We all know that a good person can be a bad artist.
But no one will ever be a genuine artist
unless a great human being and thus also a good one.
Marc Chagall

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.
Imagination embraces the entire world,
and everything there will be to know and understand.
Imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.
Albert Einstein

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter
and those who matter don't mind.
I ♥! Dr. Seuss

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Eleanor Roosevelt


Role Model to Superheroes: Meerabai (Rajasthani: मीराबाई, Meera; Mira; Meera Bai)

Meerabai (Rajasthani: मीराबाई) (c.1498-c.1547AD) (Meera; Mira; Meera Bai) was a Hindu mystical singer and one of the most significant figures of the Sant tradition of the Vaishnava bhakti movement. Some 12-1300 prayerful songs or bhajans attributed to her are popular throughout India.
 
Meera’s devotion to Krishna led her to ecstatic dance in the streets of the city. Her brother-in-law, the new ruler of Chittorgarh, objected to Meera’s fame, her mixing with commoners, and supposed impropriety. There were several attempts to poison her.
 
She considered herself to be a reborn gopi, Lalita, mad with love for Krishna. Folklore informs us of a particular incident where she expressed her desire to engage in a discussion about spiritual matters with Rupa Goswami, a disciple of Chaitanya and one of the foremost saint of Vrindavan that time who, being a renunciate celibate, refused to meet a woman. Meera replied that the only true man (purusha) in this universe is lord Krishna. She continued her pilgrimage, “dancing from one village to another village, almost covering the whole north of India”. One story has her appearing in the company of Kabir in Kashi, once again causing affront to social mores. She spent her last years as a pilgrim in Dwarka, Gujarat.
 
 
The plums tasted
sweet to the unlettered desert-tribe girl-
but what manners! To chew into each!
She was ungainly, low-caste, ill mannered and dirty,
but the god took the fruit she’d been sucking.
Why? She knew how to love.
She might not distinquish
splendor from filth
but she’d tasted the nectar of passion.
Might not know any Veda,
but a chariot swept her away-
now she frolics in heaven, esctatically bound
to her god.
The Lord of Fallen Fools, says Mira,
will save anyone who can practice rapture like that-
I myself in a previous birth
was a cowherding girl
at Gokul.
 

We do not get a human life Just for the asking. 
Birth in a human body Is the reward for good deeds 
In former births. Life waxes and wanes imperceptibly, 
It does not stay long. The leaf that has once fallen 
Does not return to the branch. 
Behold the Ocean of Transmigration. 
With its swift, irresistible tide. 
O Lal Giridhara, O pilot of my soul, 
Swiftly conduct my barque to the further shore. 
Mira is the slave of Lal Giridhara. 
She says: Life lasts but a few days only.
 
 
Mine is Gopal, the Mountain-Holder; there is no one else. 
On his head he wears the peacock-crown: He alone is my husband. 
Father, mother, brother, relative: I have none to call my own. 
I’ve forsaken both God, and the family’s honor: 
what should I do? I’ve sat near the holy ones,
and I’ve lost shame before the people. 
I’ve torn my scarf into shreds; I’m all wrapped up in a blanket. 
I took off my finery of pearls and coral, 
and strung a garland of wildwood flowers. 
With my tears, I watered the creeper of love that I planted; 
Now the creeper has grown spread all over, 
and borne the fruit of bliss. The churner of the milk churned with great love. 
When I took out the butter, no need to drink any buttermilk. 
I came for the sake of love-devotion; seeing the world, I wept. 
Mira is the maidservant of the Mountain-Holder: 
Now with love He takes me across to the further shore.

There are 2 Eric Machmers in this Universe, watch out!

Just messing around here…much of this blog should be prefaced with the sentiment in this quote from Dostoyevsky: “Sarcasm is the last refuge of modest & chaste souled people when the privacy of their Soul is coarsely & intrusively invaded.”
Somehow there is another Eric Machmer in existence. Fortunately he’s cool.
His girlfriend is cool too (…of course).
________________________
Ok, this is self-involved, but, after explaining how to pronounce Machmer [the same “ach” construction used in “Bach”] for my entire life I still cannot believe someone has my exact same name, and refuse to ask if he pronounces Machmer, “Mack-mer.” Please.

