Bob Brier | Pyramids & Mummies

January 31, 2009 | Leave a Comment

 
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Egyptology rocks! I had a great conversation with Bob Brier on the air about his book that details how the pyramid was built. Great book, and fun conversation. More about Bob Brier from Wikipedia:

Born and raised in The Bronx, New York, Brier earned his bachelor’s degree from Hunter College of the City University of New York. From 1966 to 1970, he was on the research staff of the Institute of Parapsychology (formerly the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man), in Durham, North Carolina, where he worked on such books as Parapsychology Today and Test Your ESP. He earned his Ph.D in philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1970, and began teaching at Long Island University in 1972. He served as chairman of the philosophy department from 1981 to 1996, and has also served as the director of the National Endowment for the Humanities‘ “Egyptology Today” program. He was appointed Senior Research Fellow at C.W. Post Campus in 2004.

Brier has conducted research in mummification practices worldwide. He has investigated well-known mummies such as Tutankhamen, Ramses the Great, Vladimir Lenin, Eva Perón (more commonly known as Evita), and the Medici family.

In 1994, Brier and a colleague, Ronald Wade, director of the State Anatomy Board of Maryland, claimed to be the first people in 2,000 years to mummify a human cadaver using ancient Egyptian techniques. This research earned Brier the affectionate nickname “Mr. Mummy” and was also the subject of the National Geographic television special of the same name. He is also the host of several television programmes for the TLC Network including The Great Egyptians, Pyramids, Mummies and Tombs, and Mummy Detective. His research has been featured in Archaeology Magazine, The New York Times, CNN, 60 Minutes and 20/20.

In 1999, Brier gave a series of 48 specially-prepared lectures entitled “The History of Ancient Egypt” for The Teaching Company. Brier is a recipient of Long Island University’s David Newton award for Teaching Excellence[citation needed].

From March 24 to April 8, 2006 Brier, along with art historian Patricia Remler, led a group of participants on a tour of the oases of Western Egypt. This tour coincided with the March 29th solar eclipse.

In addition to his above mentioned research, Brier has also written several articles and books, including:

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Interview with Bob Brier | Sound Authors Radio

January 24, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  Welcome back to Sound Authors!  In this week of the inauguration in Washington DC, we might hear the phrase Rome wasn’t built in a day and of course even way further back we all wonder how the great pyramid was built.  It’s a mystery and I was actually just thinking about it a few weeks ago.  Its something that pops into our minds every once in awhile.  How did they finish that pyramid?  So this book is called The Secret of the Great Pyramid: How one mans obsession led to the solution of ancient Egypt’s greatest mystery.  Its by Bob Brier and John Pierre Hodein; I’m sure I slaughtered that pronunciation there; welcome to the show Bob.

Bob Brier:  Thank you Dr. Kent.

Dr. Kent:  How do I pronounce those names?

Bob Brier:  Well, I’m briar spelled B-R-I-E-R and its Jon Pierre Hudan, you were pretty close.

Dr. Kent:  Very nice.  Well so tell me about how did this project get started?

Bob Brier:  I’m an Egyptologist but my specialty isn’t pyramids, its mummies but I got an email from this French architect who said he had solved the mystery of how the great pyramid was built and it sounded like he might be the real deal.  So I invited him over to the house when he came to New York and had dinner.  And over dinner he gave me this amazing performance of how the pyramid was built.  He brought his laptop with him and told me his story and that’s how it started.

Dr. Kent:  Did you believe him right off the bat?

Bob Brier:  At first it was just too amazing.  He’s a strange guy John Pierre, he’s from France, but he’s a strange guy.  He was an architect in Paris and a successful one.  And then he became obsessed with how the pyramid was built.  He knew that all the theories that Egyptologists have put out there couldn’t work.  The idea of a big ramp going all the way to the top, he knew that couldn’t work and we knew it too.  We were all agreed; you can’t have a ramp going to the top of 184-foot pyramid.

The ramp would have to be a mile long and as big in volume as the pyramid itself.  It’s too big.  So he became obsessed with this thing and he gave up his practice in France, he moved into a one room flat, sold his apartment so he could survive and for something like six years he just worked on his computer doing these very elaborate models of how the pyramid could’ve been built and after six or seven years he emerged with the answer.  So it was kind of an amazing thing to see this.  We weren’t convinced at first, no.

Dr. Kent:  Now, when you talk about computer models, what were you looking at?  Was it an architectural program he was sort of walking you around it?  What was it?

Bob Brier:  Yeah, it was a very sophisticated architecture program where you could go inside the pyramid.  He showed the pyramid being built almost layer by layer, you could rotate it in 3D, you could go inside and do a flythrough so to speak.  It is really quite impressive.

Dr. Kent:  So for a person that is a mummy expert, what was it like thinking about the great pyramid?  It’s quite a different kind of task.

Bob Brier:  Yeah, it certainly is but you know all Egyptologists talk about the pyramid no matter what our specialty is, that great pyramid is still out there and its pretty impressive so we talk about it so we know a little bit about it though its not our specialty but it was interesting to hear him come up with a totally new theory that nobody had ever come up with before and I think the reason he could do it is that he was an outsider.  He wasn’t an Egyptologist, he hadn’t grown up in the field and he just could think outside the box.

Dr. Kent:  Now are you allowed to kind of give us a tip how it happened or do we have to read the book to find out?

Bob Brier:  No, no, no, I’m going to reveal it right now.  It’s an amazing thing.  As I said, the best theory we had was this single ramp theory.  The way Hollywood shows it with the slaves pulling the blocks up and the guy with the whip and that couldn’t work as I said because the ramp would have to be a mile long, the volume would be as great as the pyramid itself and also nobodies ever found a ramp like that or the remains of a ramp like that and you know a ramp like that would be would weigh like two million tons so it just doesn’t work.

So John Pierre was saying the same things we were saying, this ramp couldn’t work, it’s too big, its this its that and he said but I know how it was built.  And I said okay John P how was it built?  And he said, it was built with a ramp, but the ramp is inside the pyramid.  Now at first it’s hard to wrap your head around it.  What does he mean the ramp is inside the pyramid?  And the best way I can suggest to visualize it and he showed it to us on the computer so it was easy.  Think about when you go inside a parking garage and you go up the little road that corkscrews up the garage to level five where you finally find your parking spot.  It’s that kind of thing.  There’s a ramp inside the pyramid that corkscrews and makes left turns going up, up, up, inside the pyramid and that’s how the blocks were brought up to the very top of the pyramid, inside that ramp.

Dr. Kent:  Huh.

