Magnum Photography has something in its core…

Wikipedia : “Magnum Photos is an international photographic cooperative owned by its photographer-members, with offices in New York City, Paris, London and Tokyo”.

https://www.magnumphotos.com/

I’ve been given a huge book about Magnum this Christmas, and the preface tells something I’d like to share with you :

Magnum is driven by a tension, a conviction : it is a space where the opposites can cohabit.

From the beginning, two of the founding members were like deciding it. Capa almost invented the modern photo journalism and was a war photographer, and Cartier-Bresson was considered a master of “candid photography”.

A candid photograph is a photograph captured without creating a posed appearance. This is achieved in many ways, for example:

• when the subject is in motion,
• by avoiding prior preparation of the subject,
• by surprising the subject,
• by not distracting the subject during the process of taking photos.

(Wikipedia)

This opposition between the documentary and something more artistic is the core of Magnum.

And therefore, other oppositions have been fertilizing the agency :

• Photos on command or more personal works.
• European culture vs American management.
• Individual work, or team work.
• Fragility of the photographer outside, but/and being part of the elite of photography.

 

There’s no need to go further. We have here a pattern, like a “map for the mind” to organize, build and watch a team. I like it because it integrates opposites, instead of inventing useless rules, frontiers, and take away a part of something.

Where to apply that? Could it be useful? How to think about it?

MORE : what else could we build ON contradictions and opposites? How can it be a source of energy? 

 

It’s 10 PM the 31the December. Last article of the year!

 

Thanks for reading!

Peace!

Photo : Marc Riboud

 

(Magnum)

Long cool movies for holidays Part 1

Winter holidays are linked to childhood. I was born in 1966 and there were 3 TV channels. Three. I was happy to spend a little time with the TV magazine, to circle good films with a red pen.

Today I remember these Big Budget Long Movies, with an Intermission, see? I remember Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (“with the guy of Mary Poppins”), Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, or Dr Zhivago. These let you, as a child of this era, full of tears, happiness and energy, and I’m sure it put a strong core into me. Something like… whatever.

 

Have a nice New Year’s eve!

Wandering into Lists of Best 2017 Albums

I googled “Best 2017 Albums” and found many things. Today I wander.

 

Charlotte Gainsbourg is pretty good. Gourmet production, crescendos, gorgeous harmonic shifts. Ring a Ring o’Roses is a great song. 4

Fever Ray and her icy voice… The album looks like a disconcerting big chest, full of sharp patterns, eargasming sounds and a constant sense of drive. There’s a lack of harmony-magic though 3

Fleet Foxes gives me smiles with strange rhythms, but it’s badly produced (too much reverb, buddy) and too casual for me. Voice is boring. Harmonic colors are great, full of moving clouds and facets, and architecture surprises. 3

Girlpool places itself in a clear “indie sound”. Average, but some rare good surprises (the slippery waltz of Powerplant – oh this bass player), the stairs, squeaking risks & breaks of She Goes By).

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith like a baby Fever Ray. Harmless and insipid, but sweet. Stupid voice and funny sounds at times (To Follow & Lead). I like her good will.

Kamasi Washington, a splendid saxophonist, great to listen in your car

Kehlani got me immediately with Keep On. Irresistible! The rest is crap, sadly.

Kelela loves the sound of her own voice. It’s not good, but it’s good enough to keep me listening to the album. There’s always an element (a sound, a loop, a production idea) which makes you wonder.

Kendrick Lamar. Rap is not my cup of beer, but I really LOVED “King Kunta” in 2015 (which is perfection : the implacability of the bass, the laddered construction). Sadly I didn’t hear anything at this level today…

 

(to be continued)

 

 

In the trash :

Dead water puddles : Boring lazy, examples of “I am ecstatic about myself and I don’t work” : Björk, Future, Jay Z, Julie Byrne and Julien Baker (“I bathe in my voice and empty music”)

Stressed boring mosquitoes : Drunk, slippery and unorganized “experimentations with machines” that goes to trash pretty quickly : Arca, Jlin

Haiku about storm…

Some say haiku come from old songs. If you extract words from these wakas (Japanese songs) you have an haiku ! Sadaiye collected some of these songs in a book…

Chiru hana wo
Oikakete Yuku
Arashi kana

The falling blossoms:
Look at them, it is the storm
That is chasing them.

