Chad Taylor

Mystery Machine

Tres fatigue, bad news all round and all that. A random dip into articles I bookmarked this week:

This just in from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm:
New research shows a possible explanation for the link between mental health and creativity. By studying receptors in the brain, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have managed to show that the dopamine system in healthy, highly creative people is similar in some respects to that seen in people with schizophrenia.
Any author could have told you.

The painting that used to hang in Michael Crichton's bedroom sold for US$29million. It's a Jasper Johns; what I like about this story is that a writer got to own it. Here's Crichton talking to Janet Berliner:
Starting around the early Eighties, I began to realize that people’s perceptions of me were very different from how I perceived myself. There was this sense that I was a kind of stainless steel, high-tech person, who would be really interested in lecturing on the subject of robots, or something. I found myself saying to people that I didn’t have those interests, and that caused a lot of surprise. I began to feel that what had happened, because I had so much early attention for books like The Andromeda Strain – which I really feel were misunderstood, though they were very popular–perceptions of me were of some twenty-six-year-old techie whiz kid. Meanwhile, the experiences of my life had gone in another direction, had been going in that direction for many, many years.
It's a good interview about writing, public- and self-perception.

As a teen I very much admired the blurry work of photographer Anton Corbijn. He's since graduated (or regressed) to the moving image: his interesting blog for his new project The American is here:
Wish it was raining, makes it so much easier to go into the darkness of the edit suite. I'm going to look at the ending of the film and make sure it is understood by more people. No way i'm going to let you in on the actual ending so you will have to wait and see. Or wait longer and go and see the sequel, in 3D of course.
I killed my Twitter account yonks ago but the positive, funny tweets of director David Lynch make me happy.
NY Magazine has a feature on dining with Bill Murray:
If you are a lady, he will stand up when you take your seat and remain standing until you pull your chair in. He will do this for every female at his table. You soon will start making an effort to sit down and stand up faster.
A recent survey of British consumers found that:
Two-thirds want hard copies of photographs and music, 75 per cent want their films to come with packaging, and 90 per cent want their books to stay as books... And it's not just the oldies. Almost 40 per cent of 16-34 age groups still buy CDs and DVDs alongside digital formats.
Scooby Doo (above) was created by Hanna Barbera artist Iwao Takamoto. During World War II the American-born Takamoto was interned in the Manzanar camp in California. After 1945 he went on to work for Disney; at Hanna Barbera he created Scooby, Muttley, Astro and Penelope Pitstop. There's a lesson in there somewhere. A detailed interview with the funny man is here.

World: turning. Things not so good.