Entrepreneurs are known for being busy and constantly on the go. They often have multiple projects and ideas on the go, and are constantly looking for ways to stay organized and on top of their game. One way to do this is by using custom notebooks specifically designed for entrepreneurs. In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of using custom notebooks for entrepreneurs, how to create your own custom notebook, and some tips and tricks for using them to their full potential.
Benefits of Custom Notebooks for Entrepreneurs
There are many benefits to using custom notebooks for entrepreneurs. Here are a few of the most significant benefits:
Organization: Custom notebooks allow entrepreneurs to keep all of their ideas and projects in one convenient location, making it easy to stay organized. Click for more: https://www.anda-book.com/
Personalization: By creating their own custom notebook, entrepreneurs can design it to fit their specific needs and preferences, making it more personalized and enjoyable to use.
Time-saving: Custom notebooks can save entrepreneurs time by making it easier to find notes and ideas, allowing them to spend less time searching and more time working.
Inspiration: By keeping all of their ideas and projects in one place, entrepreneurs have easy access to them whenever they need inspiration or motivation to work on a new project.
Success: Custom notebooks can be a tool for success. By keeping track of their ideas and projects, entrepreneurs can make better decisions, stay focused on their goals, and ultimately achieve greater success.
Creating Your Own Custom Notebook
Now that we’ve discussed the benefits of custom notebooks, let‘s talk about how to create your own. Here are the steps you can follow to create your own custom notebook:
Choose the right notebook: The first step is to choose the right notebook. Look for a notebook that’s the right size and style for your needs. Some people prefer smaller notebooks that are easy to carry around, while others prefer larger notebooks with more space for writing.
Choose a theme: Once you’ve chosen your notebook, it’s time to choose a theme. You can choose a theme based on your business or industry, your goals, or your personal style.
Create a table of contents: To keep your notebook organized, create a table of contents. This will make it easy to find notes and ideas quickly.
Start taking notes: Now it’s time to start taking notes. Jot down ideas, goals, and to-do lists. Use your custom notebook to brainstorm and to keep track of your progress.
Use tabs and dividers: Use tabs and dividers to separate your notes and ideas into different categories. This will make it easy to find what you need quickly.
Tips and Tricks for Using Your Custom Notebook
Now that you have your custom notebook, it’s important to use it to its full potential. Here are some tips and tricks for using your custom notebook:
Keep it handy: Keep your notebooks with you at all times. You never know when inspiration will strike.
Use it for brainstorming: Use your custom notebook for brainstorming sessions. Write down all of your ideas, no matter how big or small.
Make it a habit: Make a habit of using your custom notebook every day. This will help you stay on top of your ideas and projects.
Keep it simple: Keep your notes simple and to the point. You don’t want to waste time writing down unnecessary details.
Review your notes: Take the time to review your notes regularly. This will help you stay focused on your goals and make better decisions.
In conclusion, custom notebooks are an excellent tool for entrepreneurs. By creating a personalized notebook, entrepreneurs can stay organized, save time, find inspiration, and achieve success.
Paramore stopped by Jimmy Kimmel Live last night (February 14) to perform ‘Running Out of Time’, a track from their latest album This Is Why. Watch it happen below.
PONY, the Toronto duo of Sam Bielanski and Matty Morand, have announced their sophomore LP, Velveteen. The follow-up to 2021’s TV Baby lands on May 19 via Take This to Heart Records. Listen to the new single ‘Tres Jolie’ below, and scroll down for the album artwork and tracklist.
“‘Très Jolie’ is obviously a love song. It’s about falling hard and fast, and allowing your love brain to trick you into believing that you’re in a healthier mental state than you truly are,” Bielanski said in a statement. “I know I tend to hide the ways that I struggle in the beginning of relationships because everything else feels brand new. ‘Très Jolie’ is about the conflicting emotions of falling in love with someone when you don’t quite love yourself yet.”