Sadaiye

Found in Haiku and Modernist Poetics, by Hakutani Y.

Street Sun Photography

Drive or walk, if you Instagram you have to stop when you see this : the winter sun in the street!

Have a great 31!

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Flying Colors, New Year’s Stars & Norwegian Angels : Chronicle 30

What if happiness was the sum of the best memories?

“With flying colors”. It’s a new idiom for me. We say “Avec brio” (with brio), or “haut la main” (up the hand). I love your “handsomely”, too.

I once more propose this :

“To overcome one’s talents. My skills unplease me. My easy bores me. My difficult drives me”.

Paul Valéry

It’s not “my easiness”, but “mon facile” (my easy), grammatically incorrect but everybody here will understand what he means, right?

Escape into work works. For some. It doesn’t for me.

Sometimes we remember things we’ve never seen. Because we remember what we’ve been told. An image has been formed.

I remember the image of a firework, from a beach in the Pacific ocean, linked to sadness, choices and blocking feelings with logic. Just one picture of flowers in the night sky… and tears.

When you are too much for somebody. Even for a spouse…

I heard a U2 bad song, but they recover it with a splendid strange break. It could be an article (“What do you do with a bad song?”), but I forgot the song, so…

When you make a choice, you live your choice and you think the other one.

Can we lose our colors? Why? How?

Sometimes people change, and they just lose themselves.

 

There’s a big storm coming tomorrow in France. Name’s Carmen.

Thus I found this translation of Ze song from Bizet’s opera Carmen, “l’amour est un enfant de Bohême” :

Love is a gypsy’s child,
it has never, ever, known a law;
love me not, then I love you;
if I love you, you’d best beware!

The bird you thought you had caught
beat its wings and flew away …
love stays away, you wait and wait;
when least expected, there it is!

Many persons here tweet about this storm – “Si je t’aime prends garde à toi” : if I love you, beware!

Brrr…

 

At the end of this year I have 174 real followers. Hello everybody! One day I reached 30 readers and someone told me “Hey, that’s a class!”. Today it’s a little more… I would like to thank everyone, and especially those who like or comment my little tools here. Thank you! Merci !

Have a nice last day of 2017!

Jean-Pascal

 

 

Dwindling Ideas & Wobbly Recoveries for bloggers

Hi everyone!

In this penultimate day (and maybe article) of the year, I discovered this verb : “To peter out” (never heard this before); then “to dwindle”. That’s so charming that I played with them (aweeee “dwindling“) for my title.

Look at this Nietzsche quote :

A Sigh. I caught this notion on the way, and rapidly took the readiest, poor words to hold it fast, so that it might not again fly away. But it has died in these dry words, and hangs and flaps about in them and now I hardly know, when I look upon it, how I could have had such happiness when I caught this bird.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Fourth Book, 298

 

We bloggers sometimes catch a great idea at the weirdest moments : at work, when we drive, when we shower. Darn it!

And we all know this feeling : this idea is mixed up with a rush, a fast and blossoming urge to write it down, to develop it in a cool article to share. It’s a sigh, a wind, a light, a force. You are so happy you caught it…

Well, the most common event is that you will totally forget what it was about, as soon as you’re ready to write. You then have this terrible moment : you’re stuck in immobility, closing your eyes in silence, trying to find in your mind any string to pull, a path to it, anything. But the marvelous idea stays hidden in the deepest waters of your worn out brain…

Hopefully it’ll grow bigger until you catch it back, like the fish. Unlikely, right?

All petered out, off, down, whatever.

