IN THIS ISSUE
- A Guatemalan Funeral

- Cookies for Harry

- Custom - 'Hey Mister'

- Extract in Motion

- Game Trailer - 4x4 Evo 2

- Game Trailer - Shaun Palmer's Pro Snowboarding

- Marc Brickman: Master of LSD

- Movie Trailer - "Made"

- Native America - Real History from the Inside Out

- One New Idea: Author Daniel Quinn and the Birth of Ishmael

- Rich Mackin - Consumer Defense Corporate Poet

- The Fame Game

- The Mad Capsule Markets

- The Polyphonic Spree

- Way of the Mantis

One New Idea: Author Daniel Quinn and the Birth of Ishmael -Damon Brown

New ideas, and I mean really, truly NEW ideas, are few and far between. These are the type of thoughts than hit you in a surprising, yet familiar, moment of clarity as you read or experience them. These are thoughts that make you physically feel as though a new portion of your mind has been opened. These are ideas that, while new and inventive, seem almost like common sense in their simplicity. The most innovative and thoughtful of ideas always touches a part of the mind that, in principle, knew it all along. They make sense because they're made of just that - sense.

My father actually introduced me to the work of author Daniel Quinn in the early 1990s. He found such a personal comradeship in Quinn's book Ishmael that he immediately went out and bought copies for all his friends and family. It became a tradition for a time: the ritualistic giving of Ishmael.

"Have you ever read any Daniel Quinn? No? Well it just so happens I have a copy of his book right here. Give it a read, why don't you ? I can wait."

Later, I found this was a common occurrence among Quinn's readers. My father was not the only one with backordered copies at Waldenbooks.

Last fall, Daniel Quinn and his wife Rennie graciously agreed to be interviewed for SubstanceTV. What you see on the DVD is only the barest of introductions to this very interesting team. Daniel and Rennie are living examples that sometimes work-life and real-life can become just as harmonious as everyone dreams it might be. As Daniel himself said to me (paraphrased of course) - sometimes when we're on vacation, I just find myself wondering "when can we go home?"

We've placed a number of longer excerpts from the interview here on the site for those that would like to go deeper. I purposefully left out quite a bit of specific detail on the nature of Quinn's books simply because my paraphrasing and summarizing is a poor substitute for actually reading his works yourself. If you haven't read any of them, I would encourage you to give it a try, someday soon. And if they tell you it's on backorder at the bookstore, well, I'm sorry about that. Maybe I'll give you one when they come in.

Damon Brown is SubstanceTV's Director of DVD Development