How do you capture something as messy and intangible as love? How do you pursue, actually believe in it? Can it be something to hold onto, untangled from the ephemeral trappings of desire? Try putting it into words, and you can’t help but navigate those questions through some form of figurative language. Thankfully, it’s a tool Caroline Polachek uses both deftly and imaginatively: “I’m feeling like a butterfly trapped inside a plane,” she sang on the Pang track ‘Hit Me Where It Hurts’, describing love – or romantic anticipation – as a dizzying, out-of-body experience. On ‘Butterfly Net’, a highlight from Polachek’s new album Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, we once again find her mid-flight, but the song moves to a different kind of transcendence: floating in a dream, love appears to her as an angel so radiant she can barely see herself. “There I was with my butterfly net/ Trying to catch your light,” she sings, soaring and desperate.
You’d figure the intense longing at the core of Pang could only have deepened in the years since – and you wouldn’t be wrong – but Desire is framed as somewhat a departure from that record: looser, dirtier, and more bizarre, its metaphors hewing closer to the earth. It’s not any less cohesive than its predecessor, but the boundaries here are more porous and abstract, with sounds darting in all sorts of different directions. There’s a duality to the album’s title, depending on whether you choose “you” or desire itself as the object of obsession – but you could also place as much emphasis on the motion of turning as the emotion of wanting. It’s no coincidence her tour in support of the LP is billed The Spiraling Tour; Polachek has described the vibier, more amorphous tracks on it as exercises in “lateral spiralling.” It’s not just intellectual nonsense – you can hear it in ‘Pretty in Possible’, whose free-wheeling nature urges her to ask, “Who can afford that kind of free?”
The song is followed by ‘Bunny Is a Rider’, which felt at once slippery and slick as a single and remains just as inscrutable as the third track on the album. You can picture Bunny, untethered from the corporeal form, shifting in and out of the various places Polachek graciously transports us to; and she, in turn, is able to find rapture in the “nonphysical,” even if her escapist tendencies can only provide a fleeting kind of magic. The fact that she allows herself to venture off the beaten path does nothing to detract from the emotions at play, though, which is the real miracle of Desire. There is a physicality and vulnerability to the record as much as there is humour and surrealism – they’re all part of her “twisted, manic, cornucopeiac” vision. ‘Pretty in Possible’ might be enchantingly resistant to any sort of structure, but it still burns hot with desire. The flamenco-inspired ‘Sunset’, meanwhile, flutters to a more familiar rhythm but can’t quite drift away entirely into the horizon, each element clipped with precision and dominated by an effortless pop instinct.
As the album progresses, there are songs that occupy more distinctly liminal spaces. ‘Crude Drawing of an Angel’ lumbers into a murky realm where love is overwhelming and inextricable from violence, while the ecstatic ‘I Believe’ embraces its brightest possibilities. Without showing much concern for marketability, Polachek makes sure we’re granted immediate access to her world, from the bombastic introduction of ‘Welcome to My Island’ to the effervescent ‘Smoke’. The most thrilling moments, though, arise from what she calls “the upward spiral,” which “is maybe the closest thing we can experience to heaven.” It’s the hardest turn to pull off, because it requires expressions of sincerity and conviction that cannot be faked. But when Polachek attempts to channel it, she doesn’t hold back – going so far as to include features from Grimes and Dido on ‘Fly to You’, Celtic bagpipes on ‘Blood and Butter’, and a children’s choir on the closer ‘Billions’, whose final declaration – “I’ve never felt so close to you” – reaches cosmic levels of extravagance.
