The U2 Syndrome – What do you do with a bad song?

Hi! I just found this title in my big list of more than 400 article-drafts, and I loved it. So there it is. Let’s find a tool.

I probably read an interview of Bono, telling about a big “problem” with songs : What do you do with a bad song?

• You can trash it, or just keep the bits somewhere and wait.
• You can try to heal the song, like a doctor, finding what is wrong or ill or boring here. Ask someone maybe?
• You can take two or three bad songs and operate a graft, transplanting ideas on others – with the secret hope that some shocks, weirdies and surprises will come out of it.
• You can rush and be casual and make is worser… then interesting? Hmmm…
• You can keep it like that and hope someone will love it!

These tools applies to : “What do you do with a bad …?” (book, marriage, team, president, etc).

It’s option 3 that I often choose, like for my Chronicles these days. I pile drafts, and that’s all. If I entertain someone somewhere on the planet, I’m happy, though I’m a bit sorry for my bad English.

Thanks for reading!

Karmic Payback

There’s a big affair these days in France. A group of journalists had a Twitter account where they mocked and harassed female young journalists.

The girls fought back, gave lists, and it exploded recently. The guys are caught, they make public excuses, wishing they won’t be fired…

Today I read a woman’s answer, saying that she did not believe in the excuses, made only because the guy had been caught, then she wrote she believed in one thing : the Law of Karma.

Karmic Payback, it’s a good subject for a short article…

I do believe in this, even I’m not a believer. I believe in balance. I love this funny sentence :

One day, you have to pay the bill.

When you act badly, you pay. One day you pay. And it works.

It’s probably a belief from weak people. “You can’t act, you can’t have revenge, therefore you believe in like a universal justice”, why not? It’s a way to cope, maybe? Trusting the Universe.

Life is made of events, and bad events are part of the program. Therefore, you can wait : something bad will hurt the people you watch. It always happens…

But also, you can really believe in karmic payback. Then when it happens you just smile. It’s as if you just have to wait to have your revenge…

What does that mean? What happens then? You smile? You just shut up? You present yourself in front of the “punished person”, like good-to-you-ing them? What if it’s too late, and vain, and you really feel sorry for this guy?

Revenge is cold, as they say…

If you fail and fall, after you acted badly, who will rejoice?

Do you believe in this? Have you seen it?

Thanks for reading!

la photographie not good

Back home today with my Canon G9X, from the train station through a little park I love, I took pictures and I posted a few here.

Here is an exercise. I chose 9 failed pictures. What I noticed is when a photography is not good, you can do what you want : change colors, reframe like this or like that, it will always LACK something :

1. For picture 1 I was sure to make something interesting, because of the quiet work site : the blocks/pipes layout, the noony harsh light. I didn’t manage to “resolve” it. I should have come in the evening, maybe. Or climb somewhere.
2. The E.T. block on picture 2 was funny, but it cut the girl’s legs for no reason, and the “sense” of the image is just nonexistant. I reframed it like a fool until I saw there was nothing to do about it.
3. I love picture 3 because it’s a reflection, you can feel the warm city mood, I managed to underexpose it the good way and the picture has a good structure, framed by shadows. But well well well : it’s blurry, and this is not Alex Webb, right?
4. The bridges in picture 4 are great, the light is good, the guy is luckily in the sun and the tulips are just perfect on the right. Nevertheless it’s not good. Too far. Too flat.
5. The guy with the trumpet on picture 5 was funny to watch (and to hear with is ducky wrong notes). I asked him for a picture after this one but I failed to take any good pics. This one is wrong : the trash, the light, the background.
6. Picture 6 is like “yeah yeah yeah humans and architecture”. Could have been good but it’s not but I don’t know what to do here.
7. Picture 7 lacks a kid or two, that’s all.
8. Picture 8 is like too easy, right? Contrasts, underexposition, verticality. To “eighties Rayban ad”, oui? Nope.
9. Picture 9 is the “OK but so what?” type. I was lucky with the blue (sky, car, shorts), that’s it. Pff.