Bob Brier:  Yeah, and to make it even more interesting, the ramp is still there.  It’s been hidden for 4,500 years waiting to be discovered.

Dr. Kent:  My goodness.  In what form is it still there?

Bob Brier:  It was never filled in.  It’s as if you could walk a tunnel.  The ramp itself of course is a mile long but it makes those turns.  It makes 22 turns so the ramp is almost walkable.  You could actually walk through this tunnel, corkscrewing up inside this pyramid.

Dr. Kent:  Now I’ve been to the pyramids, which can you give us a clue.  Everyone’s seen these sort of three pyramids lining up and I went to the place out in the desert where you could see the three line up and I went to the really dark little cave underneath the pyramid.  But describe the pyramid to someone who’s never been there.

Bob Brier:  Well you know there’s more than 100 pyramids in Egypt and they’re all different.

Dr. Kent:  Right.

Bob Brier:  They are all different but on the Geisa plateau are the two largest ever built.  The two largest ever built.  There’s three fairly large pyramids on the Geisa plateau and another couple of pyramids between, but the really big one, the great pyramid of Geisa is the most complex and the biggest of them all.  Its 480 feet high, right?  It’s as tall as a 50 story building.  It’s so large, that the base, which is a square, covers 13-1/2 acres and it’s built out of a couple of million blocks.  Two million blocks that average about 2-1/2 tons each, blocks of limestone.  So the thing is just immense.

To give you an idea of how amazing it was to build such a thing, the pyramid was built in about 20 years.  The pharaoh who built it is Hutu and the architect was his brother Henry and they built it in about 20 years.  If you got two million blocks, one block was pushed into place in that pyramid every 3-1/2 minutes for 20 years.  Think about that, to chain one block to chain in another 3-1/2 minutes another block.  It’s an amazing social event; an organized event to keep this going like that, it was just a phenomenal thing to do.

Dr. Kent:  Wow.

Bob Brier:  Yeah, it’s amazing.  So this pyramid really is the best of them all, the great pyramid, because it’s also complex inside the pyramid.  The pyramids aren’t solid, there are rooms inside, there are passageways connecting the rooms and all of this had to be planned with this ramp inside not intersecting any of the rooms and passageways and that’s one of the things that John Pierre figured out.  Is it possible to do that?  Can you have a mile long ramp corkscrewing up inside hidden with all these rooms and passages and the computer showed you bet you can.

Dr. Kent:  So, talk about this character John Pierre Hudan.  Besides just his theory, what drew you to him and his story?

Bob Brier:  Well you know its sort of not my field.  I didn’t know about his theory at first, it’s that a friend of mine who’s an engineer and an Egyptologist said to me, do me a favor and talk to this guy.  So I figured if my friend Jack said to talk to this guy he must be the real deal.  Then when John Pierre came over he really is an eccentric.  He’s a dear friend now but I’ll give you an example.  We’re listening to him, I had about five friends over to the house for dinner to hear it, I wanted to hear their ideas about it; I thought it would be interesting.

We’re listening to this guy and he’s showing us on his laptop this beautiful computer images of the pyramid.  The best we had ever seen and it became clear after about an hour of listening to him that he knew the pyramids better than anyone alive, including the pyramid experts.  He knew every block and when this block would be put in place in year seven, in year eight this happened, and we’re listening to him and then I said to John Pierre how did you feel when you first saw the pyramids and he looks at me and says oh I’ve never seen it.  He had never been to Egypt.  He had been working on his computer and I said to him, you got to go, right?  And he said, no I know what the pyramid looks like.

To him it was this abstract puzzle to be solved not a monument to be visited.  I said that was the most telling thing I can give you; the guy is really an eccentric and he’s a nice guy.  You talk to him and he seems quite normal but I’ll tell you when I used that word obsessed in the title of my book How One Man’s Obsession, I meant it.  Its all he talks about, he doesn’t have any interests other than the pyramid.

Dr. Kent:  How about your obsession; how did you get into Egyptology?

Bob Brier:  I got into it in a strange way, through an accident, literally an accident.  I was a basketball player, I loved playing basketball and at the college I was still playing and I hurt my knees.  Typical ball players knee injury and I was having these operations on my legs so I could play again and this is before arthroscopic surgery, this was years ago.  So I was in casts from my ankles to my hips for months.

Somebody gave me a copy of a hieroglyphic textbook, how to read hieroglyphs and I became real obsessed with it and for eight hours a day I did hieroglyphs while I was in bed.  When the casts came off I could translate so my university asked me would you teach a course to the students on hieroglyphs and I said sure, that would be fun.  The kids really got into it and we were all doing hieroglyphs and I thought gee, you know it might be fun to go to Egypt.  And then I was hooked.

Dr. Kent:  It’s such a fascinating thing.  I was there with a friend and as we pulled up there’s a throng of men running after the car yelling camel, trying to sell camel rides.  My friend bribed someone to go into a special chamber and it’s just an experience that I’ve never had.  It’s an interesting place.

Bob Brier:  It’s certainly impressive, right?

Dr. Kent:  Yes, and do you find it amusing, difficult, all of the above to work in that field and sort of gain access to places and all of that.

Bob Brier:  Well you know, I’m lucky.  My experience is a little different than yours and the average tourist because when I was working on the pyramid with John Pierre we had a tour ourselves.  We work in there at night after the tourists are gone so it’s really quite something really different.  We got the pyramid to ourselves, its quiet, its peaceful; we’re crawling in and out of holes that nobody really ever sees so it’s really quite special.  And the more you learn about the pyramid, at least for me; you know when I started this project my job was just to help John Pierre, who’s theory it was.

He had no idea how to navigate the bureaucracy of Egypt and the Egyptian antiquities there so my job was to help him get in so he could see things and we could look at stuff.  So I’m helping him and I’m learning at the same time and the more I learned the more impressed I was with the pyramid.  I mean the more you learn about it, its not like oh that’s how they did it, not so impressive.  It’s the other way around; that’s how they did it?  That’s incredible!  So the more you learn about the pyramid, the more impressed you are.

Dr. Kent:  Its such a fascinating book full of diagrams, old pictures, going from page to page is just fascinating.  What did it feel like to you to put together the pieces of this?

Bob Brier:  I loved it; I’ve written I think six or seven books and this is my favorite I think in terms of putting it together.  Partly because I was learning as I was doing it, learning from John Pierre, learning from my experiences in the pyramids, but also it was really like a bit of a mystery. Not a murder mystery, but a mystery.  How did they build it, how did they put it together, what do the architects think now, how do they do it?

