La Culture à réaction, or why “Luxury is Insular”…

Un beau jour (“One day”), you just realize that… you react.

The news. The movies. Novels. Blogs. FB. You are smart, and you are curious, good to you.

But the day you realise you’re only (mainly) reacting to what is prepared for you, it’s a shock ! Haha ! You are a flipper ball. Juste une petite boule de flipper…

Look at your wall. You like “this”. Or you don’t like “that”. But… you react ! Or you don’t care. Ça compte pas.

A new movie from Tim Burton ? Turn away. This time, turn away. Explore Bergman, listen to Pergolese. Or buy Elia Kazan’s autobiography : you’ll learn about immigrants, New York in the crisis, Hollywood, Theater, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Tennessee Williams, mccarthyism, betrayals and Arthur Miller…

Watching the bubbles at the surface of the sea ? One day you realise you could choose to go under the surface, watch the demons acting freely outside of “what the medias organize for you”, explore unknown paths and territories, etc, etc. Turning awayyyyy…

Dial to watch : Autonomie Culturelle.

Tool : Unhook yourself from reacting. Close the usual sources. Just fly away from this. If it’s tatoo time, write about oboes. If there’s a new pop group to listen, document about John Ford movies. If you wonder about the Apple watch, go try the South West of France Art of Cooking. Draw YOUR paths. And yes : you’ll be alone. Yes yes yes yes yes. So what ? Et alors ??

Luxury is Insular.

Breathe ! Stand up. Go away from reacting. Take your machete and dig your way into YOUR jungle. It’s DJ time ? Listen to King Crimson. Fashion Blogs ? Write on paper. To a unique penpal.

“Luxury is insular”. Jünger wrote it that way. I like it. Pensez-y : Le luxe est insulaire…

Happy Praise of the Third Path

OK I’m french. My english is a frenglish, it’s rusty and wobbly, et voilà. Try me, though. I’ll do my best. I promise. If sometimes it’s too bad, just laugh at me or roll you eyes.

Qu’est-ce que c’est que cet “Eloge amusé de la Troisième Voie” ?
The Happy Praise of the Third Path is a state of mind, or a game if you prefer, consisting of

1/ Noticing that most of choices are dual : A or B ?

2/ Then immediatly choosing to… step aside and pick up : C !

The C choice, or the Third Path, is very funny to apply. It’s, in fact, flying away on another territoire. It’s refusing to be trapped in what people chose for you.

If A runs of gas and B runs on diesel, then C rides his bike, of course.

A smokes. B struggles and tries to stop. C don’t smoke at all, never did (“that gives sick things to you”).

There’s a controversial anniversaire expo about a painter. You like (A) ? You don’t like (B) ? Oh : you are currently reading a book about Puccini under a tree (C) ?

Tool : ALWAYS try to find the C outside a bi-faced choice. You don’t always have to use that C choice, but know it exists.

Pro or Con ? There’s a place outside of that. And maybe it’s your place !

Wrong Way Up and… the game of “finding structures”

OK I’m french. My english is a frenglish, it’s rusty and wobbly, et voilà. Try me, though. I’ll do my best. I promise. If sometimes it’s too bad, just laugh at me or roll you eyes.

“Wrong Way Up” is the title of a Brian Eno & John Cale album. It’s not even the title of a song – and that’s sad because I would have liked to explore its cryptic lyrics to find a good quote ! Eno is a great artist, but his lyrics are délicieusement funny.

Most of us are tinkers
Some of us, tailors
And we’ve got candlesticks
And lots of cocktail sticks

This idea, “Wrong Way Up” – comment dire ça en France ? : se gourrer en montant ? – is a great little simple seed. Let’s pull every string attachée à cette idée :

You made a decision and you act, you move. You are sure it’s a “up” decision, a move for a good change. You aim Victoire et Progrès ! It’s not a retreat, no no no. Up.

You, or somedy else who pokes you, knock knock, realise that there’s a problème. Wrong Way Up. No good. What do you do ?

– You can go on climbing, because you want to explode the glass roof. Or because you’re a nihilist and you like the idea of headlong rush. OK. Go.
– You can try to fix the Wrong Way Up failure by une déviation du mouvement. Bypass the problems. Is it effective ? Isn’t it too late ?? What are the other ways up ? Did you prepare this ? Plan B trajectories ?
– You can just stop and stay immobile between your previous place and your goal. Into the air, in between. Then you’ll have to change something…
– Well, you can go back down but isn’t it a failure too ? Wrong (or Good) Way Down, retreaaaat !
– What about what we could call Incomplete Change ?

