Small Units Speed & Ways of Escaping : Chronicle 57

“A very trying summer”? I found this in a Willa Cather short stories book. Who “tried” what?

Dictionaries give me the French “éprouvant” (punishing, demanding, grueling), which comes from “épreuve” (ordeal, hardship).

Question : is “trying” colored with “he tried”, or is it, for English speaker, like another word?

oOo

There’s a whole continent to explore : idioms of a language.

In French, if someone asks you something and there’s NO WAY you give it to them, we say “Des clous !” (“Some nails!”) while you say “No way” or “Nothing doing” (which I like a lot).

When something’s fabulous, I hear you say “the cat’s meow” (or whiskers), and I think “aaaawwwww”.

oOo

Today, web pages are all somethered with Java and PHP. I’m an old fool and in 1993 I was writing my blog in HTML without any editor. Raw. As French is full of accents, it was much worse than you can imagine :

The word “hétérogénéité” needed : hétérogénéité, yeah. I don’t tell you about the tables and charts. It was a mess to code that!

As I type, I was very fast, and my hands, today, remember the sequence “é” very well.

But at this time, I was getting some emails from guys asking me what was my secret to have “so fast display”. Well, nothing more than HTML, that all.

Make it simple. Decrease sophistication. Small fast units. It’s a little tool.

I remember Robert Fripp thinking about that, against big pop groups’s tours, with dozens of trucks. He preferred small fast groups.

What do we gain?

oOo

My fantasy is to explore the States of America in a slantoblique way. Maybe I should visit Bowbells, after all?

One day I was talking about that with a friend, living near Seattle. I asked her : WHY don’t you take the train to go to San Francisco?

In France, the “train thing” is more important. TGV (Trains Grande Vitesse) go 190 miles/h and I can cross my whole country in train in less than 6 hours.

From Seattle to San Francisco by train, I checked : 22h, 1300 km, it’s taller than France itself!

How can I explain? My brain watches the map, and like refuses to get that USA is bigger than that. Of course I knowww the distances and that France is smaller that Texas alone!

oOo

Warfare, strategy, tactics, yeah, you know the Art of War, and that it’s useful out of the field of war, too, blah blah blah : in a couple, in a group, sports, trial, business of course : these “applications outside the military” are fascinating, right?

There are many other Chinese strategy books. The best is probably The Thirty-Six Stratagems. Very interesting in itself AND in the way our mind wants to apply them elsewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-Six_Stratagems

oOo

There are many sorts of humor, and it’s funny to sort and categorize them. I like when humor is to “say the truth” : Demetri Martin & Dilbert are two examples.

I like sports bars. Sports bars are great because they collect all the people I don’t want to hang out with and put them in one room. I’m not against sports. I don’t have a problem with sports. I’m just not good at them. I’m not coordinated. I’m not drawn to sports. I don’t even look like someone who could spend time in a sports bar. I have a very punchable face in a sports bar.

I set a personal record on Christmas. I got my shopping done three weeks ahead of time. I had all the presents back in my apartment. I was halfway through wrapping them and I realized ‘Damn, I used the wrong wrapping paper.’ The paper I used said “Happy Birthday.” I didn’t want to waste it, so I just wrote ‘Jesus’ on it.

oOo

One of the best games is to “find a common structure, then differences between things”. Find examples.

oOo

When is it you have to work well against your hierarchy? You need a mask. You have to forget about your need of approval, play the hierarchy play, knowing its principles, invent your own laws and principle. Loneliness and autonomy, samurai. It’s exhausting though.

oOo

Who likes your little enthusiasms?

oOo

What kind of burning tryingness is there? What are ways of escaping?

Thanks for reading! Stay safe!

Radioactive Bees & a Conquistador : Chronicle 56

Who are the musicians you always come back to? Genesis and Mike Olfield, Pink Floyd and King Crimson, Blonde Redhead and Röyksopp, Brahms and Schubert. Like… if I had to “check” something, each time.

oOo

oOo

And there are some you keep coming back to… to explore, like Mahler (Sy 2 Part 2 as a cursed Waltz, Sy 4’s strange violin), or the ECM label : these are like continents to never finish to explore, discovering parts or mapping them, or deepening, digging, reading about to understand.

oOo

Currently with Egberto Gismonti‘s discography. Hmm… no. I go back to Eno’s Thursday Afternoon as a place of feather.

oOo

Conquistador is pierced, explorer lost, betrayed or imprudent?

oOo

In my “French toolbox”, I present tools for the mind, little tools. I really like to find structures, and patterns. You’ll find many books about tools. Some of them are from spirituality and self help, some other about manipulation and power. How to “win”. How to become a shark…

Sun Tzu, for example, or “The Power” (Greene) are all about power, how to win, destroy an opponent. The war like an Art, a way to unfold invention, with tricks and knacks.