And it really was an awful lot of fun and it almost just happened and I wrote the book in about a year.  It took a year to really write it.  I worked with John Pierre for two or three years learning, getting up to speed so I could talk to him about it, ask questions, and then writing it was just a lot of fun putting those pieces together.  I hope some of that comes through in the book.  That there is an adventure, it’s an intellectual adventure; this guy solved the big archeological puzzle of our time.

Dr. Kent:  Its something, must be neat to work on something that’s puzzled people for so very long.

Bob Brier:  You get this ah-ha moment you know where you’re wondering and you’re wondering.  In the beginning I wasn’t 100% sure that I was right and to tell you the truth still I’m not 100% sure, I’m 85% sure.  But he’s 100% sure.  He’s absolutely 100 percent, has no doubt, and I think he’s probably right; I would bet with him instead of against him but in the beginning I sort of thought this is pretty good, lets see, and I learned more, and it was yep, he’s right, he’s right.  Oh look at that, yep, he’s right.  So all these pieces started to make sense in the light of the theory.  Even we had one wonderful experience.

There’s a big notch way up on the pyramid about 375 feet up on one of the corners.  A big chunk of the pyramid is missing like a big birthday cake piece is taken out and I got permission to climb up; John Pierre stayed on the bottom, to climb up there to see if it was intentionally done that way so that maybe they were turning the blocks in that ramp and when I got up there at the very back of the notch was a little room that no Egyptologist had ever talked about.  We figured out that this room was used to give more space for turning the blocks when they had to make that right angle turn to make a left turn and go up to the next level of the blocks in the tunnel.  It just gave you more room to maneuver, and it was kind of really exciting to see this room that I’d never seen and then to come down and show John Pierre the pictures and he figures it out.  It was a little bit of Sherlock Holmes there.

Dr. Kent:  So is Las Vegas going to use John Pierre’s research and techniques to build their next pyramid?  What do you think?

Bob Brier:  I don’t think so.  You can’t; I don’t think we could build the great pyramid again today.  It would just take too much labor, too much cooperation, I mean the great thing is the reason Egypt could do something like the great pyramid was that the pharaoh was a god and he said it and he did it.  There were no unions; there were no committees, that was it.  The architect figures it out and the pharaoh says do it.  I think we couldn’t do anything like that today, I mean think about it.  How many people would be willing to undertake building a building that took 20 years?  Well, we’re going to start now and it’ll be finished in 20 years.  Not many people are going to fund that, its just not going to happen.  I don’t think we could do it again, so I don’t think Las Vegas is going to use those techniques.

Dr. Kent:  Let’s talk about some of your other books over the years.  You’ve written about Tuten Kaman, how do you say it correctly?  What’s your next obsession?  How do you choose your obsessions?  Do you just find things?  Do they fall on your lap?  What’s your secret?

Bob Brier:  It’s almost like they fall in my lap.  I mean you mention the Tuten Kaman book.  I did this book which was the other book that I really liked doing.  It’s called The Murder of Tuten Kaman and it’s where I figure out again, this is a murder mystery.  Tuten Kaman dies as a young boy king; he was 18 years old when he died.  By looking at the x-rays of the pharaoh’s skull, you know we have his mummy.

By looking at x-rays, by reading text from the time, it became clear to me that he was murdered and I try to put that together in an interesting way to show how this can evolve.  So that was a fun book too; it was a little bit like this pyramid book where you’re solving a mystery.  My next book is going to take me a couple years to write but it’s about moving obelisks.  They pyramids aren’t the only great monuments that Egypt built.  There are also obelisks which are a single piece of stone weighing 250 tons and are going up 100 feet high and how did they get them up?  How did they erect them?  How did they carve them out of the quarry and granite?

And then that’s part of the story but three of them were moved out of Egypt in the 19th century; one is in France, one is in England and one is in New York and my next book is going to be about these obelisks, how they were quarried and then how we moved them out of Egypt.  I think it’s a great story that most people don’t know.  Its going to be a nice little slice of history, not so much a mystery but a nice little slice of history; its fun to show people things they don’t know.

Dr. Kent:  What’s your favorite thing?  If you go to a museum and you get in behind the scenes when the lights are out, I’ve heard some funny stories such as in the Cairo Museum apparently they stored all the mummies in the hallway or something like that because of renovations and what are some amusing stories you’ve had over the years.

Bob Brier:  Well that’s true.  In the Egyptian museum in Cairo, the mummies are stored on the third floor.  There are two stories basically where tourists go and on the third floor there’s a whole batch of mummies there.  What I like to do when I’m in museums and have access is because I’m a mummy person, I always go directly to the mummies and one of the things we do, you know mummies are like little encyclopedias if you know how to read them there’s an awful lot of information in them.

For example, I have taken mummies out of museums to hospitals and CAT scan them, x-ray them, try to figure out what the person died from so again it’s a little bit like getting to play Sherlock Holmes.  It’s a little bit of forensics; it’s a little bit of CSI Ancient Egypt, where you’re trying to figure out what killed those ancient Egyptians, what was their life like, what did he eat.  By x-raying the bones for example, I can tell you what his diet was.

Did he have good protein and calcium; you can tell by looking at the bone density.  I can look at his teeth and tell you what kind of diet he had or how old he was when he died by looking at the sutures so I love going into museums, taking mummies out, taking them to a hospital and figuring out what I can figure out.

Dr. Kent:  When you were a kid did you ever get a chance to see a mummy?

Bob Brier:  No I grew up in the Bronx and we didn’t go to museums much or anything like that.  It wasn’t until I was older that I got to see things like that.  But you know, you think about Egypt as a kid and you always see the mummy movies, right?

Dr. Kent:  Yeah, I remember seeing one of the mummies as a kid, it must’ve been a traveling exhibit or something in the Midwest; I remember being completely terrified of this thing.

Bob Brier:  You know it’s funny; most kids don’t react that way, most kids react with fascination.  When you see a mummy, you’re looking at a person, it’s a recognizable human being who lived maybe 3,000 years ago, and I think kids sort of it’s a rare chance to look at death.  Kids are afraid of death but they want to see what it looks like.  My experience has been when you show them a mummy they’ll just stand there and stare. Then they’ll ask questions.  I don’t think kids are a bit afraid of mummies it’s a very interesting thing.

Dr. Kent:  At the same time this secret of the great pyramid and what you talked about with the obelisks, it’s almost like you get to play being a kid for the rest of your life in an incredibly well researched academic way.

Bob Brier:  No, I’m very fortunate, I am.  You’re right.  I get to be a kid for the rest of my life.

Dr. Kent:  Huh, so it’s been a real honor chatting with Bob Brier and he wrote a book with John Pierre Hudan.

