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Tag Archives: David St Hubbins

Accelerating History, Universal Rules & Tappist Conundrum

20 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Back to the future, Bowie, Castro, Cold War, Conspiracy Theories, David St Hubbins, Dia De Los Muertos, facebook, Frank Cannon, GOOGLE, Guy Fawkes, History, Interior Design, JFK, Kevlar, Kruschev, Low, Marilyn Monroe, May Flies, Moore's Law, Mrk IV Continental, Rum Bean Stew, Simon Schama, Spinal Tap, Street Food, Will-i-am

Screen Shot 2016-06-20 at 11.38.20.png

The future is Now – or just a hop, swipe and a quark in front of the moment we’re in – apparently – and every leap forwards we experience just another masterful identification of yet another inflection in technology – another opportunity or possibility seized by one silicon valley giant or another (and at which they ferociously throw themselves like a clown-masked bank robber sprawled across the bonnet of Frank Cannon’s Mark IV Continental, money spilling from his pockets like confetti, killer app strapped to his oversized gloved hand, joker grimace mouth frothing with messianic fervour).

And as each Now is seized, another rush of them pop up in its wake. Not one. Many. Nows are like May Flies, their single short life, their moment in the sun though brief and bright, is followed by not one but many more, their job of expanding their universe efficiently and economically done. And like May Flies, those Nows and the wave of possibility and opportunity that accompany them are coming thicker and faster than ever as technology and the Moore’s Law slingshot applies.

But there’s the question (if you can be arsed to ask it).

These Nows, and the infinite relentless possibility that comes with them are coming thicker and faster BUT are they rushing towards us, and if so what’s pushing them? Or are we rushing towards them – and if so, what’s propelling us?

Are we in a delicious Pull relationship with that point somewhere between the far side of the Now and the leading edge of tomorrow? Is the mesmeric possibility and galloping expectation of ‘what might be’ seducing us to rush at ever greater speeds into that space, self-propelling ourselves on the accelerating nature of tech capability?

Or are we being pushed? – bullied and bumped by the expanding exploding mosh of what has momentarily just been…by history, its knee relentlessly in the small of our back: its open palms flat battering against our shoulder blades – oooffff – sharp shoves with vertebrae clicks as the metronome of our progress?

And if it is the latter, when did quaint, doleful, dusty history get so pushy?

Though providing a huge potential for sounding a little like David St Hubbins from Spinal Tap (how could we forget his musings on Infinity – “if the universe is indeed infinite, then how – what does that mean? How far is all the way, and then if it stops, what’s stopping it, and what’s behind what’s stopping it? So, what’s the end, you know, is my question to you.”), the question of whether we are being pushed towards the future (and if so by what) or whether the future is rushing towards us is a rather fun thing to ponder,

My interest lies in the two camps that seem to vie for attention in this Tappist space. On the one hand the Historians have always felt very strongly that the answer to every human question yet to be asked has already been answered somewhere in history so they would say that history reaches forward into the Now and the Near Future continuously, shaping, poking, and priming them as it goes, and, ultimately isn’t everything rather circular anyway in our Goes Around Comes Around world?

And on the other, the futurists have a tendency to simply view history as the collective debris strewn behind our relentless pursuit of that great big beautiful rush  of ‘Now’s – the past simply the rusting wreck of all that furious Doing and Being – the landfill of quadrillions of previous ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’s – and a fistful of ‘maybe’s’ – now old; spent; finished; past; dead.

It would be fair to say that in our tech-fuelled accelerating world one might be forgiven for believing that the Futurists are ahead

Bar the odd Simon Schama moment and the old farts watching Time Team re runs – and a small deep fetish for period dramas – it’s all i Robot, Future Shock, cyborg, Artificial Intelligence, the upcoming sensory smack addiction of VR, multiple Wireds by Will i am, and the ‘prism-meets-kaleidoscope-meets-mirage’ of social network identity.

But for my tuppence worth, I believe we are not being drawn towards the relentlessly multiplying possibilities of an accelerating life powered by accelerating tech.

We are being pushed towards them.

Life is not accelerating – history is. It is also expanding and deepening as it does so. Technology is not accelerating future opportunity; it is amplifying, multiplying expanding and accelerating the Past at an exponential rate, which in turn pushes the future. (I can hear the sound of a split hair readying itself for further splicing!)

The Past is throwing more and more data, options choices, threads and wormholes over our shoulder into the path ahead.

The old, odd, sloth-like and highly personal model of living history – a straggly tendril poking us along our merry way, or popping up for some reason every now and then – has transformed into a high, broad and deep wave of such staggering proportion that the sheer critical mass of it relentlessly rising up behind us presses us forward at ever greater speeds.

