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Monthly Archives: May 2016

Disney, atoms, spinal tap & the power of the Melancholic hum

21 Saturday May 2016

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Abrahamic peoples, Atomoles, Brian Cox, Bruch's Violin Concerto, Cradle of Civilisation, D Minor, Dissonence, Feed The Birds, Gnostic Chanting, Hebrew Spirituals, Kracow, Lydian Harmoniai, Mach Piece, Mary Poppins, melancholia, Mellin, Octaves, Rad-energy, Robinson Crusoe, Sentimentality, Sherman & Sherman, Spinal Tap, The Crusades, The Law of Harmonic Repulsion & Attraction, The Moors, Theory of Musical Equiliberation, Thermism, Travers, Walt Disney

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Why do some pieces of music seem to overwhelm us with emotion?

There are some pieces of music that seem to tear down the defences of even the coolest cucumbers and the most rational beings – stirred to high emotion by the mellifluous cadence of the piece.

And there always seems to be a minor key mooching about in there somewhere with the more melancholic or sentimental pieces of music. Certainly in western cultures those Minor keys are right up there with best of them in the profoundly moving department.

How can we forget Nigel Tufnell and his unforgettable Mach Piece – in D Minor

“I’m working on in D minor which is the saddest of all keys, I find. People weep instantly when they hear it, and I don’t know why.”

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BUT is ‘sadness’ really a universal minor key thing?

Melancholy in the western world may well reverberate through its minor chords. But such is not the case for many other cultures who can find joy and happiness in chords or harmonies that might have western ears sprinting for the Kleenex and a teary lie down.

The minor chord features heavily in both some African and Asian wedding music. Someone recently pointed out that in the Lydian Harmoniai of Ancient Greece which was designed specifically to evoke melancholy most closely resembles our major scale – and not a minor tear to be seen.

To be fair the ancient roots of our musical heritage have travelled a long and complex road – from music or harmony as one of the first human technologies – a way of expressing complex emotion, information and occasion – to their more recent shadings the result of its continental shifts out of the cradle of our current civilisations beliefs and influences.

Music or musical Harmony as we know it has bounced and bobbled around to a most staggering degree, spouting up from the rhythmic heart of Africa, thrown northwards to be strung high on the strings of the pre hellenic tribes to those deep in the Syrian basin; to roar out in the soaring song and melody of the Abrahamic peoples and faiths, via Palestine, through the Monastic Orders of the Crusades, up into the mellifluous discordant chanting of the orthodox churches into the throaty baritone of steppe Russian and Cossack singing and echoing amongst the walls of the ghettoes of Kracow; or carried on the warm, sandy  Gnostic breezes to turn up towards the Mediterranean, clipping the southern rim to meet the war-ish Moorish wails and chants: to vault the seaways into southern Spain and the monastic orders to collide with the Cantorial Melancholy of the Renaissance rendered dissonant by the long Asian shadow of the Venetian  merchant and underwritten by the colder airs and arias of the Middle and Northern European marches.

In a nutshell, harmony has been around a bit – and its been a little loose with its favours. Harmony has found itself sad and happy in so many different contexts that it doesn’t know its major arse from its minor elbow when it comes to the proving of what makes a sad or happy musical sound, note or chord.

You could say that for a broadly consensual idea of ‘sad’ (for that read minor) chords to have percolated to the top of that millennia-long journey shows their immutable and inherent power. But on the other you could say that every sequence of harmonies or notes, having travelled that road, would by now be laden with ‘context’ – the shaper and colourist of emotion in music.

This historic cultural criss-cross, the subsequent assimilation and blurring of musical cultures might explain why the chord sequence of ‘Lord, Hear my prayer’, the French Taize Christian spiritual has a decidedly Hebrew quality in the way in which its chord sequence descends and ascends, and whose chord succession has a remarkable similarity to some of the orchestrations from Disney’s Mary Poppins (more of which later).