Bob Brier:  Yes, I did most of the writing; he did most of the thinking.

Dr. Kent:  That’s a great way to do it.  It’s called The Secret of the Great Pyramid: How one mans obsession led to the solution of ancient Egypt’s greatest mystery.  I’ve barely cracked my copy but I’m definitely going to read through this thing carefully and maybe I’ll build my own pyramid in the back yard.  Maybe not.  Thank you so much for being on the show and I can’t wait to see what you come up with the next time.

Bob Brier:  It’s a pleasure.

Dr. Kent:  My next guest on the show is the author of a book about the Middle East called Unsettled, the Problem of Loving Israel.  Come on back for that.

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Interview with Ella Curry | Sound Authors Radio

December 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  Welcome back to Sound Authors.  Today is August 29th, it’s the anniversary of many things today but of course this week has been very interesting as it was the anniversary of women’s right to vote and the I have a dream speech yesterday.  My next guest on the show is the host of the black authors’ network radio and has done many other things, including web design and other creations.  Welcome to the show Ella Curry.

Ella Curry:  Hello, how are you?

Dr. Kent:  Very good.  Give me a nutshell of what you do for the world.

Ella Curry:  Okay; I’m the CEO and president of EDC Creations and that’s a graphic design firm in Maryland.  I’m also the founder of the Literary Society Bookclub and I’m the founder of the black authors network radio show.  That pretty much covers all 24 hours of my day!

Dr. Kent:  I’ll bet it does.  Now tell me a little bit about how important to you is this week in history?

Ella Curry:  This week in history is very important for me because I guess you can tell from my accent that I’m from the south.  My family worked years in the civil rights movement and actually we have four generations to watch Barack Obama accept the nomination to run for the presidency last night and that was phenomenal because two generations were very active in civil rights and never thought they would be living to see this day.

Dr. Kent:  I watched the entire speech last night and it was so well choreographed with the fireworks and the music beforehand and just it was amazing to see that every time they panned to faces, everybody in the audience, all of those thousands of people were just transfixed watching the stage.

Ella Curry:  Yes, I think everyone there and I don’t even think it was the décor; it was just soaking in the fact that there is this many people here to see an African American man accept this kind of honor.  I think they were just really soaking in the vibe, the feel of the event.  I don’t even think it had anything to do with the glamour of the stage.  It was the message that he was bringing about change.

Dr. Kent:  People really had tears in their eyes, it was good to see.  Now you’ve got some radio shows, you work with this graphic design firm; what drives you?

Ella Curry:  I have a love for literature.  I’ve been reading ever since I was a small kid and I have a collection that’s phenomenal of books.  And I worked at the ### Bookstore before they went out of business as a buyer and a lot of people submitted their books to the bookstore for review or sought placement on our bookshelves.  I was the head buyer’s executive assistant and it was my job to turn these people down.  I wasn’t allowed to tell them why, I was supposed to send out a form letter.  It was heart-wrenching because a lot of times they would email me back because I was the only contact they had or they would call me and it’s like I had just killed their dream.  So I turned my marketing company around and focused primarily on the literary world so I could help these people see where they went wrong.

Dr. Kent:  Give me an example of that.

Ella Curry:  We had a certain protocol for submitting books.  You had to download our submission form and you had to send all the required items and one of those items was a professionally prepared press kit.  A lot of people never researched ### bookstores to know that we had guidelines on submission so when they didn’t follow them, that said that they didn’t really take interest in what they were trying to put out.  We didn’t spend a lot of time researching for them and another thing was a lot of the people that submitted books didn’t know what a press kit was or didn’t take the time to prepare one and that said a lot about them.  They weren’t industry savvy.  So with EDC Creations I started reaching out to authors to teach them how to come across as a professional industry savvy individual.

Dr. Kent:  Have you ever thought of getting in there yourself and writing a book?

Ella Curry:  You know I don’t think I have the heart to write one.  Now that I’m on the promotions side of it and I’ve been on the retail dividing side of it.  Its kind of a tough industry, I don’t think I ever want to write one, because it’s not writing that’s hard, it’s actually promoting it and getting it out to the reading public.

Dr. Kent:  I’d like to sit here and talk some more about Barack Obama if that’s okay with you.  I feel like the whole world should be abuzz about this thing and I was actually kind of amused.  I always watch CNN and CNN sometimes has a little bit conservative approach but last night they were just like kids in the candy store, they loved it.  I really loved that too.  What network did you watch?

Ella Curry:  I watched I think Fox network.  I watched it on channel 7 so I’m almost certain that’s Fox News Network.

Dr. Kent:  Was it pretty much the same?

Ella Curry:  We were a few minutes ahead of CNN for some reason because I was watching it and my family in Alabama was on the phone and we were all watching it and it came on here in DC before it did there.

Dr. Kent:  Wow.  When he talks about a message of change, they said he really needs to and if we thought about Barack Obama as an author with that incredible speech, did he pass the grade?  Did he fit the bill?

Ella Curry:  I think so and I’d read his other books and he has a new one that’s going to release.  So I think he did incredible.  He did a fantastic job because there was some doubt in a few peoples minds if he had the political maturity to hold this position.  He came across very confident and the one thing right now in this society we need to hear is that somebody understands us and where we are.  The one thing that stood out the most for me and it almost had me teary eyed was when he said his mother was lying in the bed dying of cancer and she was on the phone fighting with the insurance company.  That broke my heart because there’s a lot of people in the south, that’s where I’m from and know the most about, that have no healthcare.  And a lot of them die from tragic death because they don’t have money to get their medications or to have surgeries that they need and that kind of thing, so that was what brought tears to my eyes.  I’ve had people dear to me to die because they didn’t have healthcare.

Dr. Kent:  It was such a moving thing for him to say in a public speech like that.  I can’t imagine not tearing up talking about personal stuff like that about myself.  I was really moved by the speech, I’m really moved by a candidate.  I don’t usually come out and talk about it on the show, but it was really a special night last night.  I feel like my grandchildren are going to be watching that speech.

Ella Curry:  I had my 13 year old watching it and she was very nonchalant because she’s grown up in a time and place where there’s not much racism in her life.  She’s not affected by it or nothing tragic has been brought to her attention about racism.  She attends school here in Maryland and African Americans and Caucasians are the minority in the school.  There is all sorts of races, I’m serious, it’s all the Asians, India, Latinos from different countries, so she is not really, this doesn’t mean a lot to her now at 13 because she’s grown up with it.  She doesn’t see black or white, she doesn’t see any of the different prejudices that I see at 43.  I’m thinking that when she looks back at this at a later date as an adult, it’s going to have a significant bearing on her at that time.