Wikipedia Article on "Mars to Stay" one-way Mars mission plans and a new Twitter hashtag: #UpUrsCowards! >: P

 

An article on “Mars to Stay” one-way Mars missions for pioneering settlers has been published live on Wikipedia. Of course you are welcome to edit and improve the post, please do so here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_to_Stay

Advancing one-way mission architectures as possible, pragmatic, and even ideal serves to make the eventual settlement of Mars that much more conceivable when only traditional round-trip research missions are proposed. We need to create an institutional culture at NASA which considers long-term multi-decade pioneering missions by married child-bearing couples as the norm in long-distance space travel. The days of Flags-and-Footprints followed by regression into multi-decade lulls in further human exploration are over. The tremendous resources humanity has to allocated to NASA for space exploration are not intended to catapult a select few into a lifetime of black-tie dinners and annual speaking retreats on Maui. The purpose of human space exploration is to develop space-based resources, increase our understanding of nature, and settle the solar system. Traitors return to Earth.

The Case for Ellification of the Universe, ASAP PDQ PLZ : ) ♬♫♪♫

First, the most obvious argument for Ellie: she exists as a proven character created by artists still working together at the most successful animation studio in the frickin’ universe, Pixar. She would be hard to screw up. Second: Ellie radiates virtues and passions difficult for any of us to evoke whatever our gender, age, or calling; she can show humanity worldwide how to make everyday life fun, meaningful, and authentic — while being entertaining and adorable.

This is especially important when independent, expressive, ambitious young girls, women, and the men who adore them (and who are made stronger by them) are under attack so explicitly on cultural — not economic — fronts, worldwide. As bizarre as it may be, we share a world with fathers who pay physicians to cut the clitori off their daughters — at a rate of over 2 million girls every year; amazingly, we are also sharing our God-forsaken planet with parents who kill — solely because their children are girls — nearly 100 million Ellies before they are born every year. Neither of these direct assaults against female humans are due to economic reasons. How is this possible? These attacks are motivated by ideas which can be changed for free — at no cost — even while temporarily psychotic minds undergoing change pay to be altered and entertained.

Then there are the glass ceilings of our open-air global madhouse: the incompetent uneducated men throughout the world who are somehow dependent upon women to calculate, translate and basically transact everyday business for the companies these men supposedly manage.

Dowries, arranged marriages, veils, chadors, mandatory headscarfs, required overcoats, full body swimsuits, hajibs, niqabs and God knows what else to hide and sequester feminine beauty — round off this cultural attack on all humanity. We do not need to make societies wealthier to change these ideas. We can change expectations by teaching lifestyles embodied in entertaining, fun, endearing characters everyone wants to watch everywhere.

Pixar could run with this opportunity as quickly and as far as Ellie’s spirit will take them — with little risk, with the virtual assurance of profitable accolades, and, with the satisfaction of having woven deeply into our global social fabric the most important female spirit thus far recognized. She does not need to be a freckled red-headed cartoon, either; Ellie’s spirit could be embodied in an animated caterpillar, carrot, or gigantic monster — who can imagine what: with a vibrant sense of self-respect, a fun uninhibited exuberant drive for self-expression, and an uncompromising straightforward sense of oneself as a unique female person.

The following are comments by National Public Radio’s Linda Holmes about Ellie from an article titled “Dear Pixar, From All The Girls With Band-Aids On Their Knees“:

“Please make a movie about a girl who is not a princess […] Of the ten movies you’ve released so far, ten of them have central characters who are boys or men, or who are anthropomorphized animals or robots or bugs who are voiced by and imagined as boys or men. […] And Up…oh, Up has Ellie, who I could have watched forever. Seen only in flashbacks to the main story, Ellie is warm and hilarious, ambitious and fearless, and then gone for most of the movie. She provides the engine for the story, in many ways, but it’s an old man and a little boy who actually get to hit the gas.”

If you would like to watch the entire segment of Ellie’s spirit embodied as an adorable young girl — the most profound Pixar character yet created — check out:

Congratulations to Peter Docter, Bob Peterson, Ronnie del Carmen and the entire Pixar story crew for boarding such a precious positive role model.

O Ellie, Ellie! Wherefore art thou!!!!!!!!!!

http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2010/01/09/short-film-life-for-yemeni-girl/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_genital_cutting 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-selective_abortion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chador
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_segregation_and_Islam
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2009/06/dear_pixar_from_all_the_girls.html?sc=fb&cc=fp
http://www.titlesequences.com/heroines/whereRthey.html

(As an interesting side note on the transmission and life of ideas independent from any one one particular mind, the motivation for this post arose after Emma Coats (a story artist at Pixar) asked through Twitter “where have all the folk heroines gone?” with a link to this article: Google Cache (backed-up on Titlesequences here). A moment in the life of this idea can be seen by clicking on the ‘Favorites’ link of my profile: http://twitter.com/oceanbluesky/favorites Changing the world is a team sport; righteous fury is a gift from God. Enjoy!)