The energy that runs through Desire is both pure and born of intention, esoteric and breathtakingly beautiful. But is it enough to complete the transformation Polachek hints at? She flies to, not into; on ‘Blood and Butter’, the want is to “walk beside you, needing nothing,” to “dive through your face/ to the sweetest kind of pain.” On ‘Sunset’, she finds comfort in “the hand that’s holding mine,” admits that “every spiral brings me back into your arms again.” Is finding home always the end of the journey? The answer may be no, but through it Polachek manages to unlock a kind of euphoria that’s different from, maybe deeper than, the one in ‘Welcome to My Island’, where it’s “just you and your reflection.” There’s no word as to what it looks like, but Polachek moulds it into a mess that’s all hers, fragile and revelatory. “How does it feel to know your final form?” she asks on ‘Hope Everasking’, gesturing at the nature of the question itself: elusive and eternal. If Desire only catches a divine glimpse of those larger-than-life ideas – love, hope, heaven on Earth – who could really ask for more?
beabadoobee has shared a new single, ‘Glue Song’, for Valentine’s Day. The track arrives with an accompanying video shot in Bea Kristi’s hometown in the Philippines and directed alongside her boyfriend, Jake Erland. Check it out below.
“I wrote a lot of this song while on tour across Australia and Asia in the back of cars and
traveling,” Kristi explained in a press release. “It’s a heartfelt song that means a lot to me…. A love song and the first one I’ve written in my new relationship. I usually write these songs that are sad, in the past with my writing even when it doesn’t sound sad looking back, the lyrics usually have been. For the first time this is just me being really happy. I’m in a really positive place for the first time in a long time and feeling love. We recorded the song with my guitarist and producer Jacob in his house and added in trumpets and strings. This song feels really personal and I went to my home town in Ilo Ilo to film the music video. It’s where I was born and so that also added another personal touch to the song,”
beabadoobee released her sophomore album, Beatopia, last year.
Feist has announced her next album: Multitudes arrives on April 14 via Interscope. Along with the announcement, she’s shared three new songs: ‘Hiding Out in the Open’, ‘In Lightning’, and ‘Love Who We Are Meant To’. Take a listen below, and scroll down for the album’s cover artwork and tracklist.
Multitudes marks Feist’s first LP since her 2017 effort Pleasure. Feist produced the new LP alongside Robbie Lackritz and Mocky at Northern California’s Redwood Forest, with contributions from Gabe Noel, Shahzad Ismaily, Todd Dahlhoff, and Amir Yaghmai.
“The last few years were such a period of confrontation for me, and it feels like it was at least to some degree for everyone,” she said in a press release. “We confronted ourselves as much as our relationships confronted us. It felt like our relational ecosystems were clearer than ever and so whatever was normally obscured- like a certain way of avoiding conflict or a certain way of talking around the subject- were all of a sudden thrust into the light. And in all that reassessment, the chance to find footing on healthier, more honest ground became possible, and the effort to maintain avoidance actually felt like it took more effort than just handing ourselves over to the truth.”
To celebrate Valentine’s Day, Feist will be debuting new material during a free “mini concert” taking place tonight at 7:00 pm ET; tune in here.
Multitudes Cover Artwork:
Multitudes Tracklist:
1. In Lightning
2. Forever Before
3. Love Who We Are Meant To
4. Hiding Out in the Open
5. The Redwing
6. I Took All of My Rings Off
7. Of Womankind
8. Become the Earth
9. Borrow Trouble
10. Martyr Moves
11. Calling All the Gods
12. Song for Sad Friends
Lana Del Rey has released ‘A&W’, the second offering from her upcoming album, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. Following the record’s title track, the seven-minute song was co-written and co-produced with Jack Antonoff. Check it out below.
Eight years after her death and six decades following her quiet retirement from the film world, Setsuko Hara arguably remains the best-known twentieth-century Japanese actress. Audiences worldwide remember her unique beauty (she was often suspected to be of partial European heritage)1 and the humane performances she gave in the films of Yasujiro Ozu. “Decidedly unglamorous,” wrote Stephen Harvey in a 1974 issue of Film Comment, “this least histrionic of actresses relied on little more than an irrepressible half smile and decorously hushed voice. Yet her performances are invariably so moving that no pyrotechnics were needed.” Cementing Hara’s status as a film icon was her premature disappearance from cinema screens in 1963 — the year of Ozu’s death and not long after her swan song in Hiroshi Inagaki’s 1962 Chushingura. Per film historian Donald Richie, she withdrew from the public eye claiming to have never enjoyed acting,2 and secluded herself in Kamakura, south of Tokyo.
