To “a stone’s throw” or “60 feet”? – The Safety in Numbers illusion

OK I’m french and I speak english a little. One great activity then is to explore english idioms. I LOVE my Dictionnary of Idioms !

“There’s safety in numbers” is a good simple one : it’s safer for a group of people to do something which could be dangerous for one person alone, voilà !

Evidently, I understood this metaphorically.

In the world of business and companies, managers often think they control and understand what happens because they collected a bunch of numbers.

Unhappily, it’s often the source of misunderstanding. They don’t control. They don’t understand anything.

When you “measure” an activity, you collect numbers, but you lose the main things. You get lines and lines on your computer, but you ignore the mood, the pace, the relations, the tensions, the movements and the hows…

They “evaluate”, and they are ignorant. They give objective, but they don’t understand what’s happening on the ground.

People in offices : give them what they want (numbers), and do your job properly!

Thanks for reading!

Alliance

When I was 25 I talked with my friend who was 40 and she said :

“Love? It’s an everyday choice!”

What? At this young age you’re NOT ready at all to hear that, right? You think meeting, magic, bond, “the one”, etc. Choice sounds not romantic enough…

Well it’s a whole subject, you’ll find books and blog articles about that. Married couples can explain. That’s not my point.

Of course, she was right!

When I began to read the letters between Gide and Valéry, two big French intellectuals, I found this idea. These guys were very different, have very little in common, but they found a spot, a territory, and they stayed friends their whole life!

It was not about “good friendship”, best pals and laughing while having beers. It was not magic of eyes and long smiling walks. It was like some work. It was like… a choice.

They used each other.

You know me, I’m constantly flipping through many pages and many books. Today I found a chapter about Sollers and Barthes. Of course : I found the same idea, very clearly exposed : they needed each other, they ate each other twice a month, and they used each other, intensively. One published the other. The other wrote an article to defend his friend. One had more experience, but loved the rocketing ideas of his friend. Etc.

Alliance.

Explicit, and probably untold. Dance of brains. Hands given. Stairs.

I don’t know why. What I understood about love decades ago existed for friendship and I ignored it. Strange…

Have a nice day!

Instagram : _bodylanguage_

“Don’t lose your inner child and stay a child… from time to time, OK?”

– I wanna watch Thor Ragnarok!
– No : tonight it’s Stalker, by Tarkovsky…
– Oh noooooo… Pffff…

 

ONE

“Don’t lose your inner child” seems a splendid advice. The spirit of childhood is almost a superpower!

Everybody understands that : the capacity to marvel, curiosity, a genuine sense of happiness, love of simple things, ability to lose yourself into an activity, gathering ideas like shells…

I hope you kept it. And if you don’t, your own children can show you : you just have to watch them play, together or alone, 100% focused…

“Garder son âme d’enfant” (to keep your child’s soul”)

 

TWO

But there’s a difference between keeping your inner child and… staying a child in your head. Refusing to be an adult. Fleeing responsibilities. Bottle-feeding mainstream teen medias, which makes you an obedient larva…

You’ll be a perfect consumer!

 

THREE

Don’t lose your inner child, AND grow up as an adult, using this spark in your eye. From time to time :

1. Explore Arts you don’t know
2. Stay away from mainstream entertainment
3. Be autonomous in your search
4. Stop “reacting” to medias all the time
5. Let your “cultural comfort zone” behind
6. Study and draw maps about what you’ll explore
7. Draw your own path
8. Try adult things

 

– Yes, but I wanna watch Thor!
– OK, but tomorrow, it’s Tarkovky.
– Okey! Can we read some Garfield in bed?
– Nope : we go on with this Manet biography.
– Pffffffffff…

(Yes, it was a dialog between me and myself. Yes I watched Thor yesterday, and Stalker today. So there!)

 

Thanks for reading!

STALKER is a treasure: an invitation to go on a mental ride with a poet and philosopher. A film that makes you wonder more about yourself yet without making you anxious. The few existing films like STALKER are the reason why cinema is called “art”! (IMDB comment)

 

 

List of Sorts of Blog Articles

As I wrote some days ago a “too long, faltering, toomanyideas-ed article”, I trashed it, but found out that I could make a list. A list of “sorts of articles”.

I have to repeat this before : when you write daily, your brain is like “placing itself”, all alone, in another place. It can be a garden of your teenage years, a classroom, inside a car, on a beach, in a forest. Many people confirmed it to me. As for myself, I write all my articles from a porch in Santa Rosa. I see it, I feel it, I know the house next to it, I love the light, the wood, the grass, the flowers, the lamps, the mood, the sky. Everything I write in this blog were written from this place. I’ve never been there, though… It’s pure imagination.

