Winslow Homer, American painter

Winslow Homer, American, 1836-1910, “best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th-century America and a preeminent figure in American art.”

I saw a painting from Homer in le Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, a long time ago (it’s the first of the works I chose for you). The last one (the reader, at the bottom of this page) was my choice for my Journal, years and years ago…

I’m not a critic, I can’t talk about this guy. I just keep amazed by his… poise, his ease. It’s perfect, elegant, gorgeous, and sometimes even risky (see what he does with silhouettes, with the light, or weird angles…).

Is he well known? If you like him, you’ll find plenty more on Google Images.

In all these, I can… see the Wyeth family coming. The grand-father with his almost mythological America, the father with some dark moods, and the son : the sea, the sense of wind in the seashore… I’ll blog about them very soon.

Thanks for reading!

 

“If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint”. Edward Hopper

“If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.”

Edward Hopper

 

Release tension / Increase tension

Repetitive music is interesting to study, though you… rapidly understand what’s “going on”, right?

Propellers (Philip Glass) or Pulsations (Steve Reich), all have a way to repeat (obviously) patterns until you CRAVE something different. In Music for 18 Musicians, it’s wonderfully weaved. YouTube it if you want!

Modern dance often use repetitive music. They can use the same structure : repeat-repeat, making the audience wait for something. It’s one knack, after all, to… catch attention. And it’s rhythmic, thus energetic. It works! The risk is to lose everybody in the process, héhé…

OK. A friend of mine told me about a modern dance ballet he saw recently. It was about, if I remember well, naked men and woman queuing and repetitively walking in line. Yikes!

The beginning of this piece was long and… interestingly boring. The fact that dancers were naked was implying an erotic tension in the audience, this kind of electricity (made of “blushing with pleasure”) we call in France “Le Trouble” (how come you don’t have this word in English??). Understandable…

But it was long, repetitive… (sigh).

So a strange weaving was weaving its weave in my friend’s mind :

1. Decrease the “blushing tension” because you get “used to” these naked bodies walking in lines.
2. Increase the waiting, the “crave for something new” in the ballet.

…which eventually happened. Of course! It was all the engine of it, obviously, and, well, he LOVED it!

 

Here, I grab a pattern, it could be a tool : Increase A while Decrease B.

What would you do with that in Marketing? In a poem? In a music? In therapy? Elsewhere?

Tell me.

Thanks for reading!

 

Instagram : itspeteski

La Grande Vadrouille / The Great Stroll

Hi, my American readers! From San Francisco to New York City by way of Wellington, Fayetteville and Wichita, it’s SUNDAY, a special day, right? Time for a barbecue and Rosé wine, or maybe a good old French comedy classic?

La Grande Vadrouille is one of the best. It means literally “The Great Stroll”; originally released in the United States as Don’t Look Now… We’re Being Shot At!

It’s a big production, made in 1966 (a good year : I was born this year). Wikipedia says :

“For over forty years La Grande Vadrouille was the most successful French film in France, topping the box office with over 17,200,000 cinema admissions. It remains today the third most successful film ever in France, of any nationality”.

I copied pasted the plot from wikipedia too :

Summer 1941. Over German-occupied France, a Royal Air Force bomber becomes lost after a mission and is shot down over Paris by German flak. Three of the crew, parachute out over the city, where they run into and are hidden by a house painter, Augustin Bouvet, a puppet show operator, Juliette, and the grumbling conductor of the Opéra National de Paris, Stanislas Lefort. Involuntarily, Lefort, Juliette and Bouvet get themselves tangled up in the manhunt against the aviators led by Wehrmacht Major Achbach as they help the airmen to escape to the free zone with the help of Resistance fighters and sympathisers.

You’ll hear French good persons trying to speak English, fighting with a huge sense of… Frenchiness against the German occupiers… If you like The Great Race and other big budget sunny happy crazy movies, it’s for you.

Is it or Netflix or something? No idea. But if it is, give it a try!

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Feeling the air of Waterloo & other oblique explorations…

Hey, explorer…

Choose a knowledge-field you don’t know at all, and begin to dig to find your gold. This is what you like to do, right?

Japanese cinema, French classical music, British painters of 19th Century, US Civil War – what else?

Voilà : you have your unknown territory ready. Your hungriness will do the rest. Yum!

