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Monthly Archives: January 2017

Trump, Trust, People Power & A New Social Contract

25 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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20 Million Voices, Con, Divestment, facebook, Fossil Fuels, hawks, Islam, Lyndon Johnsen, Military Industrial Complex, Monty Python & The Holy Grail, NeoCon, Oil Men, PeoplePower, Pussy Grabber, Radicalism, Social Contract, Trump, TRUST, UltraCon, Vietnam

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I’m less concerned with the overt Trumpness of Donald. I am sure that I should be.

Weirdly, the idea that one certain mister ‘pussy grabber’ becomes the President Elect of the United States does not surprise or shock me.

The White House has had its fair share of mysoginists and philanderers – and of course the hawks (both the useful ones the world desperately needed and the assholes the world didn’t). Presidents have not all been shades of the wholesome, family-loving God bless America of Carter and Reagan.

Trump’s direct assaults on minorities, global warming groups, foreign aid, etc. are in no way a surprise. He claims that he is against radical Islam not Muslims, but seems to think beating up Muslims is a great strategy to that end.

And as for the Wall and the Mexican issue. Its teetering on high comedy.

I imagine Trump in the roll of the Norman Knight played by John Cleese in Monty Python & The Holy Grail, looking down from his high vantage on the castle wall.

As the people far below call up to him the Donald flicks his nose at them.

Whispers from off camera: What do they want?

Donald: They’re looking for the American Dream… (sniggers) I told them we already got one.

The cynics point to the fact that Trump can’t be a friend of Hollywood because Hollywood would never forgive him for sending back the people who do their gardens – as every lawn from Sunset to Malibu would scorch and die if it weren’t for the Mexican part time labourers who fill the pick-ups every morning on every principal corner of Sunset where the bus stops sit.

Global warming is cobblers of course  in Donaldland (my new name for the Disney-esque NeoCon Hoo Haa place we call the Disunited States of America).

We knew this was coming. His dinner party friends have all made a huge amounts of money from fossil fuels – Oh, and they think the science is cod. How remarkably convenient. Oh and they’d like to continue to make a whole lot of money from fossil fuels. (Apparently the quickest was to roll back environmental impact stuff and fluff is to roll forward one hell of a pipeline.)

And the new hawkish ‘build it up build it out’ approach will be making a whole lot of industrialists in the ordnance sector positively dribble in anticipation. Its like ’64 and Lyndon Johnson’s election all over again.

So shock horror probe.

Donald’s anti the soft lefty red types in the arts. He’s backing the Oil Men, the Military Industrial Complex, the dream of the self-made Millionaire, a two people America and defensive divisive Isolationism.

Damn right.

This is what made America great people. And that’s what Donald is gonna do again.

Look it. Whatta guy. Even his Campaign Officer is a helluva woman – comin’ out fig’tin an e’ry thing at that Inauguration Dinner. Hah.

We’re a hellzaapoppin, asskickin, red slappin’, say it the way it is, speak my mind raise my fists burn some rubber bomb some ragheads give no quarter US of Damn A – an’ don’t you forget it.

There is nothing surprising about Donald Trump at all. He is a very ordinary unsurprising old school alpha man. He is that man in that bar or pub. Foghorn Leghorn. His scrabble for money has given him bragging rights and a loudspeaker for whats right and wrong. And his politics are simply his genetic ‘assert & ascend’ survival strategy writ large and loud.

The greatest issue with Donald Trump is not his politics. It’s his integrity. That fuzzy golden grey periphery that seems to wrap itself around and about everything he touches.

And the minority of ordinary people who voted for him are potentially in for a rude awakening one day. There’s no guarantee he’ll screw it up of course. He may busk it. Survive the next 4 years and fate will smile on him.

It’s a little like functioning alcoholics: teetering on the edge of the abyss of their addiction but never quite falling into it. He may just glide across the bumps. Even more scary for some, there may even be some things that he does that are not necessarily welcome but actually might benefit a large number of people. The issue is can you trust him to do that but not at a punitive cost to others. Favouring one group or bloc or constituency over another is a politician’s remit. But not a President’s.

A substantially larger number of the thinking, living, earning, voting population of the country he runs don’t trust him to run the country in a manner they see fitting for an advanced and great First World bastion of Democracy and Liberalism (and I don’t just mean the fiscal kind).

They do have some fair reason.

A man who does not immediately and absolutely divest his business interests in the interest of running a country is like a man who turns an old pre wedding girlfriend into a post wedding mistress. A weighty dose of cake and Eating it.

A president who does not happily take a transparent line on his business and tax affairs is not to be trusted. This is where I will draw the Silvio Berlusconi parallel. It simply does not work. It leads to or exacerbates existing corruption, self interest runs riot, and toxic back room dealings and trades become the foundation of government decision making. Governments and Presidents do not need any more ‘obfuscation as policy’ – other than  that which already exists in the misty foggy worlds of GeoPolitics.

Regardless of whether he is playing games to reduce tax disproportionately or whether it is because Divestment might lead to full and open scrutiny of the financial health and integrity of those businesses – especially the degree of leverage he’s using and the source of that leverage (China anyone?), he is a man who fogs facts and doesn’t finish sentences – an obfuscator of the first order.