In music particularly, there is much debate about how ‘melancholy’ or emotional characteristics are given to certain notes or chords – back to Nigel Tufnell and D Minor, the saddest of chords.

Specialists in this area point to the Theory of Musical Equilibration to explain the relationship between music and emotion. They see notes and chords as not inherently emotional but as a process of Will – a process which sets chords and notes in relation to particular cultural social and temporal contexts. The theory contests that it is these contexts that ’dye’ the notes chords or harmonies with emotion.

An example perhaps of this theory is the song ‘Feed The Birds’ featured in the 1964 Disney film Mary Poppins. Written by Sherman & Sherman. There is enormous contextual substance and potency in this song for generations of western adults and their children (as the adults tend to pass down their cultural ‘mores and memes’ through sharing of the things they loved as children, and the children in turn love what their parents love as an act of belonging – emotional adhesion).

It is said that Travers, the lady who wrote the story of Mary Poppins, on hearing the suggested song Feed The Birds wished instead for Greensleeves (which Wikipedia notes as being in E Minor as is much of Feed The Birds) to be the soundtrack to Mary Poppins – as it was quintessentially English. The quintessence of Feed The Birds I would venture is of a very different tribe.

There is an underlying spirit in the music of Feed The Birds that for me is inextricably linked to the Hebrew spirituals and the eastern European musical traditions. The echo of the yiddisher musical culture of eastern Europe seems to rise up in so many of the composers of these ‘melancholia’ or nostalgia pieces. The Sherman brothers are but one example.

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The composer of another great and renowned melancholic piece, the theme tune to the 1960s TV serialisation of Robinson Crusoe, was originally from Kiev in the Ukraine. And though there are some parts of this score that sound more Bond theme than anything else, the core of it, is distinctly eastern European for me. There is a point about 3 minutes and 40 seconds in where it transfers from a bombast Bond-like orchestration to the most heart wrenching solo violin. The echo of the first 60 seconds of Bruch’s Violin Concerto in G Minor is not difficult to hear – and seemingly a similar wish in Robert Mellin to incorporate Jewish inspirations into his music, as Bruch did so many years before.

In much the same way as Feed The Birds, the soundtrack for Robinson Crusoe is quite extraordinary in its ability to overwhelm the listener with feelings of profound emotion – both joy and sadness in perfect harmony.

These both make very good exemplars of the Theory’s concept of how Context (yearning, simpler times, naivete, longing, loss, when the world was young, carefree, endless summer) ‘dyes’ the music with emotion

The yearning in these pieces does seem to reach beyond simple sentimentality though. There was a profound feeling present when I first heard them. This pre-sentimental, pre-nostalgic effect is played out in the numerous comments that can be found underneath their youtube listings – ‘as moving as the first time I heard it’ is a reoccurring refrain. The fact that these pieces of music have become sentimentalised and dyed with emotion is I would suggest a secondary effect: an outcome of their initial impact and the mesmeric effect they had on the viewer/listener.

I would like to venture that they vibrate with something far greater than simple ‘context’ and dyed emotion.

They seem to vibrate with the power of a far more timeless human ‘voice’.

I wonder whether there are certain harmonies that in their vibration come closer than anything else the millennia of musical story tellers could muster to capturing the vibration of life itself.

That vibration – the energetic shaking of atoms on which all animate existence or life is based – but perhaps its resonance, however fleetingly is captured in some of these pieces.

The Law of Harmonic Attraction and Repulsion tells us that atoms shaking or vibrating at between 42 and 63 octaves per second produce a creative force – thermism – whose transmissive force – Rad-energy – creates association and cohesion – creates ‘stuff’ -the ethereal and material world we live in – Oh, and us. So we are in effect vibrating along with everything else. So why would we not recognise and respond to a fellow vibration in the world and feel drawn – to want to cohere with it – even if it is just a sound, note or harmony

It is a long stretch from the measuring of atomic octaves per second to the sweeping choir of the Sherman Brothers piece in Mary Poppins BUT I would venture that as we find out more and more about our existence and how we fit into the world we live in, especially at a sub atomic universal level, a distant and circuitous link between the octaves or vibration of life and those of musical harmony will eventually be laid out, only yo be met by an Uh Duh! response. ‘Of course they’re linked’ we’ll say.’Whoever was stupid enough to think they weren’t ?!’

