Snow & Fancying Snags : Chronicle 24

It’s snowing tonight in the North of France! I feel like a kid on my balcony in an awe (isn’t snow time in the evening a little magical?). Awe and wonder. The first thing I did is to text my two daughters (who are 16 & 19 years old now) like : “Il neige !!!!”.

Like you, “neige” (just say “nej”) is the verb (it snows) and the snow itself (la neige). Neige is a great word to hear, it’s magical. I have a friend whose cat is named Neige (Snowy, in America, right?). Instead of saying “covered with snow”, we invented : “Enneigé”. Yes : ensnowed…

Christmas is family time, and, well, it’s a sad month for me now, some days…

A funny exercise is to watch yourself with the “two facets” dial. We have many aspects, but let’s play the game of two. Your own two opposite properties.

You like to be alone AND you need your spouse around. You are creative AND you’re lazy. You’re introvert AND in some case you love to be the leader in front of a room. You’re married AND… ooops! Sorry. Too French.

There’s more that we think in this simple AND. It’s a better word than BUT. It includes this : there’s always one facet who needs attention, to grow, to be more complete. It’s one source of happiness. More : you can invent a dance between what you think are opposite qualities. You can invent a braid. A strong, powerful one.

Sometimes I open a book about coding, programming. I remember I spent a whole summer, as a teenager, to optimize a program which had to place the boats on a hit & sunk 10×10 grid. Well : I remember pretty clearly the UNIQUE state of mind which is to program. It’s a particularly strong sort of flow…

I almost got it back when I learned HTML, but nope-too-easy.

I used to make verbs from nouns, in English. I’m sorry. What do you do? I coffee.

And at night, I bed. I’m sorry.

Well, I could say “I’m going to bed” in both, hmm?

To say “To hit a snag“, we way “Tomber sur un bec” : to hit a… beak. It’s to meet an unforeseen difficulty, an “unexpected problem”, right?

I saw in English : To encounter a challenge. That’s a very positive way to say it!

Thus I wonder how it’s “heard” in America, the radioactivity of it. You hit a snag, great, you’ll unfold your powers and move forward? Or is it like in France a bit sarcastic : Haha, you hit a snag, now wait for the backlash! Bim in the nose.

We use it often when a smart-ass mister-knows-everything meets an angry little person who has none of it and has a different take. When fists fancy flying…

Yep, as a casual structuralist, a pattern digger, I like to find “what is common” between things, what is “under”. But after that, the real pleasure is in the differences…

 

Good day!

 

https://youtu.be/7AYJOQ09PeU?t=29h40s

Blogger’s Words Horniness & consequences

Yesterday I wrote an “inspired” long article about Genesis and Progressive Rock. I was listening to Firth of Fifth and I was very excited.

But after finishing it, and publishing it, I stayed unsatisfied, I knew it was written in a rush, the building was not OK, something was bothering me. So I polished it endlessly, adding this, cutting that, quoting lyrics… I was like “Yes, but”.

Happily, later in the evening I had an idea to prolong it. I found tools, ideas, common patterns. Thus I fixed my article, I added a paragraph and published it.

I read over it this morning : it was all bouleshit – despite all the dressings I had added there and here. I trashed it immediately.

 

Every blogger knows that there are two kinds of “words horniness”.

1. When you’re in the flow, you write fast and clear, and that’s delightful. You go girl.
2. When you’re excited and you go in many directions at the same time, happy like a fool : you don’t hold your wheel vert smartly (or you invented three wheels and you don’t know what to do with them), you have good ideas but the result is too long, you ask yourself if you shouldn’t divide it in more articles based on this one, you run after a structure you feel you’re about to find, etc.

It’s like a rush. You’re too excited, you look like a leaping mountain baby goat.

 

It’s really like when you have this : “Let’s pretend” and other as if games…

When you feel this little nausea after you just say with someone you “want to believe it’s true but fuck it’s really not” : “Yeah, we are strong !”, “Yeah, we will beat them all”, “Yeah, it will be simple and beautiful !”. Yeahhhh.

 

Every serious author knows this : you have to be cautious with “inspiration”, it can loose you into nothing.

