It's a steal

One of my favorite things I've written in the last 15 years or so, is this demolition job on what I called "recreativity" - a.k.a. "everything is a remix", a.k.a. "copying is cool", a.k.a. "there's no such thing as originality"So it was funny to see this well-worn mission statement recycled in a f motivational book of aphorisms + illustrations (an echo itself of that famous McLuhan book with all the pix, The Medium is the Massage).Ha, ha - the twist at the end where he reveals that he nicked these pearls himself, from Jim Jarmusch. Clever-ish. But as is pointed out in my Recreativity piece, the key bit of the Godard quote that Jarmusch and now Arden brandish is "it's where you take them to". That, right there, is the aperture, the window, through which creep back the very properties of originality / genius / innovation that the recreativity mavens are trying so hard to exorcise and eliminate. Seeing that reminded of how desperately uninspiring I found the David Shields book Reality…