 

What’d you’ve done, dear?

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Digits Masters Detrimentors

Example 1

A film distributor hesitates about what to do with a foreign movie, thus it puts it in a few avant-garde theaters in three big cities of the USA, and makes big money, and is very happy about it, then pulls it out.

The distributor doesn’t realize the movie fiercely agitated social medias and could have made 20 times more money with a larger proposition across the country, and much much more if it let is spread by word of mouth.

Example 2

His job is to sell concert tickets 8 hours a day, he’s asked to also sale an insurance fee with each ticket. He sells 3000 tickets a day, 35% insured – which is pretty good.

While he takes a 15 minutes afternoon break, someone takes his place for cover, sells 10 tickets, 5 of them insured – 50%.

The cover guy gets big congratulations by the boss : 50% is better than 35%, right?

Example 3

Google “spurious correlations” to find hilarious graphs that “proves” that there’s a link between “Per capita consumption of cheese (US) correlates with number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets” or “German passenger cars sold in the US correlates with Suicides by crashing of motor vehicle”.

Then be afraid, because it happens all the time in your company.

Example 4

In a medium size city, a DIY and artists store’s boss puts a book & stationery corner. It’s pretty rare, and people come from the everywhere around to buy a magazine or a book. Each of both activities enriches the other.

A new boss arrives, watches the turnover, assures that it’s not that much, then closes the corner. Then complains the whole store revenue slowly decreases…

 

TOOL/DIAL :

Evaluation. What is it? If in one’s job one has to analyse numbers, one has all the chances to understand NOTHING.

Digits give the great illusion of mastering things. And it’s just wrong.

When a “manager” watches bunch of numbers without meeting, asking, listening to the people involved, he’s just a happy jumping goat, an ignorant.

Therefore he’s ridiculous, embarrassing, and detrimental.

What is important is not measurable with numbers.

 

Thanks for reading! (sorry for my English…)

“Duty of Apology” against Dégringolade

In all languages of the world, you know that pattern : when you watch a word too closely, you find it very weird suddenly. Blop.

For “Tumble down”, we have a verb. The fact that we in France don’t use the “up”, “down”, “back” and so on, forces us to invent words. This verb is :

Dégringoler

Your bag of oranges crashes and opens at the top or your stairs : oranges dégringolent, they tumble down, right?

It happens for all men and women on the planet. A big betrayal, realizing something bitter, a failure, and you tumble down. You crash. You want to cryscream, you want to be hiddendead, you wanna kill the sky!

The common name for dégringoler is dégringolade, and it’s a word so funny (though everybody knows it here) that it becomes strange. Unlike your “fall” or “tumbling”, I reckon. You have your own strange words, right? “Betrayal” is strange…

Dégringolade

Some day, you see your spouse in full dégringolade. It’s messy. Your love or your partner is desperate, has lost it. Total failure.

And of course, it’s NEVER a total failure. You have to stand now, OK?

There’s a “Duty of Apology” here. You have to move your ass and pull your partner up, right? It can be a spouse, a collaborator, an associate. When someone’s down : ACT.

Apology : FIND WHAT’S GOOD here, and say it! Beat the drum! She needs it!

It’s your duty.

Thanks for reading!

Instagram : _bodylanguage_

Like watching a tree in the wind for a long time, it becomes…

When you can’t/don’t divorce, who do you choose?

I’m so sick of sarcasm and irony, I could kill!
Sincerely, the real root of things is love and sacrifice.
Ben Foster

 

 

PREAMBLE

Here’s a little joky conversation I had with a colleague recently :

As a bookseller, I order and receive hundreds of (new or not) books every month. They have their little life, and the agreement with editors is to keep each reference for at least three months (like : “Give our books a chance”). I also order older books on the occasion of (a concert, an exhibition, a movie, etc…).

So a bookseller order books, put them on shelves, and also, continuously, send them back to companies. It’s constant, a constant flow of in and out.

