Football, Theatre and Team Cultures

One thing I like about this England football team is the unyielding emphasis on the team, and all the support that entails.  Take his interview post the 7 July Sweden Quarter Final World cup win from the Manager, Gareth Southgate:

“It’s an incredible privilege to be the England manager but when you sit and think about the people who have got to this point before, people I hugely respect and admire ... it’s difficult to put it into perspective… It would fairly easily be my best day in coaching. But, look, we just want to keep improving as a team of coaches, staff and players. I go back to the fact it isn’t about it. It’s about the whole group.

To be in charge of people who give as much energy, and give me as much as they have over this period of time, is very special. … We’ve got to this point because the collective has been so strong…. [he then pays tribute to the last manager giving the team experience 2 years, in a tournament where consensus suggests the pressure hampered the young players, Southgate then goes on to praise everyone behind the scenes…] We are a team who are still improving, but we know where we are. We are having success because everyone is working so hard on the field, while some of the older guys – like [Gary] Cahill, [Phil] Jones, [Danny] Welbeck, [Jack] Butland, [Danny] Rose – have been exceptional in their mentality supporting the team, training every day, even though they’ve not had as much game-time as they’d have liked. They’re as much of a reason why we are where we are.

You can say the same for people like Tom Heaton, Adam Lallana and Jake Livermore who were on standby and trained with us before we left, and whose contribution was brilliant. And people like Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, who has been messaging me, or Joe Hart, who made a massive save for us in the qualifier in Slovenia. People who have played a massive part in getting us to where we are. None of that should be overlooked. …”

To a distant observer like me, it seems to be me that Southgate has developed a team culture, where the parts can go on to make a very strong whole. (Southgate is also publically name checking, other players’ interviews also heavily talked about the team)

This is important to culture within arts or business, it is perhaps a reason I was drawn to theatre.

Many other arts celebrate the individual and while sculptors and artists (all the way back to old masters) may have assistants and their galleriests, and novellists have editors and publishers, and poets have… each other (?)  mostly theatre is a collaborative effort.

While some strands of theatre may celebrate the writer, or the director, or an actor it is impossible to have most performances happen without design, lights, stage management, let alone the cast interplay, directing, writing and so on.

Even in traditions which might hold the playwright as the centre (listen to the intro between the podcast conversation of Chris Goode and David Eldridge), few writers would deem their script finished without a performance; and, arguably, a performance is unfinished without an audience.

This then makes the culture of a theatre, or of the team gathered together to make a performance, so critical - it’s also one reason I found the MeToo movement within theatre so profoundly shocking.

It’s perhaps why I’m drawn to working within investment teams. I like the collaborative nature of theatre and teams. I like how at their best, the parts make up more than the whole, and that the whole relies on so many parts and the synergy of those parts.

Perhaps that what makes theatre at its best so special. Like football. (Or even business teams).

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The current Arts blog, cross-over, the current Investing blog.  Cross fertilise, some thoughts on autism.  Discover what the last arts/business mingle was all about (sign up for invites to the next event in the list below).

My Op-Ed in the Financial Times  (My Financial Times opinion article) about asking long-term questions surrounding sustainability and ESG.

Some popular posts:   the commencement address;  by Nassim Taleb (Black Swan author, risk management philosopher),  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes;  JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Charlie Munger on always inverting;  Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude.

How to live a life, well lived. Thoughts from a dying man. On play and playing games.

A provoking read on how to raise a feminist child.

Sophie Woolley Interview

Sophie Woolley, is performing her work-in-progress show at Ovalhouse about going deaf, and going hearing again, after becoming a cochlear implanted 'cyborg'. What is it like to hear again? What happens to a person when 20 years of progressive deafness is suddenly reversed? The show is at Ovalhouse in London from 12-14 July, 2018, at 7:30pm (£5). Here's an interview we did below.

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Growing up, I knew very little about deaf culture and only came to it late. It’s still little known outside the mainstream. What would you say to more typical people about what they should appreciate about deaf culture?

I grew up hearing and went deaf from my teens. Every deaf person is different. It's important to recognise that what works for one deaf person, doesn't work for the next. Hearing people sometimes ask how come I can speak, and then they compliment me. I accept most compliments but not that one, not in the way it is usually angled.

It's a backhanded assertion of hearing supremacy. It's kind of why I'm writing Augmented, my one person show. I'm asserting my deaf cyborg power.

