Unwashed And Somewhat Slightly Dazed

Tuesday morning-ish. Sunny, after weeks of consistent sun. The ambience is low-key agreeable. A bit sweltering with my head against the train window. Just my tshirt: no jacket, no backpack. Earbuds. A past version of me made sure I would listen to Bowie today. After weeks, I’m finally in the mood: not quite enough sleep to be fully functional, a hangover leaning on the strange side of pain, and a desire to launch myself in space.

Bowie is simply perfect right now. Catchy enough to drag me along. Loud. Comitted. Happily weird. The world is blue. And there’s nothing I can do. Though I crossed one hundred thousand miles…

(26/365)

You owe me, Leopold Museum, you owe me

DISCLAIMER: pretentious stuff ahead.

I hate it when people try to help me in secret. Call me callous, but I usually don’t appreciate it at all. I’m convinced I know what good for me better then anyone else. Particularly when people help me in a way that makes things worse. When you have to be grateful for their help, when you’re actually angry. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a manifestation of being a control freak. I usually have an unbreakable conviction on where I want to be, and how to get there, even if I rationally know I’m dead wrong. Probably more often then not. Case in point: the Leopold museum.

The Leopold Museum is located in Vienna, somewhere among a whole host of museums exhibiting a lot of masterworks that the perfidious Habsburgers looted from other countries. But I digress. The Leopold Museum lures unsuspecting tourists by advertising it’s Klimt collection in every elevator and bathroom in Austria. So I went. I like Klimt. And guess what? The only works they have are second rate, which they tellingly can’t even allocate a dedicated room for. Pshaw. As a small, perhaps Belgian-style revenge, I decided to see every single painting on display. Starting on the ground floor. Egon Schiele. The first painting I see is quite large, 2m x 2m in my memory, so perhaps half that. A nude, yellowishly hued man, slight bend at the middle. Incidental penis and pubes. An almost cubistic quality to thighs, belly and pelvis. No arms, but prominent legs. An expression between concentration and melancholy, hard to read due to the covered mouth.

This painting had the strongest emotional impact on me that any painting I’ve seen before and after. Schiele’s paintings could easily be classified as ugly, but after a while it’s clear it is a very honest, direct, and often brutal portrayal. And I needed to take a couple of seated minutes now and them, as the works were having a very emotionally draining effect on me. I’m obviously a melancholic, and usually pessimistic person at heart, and I empathized at a personal level that I might even have ignored all this time. The world is obviously an ugly place, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be beautiful…. despite? at the same time as? orthogonal to? that.

Egon Schiele died in 1918, 99 years ago. I guess good art really can speak across any temporal boundary. In an amazingly powerful manner. Goddamn you, Leopold Museum, goddamn you.

(25/365)

An old echo

Next time, you’ll be me and I’ll be you

(24/265)

Let the beat control your writing

I read something good. About writing. And pacing. And punctuation. Specifically, sentence length. You should keep it varied. Not only use short ones. Some sentences should be longer then twenty words. Others are less, but more than, say, seven. Everything shorter than seven is short. The point is, you have to vary them. Not have 3 or more of the same type, consecutively. That is not only boring, but also predictable. The article made it really clear to me that, despite a tendency to write those deliciously meandering sentences (with more subclauses than an iTunes TOS), you really should insert in some short sentences. Those really give a staccato effect to the flow of the text, and, paired with a couple of medium length sentences, don’t feeling jarring after they follow a rambling block of words (without any relief of punctuation in sight).

Record scratch, freeze frame

See? That was terrible. Usually, I tend to lean towards long sentences. Sentences tend to stand on their own, and with more complex subject, it’s very tempting to only use long ones, rich in turns of phrase. The ones that make you sound German. You don’t want that. Short ones are attractive too. They punch. They’re direct. They’re personal. But, used indiscriminately, you could sound like a bad Hunter Thompson cover band. Don’t do it. Keep your reader hooked, but don’t exhaust her. Tell her what you want to tell her, but make sure you have some pit-stops on the way. To breathe. To keep them on their toes. At it’s best, writing is aesthetic, a fact easily overlook by text being the de facto medium for record knowledge. I still have a long way to go.

(23/365)

Sit down

People who don’t drink
People who don’t sleep naked
People who don’t curse
People who don’t have an absolute garbage dump as a desk
People who don’t listen to music older then themselves
People who don’t dwell on the past
People who don’t hate getting up in the morning

I’m going to follow you around with a notepad, and try to sell an article to National Geographic.

