Notes from the Field: 2012

"In looking back, I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. Affection, trust and sharing some common ground is the only way good work can be achieved. Otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle."

Milton Glaser

Plasticity

Philip K. Dick, from The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1972-1973:

A person's authentic nature is a series of shifting, variegated planes that establish themselves as he relates to different people; it is created by and appears within the framework of his interpersonal relationships.

Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher in This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking:

Personality is composed of two fundamentally different types of traits: those of ‘character;’ and those of ‘temperament.’ Your character traits stem from your experiences. Your childhood games; your family’s interests and values; how people in your community express love and hate; what relatives and friends regard as courteous or perilous; how those around you worship; what they sing; when they laugh; how they make a living and relax: innumerable cultural forces build your unique set of character traits. The balance of your personality is your temperament, all the biologically based tendencies that contribute to your consistent patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving. As Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, put it, ‘I am, plus my circumstances.’ Temperament is the ‘I am,’ the foundation of who you are.

Paths vs Roads

”A metaphor illustrating this contrast is found in Wendell Berry’s essay “A Native Hill.” Berry writes:

“The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it; its aspiration, as we see clearly in the example of our modern freeways, is to be a bridge; its tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort. It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way.”

http://gramercyimages.com/blog1/2011/02/14/wendell-berry-c-s-lewis-j-r-r-tolkien-and-the-dangers-of-a-technological-mindset/

The Importance of Lists

"Early in the deliberations that led to the founding [in 1983] of the journal that became Places, Kevin Lynch made a list of possible topics. Soon afterward Lynch died at the end of a day while planting his garden in Martha’s Vineyard. We can think of no more fitting tribute to Kevin Lynch than to publish his list — in the hope that his ideas will give rise to future articles. Here is the list, which he offered "in no order whatsoever."

Lists: http://places.designobserver.com/feature/in-no-order-whatsoever/112/

HBS Working Knowledge: Career Effectiveness: Six Ways to Build Trust in Negotiations

HBS Working Knowledge: Career Effectiveness: Six Ways to Build Trust in Negotiations: "All negotiations involve risk. That?s why establishing trust at the bargaining table is crucial. Professor Deepak Malhotra presents strategies to build trustworthiness. "

Movies I Would Like to See

Two Years at Sea (trailer)

Using old 16mm cameras, artist Ben Rivers, who has been nominated for the Jarman Prize and has won a Tiger Award at Rotterdam, creates work from stories of real people, often those who have disconnected from the normal world and taken themselves into wilderness territories TWO YEARS AT SEA extends his relationship with Jake, a man first encountered in his short film THIS IS MY LAND. The title refers to the work Jake did in order to finance his chosen state of existence. He lives alone in a ramshackle house, in the middle of the forest. It's full of curiosities from a bygone age, including a beloved old gramophone. Jake has a tremendous sense of purpose, however eccentric his behaviour seems to us and Rivers' witty and gracefully-constructed film creates an intimate connection with an individual who would otherwise be a complete outsider to us.

Twombly

In 2007, an exhibition of Twombly's paintings, Blooming, a Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things, and other works on paper from gallerist Yvon Lambert's collection was displayed from June to September in Avignon (France), at the Lambert Foundation (Hôtel de Caumont). On July 19, 2007, police arrested Cambodian-French artist Rindy Sam after she kissed one panel of Twombly's triptych Phaedrus. The panel, an all-white canvas, was smudged by Sam's red lipstick. She was tried in a court in Avignon for "voluntary degradation of a work of art".

Sam defended her gesture to the court: "J'ai fait juste un bisou. C'est un geste d'amour, quand je l'ai embrassé, je n'ai pas réfléchi, je pensais que l'artiste, il aurait compris... Ce geste était un acte artistique provoqué par le pouvoir de l'art" ("It was just a kiss, a loving gesture. I kissed it without thinking; I thought the artist would understand.... It was an artistic act provoked by the power of Art").

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cy_Twombly

Images and Official Site: http://www.cytwombly.info/

11.5.12

How We Navigate the World

Inspired by a post http://t.co/d0YCKK8r via @NatGeoTraveler

Ideas about navigating without a GPS; like the old days. Reminds me of being in Baker Lake and meeting two teenagers leading seemingly hopeless lives (not that they were unhappy). The came by one evening when Eric and I were finishing dinner. Teenage pregnancy, probably drugs, dead-end jobs, dropped out of high school. We despaired for them. Next night, they came by again. This time one of them told us about a late spring skido trip - 500km, two days - to a distant community. It would have been below freezing the whole time. One of the skido's broke down. All told with that calm, almost graceful approach. After they walked away, we were left stunned by the juxtaposition of images of the two girls. I had more faith after that encounter.

“Always move towards pain when making art.”