Sloterdijk wrote : “To be sovereign is to choose what will you be overwhelmed with”, which contains the idea of sovereignty : you decide what you do with energy. You canalize it, you organize it.

Baudelaire wrote : “It is impossible for a poet not to contain within himself a critic. Therefore the reader will not be surprised that I consider the poet as the best of all critics”. This is exactly my point. Inspiration alone is nothing. You have to study and change what your write. And if you’re a genius, it’s the same!

Valéry wrote a lot about this aspect. He says that to write you have to find the “singing”, the little wind, easy to handle, the good temperature – But nervous freedom, fury or impetus are waste and loss. Stay a child, let it spurt, hear the gods, but then be a chief, take your brain, your tools, watch and clean it, build your thing. TAME.

 

OK, I trashed my article. But I liked it, in a way, this ugly child… Therefore, I re-published it, thanks to WordPress, in the past. November 1st. My bad.

 

Thanks for reading! Have a nice day!

 

 

#fall

from Instagram: http://ift.tt/2A3sNh0

Pokemon Power & Building Ways Out : Chronicle 23

Le plaisir littéraire n’est pas d’exprimer sa pensée
tant que de trouver ce qu’on n’attendait pas de soi.
Paul Valéry

 

I really don’t know how to translate this. It’d be : “The literary pleasure is not to express your thought but to find what you didn’t expect from yourself“. Satisfactory idea, no?

Pokemon (Pocket Monsters) is a media franchise managed by a Japanese consortium between Nintendo and others.

Yesterday in the store I work in, I saw a kid who bought for $70 of Pokemon cards. His papa had his credit card, that’s pretty cool! I said to the boy, who was smiling holding his ten little packs : “Will you open them like… one each day?”. “Nooooo : some cards have POWER, you know!”.

Power!

Two students asked for “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” a few minutes later. Which, I told the girls, is about how to be free or how to be submissive and obey.

Who is powerful here? Nintendo, the Pokemons, the kid, the father? Where is the power “acting” IRL?

Will the kid buy Pokemon ring binders at 35 years old, like many adults I see? Therefore what? At the Pokemon marketing (cattle displacement) time, will your son chase Pokemons, or will he find anything else, by himself, out of the obedience area?

It’s been Thanksgiving. Have you been grateful? To…?

To build ways out.

Ulysses resisted the song of the Sirens by having his ship’s crew tie him up, because their singing is so beautiful that it drives men mad.

He heard. The song was beautiful, and it offered “new knowledge about the world”. Well, I think so!

Céder aux chants des sirènes, we say in French : yield to the Sirens’ songs. It’s not “to succumb” (which is you lost), it “to yield to” (which is you decide to lose and let go).

In mythology, sirens are women-fish or women-birds (see the vase)…

This classic image of the guy tied to the mast because he wants to hear something dangerous is like an itching metaphor, don’t you think? Where could we apply that?

When do you “go even if you know it’s a mess”, and how to you protect yourself, then?

 

 

To drive is to ignore plenty of things. There a great article about what is attention on Wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention

It’s worth an article but I’m lazy. Nevertheless : I will explore this a little, later.

In France, some guys were chasing Pokemons in cemeteries with their phones – or in people’s properties and gardens. What does that “mean”?

You don’t understand : some Pokemons have powers, they are RARE. You’ll never understand, right?

Nope.

Bazin says that The Complex of Nero is when you have pleasure in the sight of urban destruction.

There are two kinds of movies, those who shows, those who tells.

In Ryan’s Daughter, a husband is walking in a quiet sunny morning on a seashore. He smiles because he noticed steps in the sand, the steps of his wife. He knows she had a walk there. He follows the path. And he sees another set of steps, of a man of course, getting to the path, reaching her. Now it’s two pairs of shoes. This “feetprint” turns around a huge rock on the sand, and shows that they stopped behind it.

For a kiss

Here, two events are showed at the same time, without a single word. 1/The new romance, and 2/the discovery of the now broken hearted husband. On the image, you see what the spouse guesses…

Do you prefer this, or hear him crying on a chair telling a friend what he discovered?

Show, or tell?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Soccer Games (in shorts) (in the mud) (good grief)

When you’re not really interesting in soccer, you just watch and see two dozens of guys in shorts running after a ball. After all, we all need to be kept busy and to manage our time. Therefore, why not? Let’s take oneself in hand, and run after a ball, in a team! (important : in shorts).