History has stopped being the inert supplicant to the edgy today and ever more glamorous tomorrow. History is no longer dusting off books and only getting noticed when the 120 pound muscled-up Now feels like kicking sand in its face.

History is now the big kid on the block. History has changed its diet. History is bulking up, doing free weights, and running faster and further than ever before. History’s arms are more ripped and wider than ever. History’s shoulders have expanded, laying on more muscle and width. History has binned the old singular enormo-head of massed experience, chronology and intelligence and now rears up like a hydra, multiple heads sparking, spitting and snapping in every direction at once.

History is so NOW. Alive. Vibrant. Ripped. (Ooohhh.)

And this History is no meathead. This History has taken up Humanities. Broadening its mind at the speed of light fibre. This history ‘listens’. And it learns.

The old, mean, sharp dry propagandas of the old History – mean, brittle, myopic, self interested, closed, elitist – have been supplanted with a broad minded, expansive all seeing History, fired by myriad reference points and concurrent history threads on any given subject – all of which can be viewed ‘in flow’, hyper linked to each other in a cats cradle of information, opinion, feeling, insight, record, and data. History is not only alive. Its groovy: switched on. Tuned in.

For example, lets take an era of historic record – The Cold War. In our new hyper connected world, at the touch of a screen I can explore the Cold War not only from the vantage point of general historic record; the standard expository account as set out in a geo political or military text book but also through ‘pulling up’ what’s out there (About 65, 100,000 results in 0,62 seconds according to GOOGLE) delivering everything from random Wikis to blogs to current affairs programmes and texts from the time, government papers subsequently released by interested 3rd parties (web platforms & activists): treatise on How and why – profiles on whom – the JFK lens? – the Khruschev lens? – the Castro Lens?  – suddenly Ive got Marilyn Monroe conspiracy films with my Bay Of Pigs and a recipe for Cuban Rum Bean Stew in front of me. There are personal biographical and autobiographical accounts of living memory (both politicians militarists, civic officers and everyday people) to swim in.

I can have a shufti at the confrontation through the 1st and 3rd person filmic, musical and artistic reminiscences of people who ‘lived it’. I can virtually experience Cold War happenings, using Google Street View to walk the streets and dark corners of the Eastern Block to bring a narrative reminiscence to life. I can listen to recordings, interviews; watch reams of old newsreel. I can even consider it through the lens of how the art direction of movies focused on the period have inspired new wave designers in a kind of New Wave Cold War Hot Looks Chic – with a range of soft furnishings furniture and wall papers that celebrate concrete block builds papered with the rural mirage of big florals rendered in a palette that cold best be described as ‘Bowie Low’ Orange

This sea of multi dimensional multi perspective references is universal.

Technology allows me to drown myself in my own historic tsunami on any given subject.

Now this new, expanding, deepening, towering hydra tsunami of history can be broadly separated into two forms.

Near History & Far History

Far History has nothing to do with timelines or chronology – Far History is the kind of history which is only occasionally drawn into our everyday consciousness – the type of history that is farthest away from our Now.

Far History is only drawn up for or by a particular reason. For example, I watch the film Book Of Life with my children; they ask me about The Day Of The Dead. I follow up with a little light research on Dia De Los Muertos and suddenly I can drown myself in an avalanche of semiotic, cultural, religious, geographic, artistic, musical rendition and reminiscence. And the odd street food recipe.

To put it another way, Far History is everything beyond the peripheral vision of a facebook timeline and a linked-in profile update.

Near History is the one to watch. Near History is the pushy one here. Near History is the type of history that is expanding to the greatest degree. Near History is the staggering funnel of information, data, reference, touch point, perspective that rushes outwards across multiple channels and platforms from any one moment, action, experience or occurrence to deliver social, cultural, economic and environmental context of staggering breadth, impact and effect.

Think of it in personal terms for a moment. Your ‘history’ was once something gentler, broadly of two parts – the highly personal – ‘Close to you’ version. Spoken memories. Photo albums. Diaries. Familial reminiscence. Shared experiences between neighbour and local. With a  nice and highly engineered ‘Part Of This’ national identity draped over the top for when bigger stuff came along – football, war, European Union, holidays, collective cultural rituals (Guy Fawkes Day).

But it was slow, intertwined, indistinct. Ambling.

Now every moment explodes with Near History – the old personal intimate ‘close to me ‘ stuff amplified to staggering proportion by the connections pictures films shares links likes revelations news sources contextual materials.