I should article about these, maybe one day – could be called “Mean Tools“, though this sounds unfair. Hmm. “Mean tools to use gently”?

oOo

oOo

In France when you write down a shoppin list you’ll add PH for Papier Hygiénique (for toilet paper – maybe you write TP in English?), or more often PQ, and why is that? We call it “papier cul”, ass-paper (AP?). Thus, we say : “Pécu”.

oOo

Thinking about Talk Talk‘s Shame and Tears for Fears‘ Shout, two “hymns” I had in ears when I was a young man. I remember that for Shout, the composer wrote all night long, knowing he “had something”.

The tropism : “I work and suddenly I know I have something big” is something to explore in the history of arts. What if it was a mistake? How to read it, as the result of big work? Chance? Acuteness?

oOo

Sshhh…

oOo

There’s an old classic in self help and psychology, which is that abandonment in childhood becomes dependancy in adulthood. These sound very much too easy (and it’s vague enough to be applied on every life), but, well…

Dependancy becomes here a mask, an armour against the fear of feeling the fiery bite of abandonment. It provides a frame. It can be cigarette, a constant need of approval, sex, sports, any dependancy, seen there has almost a shelter.

oOo

what happens when we seek coincidences

oOo

Words are “radioactive bees”, they move all the time, they irradiate meanings. When a bee watches herself into the mirror of another language, her image is blurry, multiple. She flies away, and the image hesitates to.

Yesterday I watched a bee : “Incentive“. Inducement. Motivation. Reward. So I was a bit lost. I wanted to write something about the fact that a good motivation, in life, was a genuine curiosity from the person you love.

But I wanted to express something about stimulation. It’s not even “seeked”, it’s a rush in a work one can get because you have someone in front of you asking actual questions. You get a fire, a light in eyes, because of the bond, and all, etc, etc.

Bzz bzz bzz.

oOo

Like a dream
the butterfly
in my fingers

oOo

To follow my previous article about carpentry/marquetry, I’d add this tool, which is to choose the other art, as a source of lateral thinking. If you’re blocked, stay on it, but choose a tool you don’t know very well. You’ll find, there.

Here are my articles tagged “Change” :

https://afrenchtoolbox.wordpress.com/tag/change/

Thanks for reading!

Carpenter or Marquetryier?

In an article about a group the journalist called one musician the carpenter and the other one the expert in marquetry.

• 

• 

It’s obviously an article subjet “in itself”, a tool, a choose your weapon one.

• A photographer likes textures, and another one thinks “composition”, lines and balance.
• A poet thinks “long story” and parts, another one thinks about how he would associate words to spark an interesting meaning.
• An orchestra director works on the big picture, and another one on timbre.
• A teacher sees a course as a progression, or focuses on elements which…

Wait, isn’t the ideal tool to choose to be the both, each time?

Rarely we are lucky enough to have a McCartney who writes the whole Hey Jude song, AND a Lennon who says hime to keep the great, confusing, fabulous nonandverysensical phrase : “The movement you need is on your shoulder”.

Pure marquetry!

Therefore we have to tango between details and big lines, between a spoken sentence and the scenario, between a minute and a life’s choice…

“The movement you need is on your shoulder”, hmmm what does that mean? It’s maybe the subject of another article, right?

Thanks for reading!