Policies are not the issue. Trust is, in regards to both his intentions and his actions.

And to be clear what I mean by ‘half the nation do not Trust Donald’ – I do not mean Trust as in their belief in his ability to undertake and do something he commits to doing. I wholly trust him to keep to his (vague) word and commitments:

“I trust DT to execute a mass of executive orders in his own and associates interest and to his own ends”

I wholly believe he will do that.

The Trust I mean is the one that defines the commitment to an action that is instilled with values and ethics – and of a clear sense of collective and not just selective good:

“I trust DT to set aside this own self-interest in pursuit of creating a better country for both the people who didn’t vote for him as for those who did.

As President, his role is to increase prosperity, and reduce division between the haves and the not haves, and between those for and against him.

Which leads me to venture a thought.

I wonder whether perhaps in our peer to peer world in the absence of a Trust coming down from on high, the new social contract needs to be drawn not between government and the people, but BETWEEN THE PEOPLE THEMSELVES.

Perhaps the new social contract – the contract of TRUST – needs to be drawn up between Trump voters and non Trump Voters. And to each the other is held accountable. Because if Donald is all about acting on the will of the people, then the people’s integrity and mutual trust and vision is everything and he should be in service to that.

Perhaps this is the new model to be forged – enshrined and acted upon in the interests of the American people.

The social contract of TRUST should become a respectful charter for mutuality that transcends party and individual politics:

I trust you to uphold your personal liberties without holding them above mine.

I trust you to raise and protect your family but not at the expense of mine or others

I trust you not to harm our communities in pursuit of making a better one of your own

I trust you to raise your hand in support of those less well off than you, not in suppression of them.

I trust you to protect the freedom of every American citizen, not just those like you.

I trust you to protect our great American wildlife and countryside for our grandchildren

I trust you not to be seduced by words but swayed by actions

I trust you to share equally the Greatness we collectively make.

Just a thought. A new peer to peer Social Contract for the American People.

If we could get both sides to agree that it is the people who Donald serves, and let the people shape the Social Contract that he is action, underwrite and secure using all of the instruments tools and machinery of his elected office, now that would be something.

Who knows: we might even have finally found a meaningful role for Facebook in a declining market.

A peer to peer social contract managed across face book’s 20 Million users – which to be fair even allowing for the teenage user profile and pre voting age bloc is still a hell of a lot closer to representing the future voice and desire of America.

It is certainly more broadly representative of the people of America than the 60% turnout of which Donald still did not secure the majority.

Just saying.

 

 

Fake News, Spooks & The Combing Over of the Truth

16 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Chinese Funding, CIA, CNN, Donald Trump, Fake News, FBI, FOX, House of Cards, Journalism, Lobbyists, Newspaper Consortiums, Regulation, Russian prostitutes, social networks, Spooks, Truth. Geopolitics

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So CNN do fake news. According to the President Elect at least.

Damn. I knew it. FOX are just so real and pure. I should have known.

I was wholly reassured of course to find that, in the face of that dreadful state of affairs that is the telling of half truths and whole lies in the unregulated space of the social networks and news feeds, SHAZAM, the big government guns are going to roll up their regulatory sleeves and get busy. Starting with Nick Hancock, Minister for Digital & Culture Policy in the UK. Now we’re going to get things sorted.

Thank [insert preferred god, prophet, leader, sage here] for that.

It takes years of dedicated training, some remarkable imagination, a sprinkle of facts and a Mensa like flair to dispatch subversive and propagandised news and stories that can undermine leaders and governments. Its not a bloody hobby.

The newspaper consortium are finally going to apply their staggeringly large institutional oomph to helping us sort out these unregulated snipes, opportunists and their corrosive obfuscation. These guys know what real news is!

My mind now rests easy at the thought of the regulated press and the spook agencies collaborating on pointing out to us and regulating against what is Real Fake News (theirs) and Fake Fake News (the social network johnnies).

I will personally be forever thankful for the clarity they will bring. It’s confusing out there.

We just simply cannot have two sets of fake news out there. If anyone is going to fake news  it needs to be the grown ups: the people who know what they’re doing – like spin doctors and spook agencies. And Black Ops operatives (or did we make them up as well?).

It is not acceptable to have any old Tomasina, Dicky or Harriet in their oh so self conscious footwear, fit bits and frappaccinos saying utterly misleading, damaging, derisory or inflammatory things about elected officials. Say what you like about Kimy or Taylor but keep your stinking hands off the likes of Donald Trump.

Hell, he won the people’s vote didn’t he. (Err. OK; not really but we can say that cant we? Well, the electoral college system anyway – ish).

Why everyone is getting so upset about all of this I am not quite sure. Donald Trump has never played down his love of a little bit of playfully ‘loose’ representation. He celebrates every individual’s right to swoop and swerve and flip reality and facts, agile as a swallow, the worm of truth clutched screaming in its plunging and soaring beak. And as with all practiced deceivers, he will know that the greatest hiding place is in plain site.

The greatest celebration of Fake News perches glowing golden fleecy gorgeous on top of his freshly elected head.

Genius.