 

OK. Now enough paths and decisions. Stop.

Tools :

How to draw a map ? How come a map isn’t appropriate ? Who drew it ? Can you fix the map for later, or for other Ways Up ? What can you do with the differences between the map and the real territory ?

Dial :

What happens when you suddenly realise that what you’re doing since days is totally vain et absurde ? What if you’re kitesurfing or hunting or pray, and suddenly the dumbness of all this activité jumps at your face like a spider ? What happens when you sing on a stage and suddenly realise that you’d prefer write a novel in a cabane au Canada ?

More :

How stupid is it to call a simple failure a “Wrong Way Up” ? Isn’t it just a change of name ? How useful can it be to talk about a concept without its “name” ? Just to find the structure of it ?

Tool again :

Precisely it is. The point is here. Take a little event and find its structure, its skeleton. It will be, then, maybe, usefull to use this little tool to another part of your progress.

That is : If you think “failure”, your spirit is already full of ready-made-ideas. Means you’re “wrong”, you “have to stop”, etc. If you see that failure like a “Wrong Way Up”, you’ll find other ways to get out of this merde. Think weird ! Try other spectacles !

Again : What can you do with the differences between the map and the real territory ?

The Extreme Upper Register of the Bassoon, story of the Wrong Tool

OK I’m french. My english is a frenglish, it’s rusty and wobbly, et voilà. Try me, though. I’ll do my best. I promise. If sometimes it’s too bad, just laugh at me or roll you eyes.

The opening solo of The Rite of Spring, by Igor Stravinsky, is played by a bassoon playing out of its normal register. It’s written “out of range”, and the result is a quite weird melody.

Musicians and analysts have been wondering about that for years. How to play this machin ? Le Sacre du Printemps, is about primitive rituels, it’s full of danses sacrificielles and other étranges processions. Soooo… I like the idée to play it weirdly, strangled or lost, lost in a forest, œuf corse…

By the way, héééé, you know the bassoon, this instrument : it’s like a tree, un arbre ! It’s long and made of wood, it’s a tree. A tree without the branches, d’accord.

OK that’s useless, but the idée of beginning that “pagan mass” (of mess) of broken dances by this “out of range” melody played by a bassoon is giving me the chills.

Well. OK. So what ?

Francesco Alberoni is an Italian, a professor of sociology. He wrote a très utile book named Falling in Love, which is completely… out of range for him. As a sociologue, he knows how to study collective movements, and certainement pas some couples and lovers. No no no no. Mr Alberoni, vous n’êtes pas du tout dans votre domaine de compétence…

He is NOT skilled to do that. Toutefois, et néanmoins, he DID it ! He used his sociologist tools to study two persons who fall in love, pfffff. Unappropriate ! Fool !

The result ? A classic, a best-seller. And it’s still a best-seller, more than 30 years after the first print. And it’s a great book by the way. Useful if you’re a broken heart – you’ll understand once you need it, trust me…

I let you elaborate the links between le livre Falling in Love and la musique de The Rite of Spring. It’s Tool Time now.

Tool :

Maybe sometimes, in life or at work, in a brainstorming session or in the middle of a battle, you just have to pick the wrong tool. Or pick the usual tool, and use it the wrong way. Use it nevertheless. Whatever ! Zut ! Maybe you’ll explore a new way to lead the victoire, after all ! Maybe you’ll be enough étrange to surprise everybody, allies and ennemis. You go boy and girl ! You go !

Poumeyrol

Who’s shoes…

Look Up

The “Two Many Ideas from a Beginner” Syndrome, ça n’est pas tellement grave…

OK I’m french. My english is a frenglish, it’s rusty and wobbly, et voilà. Try me, though. I’ll do my best. I promise. If sometimes it’s too bad, just laugh at me or roll you eyes.

Young and passionate, here you are.

You want to express yourself, prove something to the world. You’re an artist, an architect, a designer, une personne créative !

While you learn your art and its rules, your energy is growing and you feel powerful. You want and need to unfold into that. Your ideas and your way of organizing them are boiling into your brain. Projects…

Then, one day you discover the enthusiastic possibility of doing something “real”. You begin your new professional life ! Congratulations ! Bravo mon ami(e) ! Money is provided and you will prove your talents.