So let it out and let it in
Hey Jude, begin
You’re waiting for someone to perform with
And don’t you know that it’s just you
Hey Jude, you’ll do
The movement you need is on your shoulder
La-la-la, la, la
La-la-la, la, mmh

The Uncle Albert’s trick – juxtapose, juxtapose, juxtapose

ONE

“Uncle Albert – Admiral Halsey” is a Paul McCartney’s song from the album RAM (1971). Here’s a little text I found on songfacts :

McCartney combined pieces of various unfinished songs to create this; in the later years of The Beatles, they did this a lot as a way to put unfinished songs to good use. As a result, “Uncle Albert – Admiral Halsey” contains 12 different sections over the course of its 4:50 running time. This jumble of musical textures, comic character voices, sound effects and changing tempos turned off a lot of listeners, but many others thought it was brilliant. The song wasn’t released as a single in the UK, but in America it became McCartney’s first #1 hit as a solo artist.

Oh, lovely, isn’t it?

I love this song, because it prevents you from drowning after one minute of a “cool seventies slow” with noises, surprises, changes. A big smile gets bigger all along : “Is Macca silly?”. Yeah!

TWO

There’s a famous Medley at the end of the Beatles album “Abbey Road”. McCartney says that they wanted to create a sort of “opera structure”. Lennon despised it, though. It’s considered today as one summit of the group.

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

THREE

When you listen to that (structure, noises, guitars), you think about Pink Floyd, who created in the Seventies like the epitome of this structured, fractured tracks sticked together in long classical-music-like “movements”.

Some examples : Pink Floyd “Pigs” (11 mn), Supertramp “Fool’s Overture” (11 mn), Genesis “Firth of Fifth” (9 mn).

FOUR

The pleasure is bigger than the juxtaposition of tracks, you get pleasure in transitions (closing door, opening door), in contrasts, you get it in subsequent modulations, you build like a “little travel”, like through the rooms of a big surprizing house…

Lennon is funny, when he says it’s a very practical to dispose of music you don’t know what to do with!

Lennon is COOL because he uses this game, in a fractal way, in other songs like Did A Pony, sticking words together (like Dylan, he says) to see if something appears, AND sticking two different song together to make a new song.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juxtaposition : Throughout the arts, juxtaposition of elements is used to elicit a response within the audience’s mind, such as creating meaning from the contrast, an abrupt change of elements. In film, the position of shots next to one another (which montage is) is intended to have this effect.

FIVE

So here we are, on the path of Progressive Rock! But there are differences. Prog rock wants to build long pieces – maybe with “parts” -, and they are damned serious!!

McCartney and The Beatles constructions are more like… medleys. This + this + that. And they have fun!

https://afrenchtoolbox.wordpress.com/2018/05/07/the-juxtaposition-principle/

SIX

My principle/tool is :

• Choose the elements you already have and want to get rid of (things must probably be of the same nature (music + music))
• Juxtapose – stick!
• Be conscious of transitions
• Choose the order of parts
• Don’t take it too seriously
• Try, try, try

Whether you use it in poetry, novel writing, music, have fun!

Thanks for reading!

Here’s MGMT, 12 minutes of

Mike Oldfield, 24 minutes :

Models & Cases

Here’s an exercise I love :

• plunge into a domain I don’t know,
• study it in a casual way,
• find and extract a concept or a method,
• explain what I found in an article,
• use it elsewhere.

In a French encyclopedia article about Constitutional Law, a domain I don’t know at all, I found lines telling about the Methods of Constitutional Law, with opposites :

1. Exegetical (explains/state) or Dialectical (involves opposites/changes)
2. Positive (describes and explains) or Normative (what is fair, what things should be)
3. Cases (studies the political thing in its particularities) or Models (compares the political thing to some types)

We don’t know these things at all, but we can see something here, right?

Models can be very fecund, they can teach us things, they can also be an ideal to reach, they offer a direction. But cases are funnier to study, it’s like gathering shells instead of studying them in a book. You find nuggets, strange and good ideas. To explain is great, but to find oppositions and differences is cool too.

https://afrenchtoolbox.wordpress.com/2017/05/24/gleaning-in-loop-the-gathering-seashells-type/

A model is in a brain, or on paper. Cases are in life.

This is linked to my body/soul recent obsession (see my last blog articles), and to the famous reality principle, where it (the reality) reshapes ideals and ideas and expectations.

It’s like a huge toolbox I just found! Where will I use these tools?

Have a nice day. Thanks for reading!

Action or Language : are we made to take action in the world?..