I have hereditary progressive deafness. On my mum's side, we go deaf in our teens onward, on my mum's side. We sign and speak. we use what is called Sign Supported English. We can also use BSL.

If people are interested in learning more about Deaf culture, a good way is to do a BSL level 1 course. My husband learned to sign, and his brother and sister in law did BSL Level one. This gave them a good deaf awareness and empathy. If you can't learn to sign, remember to maintain eye contact when you speak. I write about that etiquette in my play, and what happens when I break the rule with my deaf mother.

In the first few weeks after my successful cochlear implant switch on, I was blown away by how hearing culture is often about speaking to people with backs turned, often from a distance.

In 2013, a week or two after switch on, something happened to make me realise I had recovered what is known as incidental hearing. I was on the bus, south of the river. I asked a mum with kids – do I get off next stop for Lewisham station? She said nothing, and I thought – bit rude. She bundled her kids off the seats and walked toward the doors to get off the bus. And then I realised, she was talking to me as she walked away from me. "Lewisham station is in two stops."

This will sound tiny to some people, but it's a big part of hearing culture. That busy mum made me realise that from now on, I would have more access to information and more power.

The privilege of incidental hearing is an invisible, structural barrier for deaf people. My incidental hearing is not perfect yet. I can't eavesdrop from a distance like some hearing people can. My 'listening bubble' is smaller than my hearing husband's.

You can also check out my Deaf Faker series on youtube, for some laughs about deaf awareness.

Over your life your hearing has profoundly changed. How has that affected your performance and writing practice, if at all?

I became profoundly deaf over 20 years. When I started working in theatre, I made sure my own shows had creative captions. I mainly wrote hearing characters. Later I began to incorporate some sign language (Bee Detective, Deaf Faker).  

I wrote BBC Radio 4 plays. My last thing was a Radio 4sitcom called Absolutely Delish: Grazing.  It aired in 2013 and I didn't listen to it until six months later, after my surgery enabled me to follow radio.

Deafness affected my practice in that I was spending increasing amounts of time on organising access or worrying about access. It's difficult to quanitfy how it affects your career, until you are suddenly able to hear again, to be able to make that comparison. That is what happened to me.

Did growing up in Glasgow influence you?

I left Glasgow aged 18 months, and never looked back. It made me tough, resilient and fond of sweets. I grew up in Harlesden in NW London. That influenced my early work. I lived in South Africa for a bit recently, and that has changed the way I experience British culture. I'm very influenced by my environment.

What was the first performance to make you want to write plays or to perform?

I was very influenced by comedy TV. I also used to like watching Fame with my little sister. We also taped Top of the Pops and re-watched it. Dallas and Dynasty and all the UK soaps were big in my mum's house. I also felt inspired by people I watched performing at Leeds University. I didn't have the confidence to join them. They are all doing well now and that feels good.

What was your background to becoming a writer and performer?

I fell into it after university. I started performing my short stories and found out I was good onstage. I had done a lot of theatre in primary school but I did not pursue it at secondary school. There were no school plays there.

What do you find hard to write or perform about?

I find it hard to write about my experience of deafness. It's taken me a few years years to find the voice for my new one person show about becoming a deaf cyborg.

What’s brought you most happiness and pleasure to write or perform?

I enjoyed performing When to Run, my first one person show. It was a long process to make but it was worth it in the end. I am now at the beginning of the long process for my second one person show, 10 years later. So far, so enjoyable.  

What have been your artistic influences?

I write about what's around me. Music and nightclub culture was an influence when I started out professionally, I satirised and performed in that environment.

Favourite novelists include Tom McCarthy, Kit De waal, Deborah Levy, Irvine welsh.  I like TV. I like the TV serial called World on a Wire by Rainer Werner Fassbinder? It's so good. I like Koleka Potema's poetry. I don't know if these artists have influenced me, but they have inspired me.  

I have more theatre  influences now that I can go and see the cutting edge work of my peers in theatre more easily.

Any hard lessons you’ve learned as a writer and performer? Any advice you’d like to give?

Look after your posture and avoid RSI. Pilates is better than yoga.

If you could change one thing about performing arts, what would it be?

Theatres should caption every performance when they get to full production.

What projects are you working on now?

Augmented, my one person show. The scratch performances are at Ovalhouse on 12-14 July. I also want to raise international backing to develop The Fake Interpreter, with dancer Andile Vellem, see https://fakeinterpreterblog.wordpress.com

Money no object, what project would you most want to do?

