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Tag Archives: Cork Wedges

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.

 

One Man’s Ceiling, Elevated Ideas of existence & the problem with Growing Up

12 Monday May 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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70s shift dress, Cork Wedges, Creative Workshops, District & Circle Line. Glastonbury Tor, Grassy Knoll, Growing Up, Human Behaviour, Human Ingenuity, Lateral Thought, Lizard Brain, methods of Doing, My Little Pony, Need States, Roswell, sophistry, Tickle Fights

 

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As I lay on the sun-warmed grass of the south facing slope of Glastonbury Tor something struck me.

My Little Pony. The yellow-maned one.  On the side of the head to be precise.

“Tickle Fight! Tickle Fight! Tickle Fight!” The shout went up: auguring another limb flailing biff smash crash guffaw squawk celebrity smack-down between myself, my increasingly physical 9 year old boy and his highly rambunctious six year old sister.

Tickle fight is really just an excuse to roll around on the floor. Not that children need much excuse

They had been repeatedly rolling down the slope further around the Tor from where I lay for a good twenty minutes prior to this point.

My son finds any excuse to drop to the floor and roll around. To be fair they both can find themselves sprawling across the floor at the drop of a well-turned hat.

It is not just a percussive physical strike-force strategy: i.e. hit the floor often and repeat as necessary. It is a happy and safe place for them, lying, sitting, sprawled. The more deconstructed the better.

Both can be found at different times Lying inert: staring into the void beneath the bed, by the sofa, in the hall, half-way up the stairs; usually frozen mid play, off in some other universe of being: or they’re sellotaped to the floor setting up various abstract collections of small figures, bits of plastic, random findings and parts of their parent’s more precious items configured into some form of story to be told: a battle, a fairy tale, a horror show, a chance meeting, the end of the world, cosmic catastrophe.

To be part of the invention or story requires the grown up to a) get over them selves and down on their knees, b) fall forwards onto their stomach and c) get their face into the right universe – the miraculous and magical one that has just been created a few millimetres off the ground. A little like spiritual scuba diving, the wonder in their world is a few atmospheres of imagination below us.

Grown ups know this place. Or we should do.

We once spent hours there: whether the ground in question was covered in carpet, straw, wooden boards, grass, earth, pine needles, gravel or even tarmac. (I remember as a child lying on a tarmac road on a hot day and pressing my face to its surface and using a small pen knife to lever out the small lead balls that had been set into it – miniature cannon balls for later use in some fantastic battle scene.)

It was a place of wonder, the ground; where you could still feel the gravity pull you towards the spinning orb. Where you could turn on your back and watch clouds scud above. Where bugs crept up blades of grass. Small pools of dew and rainwater hid. Where the earth smelt real and close: and yours. You knew where you were when you were on the ground.

Anything could take you there. Sometimes it was dramatic: your body suddenly and brutally pulverized by the imaginary film baddie’s automatic pistol/phaser/laser/RPG, at which point, juddering in percussive stunt man slo-mo fashion we would launch off the edge of the bed to land, in continued fake slo-mo, face crunching, on the ground. To then just lie there because it was quite a nice place to be.

Other reasons for being floor or ground bound?

The turning upside-down while sliding off a bed/bench/swing/wall/step like a slithering lizard, lower body still suspended or supported by the thing one has just slid off while the head shoulders, and most importantly, the face, come to a friction-stop, to end up adhered to the floor or ground beneath.

The siren call of a floor-based feast would signal the gathering of twigs leaves, divots of muddy stuff and strands of grass to be confected into a fresh baked pie or meal laid out in the middle of a damp rain flecked piece of grass or in the cork-muffled floor space under the climbing frame. To be sat around and tuned to perfection.

There’s the rolling-down-grassy-knolls reason of course (the non JFK type – though the presence of two small children flailing around on that one might have led history in a different direction!).

Collapsing modes of expressive dance offers many opportunities for floor bound adventure – where a few random balletic moves deconstruct downwards until the small person slumps to the floor like a pile of dropped clothes. Face pressed against the sprung floor of a dance studio or school gym (a nostril of dusty motes and the faint vibration of the boards is one of the happiest places known to man!).

Or at a really base level, you can’t make all of the subterranean tunnels, underpasses, secret doors and undercrofts required to make a killer sand castle until you get your face in the grains and GET IN!

