how to rely on change

I’ve spent the past week in Italy. Mostly around Loreto, Ancona and Porto Recanati. Sometimes Castel Fidardo, Numana and Osimo. A lovely handsome man showed me around. We discussed life and loves. His past and current proceedings as well as mine.

And as always, we advised ourselves to rely on change. Things do not turn out how we imagine them usually. A wise, wise man I cherish told me some weeks ago that I should stop just doing things and start knowing. To which I replied that if I’d held on to the things I’ve known throughout these recent years, my life would be very different, yet not necessarily better. But surely he wouldn’t have been as big a part of it. 

So I’ve come actually to count upon the fact that things will not turn out the way I’ve planned them. And that somehow I’ll fall on my feet and the things I truly love will still be there. Thing is there’s too much stuff I can’t control happening all around. And I’m not going to put all my energy in trying to make it go my way, but just catch the wave. 

I’ve been talking to several friends. We’re all lost. Dazed and confused. We want to love, read, talk about art and literature, get high, do our best, overachieve and overdo. We’re good at most things and love each other more than anything. No, honestly. We write, sing, dance, text message. We say silly things that no one else understands and laugh like the world is ending. We’re as bright as our smiles. And we still believe in one another and in the change we’re supposed to be making. We’re jaded but in an optimistic way. 

And I know for the most part this is you as well. I know you’re smart, courageous and fun. I know you try hard and want to make the best out of what you’ve got and what others lend to you. I know you’ve listened to Dakota and felt the words at least once. I know you might love Bob Dylan as much as I do if for once you’d stop listening to the harmonica and look at the lyrics. It’s probably the Obama-ism in the air, but hell, we can. And we’re going to. And all mediocrity should watch out. This time, it bites the dust.

Filed under: Personals , bob dylan, change, dazed and confused, fears, hopes, learn, poetry, rely, time

a short note on typologies

I’m finally done with Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December. Took a long time because I kept it as a subway book. Enjoyed it, there are a few interesting things that sir Bellow does with his prose. His analysis is always a bit too analytical and the emotions are a bit too emotional, but all in all it takes a bit of going over the top to makes us see the difference once in a while. 

Anyway, what has been puzzling me lately is the fact that literature characters seem to not keep up with the times (not even Ryu Murakami’s or Beigbeder’s). Take dean Corde, The Dean’s December’s main character. He’s a middle aged chicagoan with mixed European origins that spends a month in communist Romania so as to be next to his wife at the moment of her mother’s death. He’s an intellectual of the old guard. Calm, moderate hard liquor drinker, with a background in philosophy and journalism that seems to understand all social intricacies by grasping them in a bookish manner. He’s a ‘ripe’ individual, the kind that has mostly already learned most relevant things of his time. 

However… the action takes place I think at some time in the 60s or 70s. It’s hard to tell really cause apparently Romania was already poor as heck but Sinatra was still hip. Now… this was a tremendous time in history. You’ve got the birth of rock’n roll, JFK, Bob Dylan, Woodstock and blow. The world was changing. And apart from reflections on the daily assumed abnormality of a suppressed people (which would be us) and on the anti-humanism apparent in a murder trial or prison life (which probably don’t seem that acute to anybody anymore), the perspective’s missing. The ‘plots’ of the different narrative strings that intertwine seem to be pieces of a different puzzle. 

And this man that’s supposed to bring it all together is neither here nor there. That’s what also makes him a good icon of cultivated people in general: he knows a heck of a lot of stuff about how things are supposed to be, dove a few times into what they are but really still has no clue what’s going on. And he’s not even trying to figure it all out. Most of the time he’s just… taking his time. Absorbing, comprehending, feeling. Things that most of us really have no time for, especially considering this age. Cause online made it all the more difficult. It’s becoming so easy to find out everything immediately that it’s turning into the only thing we do. We… find out, comment, move on, find out, comment, move on. But the necessary distance and time required for intimately acquiring what’s happening into our system seem to be long gone. 

It’s kind of like the difference between an elephant… and a ping-pong ball i.e., between a creature doomed inside a tech era and something completely worthless but on the move. 

So… what’s to be done?