I'd like to make some international shows. One is performed in two countries at once.

I would make a romantic movie, set near a nuclear power station.

I'd also like to do some re-enactment of a particular moment on London Underground, that I like to think about - and have written about.

Is there a play or performance that has made you cry?

Not recently. Check out the Eagle Huntress on BBC iPlayer though!

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Sophie Woolley, is performing her work-in-progress show at Ovalhouse about going deaf, and going hearing again, after becoming a cochlear implanted 'cyborg'. What is it like to hear again? What happens to a person when 20 years of progressive deafness is suddenly reversed? Here's a podcast with Sophie on her experience and on making the show:

The show is at Ovalhouse in London from 12-14 July at 7:30pm (£5). All performances are captioned with live palantype, and are relaxed performances. Facebook event link.

Buying social media friends and followers, wholesale.

This is a dark art. It raises many questions, but (what should have been unsurprising) is how the market has developed. The NY Times has an investigation.

“Manufacturers” create Twitter bots. These come in high-quality from, usually copied from an inactive Twitter account (but sometime an active one), with a copied picture and ID. There are also low-quality bots which do not copy a real-life person and are super easy to spot.

These are wholesalers (eg Peakerr) and some are not available to individuals only “retailers”.

The NY Times exposed one such retailer Devumi, which has a large number of celebrity and political clients.

These bots can then be used to amplify your message or any message (realnews or fakenews), or denigrate other messages.

While, the bots will not likely create “true engagement” so not likely to help sell a product directly. They can be very good at pushing an agenda indirectly.

Eg

-follower count is used to gain influencer contracts with real brands

-a useful promotion (eg Go Out and Vote) is targeted only at a certain segment (eg target only >65s will skew the Brexit vote)

-obscuring realnews with fakenews

There is also evidence that many advertising clicks (eg FB) are going to bots and not real accounts resulting in real advertising money being lost.

While Twitter is more open to bots (less checks), IG, FB and LI can all have bots as well. Or even multiple simply fake accounts maintained by real human agents.

Or, simply those who can use the data more sophisticatedly.  Eg a right wing org can try and discourage young voters from bothering to vote, while a left wing org should be targeting its ad spending on the under 25 group.

Imagine if the UK Remain group had spent £1m on FB adverts to under 25s encouraging them to vote with a good advert. The under 25 turnout was <35% vs the >65s with a >80% turnout.

Is that weaponising democracy? Certainly it seems like savvy agents for various governments and other organisations were more savvy than the platforms themselves, and on the the face of it, continue to do so.

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More thoughts:  My Financial Times opinion article.   How to live a life, well lived. Thoughts from a dying man.      

If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try:  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or Nassim Taleb's commencement address; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Or Charlie Munger on always inverting;  Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude or investor Ray Dalio on  on Principles.

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here. 

Farewell, Ursula K Le Guin.

One of my favourite authors, Ursula K Le Guin passed away this week. Amongst many things, she showed me that you have good books and you have bad books, the “genre” of the book doesn’t really matter. So Le Guin is famous for Science Fiction and Fantasy, but mostly I simply treasure her wonderful books.  I posted on her writing craft book here, and her on literature as a manual for life.

In her later life, she kept a blog (recent interviews here) which is still a treasure trove and much better than my blog. If only mine could be so rich over time.  If you are a fan of cats, then you should read through her blog as though she didn’t write books in her last years, she wrote extensively about her cat. The Annals of Pard.

“As I see it, writing and the arts (and the sciences, and all learning) don’t play a role in ensuring our freedom; they are our freedom — the heart of it.” — UKL. 30 September 2017.

David Mitchell (of Reasons I Jump fame and father of an ASD child, and more famously a novelist) writes about his encounter with her and her influence.

I leave you with her reply to George Zebrowski, who asked her to blurb an anthology of science fiction that contained precisely no women:

"I cannot imagine myself blurbing a book, the first of the series, which not only contains no writing by women, but the tone of which is so self-contentedly, exclusively male, like a club, or a locker room. That would not be magnanimity, but foolishness. Gentlemen, I just don’t belong here."

And her “A Few Words to a Young Writer”

Socrates said, "The misuse of language induces evil in the soul." He wasn't talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

Zadie Smith. Questions and Answers.

Zadie Smith’s essays are some of my favourite writings.  She takes an idea and pursues it with thoughtful care.

