Colin Marshall

5 posts, oldest first

Dec 2, 2022

Please be kind: Rewind

[We] didn’t discover his work in the theater, much less at Cannes. Rather, we found it at the video store, ideally one that devoted a section specifically to his work—or at least to his signature genre of “body horror,” which his films would in any case have dominated.

~ Colin Marshall from, David Cronenberg Visits a Video Store & Talks About His Favorite Movies

Elsewhere, this is 4uoeda2. — slipbox

Do you remember video stores? …I mean the individual stores, from before Blockbuster came along? Sections. You had to walk to the section in the store. New releases. Maybe there was a staple employee who knew every movie. Maybe you—like me—wondered if working there meant watching each movie before putting it out… what a job that would be!! Maybe there was a hand-written sign whose perennial message stands atop this missive. Maybe family movie nights? The lottery that was the occassional “doesn’t play” tape. “Tracking”—and then the magic of “Auto Tracking”. And all of that from two words: video store.

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Dec 19, 2022

By any measure, indeed

By any measure, David Bowie was a superstar. He first rose to fame in the nineteen-seventies, a process galvanized by his creation and assumption of the rocker-from-Mars persona Ziggy Stardust. In the following decade came Let’s Dance, on the back of which he sold out stadiums and dominated the still-new MTV. Yet through it all, and indeed up until his death in 2016, he kept at least one foot outside the mainstream. It was in the nineties, after his aesthetically cleansing stint with guitar-rock outfit Tin Machine, that Bowie made use of his stardom to explore his full spectrum of interests, which ranged from the basic to the bizarre, the mundane to the macabre.

~ Colin Marshall from, When David Bowie & Brian Eno Made a Twin Peaks-Inspired Album, Outside (1995)

Elsewhere, this is 4uoewe1. — slipbox

Somehow I just missed being really into David Bowie when I was in high school. He was definitely big, and popular, and part of the music I heard. To my detriment, it wasn’t until after he died that I started listening to more of his music from his wider catalog, and then watching a documentary, etc. It’s always inspiring to discover a creator who gets more interesting the more you learn.

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Jul 20, 2024

On depression and meditation

David Lynch has a variety of notions about what it takes to make art, but suffering is not among them. “This is part of the myth, I think […] the more you suffer, the less you want to create. If you’re truly depressed, they say, you can’t even get out of bed, let alone create.”

~ Colin Marshall, from David Lynch Explains Why Depression Is the Enemy of Creativity–and Why Meditation Is the Solution

Elsewhere, this is 4uoeda1. — slipbox

The cure for depression? My experience is that the only thing that works to avoid depression, in the long run, is meditation.

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Aug 20, 2024

Victims of our own technology

Just a cou­ple of days ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook tweet­ed out a video pro­mot­ing, “the new iPad Pro: the thinnest prod­uct we’ve ever cre­at­ed.” The response has been over­whelm­ing, and over­whelm­ing­ly neg­a­tive: for many view­ers, the ad’s imagery of a hydraulic press crush­ing a heap of musi­cal instru­ments, art sup­plies, and vin­tage enter­tain­ment into a sin­gle tablet inad­ver­tent­ly artic­u­lat­ed a dis­com­fort they’ve long felt with tech­nol­o­gy’s direc­tion in the past cou­ple of decades. As the nov­el­ist Hari Kun­zru put it, “Crush­ing the sym­bols of human cre­ativ­i­ty to pro­duce a homog­e­nized brand­ed slab is pret­ty much where the tech indus­try is at in 2024.”

~ Colin Marshall, from Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961)

Elsewhere, this is 4uoeao1. — slipbox

Setting aside the marketing brouhaha, I was gobsmacked by the phrase, “Crushing the symbols of human creativity to produce a homogenized brand-slab […]” Yes, “homogenized brand-slab” is brilliant and feels like a line of dialog from THX-1138. But I was really fish-hooked by the “symbols of human creativity” part. I talk a lot and often these days about creativity, but I’d never really considered the question: What are symbols—images, place holders, iconography—of creativity?

Because it doesn’t seem to make sense to me why a paint brush, or a trumpet (for example) represent creativity. It’s the mind of the person that does the creativity part… and so: What are symbols of creativity?

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Jul 15, 2025

Always the horizon

You could see arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence as a kind of fron­tier, then, which moves for­ward as com­put­er­ized machines take over the tasks humans pre­vi­ous­ly had to do them­selves.

~ Colin Marshall, from Isaac Asimov Describes How Artificial Intelligence Will Liberate Humans & Their Creativity: Watch His Last Major Interview (1992)

I prefer the metaphor of the horizon: always just out of reach. But it’s our curiosity to see what’s there which pulls us ever-forward.

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