I always have a bunch of naive questions I ask to my soccer lovers friends.

• Why don’t these guys play with women? Co-ed football?
• Why the hell is the team of “your” city the best? Imagine we do the same with movies or writers… Why don’t you watch all styles all teams and choose the one you love the most? No, OK, it’s your city, they’re the best. OK OK. OK.
• Why don’t you all handle two balls at the time? It’d be funnier!

 

Introverts and other guys with glasses will try to find a philosophy here. Camus said he liked to play the goal keeper, where he learned a good lesson :

“The ball never comes from where you expected her to come”.

Like problems and betrayals in life?

(pardon my French)

 

When I was a teenager, my spectacled friend Jean-Marc and I (there are always two guys with glasses in a classroom, right?) we had to play soccer, and we hated it. Œuf Corse.

It’s November, it’s cold, drizzling. I want quiet, an easy chair and a fire and a cat and a book. Not to run in the dirt with idiots!

Bahhhh I loved that bunch of screaming guys : they were running like lemmings after the ball. It’s cute. Look at’em all! YAHHHHH.

Needless to say that the two poor shivering Jean-Marc and Jean-Pascal, in shorts and drizzled eyeglasses, were not in the group clucking like headless hens, because having found one or two functioning neurons in our bored head, we were, on the playground, waiting, a little bit outside of the circle of fools.

Re-needless to say that, oh fuque, inescapably, the ball ALWAYS suddenly spouted out of the group towards JM (or JP). Shit, shit and shit. What do I do now?? Mired for good.

With a good dose of audacity, I tried then to do the thing : running in cold November, in shorts, with a ball in the middle of my legs! Obviously, with a horde of yelling pimpled teenagers locked on to me…

When then reach me – if they don’t, I fall (because of the mess ball/legs) – in a panic gesture, I hit the ball. PAF. Anywhere. PAF! Go get it, you fools! Let the fetchers fetch.

Sigh… My hands on my knees, trying to catch back my breath, pfeeww, spitting my lungs, listening distractedly to the reproaches of Mr Sports Teacher, I’m thinking about next month’s soccer game. Oô December, “when mud on the ground is frozen in uncomfortable excrescences”.

I hear a crow. Croak! He mocks me. OK, let’s focus. Where’s the horde? I stand up and deep breathe. You go girl.

Happily, today I didn’t fell full length in the mud…

 

Thanks for reading! Have a great sunday!

 

Losing My Religion, Every Breath you Take

Consider this
The slip that brought me
To my knees

 

I wrote here, a few days ago, something about Every Breath you Take, from Police :

• The strange lyrics of Police‘s Every Breath you Take, the story of a stalker after a break up. “Sting later said he was disconcerted by how many people think the song is more positive than it is. He insists it is about the obsession with a lost lover, and the jealousy and surveillance that follow.” – and not a gentle love song.

Tonight I just watched a documentary about Pixies, R.E.M. and Nirvana. I saw the clip of Losing my Religion, then discovered this on Wikipedia :

• The phrase “losing my religion” is an expression from the southern region of the United States that means losing one’s temper or civility, or “being at the end of one’s rope.” Stipe told The New York Times the song was about romantic expression. He told Q that “Losing My Religion” is about “someone who pines for someone else. It’s unrequited love, what have you.” Stipe compared the song’s theme to “Every Breath You Take” by The Police, saying, “It’s just a classic obsession pop song. I’ve always felt the best kinds of songs are the ones where anybody can listen to it, put themselves in it and say, ‘Yeah, that’s me.'”

 

Well, I suppose everybody remembers these two songs. In France, I admit both were hits, though we didn’t care that much about the lyrics. Though we felt that R.E.M.’s song and clip was, indeed, about a powerless obsession. The mandolin…

 

Yep, it’s a tool for my blog, a dial for creatives. Stipes says it perfectly :

I’ve always felt the best kinds of songs are the ones where anybody can listen to it, put themselves in it and say, ‘Yeah, that’s me.’