Despite the international acclaim of her work for Ozu, Hara’s collaborations with that director (six films made between 1949-1961) comprise a small part of a career that, historically speaking, hit its most interesting phases a decade or so previous. Between the late 1930s and late ‘40s, Setsuko Hara as a film presence symbolized swaggering political agendas. In 1937, she was scouted3 for the Nazi Germany-Japan co-production The New Earth / The Daughter of the Samurai, which concludes with her farming in Manchuria (the Chinese demographic annexed by Japan a few years earlier). Hara’s embodiment of wartime expansionism continued in Tsutomu Sawamura’s Naval Brigade at Shanghai (1939), in which she plays a Chinese woman at first opposed to but later endorsing the Japanese forces occupying her city. In the early ‘40s, she exuded patriotism in settings familiar to domestic Japanese audiences: happily seeing off battle-bound recruits in Kunio Watanabe’s Toward the Decisive Battle in the Sky (1943), dedicatedly serving the military despite personal loss in Kiyoshi Saeki’s Three Women of the North (1945), and playing herself in Mikio Naruse’s Until Victory Day (1945), a comedy wherein she and other starlets were dispatched to entertain troops on a Pacific island.
Following Japan’s surrender to the Allied Powers in 1945 and the start of the American Occupation that same year, Hara’s screen image changed, now abiding by film regulation supervised by the foreign authorities. In addition to banning heroic depictions of militarism and feudalism (which the Allies believed responsible for Japan’s international aggression during World War II), the Occupation censors encouraged democratic movies promoting individuality, workers’ rights, and the emancipation of women.4 As one of her nation’s most popular actresses, Hara became a cinematic spokesperson for the Occupation’s vision: gone were the nationalistic speeches, the fawning over military tunes, the willingness to die for imperial causes. She now depicted idealistic Japanese hopeful for a better life in the new Japan.
This latter cycle of films included Akira Kurosawa’s No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), for which Hara played a determined young woman whose father and lover are persecuted by the wartime authorities, and who becomes an activist by the drama’s end. In Tadashi Imai’s two-part The Blue Mountains (1949), she espoused liberal principles before an old-fashioned community. Kozaburo Yoshimura’s The Ball at the Anjo House (1947) casther as the sole member of a bourgeois family accepting change in their world. The latter picture ended with Hara persuading her father to accept the passing of their previous way of life and stepping into the sun, beaming in close-up: a symbol of optimism for the future. She’d reunite with Yoshimura the following year for Temptation, a picture placing greater emphasis on straight-forward melodrama but nonetheless streaked with time capsules of late-’40s Japan.
Temptation (1948) begins with a twenty-one-year-old medical student named Takako Hitomi (Setsuko Hara) visiting her father’s grave in remote Gifu Prefecture. There she meets Ryukichi Yajima (Shin Saburi), an older man and former student of her parent. Riding the train together, they reminisce over their loss in common, Ryukichi remembering how, during the war, Takako’s father had been expelled from his professorship for liberalism. Later, Takako tearfully remembers her father’s dedication to his students despite being “under the watchful eye of the military police.” For Setsuko Hara fans, these lines immediately recall No Regrets for Our Youth and how that film began with Hara’s father losing his job under the same circumstances. Both plot threads derive from the real-life terminations of suspected leftist educators during the war.
Setsuko Hara and Shin Saburi.