 

What is your own list? Mine is :

• Quote
• Image(s)
• Report about something you saw (a concert, an event)
• Explanation of a concept you love (from years ago, or discovered in a book)
• How you’re fascinated by (another country, a music genre, etc)
• A memory
• Tips
• A rush of an intimate question
• Presenting & sharing something you know pretty well
• Exploring many ways to ask a question
• Presenting someone else’s work (a photographer, a poet)
• Complain
• A code
• Incitement
• A little of random things (chronicle)
• A little lecture
• Criticism
• A way to decorticate what happened to understand
• Presentation of an ideal
• Comparison
• Mapping a flaw
• Finding why
• Telling you found a good door
• Telling a struggle
• Trying to find out if it’s interesting for others
• A recipe

 

What would you have to map your blog? To divide in categories? To invent another blog? To focus on certain things? To cut others? To accept you’re constantly random? To accept your work has many facets?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

Sepia Forest Photography

A few pictures I took in 2009.

#blackandwhite

from Instagram: http://ift.tt/2osNM6h

#minimalism #minimalist

Finding pictures in daily office…

from Instagram: http://ift.tt/2os0eDg

Maxfield Parrish – American painter & illustrator.

Maxfield Parrish (1870 – 1966) was an American painter and illustrator. He’s a levers-pusher : his work is too much something. Obviously.

You’ll find your too much, right? Too fairy-talish. Too colored. Too cute. You almost want to poke his shoulder : “Are you sure??”. I found his melancholic portrait too…

But this toomuchy guy makes you dig until you find little gems, winter landscapes and other Wyeth-esque (the grandfather) adventures. His works influenced movie posters and album sleeves (yeahhh Enya). Some Roger Dean‘s for Yes, too…

Yesss, childhood…

Norman Rockwell had an idol. Guess who…

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is Happiness really? – The Flow & Autotelic persons – #Csikszentmihalyi

This little article is just made of things I found on the web. It’s made for people who never heard about the “Flow”. I added a little complement with Autotelism…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

 

Mister Csikszentmihalyi is an Hungarian psychologist. He was interested in happiness, and found out a very curious thing : one is happy when one is… busy.

The components of this happiness are :

1. challenge-skill balance
2. merging of action and awareness
3. clarity of goals
4. immediate and unambiguous feedback
5. concentration on the task at hand
6. paradox of control
7. transformation of time
8. loss of self-consciousness
9. autotelic experience

 

For this last word, I copy paste wiki :

The autotelic personality is one in which a person performs acts because they are intrinsically rewarding, rather than to achieve external goals. Csikszentmihalyi describes the autotelic personality as a trait possessed by individuals who can learn to enjoy situations that most other people would find miserable. Research has shown that aspects associated with the autotelic personality include curiosity, persistence, and humility.

 

People who have experienced flow, describe the following feelings:

1. Completely involved in what we are doing – focused, concentrated.
2. A sense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday reality.
3. Great inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done, and how well we are doing.
4. Knowing that the activity is doable – that our skills are adequate to the task.
5. A sense of serenity – no worries about oneself, and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego.
6. Timelessness – thoroughly focused on the present, hours seem to pass by the minute.
7. Intrinsic motivation – whatever produces flow becomes it own reward.

 

You can find this when you flirt, when you blog, when you videogame, when you… work. Sometimes you have to think back about it when you ask yourself about happiness. It’s a way to show that it can be reached with(in) yourself…

 

Have a nice day!

 

End of Sixties Charlton Comics (imaginery) nostalgia

As a 8-11 years old little boy, I remember that from time to time my family went to visit friends in Dunkirk. We were two boys and this other family had two girls. We played a lot outside, ball, badminton or in the snow, and numerous board games too. It was a bit far from our home so we often stayed to sleep.

But well, I liked to read, I love quiet, I also remember that the father always had a good pile of these very cheap comics named Akim or Zembla (pseudo Tarzan, of course). I used to read everything I found, in these mid-seventies…

These were made by the Italians, they had dozens of titles.

 

Today I found on the net a torrent full of “Charlton Superhero Comics“. Something unknown from me! I read this one and was very pleased to find the advertisments. Awfully cute and cheap : I could almost FEEL the excitement of little kids asking to their parents for the frontier cabin, the stamps, or any catalog they would flip through in loop, every night in the quiet of the bed, or under a tree.