That comb over hides a multitude of sins. It may even hide the much sought after Tax Returns. Oh and the paperwork for all that Chinese-funded leverage that keeps the Trump Tower of Cards standing (or did I make that up?). Sometimes I feel like if they were to film another Men In Black, I know where the second entrance to the MIB headquarters can be found.

So, Social Network ‘journalists’ and all you ridiculous little conspiracy theorists; please, leave misleading news feeds, political obfuscation, corrosive geopolitical engineering and plain lying to the elected, the Agencies, the regulated press, the political lobbyists and the specialists those people pay to do it.

Fake News is Dead. Long Live Fake News

Reindeer, Rambo & Norwegian nursery Schools

15 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Bambi, Fearnley Whittingstall, Granstuggen Bernelage Pre School, Jeffrey Moussiaff Masson, Livestock, meat, Norway, Rudolph The Red Nosed ReindeerBambi, Steinkjaer, When Elephants Weep

 

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People on Facebook are outraged. Again.

The reason? A Pre-school teacher in Norway took his class to see a Reindeer farm where there was a Cull and the subsequent butchering (the real functional meaning as opposed to the shock horror news descriptor version) and processing of the livestock that have been culled.

According to some of the Facebook ragers, this will apparently turn our children into psychopaths: Rambos stalking the woods with murderous intent, bursting into the classroom or nursery at any given moment seeking less fluffy and more human victims, the blood of animals no longer sufficient to slake their bloodlust.

Apparently killing animals is only one step away from killing humans – and a fast train to psychopathy. (Personally I am keeping a slightly closer eye on the technology tower we are locking ourselves and our children into and the creeping sociopathy and death of empathy that might potentially ensue and perhaps a sprinkle of psychopathy that might follow; but lets get back to killing Bambi.)

I really think we need to grow up. We have become so over sensitive to the reality of the lives we lead, bubble wrapped as we are from any of the more brutal and unpalatable aspects of being a human with a supermarket trolley and a weekly shopping list. And we seem happier for our children to grow up thinking meat is born in the sello-wrapped foam tray it appears in on a shelf than grasp the nettle of animals dying for us to eat them.

Whether people like this or not, there is an still enormous amount of meat consumed in the world and I for one would like my children to learn what happens prior to their rosemary and butter rubbed leg of anything appearing on a plate next to goose fattened potatoes and the odd lardon.

Creatures die for us to eat them. And I respect anyone who believes that we should respect that and seek to educate young people to that end – to understand the process, to respect the contract of existence that has been created, and to lobby for decent conditions and rules of production to ensure that the most professional and humane standards are maintained.

I doubt we can embrace the full Navajo spirit of praising every creature once killed, becoming one with its ascending soul in a ritual of respect and honour for both the fallen and the benefit of the tribe. Chaos would ensue in the vast majority of industrial poultry and beef processing plants. Every 22 second hook-to-fillet step filliped with a 20 minute chant to the Great Spirit would skew the performance, economies and profitability of most modern processing plants. But perhaps that is a good thing.

The children and parents of Granstuggen Bernelage Pre School in Steinkjaer should think themselves lucky. At least they understand, and can therefore be better prepared to navigate the thorny issues of meat eating versus other diets and assess what they really think – and make an informed choice. Id rather a child made a choice that no animal should suffer that for their sustenance through direct experience of what that entails than through the bullying of some pompous 1st World  treatise utterly dislocated from the reality of what happens to other creatures in our name.

I am a passionate supporter and advocate of urbanity and the metropolitan enlightenment that comes with city living, amidst the bustle and ruck of diverse minds, cultures ambitions, dreams and achievements. But the majority of the urban intelligentsia don’t know squat about what goes on outside their built up lives, or the through the back door of ‘pick a supermarket any supermarket’ or the antipasti board perched at the far end of their deliciously oiled dining table.

No-one likes the idea of Red Nosed Rudolph getting topped – let alone gutted and butchered in front of 5 year olds. The saccharine anthropomorphisation of creatures has not helped us in our ability to stay connected to the truth. With Rudolph and Bambi (and the captives of kidnappers for that matter, taught as they are to render themselves real; human, by giving their name and sharing family stories) its a lot harder to contemplate inflicting pain or killing on something that has a name, a cute family and a soul.

Sir David Attenborough has always disliked the anthropomorphised rendering of wild animals – the Disney effect- as he feels that this misrepresents them: pretends they are human and conscious in a way we can comprehend and empathise with.

For me the jury is out in regards to whether anthropomorphism helps or hinders our ability to co-exist respectfully with other creatures. On the other side we have studies like the one that sits behind When Elephants Weep: The emotional lives of animals by Jeffrey Moussiaff Masson. It is a beautiful and enlightening book.

All I would like is for people to be able to make their own mind up based upon facts and experience. We seem to run scared of the ugly truth of what exists around us and what stitches itself through our collective existence.

In the same way that free speech most allow the ugly bitter cruel hate mongering of some to co exist with the enlightened inclusive and conscious humanity of others, I do not believe that we should silence, deny or hide these things. They must live in the light, and be allowed to be challenged directly by people in charge of the full story as much as is possible.

If we say killing animals is one step away from psychopathy and murder, then what does that make of the farmer who farms livestock for the slaughter houses that feed the food processing plants that feed the food manufacturers that line the supermarket shelves. And if in the case of the murder of a human, complicity can in some cases lead to an equivalent sentence as that of the murderer, that logic makes Jean in Bradford grabbing a beef burger for her supper a functioning psychopath and accomplice in mass murder.