It’s true I admire poets, photographers and musicians who are able to talk about subtle things “between words”. Words are simplifyiers, and it’s sometimes boring. They put life, and moving shades into immobile boxes.

We talk here about another thing. When words are “so” flat, grey, imprecise, that anyone will find what one wants. Haziness as a talent. The audience jumps into it. We apply it to our story…

Sting told the story of a stalker, but lovers love it, they play the song at weddings! Stipes sings about past pining, but never explains what it is about in the song. It’s like a tropism, a flake of feeling. One person is “losing religion” – and we all understand the frustration.

It’s like the “But I could be wrong” image. You don’t know the author, and why we see that picture, what does this mean. You raise an eyebrow in wonder. And YES, you could be wrong, dear!

 

Awweeee. Have a nice day…

 

Life is bigger
It’s bigger
And you, you are not me
The lengths that I will go to
The distance in your eyes
Oh no, I’ve said too much
I set it up

That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spotlight
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don’t know if I can do it
Oh no I’ve said too much
I haven’t said enough

I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try

Every whisper
Of every waking hour
I’m choosing my confessions
Trying to keep an eye on you
Like a hurt lost and blinded fool
Oh no, I’ve said too much
I set it up

Consider this
The hint of the century
Consider this
The slip that brought me
To my knees failed
What if all these fantasies
Come flailing around
Now I’ve said too much

I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try

But that was just a dream
That was just a dream

That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spotlight
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don’t know if I can do it
Oh no I’ve said too much
I haven’t said enough

I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try

But that was just a dream, try, cry, why, try
That was just a dream, just a dream, just a dream
Dream

 

“Sways & Totters” : Teetering Harmonies in Bear in Heaven

One motto of art is “What’s new here?”, right?

Therefore my inner dial is the “Eyebrow Criteria” – one has to move up.

Like : “What??!”

Thus today I gathered some sick pop songs.

 

If the verses sounds minimalistic plastic “I make you wait”, the choruses lift you up dangerously in uncertain harmonies. Don’t be sick.

 

This one is pleasantly teetering, right? Your ears warn your brain : there’s a mistake! There ARE mistakes! But… Errr… these ears of yours also say : I feel pleasure. Mmmh. Maybe. When it climbs?

 

I opened a community about dissonant pop in G+ :

https://plus.google.com/communities/115751320828152239563

 

 

 

 

Artificial Powerlessness

Google image “Street Art” and you’ll find great, amazing things. I follow a few street photographers : some of them “have it”, they show us an electricity, a life moment, a mood and a light.

 

Now I look at this two pictures. The movement in my brain is simple.

1. I notice the knack. “Spiderman’s string is the crack on the wall”. “The puddle photography is upside down”.
2. “Ha ha ha, OK”
3. So what?

 

It’s as if the “artist” wanted, without any shame, to show us how crafty he is, how smart he is. So, you get the flick, you smile, and… SO WHAT.

Everybody needs to be loved, so you smile to Mister Crafty Crafty. Good job. You did it. And Spiderman, yeah, my childhood, etc. Ingenuousness. Cool.

I find it embarrassing. And I’m sure this person “can do better”, right? And know better.

OK. OK for the flick. But I prefer to discover a painted wall, or a picture taken in the street, to stop, to raise an eyebrow, to begin another process : a question, a wonder, another question, a resonance, a doubt, a will to no more, a sparkle of smile, a curiosity for the author, and his other pieces of work, a WAOW…

Better than a wriggling out knacky flick on my nose.

 

So I put the third picture – a modern “I want to be loved!”, but with wrong expectations, right?

So, to the end, I put a R. Burri “street photography”. A beauty, and a wonder…

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

#instagram

This morning I had to take a picture :

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

Thank you Elia Kazan

Elia Kazan (1909 – 2003) was a Greek-American director, producer, writer and actor, described by The New York Times as “one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history”.

His autobiography, “A Life”, is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Smart, fast, generous, complex, it made me study his films, Marlon Brando, McCarthyism, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, the “Methods” in acting, New York vs Los Angeles, the crisis of 1929, what it is to be a director, a migrant, etc…

Kazan is a controversial personality because he gave testimony before before the “House Committee on Un-American Activities”, and you can see an example on YouTube when he got an honorary Oscar at 90 years old, a few actors refused to applause him.