These quiet empty afternoons, where you were watching the clouds for hours, on your back, are almost included in the pages I read tonight.

Thanks for reading! Bye!

I’m sick these days. Sorry for the lack of updates…

 

The images are clickable :

The 2 Products of a Blogger (and other artisans)

Hey, craftsperson! Hi!

You blog, right? (or you take pictures, you paint, you write poems, you invent things or concepts). Here’s a little patterntool from Paul Valéry for your pleasure :

1. Your article (and your past ones) can be considered as a state, a work which can be taken over, modified.
2. The product is your article, it stays, it’s independent : it makes sense for readers.
3. But the work of modeling, building and rebuilding has its own value.
4. The work you had to do reacted in you, changed you, and in a way invented another product, which is a more skillful and clever you.
5. You learn from what you write.
6. Feedback feeds the magician.
7. Your article is never really finished. You could make it better all the time, couldn’t you?
8. It could teach you something more, after all…
9. In a way, you learned so much working on it, that you could erase it completely and do it again. Better.
10. A craftsperson will be satisfied with his/her product when he/she learned enough from it.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

I’m much more interested in the work than in the product of the work

P. Valéry

 

 

 

Mozart : “Dissonance? #holdmybeer”

Art, Music, Painting, do what you want with these, but there’s something you can watch, a dial : Art is a progress. 

One core of Art is : “What’s new here?”.

Thus, one path in music history – but not only – lead towards dissonance… Listen to Bach, then to Webern… Today it’s more complex, I agree…

One day I asked a friend : “How come a guy like Mozart never thought of wringing harmonies?”.

“Well, he DID!”, he answered.

The beginning of the Dissonance Quartet is a total shock when you discover it. It’s from the 18th Century and it sounds like Shostakovich! At least : first half of XXth Century.

I was like : “Wait what?”.

We could talk about this pattern for a few hours, right? Each important piece of Art swallows influences and digests them and builds something new, never seen, never heard. Think Picasso. Think Stravinsky!

But here it’s like a casual slapping in your face. Like an open window into 150 years in the future… with no consequence.

Now, in YOUR field, what is this? Are you skilled enough to guess?

MMmhhh. Maybe Leornardo Da Vinci tried some Pollock dripping? Who knows?

Have a great day!

 

 

 

 

Dieppe, Normandy, France

 

 

Dieppe, Normandy, France

 

 

Dieppe Normandy France Sky Seagull

 

 

Dieppe, Normandy, France

 

 

#abstract #streetphotography #instagram

from Instagram: http://ift.tt/2o9Vjpp

from Instagram: http://ift.tt/2o93IcM

from Instagram: http://ift.tt/2o3Ba5e

Dieppe, Normany, France : Sky

 

Dieppe, Normandy, France

The highest state of the Method is a Principle : Chronicle 36

The highest state of the Method is a Principle. I don’t know what this means, but well, it triggers a pattern digging. What are other “Highest States”? You see what I mean? Of course you see…

Take a tree, or the sun. Make it a symbol, OK? What is between “a tree” and “a symbol of a tree”?

Ooo

Valentine’s Day is a bit special to me. For years I’ve been like these people who say “I don’t need to be ordered – on a special day – to offer a present or flowers to my lover”. The cattle thing is always a bit frightening. “Obey”. I keep this for other days…

One V-Day, also… Forget it. Thus & since, V-Days, well, really : no. Other days, OK?

Ooo

Cut flowers are dying, right? Then they are on slow drip in a vase. A bunch of tulips is an agony.

Plus “Awwweeeee…”

Ooo

“This author? I have everything”. Or almost.

Thomas Bernhard, Ernst Jünger, Paul Valéry, Anton Chekhov for me.

Ask the question, the answers says something about the reader.

Ooo

When you dislike an artist but keep exploring his/her career to find out why everybody loves that. The “despite”.

Ooo

Wikipedia : “In Jewish folklore, a golem is an animated anthropomorphic being that is magically created entirely from inanimate matter (specifically clay or mud)”.

Aren’t we all Golem Makers?

“Writing for someone” is a good example. We write “in front of someone”, an audience, a nonexisting person made of clay, our “imaginary reader”.

Ooo

A symbol has a special power of impact/effect, right? There’s magic, here?

Is a symbol an image?

Ooo

What is a thinker who can not exert on anything?

Ooo

Can we imagine without images?

Can we imagine without words?

“The imaginary fashions Golems…”

Have a nice day!

Jean-Pascal