You need help, right? A compass, a guide, a book, a web site, friends, a lecture… It’s easy to find some. Find a map. Draw your map.

What we often do is to see what’s essential. Kurosawa and Ozu for Japanese cinema. Ravel and Debussy for French musicians, etc. You read the most important books, and that’s OK. An afternoon on the web will help to find the list…

Here I propose some more oblique ways to do that.

• Find documents against. People who dislike, or say the contrary of what it’s commonly said. I once read about the French Revolution : next to the great books I piled on my table, I put a book written by a Royalist, an historian whose motto was “Revolution : a wrong mess!”. He was a good writer, though, and I learned a lot from him – though it’s pretty rare to find this “music” in our times.
• –
• Explore little branches of the tree. After decades of exploration, I knew the great composers and their important works : Brahms, Bartok, Prokofiev and more. Then I spent years to explore the same field, but under the stars : Roussel, Martinu, Walton and Sibelius. And thanks to the previous “normal” exploration, I had so much pleasure!
• –
• Find other ways to explore :

• Instead of reading history books about an era, try to read books written by witnesses. Instead of trying to find the big picture, choose one person, a detail. One painter’s life. Instead of reading, go to lectures, watch them on YouTube. Find the minor things, what’s considered failures, and study hows and whys…

• Explore what’s difficult : Mahler instead of Beethoven. Avant-garde photography.
• –
• Explore what’s hard because documents are rare, or the field very small.
• –
• Explore what you think you dislike : Consider other doors. Baroque music. Swedish movies. History of Prussia. Try to see if you find surprise-gold.
• –
• Go on site. This is totally different. Feeling the air of Waterloo. Find Vermeer’s city. Watch the sky…
• –
• In between two fields. Instead of studying Portugal or the new America, study the boats, the travels, the movements, agreements, trades. Learn what happened between two territories : producers and movie makers, Napoleo and United Kingdom…

 

What territory will you find? Butterflies? African masks? Dante? Religions in India? Story of the city of Philadelphia? Bridges of Budapest?

Do you have other ideas to find doors, bridges, territories and maps?

Then, what vein of gold will you find? What doors, what ways? Will you wake up in the morning with this delicious urge : dig more, know more, learn more?

Thanks for reading!

 

Instagram : genevievealicegarner

 

 

 

Haunted Cute Trash & Vicariously in Rome : Chronicle 15

Yesterday, in the movie Body Heat, I heard

“I vicariously…”

– the proof that people really use this word in English. We have it (“vicariant”) in France, but it’s a very rare one, used by scientists or in pedagogy. I was fascinated by this range-difference for a word’s usage and I also wrote an article about it, because it’s a tool : “Vicarious” : How to learn by watching others

 

When your students feedback your teacherness, it’s an obsession to me, a good conversation subject, and a great pattern to use elsewhere. It’s also true in therapy, in many other fields. Students can “climb in metacommunication” and tell you about your Art. It’s a feedback, it teaches you! It’s a great structure to explore, and I will probably do it.

 

Does your style come from your work, or do you think about it “out of action”?

 

Parents are exhausting in a bookstore. They need books for their child, who is œuf corse absolutely the greatest, the best, and is – like all the other ones – “really in advance for his age”. Come on!…

 

On WordPress, Categories & Tags mustn’t exceed 15 in total, or else your article won’t be included in the reader. Beware!

 

What surprises me the most, in someone I know, is the clear “will to be nasty”. When someone speaks and wants to hurt me…
One antidote is to notice it. Instead of being hurt by this unkindness, meanness, your brain is building an instant shield with reason, an assessment : “This person is trying to hurt me with words”. Like a submarine, your heart goes underwater, for protection. In an awe.

 

One day I met a trash which… opened electrically alone when your hand was about to reach it. BZZZRT! It was absolutely a mess. Non opening when you needed it to. Surprising you and killing you with quirky heart-attacks in the middle of the night (when you had to trash this saving life orange-juice bottle). Staying opened for no reason (and resisting to close down). Closing the lid too fast when you were trying to debag it to add a new trashbag. Oh bloody cute thing! And, well, I liked it a little too…

 

 

« when in Rome, do as the Romans do »
What does it mean? You have to obey the laws and rules or the society you visit? You have to adapt? But also… should you live a little of other people’s lives? If one day I visit Portland or Kansas City, do I seek French food, or do I taste local meals? Do I watch French TV series in my hotel, or do I go watch a theater play? Do I read my French books, or do I visit museums? Do I move in the tourists cattle, or do I rent a car to go 20 miles out of the city to sit on a bench and watch how people walk?

