block or is it a convenient excuse for a lack of ideas? Designers are not robots and everyone has spells when ideas dry up. If this happens, what do we do? Is there a plumbing company we can call to unblock the blockage?
[ MAGPIE ]
I always have creative block. It's not that I don't
the computer and pick up a pencil; change the
have ideas - I have lots. It's just that I'm never
book we sketch in; change the place we work in;
very happy with them. They rarely seem good
change the surroundings we function in.
enough, and I always want them to be better. It's as if I know that behind every idea there's a
Another reason is that it takes time to develop
better one waiting to burst out; or, if not a better
ideas. If we only rely on instant thinking we will
idea, then a way of making the first idea better.
miss the opportunity to develop an idea fully.
Even when I have an idea that others tell me is
If we can give ideas time to gestate we stand
good, I'm not convinced and always look to dig
a better chance of producing new and fresh
down to another layer.
expressions. But time is a scarce commodity in design. Ask most designers what they'd most like
This state of semi-permanent creative turmoil is
more of and many will say - time. Yet, despite
familiar to many designers. We are biologically
never seeming to have enough of it, by juggling
conditioned to agonize over our work.
deadlines we can often give our psychic engines
It is natural - desirable even - to fret over it. I'm
time to generate new thoughts.
not talking about torturing ourselves. I'm talking about relishing and accepting the process of
When we have a creative block we should move
pushing, extending and sculpting ideas. When
on to something else and go back to the task
we stop doing this we inhabit a state of mind that
that's causing the problem at a later date. This
is far more debilitating than mere fretfulness;
usually results in a new perspective. However,
it's called self satisfication, and it's the mortal
it's worth emphasizing that it's important not
enemy of creativity.
to suspend work on a project when a blockage is at it's worst; we should only put a job to one
But ideas can sometimes be hard to find, and just side when we have reached a psychological as great sports people have off days, designers
point where we are not experiencing extreme
can experience spells of creative inertia. Are
despondancy. We should keep going until we feel
there any practical steps we can take to dislodge
some inkling of confidence that there will be a
creative blockages? First, we have to look at
suitable outcome, otherwise we will be reluctant
why blockages occur. One reason is that we
to go back to the project.
become over reliant on our tools. Designers the world over use the same tools, and over time we
If all else fails, try reading a chapter of Alice's
come to accept the limitations they place on us
Adventures in Wonderland. Any book will do as
and start working in ways that are familiar and
long as it provides a glimpse of genius, but Lewis
repetitive. Often the first step towards avoiding
Carroll's Victorian surrealist masterpiece is hard
creative stagnation is to change our tools: ditch
to beat for unfettering the imagination.
[7]
[ MAGPIE ]
Stefan Sagmeister is something of a graphic design superstar and one of the most closely watched graphic designers working today. Famed initially for carving lettering in to his own body for the 1999 AIGA Detroit poster, Stefan has continued to create arresting and original graphic design solutions. His work shuns convention in favour of conceptually appropriate but frequently audacious ideas. We were curious to find out whether his reputation affects the creative freedom a client allows, and how he balances
M E E T I N G S T E F A N
By Holden Coalfield
commercial expectation with his experimental approach. Stefan's starting point for many projects is to resist design 'rules'. His approach to his work seems to epitomise the complex relationship between freedom and constraint with which most designers battle. But is this reflected in Stefan's influences or explicit in his design philosophy? As someone who is frequently cited as an inspiration by other designers, who or what inspires Stefan? Even the most experienced graphic designer can find parts of the creative process uncomfortable. Stefan is refreshingly candid about this, "I
[9]
find thinking very difficult". To help overcome this he has evolved a strategy for what he calls his "concept time". Rather than allow himself limitless time to think, Stefan finds he is more productive if he structures thinking time in a very disciplined way. He allocates himself clearly delineated short slots of time - two sessions of twenty minutes, or three sessions of ten minutes, for example. He confesses, "If I put aside three hours' thinking time, the chances of achieving nothing are pretty high." During the initial ideas stage Stefan makes notes and sketches. These are often in the back of his 'daytimer', a leather bound personal organiser which he keeps with him at all times. He makes sketches during meetings, while waiting in airports or in the back of New York taxi cabs, the most salient of these eventually being transferred and collated in to his sketchbooks where he explores and develops them further. These sketchbooks are always black and hardbound, measuring nine by twelve inches. He has kept all of his sketchbooks from the last fifteen years, as an ever expanding library of thoughts and references. In addition, Stefan has always kept diaries, an activity that reveals further his comfort and familiarity with recording thoughts, analytical reflection and disciplined documentation. Stefan has kept written diaries since he was young, a weekly activity he describes as an "accounting of my thoughts". he used to handwrite these in separate personal and business journals, but now Stefan types entries in to a file on his laptop. He advocates keeping diaries as a means of personal development and refers back to them regularly, a reflective practice which bears fruit in his analytical and philosophical approach to design.