And as for Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, well, I rest my case.

The man is patently Hannibal Lecter in all but name.

 

 

 

Bowie, Ply Personae & The patina of our most vibrant selves

12 Thursday Jan 2017

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Alfa Romeo Junior, anaglypta, Bowie, Cork Wedges, Five Years, Garage Band, I'm a Space Invader, I'm An Alligator, Ibiza, Life On Mars, Moonage Daydream, Patina, QueensWay Ice Rink, Wakeman

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Yes.

Another.

Yet again.

Bowie pokes and provokes something within me that I am compelled to share mostly to myself. Hopefully it is in some way vaguely interesting.

Or maybe it will just reveal that I need my head ever more extensively read.

So. Last night I watched the documentary, Bowie. The Last Five Years.

I now find myself subsequently splintered into the myriad selves that his staggering catalogue of music has served since I first heard Life On Mars wafting from the room of my school friend’s eldest sister.

(She fulfilled her role perfectly. Pretty. Unreachable. Cool. Mature beyond her years. And… she had Cork Wedges.)

It’s a God awful small affair.

Bowie is linked to so many seminal moments in my life; so stitched into so many shards of my existence – the most profound backing track of me.

In this way I am a cliché. One of millions carrying the same banal truth.

Though I now realise that it takes rare moments, rude awakenings and sometimes brilliant documentaries to remind me of the fact.

I have always hoped that somewhere in the world there is a White Light filter; a magical prism lens that, when placed in front of your average ordinary person, splinters out the White Light of them – that of the façade and myth – into a rainbow of different truer selves.

This prism would reveal the fact that we are in fact Ply People – a highly compressed super glued set of layers – each layer a recording of a pivotal, seminal or catastrophic moment from our past – an emotional freeze frame of us in that moment. Each layer revealing different ages, contexts, emotional maturities, worn identities, degrees of hope or disappointment, insight, arrogance, insecurity and confusion.

As to whether this sandwich of recordings play constantly or are frozen until taken off pause by some impact I am uncertain.

I have a feeling that they are mix of the two. Equally I believe that they not only have different speeds, but also directions, and occurrences. Add to that that I also believe that they have different textures and densities, and one might see how the Ply of us could easily render every human being as a wholly unique and individual organism. Before we get anywhere near the sub atomic genetic junk and data of us, or the direct environmental effect of the context in which we exist.

As with all ‘memories’ or recollections, each of these snapshots of ‘us’ in that moment, are rendered in different opacities and intensities; sometimes the information is dense and knife sharp, other times a wafting vagary, more a feeling and some olfactory signature bundled into a misty strip.

Like a Garage Band lay-down, imagine each of them roughly placed across the whole at different junctures and depths, arranged in such a way as to make sense of the particular moment to the whole in which they exist. Each of them ramping and intensifying and fading or cutting in and out as necessary or demanded: or perhaps continuously rendered for the duration of the whole.

I don’t think the Ply Persona is the same as multiple personalities hosted in one person, as the layers I am speaking of are not separate personas to the degree that they are other to me or notionally different people to me (though if a grown up psychiatrist that actually knows about these things corrects my observations I would be delighted!)

So this is my theory.

The Ply Persona is a compound effect of the most evolutionarily powerful moments in our lives -moments that cause a progressive shift or change in us; moments that have shaped us in a way that is indelible; in a way that will never be undone; where decisions we have made, feelings we have felt, things we have seen or heard, connections we have made, actions we have undertaken either indirectly or directly, things we have created and revelations we have unveiled mark us.

Having watched the first Bowie. Five Years documentary this had already started to reveal itself to me to some degree.

To be frank, at the moment I watched Rick Wakeman unpick the chord sequence of Life On Mars on a simple keyboard, the film of it intercut with footage from Bowie’s Be-suited glam film rendition, I cried.

I am not quite sure why. I think I know why.

It moved me in a way that no one single self or moment could explain. But my Ply Persona could. My Ply Persona could point simultaneously to multiple profoundly shaping moments in which Bowie had become both generally and that song particularly inextricably linked to me. And when I hear chords lyrics and refrains of the greatest emotional value to me, the collective  is triggered all at once. Emotionally cacophonous: as if I had pressed play on hundreds of precious recollections at once, and felt every emotion simultaneously therein.

