To Think Outside the Box, First You Need the Box

I happily read some more pages out of Twyla Tharp's inspiring marvelous wonderful beautiful nifty-fifty lovely helpful tome, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life: A Practical Guide (with Mark Reitner;* New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003). Taking it closely, nice.

Who is Twyla Tharp? 

Twyla Tharp is a famous artist -- choreographer, dancer and so on. She will be 72 next Monday.

Once you've heard the name Twyla Tharp -- unless it goes in one ear and out the other, or you literally cannot hear -- you remember.

Once you've seen the name Twyla Tharp -- unless it goes in one eye and out the other, or you literally cannot see or have no working memory -- you remember.

Twyla Tharp first flew across my radar screen via The Catherine Wheel (1981), but she did a gazillion projects before that and has since done a gazillion more.

Now you know a little something about Twyla Tharp if you didn't already; if it's still not clicking, check her out on Wikipedia or something. Live a little!

This is all leading up to the title of Chapter 5 in the book: Before You Can Think out of the Box, You Have to Start with a Box.

In this chapter, Twyla Tharp gives examples of her project boxes, from ideas and conception to completion and archiving. Real simple approach to production. Real good one, too. More on the practical use of boxes (or other containers) in the next "post."

Above: From Jon Ronson's pithy 2008 documentary Stanley Kubrick's Boxes. Containers come in many colors, shapes and sizes nowadays. All aboard for funtime!    

Today's Rune: Protection. *Mark Reiter is Owner, The Reiter Agency and has co-written, edited, represented and/or written many a book.