But the subject of this article is different : it’s when you remembered your weaved “idea & rush”, you drove this pack down into words on your computer, but… it’s parked dead in the end. It dwindled into a “WTF I don’t care anymore”. You lost it. The idea is there, but the steam is not. No life. You lost something but you don’t know what. Dry words. Article incompleteness.

In the end, you can trash it, or let it macerate in your draft section on WordPress. Maybe wait the day after? Sometimes it works. Next morning, jump up from your bed, have a coffee and read over your mess. Maybe (maybe) you’ll hear the engine pre-roar… You go girl!

What will happen likely is that you will publish this wobbly and patched article, like it is. A bit bitter unhappy, but hoping it’ll inspire something to someone somewhere.

 

If you’re lucky, an hour later, while you commute to work, you’ll feel a lightbulb over your head, une ampoule électrique : you found the rush back, it’s now full of light, at least!

Until you’re back in front of your computer?

 

Thanks for reading! Have a nice day!

Instagram : jasonnocito666

The “Let’s make it a dance” tool

Hefez : La Danse du Couple (really need a translation?) is a book written by a couples therapist. He says that a couple is an impossible thing to build and to live – the other one never “fits”.

Therefore, we all have to think, watch the other and our alliance, and realize that there are stairs to climb, paths to invent, that we have to think and “find a way”. All this gestures-mess is a DANCE.

“Let’s make it a dance” is a tool which says :

“When it’s difficult somewhere but you have to insist and you have to stay in the system, just accept and absorb the difficulties – and invent a dance. Your dance. It’s a mess, but you can dance it, smile, and climb the stairs”. And ignore the others. Nobody can understand your own dance. It’s a secret.

Thanks for reading!

Instagram : tammygucci

Chekhov quote about life’s crisis

« Anyone can face a crisis — it’s the day-to-day living that wears you out. »

A. Chekhov

 

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3 Quotes from Manet : a toolwaltz for artists, painters, thinkers…

“It is not enough to know your craft – you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more”.

 

“There is only one true thing: Instantly paint what you see”.

 

“But to have spontaneity, one must be master of his art”.

 

Edouard Manet

 

These are good little seeds for artists, thinkers, and artists thinkers.

The middle one is linked to the 1st & 3rd.

The pack is like a loop, right? 1 – 2 – 3 then again. A braid.

Tool :

What’s your braid? When you write a poem, do you tell a story, do you picture a place or a mood, do you work on words as elements : jewelry or photography? If you’re a teacher, what do you weave? Watching the class, the students one by one? Do you invent, or do you follow? In jazz, do you listen to others or do you lead? What about sex? Marketing? Leading a battle? Politics? Making a speech? Being an actor? Conversation?

As always, it’s about

1. thinking about what you’re doing
2. draw or find lines, frontiers (spontaneity/mastering, freedom/constraint, casual/focus, one tree/the forest, respect rules/mind of your own, etc)
3. choose how to balance
4. move cursors (and pan scales) is necessery
5. be aware of all of it
6. or not

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Some examples :

• Reason & Pleasure : An Interesting Braid
• Adding from the Other Side – An Interesting Braid Part 2
• #INFJ & #INTJ & the Tango Feeling/Thinking
• Both Sides NOW
• Event VS Structure
• Le Semblant d’Acceptation – I say yes all the time & I have a mind of my own
• “I chose you for your weaknesses” – #Pina

 

 

“An artist should be a spontanéiste. There’s the right term. But to have spontaneity, one must be master of his art. Undirected groping never leads anywhere. One must translate one experiences, but translate it instantaneously, so to speak”

Manet

 

Eno & U2 : a freezing creative process

Brian Eno produced a few U2’s albums. I read one day in an interview that he had to restrain these guys’ creativity : they have too many ideas, all the time, and it’s exhausting!

Therefore, as the person in charge, he sometimes has to decide a STOP.

