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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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Tags

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.

 

Old heads, Young Hearts & The Foot soldiers of resilient humanity.

25 Saturday Jan 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

anaglypta, bi-generational living, broadband providers, collectivism, enduring aspirations, innovation, millennials, old people's homes, resilience, resilient societies and communities, skype wisdom, telecoms, Wisdom Of Age, within our means, youth

Screen Shot 2014-01-25 at 17.32.23

If we had to choose two lead stakeholders in building a more resilient society, my money’s on the under 20s and the over 60s: and here’s for why.

Allow yourself the luxury of the observer for a short while at least and there’s one thing you may notice: teenagers and oldies are very, very similar in many ways – especially when they are grumpy. They re in fact made for each other.

Both sleep at weird times of the day. Both are prone to radical mood swings. Both err on the side of the heavily medicated (prescription or non prescription). Both sport injuries and conditions as a form of life signature: some inflicted by challenging the nature of their own mortality and existence (the irresponsibility of youth): others purely by having existed for so long (the immutability of age). Both enjoy wheeled modes of transport other than cars. Both tend to suffer either a crisis of or a surfeit of identity.

Both view the wheezing middle (those of us between 20 and 60) as an uptight, over wound self obsessed lost tribe. We are trapped in the lost years, having left the age of wonder, explore and create behind, we are trapped in the secure protect and defend stage – fiercely ring fencing the things we have accrued and are accruing – and as yet far short of the time when we are finally confident and secure enough in ourselves that we can begin to discard and disassemble stuff and liberate our crippling concepts of a thriving life and just be.

Unlike the Lost Middle, they have ‘nothing to lose’ in spiritual or material terms. At one end the young, prior to being owned or owning, are still free to explore possibilities randomly, inspiring themselves and each other as they flow. They are at the least compromised stage of their lives. No strings have been attached: no mortgage overlord; no food and energy bills to speak of (even if they have got as far as renting); no fixed pathway measured in decades from which they cannot deviate; and little in the way of allegiance to the sensitivities of others, speaking out loudly and relentlessly at those things they find unfair, irresponsible or destructive. They both have a penchant for saying inappropriate things in public.

Equally, many of the elderly are also in the position of liberty and regeneration, being reasonably capitalised without the stricture of a working day or people to answer to. Both also enjoy a strong sense of community that seems bleakly lacking in the striving grinding scratching generations that separate them (unless of course you think the togetherness of mutual Lexii ownership or collective apple upgrades represent communities of any real worth.)

It is these similarities in nature and self that lead me to believe that they are the two primary stakeholders in building a more resilient model of humanity and the architects of a more enduring aspirational life.

And I believe wholeheartedly that it will take both of them. There is too much pressure being put on the shoulders of the excited young to use their seamlessly connected collectivism to compel companies to act more responsibly, to shape a kinder less tyrannical form of consumption, and ultimately to be more capable of finding meaning within their own means. They simply lack one thing: the kind of resilience and adaptability that is only ever learnt through multiple sustained and not always pleasant experiences being endured over time; and a clear sense of the inevitability of consequence come what may.

Young people need the easy, reflex and second nature wisdoms of thrift and financial integrity of the older generations. They need mentors to help them build a more integrated, inclusive and supportive society; the benefit of which they will come to reap eventually.

Oldies need to be brought in from the cold for a number of reasons not only just to supplement and compliment the young in the shaping of a more enduring model aspiration. Their return to a central role in society would be a salve to the fractured communities and families we increasingly exist within, with parents and grandparents increasingly isolated as younger families move further afield.

There is a dreadful lack of economy, efficiency and foresight in the speed with which we dispense those slightly worn generations into some inert anaglypta hell with a name drawn from the lexicon of calming rolling rural pastures or idyllic flora & fauna. (Even the best of God’s waiting rooms still suffer a dreadful absence of young people in their halls as reminders of the living.)

Thankfully, the brittle brutal truths of austerity, the death of cheap money and the comedy of house prices are making people reconsider bi and tri generational living again. Not to say that will be rose scented from the off.  It will reignite some of the old issues of proximity certainly amongst generations with radically different perceptions of what is good right and fair.

Part of the original dislocation was due to the fact that the oldies of yore remained quite attached to some of their more suspect beliefs even as the world turned. Their casually voiced views and derogatory referencing to foreigners broadly and specifically people of a different ethnicity marked out by colour and homosexuality to name the two biggies didn’t roll too well with the newly liberal uber-youth. This only served to exacerbate the social and familial ruptures.

The unacceptable nature of these traits rightly needed rebalancing but it became a reasonable much cited excuse for us to condone abandonment and simply eject them from the framework of what constituted a decent functioning liberal society.

In doing so we threw the wrinkly baby out with the bathwater. Because with them went all of the old wisdoms of making ends meet, make do and mend, waste not want not, the economies of leftovers, smart buying and existing and still finding meaning within ones means. And it is the nature of those wisdoms that will secure young people’s futures.

For all of the old jokes – Quick, Get teenagers to run the world while they still know it all – the immutable emphatic heart, energy and passion of youth is fragile. They need the irrepressible mettle of oldies and the life wisdoms that come with them. The combination would be amazing.

Brands, especially ones that have been around a while, could find amazing ways to harness this power duo – starting from the inside out and the ground up. Formally connecting the young graduates, interns and apprentices with the retirees and wise owls would recalibrate how a company develops its service propositions and extant purpose in a far more holistic manner.

Telecoms and Broadband providers with an interest in building cohesive societies could fill the gaps that tech progress leaves behind. They could allow fractured or distant families to utilise skype culture to reconnect old and young as part of a Family Broadband Offering.

Educational groups could help children on the verge of dropping out of school by giving them access to the perspectives of a generation of old people who can speak from a lifetime of knowing about the decisions we all make in haste – some with regret some with joy – but all without the hectoring proximity and intensity of a parent made fractious and intransigent because they are both scratching out the bills as well as steering their brood.

But where it really gets exciting is through the introduction of the question ‘Why?’ When we sit around and hack new technologies, create new products, most looking a pale shade of difference to the ones we’ve already got. To raise the question Why? Why spend the money on a tiny upgrade? Why make a 5 bladed version of a 4 bladed razor? Why triple pack food you’ll waste some or all of? Why burn money you don’t have? Why?

The energy and passion of youth with the calm caution and questioning nature of age would create the killer innovations department in most any business.

So here’s to the hard-core stakeholders and architects of better, the oldies and the youngies: old wisdoms and young hearts reshaping a more measured and enduring future.

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