 

My colleague saw me pushing crates of books on wheels (as we all do almost everyday) :

– What do you do here?
– Returning books, silly!
– Sheeesh!
– What?
– You really have a problem, pal!
– And what is that problem, Sherlock?
– You return books, right?
– Yeah…
– That’s what I thought : you are wrong, somewhere, you are a bad bookseller!…
– How is that, tell me?
– You idiot should order ONLY the books that sells!
– Ohhhh! You’re a genius! Thank youuuu! I will now follow that rule!…

And we lolled.

 

ONE

I was amazed how marriage stays a milestone in America. In France, more than 50% of marriages finish in divorces, and more and more lovers choose to avoid this old tradition – the government invented the PACS (a Civil Solidarity Pact) in 1999 : “A contractual form of civil union between two adults for organizing their joint life”.

Well : it’s like legal marriage without all bunkum you say at church, and it works for same sex couples too.

For example in 2013 you got 168,000 PACS and 231,000 marriages in France.

 

TWO

What surprised me a lot when I talked to American women is that, well, you almost HAVE to marry to get a proper life (and it’s the same in many countries). Even today. If you don’t, you’re not real. You have problems with many things, including healthcare… I found out that today 83% of women get married in the USA.

 

THREE

Therefore, as you are a smart young woman, as you watch around you, you probably realized that the guy you’re pressured to marry will probably be a failure 20 years after the fabulous wedding.

The causes for divorce in USA are said : adultery, abandonment, or cruelty, though “No-fault divorce (“irreconcilable differences”, “irretrievable breakdown of marriage”, “incompatibility”, or after a separation period etc.) is now available in all states“) are now evoked.

So people divorce but many others don’t, because it has a social cost, you lose plenty of privileges, it’s boring and loneliness is frightening.

 

FOUR

Like me with my books, you never know in advance what will fail. I just “try to” guess. And I fail (of course, and happily). My little sarcastic article is about this dial :

Who do you choose, then?

The guy who will be :

1. Bored
2. Boring
3. Violent
4. Silent
5. Workaholic
6. Alcoholic
7. Sexaholic
8. Indifferent
9. Dead
10. Stupid
11. Absent because :
12. Unfaithful
13. Garage handyman
14. Sportsman
15. Hunter

 

OUTRO/TOOL

Well, as I can’t guess how many books I have to order, you can’t guess how messy your husband will become. Maybe he’ll collect staplers – that’s not so bad, right?

How could you guess? Astrology? Give him a try for a few years before getting married? Listen to your friends and family who watch him? Listen to your guts? Your brain? Watch the slopes he’s taking with you about free time, sex, conversations, food and culture? What are the criterions you could watch?

What’s the process, from now on? Marry then watch the predicted slopes? Well : it does not work. Sadly you can’t return him to the company, in a crate on wheels. Or a wheelbarrow!

Thanks for reading!

 

Painting : Levitan

 

Love is when the other person’s happiness
is more important than your own.
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

 

 

Overtaking Fatherness’s Inevitable Bullshittery

Here’s some cheap psychoanalysis, to game.

Girls & boys have to fight their father & mother, but in a different way.

1. Girls have to fight their mother. They say “I won’t be like her”.
2. Boys have to kill their father. They say “I’ll beat him, I’ll be better”.

The crossed thing is all about love. Boys love their mother and girls love their dad, that’s it. Boys are weak, they just love. Girls find a husband like dad (in order to repair him), or the opposite of him (to feel secure at least – or challenged?).

 

My dad was great. He lost his father and grand-father at war. He was a sensitive person, and as a young man he was an actor and a singer. I thank him because of his curiosity, and because he built up a great pack of shelves : books. A treasure for me!

I think he’s been strongly affected by disillusions of life, and depression hit him deeply, for years. He died two years ago.

In a way he made me : I am a curious person, am interested in classic cinema, psychology, philosophy, literature and arts, and I’ve even been a musician once, for theater and dance.