There will be a quick populist ‘Brian Cox’ rewrite on the  infinite and unchangeable quantity of atomoles, the base of all matter and their state of constant vibratory motion, then the odd deft collision of both pop and high culture referencing:

What piece of work an atomole.  How infinite in extent, how unchangeable in quantity, how initial of all forms of energy; how express and admirable in action, how like a god!

Closely followed on stage by a rip roaring rendition of:

I’m pickin’ up good vibrations
She’s giving me excitations 

Perhaps a far more complex nature is at work in Nigel Tufnel’s saddest of all chords – one that reaches far beyond the influence of the cultures in which the listener was nurtured: in which they exist – one that reaches perhaps into the realm of our very life’s vibration.

Vibration as a signifier of the most profound life force is a reoccurring theme in many faiths and belief systems – not just in the physical, mathematical treatise of atomoles.

And I’ll bet you two finger cymbals, a Catholic Mass bell and a Buddhic gong that music is our way of reconnecting with the vibration of life.

And perhaps the melancholy we feel when we hear certain music is not only the residue of context and emotional dyeing but perhaps driven by a yearning rooted in its ability to remind us of a more profound connection with the vibration of life: one which we were once so closely aligned with; and to which we have now become strangers.

 

 

Tuppence a bag and a quick weep is a small price to pay for the key to cosmic connection

Homes, Castles, Connectivity & Living the Dream

12 Thursday May 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Broadband, Connected Homes, Cost of Life, Cost Of Living, Dolls House, facebook, gogglebox, Identity, Larger-than-life iving, Nectar cards, Reimagine Prosperity, Ridley Scott, Robin Hood, Russell Crowe, Smarter Lighter Living, tech Businesses, thriving, twitter

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The home bone’s connected to the bill bone. The bill bone’s connected to the sigh bone. The sigh bone’s connected to the…

The difference between our base line Cost of Living and our expanded Cost of Life depends mostly on the size of life we think we’re entitled to.

For most of us, the size of Life we choose seems to be a ‘larger-than-life’ one – regardless of whether we can actually afford it or not. We rarely seem to find meaning within our means these days. Living within our means feels so, well, small.

We’re all rock stars now; super consumers of gorgeous.

And as with many things – our Cost of Life aspirations both begin and end in the home.

Our home is a hub – a hub of Us. A hub that speaks of our aspirations, background, histories and values; the dolls house of our life’s journey, set out like a huge work-in-progress catalogue for the life we aspire to: a  life that looks so good we’d just have to buy it (if we hadn’t done so already, three times over).

The living catalogue of Glorious Me. We’re all on air, on screen and published now, love – our perfect lives played out on facebook and twitter ( “Great Barbecue babe! Rose! Rose! And OMG!…gorgeous new garden chairs! you old fashionista you! #barbietodiefor @barbiegurl” ). Perfect lives, perfect bound by that lovely little digital printing and photo shop down the road into a coffee table book of Us.

Our home is where the Art is. The art of a life lived increasingly on camera and social network (even some of the GoggleBox families seem to be suffering a creeping upgrade to their furnishings).

And in the UK that home reaches far beyond its more recent role as the backdrop and canvass to our gorgeous perfect lives.

Let’s not forget the home enjoys near mythical status.

Because it really is our castle. (Cue Mr. Crowe’s Robin of Loxley speech in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood)

The home enshrines the right of every man woman and child to self-determination and liberty – each of us the Lord of our own manor.

If I want to crazy pave it, paint it in stripes or put crash barriers on my front lawn, I will.