[ MAGPIE ]
Early morning is Stafan's most productive concept time. This is especially true if he is travelling, taking advantage of his disrupted sleep patterns. He finds the anonymity and atmosphere peculiar to hotel rooms particularly inspiring and conducive to what he calls 'dreaming freely'. As he explains, "It's easy to think there, specifically because you don't really have to think about the implementation. If the hotel room has a balcony, that's fantastic. If there is room service and coffee, even better."
[ 11 ]
A
F E W
T H I N G S
MATERIAL LUXURIES ARE BEST ENJOYED IN SMALL DOSES I love the moment when I initially enter a guest room in a luxury hotel. It is enjoyable to turn on the light, take in the room, check out the view, and survey the bathroom. My
S T E F A N
delight usually lasts all through day one; I still like the room
H A S
is boiled just a bit longer than the requisite four minutes, the
L E A R N T S O
F A R
by day two; then I start to notice all the little inadequacies — the dark grouting in the bathroom, the soft-boiled egg that vacuum cleaner left in the hallway — by day three. I should check out of every hotel after a single day. It's a good thing I can get my favourite cookies — the incredible Luxemburgerli, from Sprüngli in Zurich — only two or three times a year, when I visit Mum in nearby Bregenz. The scarcity keeps them special and delicious. DRUGS ARE FUN IN THE BEGINNING BUT BECOME A DRAG LATER ON They are fun in the beginning, they truly are. Still, in most drug movies I have seen there seems to be very little enjoyment in the taking of them right from the start. If the first tries had made me so miserable, I don't think I would have ever continued. I have an addicitve personality and tend to overdo most endeavors. When I drank, I drank until I became no fun to be around, and had to stop. When I smoked, I inhaled two and a half packs of lucky strikes — with no filter — a day. When I quit cigarettes and tried cigars a couple of years later, I smoked twenty midsize Villigers within days. My drinking in the early nineties had gotten so bad that I went to a couple AA meetings, but I quickly realised that most people there were much farther down the long road to unmanageable addiction. My friend Paul attended one meeting where a woman in her thirties held forth behind a podium about the point in her drinking career where she had hit rock bottom: She found herself one Sunday morning waking up in a garage. A man was pissing on her. A male audience member interjected. "That was you?" My niece Juliane studied psychology at the University of Innsbruck and participated in a study of six popular drugs. The premise of the study was based on a hierarchy established by Jack Henning field and Neal Benowitz that ranked the drugs from the most to the least addictive, which went like this: [ MAGPIE ]
Heroin, Alcohol, Cocaine, Nicotine, Caffeine, Marijuana. Luckily I never got the UK working permit for that advertising internship I was offered during the coke-crazy eighties in London: otherwise, I would have been hooked on coke or speed rather quickly. Knowing myself, I never tried heroin, but even smoking pot, the least addictive of the six, is only fun if I do it every once in a while. It tends to make me lazy, insecure and—munchies!—fat. EVERYBODY WHO IS HONEST IS INTERESTING Quintin Crisp, the late British queen extroadinair and subject of Sting's song 'Englishman in New York', once came to visit our students at the Graduate Design Department of the School of Visual Arts in New York. Among the many memorable things he mentioned was a line he used to say to journalists, "Everybody is interesting". Members of the press came back and said, "Mr. Crisp, this is just simply not true. There are losts of utterly boring people out there." He thought about it, agreed, and revised his statement, "Everybody who is honest is interesting". This rand true immediately, has impressed me so much, and has informed many of the studio's design projects since. Every boring dinner I have ever attended was dull principally because people did not say what they actually meant.
[ 13 ]
P C
A H
T T E R A N G I
N N
G
Writer: Edward De Bono
Lateral thinking: the way sideways. Patterns allow us to make
Working within
a deliberate means to pattern switch,
sense of the world we live
existing patterns will not itself
rather than relying on mistake or
in. Without them, everyday
lead to new patterns.
accident; it seeks to achieve pattern
would be like hangover day.
switching that occurs in insight.