 

In a way I prolonged what he began but in other ways. I have many more books and I never really stopped exploring culture. I made 2 CDs for dancers – but I stopped composing music. I let go things without bitterness. I just kept this : I stayed a romantic, I suppose… I believed in things…

 

At one moment, though, you feel, you have to feel the fight, the fatherness (I know it’s fatherhood, but I choose fatherness) becomes toxic. You watch him and his tastes and you’re like : OMG, NO.

It’s a whole story, and there are many ways to live it : you can cut all bonds (or your parents can do it for you if your family’s cursed), you can do “as if” and see them the less possible, you can just argue, etc… All of it, almost, becomes impossible. You have to overtake something, right?

 

At one moment, YOU become a father, a mother :

1. If you’re a normal person, you won’t even notice that your child is now a teenager then an adult judging you. You’re strong, and sure, and you play the “Bahhh the younglings they understand nothing”.
2. If you’re aware, that’s terrible : you see this in their eyes. Now, you ARE uncool and unfashionable. Then they begin to despise you, to fight, to hate your terrible music tastes, and your movies stink. Good to you : that’s how it goes!

Their turn, soon.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Yes it’s me on the left. And I’m on the left of the first photography and in yellow on the last…

 

 

 

 

 

 

26 Worst Ways to Wake Up

Well, hi. I woke up with this title in head, therefore I had to write it…

Why 26? I don’t know, but I kept it, though there’s not 26 ways here. It’s like the traps on Facebook : “11 elements which proves you’re more intelligent”. Yeah yeah yeah.

You can add some in the comments!

The 26 Worst Ways to Wake up are :

1. There’s no coffee anymore
2. The cat puked everywhere in the house
3. You had insomnia all night and you slept at least… ten minutes before your alarm buzzed
4. You walk on and crush your glasses
5. There’s a spider on your pillow
6. You shower and go to work and when you’re there it’s your day off

 

 

Your turn!

 

Have a nice day!

 

Instagram : vzcomood

 

Backwards Propaganda

I have a good example : advertising of radio. It’s so bad, so wrong, so ridiculous that you facepalm and promise yourself to never buy it. EVER.

You’re in a big store and there’s a “commercial announcement” in the loudspeakers. But the voice hesitates and makes mistakes : a disaster. And it goes on, for days, weeks and months. Flee!

It’s almost all the same for propaganda. When the audience is aware (and that’s not too difficult with this mess : big statements, systematic criticism of the “enemy”, exaggeration of successes), all you reap is inner sarcasms, facepalms and rolling eyes.

So yes, the audience is this “You can’t be THAT stupid, right?” state.

There are entire books of jokes “under communism”, and they are hilarious.

Where else are we confronted today to this overboring crap? Companies slogan? Ads?

Propaganda SAYS something about the propagandist. What is it? What do you do about that? Run away? Indifference? As if enthusiasm if you have to? Inner LOLs?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

Dark Propensities

In an old article I played with this Chinese idea : Instead of pushing towards our “goals” like stupid bulldozers, it’s maybe smarter to use the propensity of things. The “natural tendency to behave in a particular way, to move in a particular direction.”

Stay positive, keep your chin proud and high, move forward soldier, go go go!

But in Afghanistan, guys from the desert kidnap soldiers, cut their arms, legs and penis, put a solid tourniquet on each stumpextremity to keep them alive before giving back the poor body with a head next to a US base with medics. Purpose is not honorable : “Suffer, now, and until you die”. Medicine now is able to keep these men alive…

The ideal propensity of a warrior is to vanquish. The ideal propensity of a couple is to live in rich harmony (sex, hobbies, communication). The ideal propensity of fast cars is to make the knight-driver feel powerful and to go home faster, you go boy!

Tendencies and propensities have a dark side, Darth, though. The dark propensity of a soldier is trauma, to die or to be wounded. The dark propensity of a couple is drama or worse : manipulation, misunderstandings and boredom. The dark propensity of fast cars is accidents and consequences : death, hospital, disability.