The English verb “to act” is a MESS for a French. It means :

• To act : to behave (se comporter)
• To act : to take action (agir)
• To act : pretend to be (faire semblant de)
• To act : to operate (faire fonctionner)
• To act : to perform (jouer)

The French question “Sommes-nous fait pour agir ?” means “Are we made to act?”. But it’s not exactly to “take action”, which sounds, I think, “decision, beginning”. Agir, in French is just to act “all along”, to do something.

Then the question could be : “Are we made to do something?”.

Hmmm

Our era is a good environment for this question :

1. On one side : action, gestures, do, make, use the body, use the world, interact, sex, dance, run, make, eat, walk, build. Gestures!
2. On the other side : language, thinking, dialogs, dreams, to read, and all the “do without doing” : to drive, to play a game on a screen, to watch a movie, to geek.

Some like 1.

Some prefers 2.

We dance from one to another. And there’s an invariable, an invariant, a fixed point : the body. It calls, it screams, it collars and nabs. Constantly it pushes us (our mind) and pulls us into the world. A recall, sometimes a caveat : we are incarnated!

So yes, on est fait pour agir, we’re made to “do”, though we can be tempted not to and stay in bed with our mind, thoughts and musics.

Thanks for reading!

Birds for scale

We all noticed it, but without words :

When, in a movie, there’s a “huge place”, a monument, a city, a monster, they put “birds for scale”, a bunch of!

I was happy to discover there was a SubReddit for this :

https://www.reddit.com/r/BirdsForScale/

For this statue, birds are everywhere (and men’s silhouettes for good measure) :

Of course this made me think of its structure, and asked myself where else it could be used :

“Add elements B of another nature/scale to A, to, by contrast, make the audience feel and understand, size or else of A”.

What if I used prose in a poem of verses? What if used jazz in seconds of an electronic music track? What if I used a photo in a part of a painting? What if in a classroom I…

It’s not a process of surprise, like Strangeization, it’s a process of adding something for contrast.

https://afrenchtoolbox.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/strangeization-tool-eyebrow-criteria/

Voilà! I let you think on this. Have a good day!

 

 

Autodidact or else-taught? Rules or whatiffing things?

Autodidact or else-taught? Rules or whatiffing things?

Big laugh hearing Paul McCartney he can’t read music nor name the complex chords he uses in music.

Explaining that he and John Lennon learned a bunch of new chords (and some complex ones!) watching other groups in Hambourg, or the guitar salesman’s hands in a Liverpool music instruments store, or playing other groups music.

They made a “chords stock” – and more : learned how to combine them into songs!

Lennon is said to be a composer who were used to “stack bits of songs”, even dangerously.

How does this evolve? What’s the structure of A Day in The Life? How many songs here, into one? :

Macca helped creating an Art School called LIPA in Liverpool, where he “teaches” music sometimes to some luck students.

He said in this conversation that he can’t teach music, because he knows no “rules” in making a good song – that makes people smile! He just helps the students to quit the normal, ordinary, boring, predictable ways.

Here’s a cool example, an ordinary Macca song, not a hit, it’s the first song from “Chaos and Creation in the Backyard” (which is a title I love). Fine Line :

Boring ordinay until 1’06”, where the piano wrings the song in risky harmonies like in a bridge (that soon?). When the second verse begins at 1’19” the rhythm is slowed down already. Strings come, and at 2’09” there’s another cool part, before coming back to the strange piano pulsation, ending in an oblique obsessive modal repetition…

It’s not even a great song! But I find it elegant, casual, there’s a freedom here, in the way the song unfolds into unexpected little ideas. I can almost find the “what if I do that?” pleasure into this music…

All this not in avant-garde craziness, but in a small song!

The tool is structural : Follow rules or try things? Stay on the road or try little paths? Go on a line, or draw yours? Where to do that : life, love, poetry, writing, marketing, photography?

Sorry for my frenchy English, sorry for the Beatles obsession, it’ll go soon, probably. Have a nice day!

Thanks for reading!

Singles & Albums

Singles & Albums

ONE

I grew up with a few vinyl singles I knew by heart and listened in loop :

• Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles
• Golden Brown by The Stranglers
• Hell’s Bells by AC/DC
• Spirits in Material World, by The Police.

They were like drug, instant and violent pleasure!

TWO

But I remember LPs were like “the real thing”. You had to be ready to listen to 20 minutes of a side, then eventually the other side. Each side had a musical color. An album had a purpose, a mood, a… progression. And a sleeve!