"Where's my shoe? How do
Humour is probably the most
I walk upstairs? Why can't I
significant characteristic of the
Creativity is different to lateral
walk properly!".
human mind. It tells us more about
thinking as a creative person may
how the system works than anything
think differently to the average person,
The main purpose of the
else. Humour involves the escape
but may never think differently to
brain is to be brilliantly
from one pattern and the switching to
themselves, so they may perceive the
uncreative. And so it
another. Devices such as puns, which
world in a special way but may be
should be but from time to
change the meaning of a word to mean
stuck in that way of seeing. Lateral
time a change of pattern is
something else i.e. "going for a tramp
thinking allows the ability to change
required. This is difficult
in the woods". Tramp could either
perception and keep on changing
because we do not really
mean a walk or a homeless person.
perception in order to constantly
have any mechanisms for
Another is misdirection, sending
think of new ideas.
doing this.
someone in one direction and then back round to seeing the first
In science, breakthroughs
direction differently.
tend to come from chance observation, accident
Hindsight and insight are also
or mistake. Once the
used to switch to a new pattern. We
break has occured we can
switch patterns to suddenly realise
follow on with more analysis
something is reasonable and obvious.
and development.
In hindsight creative ideas must be logical otherwise we can never accept
In terms of the mind, the
it as having value. The way of getting
mechanisms for pattern
to the idea however, must not be
changing are mistake
logical. This is where lateral thinking
accident and humour.
comes in. Lateral thinking works as [ MAGPIE ]
"Humour involves the escape from one pattern and the switching to another."
[ 15 ]
[ MAGPIE ]
PROBLEM No 1 Place three bottles upright on the table or floor. Position them so that each bottle forms the corner point of a triangle of equal sides. The distance between the bases of any two bottles should be slightly more than the length of a knife. Using only the four knives, construct a platform on top of the bottles. No part of any knife may touch the ground. The platform must be strong enough to support a full glass of water. You may attack the problem with logic, or you may play around with the knives until something turns up, you may wait for the solution to occur to you or you may deliberately search for it. As you work on the problem observe the ease with which you solve it. Observe how long it takes you. Observe how you set about it. Look at the different approaches that you use and consider why you use them. If you come to the conclusion there is no solution, think about how long it takes you to realise this and how sure you are about your decision. This is an opportunity for you to think about your thinking. There is no frantic demand for a solution. If you are still unsuccessful at the end of the day, try sleeping on the problem. If not, the solution will be revealed in the next issue.
[ 17 ]
FOOD FOR THOUGHT By Billy Bragg
I was breast-fed until six months old.
this organ uses up around 20 to 30 per
My best friend at school, Jane, was
cent of our total energy needs.
bottle fed. Jane was brighter than me - she was better at everything from
Yet the amount of glucose (the energy
maths and music to French
that fuels the body) our brains can
and chemistry.
store is tiny and without constant replacement would be exhausted
In spite of recent research, which
within ten minutes.
suggests that breast-fed babies have a higher IQ than those who are given
However, this idea is now being
formula feeds, my advice is that if
challenged with findings that
were you given the latter, don't panic.
improving blood-glucose control (by eating the right kind of breakfast, for
It clearly does not condemn you to
example) raises blood glucose to an
a life in the intellectual slow lane
optimal point that improves our brains'
as Jane and many other people have
performance, boosting mem-ory and
proved; and, fortunately, there are
learning powers.
things you can do in adulthood that can help to boost your brain power,
Research has shown that adults who
some of which includes being picky
eat breakfast have better “free-recall�
about what and when you eat.
abilities (tested by showing people a list of 20 words at a rate of one every
The No 1 rule is to eat regularly,
two seconds with two minutes at the
especially starting the day with
end to recall the words) in the
breakfast. Although our brains account
day ahead than when they skip
for only 2 per cent of our body weight,
breakfast. Breakfast eaters not
[ MAGPIE ]
only scored better in this kind
So too are eggs. They give us
of test, but also had enhanced
choline and lecithin, which are key
“delayedrecognition memory�.
components of acetylcholine, the transmitter that plays such a big role
The types of foods eaten at
in memory performance.
breakfast and during the rest of the day do seem to count when it comes
No one has quite worked out why, but
to making the most of brain power.
eating protein does seem to make us
One of the keys is to stay off the
feel more mentally alert. Tucking in to
fast-release carbohydrates, such as
a good serving of lean chicken, turkey,
croissants, cereal bars and white toast
beef or fish such as tuna or salmon
with marmalade.
at lunchtime with salad or vegetables could be a good move, especially if
Because they are digested rapidly they
you have a big meeting or need to
give your blood glucose an exaggerated concentrate on an important issue. spike that is swiftly followed by a low that makes you feel mentally sluggish.