So, you could study this interesting struggle between what is quick-easy to judge as a “mistake”, and the huge talent of this man. I read his own book (he explains himself in many pages), I watched “On the Waterfront”, and I understood. It was like a relief…

I’m thankful today because he made me understand many aspects of the American culture, he whetted my curiosity on many other artists. I read the Arthur Miller’s autobiography just after Kazan’s book, and watched many movies adapted from Tennessee Williams (Kazan directed A Tramway Named Desire on stage and as a movie, both with Brando).

A book, and a year long travel, around this, in fact : “What is it to be a standing man?”. Thanks, mister!

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Quasars, Fireflies & Seeds : Chronicle 22

“The power of quasars originates from supermassive black holes that are believed to exist at the core of all galaxies”. You don’t need to know more than this little Wikipedia extract. N. Bouvier writes about one quasar moment (in front of a wave passing under an almost frozen sea). I’d say :

You’re in a quiet time with yourself, contemplating nature – or a good idea. But suddenly you click on something in your head, your idea connects with another one, or with a memory, and here we are : you disappear into yourself. You don’t see, nor hear anything. You’re in your own deep space, hidden without even knowing you’re “not here” : your brain has cut the mooring line. Meandering or Dreamery, it is not – these follow what’s around, like when you traintravel – it’s an inner thing. Quasar. You disappear into yourself. When you “come back”, it’s a weird feeling to reconnect with your life and your duties.

 

Yesterday I met a man in his sixties, he talked about a book named “The Survival of the Fireflies” (La Survivance des Lucioles). In a way, it’s a whole book extending the idea of “Light a candle, you can’t fight the night”. Fireflies are the humans who sparkle little things in the night. A smile, a picture, a little hoping seed, a way tu stay calm, a curiosity, a helping gesture, a painting, a poem, a silence…

“Disappearance of the fireflies” seems a fact, but I’m interested in Didi-Huberman’s book because he agrees but explores deeper : glow gleam glimmer – what kind of resistance is it? Fireflies disappear maybe because we don’t know how to see them anymore? Maybe there’s a way to “organize the retreat”? Can you become one firefly? When and how?

Google will help you. For example I found this :

The book ends with the violent glare of the police torches and helicopter beams sweeping through the fields of Sangatte, and unseen by them, a Kurdish boy dancing in the wind, “his blanket his only drapery: like an ornament of his dignity and somehow his joy despite everything.” – http://www.laurawaddington.com/article.php?article=48

The “joy despite everything” is like the smiling Sisyphus, right?

Alice Miller studied the school books of this generation, in Germany, who became the Nazis. It’s now known as the Poisonous Pedagogy – “child-raising approaches that damage a child’s emotional development”. Other poisons has been studied ever since, like the King Baby (when you never say no to a child, he becomes a fool) syndrome :

A King Baby copes with life’s difficulties and trials by refusing to accept them and instead focuses on selfish needs and desires. He doesn’t take responsibility for his actions and is always looking for the next reason to laugh and have fun — no matter what the expense.

It is difficult for a King Baby to move out of this role given the fact that he perceives so many advantages to not needing to worry about life.

In China the “one child policy” lead to what they call “Little Emperor Syndrome“.

Today I do wonder what will become of these one year old kids using tablet computers instead of discovering the world. Some studies show that there shouldn’t be any screen from 0 to 3, a little TV from 3 to 6, and tablets at 6 and after. The main problem seems that some parents are pretty sure it’ll make their kid a genius. In fact, it will probably destroy their empathy and bust their future relationships. Thus : Nazis or Fat Potato Sheeps?

As a bookseller, I ordered and go a biography of Edouard Manet, the French painter. I know for good that this man’s life and art is important. If you agree that Art’s progress is this question : “What is new here?” – Manet pushed many levers.

I opened it at a random page, and read about Lola de Valence, a painting who triggered a poet’s enthusiasm (Baudelaire) :

Here it is, and 3 possible translations :

Lola de Valence

Entre tant de beautés que partout on peut voir,
Je contemple bien, amis, que le désir balance;
Mais on voit scintiller en Lola de Valence
Le charme inattendu d’un bijou rose et noir.

