Inspiration

Kraftwerk! Still rocking the Tron suits. Good motivation to stay fit. Ralf Hütter and my mom are the same age. I started imagining Mom up there and that pleased me. 

Inspiration

“In the early 10th century, China was torn apart by endless civil war. Yet it was out of this anarchy and chaos that the Chinese tradition of landscape painting first blossomed as the great subject of art…

“Dominating the scroll are mountains, symbols of the Song dynasty. The biggest, most imposing peak is the Emperor, the lesser peaks are his ministers. Li Cheng’s message is that this is the protecting force beneath which China can recover its harmony and rebuild its civilization… And the bottom half of the scroll is crowded, not just with people…. This is our world, this is the place we inhabit. 

“This is more than mere propaganda. Li Cheng asks profound questions, which go to the heart of our relationship with the world around us. As our eye ascends through the painting, so our whole approach to it also ascends to a higher order of question. Right in the visual centre is the temple itself, and the temple is almost more important than the whole mountain. It is the place of equipoise, the place of peace.” 

— Simon Schama, Civilizations (2018) Episode 4: Picturing Paradise

Inspiration

“She lived alone on an isolated mesa in New Mexico with no running water or mains electricity… It’s been said that neighbours who popped round offering cake and cookies were welcomed with the business end of her gun.”

Will Gompertz on Agnes Martin, BBC

Inspiration

“Almost all the world’s alphabets share the same root—scripts like Hebrew, Armenian, Cyrillic, Tibetan, Devanagari, Gujarati… All the alphabets of Arabia, the Mediterranean, the Middle East go back to one original prototype. It seems that the alphabet, that idea, as simple as it is, was only invented once.”

The Secret History of Writing, BBC4

Inspiration

The weather reporter said, “Enjoy tomorrow while it’s still here."

Inspiration

“Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, cosmic emotion, are all unifying states of mind, in which the sand and grit of the selfhood incline to disappear, and tenderness to rule.” The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) by William James

Inspiration

The table lamp in my childhood bedroom saved my mind. It was shaped like a vase and painted with a traditional Chinese landscape featuring tiny, contemplative people amidst massive mountains. When I was a stressed out teenager, I would stare at that lamp and it always knocked me out of my myopic thinking and put my worries in perspective. It still works.

Inspiration

Legend goes when missionaries told Chinese non-believers they were going to hell, they thought hell = the afterlife. They gladly added “hell” to their traditional ghost money, symbolic money burned to send prosperity to ancestors. So that’s how it came to be called hell money, and now I get to recognize my elders and the dark side at once.

Inspiration

Inspiration

Aggressive pruning called pollarding creates streets lined with gnarled fists and statement hair.

Inspiration

A family wails into a vulgar pile as cameras flash. From The Host by Bong Joon-ho.

Inspiration

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

Arthur C Clarke

Inspiration

“Courage is the solution to despair. Reason provides no answers. I can’t know what the future will bring. We have to choose despite uncertainty. Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our mind, simultaneously, hope and despair… Holding these two ideas in our head is life itself.”

First Reformed by Paul Schrader

Inspiration

“The greatest question of our time is whether men can bear to live without God…. I cannot believe, in the face of biology, in the eternity of the individual self; nor, in the face of history, can I believe in a personal anthropomorphic God. But unlike the tougher minds of my time I miss these encouragements, and cannot quite forget the poetry with which they surrounded my youth… What immortality means to me now is that we are all parts of a whole… the whole is made forever different by what we have done and been… Perhaps the greatest Whole, to which in all generations the greatest souls have devoted themselves, will, in tomorrow’s religion, be called God.”Will Durant, 1932

Inspiration

“Every man is a mob, a chain gain of idiots. This is the tragedy of life. Because for a few minutes of every day, every man becomes a genius… But then the genius has to hand over the controls to the next guy down the pike, most likely the guy who just wants to eat potato chips… The only way out of this mess, of course, is to take steps to ensure that you control the idiots that you become… The best way to do this is with a list.”

Memento Mori by Jonathan Nolan

Inspiration

“In the thirteen years since Zema came to America, she has never had any idea that having no idea who she is and having no idea where she belongs makes her more American than anyone.”Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson

Inspiration

“Strangely, the memory of eating eggs on Chinese New Year was one that my mother later told to me as well, except in this version, it was she who had grown up in the countryside—even though she had actually grown up in Fuzhou city proper. It was as if she had absorbed her husband’s memories as her own. Or maybe she was trying to speak for him, to keep his memories in circulation.”— Severance by Ling Ma

Inspiration

“He said we do this all the time, all of us, we become ourselves beneath the running thoughts and dim images, wondering idly when we’ll die. This is how we live and think whether we know it or not. These are the unsorted thoughts we have looking out the train window, small dull smears of meditative panic.”Point Omega by Don DeLillo

Inspiration

“Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.”

Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky

Inspiration

“But this confusion is me as I am, not as I’d like to be. I’m no longer afraid of telling the truth about what I don’t know, what I’m looking for, what I haven’t found. Only this way do I feel alive.”8 1/2 by Federico Fellini

Inspiration

On a temple floating in the middle of a lake, an old monk writes sutras on the wooden deck with a cat’s tail dipped in ink. A student is instructed to methodically carve these characters with the same knife he once used in destructive ways. From the film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring directed by Kim Ki-duk.

Inspiration

Around 6000 B.C. someone in Knossos made this guy from a little piece of rock. Happy 8,017th New Year to him.

Inspiration

“A tear of petrol is in your eye. The hand brake penetrates your thigh. Quick – let’s make love before you die.”

The Normal

Inspiration

“In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Inspiration

“To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.” The History of Western Philosophy (1946) by Bertrand Russell