This is what he does, then :

As each musician is recorded on his own track, the freedom is total, which leads to infinite choices. At this time of the composition, Eno decides to pre-mix what he has, freezing the whole song in stereo. Instead of having for example 12 tracks you can move, mix and change all the time, he reduces all the pack in 2 tracks, left and right. From there, nobody can touch it anymore – then he trashes the source.

He transforms, this way, the big tree of possibilities into a “this is how it is now” song.

 

Of course you see it’s a tool : what are the consequences of this? Displacing creativity? (what do they do “from this”?). Is closing inventiveness from here allow people to invent elsewhere? Another thing? When do we need, in our work, to stop inventing and move forward? Why? When do we have too many ideas? What to do? What if you remove an element?

When do you need to have a thinker in charge?

You can also read : Fecundity of Limits

Thanks for reading !

 

Juxtaposition & Continuity VS Instant Nuggets : an efficient Art Pattern

When I find a structure like this, an Art-Pattern, I’m as happy as a kid who found a colored beetle under a rock. Here it is :

ONE

In the bonuses of the war movie Dunkirk, C. Nolan explains that he want to puts tension and stress in the audience. Firstly, he does it the normal way, with the story and its continuity/proceedings (suspense, following action, etc). Secondly, he wants that every little part of the movie to be stressful “in itself”, in the way it’s done at the moment (with sound, music, cut, etc). Cut 5 seconds randomly in the movie and bite your nails!

Dunkirk as a MAYA & Strangeization sensorial experience

TWO

The day before, I was reading an article in the train (there’s some bliss to read in a train) written by Paul Valéry about Marcel Proust‘s masterpiece “In Search of Lost Time”. He says something I already noticed & told you about : if the novel is great from its “stories”, you can pick ANY PAGE in the thousands, you’ll find a great idea. In each page, there’s a seed…

Proust was a blogger…

THREE

I bought two photography books last week. Stephen Shore‘s Uncommon Places (in USA) and Raymond Depardon‘s Habiter en France (“To live in France”). At first I was not that impressed by Depardon’s work. Shore’s photos are so gorgeous you can melt your brain into them, like in front of a painting. With Depardon in France, you have a little parking place, a road, a church. It’s touching, but it is almost “just ordinary”. BUT…

Watching many of them, though, you begin to understand there are patterns (like juxtaposing modernity and “old France”) : the pleasure is not in each photography, but in what you find when you watch many of them…

“Why do you live in this place?” – Shore & Depardon

Stephen Shore, mesmeric #Photographer

PATTERN/TOOL

How could we call that? There are two tools presented here, and I admit I’ve been amazed to notice them in a single week, in three differents Arts (Movies, Literature, Photography).

What could we say about this in Architecture, Poetry, Teaching? What about weaving them? Are artists aware of that? What could it bring them to be aware? Where is the efficiency? Can the artist offer a clue on more discreet propositions? What do you prefer? What is the more satisfying? To focus on each little part (moment, second, page, verse), or to focus on the proceedings, the long development of a piece? What other questions does it trigger?

Thanks for reading!

Instagram : beautifulbizarremagazine

Anders Zorn, Swedish Painter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Zorn

Anders Zorn was a Swedish painter (1860-1920), a star in his country but I’m not sure he’s well known elsewhere. He knows his art, and when he paints water you can almost hear the sound of lapping…

There’s talent, and freedom, and he knows what a portrait is. Bravo!

Thanks for reading!

Degas & Mallarmé : painting, poetry, ideas and creativity

Degas (a painter) was discussing poetry with Mallarmé (a poet);

“It isn’t ideas I’m short of… I’ve got too many”, said Degas.

“But Degas,” replied Mallarmé, “you can’t make a poem with ideas. … You make it with words.”

Game for brain : behind the obvious, what does that mean? What frontier does is draw? Why? What can we find around this? Where to apply it?

Mallarmé answers a painter… as a poet. He did it on purpose, right? How can a Art irrigate another Art?

 

Have a nice day!