— Charles Baudelaire

Lola of Valencia

Among such beauties as one can see everywhere
I understand, my friends, that desire hesitates;
But one sees sparkling in Lola of Valencia
The unexpected charm of a black and rose jewel.

On Manet’s Picture “Lola of Valencia”

Amongst the myriad flowers on beauty’s stem
It’s hard to choose. Such crowds there are of them
But Lola burns with unexpected fuel
The radiance of a black and rosy jewel.

Lola De Valence

Friends, though on every side of you you see
Such beauties that desire must hesitate,
In Lola de Valence there scintillate
Strange charms o’ a gem of rose and ebony.

The poem has been a scandal in itself (because of the “black and rosy jewel” sexual ambiguity, and was printed and showed next to the painting). This was a strange painting, like a picture taken in a backstage area of a bit dumpy dancer with strong calves. It was a disturbing sight at this time : the decor, the imperfections of the girl, and of the way he painted – with a kind of freedom, an air of casualness… The poem added enough to create a little scandal…

It’s a movement, to read about this in books and on the web, to try to understand what was new in this work, how Manet… Oh, there’s a good page in English in you want to see more : http://www.manet.org/

 

 

Proust was a blogger…

“Remembrance of things past
is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust

 

 

Proust is a well known French writer, renowned for his… difficult style. You’ll Google it if you want to try, OK?

Thus, in France (and probably elsewhere) you often hear this “I tried Proust, but I couldn’t finish it”, with a little funny face.

Well, OK, I never finished it either! Reading Proust is like eating a feast everyday. It’s exhausting!

• Worse : you can not really read something else, because every writer looks like a dumb moron after Proust. Too much intelligence pulls you in an awe, where air is rare.
• Worse : you want to grab anyone you know to scream “Read Proust, it’s amazing!”. No, come on, it’s impossible to read him.
• Worse : Proust’s style, made of long, complex phrases, with an absolute lack of concessions (for the reader), is like dive into it, or else…

Therefore : you have to make an effort. Each time you plunge in Proust you have to. You’re like “OMG it’s dense!”, then you find the marvels. A bit like opera, you see? If you don’t make an effort, an opera is a boring story with people singing like crazy about stupid dramas. Make an effort to find your own pleasure : voices, performance, music, comparing, etc…

Once you did it, here it is : Proust is a blogger.

One day I explained it to my best friend. She was like “Meh”. OK, I said. I picked up the book, read a page (randomly), and we found an idea. So good it filled the evening in conversations.

The only secret is this : do not take it too solemnly. It’s not a cathedral. La Recherche (“In Search of the Lost Time”) is just a huge great book. If you’re bored, breathe and pass a page. YES. Go on. You’ll find emerald & pearls. It’ll kill you (it’s soo good). One day, it’s enough. Read something else.

In each page you’ll find one or more ideas. Each one could let you thinking smiling watching the sky, like “Ohh, that’s true!”.

He’s a blogger. But he’s better than you, I warn you…

 

Have a nice day!

 

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.”
― Marcel Proust, Time Regained

 

 

“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power … that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”
― Marcel Proust

 

 

 

 

Surprising Reversibilities

– I owe you so much!
– No no no, it’s I who owe you…

 

1. A therapist takes care of his patient.
2. Stravinsky or Hindemith were influenced by Bach.
3. Someone is watching and analyzing a painting.

All these three examples are simple and clear. You can draw the arrow, right?

We thinkers like to go deeper, though. To find nuances, subtleties :

1. There are many ways of listening, of helping someone…
2. What are the elements which makes us notice the influence?
3. What do we seek – and find in Arts? An emotion? Links?

You can spend months on each, reading books. Refining concepts is a bliss, right? Good!

 

Today I study one thing : reversibility. It’s meeting a surprise “the other way around”, and it’s charged with intensity :

1. A therapist suddenly talks about himself. Instead of listening, he tells his own story. The patient is suddenly captivated. This is a well known trick in this field! Psychotherapists say it gives a stronger link (therefore a power) on a patient. Adding humanity in the bond is a strange and powerful idea…
2. Many specialists come to a point where they see where is Bach in Hindemith, but also that there is some Hindemith (1895-1963) in Bach (1665-1750). Two centuries before, OK, but you can study this the other way around – even if you think it’s “not OK”. It’s a game for spirits, to study how the now can be seen as an influence for the past.
3. An Art lover studies a painting, a music, and he realizes it works in the other way : the piece of work moves him, changes him, teaches him, overwhelms him. You explore yourself through another person’s work. You are amazed by unconscious and historical forces at stake. Your skin (or your guts) are activated. Astonishment is a trigger for your brain. Then, maybe, you’re… slaked (and this can be in MANY ways), right?