 

This function of friendship : listen and question.

 

“Manifestement Friand : Manifestly Fond Of” : write 3 short stories on this seed.

 

My father’s father was a soldier in France in 1940. He’s been made a prisoner by the Germans, sent in Germany and had to work there in a factory… bombed by a British or an American attack. He died, and, well, my father didn’t know his father, his childhood was a sad mess. This made him the man he was, and of course I’m now a part of that. I found this part of an interview on the web, and I copy-paste it to tell the readers about the resonance…

You witnessed aerial bombings in Nantes…
The bombings were a very complex and perverted phenomenon. You can’t understand the French collaboration and resistance movements if you don’t understand the occupation period. Being occupied is being in a situation of absolute perversity. You live next to your enemy, and your allies kill you. I was ten years old in 1942. I had to understand that the people who lived close by were my enemies, and the ones bombing me were my friends.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Some absences are impossible to accept.

#abstract #art #abstrarbre

from Instagram: http://ift.tt/2wwGbZc

Did you feel your eyebrows moving?

Quiff is a mess & French frou-frou noiseling : an #ESL struggles with English words…

One pleasure of ESLing is to gain vocabulary.

This week I watched a clever crime movie, Body Heat. Smart dialogs offer you new words – and I watched it in English with English subtitles. Each time I find an unknown word I remotestop the film and I check on my phone, and it’s… almost always a problem (because the French words are, obviously, “not exactly” what yours mean, it’s always a bit… displaced).

All these words were totally new to me :

• Outsmart seemed easy but it’s not : beat by cunning, surpass, foil, thwart – what is it exactly? I like the way it’s made : “Out + Smart” (could be offsmart, right?). We have “déjouer” in French, which could be “de-play” or “out-play”. I love the cousinning of all these.
• Rustle is great. I imagine it’s non human, something in a tree or maybe from a dress’ fabric, right? We have bruissement in France, and as “bruit” means noise, it could be… “noiseling”. I wonder what’s the difference with creasing or crumpling. We have in French the delicious “Frou-frou” for the “dress swish”, the word says it all, right?
• Searing is clear, but then, when don’t you say burning? Is it… more painful? More red? More intense? Can you use it to talk about meat (then is it spoiled, or delicious)? What is scorching, then? Can I have a searing memory?
• Arson is “setting fire to property”, but is it a law word only? Could I use it metaphorically, like I want “to arson my feelings/my past”? Where does this word come from?
• Quiff is a mess. I found the hairstyle thing, OK. But what’s a “quiff’s eye”, then? A “haughty little stare”? (Haughty? Really? New word again… which led me to “your high horse”, a clear idiom, for once). But for quiff I also find “legitimate spouse” (really?), which seemed the case in the movie I was watching.
• Askew : where is it used? For a hat? For a life? Does it sound vintage or do young people will say it about your eyes (or your books on the shelf)… askew?

 

Where does it come from, to feel such pleasure, exploring this? I don’t know.

Feel free, ô my reader, to make things clearer in the comments. Maybe it’ll help my brain (and some other’s) to understand these daily subtleties…

Thanks for reading! Bonne journée !

Instagram : _bodylanguage_

One purpose of Art – Is it yours?

I’m no Art Historian, but today I will link two French artists to write a little article about the Purpose of Art : Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Painter, and Paul Valéry (1871-1945), Poet and Philosoph. Both were artists but also thinkers.

Valéry says that Art has an object, a purpose, which is to grasp, to understand, to give birth to Poetry. Not the “poetry of words”, of course, but the Poetry of things, of Art, of Life, who knows, Poetry with a capital – you and me we exactly understand what he means, right?

Poetry is EXACTLY what you can not explain with words. It’s “between” concepts, between all words. It’s above them all. It’s richer, and more complex. Words are weak, in this kingdom…

But, says Valéry, Art uses little tools, particular “low level” objects, the “things you notice” : likeness in painting, plot or descriptions in literature, energy or rhythm, in music. All artists have knacks and tricks. Impressionists used a certain way to paint. Psychedelic rock groups have a certain sound. Some photographs have a blurry style, or a particular way to use black and white. Some movie makers – choose Tim Burton – do “their thing”, right?