Dr. Kent:  Oh I think so.  You also have black author’s network radio so it is important to you to focus in on black authors.  It’s fascinating in the industry there are a lot of authors, something like hundreds of thousands every year.  How is it to focus on black authors?

Ella Curry:  Well you know when I started black authors network radio, I wanted to give the self-published and the new authors a platform because the publishing houses they get a lot of energy, they have a lot of publicity, but I wanted to give the people who were just entering the industry a fighting chance to get their work out there.  Over the past month, we don’t always have just African American authors on the show.  We have American community leaders, educators, and people in the media, but we also bring in people that aren’t African American because we need to know their perspective, their take on what we are saying.  a lot of times with black people, we blame everything that’s happened to us on the government or white people or anybody but ourselves and a lot of times when we have shows like radio shows, we beat up other races and the government but no one is ever there to speak out for the other side.  So doing my show, I sometimes bring on non-African Americans so they can stand up and answer these challenges.

Dr. Kent:  It is such a fascinating time.  I grew up partially in the south in Louisiana and Shreveport and it was such a divided city, and just a horrible thing to see how divided people were.  Now I live out on long island and I teach here at the university.  It’s so diverse and again the kids don’t see a different race when they look at each other but where I grew up in Louisiana you sure did.  It was a big issue.  What’s your take on that; the difference between north and south with respect to race?

Ella Curry:  Let me tell you, back in the day my mother was the first African American woman in my county that openly dated a white man so I have to say my childhood was very difficult.  Black people didn’t like us and white people didn’t like us.  Where I lived there was a clear divide.  There was white people in their section and black people in their section.  And I don’t care how affluent the black person was; they didn’t cross that line and live anywhere but in our section.  So I had issues that arised with the KKK and a number of other things in our community.  So I grew up I have to admit quite a bit racist.  I had some hard opinions about white people, but they were formed due to things that I had been through.

I worked in the textile industry as a manager and I was one of the few black people to be a manager.  I am sure I was not paid half what my white counterparts were paid.  So I had reasons to be racist but I’ve moved to Maryland and I brought my daughter and my child introduced me to another way of thinking.  She now has white friends and Indian friends and I didn’t want to teach racism, I didn’t want to teach her to have these hard feelings I had.  So these people started coming into my home and therefore I had to meet their parents.  So now I seen that some of them had the same challenges that I had.

Dr. Kent:  That’s what’s so fascinating about last night looking at all the faces watching Barack Obama, you know?

Ella Curry:  I’m now I don’t guess you don’t really call Maryland the north, but it’s northern for me coming from Alabama.  Its different mindset where I’m at now.  My neighbors are its like I live in the United Nations.  I have people from all nationalities living in my community and I have to intermingle with all sorts of races because of my child.  I don’t have any of those hard feelings I had when I was in Alabama because I was continuously exposed.  It was in my face every day that people didn’t like me because I was black.  But here I feel like I stand a better chance here.  I own my own company, three companies and they are very productive and we offer a lot to the community.  I could never run the business I run here in my hometown in Alabama.  And that’s sad.

Dr. Kent:  I think that’s what I see a great deal of hope in Barack Obama.  What do you see possibly happening if he’s elected president?  I sure think that he will be but what do you see happening for healthcare and for human rights and those things?

Ella Curry:  The main thing with healthcare, he may not be able to get the universal healthcare passed, and I’ll be okay with that.  But if we can just get help, supplements for people who cant get their medicines.  If he can just get insurance; you know during Hillary Clintons reign, she got the first kids and that most of all the kids in the rural America was able to have health insurance.  It didn’t pay everything, it was based on your income, but it was more than we had.  The kids were being taken care of.

If Barack Obama can get something on that level, lovely.  But the one thing I see that’s going to change for the African American community if he’s elected president is this: All African American kids now have hope.  Our young black men can see another black man as president, that means that anything is possible and that’s the most powerful thing for me is now we have young black men in droves registering to vote.  They have hope now, they can see it happening.

Dr. Kent:  I sure do hope if the whole African American population comes and votes, man that’s going to be a wash.  It would be amazing.  Even in Florida I heard that if the African American population comes out, that might decide Florida.

Ella Curry:  If he gets that crew, that’s phenomenal.

Dr. Kent:  Well this has been a real honor speaking with you.  We can find you on the web, the marketing work you do and the design at edccreations.com.  Where else can we find out about you?

Ella Curry:  Actually its edc-creations.com and you can also find my work, my book club and the literary work at the sankofaliterarysociety.org.

Dr. Kent:  I really hope you continue to do what you’ve been doing for authors.  It’s a rough world out there for authors and of course hosting a radio show is the best thing in the world so I love that you’re doing that as well.  Gosh, I sure hope Barack Obama wins this election.

Ella Curry:  Oh most definitely; he’s going to win.  And when he does, I’m going to put it on the front page of the Sankofa literary society – all over.

Dr. Kent:  Well it’s been a real honor speaking with Ella Curry.  We can find out about her on the web at edc-creations.com or sankofaliterarysociety.org.  Talk to you soon, thanks for being on the show.

Ella Curry:  Thank you.

Dr. Kent:  My next guest after the break is going to be Leonard L. Berry.  He’s the co-author of Management Lessons from the Mayo Clinic: Inside one of the world’s most admired service organizations.  There’s a lot of insight in that book, especially how to run businesses and so forth.  Come on back for that.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Design, Art, TRANSCRIPTS, Business, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Interview with Davy Liu | Sound Authors Radio

December 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  Welcome to Sound Authors!  Today is Friday, August 22, 2008.  The Olympics are still going on.  That’s my favorite pastime; I can’t get away from it, I watch every second of the day.  I have four guests on the show, three authors and one musician as always.  My first guest will be Davy Liu and he has a wonderful children’s book that is incredibly filled with art and all of that.  My second guest on the show is Lillian Brummet.  She is going to speak to me about her book Trash Talk.  My third guest will be James D. Stein and that is for a book called How Mass Explains the World, A Guide to the Power of Numbers; that’s fun.  My fourth guest will be Carolyn Solobelo from Red Molly, an amazing folk and bluegrass group.  So my first guest on the show today is Davy Liu.  He has extensive experience in artwork straight out of school.  He went to work at Disney Animation Studio on Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and the Lion King but his own work is very powerful.  He has written a book called Fire Fish.  It’s gorgeous and he’s got some films and books coming out in the near future.  Welcome to the show Davy.

Davy Liu:  Thank you very much.