Disillusions will rain on you, c’est inévitable vous savez, but that’s a topic for another article. You’ll do your thing, nevertheless.

If you’re smart (and you ARE smart, aren’t you?) you can guess what the : “Two Many Ideas from a Beginner” Syndrome is. You want to do well, so you literally pour out everything that’s boiling in your head into your first project. Ça dépote !

Imagine : Your first park ! Your first house ! Your first fashion show ! Your first cooking TV broadcast show… all flooded with your concepts. OK. J’aurais fait pareil…

You know that “less is more” and that great artists are doing great things in simple form, at the same time, you are young and you WANT to express yourself. C’est compréhensible…

A matter of levers again, the “double bind” kind.

If you let go, the result will be great, BUT (and this “but” gets interesting here) you will get little smiles from connoisseurs. And you will hate it because :

1/ You know they’re right… too much all at once.

2/ You quickly realize that one day, in a few years, you’ll look at your work with that same funny smile. Effff !…

Too Many Ideas

Let go. You can’t do anything else and you can’t and mustn’t restrain the energy of youth. You go girl (or boy) ! Later on, you’ll learn how to put these ideas into wise and powerful furrows and choose keys on the keyboard (but not “all the keys” on your keyboard) to make your Art more effective… it will just happen at a later time.

Tool:

It’s an amusing tool and a subtle one. Just keep in mind the, “Two Many Ideas from a Beginner” Syndrome. It’s like a little wave, a mini-thread to keep some ideas for later.

Cut. Breathe.

You are great… and breathe again ! Et bon, coupez, que diable…

A New Way to Read – A Deconstructionist Approach

OK I’m french. My english is a frenglish, it’s rusty and wobbly, et voilà. Try me, though. I’ll do my best. I promise. If sometimes it’s too bad, just laugh at me or roll you eyes.

Why do people love crime fictions so much?  It must be personal.

First there is a murder, and who likes dead bodies? Then, comes the policeman.  What is so exciting about police officers?  Boring. It’s all boring. Les polars…

But OK, let’s amuse ourselves… Some of you enjoy using your minds to follow the clues and solve the case. Maybe that’s cool, et si vous aimez ça, tant mieux. Readers enjoy living in the pages where crime has happened, within papers, reports, and discussions and then they suddenly understand the mystery and all in the comfort of their homes. Voilà !

Do you believe that the author has just as much of an alibi as the murderer?  Well he does.  The author’s usual alibi is to paint a historic period, show rising suspense, invent action, criticize a way of living, and exploit a setting.
Most writers don’t write a “polar” (as we say in France) to simply write a police story.  They write for other reasons !

I would like to propose another way to interact with this genre.

First :  What if you read the first twenty pages of your crime novel to get an idea of the plot, characters, etc.  You like the idea ? Good.

Second : OK… bear with me… You read the last five pages of the book. YES. OK, you now know “who did it”, but there is a purpose behind it all. Still with me?

Third :  Go back to page 21 and continue to read the rest of the book. Following the writer’s process of unfolding the story.

With this exercise, you the reader, are changed. You cease to be the victim, the writer’s prey.  YOU are now the investigator discovering how the writer pulls his readers this way and that.

Tools :

• Once in a while try to break the old cycle.

• If you’re bored in the world, invent a different approach in order to make your own power and pleasure.

• Don’t be so serious. You can always break the rules by adding casualness to Art. Pick pages in Proust. Vous avez le droit !

• What would it feel like to stop the Pavlovian response to what media proposes. Invent your own style of perspectives. Write something. Deconstruct anything and above all… Play.

Lastly, at the end, you should maybe pick another crime book and read it properly. That is good TOO. The waldgänger is a hidden discreet rebel, but he sometimes quickly reappears from the dark woods and is back, in a second, within the world of humans.

“Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of the plant in us.”

“Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of the plant in us.”

Gilles Deleuze

What to Do With Stupid Orders – Que faire face aux ordres stupides ?

OK I’m french. My english is a frenglish, it’s rusty and wobbly, et voilà. Try me, though. I’ll do my best. I promise. If sometimes it’s too bad, just laugh at me or roll you eyes.

If you evolve within une hiérarchie, you have probably at some point faced… stupid orders. What can we do against stupid orders ? We can think, but we can also act.

Of course, we can choose to secrete some of the stress caused by stupid orders into our heads and that’s OK ! Try doing this for a while though and you’ll most likely stop, because you’ll find it’s useless.

Stupid orders make us think.