Near History doesn’t pop up eventually, a little way down the track. It goes off like a grenade – rising up and billowing around us so quickly that we are living in it – the Near History is now a part of the Now.

It is this expansive explosive Near History rising up behind every moment we live that is pushing us forwards.

Near History is not in service to Moore’s Law. It is what fuels Moore’s Law. The exponential multiplication of capability, capacity and functionality is forced forwards by the Near History of every innovating, applicable and expanding moment in technology that has just been in service to every expanding moment we’ve just lived and the legions of multiplying Nows lining up just in front of it.

I think.

Anyway, if you’re facing the future, throw away the rear view mirror, strap yourself in, pop on some flash goggles and turn that Kevlar round to face the back. And let History, especially the Near kind fire you forwards.

 

The Bard, Bowie, hemispheres & the bearable lightness of being.

07 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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1975, Aeschylus, Boccaccio, Bowie, Bowie IS, Broakes & Marsh, cartesian Duality, Charles Laughton, Chaucers, Dante, David St Hubbins, Descartes, Donne, Empathy, Extasie, Georg Cantor, Greek Chorus, Iain McGilchrist, Infinity, Lady Macbeth, Marlowe, Master & His Emissary, Neuro-imaging, Otherness, psychology, Right Hemisphere, Rosalind, Shakespeare, Spinal Tap, Station To Station, The Bard, The Soul, The V&A, Thin White Duke, Throwing Dart's In Lover's Eyes, Troillus & Cressida, University of Liverpool. Olivier, Ziggy Stardust

david-bowie-40-anni-di-ziggy-stardust-l-alieno-sessualmente-ambiguo_h_partb.jpg

I think there’s been a happening in the cosmic fizz just beyond our mortal measure and comprehension – but thankfully those of you Right-Hemisphere leaning kids out there will be none the poorer for it – quite the opposite one would hope, if the laws of social contagion are to be believed.

On 10th January 2016, David Bowie, a rock and pop performer of exceptional elegance and a master of transformation, died.

He left behind a staggering back catalogue of human invention. His ability to shift from masque to masque, identity to identity, not only in his career and lifetime but even in the process of one performance was in retrospect one of the great artistic spectacles of the 20th Century.

Until the point of his death, history was preparing to view 2016 through the eyes of another Great British artist (some would say the greatest), and a master of the dramatic theatre of shifting masques and identities.

2016 is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.

2016 was to be the year of the Bard, generator of some of the English language’s greatest turns of phrase; creator of some of its greatest dramatic masterpieces, characters and archetypes.

Hamlet. Lady Macbeth. Iago. Juliette. Oberon. The list is endless, and the construct and dynamics of their identities have been studied in minute detail and from every conceivable perspective.

The Bard’s own real identity has also come under intense scrutiny over the years – was he part of his work, merely the quill of it, or himself the greatest piece of literary confection of the English lexicon?

Was he a thief, an imitator, a fake, a sage or a genius? The jury it seems is still out.

Speaking of The Bard, genius, shifting identities and cosmic collisions – it is worth noting that on the evening of the 10th of January 2016, as David Bowie peacefully departed for a place from which he could chime ‘Look up here, I’m in Heaven’, another great shape shifter of the stage, (already an inhabitant of the intangible Otherness) was being celebrated in an RSC film night at the Barbican.

The film was Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream starring Charles Laughton – a man known to have infuriated his contemporaries(Olivier particularly) with statements such as:

“Great artists reveal the god in man,” he said in an interview, “and every character an actor plays must be this sort of creation. Not imitation – that is merely caricature… The better – the truer – the creation, the more it will resemble a great painter’s immortal work.”*

Reaching out beyond what is known, what is given and what exists is the simple process of creation – a conscious or unconscious action – and one of the greatest slingshots of our conscious development. It was certainly what drove Laughton.

 Laughton’s post-war masterpiece, Night of The Hunter, delivered a ground-breaking collision of theatrical chiaroscuro and dramatic tour de force that had until then never been seen on the movie screen.

In his need to see and go further than any one had ever gone before he aligned himself with the belief that the primary force of the stage is creative, not imitative – a belief system by which both The Bard and Bowie patently lived their lives.

The Bard & The Thin White Duke were, I believe, driven to do so – compelled to create something of a higher order – using contexts and characters to draw the sky towards them, to study the whole of our existence, instead of scratching out increments of cause and effect, measure for measure.

I believe that they did this because one aspect of their conscious self compelled them to do so. They were wired that way – more attuned to the right hemisphere of our brain; and its quest to seek that which lies just beyond our sight and our reasoning, rather than just controlling and measuring that which we already have.