In short, the thing that crossed my mind (just after the small yellow plastic pony) was the thought (one I have had previously and forgotten about) that the main problem with growing up is perhaps that we do exactly that. We grow up and away from the ground, elevating ourselves out of the rare and other worldly atmospheres of the imagination and the visceral experience of the planet on which we exist to take some higher plane of consciousness. We both intellectually and physically start to ‘get above ourselves’.

In growing up we move up and away from our primal connection to the natural landscapes of the imagination and the storytelling nature inherent in all of us.

Our ability, left to our own devices (and closer to the floor) to create or navigate worlds so real that we could attach quite clear cognitive and social principals to them: develop their cultures, languages and rituals: in ever increasing and ever more complicating detail, was and is for those children still doing it quite astounding.

If we weren’t creating floor-sprawling stories from scratch (which takes on a whole new meaning in this earthy atmosphere), we were navigating and revealing to ourselves the ones that already existed there in front of us: between the bugs and the blades, across the mulch under our nose; in wind as it bumped and popped our ears and rolled the blanket of sunlight backwards and forwards across the grass on the common: and in the sky above us in the shapes of the clouds and the velocity of the rain drops that dropped out of the universe to travel through science fiction to arrive as a fact, splat, on our forehead.

And I wondered what robs us of this facility to look in wonder at the simplest things? What interrupts or obscures our ability to see ‘creatively and inventively’, as a rite of human passage to a better existence or a more enlightened and joyful experience? Especially in the context of improving our immediate existence – in our ability to look at our work – is systems its processes its people and its material self.

What diminishes this almost lizard brain mechansim? Of course life sends us tests and brutal realities that knock the ‘stuffing’ out of us and pop our little balloon. Yes, the cynic must play some part in removing the infantile nature of some of the things we explored as a child.  And sticking to a stubbornly naïve and willfully childish perspective (as opposed to child-like one, which we like) only serves to exacerbate the problem with those of us more partial to sharp cornered and wholly reason based perspectives.

But it seems that as some of us become increasingly more ‘grown up’ we become increasingly ‘shut down’ in our liberal creative ‘gut’ abilities – and decreasingly capable of allowing facts and reason and myths and storytelling to exist next to each other without feeling compromised and compelled to ‘choose’.

The rigour of reason and sharp cornered fact is essential in ridding the human race of the kind of voodoo puffery and hocus-pocus to which the more marginalized and frankly dangerous freaks, socio and psychopaths, manipulators, tricksters, megalomaniacs, zealots and fundamentalists flock.

In far more inane terms, frameworks structures and methodologies of Doing are critical to keeping the wheels of human existence turning. But the rote systems that prepare us for participating in their systemic truths are just that.

Systems of Thinking to fit Systems of Doing – manufacturing, trading, building, maintaining, powering, growing, stewarding, managing – allow communities and collectives to be resourceful, resilient, adaptive and endure – a primary imperative

But they are not the source of the wonder of human existence. Human ingenuity, the elevator and slingshot of all we are stems from a curiosity and a wonder of all that exists: both materially, spiritually and inventively: the collision of which creates our sense of What If?

Our frameworks of thriving seem to discount imagination and the storytelling structures it uses to exercise and process cognitive truths as broadly dangerous, fruitless or feckless.

It is as if the cool lucidity of reason can be brutally and eternally extinguished by fairy tales and myths – and anyone partaking of the Kool Aid of lateral creative and deconstructed thinking and any exercises that promote it will be rendered deaf dumb and blind to danger and threat: to risk of any sort; and fail to see the mammoth/meteorite/fight/war/financial-crash/virus coming. Strangely, as I write those out I see that the source and purveyors of most of these bar the mammoth and meteorite are the consequence of wholly sharp cornered reason minded individuals and collectives exercising their needs and desires in the world.

Put some scientists, analysts, mathematicians, engineers in a room with a creative exercise and suddenly we’re all feeling that someone is about to sell us Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny wrapped up in an “I’m a Roswell Believer T Shirt”.

