I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought
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A Refutation of the "Say Yes and Never Do It" Philosophy
Film director Mel Brooks shared his survival trick in his memoir: "say yes and never do it." For example, when a studio executive told him to fire Gene Wilder, Brooks answered that Wilder would never be seen again, all the while keeping him as the star of the film. Brooks smiled and said "yes" to all demands, then completely ignored them. Brooks' logic was that trying to explain or convince another of your perspective rarely works, so it's easier to seem agreeable and do what one will anyway. Yet aren't there at least two problems with Brooks' advice?
Brooks was right that explaining isn't the thing to do. Even so, as a Hollywood elite, it's unlikely that Brooks was ever truly anyone's flunky, and so he could get away with never following orders from higher up. That's the problem with celebrity advice: it comes from places of privilege and is addressed to people in general as if they, too, could apply it and get away with it. The rules simply aren't the same in different social spheres. Still, there might be something to learn from the first half of Brooks' survival trick.
What if one says "yes" to any demand, no matter how disagreeable, and then seeks to work with those demands as challenges to make an even better product? It may feel impossible to imagine Brooks' Young Frankenstein without Gene Wilder, but that doesn't mean that another actor couldn't have offered a more brilliant performance. Consider director Lars von Trier's interesting documentary The Five Obstructions, in which he challenges another filmmaker to remake a favorite movie five times, each according to a different "obstruction" or obstacle. One obstruction was to film in Cuba but to use no set. Others were to never show a main character, to film in the worst place in the world but not show that place on screen, and to present everything as a cartoon. The premise, of course, was that arbitrarily imposed obstacles would stimulate better art. We might relate this concept to the wisdom teaching that life is full of challenges and suffering precisely because we don't spiritually evolve without them. Laboratory rats who are placed in utopian environments with plentiful food and no predators live shorter lives, presumably bored to death by lack of stimulation. So the question is, what if we say "yes" to a demand we don't like and then follow through anyway, dropping our egos and our insistence that our preconceived notions can be the only way. It's not that some executive behind a desk should necessarily dictate how art is made — it's more about an artist embracing even misguided suggestions as challenges to be embraced so as to elevate the art. On a personal note, though I'm now intrigued by the power of saying "no" to every question (addressed in this article), I've very many times said "yes" to requests that I'd otherwise never pursue, just because such requests would take my art down avenues that would never have otherwise been accessed. My band Neons Gone Mad has been asked to use our Tesla spirit radio and haunted grandfather clockwork to transmogrify all sorts of famous songs that we're not especially fond of, but having said "yes" to those suggestions, some amazing recordings transpired. For our horror comedy series Grave Mood Rings, we've followed through on viewer and co-writer suggestions that we were personally quite skeptical of, but those ideas ended up manifesting some of our favorite episodes to date. In the face of such personal experience as well as von Trier's Five Obstructions documentary, the advice to "say yes and never do it" rings of myopic, elitist egomania.
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Possibly Supernatural, Surely Today's Most Inspiring Artist
“Vampire photographer”? “Archaeologist of the soul”? Some artists figuratively “walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” Nadine Dinter of Berlin very literally does, and she has the pictures to prove it. Outside of her day job, her work as a necropolis photographer, recording artist, perfumer, and model invariably touches upon love and death, beauty and decay, doom and elation, mourning and resurrection. You’ve heard of human energy fields, but Nadine seeks to capture the auras of statues and the uncanny glamor of hidden doorways and atmospheric pathways in the gothic world she navigates. Then, her music and her perfume ensure a richly sensual experience of her visual work. These are just some of the reasons Nadine Dinter is being called the most inspiring artist working today. But let’s dive deeper into her world.
 In the process of sharing her creativity online and in art galleries, Nadine teaches, too, by helping her audience to understand how a photographer sees the world and how the composition of a shot can utterly transform the viewer’s reaction to a scene. She even offers videos of locations, to give a sense of the greater environment before showing the still photograph she ultimately captured. More context is offered in the captions, including historical backgrounds as well as notes on easily missed details, symbolism, and Nadine’s own emotional experience of each place. The viewer is invited to see through Nadine’s eyes, even while learning to discern with more sensitivity.