Maybe we first have to realize that our managers KNOW his or her instructions are dumb, useless, or counter-productive because after all this game of hierarchy is a matter of masks. At points, it can even become humorous to think that maybe the manager is hiding his own embarrassment when he asks us do – that. Donnez-lui un coup de coude (en pensée).

On the mood-dial of our brains, the needle can go from complete zenitudness (you don’t care about the consequences of disobeying stupid orders – you’re the Zen Master) to complete madness and murderous wishes. Alas, in the hierarchic work world, whatever you “think” can become completely useless. So what happens when your tired skull is fighting responsibility?

We play with this, manage it, compress it, try to understand it, and document it… it’s all ours. Maybe you are great at being able to detect stupid orders, however you prefer not to think about it. So then what do you do with the entire keyboard of options in front of you?

1. You can fight and say NO (aaaand… you’re fired. Goodbye).

2. You can try to explain to your manager (or to his own manager if you like danger) why the order is sooo stupid.

3. You can disobey and hide your “good work”.

4. You can just shut up and do the thing (muttering and mumbling in you beard if need be).

5. Discrete resistance is also an option. For example:  Sabotage.  Slowing the process.  Killing the branches of stupidity in silence and hiding your effort to make these stupid orders a partial or complete failure (however this could lead to betrayal by colleagues and your activity might be detected.)

Tools:

It can be useful to try various types of dissonance in an effort to develop your stance.

Inner Exile can be perfect at times. You are simply not there. You hide like a spider in a hole, linked by a casual thread.

Disguised Acceptation is cool too.  You merely say yes (and smile if you want), but you follow your own path.

At the most you’ll be found guilty of being a free electron. So there!

“I need authority, although I do not believe in it.”

“Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.”
Ernst Jünger

Insect

Reaching by Taking Off

Is it important to not believe?

The answer is probably yes for creatives.  If you invent something you have to, at some point, target the “I don’t believe it” factor. “You can’t do that” must be addressed.

We invent mainly by modifying. You add a characteristic or you make it smaller, or bigger.  Bending what you already have increases the strength of the item.  Maybe !

Or…

There is another way to invent something : Taking off.

Pick any human activity and play with that lever. Take off. The “less is more” tool.

Steve Jobs invented the iPhone when he decided to kill the physical keyboard.  This concept left a place for the screen and eventually the dropdown keyboard came to life.

Google had a great idea when they decided to take off everything from their page except the logo and the search tool.  No publicity or list of pages was there.  This was contrary to their Yahoo or Altavista competition at the time.

Peter Gabriel once asked his drummer to throw the high-hat. What?!! He replied, “I have a free hand now. What will I do with it?”. That was the point, exactly…

It can be useful to draw a picture of this activity or make a list of what’s already at play here. Then: CUT SOMETHING!

Take an umbrella.  Take the color off.  Now it’s transparent.  Kill the handle and you suddenly need to find a way to hold it (magic? levitation? fixing it to where?). And what if you take off the fabric, or the plastic, or the umbrella ribs?  Is it still an umbrella?

Now for a poem. What can you cut?

A few words – up to the reader to decide?
Structure – words wandering off the page – a calligram?
Support – no paper, so where is the poem now?

What else is there?

Tools:

Maybe sometimes, instead of pushing all the levers to maximize the course, you can try to cut one small element off the machine and then watch what happens.  Maybe the whole system will move along faster, or maybe you’ll find an idea so great it becomes ground-breaking.

Reason & Pleasure : An Interesting Braid

Why, and how does music bring us pleasure?

I understood one day that human beings love music for very different reasons.  Melodies, the energy of dance, or the voice of a singer, nostalgia of an era or personal moment, to feel part of a community, for solos or the virtuosity of an instrumentalist, for a “sound”, or a production work.  Some people stay stuck their entire life on the Beatles, or Yes, or a single singer – Callas and everything around her. Why not?

Today I wonder, and I turn down the dial, or one of the cursors on musical pleasure.

1 – At the beginning of this dial you’ll find pure simple pleasure. You listen to Brahms‘ German Requiem and you feel bliss: “That is beautiful” bravo, and good for you.

2 – In the middle of the dial, reason and culture begin to become important.  You know where Brahms is in the historical timeline of classical music (say, between Mozart and Ravel), and you know a little of what’s happening in the music (here’s a soprano, there, woodwinds are playing a fascinating part with the horns…).