I am trying to sort this out:

“Always move towards pain when making art.” - J.M. Coetzee

Anish Kapoor

“It’s a bit of madness,” Kapoor laughs. “The canopy is dark and menacing. I’m interested in this journey from dark to light – you go into this dark heavy object, then up the lift and you’re tipped out into an observation platform with two concave mirrors, so you’re in a kind of instrument for looking. You’re inside a telescope ... I’ve been looking at this for two years and it still looks uncomfortable. That’s the point. I can make long, sleek elegant things, but this object needed to be the opposite.
...

“Er, no. It was much, much, much more than that. It was a sense of disorientation, not culturally, but with myself, which I needed to live with, understand, be less afraid of. Perhaps I was also coming to terms with an idea that I wanted to do something. No – wait, it’s difficult to find the right words – a sensation that I had something to do, but I didn’t know how to do it and didn’t know if I could allow myself to do it.

“The first years when I was making art, I felt as if I didn’t exist if I didn’t work. Now I don’t. The work got better when I didn’t feel that. Now I’ve allowed the work to be the work, I can be me, and somehow we can live together.”

...

Is his art, then, autobiographical? “No! No, but yes. You can’t avoid your psychobiography. In psychoanalysis, you go into the room with a problem, lie on the couch, and something else emerges, which has repercussions way more interesting than anything you might have gone in with. Similarly when you go into the studio, you get unexpected connections. If I had a great message to deliver, god how boring it would be. Boring for me above all. Not knowing, yet daring – that’s the métier!”

...

“I love poetry, I read a lot,” he continues, as we each slowly slice wedges off the cake until we have finished it all. “Rilke was a great constructor. And Twombly, a bit of paint and he scribbles something on canvas, how does he get away with it, the fucker – conveying a whole passionate universe with the smallest of means!

...

“That’s what poetry is about – condensing experience into a meaningful few words, gestures. ‘Vir Heroicus Sublimus’ by Barnett Newman, it’s a big red painting with a strip in, and yet it isn’t – it’s something mysterious. Newman is one of my favourite artists. Duchamp is another – ‘The Large Glass’, there are very few objects in the world that remain mysterious like that. And the third artist for me is Joseph Beuys (Gallery, Wikipedia); if Duchamp’s idea was that all objects are art, Beuys’ was that all objects have mythological potential.

Anish Kapoor interview : http://t.co/goLhWhZF

Bo Xilai’s downfall and China’s future

"A decade ago when Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao were installed as China’s president and premier respectively, one could have been fooled into thinking that the process by which they were selected ran like clockwork. Indeed, some apologists for Beijing’s authoritarian rule have argued that the way in which the Communist party picks its leaders is a model of technocratic rule. Prospective candidates for top slots are groomed over years in the most demanding jobs the vast country has to offer. The competition is ferocious. But the process lacks some vital ingredients. It is neither transparent nor accountable.
...

"There are some steps, well short of the full-blown democracy so feared by the Communist party, that could be taken. First, dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel peace prize winner, and others should be released. What most of these political activists are demanding is enshrined in China’s own post 1949 constitution. Mr Wen’s rhetoric is incompatible with silencing such people and depriving them of their liberty. Second, there should be more experiments with genuine democracy, if only, initially, at the village, county and township levels advocated by Mr Wen. Here the experience of Wukan, a village in southern China that organised its own election after expelling corrupt officials is instructive. It is mildly encouraging that the Communist party in Guangdong, where Wukan is located, chose to let the elections proceed rather than sending in troops as some feared."

FT: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c268c15e-6fa3-11e1-b368-00144feab49a.html#axzz1uZv1lYYg

10.5.12

Insights, photographic and otherwise: Heading East

From the eclectic, photographically oriented blog Heading East

Night Sounds

When I was a kid I imagined the sound of night to be wind in the branches and the beat of firefly wings.
As a teen I imagined it to be the breath of the sleeping.

Night in New York where the quiet hours were never so quiet, was always a conversation, muffled and rich.

In LA it was the tinkle and chime of a distant party.

Today, if I close my eyes after 2 or so, wherever I am, night is always full of keyboards... clicking away, endlessly, out there in the dark.

http://www.mexicanpictures.com/headingeast/2012/05/night-sounds-1.html

8.5.12

Maurice Sendak - Brilliant obituary, memorable stories

NYTimes: Maurice Sendak, Author of Splendid Nightmares, Dies at 83 http://t.co/dV3b6MIf

Video Interview: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/05/09/grim-colberty-tales-maurice-sendak/

Drawings http://nga.gov.au/InternationalPrints/Tyler/DEFAULT.cfm?MnuID=2&VUWRKS=TRUE&ArtistIRN=20545

Bill Clinton, LBJ, Caro

Bill Clinton makes some interesting observations while reviewing LBJ by Robert Caro http://t.co/nf0umzVb

15.4.12

Reading Amis ....

Reading Amis on Larkin; drinking Kilkenny. Next: Tibetan Book of Dead, interpreted by Dalai Lama, but really curious about Lopez critique.

http://twitter.com/pmorgan/status/191390021851418624
April 15, 2012 at 12:58PM

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