Back in Tokyo, Ryukichi invites Takako to live with him and his children out of respect for her dead father. Residing under the same roof, Takako learns that her patron is a progressive politician hoping to help “the new Japan.” At one point, she finds a book in his study analyzing “private life and [criticizing] our notions of the makeup of family.” (The year of Temptation’s release also witnessed the Civil Code of 1948, which challenged the Confucian family system defined by the earlier Meiji Civil Code and promoted “the dignity of the individual, equality of the sexes, and high regard for offspring.”)5 Takako herself is something of a progressive — wanting to live with independence and benefit others by becoming a doctor. Meantime, Ryukichi squabbles with members of his party over support for a rival group’s candidate (“Individuality, personal opinion, zeal. How many politicians in Japan possess these qualities today?”) and attempts to free one of Takako’s fellow students, who’s been arrested for selling sweeteners disguised as flour. When detained, the student claims he purchased the deceptive goods from the black market. Black markets, while prevalent in Japan going back to the late 1930s, had metastasized after the war, with more than sixty thousand stalls appearing in Tokyo in 1946 alone. The problem remained widespread two years later — so much so that a magazine editorial quipped, “The Only People Not Living Illegally Are Those in Jail.”6
Also reflective of the dark underbelly of Occupation-era Japan is the tuberculosis which has confined Ryukichi’s wife (Haruko Sugimura) to a sanitarium. This disease of the lungs was the number one cause of death in Japan throughout the first half of the twentieth-century but especially in the postwar years: killing two hundred and eighty-two per thousand individuals in 19457 and over one hundred thousand annually through the remainder of the decade.8 Sure enough, the wife’s condition is terminal and she ultimately succumbs to her condition — but not before suspecting her husband’s fallen in love with the young woman he’s taking care of.
In a 1947 interview with the English-language paper Stars and Stripes, Setsuko Hara expressed refusal to perform kissing scenes in motion pictures — despite the Occupation censors’ encouragement to studios for on-screen acts of physical affection. Like popular leading man Ken Uehara, Hara felt kissing remained infrequent among Japanese and thus did not want to perform such scenes until it became common behavior.9 However, also like Uehara — who enacted a steamy love scene with Daiei starlet Fujiko Yamamoto in Yoshimura’s 1956 Night River — she only maintained this resolve so long, as marked by a tearful kiss between her and Shin Saburi in Temptation. Also indicative of Occupation influence are occasional abrupt edits suggesting censorship. In the late 1940s, separate branches of the foreign government were charged with approving scripts and screening finished products before allowing them into theaters.10 Occasionally, lines or scenes met with script approval were deemed “problematic” on film and thus required deletions. A few moments indicate Temptation was one such film to undergo post-production cuts: characters sometimes change places or posture in the middle of shots, likely dialogue axed at the censors’ orders.
Temptation doesn’t so much critique late-‘40s Japan as it allows society to reveal itself through dialogue; by drama’s end, neither protagonist has done anything to impact their nation — Ryukichi’s still a progressive in rhetoric only, and Takako nearly gives up everything (including medical school) to flee her troubles. (One of the least accomplished of Hara’s liberal protagonists of the Occupation era, many of whom achieved greatness at least for themselves.) Instead, the narrative thrust derives from the protagonists’ May-December relationship, which the film handles in a straight-forward manner. Working from a script by Kaneto Shindo, director Yoshimura steadily develops Ryukichi and Takako’s relationship through chemistry and key situations. In a mid-movie dance sequence, the two characters enjoy each other’s company initially on a forced platonic level. As the scene progresses, however, Takako leans closer and more affectionately into her partner, fingers crawling up his shoulder as they weave about the dance floor. Yoshimura ideally times a montage of close-ups alternating between faces, intertwined hands, and — of course — their feet moving in unison upon the dance floor. The results, accompanied by a slow waltz, rank with the most romantic film material this reviewer has ever seen.