Our home is connected to our fundamental human right, our sense of belonging, our individual and collective identity, the signature of our citizenship and all that goes with that.

It is our own personal cornerstone in a fair decent and thriving nation.

When viewed through the lens of values ethics and identity, the connected Home for us is a far bigger idea than some tech fest junkies would suggest.

Yes the tech junkie view of the connected home is amazing.

But too often seem to ignore or miss the social and cultural infrastructure within which that home and its occupants exist. And therefore the most compelling of ways in which to connect it and to what.

Yes, the hyper connected home should represent the purest and most uncompromised version of our tech selves. But expansive tech needs meaning.

Connected homes in technological terms are amazing things – but I wish they’d speak of them in human terms – and imbue them with the power to elevate and enable the intrinsic values and aspirations of us, not just house the extrinsic ones.

A home inextricably and invisibly connected to our human needs and desires beyond having the latest something.

Imagine of all that tech was focused on serving one greater and more liberating purpose?

Imagine if the connected home was the killer app in a smarter lighter life for everyone of us?

Imagine if your home was hard wired directly to a smarter lighter model of prosperity – where the technology was put in charge of holisticity, thrift, and the inter-relatedness and integration of all things to do with your most precious retreat.

Imagine if your home sensed everything and watched all. Imagine if it was programmed to act in your best interests?

Imagine if it was the relentless scrutinizer of every opportunity to unburden you? Acting smartly on your behalf, mostly invisibly, with you only ever seeing the benefit of an increasingly improving life at decreasing cost?

Imagine if everything that you carried into your home had a bar code that registered it and simply recalculated your insurance accordingly?

Imagine if your fridge knew what needed to be eaten when – and also made suggestions to you for the left overs in the fridge – popping up with a recipe for the last two eggs, fennel head, three mushrooms and abstract cheese from the market?

Imagine if, having read the calorie counter off your i-watch, the same fridge suggested a meal from your own fridge or larder based upon the exercise you just did?

Imagine if your home knew what size the shoes and clothes were in your house and gave you the heads up if the kids needed new trainers – or those pants were past their sell by date?

Imagine if the shower knew when you’d had enough – timed to switch off after 3 minutes?

Imagine if the grey waste wandered down a pipe to be run through the lawn down through charcoal and into a aquifer, cleaning the water to within an inch of its 7 life cycles life – to pop out again in the washing machine, dish washer, and sink taps?

Imagine if the bioacoustics – sound imaging – in your home shifted the energy utilities to the area of the house you used the most? And the floor tiles generated the energy for the low wattage lighting in every room you walked into?

Imagine a house that gave you the nod when too much screen time had eaten your synapses?

Imagine a bed that kept a record of how much time you spent in REM sleep and re-calibrated your well being regime accordingly.

Imagine a house that could read the bar code on every book in it and give you a re-run suggestion from your own library – instead of just always buying another?

Imagine a home which delivered a change is as good as a rest plan each season – with a small suggestion for how to rearrange or re-see what you have – furniture, appliances, space –  to freshen up everyday life without unnecessary expense?

This suddenly transforms your home into a living evolving magazine concept – where your own home breathes in and out with you, informing and enriching your living experience by empirically understanding how you live and then helping you make the most of what you have. Apply the magazine retailing model and the connected self/connected home idea gets even more interesting.

If your home knew what reward and store cards you had and knew how many points you had accrued it could even suggest how you might use those points to best and most economic effect!

So what does this demand of us that isn’t already being done?

All of the above requires us to look at the Connected Home with Purpose and meaning – which requires us to look down through the lens of human desire and the expansive self – not up through the lens of relentless tech innovation and the optimized self.

If a smarter lighter life was predicated on super smart technologies applied invisibly to liberate the person to unburden themselves from the clutter of a ‘larger-than-life’ life and the confusion and contradiction that comes with it, starting with the bills, that would be an amazing thing.