What’s the dial? To watch all paths? Not being angelic? Cut the wrong ways up? Be attentive? Consider other assumptions?

OK : pay attention. That’s good.

Merry Christmas!

 

 

 

Beautiful day without you (ah) : Chronicle 25

 

 

People buy books to prepare their travel.

There are books to prepare your travel into Arts. As a bookseller, I order and present piles of them. Not for the experts, who already have their own maps, for beginners.

I love this series of books. 1001 paintings you have to see in your life (“you must see before you die”, you say in America). You probably don’t “have to”, though! They do it for architecture, pop music, classical music or movies. Or beers, or whiskies.

They are mapbooks, they present windows and paths. What will you explore FROM there?

There’s something to look at in the idea of laughing. Laughing is good, right? But when you think about it, there are many unpleasant ones. Coarse. Vulgar. Mean. Sarcastic. False. Crazy. Sniggers. And well, you die of laughing…

You have some laughs in you, who are sleeping.

 

I took this picture in 2004 in the park next to…

 

Röyksopp’s lyrics :

Living on my guard (guarded)
Wind is on my neck (fateless)
Sun is on my face (have courage)
Beautiful day without you (ah)

I wonder about someone who have to say “Beautiful day without you”. Is it a lie? A way to be mean? A tearful saying, like “Ah, hell, of course not, how could it be?”. A Coué incantation (I say it I say it I say it, it’ll maybe become true)?

It’s a great song, though. This science of weaving!

 

I have a theory.

Have in your house something you dislike. If you hate whisky, have a bottle. Sauerkraut (c’est de la choucroute !) is too bitter tasting? Have a box in your closet. Chinese tea maybe?

My theory is that when you life is sad, boring and bitter, don’t fill you up with sugar. It makes you fat, and it does NOT work.

Have something bitter. Make a link. Quietly, discreetly create an harmony, a balance between your state and your stomach. It will create a match, your bitterness will sit on its ass, shupping off into a “OK Well, Fuck”.

Chinese tea is awful. Smoked. Gunpowder feeling. Terrible. Try it.

 

 

More and more people replace crosswords by sudoku (where are the sparkles?). Kids are now evaluated with numbers (but how do you say about instability or shyness, then?). Jünger says that when numbers come, Gods retreat. A beautiful metaphor?

 

 

Why are disappointed people interesting?

• A disenchanted was enchanted, before, right? How come?
• He wants to warn others. Or not. Why?
• Failure leads to choices, lead to more failure (most of the time?).
• How do you ride back on your horse?
• What does he have to understand? To accept?
• Did he expect too much?
• Insisting. Waiting. Letting go.
• Before disillusion, he’s a happy imbecile. What do you say to him?
• “This time, it will work”.

 

 

What is this moment : “To become aware of” ?

 

Thanks for reading!

Life is fucking short. Let’s dance.

 

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!

 

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

 

From frowny eyes to hilarity : When you have to “find the fun” – Cioran & Bernhard

Emil Cioran was a Romanian writer and philosopher. He is famous for writing books such as The Trouble with Being Born. As you can guess, it’s very tormented and pessimistic.

William H. Gass called Cioran’s work “a philosophical romance on the modern themes of alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as agony, reason as disease”.

Thomas Bernhard was a Austrian “novelist, playwright and poet”. His style is mainly about monologues reported to a listener (you?). It’s very intense, full of anger and a bit disturbing. His books’ titles are like Extinction or Concrete.

“Bernhard’s prose is lapidary and translucent in its vocabulary, but sinuous and formidably dense in its phrasing”.

 

Yes, you can take all this very seriously.

I’ve known a couple of young men who read Cioran as an obsession, like a Master of pessimism : “The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live –moreover, the only one.”. And why not?

And I admit I read my first Thomas Bernhard with frowny eyes. “Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it’s lost.”