Filed under: Laid about opinions , character, literature, saul bellow, the dean's december, typology

what do we look for in music?

I’m kind of geeky and high school-ish about music. That attitude sort of stuck with me, that if I’m going to like someone I have to, at some level, respect their personal choice in music. 

And falling in love with Bob Dylan made it all that harder. I’ve got a thing for lyric-d music. The real chemistry doesn’t go on between my mind and the music most of the time, but relies on the lyrics. I just have to feel that music comes from one other real person, flesh and blood, warm as well. That’s why I don’t go for synthesized stuff all that much. It doesn’t seem to be real enough.

Still, there are other things that click. And all in all, it’s both the lyrics and the music mixed elegantly. In a way I can respect and relate to. Anyway, aside from Dylan, whose discography I could add here, here’s a list of my out of the line favorites: 

 

The Cat Empire – The lost song

 

Elis Regina & Tom Jobim – Aguas de marco

 

Nina Simone – Here comes the sun (Beatles cover)

 

Coco Rosie – Werewolf

 

Gotan Project – Santa Maria

 

Decemberists – Here I dreamt I was an architect

 

And a group favorite: Santogold – Shove it (featured in Jay-Z’s Brooklyn, we go hard)

Filed under: Pleasant discoveries , best, choice, music, preference, selection, top

Blue – A short story on a green reptile

Mina, the green lizard, got up one day and decided he wanted to stand on one foot. ‘Preposterous!’ Marcus said. ‘I can barely do it, and I can fly. How did it ever cross your mind?’
And indeed, it was quite unusual for any idea to cross a lizard’s mind. Soon as he heard the question, Mina realized that. In fact, standing on one foot was the only idea of his he ever remembered. Ever. And it was strange that although he seemed to have had no ideas throughout his life, he had always kept extremely busy. Even now, there were so many flies to slurp, out there. So many rocks to climb on, so much sunlight to absorb. How could he ever do it all?

Absorb the whole sun? Surely not. Preposterous, as well. Thoughts, and thoughts, and thoughts that would not leave his head, one more absurd than the other, came waltzing in as out of nowhere. Colors, figures and the taste of leaves suddenly descended on him as if dropped by Marcus from the sky and delivered a heavy blow to his usually empty mind. He felt as if a play was taking place in-between his ears, that his skull was taken over by little people putting on a show, without ever having asked his permission. Preposterous!

‘This is unheard of!’ Marcus said once more. ‘I am… a crow… and even I have no such claims to originality. And I do honestly think that you should reconsider thinking. It can be very dangerous to the green. And you’re as green as they come!’

Mina stared and stared and stared. And he thought that this all happened to him ‘out of the blue’. ‘Out of the blue’. A wonderful expression. So filled with meaning, in all ways of the word. So simple and beautiful for an apparently placid metaphor. ‘Oh yes! It would make perfect sense!’ And Mina dove into the waves. ‘It was so easy I never saw it. The only way out… from under to into… the blue. Where nothing can fall out of it.’ ‘Preposterous!’

But effective.

Filed under: The Green Lizard , blue, consider, crow, dive, green, lizard, marcus, mina, reason, think, water

what’s your process

Just read a great article by Michael Bierut on his process of designing and of course it got me thinking. I’ve been interviewing designers for my company, as we’re looking for fresh creative meat. And I’ve asked that question myself. How is it that you work? What do you do when you first come about a job? And there have been few voices to mention ‘research’… or anything at all as a matter of fact. 

But as Bierut indirectly puts it, process may be too strong a word. We don’t in fact know how or why we do most things. And  a year of psychoanalysis only proved it to me. There are intricate webs of thin lines keeping us in balance, very different than those we usually think we’re tied to. That’s why we probably feel so far away from ourselves most of the time. The world seems far, obsolete and alien and we really have no idea what’s keeping us there most of the time. Because there isn’t really one true stable thing to relate to. Not even in other people. As Sabato keenly described it in ‘The Tunnel’, most likely we’re each all alone, all by ourselves, in our own tunnel. At certain places the walls of our tunnels are so close together that we think we’ll be able to cary on together, but we always stray apart. 

Filed under: Personals , article, change, comment, design, design observer, life, process, recession, sabato, tunnel, world