Suddenly our ability to re-imagine prosperity in our everyday lives with meaning stops being the sole domain of finance houses and home retail stores seeking to expand their footprint in our lives.

Suddenly Tech businesses providing state of the art hyper fast connectivity move into pole position as the enablers and augmenters of a smarter lighter life – the deliverers of a new prosperity model.

And hey, every business category loves a new revenue stream and brand opportunity!!

“So,…yeah Ill take the THRIVE101 Hyper –fast, Invisible-Tech Connected Home Package please,

yup… yup…no…the one with the insurance/water/energy/credit card/retail bundle.

Yup.

Nice.

Nectar Card? Yes Ive got a nectar Card.

2 Million Bonus Points with the THRIVE101 UPGRADE?

errmm, OK, go on then…”

Living memory, resilience & the art of not forgetting

02 Monday May 2016

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Alzheimer's, ard drives, Arts, company culture, data points, degenerative disease, desire, drama, Elegy, Evolution, Gladiator, Identity, Language, literature, Living memory, Maximus, Nock Payne, resilience, self expression, smart phones, Social Memory, technologies, telecomms, The Book Of Life, Virgin Accelerator

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Funny thing memory

We tend to pay little attention to it; until it starts to fail us.

Sometimes its reason for failing us is a conspiracy of genes + environment – creating a disposition to Alzheimer’s and other forms of degenerative disease – the desperate creeping extinction of everything that made us one the whole beautiful living breathing loving human being we are.

At other times it’s disappearance is to do with the impact of new technologies. Recent technologies tempt us to dispense with our need to ‘remember’. Or they diffuse or diminish our natural ability to remember those things most important and valuable to us. In his book the shallows, Nicholas Carr points to how excessive immersion in the internet and the digital world disturbs our ability to transfer and store working memory into our deeper long term memory, reshaping our neural pathways.

Unlike language, art or drama – older human technologies designed to mine, explore, capture, elevate and replay memory and the experience and impact of living – our most recent technologies sometimes seem to seek to simply mathematically atomise our lives and the memory of them until human feeling is viewed as nothing more than a data point – something to be measured calibrated and engineered.

The idea that consciousness, identity and the precious value of memory is a form or condition of existence that can simply be dissected, measured, data pointed, and reengineered by science is a theme explored in Nick Payne’s play Elegy. A woman raddled by a degenerative disease that will eventually kill her is told her condition can be halted by ‘life saving’ surgery – the miracle of science – but only at the cost of catastrophic loss of memory. At which point one has to ask: ‘What life are you saving if not the recollected one; the one filled with precious riches and experiences?’

In some ways the diaspora of memories and recollections once housed in picture frames diaries sketchbooks letters and albums into the lost vaults of smart phone devices and hard drives is robbing us of tangible tactile living memory. This functional un-remembering allow us to abdicate the responsibility for maintaining those experiences, memories or recollections and synthesizing them.  The machine nature of calling up data is very different to the human nature of recollecting memory – the former is perfect, linear, modal and cached, the second, imperfect, linear, messy and overlapping, every journey into it opening up the possibilities of new revelation – as opposed to the same data cache relentlessly replayed like the locked loop in a stored file.

One of the most powerful drivers of our progress and evolution and of our astonishing resilience as a species is personal and shared recollection. Perhaps memory is a just a simple evolutionary trait mythologised – of collected wisdoms and experiences of fear pain survival and joy, regurgitated in fire side stories, tales, mementoes, symbols artefacts and dramas.

But to connect memory or remembering to some higher order of existence – to have created the thread between what is, what has been and what will be via the technology of memory is some proof of our ability to transcend the claw and scratch of base existence.

That the memory of us and what we do may well be a vanity particular to our species – a desperate need for our life to be more than some nihilistic little blip on a cosmic scale.

Nonetheless, our need to try and reach beyond the brackets of birth and death and seize immortality; whether it be through our beliefs, by our actions, the legacies we leave, the children we bear or the blunt tool of extending our physical and conscious existence, is a defining trait in us.