On social Media:  “My worry is narrower: myself, my family. I can’t stand the phones and don’t want them in my life in any form. They make me feel anxious, depressed, dead inside, unhinged etc. But I fully support anyone who finds them delightful and a profound asset to their existence! Different strokes for different folks.”

She attempts to never self-delude: “I’m not delusional – I don’t envision people casting their devices en masse into burning bins any time soon. (And I’m as addicted to my laptop as any user of an iPhone.) “

And offers no quick fixes:

“Do you have any secret techniques for overcoming self-doubt?
As you know, there isn’t really any solution to self-doubt. In the end, you just have to write and doubt simultaneously”

And gives insights in to how things practically are with no magical techniques or insights: Are creative writing MAs a waste of time for talentless saps, polish for the moderately talented or a way to invigorate the literary tradition?

None. In my class, we spend 14 weeks reading works of literature and philosophy, mostly by long-dead people, and then my students write essays about what they have read and then we discuss these books, trying to understand how each one works. In between times, a smaller group of students will show me the novel or stories they’re writing and in a series of meetings we discuss their work, try to edit it and improve it, just as my best editors do with me. I never imagine that I am, by doing this, either saving literature or destroying it. It’s just a group of people appreciating and analysing literature – and also hoping to write it.

This echoes with my experience of creative classes.

To me, she is rightly concerned about the local and narrow.  Her family.  Her friends.  Her students.

But she is a writer.  She engages with the world (she comes to writing through writing and reading).

On the one hand, she’s like to be known as herself in the way Don selling can.   Rather than a voice of a black female writer.

But as I have often thought we hold multi personalities all at the same time:

“I’m a black person, also a woman, also a wife and mother, a Brit, a European – for the moment – a Londoner, a New Yorker, a writer, a feminist, a second-generation Jamaican, a member of the African diaspora, a Game of Thrones-er, an academic, a comedy-nerd, a theory-dork, a hip-hop-head and so on.

I am delighted to be all these things and everyone, no matter where they are from – if they really think about it – will find themselves with a similar plurality of communities. At different moments, you’ll feel the pull of certain commitments more strongly, especially if an aspect of your identity is particularly embattled.

But the whole debate can fall into a kind of trap. I know the argument: no one calls Don DeLillo the “white American author Don DeLillo”, so why should I put up with being called “the black British author Zadie Smith”? But by that logic, the rhetorical pressure falls on this idea of neutrality, as if to be white is not to possess a race or an identity – is simply to be “the author” – whereas to be black is precisely to have an identity. And then from there you are forced into the corner where you find yourself arguing that to be truly great, truly “the author”, you must have your blackness forgotten, you must aspire to people seeing “beyond” it, “past” it.

It’s a version of that backhanded compliment I sometimes heard as a child: “Honestly, you’re just my mate, I don’t even think about your colour. I’m colour blind!” I think you have to reverse the concept to see how strange it is: “Oh, Don, I don’t even think about you being white any more, I just love your books!” No, I don’t desire this supposed neutrality. I am all the things I am – and also an author. It’s all inseparable, as Don and his whiteness are inseparable.”

What song lyric best describes you?

“And I just blame everything on you/ At least you know that’s what I’m good at” – Kanye West

Read more in the Guardian article here. I found the answers sometimes illuminating and pretty entertaining.

Read my earlier post on Zadie’s writing tips here plus some video of her in conversation.

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Read more tips here - top writing style tips - some thoughts from Ursula K Le Guin - and some tips from  Philip Pullman.

Or Ta -Nehisi Coates on the Black American experience.

Rufus Norris. Teach creativity in UK state schools.

 "The myth goes that the true artist is born, mysteriously fully formed in their own exceptional talent. A second myth holds that creativity thrives in adversity; a third that creative sorts are somehow morally wayward, something to be tolerated as long as the results are diverting, but not a model for citizenship. These three combine gloriously in the icon of a lascivious and poverty-stricken Mozart, writing sonatas while still in the womb."

Writes Rufus Norris in the Guardian  

"But whatever the reason, the result is that another myth, deeply embedded in our peculiarly British psyche, is being reinforced: that culture and creativity belong naturally to the elite, that they are not for everyone.

And this problem affects us all, because the whole economy needs creative skills. According to the World Economic Forum, by 2020 creativity will be in the top three most important skills for future jobs, alongside complex problem solving and critical thinking. Which are skills innate to and honed by a creative education." 

