A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.
The creative process is just that: a process. Recognizing value that others have missed doesn’t require preternatural clairvoyance. A well-honed creative process enables us to intuitively recognize patterns and use those insights to make inductive predictions about divergent ideas, both vertically within categories, and horizontally across categories. By understanding the genealogy of innovation within a given category, we can imagine what might come next.
Nikola Tamindzic, Karin Dreijer Andersson, The Knife, 2009
A portrait of The Knife’s Karin Dreijer Andersson I did for The New Yorker in 2009.
The Knife’s first album proper in 7 years, Shaking the Habitual, is out today, and is fucking amazing.
I think hell is something you carry around with you, not somewhere you go.