This reaching for some sense of Otherness – just out of sight and beyond our reasoned comprehension – is not just some artsy humanities piffle.

Georg Cantor the 19th century Mathematician struggled with finite or ‘fixed’ concepts of infinity – he struggled with the idea of there being a necessary (rational/reasoned) uncertainty and incompleteness in the realm of mathematics.

He struggled with the idea that Beyond the infinity of infinities; (lay) Something Other. Infinity was no longer tameable by turning it into an abstract concept and then just carrying on as though it were just another number.

(Obviously one should be aware that there is a danger here of falling into the Spinal Trap of David St Hubbins and his discourse on Infinity:

‘It’s like saying when you try to extrapolate the end of the universe, you say, if the universe is indeed infinite, then how – what does that mean? How far is all the way, and then if it stops, what’s stopping it, and what’s behind what’s stopping it? So, what’s the end, you know, is my question to you. 

Though, as a form of dramatic proof, in this astonishingly funny moment, as with all great characterisations, we find a far deeper and more expansive question waiting to be asked hidden in the subtext of their comedy.)

If we delve deeper into the ties that bind the Bard and Bowie the deeper threads of influence ad interrelation strung between them are many.

In their astonishing curation of the man ‘DAVID BOWIE IS’ for the V&A, Victoria Broakes & Geoffrey Marsh refer to Bowie’s formulation of a theory of Gender as Performance, ‘… antecedents for which can be found in Shakespeare’s plays, where theatre becomes a master metaphor for life.’

Broakes & Marsh also refer to how ‘with his silver lipstick and forehead astral sphere he evoked the radiant allegorical figures of courtly masque.’

Going further, they attest to the belief that ‘Indeed, in Ziggy Stardust’s supernormal militant energy and shuffled masks we may have come closer than we ever will again to glimpsing how Shakespeare’s virtuoso boy actors performed the roles of Rosalind, Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth.’

As we should remember, the relationship between Bowie’s Thin White Duke (an exquisite confection of Abdicated Edward’s veneered hair and permanent cigarette painted in the gaunt Berlin draw of a smack-head aristocrat) and the Elizabethan Bard are more than just accents and accidents of gender performance.

The Thin White Duke was a man who spent much time ‘throwing darts in lover’s eyes.

love’s arrow or love’s darts and a penchant for casting them was a popular Elizabethan conceit favoured by Donne, Marlowe et al.

This emanation from within – reciprocity of feeling not thinking – was a reoccurring theme in the dramatic and written arts.

In Il Filostrato, circa 1338 Giovanni Boccaccio fused the tradition of love at first sight, the eye’s darts, and the metaphor of Cupid’s arrow:

“Nor did he (Troilus) who was so wise shortly before… perceive that Love with his darts dwelt within the rays of those lovely eyes… nor notice the arrow that sped to his heart.”

That this piece of writing was the inspiration of Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Crisedye’ which in turn was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida should come as no surprise.

Many were enamoured by the idea of an inner ‘light’ of intimate observation, emanating from inside the ‘soul’ of the observer to become one with soul of the observed.

Take the lovers of Donne’s Extasie for whom

Our eye beams twisted, and did thread

Our eyes upon a double string

 

And Shakespeare’s Oberon says of Cupid:

“A certain aim he took

At a fair vestal thronèd by the west,

And loosed his love shaft smartly from his bow

As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.”

 

Equally, Dante in his ‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’ (Rime XIV) was not inured to the charms of the reciprocal gaze.

“The very paragon of Beauty, who

Will wound the eyes of any who dares view

The flame-like essences of burning love

She shoots from her bright eyes – which, when they move,

Penetrate to the heart and wound it too.

Thus in her face one sees the vital strength

Of Love portrayed where none may gaze at length.”

There is a vital reciprocity in all their gaze – a mutuality and transaction of something alive. This is not mutual seeing of the direct referential See the Crow. Point at the Crow. Shoot the Crow type

Something has been shared – an inspirational and profound thing – a thing that improves each of them equally.

To Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master & His Emissary, a book on how our conscious selves and the world in which we exist is being shaped and moulded by hemispheric sensibility, the light ‘darts’ from the eyes of lover’s was the Elizabethan’s way of describing a form of seeing or observation that is fired by the right hemisphere and its pursuit of the intangible immeasurable higher order of us – whole expansive pictures of our existence far beyond the scrabbling measures of the left hemisphere’s control-freakery.