 

Then… you grow up, you study the way they write (one in archipelagos, the other one in words rivers), you begin to notice their ways, their exaggerations, their… wizardry, their understanding, their contradictions.

Then you smile.

Then you LAUGH…

I agree, it’s a strange laugh. It would be a bit short to say it’s sarcastic, because it’s not. Sometimes humor sticks out with a whole harp of powers. You laugh but you think, you laugh but you sob, you laugh but you have empathy, you laugh but you’re deeply moved, you laugh and you want to get out of your house to run like hell out in the streets, full of seeds, anger, and new ideas…

You just needed to make progress until you have the capacity to “get it”.

 

Where does it happen, when you have to “find the fun”? How would you make it? When do things have like this, many doors? Why should humor move with this flag : “This is humor”?? Can (and do you need to) you invent and trace humor on something which is “obviously” not funny?

Isn’t it a lesson? Like… maybe we have to find a possible way to laugh after our months of deep despair?
Thanks for reading!

Have a nice day. Pardon my Frenchenglish, oui ?

 

Hey, it’s my article N600!

 

 

 

 

Broken Cam #Photography – Cabourg 1

Cabourg is a little city near the sea, in Normandy, France.

I was there in 2009, for a whole week, with a cheap Canon camera, which was at the end of its life. It was cold and rainy, and I spent days alone, wandering around, listening to Hindemith on my iPod (I’ll explain it in another post)…

From time to time, the whatchamacallit before the shutter stayed stuck in this oblique funny way. I often took one photo “like this”, before finger-opening it. There’s some Amor Fati in the photographer’s mind, right?

I chose a couple of pictures from this day, to build a tool for thinkers & inventors, which is :

Tool (let’s call it “Use it before you fix it”) :

When something “doesn’t work”, stop. Think about it. What doesn’t work? What could you do “with” it before fixing it?

Where will you apply this tool : Painting? Powerpoint? Poetry? Blogging? Would you go until you think it’s a sign? For what?

 

You’re a photographer. You lost or forgot something? What do you do? Do you have examples? Is improvisation good? Why?

So, well, my broken Canon picts are a little creepy like subjective views in a cheap horror movie? Of course, but I hope I got somethings else :

• a little eyebrow movement from you (“Hey, what is happening here?”)
• voyeurismness (mask behindness)
• questions (“what is the last picture about?” – it’s a dirty corrugated roof)
• maybe a mood (the remote house in the mist with the fence on photo 5) – feel the cold wind?
• an illusion game (droplet as an eye, seaweed’s cuteness)

 

Thanks for reading! Have a nice day.

 

The Giving up & Parking Life Temptation

When you hear break-up stories and broken hearts from teens and young people, you smile, right? We’ve all been there, and we all know it’s time for grief, and then one day the sun rises again, and a marvelous man/woman enters the room, and here we go again!

Smile. Moving forward. Find your silver lining. Plenty of fishes in the sea, right?

Comes an age when you begin to smile less. You got a cancer, or your husband died stupidly in a car accident, or the woman you wanted to marry chose an Egyptian flea circus trainer – not you!

You’ve been through shit-hits-the-fan tempests before, you know that another dawn will come. Well, you hope it will. Or you don’t know any more…

Giving up is a possibility, and I see so many sixty years old (mainly women, OK) who decided to park their love life that I’m questioning myself. Why not, after all?

Many people will say you’re complaisant – they think of you like you were a teenager, happy clap-your-hands two days after a boyfriend text-break-up. You consider to not even answer : when this happens to you at mid-life, it hurts much, much more. Your capacity of comprehension is much bigger, and this is exactly why you lost your smile : Big Shit happened, your vessel has stopped, all sails tornripped. Your game is on the ground like a dirty puzzle. You’re fucking wounded!

Parking your life is a way to heal, you’re right. Just this : you have to know that you will maybeventually stay there. Healed, but full of ugly scars. Haunted by a hand in your hair…

Have a nice day!