In the hierarchies of need (with which I have been a little loose and free) the engineering mentality of the Surviving With Stickers and Early Thriving stage seems to have overwhelmed our ability to just Be with our most inventive self

BEING – unfettered from burdens – luxury of conscience – What If? – life’s mysteries

Thriving – accruing STUFF, plentiful, stable, secure and expanding life

Surviving With Stickers – stable, secure, comfortable with shiny treats every so often

Surviving – stable secure fixed – a happy grind, power of the collectives

Struggling – unstable, volatile circumstance, financially socially

Flailing & Failing – pick a skip, any skip – includes ‘Scraping’ – the bottom of the barrel – and reaching up to do it: the relegation zone of existence. Struggling to fulfil basic needs – food, warmth, safety.

Sometimes, when running creative exercises in workshops specifically designed to unlock the more lateral out of the ordinary parts of a person’s brain (a part that they most patently have) it is astonishing to find how many supposedly confident and rooted adults are so easily made to feel unsteady and uncertain – and not just as part of the exercise. Even though everyone knows that they will return in a matter of hours to the very narrow channels in which to reapply the relative rigour and specificity they need to do their job successfully, even a small number of hours applied to deconstructing the frameworks they know seems to leave them terrified that the process will render them a useless engine, unfit to ever apply the strictures and applications of the more engineered mind ever again.

If we had dressed grown men in a Floral Shift Dress and 1970s Cork Wedges with Roman sandal ties they would have probably felt more comfortable than they did when asked to undertake the simple act of thinking What If? for 3-4 hours (though that may say more about the latent joy the average professional UK male finds in the ‘cross-dressing up box’ than it does about their ability to unlock their lateral creative gene without a fixed outcome to aim for).

Sadly I sense that it would just be seen as some retrograde hippy exercise but I would love to just once take every super C Suite member of the Private Sector and ask them lie on the ground for an hour (the type of which they can choose of course and face down or up is up to them) and then ask them to write a short ‘ what on earth…?’ piece where they have to relate their time on the ground to some aspect of the business they run.

What on Earth does lying on the bloody floor have to do with my business? Exactly.

I feel that perhaps, in getting closer to the ground is a good thing: not because it allows us to act like a 6 year old (though to be frank I’ve seen some supposedly grown up masters of the universe types or ‘heavy-hitters’ demonstrate behaviour that make my 6 year old daughter look positively sage-like, balanced and calm).

But because it does exactly what the phrase says on the tin: it grounds us. Takes us to a simple point of interrelation, perspective and interpretation. It is hard to maintain the toxic affectations of grandeur and status while lying on the ground. The values and behaviours set alters.

Humility becomes primary: prostrate, genuflective.

Connectedness is mandatory: because more of you is in touch with the living floor of the planet on which we live.

Calm is compulsive: lie down on the floor and see how fast you decompress. It’s measurable – a flashback perhaps to the time at the end of PE at primary school where everyone lay on the floor (long before the ‘stretching’ cool down was fashionable) to just calm down after all that running about.

Consideration becomes reflex: surprising what fills your mind when all the other junk gets pushed out of the way by the smell of grass or the dusty floorboards of an exercise room.

In much the same way that we are apparently far healthier in our minds when undertaking manual constructive and generative tasks – from gardening to DIY to dry-stone walling, I feel we also become far healthier in our minds with a little ‘floor action’.

Getting ground-bound is something I would suggest we all do every now and then, not because it makes us infantile or regress to some ‘creatively compelling’ state of deconstructed dribbling being, but because it reopens some of doors that are of enormous value to our cognitive and effective states of being.

And also a change is as good as a rest.

In the same way that an ascent to stand on a desk to the chant of ‘Captain My Captain’ compelled the schoolboy characters in Dead Poets Society to change their perspective – their way of seeing – by elevating it: I would suggest for Newtonian balance that the same is true for the ground. With stickers.

As unlike its loftier cousin ‘all the way up there’, the ground down here doesn’t just connect us to a different vantage point.

I believe it also connects us to a part of ourselves and our latent social and individual memory that we tend to keep filed away or have perhaps forgotten.

So Double Bubble.

There is something poetic (both spiritually and literally) about how sounds travel through the ground. From the imperceptible nature of the earth turning to bigger things like passing lorries on a motorway, the coming storm of the buffalo, the District & Circle Line.

So lets hear it for the floor, and our connection to it. If it ensures that we ‘get over ourselves’ for ten seconds and catch ‘the elevator down’ from ‘above’ ourselves all power to it.

It might also just be the most powerful HR weapon in the armoury of reinventing C Suite propensities for invention.

Or just be a tickle fight. In which case. Who cares?

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