Gladiator’s Maximus demonstrates our need to be remembered as an inspiration of improvement and achievement when he states: “What we do in life echoes in eternity”

To be forgotten is a terrible thing. Immortality, until some scientific trickster or data consciousness A.I. guru makes it otherwise , is mostly an exercise in seeding a process of relentless remembering.

We have a number of simple systems already in place, some rooted in thousands of years of repeated doing and some rooted in immoveable belief systems, and some developed through more recent technologies.

Some forms or remembering have until recently been seen as the sign of mental distress or illness. Take Nostalgia. Sneaking off for a quick youtube binge of TV theme tunes from childhood or rummaging through pictures of old Y Front adverts (love Retronaut!!) and a desperate yearning to watch the infamous Ziggy Stardust Top of the Pops is usually seen by the up-tight ‘its all abut the Now man’ zealots as some mawkish sentimentality BUT recent developments in psychoanalysis have shown that nostalgia is a powerful human tool – and can actually strengthen our sense of self and centre our identity, enabling us to weather greater shifts, turbulence and transition.

Look Back In Joy, a recent Guardian article looking at the power of Nostalgia, focuses on an Greek Born American academic, Constantine Sedikides, who had left the University of North Carolina to become Professor of Social & Personality Psychology at the University of Southampton. He realised that he was using nostalgia to manage the turbulence and dislocation of changing continents. This led him to exploring in far more robust academic terms the role and facility that nostalgia provides us with. His findings are liberating. Sedikides talks of nostalgia as the “perfect internal politician, connecting the past with the present, pointing optimistically to the future” and a mental state “absolutely central to human experience”.

For me this quick blog journey through the Art of Remembering was bough on by a recent collision of banal choices, a profound realisation and professional curiosity.

First up.

The banal. Sky movie choice time with my children. “What about The Book of Life?” – a simple, beautiful whimsical story with a simple point by the master Guillermo Del Toro. Yes, its about greatness. Yes, its about the illusion of courage. Yes, its about true love. yes, its about belonging – but really, it id a film about not forgetting. Relentlessly Remembering is about Not Forgetting. Memory and the act of remembering are the most powerful tools that we have at our disposal. We are all kept alive in the hearts and minds eyes and memories of those who love us and have lived out some part of their lives in around and about us.

Second up.

The profound. In a simple exchange between my brother and I, we reminded ourselves that the effects of my beautiful but now dead mother will eventually need to be shared out between my he and I – the next step in the atomisation of her living memory into our lives and eventually the lives of my children and so on. Each effect vibrates with associated memory – sodden with the context which arrives like a steam train every time they are recalled into being – expressions, sounds, smells, feelings, times and experiences. The atomic truth that an atom never dies – and that the world vibrates with the atomic echoes of every one who has ever lived needs to include the more ephemeral but still equally powerful atomic nature of the vibrations of memory that run through the effects of those we have loved. Their atomic nature is indirectly imbued by their having been part of a life. They are rendered ‘animate’ by those vibrations. This belief in this form of conscious osmosis doesn’t stop at the effects and belongings of those who have passed out of sight. We also apply it to sites and buildings – from Stone Henge and battle fields to the blue plaques on buildings. We make pilgrimages to the hallowed halls of here and there, wishing for the conscious greatness and wellhead of wisdom and learning steeped in their walls to pour out into us.

Third up.

The professional. This curiosity arose while exploring the purpose of one of the Virgin Accelerator businesses I have had the pleasure of working with. In a world of zero hours and the death of the social contract between large corporations and their employees, their idea of a platform that links previous, present and future employees creates a simple and compelling way for rebuilding a powerful and precious social memory into a company.