More here in Guardian  

I recall hearing Rufus Norris speak to a group of young theatre practitioners starting out, about 20 years ago.  

We were at the Young Vic and he was leading a workshop.   

He was inspiring and offered much practical advice.  Echoed in this quote 

"Almost all have got there by two means: elbow grease and support for their creativity. This is what we have learned: just like maths, “creativity should not be perceived as an exceptional talent; it is a basic skill that can be mastered with the right teaching and approach”."

Oprah Winfrey Golden Globes Speech on the voices who are not heard

"For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared to speak their truth to the power of those men, but their time is up.    Their time is up. Their time is up."

Oprah Winfrey’s speech as she accepted the Cecil B DeMille Award at Sunday Jan 7, US Golden Globe Awards.  Full text below and youtube.

In 1964, I was a little girl sitting on the linoleum floor of my mother’s house in Milwaukee watching Anne Bancroft present the Oscar for Best Actor at the 36th Academy Awards. She opened the envelope, and said five words that literally made history: “The winner is Sidney Poitier.” Up to the stage came the most elegant man I had ever seen. I remember his tie was white and, of course, his skin was black. And I’d never seen a black man being celebrated like that. And I have tried many, many, many times to explain what a moment like that means to a little girl, a kid watching from the cheap seats as my mom came through the door, bone tired from cleaning other people’s houses. But all I can do is quote and say that the explanation in Sidney’s performance in Lilies of the Field, “Amen, amen. Amen, amen.”

In 1982, Sidney received the Cecil B DeMille Award right here at the Golden Globes, and it is not lost on me that at this moment, there are some little girls watching as I become the first black woman to be given this same award.

It is an honor – it is an honor and it is a privilege to share the evening with all of them and also with the incredible men and women who inspire me, who challenge me, who sustain me and made my journey to this stage possible. Dennis Swanson, who took a chance on me for AM Chicago. Quincy Jones, who saw me on that show and said to Steven Spielberg, “Yes, she is Sofia in The Color Purple.” Gayle, who has been the definition of what a friend is. And Stedman, who has been my rock. Just a few to name.

I’d like to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press Association because we all know that the press is under siege these days, but we also know that it is the insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice – to tyrants and victims and secrets and lies. I want to say that I value the press more than ever before as we try to navigate these complicated times, which brings me to this: what I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have. And I’m especially proud and inspired by all the women who have felt strong enough and empowered enough to speak up and share their personal stories. Each of us in this room are celebrated because of the stories that we tell. And this year we became the story. But it’s not just a story affecting the entertainment industry. It’s one that transcends any culture, geography, race, religion, politics or workplace. So I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed and bills to pay and dreams to pursue.

They’re the women whose names we’ll never know. They are domestic workers and farm workers. They are working in factories, and they work in restaurants, and they’re in academia and engineering and medicine and science. They’re part of the world of tech and politics and business. They are athletes in the Olympics, and they are soldiers in the military.

And there’s someone else: Recy Taylor, a name I know and I think you should know too. In 1944, Recy Taylor was a young wife and a mother. She was just walking home from the church service she’d attended in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped, and left blindfolded by the side of the road coming home from church. They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone, but her story was reported to the NAACP, where a young worker by the name of Rosa Parks became the lead investigator on her case. And together they sought justice. But justice wasn’t an option in the era of Jim Crow. The men who tried to destroy her were never persecuted. Recy Taylor died 10 days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared to speak their truth to the power of those men, but their time is up.

Their time is up. Their time is up. And I just hope – I just hope that Recy Taylor died knowing that her truth, like the truth of so many other women who were tormented in those years and even now tormented, goes marching on. It was somewhere in Rosa Parks’ heart almost 11 years later when she made the decision to stay seated on that bus in Montgomery. And it’s here with every woman who chooses to say, “Me too” and every man, every man who chooses to listen.

In my career what I’ve always tried my best to do, whether on television or through film, is to say something about how men and women really behave, to say how we experience shame, how we love and how we rage, how we fail, how we retreat, persevere and how we overcome. I’ve interviewed and portrayed people who have withstood some of the ugliest things life can throw at you, but the one quality all of them seem to share is an ability to maintain hope for a brighter morning, even during our darkest nights. So I want all the girls watching here now to know that a new day is on the horizon.

And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say, “Me too” again. Thank you.

