Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu [above] holds the world record for inventions – over 3,000 in total – including the floppy disk, the karaoke machine, the taxi meter, the CD, the DVD and the digital watch.

He claims that many of his best ideas come underwater, at the moment half a second before death due to oxygen deprivation, and between midnight and 4am – what he calls ‘the golden time’ – after which he gets four hours sleep – he says any more than 6 hours sleep a night leads to decreased brainpower.

“Underwater there is no oxygen, therefore, just before death, 0.5 seconds before death, I can suddenly create new invention, because of lack of oxygen – brain condition is completely different from normal condition… Brain becomes completely different power and creates completely different new idea. Under the water suddenly comes from another world, different idea comes”

[I'm quoting verbatim, so as not to misquote]

In order to write down his ideas in the moment just after he has had them, he has also invented a notepad which can be used underwater.

He also doesn’t seem too hot on brainstorming for the purposes of invention:

“Completely alone is very important – you know this so-called exchanging ideas several people discussing this, mean nothing to create new invention. Invention submit to only one person… every discussion is waste of time”

As for his motives for inventing:

“I’m not doing invention for make money, my special invention is love. By my invention, every people in the world will become happy – that is my love to them”

As heard on ‘Jon Ronson on Being Alone‘, radio program on BBC Radio 4.

[I could listen to that awesome accent all day..]

Of course we are challenging nature itself, and it hits back, it just hits back that’s all, and that’s grandiose about it, and we have to accept that it is much stronger than we are.
Kinski always says it’s full of erotic elements, I don’t see it so much erotic, I see it more full of obscenity, it’s just… and nature here is violent and base – I wouldn’t see anything erotic[al] here, I would see fornication and asphixiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away.

Of course there is a lot of misery but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery and I don’t think they sing they just screech in pain.

It’s an unfinished country, it’s still pre-historical. The only thing that is lacking is the dinosaurs here. It’s like a curse weighing on an entire landscape, and whoever goes too deep into this has his share of that curse – so we are cursed with what we are doing here. It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. It’s the only land where creation is unfinished [yet].

Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of a harmony; it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder . And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel.

And… we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe, we have to get aquainted with this idea; there is no real harmony as we have concieved it.
But when I say this I say this full of all admiration for the jungle, it is not that I hate it, I love it; I love it very much – but I love it against my better judgement.

From another segment of ‘The Burden Of Dreams’:

It’s not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well, and the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about; it’s as simple as that. And I make films because I have not learned anything else, and I know I can do it to a certain degree, and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves otherwise we would be cows in the field.

A good article by Jessica Hopper here: ‘In Which Nature Is Lars Von Trier’s Satanic Church‘, where she puts Herzog’s comments into the context of what she sees as Lars Von Trier’s misogynist ‘Antichrist‘ [I haven't seen it - and not sure I really want to], and argues that here “nature = evil, nature = woman’s nature, women = naturally evil”.

FB: I do believe that today, or you could say modern man, wants a sensation, really, without the boredom of it’s conveyance, or to cut down conveyance as far as possible, so that you just give over the sensation.

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FB: You can’t any more do illustration, because it’s done so much better by the camera and by the cinema, so…you have to really concentrate on making….Not illustration of reality, but to create images which are a concentration of reality and a shorthand of sensation.

There’s this deep sea which we call the unconscious which we know nothing about, I always hope the most wonderful images will emerge from it. I believe in a deeply ordered chaos…in my work.
The images that I try to make I still at the same time want them to look very ordered.

In the very first place…When they come up you’re not in control of them, but when the image seems to emerge, then to make it, you have to control it. In painting with oils, you make an image and it’s changing all the time, and then it’s to do with your own instincts and sensibility, which turns it one way or another. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t got an overall idea of the type of thing that I would have liked to make, but I don’t know how to make it.

