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Odd Nerdrum One Story Singer
June 17, 2014
CONTENT CREATION, KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

Content Creation: Talking to Yourself Is Healthy

I’m on Reddit about as much as I’m on Facebook. What amazes many other Redditors is we get far more comments and likes for our posts from strangers than we do from actual friends for our posts on Facebook. Your contributions also don’t appear directly on other Redditors’ feeds; you post by subject, or ‘subreddit’, and hope for the best. So why bother posting to Facebook at all? It lost whatever negligible cool it had long ago, after all.

Many of my friends and most of my small family have either never signed up for Facebook or have dropped away. “It’s a waste of time and distracting,” an award-winning writer-director friend, who cancelled his account well over a year ago, said to me the other day. This guy is so cool he can carry off a polo shirt and actually make me hesitate as to whether I might need one or two in my wardrobe as well. (I don’t.)

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By James Killough
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Emma Thompson
December 17, 2013
FILM & TELEVISION, KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

Content Creation: Your Characters Are Family

This was going to be a review of John Lee Hancock’s Saving Mr. Banks. I’d read somewhere in the British press after it debuted at the London Film Festival that it was the one to beat, that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. In reality it’s simply the most obvious chunk of Oscar bait this season, so much so it’s a caricature of an Oscar-bait film. In this respect it is meta, but I doubt deliberately so; children’s author Pamela Travers didn’t want to sell the rights to Mary Poppins to Walt Disney because she was afraid it would be turned into a cartoon. Aaaaaand, violà! Her own life story has been rendered like a diorama at Disneyland,

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By James Killough
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October 29, 2013
CONTENT CREATION, KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

Scared Shitless — Confessions of a Butch Pussy

I admit it: Most of my life I was a fraidy-cat, a panicked pickle, a serving of yellow-belly sashimi.

Not any more, for some reason. Something happened in early middle age: I stopped running and turned around to face my fears and went, “Boo, yourselves!” and they vanished, as specters of all kinds are wont to do when confronted.

Fear isn’t always unpleasant. There are entire recreational industries devoted to people tempting danger for the adrenaline rush. There are even professions that thrive on the natural high that comes from flirting with disaster: the armed forces, the stock exchange, Somali piracy.

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By James Killough
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Angela Ahrendts
October 15, 2013
CONTENT CREATION, KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

Branding: Has Apple Just Made a Genius Move?

As any shark will tell you, you’ve got to keep moving to stay alive. One strategy companies adopt is to bring in successful creatives from completely different industries for a reboot — presumably this makes execs feel like they’re thinking out of the box. In the case of Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts’ appointment as Apple’s new SVP of retail, this isn’t just thinking different, it’s disparate.

The immediate danger is that this game of executive ping pong between Apple and the fashion industry led to an epic fail only last year,

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By James Killough
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Jon stewart Rolling Stone
October 1, 2013
CONTENT CREATION, KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

Content Creation: What the Shutdown Meltdown Says About Us

For those of us who loathe the modern GOP with as much vehemence as they loathe the Obama Administration — with the notable difference that our loathing is rational and based in verifiable, substantive fact — the latest shitstorm out of Washington has ceased to be boring business as usual with this do-nothing GOP-led Congress; it’s becoming something of a cause for celebration. Or it would be if it isn’t seeming that the inexorable decline of the GOP,

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By James Killough
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August 27, 2013
CONTENT CREATION, FILM & TELEVISION, KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

Modern Crime Dramas and the Essential Unstable Detective

There was a time when the hero detective was at most deeply eccentric; otherwise, he had ardent purpose, he was infallible, he was more brilliant than me or you — it was only a question of when and how he would solve the mystery. That’s not the case any more.

I’m not a scholar of the genre, but it would seem to me that the progenitor of the character was Sherlock Holmes,

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By James Killough
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Angelina Jolie Girl Interrupted
July 30, 2013
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

Creative Minds: Is Being Nuts the New Normal?

An article from Scientific American was bounced among the posts of creative types last week like a game of dodgeball in a group therapy session. Entitled “The Unleashed Mind: Why Creative People are Eccentric,” the essay explores the high occurrence of schizotypal personality — not the full disorder, just the personality part — in creatives who also behave eccentrically. This last distinction is important;

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By James Killough
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Diane Kruger
July 15, 2013
CONTENT CREATION, FILM & TELEVISION, KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

Content Creation: Too Cool to Connect?

As horrible as it feels for a perfectionist to make mistakes, I have to agree with the cliché that I learn far more from them than I do from my successes. I learn almost as much from other people’s mistakes, and I say ‘almost’ because it’s harder to assimilate an indirect experience — still, you are experiencing the mistake when you are watching or reading it,

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By James Killough
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