Why not? These are tools, the soil you manipulate, the knacks and the style you like to use. This is “you, working, doing your thing”.

The danger, says Gauguin, is precisely here.

the danger is when the audience drains in assessments

The audience is smart. People NOTICE what you do. They’re like : “Haha, this was smart!”. They see what filters you use on Instagram. They see you like slanted frames. They notice what you want to tell us in a blog. They smile, they notice the music in the film, the way you “sound” in your novel, the way Seurat used DOTS in pointillism. This last example triggered Gauguin’s remark :

the audience drains in assessments

(You can almost get the invisible rest : “And where is poetry?”)

Well, yes, “OK he’s smart”. People see and understand what you “do”. They have fun! But THIS IS NOT POETRY. Magic appears out of your little knacks – and I hope you know it!

 

The audience must wait. They wait for the song of life. They wait to be touched in their most treasured intimacy, with good, complex, mysterious energy. It’s about Wizardry, right? YOUR wizardry. This energy awakes things in people. And THIS is what is important. And like says Valéry :

What I hold now makes itself desirable

Hmmm, ain’t it poetry?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Your Field : Topology & Radars

What’s your field? You’re a CEO? A poet? A photographer? A blogger? A cook? What do you do, what do you explore, what is your field, your… territory?

You probably like to “Think about your art”, where things are not that obvious. A map is not the territory, but it helps you : “A model is a lie that helps you see the truth”. Why would you study your own field? Make progress? Extend your possibilities? Detect dangers or mistakes? You feel stuck? Going too fast? Other reasons?

Do you think about your art when you’re working on it, or after? Alone or with another person? What happens?

You can also read :

• think-about-your-art-or-how-to-kill-your-i-know-my-job-pinned-mindsets/
• a-model-is-a-lie-that-helps-you-see-the-truth-h-skipper/

When you work, what radars should you use? What model? Do you draw? Do you imagine? In fact, it’s a good opportunity to use topologic or other fields vocabulary, and tools…

• If you dig, what is a lode? How do you find it? What do you do with it?
• What if you were stuck in the narrow neck of an hourglass? What does that mean? Do you have to wait? To push?
• If you find grains and rocks, are there a pain, a chance, a luck?
• What could be a compass, in your field? A magnifying glass?

Other ideas of tools to use to study your own activity?

Take these jobs : clockmaker, a topology specialist, a miner, a gold digger, an entomologist. List their tools, their concepts. Then apply on your field. How do they use it? What happens? A nugget? A change? A new map? Vectors? Paths?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

“During an eclipse, be careful not to look at the sun”

“During an Eclipse, be careful not to look at the sun” is the boring advice you’ve heard 8754 times this last week. OF COURSE you won’t look at it, silly! Tell it firmly to the kids, and voilà.

BUT

As the “protect your eyes” thing is obvious, there’s another reason you shouldn’t look at the sun…

In 1999, a total eclipse of the sun happened in France. It was plain summer, and it’s been quite an event… I was at work, but needless to say we were all allowed to go outside to see this. “Be careful not to look at the sun”, right? OKey.

Ten minutes before it began, the Grand Place de Lille was FULL of a nervous what-if-it-was-the-end-of-the-world crowd. A small percentage of human beings had the appropriate device to “watch it face to face”. Then… it began.

And I can tell you that NO-BO-DY was watching the sun with their stupid glasses. You know why?

The mood of the world changed surreptitiously. Then it became darker. Then DARKER. The birds suddenly stopped singing, the cars stopped, the city stopped. The women, children and men on the place became silent. The night was there. In this quit surreal crowded silent mood, I saw the stars (ohhh), I was cold (yes, it was the night, really), and I’m pretty sure my hand was on my opened-in-a-awe mouth. And it’s pretty long!
I remember quite well the big quiet SIGH of the crowd, after the moon decided to go shadowing the Earth elsewhere – “Ahhhhh… It’s not the end of the world”. And nobody had their eyes burned!

 

Before an eclipse, you are allowed not to desperately shop for “Magic Stare at the Eclipse Glasses”, they’re useless : Be with your family on a hill. Be in a crowd on a place, and feel little and equal on our little planet.