We all had a tendancy to listen to albums “by side”. If you want to listen to one track, you had to delicately place the needle where you guessed the track was…

The flipping was like a decision, the decision to attack the other side, etc.

Of course, this was emphasized by the fact that musicians I love, like Mike Oldfield or Genesis or Pink Floyd, tended to make long pieces or at least “linked” tracks, in an unstopped flow of music.

THREE

The CD had a strange impact : it blurred the idea of “Side A/Side B”. Very cool for classical music (an opera was like 3 LPs -> 6 Sides!) or crazy things like Amarok.

If you wanted to listen to one song (or pass another), you just had to remote control your way into it…

FOUR

Today is the day of singles, it’s Taylor Swift’s era! Music faucets (Spotify/Deezer/YouTube and others) are everywhere.

We listen to music by tracks, or sometimes by “themes” or genre, and it’s a AI which chooses for us.

I think one of the reasons why the vinyl “returns” a little, is because of incarnation. You buy “an album”, with a sleeve you can admire, it’s a “thing”, your hand can manipulate it, read lyrics, there’s a link with your body, and you have to be cautious when you place it on the turntable!

FIVE & TOOL

Where else did we lost the “album thing”? Where else do we butterfly mind zap into single things? What did we lose and forget? Length? The togetherness of things? Effort? Patience?

And in the making of things? Should we focus on the project size instead of the fast/here/now?

Thanks for reading!

The Return of the Vinyl

The constant return of the body

I needed to be 54 years old to get hit by this simple assessment : whatever we think or however we evolve, we constantly have to deal with our own body: its desires, its needs, its limitations, its changes, its… priorities…

The metaphor I have is the “constant conversation” we have to do, between our own mind, and the tool we use : the body.

We’re hungry, or tired, or cold, or we get sick, we hav some “aches”. The body says nothing, but as it’s our vehicle, it is very powerful! The brain wants, but the body does. Or does NOT.

Or the contrary: Does the head want to sleep and get some rest, or the body?

In the time of Internet, we are used to read and talk and think, we do things without the body, apart from moving the mouse and typing on a keyboard.

And a little “bio-break” at times, to eat/pee/sleep.

When I watch my own hand on the table, it can be a little shock. It’s like “something” next to me, it’s mine, it’s… me. And it can be scary : it gets old and change, it can… stop.

Humans found strategies to feel their bodies : sports is one of them.

Etc : One could play with this conversation for a long time. But this lead, to me, to the concept of GESTURE.

Gestures of the hand, with a phone, a cigarette or spectacles. Feet, ways of walking, gestures of babies, of theater, of orchestra directors, dancing, writing, art making. Military gestures, lovers gestures, vintage gestures. To try, to hate, to mock, to be proud, or elegant.

Each subject is an article. This could be an entire blog… “Gestures”, les gestes, in French…

Sometimes, memories are gestures memories, right?

Thanks for reading!

JP

Photo : _bodylanguage_

My best unknown Beatles songs

Here are a few Beatles songs I love.

For No One, a strange discarnate and quiet 4/4 waltz-like song written by McCartney for Revolver, to describe the end of a love story. Everything seems perfect in this song : the piano, the drums, the chorus modulations, the French horn, very little reverb (giving an intimacy), the non-ending end…

It’s a jewel, and one of the favorite songs of Lennon, who adored it.

Your day breaks, your mind aches
You find that all the words of kindness linger on
When she no longer needs you

She wakes up, she makes up
She takes her time and doesn’t feel she has to hurry
She no longer needs you

And in her eyes you see nothing
No sign of love behind the tears
Cried for no one
A love that should have lasted years!

If I Fell is a Lennon song I adore because of its brutal modulations : it’s clearly a “chords game” – they change all the time!

If I fell in love with you
Would you promise to be true
And help me understand
‘Cause I’ve been in love before
And I found that love was more
Than just holding hands

Because, By John Lennon, on Abbey Road, has harpsichord and Moog (!), and splendid “three-parts backing vocals”.

Because the world is round it turns me on
Because the world is round, ah

Because the wind is high it blows my mind
Because the wind is high, ah

Love is old, love is new
Love is all, love is youBecause the sky is blue, it makes me cry
Because the sky is blue, ah

Thanks for reading! Have a great day!