 

A child comes from a mother, a father. But parents are also transformed by the coming. In the end, the person who is a child gives parents… motherhood and fatherhood.

Mhhh I like that. You feel that I touch something here, oui? Where, in what other examples can you imagine this reversibility process? Business? Couple? Creativity? Ads? Poetry? Where, when it’s obvious “things are going this way”, could you reverse something? Therefore what?

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

#minimalism #instagram

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

Ohmylanta ! Bad #management ideas

Here are a few bad management ideas to apply if you want your team exhausted, potatosad, ineffective or bored :

• Bossy Tinpot Dictators are the worst pain in the ass ever. One could wonder how they just find the drive to “be” that Type.
• Delation based reports is a plague. You just pick up the worse idiots in your team and give them a little cap. Have your favorites to do this.
• Micromanagement is exhausting. Just keep check on people and give little orders about their job (where they don’t need you at all).
• Incompetence or cruelty? Make you team wonder if your strategy is based on one or the other…
• Give orders without explanations, even if you know that your employees will wonder why you need this.
• Don’t ask your team what they think how things should be done.
• Make your team lose their time (for example to fix your mistakes).
• Give paradoxal orders (a command that would undo the other one).
• Suspicion : just show your team you mistrust everything they do for the job.
• Procrastination is great. Just hope the problems will be fixed by magic. Answer it’s “not the moment to talk about it”.
• Invent useless rules. Watch people struggle.
• Be unreliable. Say A to Bill and B to Bob. Decide randomly in the end.

 

Tool : 

A team is a clock, an engine. There are two types of managers. You can put a little oil here and there, from time to time, and let people work. They all know their job. Or you can add sand.

Instagram : marisharasikoskinen

 

Seeing to Finesse amid Chaos

There are many levels and kinds of chaos. You can be in the middle of a furious battle or a sales assistant in an overcrowded store near Christmas time, it’s chaotic.

There’s a dial to watch on every agent working in mayhem. From 100 (“I use my skills and I understand & master everything in my field”) to 0 (“I give up, I crash, I cry, now fuck this shit”).

It’s interesting to watch the cursors and levers (“I activate”) and dials’ needles (“I see what is happening here”), between efficient overactivity and sarcastic sloppiness.

In this blog I already studied three different states :

1. “Staggering State” & Observation Amusée du Chaos
2. The “Titanic Octet” state : stop panicking & arrange twinkles
3. The Hummingbird Tale

 

Ernst Jünger (German) was in continuously bombed trenches during WWI, and he was reading Léon Bloy, an angry French author, and noticed how the birds were back to singing, slowly, after a night of explosions.

Seeing to Finesse amid Chaos is a state of mind. It’s a security inner mode. A way to keep safe and calm when a part of you wants to scream. It’s to restore a Middle Age painting in one besieged city. To order, in December, a single book about the letters between a musician and a philosopher in the middle of piles of cardboard boxes full of best sellers. To study the youth of Goethe in a city ravaged by plague. It’s a long conversation about Pondichery, India, next to an overexcited screaming foam party…

Stay safe!

Have a nice day!

Photo : B. Plossu

 

Managing Layers, Empathy Ways & Adaptation Paths

Wandering into this…

I work in a store. I have to deal with : managers, colleagues, customers. If you’re a principal in a school, you deal with : teachers & special educators, students, parents (a gardener deals with flowers – a client from time to time. Some days, I’d like to be this guy)…

I talked with a speech therapist one day, and we agreed on this : when you work with a lot of humans, you acquire an instinct, a very fast ability to adapt and adjust your communication ways to the others, your interlocutors.

