Category: autodidacts
-
sitting at the feet of : a documentary filmmaker
Spring Break, 1998. An eighth grader rode west from Kansas City to San Francisco. Inside a two-story Virgin Records store, he ascended an escalator and at its zenith faced his future in film-making. After dozens of art classes, questions of color and light had saturated his mind. Around that time, his grandfather gave him an…
-
Warren Buffett Stock Picks :: How He Choses
When Warren figures out that a company holds a durable competitive advantage, he will only invest if it makes “business sense” to him. Since you’re buying pieces of a company, he thinks you should see each share as representative of the whole—you should only buy a share if you’d buy the whole company, in other…
-
Sitting at the Feet of : a Miraculous Healer
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uDhwFU9unc] The clip above from The Green Mile captures the feeling I had after the following interview. It’s a unique feeling, the place where fear and wonder intersect, that magical place where the awful and the awesome shake hands over a table set by awe. Real healings, assuming of course that there are such things,…
-
Sitting at the Feet of Peruvian Paintings
“People need to be given greatness. I don’t need to do a thousand things that are badly made. I need to do one thing that’s honest and well-done and people will respond.”
-
Sitting at the feet of : The Spirit in The Song
In which I interview the band Eine Blume on how they capture the spirit of a moment in music.
-
Sitting at the feet of : a Group Travel Millionaire
Mike Zirbel went to work for a little family theme park down in the Ozark Mountains of Southwest Missouri called Silver Dollar City. It was 1974, the same year People magazine printed their first issue with Mia Farrow on the front cover. Silver Dollar City assigned Mike the Group Travel sector as a minor portion…
-
A New Kind of Hero : My Bride
In the eighth grade, I wrote a Modern Woodman speech on my hero. As far as I know, that’s still the topic for that particular school’s speech competition. I picked Carl Brashear and in retrospect, that makes little sense. I spent more time drooling over Nightcrawler than I did military personelle, and for good reason.…
-
Sitting at the feet of : a Male Model
A decade ago in a town of eight thousand people two hours away from St. Louis lived a class clown named Logan McNeil. Logan always talked. Logan always entertained. Whether by photo bomb or family portrait, he loved getting his picture taken. “Never. I never thought those characteristics would lead to becoming a male model.”…
-
The Other Side 002: The Love Rally
As I carried our folding chairs, quilts and hummus down the hill into Landreth park’s outdoor amphitheater, multiple colors snagged my attention. Everyone who threw this party had stitched together a tapestry of sheets Technicolor and spray-painted with four red letters: L.O.V.E. What followed was the outworking of what I mentioned a few weeks ago,…
-
Sitting at the feet of : a Fashion Photographer (2 of 2)
photo courtesy 9art Photography Continued from last week’s Ask the Experts… “Two weeks later this kid came in and it looked like she’d tried to gouge her arm out with a broken pop bottle and I said, ‘My God, did you do that to yourself?’ And she said, ‘yes, I did.’ And I said, ‘Are…
-
Sitting at the feet of : a Fashion Photographer (1 of 2)
photo courtesy 9art Photography Thirty years ago, Brian DeMint went to Missouri Southern for art—the worst art degree he could have earned at the time. Only one of his teachers, in his opinion, was a true artist–Darrel Dishman. In spite of Darrel’s watercoloring, Brian quit and went to work for Empire for thirty-three years. “What…
-
Sitting at the feet of : Big City Photos with Small Town Charm
Robb Neuenschwander provided for his family on an artist’s income carving wood. Celebrities like Richard Simmons and Demi Moore bought his art, but he never grew rich whittling. In that environment, Mark Neuenschwander grew up. “My dad did something I could never do. I’m incapable of hands-on art. [My wife] Autumn’s great with that stuff.” Mark never…