Dr. Kent:  Tell me a little bit about what are you working on now?

Davy Liu:  I’m working on the third book, which is the donkey’s perspective of Jesus Christ.

Dr. Kent:  The donkey’s perspective?

Davy Liu:  Yes, the third book yeah.  It’s pretty much the farm animal perspective of Jesus Christ because every year in the Jewish tradition they had to sacrifice an elderly animal but when Jesus came and was crucified and died on the cross there was no sacrifice needed so this group of animals wonders why this year their older son isn’t needed.  So they want to find out who died for their son.

Dr. Kent:  All of your books are about animals.  Where did you develop your love of animals and telling these stories?

Davy Liu:  I grew up with pets.  I love the animals.  Where I come from we can have monkeys for pets.  I grew up in Taiwan and had a monkey for a pet and we get all kinds of exotic animals.  So I grew this really strong dialogue with animals as a child and I’m in America and I couldn’t speak English so I could only live in my own world so I developed my own kind of visual communications.  What if this were to speak languages and if we just understood things through pictures so when I was 13 I was taught doing all these drawings and I worked at that.

Then when I worked at Disney that kind of just was in tune with working with pictures and telling a story from the animals’ perspective.  So it was actually very helpful that it was a language I could communicate around powerfully with animals’ thoughts because some of us as humans are kind of the same way.  Animals just don’t talk, that’s all.

Dr. Kent:  I’ve read the book Fire Fish, which is visually just stunning.  How do you as an illustrator make artwork pop so well in an illustrated children’s book?

Davy Liu:  For me again, working with Disney and Lucas Films, my role was always production design, which is the picture has to speak 1,000 words and not so much the actors speaking their lines.  So visually it has to be very attractive.  So all the books I created hopefully can find investors to admit to the quality of the final productions going to look.  So I created each book pretty much pre-production design of what a movie package may be so you may see my book and a lot of kids say, wow, is this a movie?  That’s exactly the idea; it’s not like making more for illustrations, making more for like a future animated movie film.

Dr. Kent:  In all of your books have a theological message but their told through the eyes of the animals.  So talk a little bit about that and how you got into that?

Davy Liu:  For their first one, which I did the first one called The Giant Leaf, which is an animal perspective of Noah’s Ark.  I kind of started with the book of Genesis chapter 6 because God called all the animals to come to Noah and I’m going like boy, that’s pretty daring.  Even the animal has to listen to God and they have to take a giant leap of faith and really find the savior vessel, which is Noah’s ark.  But for them it’s got to be, you know I have a cat and she’s afraid of the living daylights when I run my vacuum cleaner.  I don’t even need to turn it on and she runs.

I’m thinking this big vessel and what was this things impact force when Noah took 120 years to build and what did the animals really think of what this things going to do?  He was probably destroying their forests so I took that and started bouncing off and created the whole entire series basically hopefully to really draw not just kids but the theology of understanding I mean who God is.  God really doesn’t think the way we think.  And if we go and try to understand God through the animals then we can understand Noah’s Ark.  So that’s what the Giant Leaf came from because God really put things in fair organic form and the great news is that God came as a human.  He didn’t come as a UFO or a superpower being, he came as one of us humans; very humble as a baby on the manger.

So the whole entire story is the same thing with Noah and the Noah’s Ark story.  He displayed a message of salvation through a giant leaf that’s floating in the water.  My story happened to have dinosaurs because they were the slave driver.  They oppressed them and they beat all the mammals on the ground.  And all the animals want to do one day is live free from the masters.  So that was where the idea came from.  All the animals wanted to be free from this big giant and they had no idea this giant flood was coming.  So all the animals had these dreams and they just have to leave and forsake their comfort place and they have to go find this giant leaf.  Eventually they went north and saw this monster with a big mouth and the three main characters who were hitchhiking to this leaf; a monkey, a fox, and a koala bear are kind of puzzled and thinking why would they go in there all by themselves?

So eventually the flood came and they realized the only salvation was that animal eater so they went inside it and didn’t realize it was the best party in the world in this monster that Noah created to believe.  I took that and just went on to different series which is Fire Fish and now Jordan’s Guest, which is the donkey’s guest, who is Jesus.

Dr. Kent:  Tell me a little bit about when you say okay I need to breathe some life into this donkey, how do you go about doing that?

Davy Liu:  Breathing life into the donkey I would say that very much would be a personal thing.  I feel like I’m kind of that donkey because being Chinese growing up in a culture where my academic just doesn’t excel.  I mean I had a C minus average (C-) throughout my entire academics and thanks to my parents who saved me and brought me to America where I could at least have a crutch saying that I don’t speak English so therefore I have a right to get bad grades.

That worked for about four or five years until I graduated from college and then I went to art school.  So living in that culture where everybody’s grade point average is maybe 4.0 I was just a loser you know?  I had no purpose and the one thing that I love is art.  Somehow because I realized that was a gift that God has given me and I’m able to live freely and just enjoy that.  So Jordan the donkey is the same thing.  The donkey was tied in the yard and all the barn animals like the sheep, the cow, the camel and the horses, they all have a purpose, and basically this donkey is tied in the middle of the barn.

All the tourists that come to Jerusalem want to ride the horses and the camel to go see Jerusalem.  They certainly don’t want to ride the short legged donkey but at the end of the story this donkey was used for The Savior and then the donkey became so famous he became the donkey that everybody wants to come and see when the donkey was the secondary character.  I think because the story is not so much the donkey because it’s not who you are, if God uses you you’re wise and radiant.  Like there’s no tomorrow in how God can use you and that’s what I did.  I said, God I don’t have much I just have this artistic gift and I want to just serve You and just glorify You.  Not to be preachy but I want people to know that He really loves humanity in a big way.

Dr. Kent:  So you grew up Chinese you said in was it Thailand?

Davy Liu:  Taiwan.

Dr. Kent:  In Taiwan and you’ve been back to China and you lead tours.  Is that correct?

Davy Liu:  Oh many years yeah.  I paint so I do a China tour every October we go to China and I love China.  I mean I just love the people there.

Dr. Kent:  What do you think about the Olympics there?

Davy Liu:  Oh I think it’s awesome and the Chinese went over the top to run a show its like look at us, you know?  That’s great.  Good for them.  It’s really going to be tough to top that one, whoever gets handed the next baton of an Olympic opening, that’s a tough one to top.  I know they poured millions and millions of dollars of their own money just to impress and that’s because they can.

Dr. Kent:  That opening ceremony was pretty amazing and quite artistic actually.

Davy Liu:  Oh really good.  The director, the movie director ### is really amazing with visual stunning stuff so they did a good job.