Social or Living Memory in a corporation or business is increasingly left to chance and the random foray into face-book pages, LinkedIn and the odd Instagram surge. Fully connecting with a company’s Now – amongst its employees, the communities it touches, its customers, its partners and suppliers – is only part of true socialisation

Socialising a company requires more than just acting in the Now. But few companies actively connect their past with their present and even fewer attach it to their future. The anti-socialising of a company – the active dislocation and rupture the social threads that run through it – the ties that bind it from its past to its future – are not just an oversight on the part of the social strategy or HR.

It is not just economic pressures or the trend for zero hours that destroy the social contract and living memory of a business. Many ambitious and venal execs actively dispense with the ‘dead wood’ and not always for the right reasons. This forest fire approach is often simply a way of removing those with a greater living memory of the business than the ‘new’ order now prevailing and controlling it .

Agreed, often the human nature of getting stuck in our ways: fixing things: securing them and subsequently seeing all change to them as alien or dangerous can kill a business; sucking the light and life out of it. But the baby & bathwater approach to removing people who’ve been around too long can rob corporations of a vital cornerstone of their resilience. When done wilfully this kind of action should be seen as an aggression against the business and in turn the shareholder – because it is purposefully eviscerating a source of memory and knowledge that though in its linear and previous form may be obsolete, could be re-tasked and transformed into a new and more powerful resource to greater long term value.

All of these impacts, however great or small, can create a form of Corporate Alzheimer’s – the degeneration of the social memory of the company, and with it the very thing that made the company burn so brilliantly for so long.

In a conversation with a large American telecomm business about how they might help High School kids resist dropping out, I was surprised to find that they struggled to see the value in connecting their ex employees – a truly universal and multitudinous cohort of living memory and life experience – with the young high school crowd via a weekly skype roulette. The idea was simple – for a massive telecoms and connectivity provider to create a showcase of meaningful connections by using social platforms to randomly connect high school kids and oldies to share moments of life and experience to mutual benefit. I realised that to grasp the value of this and institute this type of initiative requires an innate understanding of the power and value of being remembered for ex employees and of memory to those just staring on their journey.

Regardless of what a company gets wrong, and many get much wrong in regards to how they treat their employees over time – the truth is those companies still invest an enormous amount of time and money into training up and expanding the capabilities of their workforce (self interestedly granted but in that mutual self interest lies the truth of the social contract between an employee and an employer).Why let it all walk out the door when the employee leaves?  Because sometimes their tenure was bumpy or you didn’t act in the best manner towards them?

At the close of the Theory of Everything , when Steven and his ex wife Jane watch their children playing in the garden, their exchange summarises the value and potency of connected imperfections perfectly.

“Look what we made”.

For all the mistakes. For all the disappointments. For all the pain. Would you have it any other way? Memory can hurt. But is can also heal. Forgetting is a cop out.

Some people and the companies they run would be all the better for taking this view – and in doing so commit to rebuild their ability to relentlessly remember – drawing a long line from their past to their future. Social or Living memory is not only one of the most powerful human facilities. It could also be the cornerstone of a companies greatest resilience in our accelerating atomizing world.

Purpose, the north star of any company, is one of its tools for Relentless Remembering  – and it becomes meaningless if it is only socialised in the Now.

A purpose must be part of a continuum that reaches from the beginning of a company to its end. And to do that it must exist inside a structure that values and facilitates everyone’s ability to relentlessly remember and be improved and enlightened by that remembering.

 

Faith, banter & Living the Dream

01 Sunday May 2016

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catholocism, Dave Allen, eruv, faith, Herman Ze German, Identity, jehovah, Jihadi John, judaism, Life Of Brian, M Theory, protestantism, Religion, Science, sharia law, thugee, Wonga

 

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“Christ on a bike.”

“You can’t say that.”

“What?”

“That.”

“Christ on a bike?”

“Yeah.”

“Just a bit of fun. Think its what the Tommies used to shout in the old days when the Padre cycled past on his way to some bombed out Mass.”

“Bit disrespectful isn’t it?”

“Nah.”

“Like that Dave Allen in the 70s – upsetting all of the Catholics in Ireland”

“Blast from the past. We’ll be getting our knickers in a twist about the bloody Life of Brian next.”