As an independent creator, Nadine has her hands in a lot of pots, or more like one big cauldron that encompasses the artistic witchery of her many-faceted world. Let’s seek to better understand how all the elements began to coalesce:
1. Nadine began traveling to Paris and Madrid to explore sculpture photography in the late 1990s. By 2024, that genre had merged with model portraiture into a "TransMutation" series. Her photography of cemetery statuary is frequently exhibited in galleries such as this one.
2. Last year, to add an acoustic dimension to her work, she became a gothic recording artist called d1ntr, collaborating with the post-punk band Hex Formes. Her lyrics and vocals are rooted in the emotions that spring from life’s transformations, addressing her holistic approach to turning pain into beauty, darkness into light.
3. This year, to capture the moods and smells of the statuary gardens and cemeteries she visits, so as to bring more dimensions to the sensual experience of her photography, she crafted a signature scent, “TransMutations,” through the Warsaw perfume lab Mo61.
4. As a muse to other artists, she has inspired songs like “Vampyre Everything” by Scott Baker Graham and imagery by Boris Eldagsen.
5. As a supporter of fellow artists, she began conducting interviews in 2019 (such as this one with Paolo Ventura).
6. As a collector of exotic jewelry selected and collected from all over the world, she makes guest appearances (as in this episode of Grave Mood Rings). Most of her rings feature pentagrams, scarabs and snakes, tied to her fascination with ancient Egypt.
7. Simultaneously, as a model, Nadine has been compared to Isabella Rossellini and has posed for photographers like Greg Gorman, George Holz, Thomas Karsten, Martin Eder, Boris Eldagsen, Catrine Val, Just Loomis, Katja Ruge, Steven Kohlstock, Gerhard Kassner, Felix Lammers and others. Eder's portrait was recently used for the album cover "Tales of Immortality." This portrait by fellow cemetery photographer and darkwave scene promoter DominiQ.D is a personal favorite of mine.
Even while juggling so very many projects, Nadine is friendly, accessible, outgoing, and proactively helpful to others. She truly lives by her motto, “consult, communicate, connect,” as I learned firsthand when she first reached out to me via her Instagram to express supportiveness of my own indie endeavors.
Photo credits: © Greg Gorman (top portrait), Boris Eldagsen (snake portrait), Felix Lammers (graffiti portrait). By permission.
—Hailed by the art world as the most unusual scholar working today, Craig Conley fled academia to author Weiser Books' Magic Words: A Dictionary, HarperCollins' One-Letter Words: A Dictionary, and The Young Wizard's Hexopedia. Even more esoteric publications include Books of the Dead, Magic Archetypes, The Care and Feeding of a Spirit Board, Seance Parlor Feng Shui, How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook, Heirs to the Queen of Hearts: Tracing Magical Genealogy, Astrogalomancy, The One-Minute Mystic, and Divination by Punctuation. His work has been profiled in the New York Post, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, Publishers Weekly, The Associated Press, and dozens of others.
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[From our outpost at Spacey Panda Blog]
Which Book Would Be YOUR Constant Companion?
Books can serve as lucky charms, and some famous figures have kept special books on their persons as talismans or glorified guidebooks for navigating through life — and even through death, when they've asked for those books to be buried with them. A single volume as a manual for existence? That's not so farfetched, if one considers the holographic principle that a whole system (macrocosm) is mirrored and contained on a smaller scale (microcosm). Viewed that way, any one book encapsulates the entire human experience. If you don't already carry a single book everywhere you go, what might you choose? I uncovered a score of intriguing examples throughout history, but how about an unusual suggestion to consider first?
Wisdom traditions suggest that life is but a dream, so why not keep a dream dictionary to hand at all times so as to interpret all that we see and to foster "lucid waking"? There are A-Z dream manuals with tens of thousands of entries, covering most anything you might encounter during the course of your day. Some dream interpretations even relieve tensions you'd otherwise develop. For example, 12,000 Dreams Interpreted notes that encountering a hearse, which might typically seem an ill omen, actually means "a lightening of your burdens and worries." You'll see everything in a new way by wakefully consulting a dream dictionary.