There are many Bowie threaded Mes. They read out like a ticker tape

The Me that was desirous of my Friend’s sister and the mourning of the naïve of that youth lost. The Me that sat through Top Of The Pops and Star Man at Christmas amongst the fall-out of my parents’ highly acrimonious divorce.. The Me that coveted my favourite tape in the player sitting on the sunshine soaked floor of the dining room in Thurlestone that looked to the sea. The Me that sat in the café of Bayswater Ice Skating Rink with my best friend Mark, both of us deeply enamoured by a blonde haired girl (Kate I think her name was) in a decorated Denim Jacket with troubled eyes; all to the backing track of Sound & Vision. The Me that realised in the first flush of what I thought was Love that throwing darts in Lovers Eyes as voiced by The Thin White Duke and The Bard was more than just a shared Elizabethan conceit. The Me that remembers the top floor flat in North London and the stereo on which I first listened to Let’s Dance, my girlfriend draped on the sofa in a pink and blue patterned Foundry Dress, over laced shock pink pixie boots with the remnants of an Ibiza tan and the smell of Habanos cigarettes. The Me that listened over and over to the drum section on Scary Monsters Super Creeps waiting for the revelation of how I might ever capture that spirit and vibe. The Me that can smell the rehearsal room at Nomis Studios on Sinclair Road the week before Live Aid and feeling the world at my kick-pedal and high-hat feet to the strains of Thomas Dolby playing the opening chords of Heroes. The Me that watched Life On Mars and realised that I wasn’t the only person who lived and felt the way I did growing up in 1970s Britain. The Me in my old Alfa Junior driving around the outer circle of Regents Park with Louis and Livia, my beautiful children, in the car with me, on a summer’s day with Moonage Daydream powering out of the stereo wondering whether anything could be more perfect (and realising that it couldn’t). The Me that still felt deeply the abstracted pain of Isolation and Ending that the metronomic intro drum beat of 5 Years signifies, on re-listening only a week ago.

The list of how Bowie is written into the layers of my Ply Persona goes on and on. To the degree that it has slightly taken me aback.

But it does explain the strange and abstracted sense of grief and loss I felt on the news of his death. Again, in this I am the cliché. A common emotion shared by millions.

What is more interesting to me is the way in which it clarified and coloured the nature of Ply Personas for me.

This is where a perhaps clinical truth (I am looking once more to the psychiatrists in this) is rendered clearer through the application of an artistic interpretive filter – in much the same way that the dense data and imaging of the Hubble Scope has been separated, coloured and tinted to reveal its depth and majesty. The arts inform and illuminate the sciences.

The pure clinical science of the raw images reveals nothing to people like me. It is beyond my ken. But illuminate it with an interpretive humanity and artistic majesty and it moulds and moves and shapes itself into a constellation through which I can travel, its breath-taking expanse and complexity revealed to me. An inner space is revealed.

I am perhaps applying the vanity of my idea to all, so I should better apply it purely to myself. I’ll start there.

I, me, has I believe a Ply Persona. And the gift and revelation of the creative fillip of Bowie’s music illuminates it suddenly in the same way that when one peels back the corner of some time worn Anaglypta paper on the wall of a flat or house you are renovating, a pinstriped rainbow edge is revealed. And as one pulls harder the other older layers of paint, paper, colour, texture, era, fashion, pain, laughter, boredom, anxiety, hope, optimism – all those layers of all those lives lived in the same place, in one way as one but in so many ways highly individual and complex and rich – reveal themselves.

Bowie’s music is what colours those layers in me.

These two documentaries have revealed to me that the patina of me is made up of where various parts and glimpses of these layers of me, these snapshots of me and the emotional ‘Now’ of that moment, show through.

Like the anaglypta paper, or an often over-painted piece of furniture, these show through, are revealed, at those points of greatest openness, weakness, wear or tear. Where the percussive blunts of my life chip away the present surface layer to reveal those beneath.

Perhaps the ply persona reveals to me the simple truth of being human: our irrational, unreasonable, random and chaotic selves are really just the evidence of when some or many of these layers reveal themselves unexpectedly: momentarily. Our moments of madness. Indecision. Rash reaction. Just scrappy imperfect windows into the previous Mes that mostly sit glued and compressed into one Whole.

So David, bless you wherever you are. For revealing something to me. By accident or design.

I’m a Ply Persona.

I’m Anaglypta.

I’m a mamma-pappa coming for you.

I’m a Space Invader.

I’ll be [forever]

a rock ‘n’ rollin bitch for you.

 

Writing, Falling down & The clumsy Beauty of ‘Almost Not Quite’.

03 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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ABBA, Austin Allegro, Clumsiness, Corporates, cosmic fizz, data points, Hadron Collider, John Lydon, North Star, Outputs, Peter Perfect, purpose, Saviano, The Oxfordians, Writing

 

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THUMP, CRASH, BANG.

I’ve just re-read one of my blogs.

SMASH, CRUNCH, SPLINTER.

It has to be admitted;

TINKLE, SCRAPE, BOOM.

(To myself at least).

BIFF, BOSH, CLONK.

It’s official.

THUNK.

My writing is clumsy.

No question of it. It is many other slightly more redeeming things I am told.

But always, without fail, and in spite of some broadly applied rules (and a reasonable degree of re-reading, tweaking and correcting), the one immutable truth of it is that it is clumsy – though as to which particular type of clumsy I am uncertain.

Sometimes my writing can resemble something akin to a man falling down some cellar stairs with the fingers of one hand clinging to the keyboard as the fingers of the other hand scrabble at thoughts sello-taped along the descending bannister.

On other occasions it smacks of something not dissimilar to a man bound in double-sided tape throwing himself into a small darkened room whose walls are covered with post-it notes variously scribbled with words and phrases like: sub-atomic collider, definition of a Suede Head, John Lydon’s Sex shoes, Pappardelle recipe from Tina, ABBA, Resilience, Arse. The Melancholic Chord, 11, The Oxfordians, Stuey, Saviano, 1973 Austin Allegro, Lying Down and The Cosmic Fizz.

