Dieter Meier

Dieter Meier - half of Yello - has a neat way of explaining why we shouldn't be scared of failure: "I think to stumble and fall is great art."

I don't normally turn to Swiss electronica for guidance when considering the more serious questions of life, but I quite like this quote. And not just because I fall over a lot.  Besides, some people call Yello 'the Godfathers of Techno' and godfathers are pretty wise as a general rule.

Yello, if you don't know the name, are responsible for "Oh Yeah", which most people will have heard at the end of Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  The other guy is Boris Blank, which is almost as funny a name as the Riff Raff cinema in Zurich, where a documentary made about the band premiered in 2005.  He's blind in one eye because of a childhood accident involving empty bullet shells and gunpowder, and taught himself about music by playing a home-made bamboo flute.

Dieter Meier comes from a Swiss banking family, and is normally never seen without his signature cravat. When he's not busy being half of Yello he's busy being a millionaire industrialist with interests in the technology industry, or playing professional poker, or designing silk scarves, or making organic wine on his ranch in Argentina, where he also breeds beef-cattle. He's written a children's book and for a brief period he was a member of the Swiss national golf team.


In 1972, as part of an art project, he installed a plaque in a German railway station.  It read “On March 23 1994, from 3 to 4 pm, Dieter Meier will stand on this plaque.”.   in 1994, he did.

Andrew Stanton : The Clues to a Good Story

Andrew Stanton wrote all three Toy Story films as well as Finding Nemo, A Bug's Life and Wall-E.  He gave a Ted talk recently, in which he shared some of what he has learned over the years about storytelling.  Just as I will never tire of hearing people tell stories, I will never tire of hearing people talk about stories, and Stanton does it briliantly here.



 

There are a lot of moments I love in his presentation, but I think the part I love most of all is where he says that after he wrote A Bugs Life and the first Toy Story, he became so hooked on screenwriting that he wanted to learn everything he possibly could about how to be better at it.  And so that's what he did - he read books and did research and went to seminars on screenwriting EVEN THOUGH HE HAD JUST WRITTEN TOY STORY.

Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death

From IMDB:

"The U.S. government, eager to protect the nation's avacado supplies, recruits feminist professor Margo Hunt to make contact with the Piranha Women, an all-female tribe who believe men are only good as a source of food. Accompanying Dr. Hunt on her trip are Jim, a guide of questionable competence, and Bunny, a student of unquestionable incompetence"

Dr Hunt is the one in the middle, with the knife (which is how you can tell she's a feminist.)   She's played by Shannon Tweed who a) is the wife of Gene Simmons from KISS and b) was raised on a mink farm.  I can't decide which of these facts I enjoy more.

The screenwriter, incidentally, was, JF Lawton, who also wrote Pretty Woman, and the story is more or less a re-telling of Jospeh Conrad's Heart of Darkness.