“And with fair reason.”

“What?”

“Well, bit of a hatchet job on old JC wasn’t it. And what about all that ‘hook nose’ ‘heebie’ ‘red sea pedestrian’ stuff?”

“God, I loved that bit! “Oi! Big Nose” “Who you calling big nose?”

“Cant think the Jewish viewers enjoyed it that much.”

“Well, you cant be too sensitive can you.”

“Unless Jehovah is a really big deal for you and your faith.”

“Yeah, OK, but blimey, what next? Rename the next series of Luther because the Reformation Protestant purists are going to get all hufty otherwise?”

“No. I’m just saying be a little more respectful to people of faith.”

“Faith? You mean Religion. Faith is not the sole domain of the Holy you know.”

“Yes it is.”

“Really? Faith comes in all shapes and sizes. Even the scientists need it. That M Theory is a bit of a leap of faith – nice theory but whoops no proof – but I cant see a molecular physicist getting all arsey about Hadron Collider gags.”

“M Theory?”

“M Theory – Hawking – chap in the chair – funny voice – believes that there is one total quantum truth for the whole universe – unifying all consistent superstring theories of the universe.”

“Superstring.”

“Forget the string – all I am saying is that until there is proof, that’s a leap of faith.”

“No need to get funny about it. All I am saying is that some people have a different cultural sensitivity to stuff like this. Things are sacred for them.”

“Oh, you’re not going to get all Sharia on me now are you.”

“Why not. The Jewish community puts up an Eruv. We all respect the significance of that.”

“God, can we just lighten up. All this stuff is just not…just not how we are. We just don’t get that worked up about this stuff.”

“Great. But other people do.”

“You’ll be banning banter next. And that’s just not British”

“What about Jihadi John?”

“What, the lunatic psycho Jihadi John?”

“Yes. Calling him Jihadi John – is that banter?”

“That’s the Sun for you!”

“Jihad is a religious reference.”

“Yeah but no. Just a bit of name-calling. You’re in taking-the-piss-land mate. Get over it.”

“It’s a bit thuggish though isn’t it?”

“What?”

“You know, all a bit lock stock and two smoking shashlik kebabs. Jihadi John. Cos he’s a Jihadist. Turkish cos he’s Turkish.”

“Well if you’re going to be like that, don’t say Thug.”

“Why not?”

“Thugee – Indian cult.”

“That’s not religion! They were a criminal cult.”

“Look. All I am saying is that, you know, chill out. its a sign of a civilised society. Rising above all the voodoo and the mysticism.Being able to look at it and laugh. I mean its nuts some of it.”

“So a few billion people are all nuts?”

“Yeah. But to be fair most of them are so bloody poor they need some fantasy to believe in don’t they. A thinking person with a decent education – going to see the funny side of all that blood and wine and 70 virgins.”

“Oh OK. Got it. So by your reckoning profound soul searching faith is commensurate with poverty.”

‘Yup. Face it mate, the more stuff we can get a hold of in this life the less we need to negotiate our entry into the next. Why should I worry about 4 Hail Marys, Stamping on a glass and facing East”

“Blimey. So a couple of credit cards, a few fancy holidays and a new sofa and all forms of religion can get binned? You’ll be telling me that Wonga Loans and spirituality are conflicting belief systems next”

“God, you’re a right bag of laughs. Have you got a saddle for that very high horse you’re on? Speaking of horses; I’m hungry.”

“Yeah; Im starving come to think of it.”

‘What about that Herman Ze German. Hot dog & beer place. Wurst sausage I ever had!”

‘Now that’s funny.”

“Hallelujah. He has a sense of humour. Schnell.”

 

 

Living the Dream is a project that seeks a more meaningful and inclusive narrative for what good looks like by exploring the underlying narratives in everyday peoples lives at the intersection where prosperity, consumption and values collide.  

 

 

 

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