Dongseo University professor directing a film needs a foreign actress

The (Korean) professor is making a film about five foreign teachers living their lives in Korea. I don't know much more about the project but the professor is at my university, so that's neat.
From the Koreabridge ad.

We are looking for a foregin actress who can act for our

feature length film project aimed for international film fests.

It is omnybus styled narrative along with five english teachers

with different background living their lives in S. Korea.

30,000 won will be paid at the end of production and will get

certain amount of share if any profit was made during distribution.

Here is director's website : www.seoholee.com

Director is currently a professor teaching film in Dongseo University in Busan.

TWIC (Mid May Edition)

From the Hanoi grapevine:

M Literary Residency 2015-2016 in Shanghai/Bangalore: call for applications
Deadline of applications: 20 Jun 2014
Residency duration: from late 2015 to early 2016 (10-12 weeks)
From the open call:The M Literary Residency Programme, fully funded by M Restaurants, grew from our Literary Festivals, as we heard from writers about what was needed to nurture and produce the best writing in this region.
Applicants may apply for ONE of two M Literary Residencies:Bangalore, India: A 10-12 week residency at Sangam House, in a rural setting near Bangalore, South India from late 2015 to early 2016. (Please note: Residency dates are set by Sangam House.)
Shanghai, China: 10-12 week residency in Shanghai. The residency must be taken up before March 1st, 2016, and be completed in one continuous period.
EligibilityThe residencies are open to all writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic prose. There are no nationality restrictions, however, applicants should be over 21 years old at the time of application and be writing in English. Unpublished authors and past applicants are also eligible.
FundingThe successful applicants will have transportation costs to and from the residencies covered by the M Residency and a total stipend of US$1,000 to cover additional living costs during their stay. Applicants are responsible for their travel/medical insurance and visas.

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I just finished an online class titled "Creativity: Music to my ears" - You can guess why I signed up.  The main project was to choose a problem and think of a hundred (or more) ways to solve.  My group looked at using music to encourage people to read.  Completely independent of our work comes this news from Scientific American. Most of the article is gated; Here is an excerpt:

 Today a symphony of research trumpets the many links among language, reading and music, including several that reveal a connection between rhythm and reading skills.

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12 principles of animation:

As action starts, we have more drawings near the starting pose, one or two in the middle, and more drawings near the next pose. Fewer drawings make the action faster and more drawings make the action slower. Slow-ins and slow-outs soften the action, making it more life-like. For a gag action, we may omit some slow-out or slow-ins for shock appeal or the surprise element. This will give more snap to the scene.

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Inequality and the arts

There’s a reason why a lot of modern culture was produced by people living on a shoestring, from the New York intellectuals to all those poets and painters starving in their fabled garrets. It’s time-consuming to do something original; it requires bad manners, or at least a lack of automatic deference for received wisdom; and it helps to have an abundance of low-paid but undemanding jobs around–mailman, night watchman, librarian, clerical worker–that one can drift in and out of, as well as a few cheap urban neighborhoods where like-minded artistic riff-raff can congregate. (Russell Jacoby’s description, in The Last Intellectuals, of the ecology of the freelance intellectual has never been bettered.)

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Science Fiction from South East Asia - including Korea which I didn't consider all that southerly.
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The RIAA isn't doing much to help artists even as it squeezes companies, apparently to collect royalties for them.
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A writer on writing. An acquaintance, Gord Sellar, doesn't really care for the device of making the main character of a story a writer.  I guess he thinks it is a kind of a cheat.  I do recall several books by Stephen King that featured writers.  Still, he (back to Mr Sellar) likes this bit by Paul Auster:

There were other decisions to be made, of course, a host of significant details that still had to be conjured up  and worked into the scene–for purposes of fullness and authenticity, for narrative ballast. How long has Rosa been living in New York? for example. What does she do there? Does she have a job and, if so, is the job important to her or simply a means of generating enough money to cover the rent? What about the status of her love life? Is she single or married, attached or unattached, on the prowl or patiently waiting for the right person to come along? My first impulse was to make her a photographer, or perhaps an assistant film editor–work that was connected to images, not words, just as Grace’s job was. Definitely unmarried, definitely never married, but perhaps involved with someone, or, even better, perhaps recently broken up after a long, tortured affair.