Be prepared to be thrilled…

 

Thanks for reading! Have a nice day! Bonne journée!

 

 

Wonderfool Dayda Cacography : Eye Spelling!

I tried 241 times to pronounce Dakota (“DayGO-Da”?) until I gave up and pronounced it the French way (as it is : Da Ko Ta, plain and simple). Watching Ghost in the Shell, I heard the word “Data” many times, mimicking it to learn something, until I understood that DATA is pronounced DAYDA.

Foreigners make mistakes. This morning I woke up with some words in my mind, this marvelous way one friend of mine described my lover at the time : “Quelle formidable folle!” – What a wonderful fool she was, indeed. I woke up like : Wonderfool.

So I googled it and discovered this : Eye Spelling, Eye Dialect, or Pronunciation Spelling – nonstandard spelling but doesn’t indicate an unusual pronunciation.

women : wimmin
gentlemen : genlmen
listen : lissen
light : lite

Nooooo I won’t use it, it’s too dangerous. I could “get mixed up” (is it good English? Become mixed up?), though I know that it’s really used to get the “dialog” mood : kinda for kind of, wanna for want to. Also, it’s used for marketing purpose of course : I found “Froot Loops” cereals, froot for fruit, of course.

Now think about this group names : The Beatles. The Byrds. And the way rap groups use U instead of You.

Tool : What will you do of that? What could you invent? Where? Why? A name? A brand? A groupe name?

A deliberate comic mispelling is called CACOGRAPHY. I love that word so much that I almost fainted… Awweee!

 

Have a good day!

Jean-Pascal

 

 

On what foot will you dance? What if in a situation you don’t feel what you’re supposed to feel?

Being neutral, or hilarious, at a funeral. Feeling nothing after being fired. Laughing when you read a drama book. Crying in front of a comedy.

What if in a situation you don’t feel what you’re supposed to feel?

• It’s surprising for people around you, which means there’s a social pressure, right? You are “supposed to”.
• It’s surprising for you.
• Or maybe you exactly know why you react “out of the frame” – but it’s a secret.

 

In “A Streetcar Named Desire”, a woman visits her sister in New Orleans, who lives with a violent man (Marlon Brando). You’re “supposed to” dislike a man who beats a pregnant woman, right? But Brando is so good (and he’s a movie character) that you begin to love him, then you hate him, then you admire his work as an actor, then… Vous ne savez plus sur quel pied danser : “don’t know what foot to dance on” – You don’t know where to stand.

And this is made on purpose.

 

What are situations when you don’t know what to feel, where to stand? Manipulation? Sudden truths? Out of focus? What triggers feelings-confusion? Are you tired? What is this gap, between what you feel and what you’re supposed to feel? What if it was wrong? What if your radar needed to be fixed… or other people’s radars??

 

Thanks for reading!

 

What happens off screen on Instagram

In cinema and photography, we use in French two different words, hors-champ and hors-cadre.

• Hors-champ is like “out of the field”, I’ve seen “off screen” or “off camera”. It’s what happened but has not been filmed.
• Hors-cadre is more precise, it’s “out of the frame”, so it can happen just out of the border of the image, close to the edge.

In the movies, it can be used to hide an horrible thing (killing someone off screen but seeing the reaction of a character), and it’s a great idea in comedy : in George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib (with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn), some hilarious moments happen when a character goes out of the screen (in a bedroom where you KNOW there’s a problem) and screams.

 

All of you, my readers, read articles in past months about fake happiness on Instagram. A splendid bikini lady is smiling on the beach, holding a green smoothie in a hand and her lover’s hand in the other.

Now we’re going out of the era where we “believe” that shit (and be envious).

We all have a “off camera/out of the frame” culture now. We KNOW she spent two hours sweating under the sun like a debandaged mummy until she found a place, a light, an angle and a HDR picture she likes. The boyfriend/photographer in bored like a dying hen (with greasy hands). The assistant (often bikini girl’s sister) screams, cries, gets drunk and wanna die. And of course, as soon (at least!) as it’s done, the teeth-piano-like “smile” vanishes, the smoothie goes to the trash (who wants to drink this cucumber/mango juice?) and they all fight like rabid mangooses until the night (and next picture). Voilà!