Dr. Kent:  Let’s talk a little bit about your career, where you want to go and what your next projects are.  You told us about the book from the donkey’s perspective but what else are you working on?

Davy Liu:  Basically I own the preproduction company called Kendu Films and what we do is we pretty much do preproduction design for other companies.  But my dream is hopefully that we get enough; we’ve got a broker now and we’re trying to get the first book, The Giant Leaf, which you can get on Amazon also, to go on to a movie.  I wrote this thing when I was working on The Lion King and I wrote it as a movie script first.  So I want to keep going with the series because I think in Hollywood right now they lack a lot of strong content and what I want to continue to do is produce excellent family entertainment content so that hopefully our culture will be impacted by it.

My passion is really not to create another Pixar.  I think our culture needs to have a very strong value on human rights and that human right comes from God.  It’s not because humans say so and that value is based on who God thinks we are and I’d like to continue that kind of strong based belief in our system, especially in America.  We’re losing that kind of value so my goal is to continue to keep doing every single book from the bible from the animal perspective.  My goal is to finish the twelve books and hopefully by then we’ve got some kind of movie film going and an ongoing thing in the pop culture.  Again my passion is not to cater this thing to Christians or anybody that believes in my theories, I just want to allow them to enjoy from a new perspective of who God is.

Dr. Kent:  It seems fascinating and how will you find all the rest of the animals?  Are there that many animals in the bible?

Davy Liu:  Oh there are lots of animals!  There are a lot.  I’m doing a lion’s perspective of the Book of Daniel and a camel’s perspective of Apostle Paul when he got blind because he was a super murderer.  I mean he was going around crucifying all the Christians and oppressed them and the camel witnessed this bright light.  So that’s one and then I’m doing a whales perspective of Jonah.  The whale had a hernia, swallowed Jonah and realized he’s got something really unique that he didn’t even realize he was swallowing in those big teeth of his.

Then we’re doing a mystical animal in the Garden of Eden and the animals are all going to look very bizarre in the Garden of Eden the first time they witness a human was created.  They came and ruled the garden and they destroy the garden so there’s a lot of stuff in the bible.  It’s really very exciting and then the Jordan story, I mean in the Old Testament God used a donkey that spoke to the prophet and say why are you hitting me?  I mean that type of stuff is really stuff that’s a lot of humor that God really did enhance in the bible.

Dr. Kent:  Well it’s been a fascinating discussion.  Where can we find out about all your projects?

Davy Liu:  You can go to kendufilms.com.  At Kendu the main character is the giant leaf and also you can find all the projects I’m working on.

Dr. Kent:  Well it’s been a real honor and I love what you do so I’ll keep checking it out.

Davy Liu:  Thank you very much, I appreciate it.

Dr. Kent:  Have a great day.  Now my next guest on the show will be Lillian Brummet with her book Trash Talk: An Inspirational Guide to Saving Time and Money Through Better Waste and Resource Management.  That will be interesting.  Come on back for it.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Childrens, Comics, Art, TRANSCRIPTS, Spirituality, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Inspiration, Religion, PODCAST 

Interview with Stefan Sagmeister | Sound Authors Radio

November 2, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  Welcome to Sound Authors!  Today is Friday, June 13th.  It’s thought of as a pretty spooky day, an unlucky day but let’s think of it as a unique day, one we don’t see that often.  It’s the birthday of William Butler Yates; of course he’s not around anymore, he died 69 years ago but he was born on this day in 1865 and much more to think about on this day.  I have four guests on the show.  My first guest is world famous artist, author, and ne’er do well Stephan Sagmeister.  My second guest is Julia Hallisy, my third guest will be Aaron Lazar and my last guest is a musician of course on sound authors we always feature musicians along with the authors and her name is Molly Mason of the famous duet of Jay Ungar and Molly Mason.  My first guest, his name is Stephan Sagmeister and he is well known for doing among other things cover art for the Rolling Stone, Lou Reed and many others.  His new book is called In My Life So Far.  Its gorgeous, it’s striking, it’s new.  Welcome to the show Stephan Sagmeister.

 Stephen Sagmeister:  Thanks so much for having me, it’s a pleasure. 

Dr. Kent:  Did I say your name correctly?

 Stephen Sagmeister:  Absolutely.

 Dr. Kent:  Tell me a little bit about this book, In My Life So Far.  It’s so interesting. It’s not something that you page from page to page.  You can lay it out across the table, you can mix and match.  What was the idea behind it?

 Stephen Sagmeister:  Well it’s basically a little magazine that I found in my diary.  At one time I had set down and really tried to think about what had I actually done so far in my life.  What do I know by now and made a little list.  It was one of the many lists that I made.  In my design company we work for clients and even there we started to get clients that really gave us an incredible amount of freedom that basically said oh we have a book that we want to fill up but we don’t want to fill it up with promotional advertising, what can we fill it with? 

 So in answer to that question we take things from the diary and these little things I’ve learned from my life so far and published them.  To give you an example, let’s say the city of Paris has billboards and we took five billboards with very large, complex typography put up there trying to look good in my life.  The magazine comes out of this realization that my fear of competition or the designer always to be the nice guy can be fairly limiting in itself.  We put it up all over Paris; it seemed like a very self indulgent thing for me at the time but we got lots of reaction. 

 It wasn’t not only oh can you send me a print I would like to glue them next to my toilet bowl and reminded of it.  As we went along, more and more reactions came and we did more and more magazines, pretty much all over the world.  The book Things I’ve Done in My Life So Far really features I think 20 of them.  Originally they show from Japan to Lisbon and put all together in publication.

 Dr. Kent:  Not only do you have this In My Life So Far, this brand new book, but there’s a website where you invite other people to contribute.  Tell me a little about www.thingsihavelearnedinmylife.com.

 Stephen Sagmeister:  So that’s because of the book about eight weeks ago we put that site up inviting everybody who thinks that they have learned something.  Of course I would invite all of your listeners to write that down and design it in a way that they feel is appropriate to what they’ve learned and then upload it.  You just go to thingsihavelearnedinmylife.com and in the beginning you can check out all the stuff up there.  

 There are hundreds of magazines up there that have been put up.  There’s a wonderful book up there already.  I remember I think one of the things that comes to my mind quickly is a taste for a sort of two image piece up there where you are going down a mountain says if you are not crashing you are not trying and the second picture you see him all bruised up with a big fat smile on his face and says you are not trying.

 Dr. Kent:  What inspired you to do this book?  You had friends that said look at all these journal entries or was it in yourself that you decided to do this?  Where was the core of the project?

