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I'm a writer and creative director. I make things, collect books, write fiction and don't understand Zen. I'm Vegan.

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Confession: I Love ABC’s Castle

Okay, for starters I’m a big Nathan Fillion fan. Not like man-crush big, but come on, Fillion has to be the most likable guy on TV. Plus, he’s played some great roles on fantastic shows like Firefly (another show I loved), Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Yes, Josh Whedon has kept him busy) to name a few. So this alone is enough to tune in and catch an episode. So, tune in I did.

Now, I’m hooked.

Beyond the Fillion-factor, I love Castle because it’s a smart and funny crime drama with just the right amount of camp and sexual tension. Plus, the writing is great and the characters likable.

And kudos to ABC for actually releasing a Richard Castle novel – Heat Wave, the first Nikki Heat book. This book is the central premise behind the show. His research for the book is why he follows around and eventually partners up with Detective Kate Beckett in the first place. The book is a nice piece of cross-marketing. And, based on reviews, it’s not a bad crime read either.

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You Too Can Be An Innovator

I’ve always loved the way Marty Neumeier thinks. ZAG is still my favorite book on brands. Now, Marty has a DVD available with his famous Innovation Workshop on it. This should be fantastic.

Plus, the Tool Kit includes a copy of his most recent book, The Designful Company which is also a really good read.

Listen To A Brave New World Narrated By Aldous Huxley

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This is great. Aldous Huxley narrates his book A Brave New World as actors perform sections from the book to the music of Bernard Herrmann, the great composer who worked extensively with Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Scorsese and other great diretors.

This is a digital conversion of the original LP so there is a lot of noise, hisses, pops and scratches, but this is brilliant to listen to nonetheless.

Find the MP3s here.

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A Gorgeous New Vegetarian Cookbook

The Conscious Cook by Tal Ronnen is one of the most beautiful cookbooks I’ve ever seen. The typography is beautiful, the colors exquisite, the food photography completely tantalizing.

And that’s just aesthetics. The recipes themselves are amazing. This book, along with Alicia Silverstone’s The Kind Diet provide an incredible Vegan one-two punch of delicious, natural, earth and animal friendly cooking with flair, flavor and tons of taste.

In The Conscious Cook, we get to see what the new face of Vegan cuisine looks and tastes like. There are no bland, boring or dull dishes here, only rich, savory and satisfying dishes.

Before I became a vegetarian I had this fear that I’d get easily bored with the cuisine. I also had a sense that the faux meats where horrible. I was wrong on both. Granted, the psuedo-saugage, veggie burgers and other veg-meats have made great strides. So much so that I’ve dined at veggie restaurants where you’d never know you were eating chicken or beef if you weren’t paying attention.

This is a great cookbook. It’s full of photos, information and dynamic recipes. The layout is clean and fresh. Designwise, this is one of my favorite cookbooks ever.

Carl Jung’s Mysterious Red Book

A recent story in the New York Times discusses the release of a long-await and very mysterious book by the great psychonaut Carl Jung. The Red Book, set to be released October 7th of this year promises to blow minds while delving deeply into the psyche, dreams and thoughts of one of the world’s greatest minds.

The book has been shrouded in mystery for almost 100 years and still creates a bit of unease even to this day. According to the Times article,

Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.

So, what is the book about? Well, in essence it’s the search for the Holy Grail. In other words, the primal and very essential search for Soul. Or, as the article puts it, the story is one of the classic hero’s journey where “Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.”

What did the author find as she read the book? She summarized her reeading of it like this:

The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality. The text is dense, often poetic, always strange. The art is arresting and also strange. Even today, its publication feels risky, like an exposure. But then again, it is possible Jung intended it as such. In 1959, after having left the book more or less untouched for 30 or so years, he penned a brief epilogue, acknowledging the central dilemma in considering the book’s fate. “To the superficial observer,” he wrote, “it will appear like madness.”

I can’t wait to read it.

Attending to Dust-Clouds

There is a great quote by William James at the beginning of Dark Lore, Volume 1 that reads,

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.

As I finish up with Entangled Minds by Dean Radin and launch into In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky, I can’t help but feel the timeliness of this statement as it bears down on me.

There is so much we don’t, can’t and won’t understand, not in lifetimes. These questions aren’t answered by religions, or science or philosophers but can only be answered I believe from within. To quote Swami Vivekananda,

The goal of mankind is knowledge … Now this knowledge is inherent in man. No knowledge comes from outside: it is all inside. What we say a man ‘knows’, should, in strict psychological language, be what he ‘discovers’ or ‘unveils’; what man ‘learns’ is really what he discovers by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge.

In other words, knowledge, knowing, learning is really a form of remembering.

This is about gnosis, knowledge of self and deep understanding that transcends books. The most important things we can learn, we already posses if we could all only remember where we left them.

What Is Real?

I find that I question reality more and more lately. This isn’t some psychic break, but a sincere questioning that comes from looking within. We trust so much our perceptions, the senses, and all the filters that process what we then determine to be real. But how is it shaped? How does language help sculpt our conclusions? And what about culture?

Anyway, along similar lines, I came across this quote from a speech by the great Philip K. Dick:

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

We all do in our own way.

This Whole New Mind of Mine

I just read A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink and recommend it to anyone wanting to be grasp the emerging new realities of marketing and communications. His premise is simple: Gone are the days of left-brain dominance. In the age of Asia, Abundance and Automation, we are no longer able to compete as we once did. In fact, if someone overseas can do it more cheaply or if a computer can do it faster, then what you are doing is soon to go away.

But that’s okay. Especially if you’re more right-brained. For these high concept, high touch folks that future is very bright indeed.As for the book, Pink lays out a compelling argument and suggests 6 aptitudes critical for the future: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play and Meaning.

As a writer, director and brand strategist, this book put some additional shape on much of what I’ve been thinking and feeling over the past 5 years. Meaning is essential to people and the various conceptual aptitudes get to the heart of what motivates consumers and what should drive companies into the future.

How To Say What You Don’t Say

Or, the Synaptic Theory of Composition. John Dufresne writes about this in his great book, The Lie That Tells A Truth. He asks,

“How do you prevent the reader from being a passive observer? I think you do it by what you don’t show.”

Dufresne reminds us that Hemingway believed that the best stories had the most left out.

Whatever we leave out as writers, our readers will fill with their own imagination giving them a vested interest in a story they are subtly helping to create as their imagination adds color and depth to scene and settings.

So much for overwriting. (What did Strunk & White say about needless words?) I have more to say about this, but I won’t, if you know what I mean?

Omit Needless Words

I sometimes forget to follow this concise tip given by Strunk & White in their classic book Elements of Style.

17. Omit Needless Words.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

I’ve already written to much.