I think perhaps that the clumsiness comes somewhat from the fact that I am more enamoured with ‘conversational’ language and vernaculars and the rhythm of how people speak, rather than how one might best set out and down that humanity with minimum embellishment on a page, screen or other surface to be enjoyed quietly in someone’s head.

The rigour, measure and flow of the exquisitely written word, whether of the bleak muscular and sparse kind, or perhaps the more lyrical and rich variety, is a beautiful thing. But it is often a beauty that escapes me; narrowly but escape it does none-the-less.

I also sense that on occasion I put far too much of myself and my own emotion into my writing  – an inappropriate and self-interested incursion in a private moment – not unlike someone speaking of their own grief and loss to the newly widowed as they stand at the graveside. I really do need to get out of my own way in the writing department.

The upside (if I can be allowed to venture one) of being a clumsy writer is that, every now and then, that clumsiness means that I am inevitably going to ‘trip over’ something and inadvertently that ‘something’ might just be a thought, an idea, a profundity; or simply a ditty or a phrase that has some value either in my professional or personal life. Rarely. But the potential to trip over something is most definitely there.

(Grown Up writers would point to the benefit of being less clumsy and more clinical, pithy and precise as a recipe for enlightenment, revelation and ultimately the liberation of pure human emotion into the world – but I have to accept that the clumsy version is the one I am attached to.)

Does that destine me to be some catch phrase Charlie or an Almost and a Not Quite Right Writer? Perhaps.

But I am growing both accustomed to and fond of the fact that I seem to know increasingly less and make increasingly more mistakes every day. I doubt that perfection will grace my mind and the page in front of me any time soon.

For that I am quietly grateful because there is in that truth the potential for me to still hopefully surprise myself and others.

Why?

I know myself (to a reasonable degree, at least).

I am at my best when scrabbling for something precious. Flawed, flailing, floundering and failing.

That is why deciphering and defining a North Star or a Purpose is one of the most enjoyable aspects of my professional life. This is why I enjoy seeking them out and shaping them for others. Because they must allow for the imperfect journey. They must allow for slippage and some little slide with a few dead ends and tripwires on the way. They must be respectful of the fact that Peter Perfect is a cartoon character and that ordinary people of even the most extraordinary kind are the ones who will be expected to reach for that North Star or Purpose.

Not that everyone appreciates the humanity of Almost. The Outcome and Output junkies of the Corporate kind struggle with the idea that not every action in one’s day should necessarily turn into a positive data point on a spreadsheet. (The adult world’s version of Gold Stars in School WorkBooks.) Our obsession with the ‘prefect everything’ is killing creativity in business at a time when it needs it most.

Yes, the people running those businesses have to ensure that the business is well run, financially sound and sustainable. But the most important thing for any business to sustain is the heart and soul that began and built it. And that heart and soul is most usually imperfect: driven, passionate, obsessive perhaps. But imperfection will lie at the heart of it somewhere.

This is what I seek in every business and brand I work with: the human voice and imperfect passion at work within it. Thankfully my clumsy writing has allowed me to ‘trip over’ some wonderful human insights and moments in the process.

This is perhaps the most grandiose excuse for shoddy and lazy writing to be penned in early 2017 but I thought I’d get ahead of the game.

Now, where did I put those Post-it notes?

 

Brent, Bowie, Prosperity & living a very British dream.

01 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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A life On The Road, Alan Bennet, Alan Milman, Amish, Awkward, Banality, Barrat, Bowie, Dad's Army, David Brent, DAVOS, Extras, Father Father Burning Bright, Frozen, It's a Wonderful Life, Kaiser Chiefs, Lady In The Van, Life On Mars, Living The Dream, Multinationals, Navy Seals, Pilkington, prosperity, reality tv, Ricky Gervais, Rock N Roll, Rolos, TEDx, The King's Speech

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I have just painfully struggled my way through the film David Brent. A life on the road. Struggled because I was meant to – this format of comedy celebrating its own ability to raise the desperately bleak uncomfortable human truth of our everyday mediocrities, misfits and mishits to artistic degree. Struggled because it is ferociously painful and cringe-worthy on purpose. Struggled because his character is mostly so repellent.

(I also struggled because in comedic terms it over eggs the point, over cranks the cringe and over renders the desperate side of Mr Brent with less finesse and subtlety than I had hoped for. The original series of the Office through which David Brent entered our cultural consciousness was for me a far subtler and richer human stew. This felt like a side gag escalated to movie length. A back story narrative thread built into a one and some hour screenplay.)

I am not a massive fan of Ricky Gervais. His sneery cheap shot approach to ironic belittlement and provocation sometimes just leaves me a little cold, its cruelty only ever saved and salved by Merchant, Pilkington and the whole surrounding cast of Extras.

BUT.

Saying that and having almost switched it off at so many points, the gift for my patience (or stubbornness) came in the last 5 minutes (as I am assuming they’d planned).

