PICKED: Goodbye Shanghai

We’ve previously taken a lighter look at the East vs. West culture clash, but today we turn to something a bit more serious. Goodbye Shanghai is a beautifully directed and cinematically breathtaking short film by director Adam Christian Clark who, while still a film school undergrad at USC, became the youngest person in history to direct a US broadcast television series, CBS’s Big Brother.

In 2006, Clark traveled to Shanghai, where he wrote and directed Mainland China’s first reality TV show. The series eventually swept the nation with such near-hysteria that in 2007, China’s communist government banned all future prime-time reality TV. Last year, Clark returned to China to shoot Goodbye Shanghai, which explores the detrimental effects of Western imperialism on contemporary Chinese culture.

The film went on to win a number of short film festival awards around the world.

Though the full film is available in HD for free on Vimeo, the $4.99 price tag makes the DVD more than worth it.

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Paula Scher on Combinatorial Creativity

Paula Scher is one of our favorite designers and arguably the most daring typographer in design history, whose work never ceases to surprise, delight and provoke, thriving on reinvention yet oozing Scher’s unmistakable style. In this excellent microdocumentary, part of Hillman Curtis’ artist series, Scher recounts her creative process on some of her best-known projects, including her famous Citi identity work the iconic New York Public Theater campaign, which evolved into a whole new style that eventually permeated the New York design aesthetic across multiple facets.

The reason we find this interview particularly compelling is that, when talking about how she created the iconic Citi logo on a napkin in a matter of seconds, Scher echoes our founding beliefs in combinatorial creativity — the concept that ideas are born out of the myriad pieces of stuff populating our memories, our knowledge base, our mental pool of inspiration and resources, and creativity is simply the capacity to put those together in incredible new ways.

How can it be that you talk to someone and it’s done in a second? But it IS done in a second — it’s done in a second and 34 years. It’s done in a second and every experience, and every movie, and every thing in my life that’s in my head.” ~ Paula Scher

For more on and of Scher, you won’t go wrong with Make It Bigger, her fantastic 2005 book (and one of our five favorite book designs by famous designers), nor would her compelling TED talk on serious versus solemn design disappoint.

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PICKED: Alone

Alone (Egyedül) is a beautifully grim short film by Hungarian animator Mendrei Miklos, telling the story of a man for whom time stands suffocatingly still as days and months blend into each other in the abyss of his loneliness — not the bored-on-a-Friday-night kind, but the kind of soul-crushing existential emptiness that drains life of joy and meaning.

Part Kafka, part Saul Bass, the film captures the outer limits of something all of us have felt, perhaps on a tamer scale, and a fear that haunts us as we move, often mindlessly, through our daily routines.

Before you let your heart shrink with the painful narrative, hurry up and ingest this powerful antidote from a few months ago: How To Be Alone, a soul-warming homage to life’s most important skill.

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