 Stephen Sagmeister:  As a designer I actually do a good number of presentations and here and there you know about our book.  Sometimes in front of channel audiences, sometimes in front of live audiences pretty much around the world and here and there I show some pieces of the series and I always got the most resonance with them. 

 So I started to do presentations that only had these series in there, that didn’t show any of our other books, no record covers, no identity just to see pieces and again I got a very good resonance.  So from there it was a pretty short step to say oh it probably must be a neat thing to have all 20 of them collected for a presentation.

 Dr. Kent:  What exactly when you were a young artist where did your style develop?  Because in looking at this book and looking at your websites, in looking at your album covers and all of that you have a style.  Where did that start to form?

 Stephen Sagmeister:  Well I grew up in the Austrian Alps in a very small town that is a beautiful area so I think that was one set of influences that definitely came from there.  Starting with the apartment I grew up in, there were many signs from my granddad hanging about.  My granddad was a known sign painter early in the 19th century.  So we had a lot of his magazines here in and he was a conservative man but he was long gone by the end of the 19th century.  He was still working in that style as he carefully got typography on them. 

 That’s basically what the situation in our apartment.  Outside, if you take a step outside there was a lake in the Austrian Alps a good number of ### that again would sell little ### with magazines on them.  Then I went to Oslo which of course is much more open influences in the depression but also in England we had a group called the Vienna 1900 in the recession that also new England was from in the 70s we had a group and it was called the Influential Group in Vienna Extremists of a great number of famous artists or important artists in Austria came out of. 

 I think because I grew up in a small town I always had this desire to live in a big city.  The first time I saw New York I realized very quickly that this was kind of the mogul of metropolis was a symbol of a big city and I wanted to live here and got a scholarship to study here.  I’ve loved it ever since.

 Dr. Kent:  With your design and your artwork it’s always fascinating that whatever you’re doing it seems like it’s emerging out of the space that’s already there if its something that’s concrete.  Who did you look at as being influences?  Was it Warhol, was it the abstract artists?  Where was your great inspiration?

 Stephen Sagmeister:  Probably the biggest thing influencing my life was another designer who used to be a boss of mine.  His name is Peter Collins.  He used to run a company here in New York called ### company.  He probably might be best known for being the creator of that magazine called Colors that was a very influential magazine in the 80s and 90s. 

 I would think that him and his staffs approach as well as his socially caring approach and big heart really was a big influence from many angles.  I always kept my studio very small because in the design world the only thing more difficult than design is to figure out how not to grow.  Everything else is pretty easy and that turned out to be very virtual and in many other cases.  Peter died very early that I’m still very good friends with his widow Myra Collins who is a fantastic illustrator I know in her own right.

 Dr. Kent:  You have a unique thought about branding.  Branding is of course in the business world, everything is the brand.  What’s your take on that?

 Stephen Sagmeister:  I think that many other things its power is completely over estimated by the practitioners.  If you listen to the head of an international branding agency, you will think that they have influence over our minds that we couldn’t even begin to understand.  At one time I worked in these places and we met many of the people who were running these places.  By and large they are a surprisingly unintelligent group of people that would love to manipulate our ways but when it comes down to it not quite intelligent enough to me. 

 In most cases I found that the average consumer make decisions on the quality of a product or a service if that product is in a category that is actually possible.  I think branding has surprisingly little influence in product and service categories, we can know the difference.  Coffee for example, most people know the difference between a good cup of coffee and a bad cup of coffee, branding though is almost a stamp of approval but in a minor role.  A bigger role is how good is that cup of coffee?  In other categories, let’s say vodka.  Vodka consumers have not a clue between a good vodka and a bad vodka and they of course base their decisions on is it a beautiful bottle, do I like the name? 

 Typical branding items.  But I think that those categories where the consumer really doesn’t have a clue are in the minority.  In most other ways its pretty much is the product good or is the product bad?  If you look at a brand realistically of course its part of the brand but its not what most international branding agencies have an influence on.  It’s basically the company.

 Dr. Kent:  So, you’re sort of well known for this what they call hand-made design, which is something that is really gorgeous and sometimes shocking.  Where did those ideas come from and how have they been accepted by the public?

 Stephen Sagmeister:  Well I think that I’ve realized that we now have about 80 years of modernism.  If I look at the foundation of modernism, be it ###, its been 80 years and at least 40-50 of those 80 years modernism has been predating the dominant styles throughout the world of pretty much anything.  Be it product design or graphic design.  And of course initially there was an incredible reason and desire for this simplicity and this form full of function for this to happen.  

 Now that we have it as the status quo over the years, an unbelievable amount of simple boring things have come out of this movement and very much mechanical development has happened.  If you ask a regular consumer, I don’t know if I ask my mom who designed this book or who designed this website?  She would probably think a machine did it.  Or, who designed this newspaper?  She would be completely unaware.  She would be aware that there was a journalist who wrote that article but she would be totally unaware that there was probably a designer designing the typeface, designing how that article was laid out and that there was many meetings involved behind it.  So I think there is a pretty valid sense of making or bringing some subjectivity back into this. 

 Some human touch if you will and I’m not even arguing that every piece of design should be done per se, I don’t know say a time table for the port authority probably doesn’t need to have a human touch it can show a table that shows the time in a pleasing and concise manner.  But even there, let’s say that I look at the emergency exit instructions in the planes.  I actually collect these things.  I have hundreds of them.  They look the same pretty much from every airline.  You have the modernist, simplistic icons of little figures, some of those pulling on emergency handles and so on. 

 Now pretty much in every plane I’ve ever been when they do the emergency drill it almost never see anybody taking that card out of the backseat pocket in front of them and actually look at it because they’re just so boring.  There’s now a couple of airlines, Virgin Atlantic is one of them, that redesigned those much sweeter with a little bit of fun in it.  They tell you the same content in a more pleasing manner.  Last time I took a plane to London on Virgin, I actually, not the whole plane, but I saw eight, nine, ten people actually checking it out.  So I think even in these very factual very dry situations, there is room for some more emotion.

 Dr. Kent:  It’s really been an honor speaking with you and through the years in perusing through your biography its extraordinary how many places I have seen your artwork in the past from album covers to other things.  This book is extraordinary.  In My Life So Far; it’s beautiful, it’s something you can, I mean I plan to put it on the table and look at it again and again.  So it’s been a real honor, this is a gorgeous book.

 Stephen Sagmeister:  Well, thank you very much.  It’s been a pleasure.

 Dr. Kent:  My next guest on the show will be a woman named Julia Hallisy; come on back for that, its going to be a good one.

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