Giving characters a backstory that might not appear necessary appears to be an important part of writing believeable characters.
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Storium - turning writing into a multiplayer game:

With just your computer, tablet, or smartphone, you can choose from a library of imaginary worlds to play in, or build your own. You create your story's characters and decide what happens to them. You can tell any kind of story with Storium. The only limit is your imagination.
Storium uses familiar game concepts inspired by card games, role-playing games, video games, and more. In each Storium game, one player is the narrator, and everyone else takes on the role of a character in the story. The narrator creates dramatic challenges for the other players to overcome. In doing so, they move the story forward in a new direction. Everyone gets their turn at telling the story."
Storium offers worlds to play in created by authors, transmedia writers, and game designers, and one of the perks of supporting the Kickstarter campaign is instant access to the already-running beta.

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Advice from on beating writer's block Ask TON, One excerpt:

Rose Eveleth, freelance writer and producer and BBC Future columnist:I have a tiered strategy for dealing with writer’s block. The first tier is prevention (is it cheating to include that?) which means that before I write, I make sure that I’m ready to write. That sounds obvious, but I’ve found that the easiest way for me to get stuck on something is for me to not be fully mentally prepared to put words to page (er, screen, or whatever). I put on my writing music (usually this Songza playlist) close all my social media distractions, and set a goal for myself. Sometimes that’s “write an outline of this story” or maybe it’s “just vomit everything out so we can fix it later,” but whatever it is, I find that having a goal that’s more specific than just “write” is really helpful to make sure that I actually do write something.

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What is good writing?  Quora took a shot at answering the question.
Anne Zahra tells us, "Good writing is writing that makes you forget you are reading.

If you can make me forget that I'm sitting in my rocking chair and tracing your train of thought across a page or a screen, it's because you know what you're doing."I gotta agree.Many e-books are poorly edited and tripping over a misspelled word knocks me back into my seat and out of the story.

Dinesh Dharme offers a list of 9 points.  Here is part of four:

3. Good writing is like good teaching. Good writing strives to explain, to make things a little bit clearer, to make sense of our world… even if it’s just a product description.“A writer always tries… to be part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on,” says Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird.
4. Good writing tells a full story.  Good writing roots out opposing viewpoints. AsJoe Chernov says, “There’s a name for something with a single point of view: It’s called a press release.” Incorporate multiple perspectives when the issue lends itself to that. At the very least, don’t ignore the fact that other points of view might exist; to do so makes your reader not trust you.So make sure he or she knows you’re watching out for them. To quoteHemingway: “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.”
5. Good writing comes on the rewrite. That implies that there is a rewrite, of course. And there should be.Writing is hard work, and producing a shitty first draft is often depressing. But the important thing is to get something down to start chipping into something that resembles a coherent narrative.As Don Murray said, “The draft needs fixing, but first it needs writing.” Or Mark Twain: “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”
6. Good writing is like math. I mean this in two ways: First, good writing has logic and structure. It feels solid to the reader: The writer is in control and has taken on the heavy burden of shaping a lumpy jumble of thoughts into something clear and accessible.It might not follow a formula, exactly. But there’s a kind of architecture to it. Good writing has more logic to it than you might think.Second, good writing is inherently teachable—just as trigonometry or algebra or balancing a balance sheet is a skill any of us can master. Journalism professorMatt Waite writes in his essay, How I Faced My Fears and Learned to Be Good at Math: “The difference between good at math and bad at math is hard work. It’s trying. It’s trying hard. It’s trying harder than you’ve ever tried before. That’s it.”

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Not entirely on topic, but I liked this breakdown of Jesus' abilities as a charismatic leader.

(3) Jesus always does something unexpected

On a Sabbath Jesus was teaching in a synagogue, and a women was there who was crippled for 18 years, bent over and unable to straighten up. Jesus called her forward and said to her, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.” Then he put his hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and praised God.Indignant that Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, the synagogue leader said to the people, “There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not of the Sabbath.”  Jesus answered him, “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham... be set free on the Sabbath from what bound her?” When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted.  (Luke 13: 10-17.  Similar conflicts about healing on the Sabbath are in Luke 6: 6-11; Matthew 12: 1-14; and Luke 14: 1-6, which ends by silencing the opposition.)