Eric Machmer: Mongolian Pietà (Animatic Close-up)

Easily the most overlooked woman in history: Ögelün, founder of the Mongol Empire, mother of Genghis Kahn. (This is a work-in-progress from an animatic pitched for Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol II; the full motion sequence will be posted here soon with an explanation of this scene.)

Ögelün’s influence became law from Vietnam to Vienna; to survive in the constant violence of what was effectively a multi-continent open-air jail, this remarkable female human being founded the largest empire ever known:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasions

Ögelün’s shamefully anemic, spiritless Wikipedia entry desperately needs the attention of a respectful Wikipedian with free time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoelun
 
(Yes there are forgotten female poets, scientists, philosophers and so on, but no one has had as lasting, long-reaching impact — and has been as intentionally neglected — as wise beautiful Ögelün. If you ever wonder what a woman means when she speaks of a person having a strong mind — study Ögelün.)
 
The following are passages describing her early years as written in The Secret History of the Mongols (a remarkable book originally commissioned by Genghis Kahn nearly a thousand years ago — and only translated to English within recent decades): 
 
CHAPTER TWO
~ Section 74 ~
The Taichigud kinsmen left the widowed Ögelün-üjin, with her small sons on the site of migration and moved away.
 
Lady Ögelün was born
an intelligent woman
she arranged her hair in braids
and wore them round her head.
And tucked up her gown skirt
running up and down
along the Onan River
picking hurtle-berries and bird cherries
nourishing her smalls sons with them.
Day and night.
The gloriously born Ögelün the Mother,
dug roots of burnet and of silver weed
with the tapered stick of spruce
to feed on them
with her intelligent sons.
The sons of Ögelün the mother
supported with the food
seasoned by the bulbs of red lily
attained to man’s estate.
The sons of prudent Ögelün provided with the food
seasoned by sorrels and senescent alliums
grew up to ascend the throne.
 
~ Section 75 ~
The lanky, over grown sons
nourished with the food
seasoned by linear and senescent alliums
from the beautiful Ögelün
arrived at the age of gentle minister.
They grew into fine gallants.
They said to each other
“Let us look after our mother
by angling for all and sundry fishes
when they were sitting down
on the bank of the Onan River
to repair hooks.
They blended needles into hooks
and caught salmon and grayling.
They made seines and gorges
and caught finger lingoes”
Then, with grateful heart
they fed their mother.
 
The Secret History of the Mongols, translated from Mongolian into English by N. Dorjgotov and Z. Erendo; edited by D. Tumurtogoo, National University of Mongolia (2007).

If You Want Muses, Have Opinions

If you want to know what attracts Muses, it is standing for something.
Rough edges make people tractable. Present. Alive.
Your Life is a Force; force others to recognize It.
Lean your shoulders into them.
Respect Yourself: do not only serve others;
you are part of the equation.
Become energy motivated by ideas.
Like moths to light Muses will swarm.
Come out swinging. Artists are not politicians.
We are Forces to which others react.
Become a vehicle for your own Spirit.
Believe in yourself. Have an opinion, make it known.
 

(That said…even ‘god’ spoke (metaphorically) to Elijah with a “still, small voice.” Boorish, crude, inflexible and uninformed opinions will make you even less attractive to Muses than the archenemies: untalented cowards who distract them, poseurs.)

Ironically the more you seek approval by being nice, polite, diplomatic — the tighter you clamp a lid down on energy which might actually draw Muses to you. Once you have domesticated your interests — there is little about you to attract anyone’s attention. If you do not want to offend, you will certainly have nothing to say.
 
Your pictures may be pretty — they may be profitable — but accolades will pass as the institutions supporting you move on.  And because your work is completely meaningless, spiritless, and without character, it will be forgotten. Nothing in your life will have lasting impact or importance.
 
Intellectual cowardice — domesticated art — kills Muses. They cannot tolerate it. For their sake, become a force of nature: speak up!  Strong orgasms do not occur without strong emotions; Muses exist in a realm of precognition, you cannot reason them into ecstasy. ( I like writing charming bright cheerful children’s stories to educate the next generation; they don’t need to know what an orgasm is — you do.)

Like a Wise Older Brother

“Never in the history of cinema has a movie been entertaining to an audience because of the technology. It is what you do with the technology.  It is what you do with the media that’s so special.”  Quoting Andrew Stanton, “2D animation became the scapegoat for bad storytelling.”
 
If John Lasseter intimidates you just think of him as a wise older brother looking out for your best interests — with a proven history of being right. : )
 
Archived on Factual Fiction’s Art Garden, here:
 
Full clip and many, many other essential teachings are on the DisneyPixar, here: