“Be like a mother sea turtle.” By that he means lay a hundred conceptual eggs in the sand, then swim off and don’t fret over what becomes of them. Most of them will never hatch; most of the hatchlings will get eaten by predators. That’s not your problem. Your task is just to keep laying eggs.
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New Yorker Cartoonist Matthew Diffee: How To Be Creative
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Marvel Comics’ Troubling Origins Story
What makes this situation especially hard to stomach is that Marvel’s media empire was built on the backs of characters whose defining trait as superheroes is the willingness to fight for what is right. It takes a lot of corporate moxie to put Thor and Captain America on the big screen and have them battle for honor and justice when behind the scenes the parent company acts like a cold-blooded supervillain. As Stan Lee famously wrote, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
If Mitt Romney is right, and corporations are people, perhaps Marvel/Disney has the capacity to feel shame.
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Detroit evolving into a haven for artists
Cheap rents and an urban pioneering spirit are attracting young artists, and new restaurants, nightspots and even urban farms are serving this growing community and its hipster fans. It’s still the early days, but change is palpable, even to the casual visitor.
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Saul Bass: A Life of Film & Design
The definitive hardcover of one of the greatest American graphic design legends of the 20th century Saul Bass is now available. This is perfect for film and/or design fanatics. More than 1,400 illustrations covering his film, corporate identity and graphic work. Designed by Bass’s daugher Jennifer Bass, the book is quite unbelievably the first major American retrospective of Bass’s work.
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Eye Of The Beholder
Art, like fashion, bubbles up from street level. It happens when someone takes what we all see and places it in a different context, rearranging what already is, framing the view, spinning it into a narrative for publication, or interpreting it as a drama or dance fit for the stage. 8 exhibits in Detroit that are found in unexpected places.
How Hard Is It To Get a Cartoon Into The New Yorker?
According to Matthew Diffee’s book of unpublished New Yorker cartoons, The Rejection Collection, there are about 50 regular New Yorker cartoonists who submit 10 cartoons each week. That’s 500 cartoons vying for about 12 to 20 slots. That’s not counting submissions from cartoonists whose work appears in the magazine irregularly or the thousand or so weekly unsolicited submissions (which stand almost no chance of getting in).
Detroit Pushes Back With Young Muscles
These days the word “movement” is often heard to describe the influx of socially aware hipsters and artists now roaming the streets of Detroit. Not unlike Berlin, which was revitalized in the 1990s by young artists migrating there for the cheap studio space, Detroit may have this new generation of what city leaders are calling “creatives” to thank if it comes through its transition from a one-industry.
With these new residents have come the trappings of a thriving youth culture: trendy bars and restaurants that have brought pedestrians back to once-empty streets. Places like the Grand Trunk pub, Raw Cafe, Le Petit Zinc and Avalon Bakery mingle with shops with names like City Bird, Sole Sisters and the Bureau of Urban Living.
Cool factor lures the young, artsy to Detroit
“My friends in New York, L.A., Europe all think Detroit is really cool, and, thankfully, so do more and more people here. The energy seems great right now,” said Angela Topacio, an artist and managing partner of Gyro Creative Group downtown. The Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau has been targeting the young for four years now. “The 21- to 34-year-old demographic is the best target audience for Detroit,” said Larry Alexander, CEO of the convention bureau. The brand identity resulted from surveys of more than 1,300 visitors and focus groups in five cities that identified Detroit as “the American city where cool comes from,” Alexander said. They are open-minded and adventurous opinion-setters. This age group is considered to be the best type of visitor for whom Detroit can be positioned as a new destination, ripe for discovery.