TWIC 5 (more meat, slightly fewer links)

At Linkedin, Rita King discusses the legacy of Hedy Lamarr, the most beautiful woman of her time, and also a remarkable inventor.  King lists five things Lamarr can teach us about innovation.  I like them all but feel I shouldn't copy the lot.  Here are the first two:

1) Take risks. Hedy fled her country and husband in 1937. “It was his game to keep me prisoner,” she said, "It had been my game to escape. He lost.” On the trip to the United States she landed a Hollywood contract. She also gave herself a new name, Lamarr, after the sea, La Mar.
2) Collaborate. Five years after her film debut, at a dinner party in Hollywood, she met an avant-garde composer and shared her idea to protect US radio-guided torpedoes from enemy interference. She left her number in red lipstick on his windshield so the discussion could continue. The pair patented the invention and presented it to the United States Government for a “Secret Communications System” to help defeat Hitler. 

Via Veronica at Canadian Atheist.

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I have just finished Ted Kerasote's Merle's Door.  In addition to being one of the best 'life of my pet dog' stories I have ever read (and it really is, and much more), the reader gets a few peeks at Kerasote's writing process.  At the start of the book, he lives in a cottage and has an office in a trailer several hundred meters away.  He 'goes to work' every day and puts in solid hours.  Later, after he built his own home, the commute was not so long, but he appears equally dedicated and disciplined.  Indeed, he shows great physical fitness discipline as well.  to compare Kerasote and myself, we both enjoy wilderness activities, but while I enjoy a few hours a day, one or two days a week, he puts in solid outdoor workouts every day.  I like camping in good weather and he likes camping in all weathers.

I dream of being a writer and he does the hard work of actually writing.  I am impressed.

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I have just finished teaching at a two week ESL camp for middle school students.  it was very tiring but also satisfying.  At the camp I met a fellow teacher who also sculpts bronze.

Jason Mehl is an interesting man, even aside from his art.  He is supremely flexible, putting his foot behind his head while standing on the other foot.  I have not seen him practice rock climbing but he sounded sure, competent and competitive when discussing the subject.

I am still quite an outsider in most art forms and this description of his work first left me mystified:

My sculptures describe an oppositional relationship between man and the world as a force that is somewhere between an offensive and defensive action. Space and material are used to show tension and change using the language of erosion, decay,and growth processes.

He later describes what this means in some detail and I somewhat better understood what he was talking about.  As I say, I accept what Mehl wrote here and feel I 'get it' to some extent, but these convoluted phrases seem common in abstract art.  Is there a school that teaches 'artybabble'?  Is it really possible to read the above and understand it immediately?  Is it really possible that abstract sculptors really think these things before going to work?  I am not describing only Mehl, who I consider a friend, but such artists in general.  If it were me, and I had made a flowing sculpture with cool protuberances and varying from matte to gleaming, would I feel compelled to create a such a written description afterwards?

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Master your Domain. Also at Linkedin, is a description of how two masters of their craft work.  The two masters are Comedian Jerry Seinfeld and Sushi chef Jiro Ono.

Hmmm.  Another list of five.  This time of practices shared between the two.  Here are the first two:

1. Never stop practicing (there is no perfect)Jiro has been preparing sushi for over 70 years; Seinfeld has been a stand-up comic for over 35 years. Both are widely considered to be among the best in the world at what they do, and yet listening to them, one comes away with the impression they will never be satisfied. They are constantly practicing, honing their work, and seeking to improve.
As Jiro describes it: "All I want to do is make better sushi. I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit. There is always a yearning to achieve more. I'll continue to climb to reach the top but no one knows where the top is."
Seinfeld explains:
“If I don’t do a set in two weeks, I feel it,” he said. “I read an article a few years ago that said when you practice a sport a lot, you literally become a broadband: the nerve pathway in your brain contains a lot more information. As soon as you stop practicing, the pathway begins shrinking back down. Reading that changed my life. I used to wonder, Why am I doing these sets, getting on a stage? Don’t I know how to do this already? The answer is no. You must keep doing it. The broadband starts to narrow the moment you stop.”2. Sweat the detailsThere is no detail too small. Jiro serves sushi differently to left-handed and right-handed patrons, and once required an apprentice to make egg sushi 200 times before it was deemed acceptable. Seinfeld relentlessly iterates how to word a punchline. As the profile on Seinfeld describes it:
"Seinfeld will nurse a single joke for years, amending, abridging and reworking it incrementally, to get the thing just so. “It’s similar to calligraphy or samurai,” he says. “I want to make cricket cages. You know those Japanese cricket cages? Tiny, with the doors? That’s it for me: solitude and precision, refining a tiny thing for the sake of it.”In this regard, their approaches are highly reminiscent of Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive at Apple, where obsessing over the smallest detail is not just part of their design ethos, it's core to the company's DNA.

Here is my problem with the latter Seinfeld example.  First off, I loved the sitcom, I bought one of his books and when I see an article about him, I typically read it.  I am by no means a hater.