Borrowing Small Machines for Thinkers

Yesterday I read a little paragraph of P. Valéry and translated it my way to offer his little “structure seed for thinkers” to my readers. I wrote it fast, casually, pulling it out of the book, without the context. As if I stole a single petal – or a swanny feather – to put it on a paper under a lamp to watch it closely. “Oh, curves! Symbol!”.

Went to bed with my Pléiade of Valéry, finding out that he wrote his 261 notebooks from 1894 to 1945 – 26600 pages written an hour every dawny morning. Thoughts and abstractions (nothing like a “diary”). Thinker thinking, building small tools, pure mental exercises to keep his spirit “sharp and flexible”.

I smiled : he would have loved (like Deleuze with his concepts) people to borrow phrases to build their own thing, or to present them as little machines for thinkers.

Then I read at random page a book about Miles Davis. Found an article about Panthalassa, an LP composed in 1998 by Bill Laswell, who accessed Miles Davis’ original tapes from 1969-1974, cutting them, fixing them, rebuilding music from them. Something in this mood which exists since sampling exists : considering the music heritage like a continuous collective flow you can open and close windows in, helping yourself with convenience…

See me coming? It’s been a smile when I discovered my evening was in the whole shadow of a great ideatree.

Ideas, seeds and tools are everywhere like fruits, and no one piece comes from nowhere. You can even borrow them from yourself (read a letter you wrote two years ago). Seedseeking purposing.

Miles constantly did that with and from other musicians. You can get inspired by an ignorant, or another art. And Valéry was a great reader… It’s a flow.

If one day I learn that one of my little tools was used to make something else, or put a seed in a mind, somewhere on Earth, then I’ll be happy. Plunder it, guys!

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Instagram : linaveresk

 

The Happy Lonely Christmas Liars

“Tonight then, I Christmas eve dinner alone and I know you will believe me if I say you that this “freedom” brings me a pretty much voluptuous feeling. Music reading silence peace.”

This phrase can makes us think about the state of life where you need it – and need to write about it.

It’s maybe next to another state (when you have a family, you mostly want to be with them, right? Oh but maybe you are… and wish for quiet instead). It can be after it. Before it. Because of remoteness (your lover lives in another part of the planet). Well : circumstances…

But also : a real love for this state. “Music reading silence peace” lovers, call them introverts or quiet people, those who like silence and know that their own head is good company. Some days, you love or you need to be apart, apart from the people & parties.

Sipping moods in summer nights, the “outside the party” Type…

This friend also wrote me this :

“Yesterday evening I was invited to dinner with X and a few of her friends. It’s been like a trial :

• Why do you always wear black
• Why don’t you talk much
• Why don’t you go out
• Why a quiet face and nervous hands
• I know well that you are like this
• I know well that you are like that
• You are one of those women who this
• You are one of of those women who that”

 

Horror, she wrote.

Hmm?

Have a nice day!

Instagram : _bodylanguage_

Examining a problem with Valéry

In found this very little structure in Paul Valéry’s notebooks. I cut, bolded and translated my way. As it’s a “tool”, Mr Valéry won’t be angry (and well, he died in 1945). Where would we apply this screwdriver? How do I say “I will can”, in English? I’ll be able to? Hmm?

 

The spirit won’t be in a hurry to imagine what is necessary to considerate a problem.

it will examine, not caring about time & duration of the process.

Aware of the remarkable contrast between 1/ promptness, impatience and worries of the “heart” and 2/ this slowness, made of criticism and hope.

This lateness, this delay – which can can unlimited – has an effect : to transform the problem.

The transformed problem will be able to transform the questioner…

 

 Also :

“To overcome one’s talents.

My skills unplease me.

My easy bores me. 

My difficult drives me”.

 

“Why do you live in this place?” – Shore & Depardon

Bonjour tout le monde !

In the preface of a French photography book called “Habiter en France” (“To live in France”, by Raymond Depardon), the writer says that it’s one of the most intimate question : “Why do you live in this place?”.

