“Water Music,” by John Seabrook in the January 11, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, tells the story of Mark Fuller — “the closest thing the world has to a fountain genius” — and the background of the new fountain he designed at Lincoln Center.  Mr. Fuller runs a company called Water Entertainment Technologies (WET), credited with bringing  ”a new language to fountain architecture.”

To me, the story is an elegant depiction of the straight line a person’s life can take when it is informed by a single idea.  Simply put, Mr. Fuller always loved channeling water.

In Mr. Fuller’s childhood, according to Mr. Seabrook, “when the snow began to melt, water would rush down the sloped streets, and Mark would make elaborate networks of snow dikes, sluices and spillways for the water to flow through.”  As a young teen-ager, he visited the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland, which inspired a backyard project “complete with lagoons and underwater tunnels, using an old washing-machine motor to propel the water through the system.”  And when in college studying engineering, he saw a film on “laminar flow, a well-known principle in hydraulics” and “for his senior honors thesis … decided to build a laminar-flow fountain” — his course was set.

In hindsight, the straight line of an idea such as Mr. Fuller’s is very clear.  It all seems so simple. Almost fore-ordained.  But we shouldn’t discount the courage it takes to recognize, adopt, develop and adhere to an idea that is so strong it sustains a person throughout his life.

“The irony of the name is that people will think, ‘He must have spent all of two minutes working on that name.’  Right.  Two minutes and two years.  It’s hard to find something that sounds as if it’s been there all along, even if it’s been there all along.”

From a “You’re the Boss” blog entry reprinted in The New York Times issue of April 5, 2010 (quoting Bruce Buschel on how difficult it was to come up with a name for his new restaurant).

” … I move continually in and out of sleep when I’m working.  It’s as if sleep were a corridor to my imagination and my characters are at the end of that corridor.  I used to be ashamed of my writing habits but then I realized that that was how I find my characters.”

From a Brigid Grauman Q&A with French author Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt in the April 24/25, 2010 issue of the Financial Times.

For 33 years, a Brooklyn artist/craftsman named Beriah Wall has been leaving his own small, individual mark on things.   Make that marks, that is — hundreds of thousands of them, apparently.

You see, since 1977, Mr. Wall has been making his own “currency” and leaving coins of it here there and anywhere he goes in New York City, for anyone to pick up.  Given the way New York is, these coins have found their way all over the world.

In “Statements by an Artist, for the Palms of Strangers,” David Gonzalez told Mr. Wall’s story in the March 17, 2010 issue of The New York Times.

“Mr. Wall was a potter in Vermont when he conceived the idea of giving away small chunks of ceramics.  He was manning the parking lot at a crafts fair, charging $2 per car.  The fee did not go over well with customers, who wondered why they had to pay anything to park in a field.  ’I sliced out little pieces of clay squares and gave them to people,’ he said.  ’And they all liked it.  They smiled.  It was immediate.  So, bada-bing, I ran with it.’”

Now in semi-retirement from his paid gig as a plasterer — “(the coins) have not put any real money into Mr. Wall’s bank account” — Mr. Wall refined his approach slightly over the years.  He uses coin-sized blanks, around 2,000 of them a week.  Before being fired in his “basement studio” kiln, each coin is painted, then stamped with his initials, a date and whatever phrase or work strikes him: “… Bling, Made, Good, Real, Pro, To Have, To Hold … The big phrase last year was a nod to the economy: Income/Outcome.”

“As Henry Ford said at the launch of the Model T: ‘If I’d asked the customer, he’d have asked for a faster horse.’”

From “Why Focus Groups Tell You the Obvious,” a column by Luke Johnson in the March 24, 2010 issue of the Financial Times (decrying the over-use of focus groups in market research).

“When she was 12 years old, her sister gave her a drum set … Her drumming has srongly influenced her art practice: when making repetitive brushstrokes and hatch marks, she thinks of the rhythm of a drumbeat, she says.”

From a profile of artist Beatriz Monteavaro by Elisa Turner in the February 2010 issue of ARTNews.

“Many an idea for a McQueen extravaganza had begun as a sketch on a humble English beer mat.”

From an article about the life and suicide of English designer Alexander McQueen in “The Final Bow,” by Cathy Horyn, in the April 4, 2010 issue of The New York Times (referring to the times that Mr. McQueen and his friend and fellow designer Shaun Leane spent together at  their “old haunts”).