If you know me (and if you don’t), you probably know that I appreciate the work of Ira Glass, the host and producer of This American Life on Chicago Public Radio.

Craft: magazine has a snippet of a video of Glass on storytelling. In the short clip, Glass describes the difference between where you are and where you aspire to be and how to bridge that gap. He acknowledges that artistic geniuses have good taste and know one’s own full potential and it is really just pushing through all the sub-par work through the process of doing in order to meet one’s ambition.

Do a lot of work, do a huge volume of work [...] You have to turn out that work because it’s only by going through that volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap and the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

Starting in the world of radio broadcasting at the age of 19, it took him more than eight years to figure out the intricacies of his craft on air and recognizes that grasping ambitions “takes awhile.”

It’s going to take you awhile. It’s normal to take awhile and you just have to fight your way through that. You will make things that aren’t as good as you know in your heart you want them to be and you will just make one after another.

Producing something amazing takes work, time, perseverance and practice, practice, practice. It’s good to remember this quote from author Kurt Vonnegut, “To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.”

I hope you make your soul grow today. :)

I’m counting down the 15 days until the official beginning of Spring! Even though it has felt like Spring since the middle of January here in Southern California, the (very) light dust of Winter has been gathering and it’s time to start fresh.

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
- Pablo Picasso

(This is my favourite pictures of Picasso taken by Robert Doisneau. It makes me smile whenever I see it.)

So, today, I looked through the MoMA’s offerings and they have some wonderful exhibits on display right now and in the coming months that I would love to see:

& . Irving Penn (ongoing) is best known for fashion and portrait photography. The New York Times Lens Blog has a wonderful slideshow of some of this most well-known photographs.

& . Action! Design Over Time takes a look at the temporal nature of design and the natural changes that occur with the passing of time.

& . It’s not just about The Nightmare Before Christmas. Approximately 70% of the exhibition shows the work of Tim Burton that many have not seen before. With all the loveable whimsy of Burton’s art, I can only imagine how wonderful the displays are! You can read more about the process of putting together the exhibit through the MoMA/P.S.1 Blog.

& . I am most excited about the Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective that runs from April 11 – June 28, 2010. Cartier-Bresson defined the creative potential of modern photography with his uncanny ability to capture life — what he called “the decisive moment.”

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

expecto patronum!

J.K. Rowling gave a beautiful, poignant, and funny commencement speech to Harvard University graduates in 2008 on failure and imagination. Though Rowling is best known for giving the world Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger, she also has an amazing life story from living on welfare in Edinburgh, being a single mother, going through divorce, and the death of her mother.

Here are some snippets of the speech I, personally, found compelling:

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

I especially loved what she had to say about the imagination because she spoke about it in a say that I had not considered before — that imagination not only creates new worlds and wonders, but it also allows us to be empathetic to others.

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better. [emphasis mine]

Watch and read Rowling’s speech at on Harvard Magazine online.

“The only proof you need that there is a God is music.”
- Kurt Vonnegut

I’ve always loved this little quote from Vonnegut. It makes me smile and reminds me of how utterly amazing it is for the human voice, instruments, tunes, beats, and subtle harmonies to come together to make something as beautiful as music. Something like that has to be a gift from God.

Here’s what I’ve been be-bopping to lately:
& . Frightened Rabbit is coming out with a new album March 9th called The Winter of Mixed Drinks. Indeed, Rabbits, well said. :) The video for their new song “Nothing Like You” is over at Pitchfork if you’re interested.

& . Freelance Whales. If you do take a listen, I love Generator ^ 1 & Generator ^ 2.

&. Phoenix performances I’ve been enjoying: live and unplugged on I Guess I’m Floating and some on La Blogotheque. The second is fitting because they’re Frenchies. :)

& . Josh Ritter’s Change of Time. You can download it for free from his website.

& . The One Who Got Away. “What we remember — and what we forget — may reveal more about ourselves than about them. We have photos, letters, souvenirs, and fragments of memory, but our powerful imagination takes over from there: We color in the blanks. And that’s OK. Retouching old loves is a way of understanding what we want. It helps us find our way to new ones.”

& . I love Band of Outsiders/Boy! Here’s a bit of the collection: Fall/Winter 2009, Spring 2010, Fall 2010

& . Why Betty White is awesome. (via Mental Floss.)