Occasionally the melodrama becomes a tad overheated (e.g., the inevitable confrontation with the wife and her sudden about face on her deathbed: begging Takako to look after her family), but Temptation nonetheless triumphs through the chemistry of its leads and retroactively fun time capsules. All carried along wonderfully by Setsuko Hara, who here goes against earlier mentioned praise for the subdued acting in Ozu’s pictures, relying heavily on histrionics to convey her character’s conflicted feelings. She’d remain a vessel for Occupation politics a while longer, though in 1949 found herself in roles indicating the near end of foreign scrutiny. While the censors expressed concerns with Keisuke Kinoshita’s Here’s to the Young Lady and Ozu’s Late Spring — both of which revolved around Hara being pressured into an arranged marriage (deemed “feudalistic” by the occupying government), the two films went into production and release with their basic premises unaltered. (The script for Ozu’s film merely softened a few lines regarding the war.)11
Hara clung to star status after the Occupation’s 1952 end and entered the phase of her career for which she remains most famous. No longer jostled by government politics, she maintained fame by representing emotional agendas felt by her audience. Her collaborations with Ozu continued — predominately playing housewives and daughters who know best — while other directors, such as Mikio Naruse, pitted her against unscrupulous men. In three ‘50s films for the latter director, she temporarily leaves an inattentive husband in the first, permanently leaves him in the second, and starts considering divorce in the third. Writing in the late ‘50s, during the height of Hara’s popularity and not long before her retirement, historians Donald Richie and Joseph L. Anderson described the actress as “almost excessively subtle in her attacks on men, her main complaint being that they fail to understand, one, her business talent and, two, her true feminine delicacy. This type of role […] has not unnaturally made her enormously popular with middle-aged women, whose spokeswoman she has become.”12
Harvey, Stephen. “People We Like: Setsuko Hara.” Film Comment Vol. 10, No. 6 (November 1974), p. 34
Hansen, Janine. “The New Earth (1936/7): A German-Japanese Misalliance in Film.” in Gerow, Aaron and Abé Mark Nornes. In Praise of Film Studies: Essays in Honor of Makino Mamoru. Yokohama and Ann Arbor: Kinema Club, 2001, p. 188
JFDR – the project of Icelandic singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jófríður Ákadóttir – has announced her third studio album. Museum is due for release on April 28 via her new label home, Houndstooth. It will include the previously shared single ‘The Orchid’, as well as a new track, ‘Spectator’. Check out its accompanying video below, along with the album’s cover art and tracklist.
“‘Spectator’ is an anthem for the codependent, a lullaby for the ones slightly codependent and for those who have never felt it; a mirror into the raw thought process of someone deep in the trenches of it,” JFDR explained in a statement. “The video was made with my good friend Timothee Lambrecq, and the unmissable support from my husband Josh Wilkinson and old bandmate Áslaug Magnúsdóttir. The clouds represent thoughts, and getting swallowed by a big cloud is symbolic of the thoughts that can overtake you, when you lose your ground. I also wanted to reference the album and its artwork that centers around a statue, representing energy frozen in time. I truly hope this song makes someone feel seen. It can take a long time to learn to navigate big emotions, whether they’re your own or others’. I was feeling it at the time.”
Museum Cover Artwork:
Museum Tracklist:
1. The Orchid
2. Life Man
3. Spectator
4. Air Unfolding
5. Flower Bridge
6. Valentine
7. Sideways Moon
8. February
9. Underneath The Sun
Lunar Vacation have returned with a new single, ‘Only You’. It lands with an accompanying video directed by Meg Ha and Hudson McNeese and filmed in rural Tennessee. Watch and listen below.
“This song came about while living at my apartment, finishing college online and reflecting about the present, past and future – thinking about life phases, love, friends, cats,” singer/guitarist Grace Repasky said of ‘Only You’ in a statement. “I figured that no matter what phase of life you’re in, you’ll always have yourself, and that relationship with yourself is incredibly important and is often overlooked.”