Now for the score of examples, and we'll close with an alternative to lugging a heavy book around, for those who are already juggling enough every day.
- Eminent psychologist Carl Jung kept the Tibetan Book of the Dead as his "constant companion."
- President Abraham Lincoln always carried a copy of Artemus Ward's joke book to lighten his moods.
- Dutch humanist Hugo Grotius always carried a copy of the Roman poet Lucan in his pocket and kissed it several times in the course of the day.
- The philologist Sir William Jones always carried a copy of Horace in his pocket, and his will ordered that it should be buried with him.
- President of the Republic of Texas Sam Houston always carried a copy of Gulliver's Travels.
- Novelist Stephen Crane always carried a copy of Poe's work with him.
- Italian poet Giosuè Borsi always carried a copy of Dante in his coat pocket.
- General Stonewall Jackson always carried a copy of Napoleon's Maxims and a copy of the dictionary.
- French politician Jules Roche always carried a copy of Goethe's Faust in his pocket.
- Hollywood actor Sally Field always carried a copy of Will Durant's Story of Philosophy with her.
- Macedonian king Alexander the Great always carried a copy of Homer corrected by Aristotle. Likewise, the trailblazing pharmacist Charles Rice always carried a copy of the Odyssey in his coat pocket.
- The Tibetan Buddhist monk called the Red Lama always carried a copy of the New Testament in his red shawl.
- War correspondent Webb Miller always carried a copy of Thoreau's Walden, which he read whenever he was upset.
- English civil engineer Joseph Locke always carried a copy of Byron in his pocket.
- Naturalist, mathematician, and cosmologist Count de Buffon always carried a copy of the elements of Euclid.
- Social reformer Frederick Douglass always carried a copy of Noah Webster's American Spelling Book in his pocket.
- Hollywood actor William Eythe always carried a copy of The Life of Chopin in his pocket, just in case he ran into someone who would listen to him read it.
- Italian ruler Ludovico III always carried a copy of Caesar's Gallic Wars.
- British architect Inigo Jones always carried wherever he went the work of Venetian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio.
Another way to keep a vital text with oneself is to memorize a beloved passage and bring it to the forefront of one's mind at key junctures (important events, stressful moments, unexpected turning points, upon beginning or completing tasks, and so on). A friend has carried the following poem with her for decades, since childhood. I reproduce it below for two reasons: it's nifty in its own right, but it's also surprisingly rare. The search engine delivered zero results for it. But, being tenacious, in a very roundabout way I tracked it down to what appears to be its single instance on the internet, in the March 1934 issue of an obscure journal called The Hoosier Res-cuer (the hyphen is part of the title), which was published by the patients of a tuberculosis sanatorium in Rockville, Indiana.
So proudly now I'll hold my head
As each tomorrow comes
That those who look at me will think
I walk to singing drums.
And maybe some of them will say
They wish that life would be
Just half as gay and nice to them
As it has been to me.
If they should bring me little griefs
And little dreams to heal,
I think that I could help because
I'll know the way they feel.
—Helen Welshimer
The only word my friend had misremembered was in the third line. She had changed the word "think" to "know," having transformed brain-level mentation with the deeper heart-level knowing. By the way, 12,000 Dreams Interpreted says that to dream of poetry "betokens an interesting and unusual new friend." Could I be that new friend? I'm Prof. Oddfellow, a.k.a. Craig Conley. Let's get acquainted at MysteryArts.com.
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"Moon's tears, moon's tears, wait again a thousand years—water drown, and frizzle fire, give me now my heart's desire!" From "The Moon's Tears" by Laurence Alma Tadema, in The Children's Book, 1915.
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"Peter Puck wants to know if men who get on are better off." From The Children's Newspaper, 1932.
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Original Content Copyright © 2026 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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