Got to make and do some stuff that wasn't directly related to business school over the last few weeks, so that was great. I had some time off following the second module of the fall semester and I ripped through something like nine rolls of medium format film both here in Oklahoma City as well as a few days in New York. I got to sneak up to NYC for the Cinematography Salon Holiday Party and then back a couple days later with St. Anne the Wife and the two housefires for a holiday trip. Crazy, crazy thanks to Jeremy McDaniel for letting me crash at his place in Brooklyn for a couple days.
UPDATE
The good folks at Cinematography Salon released a recap video from the December Holiday party in Brooklyn. If you look closely, you'll see me in my nonsense along with with Jeremy – well, our backs at least – checking out the motion control and Phantom camera setup at about 0:02 into the video.
BOOKS I'M INTO AT THE MOMENT
I also plowed through a few books the last few weeks. Know I'm trying to dodge talking about school stuff, but in addition to a load of solid Harvard Business Review articles, I got to read Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek for my Advanced Leadership class. There's a few solid takeaways in the book, but the stickiest one to me was the idea of how abundance destroys value.
It’s not when things come easily that we appreciate them, but when we have to work hard for them or when they are hard to get that those things have greater value to us._
…it’s the struggle it takes to make it work that helps give that thing its value._
The two non-business related books I worked through were Poor Things by Alasdair Gray and Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. I wanted to read through the book before seeing the film version of Poor Things by director Yorgos Lanthimos. Honestly I'm glad I did considering all the changes they made from the source material. I enjoyed the book and the film was WILD. I'd seen David Fincher's film version of Fight Club years ago like just about everyone else in the western world but never read the original book. I'd read Palahniuk's Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread in late 2021 and it's wild. Looking forward to the next Palahniuk book I get to read.
I've also started reading Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert. Dune: Part Two by director Denis Villeneuve is coming out this March and I'd finished reading the original Dune book before the 2021 movie came out. I've heard the third movie is already in the works, hence me making sure I'm ready for that glorious nonsense.