Thus you begin to ask questions about humanity, like “Why the wars?”, “Why the diseases?”, “Why asking for autographs?”, “Why cruelty?”, and “Why posting fake #bikini #happiness #lovetraveling #admiremeplease on Instagram?”.

 

So we began to hear about these people stopping bouleshit, changing the comments they added under their pictures, confessing the bitterish moods of the shooting days : articles. What happens after that “revealing moment”? They study Roman architecture or begin to practice an instrument? They add another Instagram next to the other one, like “horrible making of”? They fight poverty? Meditate?

How could one use smartly this idea of “The public now knows the out–of-the-frame”, and smells the fake-iness from one hundred feet afar, without being sarcastic like Celeste Barber? Really I have no idea. I need more coffee. Want a pic?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Robert Wyatt : Sea Song

Let’s quit our comfort zone

Robert Wyatt was the drummer of Soft Machine. He one evening fell from a window and therefore became paralyzed; he uses a wheelchair since. Pink Floyd performed two benefit concerts, and their drummer, Nick Mason, produced the album Wyatt wrote in his hospital bed “in a trance” : Rock Bottom.

This album will make you uncomfortable. English prog-rock with avant-garde or modern-jazz seeds : It’s an enigma, a nightmare, a diamond. For some critics, it’s the best album of all times.

 

 

Sea Song is one of the most beautiful love song (the other one, for me, is Beach Boys’ God only knows). Imagine a wobbling harrowing Elton John piano slow track invaded with strange stars, bottomed with silver sounds in snakes and gorgeous harmonies. The lyrics are weirdly adorable. The piano break is risky, broken and drunk. The end is an almost ridiculous but touching incantations with sirens…

 

You look different every time you come
From the foam-crested brine
Your skin shining softly in the moonlight
Partly fish, partly porpoise, partly baby sperm whale
Am I yours? Are you mine to play with?
Joking apart – when you’re drunk you’re terrific when you’re drunk
I like you mostly late at night you’re quite alright

But I can’t understand the different you in the morning
When it’s time to play at being human for a while please smile!

You’ll be different in the spring, I know
You’re a seasonal beast like the starfish that drift in with the tide with the tide
So until your blood runs to meet the next full moon
Your madness fits in nicely with my own with my own
Your lunacy fits neatly with my own, my very own

We’re not alone

 

This always lets me brokenhearted, who knows why? It’s been written by a man in love, broken in his soul (hemiplegic drummer, you imagine??) : “I was just relieved that I could do something from a wheelchair”. I’ve rarely seen someone so… opened, in a song. It’s constantly two faced : beautiful but ridiculous, easy slow but with a frightening piano break, incantatory but childish, wobbling, a bit crazy, and strong. Brokenhearted, for sure.

It’s interesting to peel. Listen to the “normal form” of the slow in the beginning – the piano, the modulation (on “But I can’t understand”). The bass is interesting. The drum has been evacuated, the pulse coming from a tiny, fragile, minuscule repeated “POC” – as if this man was saying us : “See, I’m not a drummer anymore, but I can POC”. Awweee!

Symptom : this kind of song can be absolutely destroyed or badly sung live, or by other people. The essence of it will not and can not be touched.

 

 

“My funeral song”

“Possibly one of the most amazing albums ever recorded, and a psychedelic gem beyond time.”

“One of the top albums of all time. A true art expression.”

“what makes this legendary is the overall feeling it gives you. The “breathing” present throughout the tracks, the weird time-warped feeling you get at the middle of Red Riding Hood, Wyatt’s singing on the Sea Song, they all contribute to creating one of the best atmospheres. Along with some pretty neat tracks, make up for one of the greatest masterpieces to come from modern music.”

(26 pages of that here : http://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/robert_wyatt/rock_bottom/ )

 

Then try this (it’s the 3rd track or Rock Bottom), LOUD :

 

 

 

 

“This” Tropism : what you read understands you

The King of Kings of the world, for this, is Marcel Proust.

Buy, one day, a good translation of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” (In Search of Lost Time). If you want to explore Proust, buy first How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain De Botton, it’s a really great book, and a great key to this author. Buy it for your birthday! Say it’s from Jean-Pascal, OK?

I try, here, next to my little tools, to talk about “very little movements of the minds”, what we call here “Tropismes”.

