Bizarre fact of the day: Typing is like playing the piano, the more you do it, the better you get. And as with most pianists, it does help to keep your nails short. At least, it helps me. I like having long nails, but when it gets to crunch time and I need to type a mile a minute, long nails slide and scrape and increase my typos. Short nails stick. Or at the very least, they don’t interfere.
Anyway, the work continues. On to my random selection of links and interviews:
This, with Chinese film director, Zhang Yimou:
What�s different about Chinese martial arts film and other similar genres in other cultures, for instance the samurai in Japan or the cowboys in the West, both of those are based on actual historical figures that existed. But in China, this is really a genre of the imagination. There really weren�t people like this, at least not flying through the trees in the way that they are imagined in a lot of these movies. It�s something that�s rooted in the imagination and dreams and fantasy and that was really the world that I was trying to project into and not based on the existing body of martial arts films.
And the thing that you had to do was to learn to listen, to be a story teller, which I am as a writer, but to be much more deeply a story finder. And that is a very, as you know well, a very different set of skills, but also a very different kind of mindset. It�s not about coming in and showing off. Hey, I�m Mr. Smarty Pants.
and then, later, from someone else in the interview:
As a sort of creator, I guess, creator is a big word for a writer, but it�s far more exhilarating to do fiction because this stuff just comes � you know, leaves from the flat page and they become human beings, and once you�ve created these people, they�re your sons and daughters and you put them into motion and you put in conflict and you can play with your themes.
You can do things, you can sort of masquerade different thoughts and ideas. But you can�t really do a non-fiction, and I found that to be really exhilarating.
Interview with Gogol Bordello:
Well, I think the optimistic part I simply get from my family. The whole gypsy bloodline is very much cultivated with survival skills for hundreds of years, already. So, in a lot of ways, being influenced by that culture is what set me off to think in unusual, philosophical ways about modern times. It�s very interesting but, for example, in gypsy language in Ukraine the word for “today,” “yesterday” and “tomorrow” are the same word. The immediacy is what guides and is the guiding force. That�s not to say it�s a mindless, “live now” [type of thing].
And posting this is probably cruel, but what the heck…