Anything that improves circulation,
Not only does your brain slow down
and thus blood, oxygen and nutrients
from the glucose low, but you also feel
to your brain, is also likely to help
stressed and distracted while seeking
boost brain power. Omega-3 essential
more fast-release carbohydrates.
fats appear to play this role. Having
Breakfasts that include slowrelease
one or two servings of oily fish such as
glucose, such as sugar-free muesli
mackerel, grilled sardines, anchovies
with berries, porridge or sour-dough
or salmon a week should do the trick.
toast with peanut butter, are brainenhancing options. [ 19 ]
[ MAGPIE ]
STAYING AWAKE
GINKGO BILOBA: MAY HELP TO IMPROVE BLOOD FLOW AND COMBAT AGE-RELATED MEMORY LOSS. GOTU KOLA: EXTRACTS OF THIS ROOT (TRITERPENES) APPEAR TO ENHANCE HEALTHY BLOOD-VESSEL STRUCTURE AND HELP TO IMPROVE MEMORY. COFFEE AND TEA: A QUICK HIT OF CAFFEINE CAN REV UP YOUR CONCENTRATION. WATER: HYDRATION IS CRUCIAL TO KEEP YOUR BRAIN WORKING EFFICIENTLY. KEEP WATER OR CAFFEINE-FREE DRINKS TO HAND SUCH AS ROIBOSH OR HERBAL TEAS. TOP UP FLUIDS REGULARLY.
[ 21 ]
IAN MCMILLAN WINNER I always like to listen in to conversations on trains and buses; it's my job you see, as a writer, to keep my ear to the ground (or my ear three inches away from the couple who are leaning into each other and whispering sweet nothings on the seat in front of me on the train which I can achieve by pretending to retrieve a dropped pencil) to make sure I write dialogue it's of the realistic kind and not of the "Charles, you've got a gun in your left hand which is rather odd for an accountant in his late forties with a pronounced limp" variety. That's what I tell myself, anyway. Really, I'm just nosey. A noseypoke, as my mother used to say. The other thing I like to do on trains is glance at the open laptops of the besuited business types tip-tapping away next to me. Sometimes they're just playing patience. Sometimes they're reading through impenetrable reports on something I'm completely clueless about, like triple glazing
on microwave oven doors. Sometimes, though, they're sending emails, and that's when it gets really interesting. I shouldn't. I know I shouldn't. I'm a noseypoke. The other day, though, I couldn't have missed something on the bloke's laptop even if I'd wanted to. He was sending emails as the train rolled through the flatlands south of Retford and he had a template for them. What that meant, of course, was that he had his company logo at the
[ MAGPIE ]
"THE MAN IN THE NEWSAGENT WONDERED WHY I WAS BUYING ALL THE BARNSLEY TOWN HALL POSTCARDS HE'D GOT" [ 23 ]
top of each email, and his address and
me. I sent off for a magazine that claimed to lisr
then at the end (and I'm not making
hundreds of competitions and I entered them all.
this up and I wish I was) there was his
The magazine advised you to send bright and
name in big letters, and next to that, in colourful postcards because somehow they came even bigger letters the word WINNER.
out of the hat more quickly so I bought a load
His name wasn't John Smith but if it
of cards from Barnsley Town Hall and entered
was it would have said John Smith:
three or four pages worth of competitions. Then
WINNER. Poor old John Smith, in his
I sat back and waited. I've never really been a
suit and tie and with his laptop open
get-rich-quick chap but I figured this could be
in front of him, reminding everyone he
my time. I waited. If this was an ancient black
communicated with that he was
and white film rather than a colourful column
a WINNER. I'm going to stop
you'd see me sitting on my settee as around me
shouting now, by the way: it's giving
an old-fashioned daily calender shed dates like
me a HEADACHE.
a tree shedding leaves. I waited. Eventually after what seemed like months because it was in fact
I sat on the train and thought about
months there was a knock at the door. It was the
winning. Once, years ago, when I'd not
postman with a parcel. I'd won! Ian McMillan:
been freelance very long, I decided
WINNER. He handed me the fragile brown cube.