 

 

Proust & les Hirondelles : Chronicle 4

Absolutely no cunning could prevent a man
from being smashed against his dreams

 

I’m French, I’m sorry : my english is clumsy these days…

Have you ever visited the school you were in as a very little child, now you’re an adult? Among all the memories and the heartbeats you feel, you also find that… everything around is very little, right? You’re taller, now… you’re different. Perspective.

Today is the “braderie” in the city of La Madeleine. We love braderies in the North of France. It’s like your US garage sales, all along some streets : today was about 1.200 exhibitors (or displayers, how to say that?). I took a cool picture of motorbikes toys, you like it?

I’ve been asked one day about my “goals in life“. I have been very disturbed by this question, which is so… all about efficiency. I couldn’t think of a goal, even one. I feel like Cioran, in shock and in anger, after being asked about what he was “preparing”. If a French says he has “goals” in life, he sounds ridiculously Action Man, that’s it. The idea itself is a nightmare – at least when you’re more than 22 years old. I don’t want to be efficient, I just try to live, right? Dreams, maybe… Dreams, OK.

Absolutely no cunning could… etc…

I’m too lazy to find it, but the stupidest quote ever is something like “Give yourself a very high goal, then maybe you’ll reach a lower but good stage”. Of course there’s a more accurate one, saying that while you try to do that, you fail choosing the right path to achievement, you stay blind to feedbacks, etc. Typical Wrong Way Up. Well yes, these are words only, I know.

I have no goal, not one. It could be “to be happy” or “to be creative” or “to be a better human” or “to help others”, but I already failed in all these fields, obviously! And who will feed my cat, while I John Wayne?

If you want some fun, though, Google Image “Goals Quotes”. Plenty of orders in capitals. Like : <<DON’T LET ANYTHING STOP YOU FROM REACHING YOUR GOAL>>. Ohlalalaa, my French eyes are hurt! I need a beer, I think.

So I found a goal : stay zen in front of bullsh*t 🙂

It’s when the weather change (warmer air, higher sun, sudden showers) than you can have a rush of childhood memories. Or teenhood, say. Suddenly it’s HERE, you feel the same feeling you had in your mother’s arms, or at school when you were loving some shy redhead in silence, or when you were gathering interesting rocks under open sky. The idea of memories in Madeleines de Proust come from the food, but also from a smell (freshly cut grass, chocolate cake baking, little pot of white glue in kindergarten) or a sound (of swallows flying hunting between streets, or the familiar engine’s roar of you’re father’s car), but also from the light in the air, the clouds, a coming thunderstorm…

Marguerite Duras says somewhere that she can NOT write if the bed is not made. Strange thing is : I never forgot that, because… that’s true.

I bought a Raymond Carver book, “The American Chekhov”, as they say. I know Carver’s work pretty well, but I never read him in English. Good exercise. I can’t resist to a blurb on a book saying “The (Italian, Canadian, whatever country you choose) Chekhov”…

They have something in common, that’s right : they watch meticulously our little renunciations, our microscopic failures, our rushes never said, our words, spoken and immediately regretted, our love silliness, our boredom. But it’s not “laments”. It’s more like : “This is it, brother human, and it not even THAT dramatic”.

I found a rose, there. Is a rose, is a rose, Mrs Stein. Look where she is (“une rose”) :

In the shades of break-up moods, you have the yellow poison of jealousy, the dark corners of loneliness, the twinge of uncertainty and many more. The invisible bitterness of “having being loved and then not” is sometimes like swimming against the cold current of a long deep river.

In the shades of illness… Oh, another time, OK?

You can read books (or see a therapist, it depends on how you’re made), self help or philosophy : you’ll read everywhere that you have to find your happiness inside you, right? Again? I “have to”? The capitalized ORDER quote is <<BE HAPPY AND SMILE>>. Yes, each time, you want to punch the author in the face! Bim! Paf! Pouf!

Give birth to a dancing star from the chaos you have within

Strange star, but that could be my Nietzsche goal, maybe… Well, see?

Thanks for reading! Merci!