3 – At the end side of the dial, there is the connoisseur listener.  He is knowledgeable in the other works of Brahms, reads the sheet music, and understands what forces are in play (articulations of the different movements of the Requiem, what is said in the texts, how the instruments work together, etc…).

One could say this dial moves “from pleasure to reason,” but it’s not that simple. Why? Because the specialist, who is plunged into analysis and reason, is feeling pleasure as much as the amateurs.

More: I think that his pleasure is multiplied tenfold.

Tool: What is this strange way to mix reason and pleasure? Can we apply this to other territories (seduction, poetry, warfare ?), and how would this look?

What is this pleasure? Who knows the mechanisms of its birth?

How do we weave the braid made from different forces?

A Matter of Levers

The writer Borges once said that simplicity was senseless and that secret and modest complexity was better.

Therefore, if that is true, and you are wanting to change something – in your life or in your Art, here are two choices of levers to explore with.

•    Increase intensity
•    Increase complexity

Imagine you’re a rapper. You’re entering into a very coded universe with its characteristic ways of putting words to music, but you also want to be interesting.  How do you do it?

Pushing the intensity lever can drive-up your style to: Yelling Rap (decibel voice lever), Hyperfast Rap (speed lever) or Deep Loud Metal Rap (“Let’s choose an anvil sound on the beatbox”). It seems a bit too easy and… nobody does that in rap.  Why?

Pushing the complexity lever leads you to dissonance (Bartokian Rap Music), complex rhythms (I imagine a Rite of Spring Rap, don’t you?), or in voice to change the constant monotony (sung parts, tripled voices, sudden incantations, rages preachoïd, etc), or maybe even evolve into a surrealistic, avant-gardist narration.

Of course you could complexify the complexity by pushing the lever of variability of all the above by adding complexity or adding dissonance throughout the track.

OK.  Let’s move away from music levers and into relationship levers.  Imagine your sex life is becoming a bore.  Which lever will you pull?

Intensity Lever?  Stronger?  Faster?  More frequent?  More partners?  More pain?

Complexity Lever?   Subtlety?  More magic? More dimensions?  Funny tools?  Words?

Tools:  It’s fun to learn what levers the great artists chose in their changing periods of life.  Maybe Intensity and Complexity are helpful levers to everyday problems and in the Arts because they both work to revive stagnation and creative blocks. But which one ?

“Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.”

“Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.”
Robert Benchley

Fury Road

Some say that movies are the operas of the 20th or 21st century, but just how does this work?

Many times I’ve read that Mad Max Fury Road is an “opera of” (push-in a word you want: violence, barbarity, or metallic barbaria of violence 2000). You try to watch the movie trailer to get the point but – Ouch! It hurts!

Movies are a mix of many Arts: sound, music, stories, etc; the “Big Show”… you know? (insert trumpets and horns here please)

Here of course, this expression is also used to say that G. Miller madly pushes the levers much further than what you would usually see in these kinds of films. Some parts are fast, violent, mad, or well…madly, violently, and hysterically fast… so there!

It’s Operatic !

But this movie has another common feature with the opera world.

Critics, opera singers, music lovers, and everyone will say the same thing: opera is a totally extravagant Art. It’s so impossible that it is almost… stupid. You just have to choose any random scene from an opera to see the similarities.

So for example: There’s a lady near a cardboard castle, she has problems, so she sings these problems. LOUDLY!  And there is a man in disguise elsewhere on bended knee , yelling at an indifferent moon – which is merely a lamp in the back of the theater – but he yells of his despair with passion. Impossible!

To truly appreciate opera, you have to accept that it’s a really silly thing. An extravagant extravaganza! You have to pass over the fact that it’s exaggerated, idiotic, and an incredibly dramatic artform, but a tremendous theatrical performance!

And you have to admit Fury Road stands in this category. The evil character is a big, funny, ugly puppet named Immortan, huhu, the ladies are surrealistic top-models in white veils – white veils in a barbarian futuristic desert? Of couuuurse! Plus the story is so simple. We escape, then we come back, then you think about how comical it all is.

So here we are. The audience is in bliss despite the conditions it allows to pass over the craziness of the storyline. Yes, there’s a red guitar guy throwing fire from his instrument. Yes, Furiosa is in fact Charlize Theron playing furious, but once you accept the craziness, the next step is pleasure.

Tool: Think about it when you encounter Puccini, or any other kind of extravagant nonsensical art of any kind : Once you accept the craziness, the next step is pleasure.