There is ONE tropism you know pretty well, you blog reader, it’s this one :

When you read an article and you jump off you chair saying : “It’s true! I feel that too! Never seen it written though!”.

It’s lovely to suddenly see someone who struggles with the same tiny mind movements as you, right?

Someone wrote one day that

We read to know we’re not alone

Isn’t it true?

 

Jean-Pascal

 

 

When your brain has pop-up windows…

– Focus, dear, where are you?
– I have pop-up windows, sorry…

To go blank. To zone out. I searched for English vocabulary, you see?

When do we have pop-up windows? Why? Someone? Somewhere? Is something in our brain capable of “taking the lead”, cutting us from reality to throw the whole package into dreamy states? Yeah, probably. Inattentive because faraway. Is it dangerous? What if it was a sign? Of what?

Let’s trigger a game :

Each time you have pop-up windows, you stop, you stand up, you stop everything, you take your car and you GO physically, exactly, where you were pop-up windowing. I mean really. NOW. What if? What will happen?

Will you, then, have other pop-up windows? Or will you be stopping your zoning-out to be just… there and happy?

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Every bookstore is the result of its clientele

One day I saw an interview of a celeb journalist and TV show presenter, a person I like very much, directing good shows and a pretty good interviewer herself. She was asked why TV was so full of trash. I saw her face changing, she was really upset, then answered something very surprising : TV broadcasts were so bad because “It’s what the audience wants!”.

She continued on this mode, telling something like “If people were watching operas, literature documentaries and great movie classics, all trash TV would broadcast in front of nobody, then would disappear for ever, then we would have great TV everywhere!”.

Her anger was noticeable, and that’s why I remembered it clearly. When smart people complain, you listen. Then, you wonder, right?

Because of course this all seems to be too good to be true, and it’s easy to counterattack. People watch trash TV because it’s prepared and broadcasted to them, etc.

 

So, there’s a balance here to find. After counterattack I have to admit that we all have a responsibility here, nonetheless. It’s like when I hear someone complaining about dense traffic… from a car. I have to answer to this person that he is a brick of it.

In some countries, if you are stuck into a traffic jam, you get a ticket! Which, in a way, is fair : you’re a part of it, it’s your fault!

OK, there’s a balance to find…

 

I work in a bookstore, and I’m confronted with this “structure”. The axiom could be :

“Every bookstore is the result of its clientele”.

You can be appalled, but it’s true. For a part, at least.

Yeah, there are other dials to watch. You need to have serious booksellers on board. And you often have to sell tons of “best sellers” on end displays… to be able to present entire tables of great books (your choice) in the store. Etc.

In a serious bookstore, all kind of books are bought then presented on tables and shelves. Employees, then, watch (weekly) closely the sales, then books are reordered. Never sold volumes (for months) are a bit dirty or torn, and therefore sent back to editors, and this is it : little by little, the customers, by the way they act and buy, model and form the store.

You just need a year or so to adjust, understand and change your store to adapt to your clientele. If you have an architecture school a street away, your architecture department will grow, you’ll have rare books, theory books and even anthropology books for the thinkers around. A visitor will pass and will be in a awe : “Oh wow, what a great architecture choice you have!”. Yessss it’s thanks to the bookstore employee, but mainly because he found the clientele, too. It’s a dance, a tango.

There’s a balance to find.

There’s a split of responsibilities in front of trash TV, in traffic jams, in poor supplied bookstores. Suppliers, of course, but audience too.

Do you meet this structure too, in your job, in your life? Don’t hesitate to comment, here.

 

We have an old idiom in France, about couples : “L’homme propose, la femme dispose”. It’s something like “the man proposes doings, the woman makes the choice” – I’m sorry for the translation, it’s almost impossible to do it, but you got me, right? Tango.

 

Thanks for reading!

(Really sorry for my English today. Have a nice day!)

 

Logan, Arthur and Motoko

I am a movie lover, un “cinéphile“. I read a lot about movies. I own thousands of DVDs and Blu-rays. I love Orson Welles, John Ford and Elia Kazan. I love Losey, Bergman and Miyazaki. I BUY movies. I’m able to spend a year to explore 1961 in cinema history (yes there’s a Wikipedia page for that). I’m able to watch all Tennessee Williams movies adaptations in a month, just for the extraordinary pleasure of… oh forget it.