MB: Why are you so attracted to photographs?
FB: Well, I’ve looked at every type of photograph, of wild animals, of movement, or every type of photograph – I don’t really care what the photographs are, they just interest me, and every so often certain photographs bring up images, particularly like a lot of these photographs they’ve taken of wild animals and I suppose there is another side to that too, that the movement of animals is – the actual muscular movement probably has something to do with the structure of many things I would like to do. They are even stronger than the things that Muybridge did on movement of both the human body and of animals.

But I find that very often they are less interesting than the things that have been taken as you said just, as it were, a momentary photograph.

MB: Is that because the fact of, that is, something to do with that specific thing, is happening in that specific time, and nothing else, and there’s something about that instant inalienable fact that seems to you to be realer than anything else?

FB: Yes, you put it very clearly. I think that’s exactly what it is – there it is; it is itself, and it’s nothing else.

MB: And is there a sense that you want your paintings to have a similar….impact.

FB: Certainly, I would like to have them, I would like my paintings to have the same immediate effect that you see of this photograph of this animal after the kill.

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MB: Why the meat, what attracted you to that?

FB: I used to think how marvellous, these extraordinary carcasses are, hanging in great butchers shops, hanging from the wall – how amazing their colour was, how beautiful they looked.

MB: You say they’re beautiful, a lot of people looking at your paintings think of them as…horror images, images of shock, images of blood and dread and not beautiful at all.

FB: Well, the thing is, what horror, what could I make to compete [with] what goes on every single day, if you read the newspapers, if you look at television, if you know what’s going on in the world – what could I do that competes with the horror that’s going on? Except that I have tried to make images of it. I have tried to recreate it and make, not the horror, but I’ve tried to make images of realism.

MB: So when we’re looking at your paintings, we’re looking at the real world?

FB: Yes, I believe you are. After all between birth and death, it’s always been the same thing there’s always been this aspect, always of, not aspect but it’s what it is – it is the violence of life.

FB: I always think that they’re images of sensation. After all what is life, but sensation? What we feel, what happens…

MB: What happens at the moment…

FB: What happens at the moment.

MB: Do you think there’s anything that exists apart from the moment?

FB: No.

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FB: I believe in nothing. We are born and we die and that’s it – there’s nothing else.

FB: My impulse is my life, my impulse is that…I’m an old man, but I’m profoundly optimistic…about nothing.

MB: How can you be optimistic about nothing, Francis?

FB: I can be. Just existing for a moment. Exisiting today makes me optimistic.

MB: Optimistic about what?

FB: Nothing. I’m optimistic about nothing. I’m just born with that kind of optimistic nature. I’m just optimistic about nothing.

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“Flesh and meat are life! If I paint red meat as I paint bodies it is just because I find it very beautiful. I don’t think anyone has ever really understood that. Ham, pigs, tongues, sides of beef seen in the butcher’s window, all that death, I find it very beautiful. And it’s all for sale! how unbelievably surrealistic!”
“I often imagine that the accident that made man into the animal he has become also happened to other animals – lions or hyenas for example – while man remained a primate…I imagine men hanging in butcher’s shops for hyenas, who would be dressed in fur coats. The men would be hung by their feet, or cut up for stew or kebabs.”

Francis Bacon, Exclusive interview with Francis Giacobetti, 1991-2, The Art Newspaper, June 2003.
From here.

THE PAOMNNEHAL PWEOR OF THE HMUAN MNID

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.

Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

The Colony Room

“…The Colony thus became a kind of anti-Cheers, where everyone would probably have known your name, but would ignore this and instead refer to you as ‘cunty’. “

“Some songs,” he has learned, “don’t want to be recorded.” Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like “digging potatoes out of the ground”. Others are sticky and weird, like “gum found under an old table”.
Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful “to cut up as bait and use ‘em to catch other songs”. Of course, the best songs of all are those that enter you “like dreams taken through a straw”. In those moments, all you can be, Waits says, is grateful.

From an original article by Elizabeth Gilbert in American GQ.
The whole GQ interview is here – I’m not linking to the GQ site because it’s shit, and apparently in german.

From his diary A Year With Swollen Appendices:

“Starting to think that all of the world’s major problems can be solved with either oyster sauce or backing vocals.”

Pic from MOJO Magazine, I think.