At the final gasp, with his perfect shiny dream of rock stardom in tatters, the uncomfortable Brent is saved by the until then unnoticed and desperately awkward affections of the lady in accounts; his silent admirer for so long. She has looked through and beyond his vulgar and desperate showboating and seen insecurities run riot in a man who perhaps deserved a second chance. A real one. A flawed, awkward, imperfect diamond of a chance perhaps – but in spite of and because of its clumsy nature  – a real human and ordinary one.

David Brent is blind to his real dream state. His notion of prosperity is rooted in social status and the trappings that come with it – rock n roll – the irony being that he impoverishes himself in pursuit of it (cashing in various pensions to try and realise it).

Prosperity is defined as something that encompasses wealth but in reality includes other factors such as happiness and well being. But we seem to have lost the ability to comprehend and measure the balance of material riches with those of a more emotionally fulfilling and human kind.

A concept of Prosperity that balances emotional and spiritual contentedness with material security and pleasure seems just beyond our ken, destined to see saw from one extreme to the other. Achieving that balance is somewhat akin to the parlour game challenge of patting our heads while rubbing our stomachs at one and the same time.

David’s painful journey to realisation and possible redemption for me is a beautiful summary of the state we’re in. Much like his enthralment to rock n roll stardom and public recognition as the source of his happiness, we are distracted by the Kardashian model of prosperity – a very American model of perfection. Perfect teeth, cheekbones nose and ass: a magazine home, a windswept and unusual partner, a face-book page crowded with a multitude of cool and just so ‘friends’ – a model of prosperity that is the antithesis of what might actually make us happy. An impossible dream that leaves us feeling lesser and unsatisfied. A model built to relentlessly disappoint.

The flawed awkward joy of his second chance is a very British thing. As a nation we are truly at our happiest amongst the flawed and the awkward. We are enamoured most by the almost and the not quite. Perfect things leave us wanting and dislocated. We rarely trust perfect.

But, we seem to be transfixed by the pursuit of it, to the degree that like David, we will impoverish ourselves in our pursuit of it. (Credit card debt in the UK is staggering.)

Watching David Brent coincided soon after with the annual Yuletide Curtis-fest of Love Actually. Love Actually is the closest we get to a very British sense of imperfect lives rendered perfect in film – and every one of them, though pulped through the Daily Mail filter of mawkish sentimentality is thankfully still slightly flawed and awkward and uncomfortable.

Unlike its US counterparts, the characters do not always square the circle. The cheated upon wife doesn’t turn into a vengeful super woman, have an extreme makeover, sleep with the football team, take up firearms and beat a horde of Russian special forces or become the new police chief on a mission. She simply gets on.

The hopelessly smitten friend of bridegroom doesn’t get the girl. He doesn’t transform into a lothario or a serial killer. And he certainly doesn’t find a cure for cancer and global recognition as some astonishing cosmic recompense for the loss of his one love. He simply says – that’s enough now – and gets on. He is still the loser in this. But we don’t care.

The irony was that the screening of Love Actually was repeatedly interrupted by a commercial for a viewing App that offered thousands of hours of reality TV. The scripted ugly slutty buttered shiny kind – delivered for what are presented as Fuck You It’s All About Me people.

We like to pretend that our reality TV is so different to the US kind – that it is in some way more real – but we are just aping every piece of Real Housewives, Real Teenagers, Real Truckers, Real Dentists Real Vets fodder that creeps across the Atlantic. Hyper reality is a US confection. And like all of the more recent US dream factory propaganda there is something unpleasant and slightly toxic about them. More importantly there is something unreachable in them – and not in a good way.  We are bingeing on these boxed sets of Krispy Kreme content to the point of becoming spiritually obese.

Shiny is the American way. I am uncertain as to whether it is born of an immigrant nation desperately trying to expunge the dark sigh of bleak want and soiled existence that their ancestors lived under; or whether it is simply that the staggering output of the dream factory has all but obscured the less shiny truths of everyday life. Regardless, there is a chasm of difference between the perfect screenplay of It’s a Wonderful Life and Frozen – stories of perfect redemption – and our British kind. The Kings Speech and Wallace & Gromit come from a very different sensibility. The American ‘Awkward’ is a very different creature to the British one: theirs rooted in eye rolling teen embarrassment saved by a trending catch phrase; ours just rooted in, well, the awkwardness of awkward.

We take a run at shiny but really, our heart isn’t in it – we like people who are not quite 100%. We quite like a bit of a shambles and a rough edge. When all is said and done we’d take dusty Dad’s Army over sleek Navy Seals any old day.

And it strikes me that when we try and engage Brits in embracing a reimagined prosperity – one where we eschew the shiny for something more within our material, environmental and spiritual means – we need to remember this truth.

We need to remember David Brent.

The corporate Davos schtick of Millennials saving the world all by themselves with a smart phone and a face book page, and the hyper intellectual nirvana of Sustainable Living Plans may work at a CEO keynote level. BUT they are simply too perfectly rendered and presented for the ordinary people we are trying to reach – not a hairline crack in their purpose and their intent. They are quite simply unhuman. More importantly, they lack any sense of the banal – the most precious, present state of being we have. Banality. The beautiful kind. The flawed and awkward kind. The silences and shuffling kind. The kind we measure the original, the fresh, the remarkable, the uncommon and the brilliant by.

In the UK we need our prosperity to be aspirational, yes. It needs to make us feel smart and satisfied. But not self-satisfied. And it needs to allow for our flawed and imperfect selves.