Thus I really feel I have the head up display like in the Terminator red screen : when the robot meets someone, he’s computing, sorting, labelling what he sees, in real time. Tut criip tut tuuut!…

If today, at work, you meet someone you already know (a kid, a colleague, a chief), you’re fast inside because you have your labels ready, a bunch of stickers, it is. Then your sensors refines and adapts : what’s the mood here and is there something new to know? All this while your talking about the weather – right?

The purpose is not to terminate the person, but to adapt. It leads to a question about empathy : you empath, do you think or do you feel? Both? Of course both!

I posted an article about INTJ or INFJ in a forum, asking if the T (thinking) and F (feeling) are not, in fact, a braid, and I got attacked there by people who REALLY like their boxes and said I “did not understand”. Like in USSR in the old time, I probably needed to be re-educated.

So we work with groups (students/teachers/parents), we connect with individuals, we juggle with labels and realness, reality, we tango between instincts and analysis. Computing big data inside!

One day we are skilled enough to laugh when we learn that there are books about mentalism or “gestures analysis”. “Methods”. As if when someone crosses his legs to feel comfortable was a “sign of closure”! OMG.

Of course there’s a need of books! A few hundreds could be a beginning. Anthropology, Philosophy, Psychology…

And years of life.

Then, when you talk with your lover, you know he/she has an idea in her mind, a worry, a concern, anything. There, it’s not analysis, it’s instinct. And you effing WATCH your partner, from the inside, not as a pilot (you don’t decide this), you just notice anything : her eyes, a way of breathing, a microseconding hesitation in a phrase. You say : “What’s happening, dear?”. She’ll maybe answer :

– Aweee… How do you know?

OK. INFJ. Maybe…

 

Thanks for reading! Comment if you feel like you want to add something…

Have a nice day!

 

Instagram : _bodylanguage_

 

 

 

 

The sole secret to lose weight

Well we all know that diets don’t work. You lose weight then you get it back very soon.

Or you get bigger.

There’s this “so there” theory that says that your body, being frightened by your diet, is like stocking up some fat, just in case. So there!

You can count calories, make strange decisions (eat only apples, then only eggs, etc). That’s boring. It don’t work.

More : you’ll probably fall into controlling behaviour. Your brain will be obsessed with food (hungriness + “I have to control all”). Borinnng.

 

So I asked a nutritionist. She said there’s only one diet that works.

Eat Half

Really, she said. Don’t change anything in your food habits (your body will hate it, and your mind will screw up). Eat the same. Divide all in two. Half.

Half a slice of bread, half a yoghurt. Half a hamburger. Yeahhhh. Use a dessert plate for everything, everyday. Eat well when you’re in a restaurant or a guest, but for your daily life : half of it. All year long. You’ll get used to it to eat.

Voilà.

PS : Don’t serve twice, silly. And don’t snack. Forbidden. Interdit !

HALF

 

Have a nice sunday!

 

Geeks Targeting

Marketing : Cattle displacement

 

Salt & Pepper shakers : Vader & Stormtroopers (awweee). Monopoly Game of Thrones (!??). A Spiderman Pop Figure looking like he’s 3 years old (well…). Warcraft (or Harry Potter, whatever) cooking or cocktails books (yeah yeah yeah).

This article is not an article, it’s a question :

How does it feel to be a target?

Happiness? You buy? What’s the part of “Oh well, they got my money : I have a $20 stormtrooper salt shaker now…”? Is this cool? What about this little Pop thing on your desk? Is it just “cute”, or is it “cute, but, all right, it $30 of crappy plastic”?

Well, I almost had a little crush for the shakers, ohlalaaaaa…

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Reading Kundera in a crowded football stadium

I had a friend who was a teacher. She was a book lover, a quiet person you could meet in an art gallery or in a library.

She was in love with a guy who loved soccer. She was intrigued and decided to go watch a match.

I suggest you go on YouTube to 4’00” and listen to it loud…

She went there with a book, a Kundera book. She was not interested in the game, but in the festive atmosphere. 

At one moment, the whole stadium stood up (because of a point, of course). Screams! The guy next to her, then, excited and yelling, said to the reading lady : “Sorryyyyy”.

She smiled.

Listened.

Kept reading…

 

Have a nice day!

Bollaert is the RC Lens Stadium, North of France. Well…