In reference to Dramatic Tragedy and the role of the Greek Chorus, McGilchrist points out that this new form of observation – distant – removed – taken out of the immediate rational linear Now – is one of the illuminating and enlightening moments of our conscious human development.

In viewing life and its tragedies from a distance, Drama allowed us to engage in an evolving form of human learning – of matters of the soul – of Otherness.

McGilchrist writes ‘In tragedy we see for the first time in the history of the West the power of empathy as we watch …the painful moulding of the will…’

The central role of faces and identities in drama and theatre is telling in regards to what both the Bard and Bowie understood – they ‘knew what was right without knowing’ – a very right hemisphere trait apparently.

McGilchrist points out that ‘the interpretation of faces is a Right Hemisphere prerogative: in looking at the face of one’s partner (compared with an unknown face) the right insula increases in activity.’

At the beating heart of drama we explore faces and the tension lines drawn between them. In faces and living expressions played out across identities and their myths we learn to understand the abstract, unseen and unimaginable – we use the dramatic shifts in the face – its expressions and light – to interrogate and comprehend our own existence, our empathy for others, our otherness in relation to the world around us.

In 1973, few young English teenage girls understood death other than through that of Ziggy Stardust. Their pain and loss were real; as the emotions had been created within them by the artist. They were not imitating life changing sadness and mourning. They were living it.

To be clear, Iain McGlchrist is not advocating some Cartesian Duality of Either Or. He is utterly committed to the lateral truths of how both the right and left hemispheres interrelate and relentlessly inform enrich and recalibrate each other. BUT.

He does contest that the greater dimensions of our conscious selves owe much to a hemisphere which until now has had to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune showered upon it by the very  rational, left-hemisphere-leaning, scientific prism through which we are now all required to view and celebrate life. Hubble and Hawking must be enough for us now. How could we ever seek more

McGilchist’s polymathic interest in the collision point between neuro-imagination, literature and language and psychology is not working alone in the world.

Recently this world view has been bolstered by the works of another cluster of diverse minds.

Julie Henry writing for the Telegraph on the 13th January reported that ‘Scientists Psychologists and English academics at Liverpool University found that reading the works of the Bard …had a beneficial effect on the mind, catches the readers attention and triggers moments of self reflection.

Henry continued “Scans showed that the more “challenging” prose and poetry set off far more electrical activity in the brain than the more pedestrian versions.

Scientists were able to study the brain activity as it responded to each word and record how it “lit up” as the reader’s encountered unusual words, surprising phrases or difficult sentence structure.

This “lighting up” of the mind lasts longer than the initial electrical spark, shifting the brain to a higher gear, encouraging further reading.

The research also found that reading poetry, in particular, increases activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, an area concerned with “autobiographical memory”, helping the reader to reflect on and reappraise their own experiences in light of what they have read.”

Rational minds that dismiss the humanities and the arts as a distraction from the improving nature and evolution of being human seem to deny one pure truth that their own science reveals.

Our minds positively respond to reaching beyond what ‘is’. We are made better – improved – for it. Our humanity is illuminated and given depth and expanse by the creations of these pioneers of identity and conscious self. We learn to empathise with what is otherwise intangible – the feeling carried within another – beyond the linear and immediate.

The works of The Bard and of Bowie, compelled by their right-hemisphere need to reach beyond the measurable and the given – to seek to capture the ‘light’, the darts thrown from lovers eyes – created works both for the creator and the receiver – to inspire both themselves and us to reach to a greater degree of self understanding – of greater consciousness. They created a moment of mutual gaze between us and them -to allow us a glimpse of the light within in their own.

Their works become the dart and we the lover. And Vice Versa

One might even venture that the utter lack of utility or function seemingly required to render something ‘art’ is a defensive evolutionary mechanism. Perhaps its artfulness, its redundant pose, is itself an artful deceit designed to obscure the primary and far more powerful role the pieces of dramatic creativity are undertaking – to relentlessly improve and expand us through firing in us a greater quest for more conscious enlightenment in, and doing so while our left brain’s back is turned – for fear that otherwise the left will wade in, spoil and obfuscate what it cant understand – and in doing so diminish us and our potential to exist.

Or was it just that both Shakespeare and Bowie liked a man in tights (as did Laughton) – the Dressing Up box of Creativity and Dramatic effect and the reaching for Otherness being preferable to the real tragedy and visceral slaughter that came from those only interested in reaching for the Now and what existed in front of them, as they sought to measure, map, grasp and rule it.

*Quoted – Simon Callow Charles Laughton: dazzling player of monsters, misfits and kings 2013 – Telegraph On Line

 

 

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