However, while the following sounds admirable in theory, ""Seinfeld will nurse a single joke for years, amending, abridging and reworking it incrementally, to get the thing just so.", in practice, it means he repeats he repeats what sounds like old material a lot.

Quoting Patrick Graham's review of Seinlanguage:

After watching the show and listening to his standup act, reading SeinLanguage was a bit redundant. The reader will not find very much new material in this book. Most of the jokes come from his standup act, which inspired scenarios in the TV show.
The jokes are funny and I always laugh, but I picked up this book hoping for an insight into Jerry Seinfeld's life. All I found was a series of jokes about different topics, most of which I had already heard.

Perhaps the jokes were incrementally better, and played better with new audiences, but I suspect he didn't have many new audiences after Seinfeld took off.

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I note a theme through two of my three subjects today.  Mehl, Jiro and Seinfeld are working for approval among the cognoscenti, not the neophytes of their art-form.  I did not discuss Jiro's art previously, so let me take a minute here as an overall example.  Having lived in Korea for more than a decade, I know a little of eating sushi and sashimi.  I have also watched my more experienced father-in-law eat fresh water sashimi with pleasure.  For me, even after several meals a year, what I most note is the soy and wasabi dip.  The fish flesh remains a blank canvas to me.

This story is hers

I am really digging Nina Paley's This Land is Mine.  Paley is a(n) unknown cartoonist who became known, to me, anyway, for her Sita Sings the Blues animation.  This new one, the final scene to a maybe, maybe film titled Seder masochism is hilarious and horrific at once and fits my distrust of religion to a T (whatever that means).



This Land Is Mine from Nina Paley on Vimeo.

Paley has earned a spot on my creative people list in the sidebar!

Shakespeare in Busan

Much Ado about Nothing"will be staged on June 2, 3, 9 and 10 at 3 p.m. at Dalmaji Amphitheater. The venue is east of Haeundae Beach in Dalmaji Park, opposite Alexander restaurant."


The Facebook group for the production is here.

Korea already is creative

Ask A Korean is normally engaged in, well, answering questions about Korea, but also business and industry.  Just about every time I have visited the blog, I have enjoyed it and learned something, but I haven't felt interested in visiting it often.

In a post from 4 months ago, AAK discusses whether Korean can become a nation known for creativity.  He argues that it is already a place where creative solutions are thick on the ground, but that ground is inside various factories and assembly lines so it is not as obvious as Apple's iPod.

He goes further, using the iPod as an example, and offers the USA itself as the engine for the iPod's success.

There is no question that iPod was a creative, innovative product. Its design was attractive and its user interface easy and intuitive. So, if you are old enough to remember, suppose you are back in 2001. Also suppose that the first iPod equivalent -- known as yPod -- was made by a company called Mela, based in Italy, instead of Apple based in Cupertino, California (which, in this alternate universe, would continue to only make computers.) Mela's yPod is identical to Apple's iPod -- it is small, sleek, modern and easy to use. Mela also has yTunes store, through which all of the latest Italian music will be available to be purchased and downloaded directly into yPod, just like the iTunes store in real life.
Would yPod be nearly as successful as Apple's iPod? Not a chance. But why not? Everything about yPod is the same as iPod. It took exactly the same amount of creativity to produce yPod/yTunes as to produce iPod/iTunes. Then what is the difference? The difference is plain -- far fewer people of the world care about Italian music compared to American one. The ability to conveniently download music -- iPod's greatest strength -- means significantly less if the music is not American. 

He also looks at Facebook and cyworld:

Take Facebook, for example. Facebook is definitely an innovative product. But five years before Facebook, Korea had Cyworld -- a social networking service before anyone in the English-speaking world has even heard of the term "Social Networking Services." And Cyworld became extremely popular in Korea, just like the way Facebook is now. At its peak, Cyworld had more than 17 million members, an incredible figure given that the population of Korea is around 48 million. But although Cyworld attempted to expand beyond Korea, it failed to make a global impression for one simple reason: it was optimized for Korean sensibilities and environment. Cyworld's design was too "cute," and it had many design elements that were compatible with Korea's blazing fast Internet but clunky with slower Internet elsewhere in the world. Now, Facebook may have overtaken Cyworld as the leading social networking site in Korea, and that is not because Facebook is functionally so much better than Cyworld.

The post, and a lot of the blog, is an interesting read and a different viewpoint from own.  Good stuff.