It needs to allow for us to fail at it and be OK. To slip and re-offend and be forgiven. A humanity that the US approach to Better sometimes seems to deny.

I am reminded of sitting in a working session in San Francisco with a group of astonishingly intelligent, mission minded and highly driven entrepreneurs and business leaders with a scattering of social entrepreneurs and innovators amongst us for good measure.

In a discussion with a woman who was trying to re-engineer public school meals away from the fat and salt riddled fare that had previously been on offer to one packed to the gunnels with organic greens, fruit, meat substitutes and pulses, the startling difference between the ‘no quarter no leeway‘ approach and the ‘muddle through, get there in the end’ kind was demonstrated in all its glory.

She felt the solution was to create a brutal and absolute transition. Burgers, pizza and donuts one day – tofu and vegan-cheese lentil burgers and multiple greens the next.

My concern was that this absolute approach might create an extreme equal and opposite reaction from both children and parents that would negate all her best intentions and objectives. There was no room for dissent or manoeuvre. Not a breath of stumbling or conflicted self. No cracks no dents no imperfections. No flex.

So I suggested that she perhaps set aside a corner of each box – and call it ‘the naughty step’ – that place where fundamentally good but sometimes flawed and mischievous children get put from time to time. And in this corner would be a portion-controlled treat – an echo of the old school meals and less healthy fare. Naughty but nice. And a lot less Amish in its intention.

The expression on her face was a sight to behold. I may as well have been speaking Old Pennsylvania Dutch for all sense this seemed to make to her.

My suggestion that she allow for the human flaw of failing and people’s desire for something other than her perfectly modulated, highly strung and calorie and sodium controlled solution was an anathema to her. All or nothing. Black and White. No fringed and frayed edges. Old diet and food stuffs equal death. There was no leeway in her solution for those who might struggle towards a better solution in their own good stumble-tumble-and-trip time and way.

A big ambitious destination can be an onerous one: daunting and overwhelming when seen in isolation – but as long as the journey to it has some light and shade; some play and humanity with the best interests of our flawed selves at its heart, we’re far more likely to embark on it. But I sense this a very British thing.

Being a bit almost and not quite. Imperfect. Flawed. This is the British way. Saying and doing the wrong thing every now and then. Making ourselves look a prat. Failing. Getting through. The universe of the underdog is our universe. We love them – because they are relatable. This is very different to the knowing and snarky failure of Family Guy and Ted.

And in the universe of the underdog, banality is one of the most undervalued states of our existence – and the most profound. Truly universal, it is one we can all relate to.

Banality and the poetry of its daily occurrence is again very British. The perfunctory observations and recordings of the minutiae and mundane are written into everything from high culture to low art – from Syd Barratt’s ‘I’ve got a bike you can ride it of you like’ and Bowie famously singing ‘there’s lemons on sale again’ in Life On Mars – his paean to the banality of Britain in the 1970s – to the Matchstick Men and Women of Lowry’s town-scapes to Alan Bennet’s forensic interrogation of the very British nature of relationships played out in Father Father Burning Bright and The Lady In The Van: microscopically dissected renderings of uninvited friendships and still-born familial love. There is little to separate the knowing observation of Bennet and the Kaiser Chiefs as they sing ‘I tried to get to my taxi. The man in a tracksuit attacks me. He said that he saw it before me.’

In the awkward truths of hum-drum, everyday rituals is where this very British humanity lies. Bennet captures fireflies of human emotion amidst the ordinariness of shopping lists, bed-socks, Camden Traffic Wardens, NHS hospital porters and the sweet & cigarette shop plying emphysemic pensioners with Benson & Hedges and multipacks of Rolos.

Unsurprisingly, banality is the point where another character from Brent’s creator, Ricky Gervais, and David Bowie, the Glam troubadour of British hum drum collide. The moment is captured in a comedy scene that is, for me, the most perfect distillation and summary of how flaws and banality are celebrated in the UK.

The scene, from Extras, involves Gervais’s star-struck character Andy Milman trying to get into the tiny roped-off VIP area of a club to buddy up to David Bowie. On being beckoned over, Andy finds himself making a heart-wrenching admission of his own mediocrity and failure only to have it thrown both to the crowd and in his face by Bowie with that song:

Pathetic little fat man;

No-ones bloody laughing.

The clown that no one laughs at

They all just wish he’d die.

 

He sold his soul for a shard of fame

Catch phrase and wigs

And the jokes are lame

 

He’s got no style,

He’s got no grace;

He’s banal and facile

He’s a fat waste of space.

And suddenly there is a quiet alchemy at work. Suddenly, we find ourselves beginning to consider the unpalatable – we find ourselves starting to like an unlikable character a little bit. Because his flaws have been writ large for all to see. Cruel perhaps; but human nonetheless.

Banality of this kind and the flawed lives it is rooted in – this is where we need to test the new model of prosperity for British people. This is where we need to find its insights and its language. Not in the boardrooms of multi-nationals and TEDx talks.

So here’s to banality. And flaws. And human stuff. Messy, imperfect, uncomfortable and awkward human stuff – and their role in a new and more deeply connective narrative and model of prosperity. For the UK at least.

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