that I wanted to make my life even
I was so excited I dropped it.
more financially precarious. I was young and daft and anyway I've always
There was the tinkling sound of shattering glass.
thought that financial security was
I opened the sodden parcel. I'd won a bottle of
dull. I decided (to myself, I never
whiskey, a water jug and four glasses. The bottle
told anybody else about it) that I
and two of the glasses were broken. Still, I'd
would make my living by winning
got a jug and two glasses. And I smelled like a
competitions. I'd read an article
distillery. Ian McMillan: CHUMP. I wasn't put
somewhere about somebody who did
off. I entered more competitions. The man in the
just that, with cash from cash prizes
newsagent wondered why I was buying all the
and food from food prizes and house
Barnsley Town Hall postcards he'd got and I told
from house prizes and holidays from
him. He said he'd won a three day break in Paris
holiday prizes and I thought: that's for
and a lawnmower in the last few months. This spurred me on even more. I entered. I waited. Time passed. Then the postman knocked again. I took the parcel, much more carefully this time. No accidents, please! The parcel felt light and soft. I tried to recall which competitions I'd entered in the last few months. Could it be the Cuddly
[ MAGPIE ]
Duck? Could it be the Stenhousemuir Scarf? Surely it couldn't be some tickets for a round the world trip, exquisitely wrapped? The only way to find out, as my wife pointed out, was to open the parcel. I opened it. Soft and light: one hundred Superman Lunch Bags. Marvellous. Ian McMillan: WINNER. I didn't enter too many competitions after that.
[ 25 ]
I
N
T O X
I
C
E
D
A
S
I #
A T D O
E N [ MAGPIE ]
E
BUTTER IN PRITT STICK FORM Imagine you've cut all your nice paper shapes out and you're ready to stick them all down to whatever you are applying them to. You get out your glue, only this time it comes in slab form. As you take out your glue knife, readily spreading your pritt, it falls on your lap, on the surface and now everything is sticky. You think, "There must be a better way!". And low and behold, there is. It's known as pritt stick. What a genius idea meaning children and adults of all ages, size and mental ability have the freedom and ease of glue use. Yet why, in this modern day and age of the telephone, radiators and mobile broadband do we still continue to spread our nation's beloved creamy yellow spread this way? It seems to make so much more perfect sense to simply take out your butter stick (or what could be called 'Buttick') straight out of the fridge and rub it on your crispy toast. In addition, there are multiple purposes for a buttery stick—you can take it camping, to work with you for your fresh bread, you can even take it on your night's out so that twelve percent meat burger from the van needn't be dry as a bone.
Idea: Harrison Smith Writer: Carmen Dowling
[ 27 ]
WHAT WE'VE BEEN LISTEN ING TO WHILE TRYING
[ MAGPIE ]
Get your Spotify aaat!
Kanye West - Monster Warpaint - Undertow Ludovico Einaudi - Nuvole Bianche Erik Satie - Veritables Preludes Flasques Magnetic Man - The Bug Gatekeeper - Which Way Laura Marling - My Manic and I Talking Heads - This Must Be The Place Dead Prez - It's Bigger Than Hip Hop Salem - Asia Ray Charles - Hit The Road Jack Unkle - Follow Me Down Tracey Thorn - Protection Tori Amos - Winter Major Lazer - Jump Up These New Puritans - We Want War Nouvelle Vague - We Want War Peaches - Talk To Me David Byrne & Fat Boy Slim - Please Don't
TO GET IDEAS.
Veronica Falls - Found Love In A Graveyard Visage - Fade To Grey The Macabees - Walking In The Air D Double E - Streetfighter Crystal Castles - Baptism
[ 29 ]
PAU L AR DEN [ MAGPIE ]
Sixty years or so ago, for a bit of fun, God created a prototype man with a mind straight out of Edward Lear. Concerned by what he may have produced, however, he promptly destroyed the mould and threw it away. The result of his labours was Paul Arden. Brilliant, bad, charming, irascible and totally off the wall. An original with extraordinary drive and energy, blessed with a creative genius allied to a kind of common sense that just isn't, well, common. Roger Kennedy
Some wise words from the late, great man himself.