But I download them too. A lot. I watch, and if I like I buy. I’m old school. I don’t have Netflix nor an Apple TV. I want the discs, the bonuses, the sleeves. Les galettes : the “epiphany cakes” (yesss we say that, for movie discs). Makes sense, right?

It’s August, so I found many American mainstream movies to download. Fast and Furious number 39 (or whatever), or Alien Covenant (I wanted to watch is again, because it’s a bad, wrong movie, but also because of Scott, Giger/Böcklin, the “two notes flute in the echo” music, and the stress before the shuttle explosion).

By the way, I wrote to the actress behind the voice of Mother, in Covenant. Great work!

I left 3 movies on the side, because I was sure it was shit.

Logan, King Arthur and Ghost in the Shell. All of them had bad trailers. Logan smelled “I want to end this character violently”. Arthur really smelled like duck-billed platypus shit. And watching Scarlett Johansson exploding a window 6541 times in slow motion on Facebook was enough to keep me away from it (talk about bad e-marketing -> another article).

All of them took me by surprise.

But beware : I’m NOT talking about Kitano’s Hana Bi or Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter (I can’t wait to find these in Blu-ray). Don’t even talk about Heaven’s Gate, Single Man or Fanny & Alexander (I have the Blu-rays, thank you). I’m writing here about mainstream movies, to eat with popcorn and have fun with.

Logan surprised me because it was more violent, tragic, or let’s say “less stupid” than some other X-Men I watched (I watched them all). I like these superheroes movies, but here I was surprised and wondered about the audience targeted by it. So what : Adult geeks? I don’t know, but I loved it. The Wolverine girl, Xavier in his chair, powerful but dying, the cross-to-X at the end, it awed me.

I was really ready to laugh sarcastically at Arthur. But Ritchie made Snatch and the Sherlocks, and I loved U.N.C.L.E., so I tried… And I found it brilliant! Smart and fast, funny at times (I LOVE when Ritchie plays with dialogs/possible scene, like when Sherlock Holmes will fight), and so powerful (ohhh Excalibur). A good evil character (hello Jude Law), a mage… A good one!

I will forgive everything to Jude Law since he played in My Blueberry Nights.

Ghost in the Shell climbed greatfully towards the spider-tank scene (I own the anime movie, and I needed to know what they’ll do with the tank). The face to face with mother ending crushed me. The sound is great. Kitano is perfect. Binoche is fantastic (strong, fragile, alive). What a great surprise!

Well, I’m thankful. I read today something like “Even if it’s bad, it’s OK if it’s made with the heart” – I don’t remember where : Gide or Valéry? All of them were made with some heart.

Then I wonder how to blog about Logan : what are and what could be other branches in the almost totally kryptonitelic ridiculous tree of Superhero Movies? About Arthur : what’s the drive in Ritchie : a casualness, a “I allow everything, shut up” energy? About Ghost in the Shell : how to make a robot alive? How to adapt a fucking Japanese cartoon with elegance? How to convince Scarlett Johannsson to play that?

 

After all this, you will ALWAYS need to clear your spirit from special effects, Excalibur’s devastation, jumping in an invisible electronic device, or fake claws. I suggest an Ingmar Bergman’s movie : Winter Light. Or just one quote of this movie instead :

“God does not speak because there is no God. You should learn how to love, instead of praying”.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

Blurred Blurry Instagram Photography

A blurry photography is a mistake, right? Unfocused, spoiled, this is for the trash. And of course you make it on purpose… so there!

The whole photography doesn’t have to be blurry – watch the face in the middle of the nibbled leaf, photo 3, and try to guess what is behind the in line droplets on photo 5.

Make it so blurry you don’t even know what it’s about : you are in abstraction, then. Hashtag according, then season your recipe.

When you blur “a place“, a room, trees, details are lost and hidden, therefore the mood only remains. Persistence of the air, the light, the colors only. Makes your photo more like a painting, maybe : less words, more atmosphere. So what?

Tool : What happens with this concept (“blur it on purpose”) in YOUR field? In poetry, what is to be blurry? In painting, art, music? What about other territories? In communication, marketing, advertising, theater, even cooking?

Thanks for reading/watching! My Instagram is jprobocat. No they are not all like these. Have fun!

Jean-Pascal