Pastures New & Feathers Song : Chronicle 2

Douglas Kennedy says that there are two ways to meet tragedy. The first one is the bad luck coming from nowhere : brain cancer, car accident – among encounters with idiots and traitors. The second one is our own (and sometimes powerful) ways to make bad choices, auto-sabotages and other subtle ways of self destructing.

“Mission : not to be duped by myself” and it is easy to say : we all are, at one moment, pastures new seekers. Et donc…

I bought Libération, the newspaper, because yesterday was the first day of our new president in France. French people are funny, they already complain about this guy. They want change, but every attempt puts the whole country on strike!

Well, he’s been elected, right? He’s 39 years old and I’m 51 today, that’s a bit disturbing ! So I watch all the messy mess and I smile : people will very soon Facebook “Macron Go Away”, like with the previous president. But he won’t go away, for sure. I’d say : shut up and let him work.

#liberation

#white

I read a long interview with Ridley Scott. He talked about Francis Bacon (the painter) as an inspiration for his chest buster. He talked about The Duellists, so graphically gorgeous (after Barry Lyndon) he was accused by critics of inventing “too beautiful images”. “Fuck off”, he said : “I used no filters!”.

I remember the letters A L I E N in the movie theater when I was a student, and today I went to the cinema to watch Alien Covenant to… do something for my birthday.  In the movies I saw a blowing wink towards Giger (knowers will know) and a surprising re-creation of The Isle of the Dead, by Böcklin. If you want to play with Google, you’ll learn that Giger painted his own version of the painting…

I was a very young man when I saw one of the five Böcklin versions, in le Musée d’Orsay, in Paris. I stopped in front of the gigantic painting for maybe half an hour. Tremendous shock.

Yes I found a white feather just after I bought Libération. My brain said : “??!”. Is a feather is a tool to write, or a symbol?

“The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; “tout aboutit en un livre,” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different.”

― Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights

Misfortunes towards words. I know better now. Maybe.

Thanks. Good day!

 

 

Memories of places you could have been in…

We remember places. We imagine places! We also sometimes… remember places we imagined. Not necessarily in daydreaming : it can happen in the shower, while you cook, or in a conversation. The place is suddenly there, in your mind, neat, pleasant, warm. Pang ! Voilà !

Thanks for reading! Bonne journée !

The Castaway Syndrome

At some moments in your life, you really have the feeling that you’re “helped”. By whom, well, you will never know, silly!

If you want to spend time to figure it out, you’ll find books about that : God, your Angel, Quantum Mechanics or The Universe (please add Capitals everywhere, this is important).

For me, it’s useless to try to guess, because you will never know. Use all of it, though! Coincidences and signs, good intuitions, instinct, speed, meeting the right persons at the perfect time, this is all magic and a source of joy and amazement. Dance with them, c’est la vie !

But.

Irony of life is very powerful too. You meet the right person, but at the wrong moment. You encounter failure and betrayal, craziness, slowing downs or closed doors. Everything seems to brake. You make bad choices, you’re wrong. You probably expected too much, or in the wrong way, and life begins to slap your face and hit your skull, ouchy! Coincidences are stupidly useless, signs become dirty fuchsia feathers in a gutter.

Okeyyy so what? Your exhibition is a mess, your published book has no success at all, your future wife chose another guy, your startup starts to go down, c’est la merde, oui ?

“Time to move forward” and “Keep smiling” and “You build your own Happiness” don’t work for the moment. Try, and you’ll feel (and look) ridiculous. Insisting is wrong. Curiously, everybody “needs space” around you. And in space, nobody can hear you scream!

It’s time to wait, to park, to rest, to think. Shipwrecked, sailor! Castaway!

Find a corner. Narrow your goals. Regroup. Think without overthink. Put some puzzle pieces. Find your peace. Or scream, OK, but inside your belly. Real screams annoys everyone…

OK, in your car, on the highway : SCREAM!

Then, also, do something unusual.

Thanks for reading!

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