[ 31 ]
THE PERSON WHO DOESN'T MAKE MISTAKES IS UNLIKELY TO MAKE ANYTHING. Benjamin Franklin said "I haven't failed,
"There is nothing that is more certain sign of
I've had 10 000 ideas that didn't work." He
insanity than to do the same thing over and over
understood that failures and false starts are a
and expect the results to be different"
precondition of success. At the last company I worked for, you would not be fired for being
- Einstein
wrong, but you would be fired for not having any initiative. It had a positive attitude towards mistakes. Failure was a major contributor to it's success.
IT IS WRONG TO BE RIGHT. Being right is based on knowledge and
that if you've got the experience, you'll probably use it. This is lazy.
experience and is often provable. Knowledge
Experience is the opposite of being creative. Being right is being
comes from the past so it is safe. It is also out of
boring. Your mind is closed. You are not open to new ideas. You
date. It's the opposite of originality.
are rooted in your own rightness, which is arrogant. Arrogance is a valuable tool, but only if you use it sparingly. Worst of all, being right
Experience is built from solutions to old
has a tone of morality about it. To be anything else sounds weak or
situations and problems. The old situations are
fallible. So: it's wrong to be right because people who are right are
probably different to the present ones, so that old rooted in the past, rigid-minded, dull and smug. solutions will have to be bent to fit new problems (and probably fit badly). Also the likelihood is
There's no talking to them.
DON'T BE AFRAID OF SILLY IDEAS. We ALL get mental blocks.
If you are in deadlock here are a couple of tricks you might try.
We need to get unblocked. The way to get unblocked is to lose our
1. Do the opposite of what the solution requires.
inhibitions and stop worrying about being right.
2. Look out of the window and whatever catches your eye, a bird, a television aerial, an old man on crutches or whatever, make that the
The comedian John Cleese puts it rather more
solution to your problem.
eloquently. 'High creativity is responding to situations without critical thought' (playfulness).
[ MAGPIE ]
[ 33 ]
THE MIND OF MARCY KENTZ
[ MAGPIE ]
[ 35 ]
Marcy Kentz says her sophomore and junior years of high school were rocky. She got kicked out of school and ended up in an alternative program. Realising that her education had come to a halt, she managed to re-enter the first school, despite her discomfort there. Through it all, she retreated to her journal, "I drew and wrote horrible things, like a broken up skull with the words. 'I have planted a karmic virus in my soul and it's destined to go off.'" Now attending an art college in California, she laughs at her theatricality. "My journal was a complete savior for me, because otherwise I'd have been breaking down and crying. But instead, I just opened it up." The daughter of two artists, Kentz has kept journals since she was eleven, first traditional diaries then sketchbooks. An art teacher's collage-style journals gave her 'permission' to marry the two forms. "The new style has made my journals more personal," she observes. "Now, everything means something to me." Combining collage with her meditative writing and personal musing has also turned her into a hoarder, storing bus tickets, movie stubs, snapshots of friends, and receipts in the back pocket of her Moleskin journal. She works the detritus into pages during marathon journal sessions that sometimes do not end until twilight. Themes reappear in Kentz's work: the compulsions of a young woman trying to make sense of her world. She collects images of clocks and any kind of paper with a digital read-out on it as a way to account for her life. "All of
[ MAGPIE ]
it is evidence of what I've done that day," she comments, echoing the sensibility of Marin Wilner's Journal of Evidence Weekly. Numbers in general attract Kentz because "they are so odd. We made them up and yet we've given them all this meaning." She also uses a lot of arrows, because her life feels directionless right now. Kentz loves the way the journals clearly delineate moments in her life, and she takes almost as much pleasure in reviewing the finished pages as she does making new ones. Omnipresent now, she says of them, "They live life with me."
[ 37 ]
[ MAGPIE ]
HERE'S AN IDEA Ideas on how to get ideas
SITTING ON THE TOILET
It holds many names. The loo, the bog, the throne, the john, WC, dunny, shitter, slash house, fortress of solitude - okay maybe that's going a bit too far. It's a place not many people like to talk about, a slight taboo you might say, yet we all poo so why is it such a secret. I poo proud. Do you know why? Because when I'm sitting all alone in that little room, be it morning, noon or evening I'm thinking. You could compare it to meditation, as it's one of the only places today one can be alone to relax, think and contemplate life with no outside disturbances or distractions. There's something very natural about your thought process when you're sitting there on the cold white porcelain seat which means you don't feel forced to think. I'm not sat there thinking "SHIT! I NEED AN IDEA" (excuse the pun) the same way I am when I sit at my desk panicking away. It's where I think of some of my best ideas in fact.
Let us know where you get your ideas: thoughts@magpiemagazine.com
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