Indeed, I think he’s right. It comes from the deepest of the deep. Parents, roots, the sky, people around. We stay “here”, but why? What’s the bond? What do we like? Why do we live here? These questions seem to put us in a thoughtful silence…

Today, the 23 December 2017, I got this huge, heavy, mythical book from Stephen Shore, one of the best American photographer ever : “Uncommon Places”. It’s a present I made to myself…

Both books, one in the USA, one in France, like to show what is rarely showed. Not the Eiffel tower. Not New York. But little roads, normal houses, parking lots. And certainly not in a bad way. Uncommon places in America, and where do people live in France.

They both “insist” on photographing these places until we feel the mood, the sky, the silence or the little winds…

I remember this friend from Kansas, feeling the summer air here in France, like… “Ohhhhh… There is something…”.

 

I LOVE to have these two books together. In this blog, it’s because I found a common structure, a pattern, of course. Pictures of normal life. And as usual :

The pleasure comes from “finding the subtle differences” within these cousin works…

 

Merry Christmas! Thanks for reading!

 

Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore’s legendary Uncommon Places has influenced more than a generation of photographers. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, and his large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past forty years. Uncommon Places: The Complete Works, published by Aperture in 2004, presents a definitive collection of the landmark series, and in the span of a decade, has become a contemporary classic. Now, for this lushly produced reissue, the artist has added twenty rediscovered images and a statement explaining what it means to expand a series now many decades old.

An Ardent Patience & Depuzzlement Processes : seeds in Chronicle 29

People underestimate kids, right?

1. Someone hears a sound, and doesn’t understand what it is about
2. Then hears it’s a voice – of unknown words
3. Then hears it’s his language, but doesn’t understand the phrases
4. Then gets the phrases, but doesn’t get what one is talking about
5. Then understands and stands up

Les enfants aux ailes de rue – Street-Winged Children.

It’s time to repost this : Some French feel-good movies to choose from

Exploring mood? Google “Best Albums 2017”. I’m on it! What are yours?

In a conversation about things and events and ideas, do you focus on the sense and the logic, or on what you feel, the specifics? That’s a real question…

Oh, both, dear : naturally. How to weave/dance? Finding invariances in the particulars…

Serenity as a sign of love.

A good friend, or your child, has a problem, an hesitation. Needs you. You then develop a big bubble of attention, a gigantic ear. You focus & try to ask questions – useless or trappy or good questions. The purpose is to help him/her to give birth to a solution – to help the depuzzlement process…

À l’aurore, armés d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides Villes.

In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid Cities.

Arthur Rimbaud

Here’s a secret (or a question) :

People have different burdens, different ways to be bereaved (“deprived of loved ones”).

I remember telling a friend, in a letter, more than twenty years ago, about my difficulties with my lover, who had lost her mother at the age of 11.

“Go to the cemetery, with her”, she answered. Ohhh…

There are many types of bereavement : death, cutting bonds because of serious misconduct, friendship loss, remoteness… It creates, I’m sure, a black veil, with a crow under. Who can pinch. It’s maybe our responsibility to come close to the veil and whisper : “Let’s go to the cemetery”.

Talking about a dark past, wrong choices from people you loved, or the loss of a mother. Holding up (a little) the veil. See if there’s a sail under, ready to inflate and breathe. Or not.

Who will be the one who says : “Let’s talk about the past”? What can it bring? What if the answer is “No, never”?

Forgetting the past to move forward is like to erase maps and the knowledge on the maps.

My friend was a teacher for kids “with big problems”. She wrote me a long letter about these children who became worried – thus violent – when they began to understand that a special freedom comes from… learning. Then, she said, they go on, and calm down.

Interesting situation, when you want the balance to change but the other one doesn’t want the balance to change.

Funnier : you want to change something, but the other one wants to change another thing. Here you are both of you pushing on different doors…

Dervishes

Dervishes

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

#blue

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