(22/365)

Pro Forma

The problem with doing “dailies”, is the risk of rushing through some content, without iterating/critiquing enough. And that defeats the whole point. Some posts ago I mentioned “deliberate practice”. Deliberate means you scrutinize your learning process while practicing. The difference is huge. In ordinary practice, you’re literally just practicing your craft. Want to run better? Run more often. You just do more of it. In deliberate practice, you might identify bad ingrained habits, dogmatic beliefs, knowledge outside the domains you’re already familiar with. In a sense, developing a higher level of understanding of where you’re at, and where you want to go. Going hiking in order to run faster. Caveat is that you know where to go. Is there the inverse? Practicing randomly, not knowing where it will go? Could we call it “improvisational learning”? That sound like a lot more fun!

(21/365)

Dailies

As you might have noticed, the last handful of posts have had a strange fraction at the bottom of each post. But, more importantly, there hasn’t been a new one in about 4 months. And this site looks uncannily different now. Both are related.

When the year started, I committed myself to posting a post every day, all year. This was inspired by someone who does it every day, and someone on twitter from who I’ve stolen the idea of sequencing on the post, as well as the name “dailies”. Dailies is a cinema term, as every day, the director and a bunch of other seniors (eg cinematographer, producer,…) will have a look at the footage shot the previous day. While I hope to produce something every day, this blog has always been a thinly veiled excuse to enable me to talk about myself. So consider this a textual version of the dailies of any Woody Allen film.

Hilariously, I’m behind more than 100 posts, having done only twenty. That’s about the approval rating of the sitting president. There’s a pretty easy explanation for this: as most of you know, my greatest skill in life is procrastination. I’m incredibly dedicated to cultivating this skill. I thoroughly enjoy it as well. It’s often brought me in trouble, but I’m sure that, more often, it has kept me from needless toil. The most efficient work is the one not done. But I digress. My subconscious decided that the best way to hit my dailies, was to procrastinate actually doing them. And my subconscious definitely rose to the occasion. I didn’t merely put off writing my posts, and falling behind on my quota. That would make me feel guilt. Every day. Not enough to do it. But enough to make it a negative experience. That would be a decent procrastination strategy, but I’m a professional. In order to procrastinate guilt-free, I decided that such a venture required a new website. Built from scratch, just to add to the workload. It was perfect. The only niggle was the fact that I thoroughly hate building websites. But having to do a thing you hate is a fair price to pay to pay for being able to put off working on a thing you love, right???

Watch this space.

(20/365)

Ten thousand hours

I think there’s an enormous over-emphasis on natural talent. In my work, programming, there’s often a perception that people who started early in life (say, 12 years old) have a huge, insurmountable advantage over people who start later in life.  In the art world, this is even more pronounced. Mozart, whose main quality is his age. Picasso, who must have had an innate ability to do what he did. The latest viral video of a 12 year old child dancing or singing on youtube.

One thing to note is that we mostly attribute this to artistic qualities. Nobody believes a genius accountant is born that way (if we even accept an accountant having a positive quality). There are no natural born politicians, firefighters or beekeepers. But there are natural born police, sculptor, musicians, liars…

Who decides this s***?

One of the most interesting things I’ve ever heard stressed the importance of deliberate practice. And deliberate is a very important word is this. To not just cruise by on auto-pilot, but to consciously improve weak points, and to push ourselves outside of our comfort zone. To not lash on to convenient excuses, and just put our feet on Terra Incognita. To keep at it for a significant time, just as the first things we found comfort with (and probably identify with). To not be afraid to be an amateur, even if we are a professional at something else. To judge ourselves, without any fear of finding ourselves lacking. To not be complacent.

It’s certain there are some people who had a born-with advantage. Daniel Johnston, who innovated without being part of the music scene.  Leonardo da Vinci, who was so far ahead that he had to be alone. Gaudi, who carved out such a unique space, he had to work on his own. But all of them learned how to wield that talent through practice. Perhaps 10000 hours worth.

(19/365)

Ambitions

Mine is pretty simple. I want to wear a tie, sit behind an empty desk, and bullshit into a camera. Some guests would be nice. Probably would call it comedy, as a cover. And yes, I miss Jon Stewart.

(18/165)

Primitive

This years World Press Photo has been announced. It’s a very angry man, who has just murdered someone he has never met before, and has never interacted with. His face, even after the act, is a mask of pure hate. It’s not an easy photo to look at. Most of the good qualities of standard photography that apply (eg composition, framing) are incidental, or tangential.

And it does seem there’s a lot of naked hate out there. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that before as such a diverse and global scale. Hate against refugees. Hate against “the west”. Hate against republicans. Hate against democrats. Hate against the extreme right. Hate against the right. Hate against the left.

It’s a fitting photo.

(17/365)