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Read   Oprah on gratitude and service.    Sheryl Sandberg on death, gratitude and resilience. 

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The speech is artful. I like the thread of story she carries through using Rosa Parks. The tricolon triple repeat of "their  time is up" is well pitched emphasis, and she is even handed to the "men who listen" while never letting up on the championing of the women speaking up.

Annie Proulx acceptance speech

Annie Proulx (wiki here, Brokeback Mountain author) 2017 acceptance speech for lifetime achievement (Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters). I like this from it

"The happy ending still beckons, and it is in hope of grasping it that we go on."  Full speech below.  The video below is her take on the publishing industry from a 2014 speech.

This 2016 Telegraph article is also insightful reading:

"Proulx doesn’t like to talk about her personal life, and sharply deflects enquiries about her three marriages and four children. When I ask how long she has lived by herself, however,  she responds enthusiastically. ‘Like many  older women, I have discovered the absolute luxury of living alone, and being master of one’s time – important if you are a writer.

'Freed  from the tyranny of table and closet, there  is time to observe and think. If one longs for company, there are friends and relatives. Nothing and no one could persuade me to give up voluntary solitude.’"

....

"‘Curiosity is what drives me,’ she says. ‘I am interested in everything, and all the people I know and like have fierce passions for places and things. I never thought it was peculiar or abnormal to be this way when I was younger, but I’ve learnt differently. Most people are remarkably incurious.’"

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I agree.  I wish this for my children. S. has an idiosyncratic curiosity - sometimes narrow, but often quizzical, and I'd love for him to keep it as a strength not a weakness.   Same for O. I wsh they could teach curiosity, empathy and creativity more at school; and rote learning, less or even not at all.

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Although this award is for lifetime achievement, I didn’t start writing until I was 58, so if you’ve been thinking about it and putting it off, well…

[ ]

We don’t live in the best of all possible worlds. This is a Kafkaesque time. The television sparkles with images of despicable political louts and sexual harassment reports. We cannot look away from the pictures of furious elements, hurricanes and fires, from the repetitive crowd murders by gunmen burning with rage. We are made more anxious by flickering threats of nuclear war. We observe social media’s manipulation of a credulous population, a population dividing into bitter tribal cultures. We are living through a massive shift from representative democracy to something called viral direct democracy, now cascading over us in a garbage-laden tsunami of raw data. Everything is situational, seesawing between gut-response “likes” or vicious confrontations. For some this is a heady time of brilliant technological innovation that is bringing us into an exciting new world. For others it is the opening of a savagely difficult book without a happy ending.

To me the most distressing circumstance of the new order is the accelerating destruction of the natural world and the dreadful belief that only the human species has the inalienable right to life and God-given permission to take anything it wants from nature, whether mountaintops, wetlands or oil. The ferocious business of stripping the earth of its flora and fauna, of drowning the land in pesticides again may have brought us to a place where no technology can save us. I personally have found an amelioration in becoming involved in citizen science projects. This is something everyone can do. Every state has marvelous projects of all kinds, from working with fish, with plants, with landscapes, with shore erosions, with water situations.

Yet somehow the old discredited values and longings persist. We still have tender feelings for such outmoded notions as truth, respect for others, personal honor, justice, equitable sharing. We still hope for a happy ending. We still believe that we can save ourselves and our damaged earth—an indescribably difficult task as we discover that the web of life is far more mysteriously complex than we thought and subtly entangled with factors that we cannot even recognize. But we keep on trying, because there’s nothing else to do.

The happy ending still beckons, and it is in hope of grasping it that we go on. The poet Wisława Szymborska caught the writer’s dilemma of choosing between hard realities and the longing for the happy ending. She called it “consolation.” Darwin: They say he read novels to relax, but only certain kinds—nothing that ended unhappily. If he happened on something like that, enraged, he flung the book into the fire. True or not, I’m ready to believe it. Scanning in his mind so many times and places, he’s had enough with dying species, the triumphs of the strong over the weak, the endless struggle to survive, all doomed sooner or later. He’d earned the right to happy ending, at least in fiction, with its micro-scales.

Hence the indispensable silver lining, the lovers reunited, the families reconciled, the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded, fortunes regained, treasures uncovered, stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways, good names restored, greed daunted, old maids married off to worthy parsons, troublemakers banished to other hemispheres, forgers of documents tossed down the stairs, seducers scurried to the altar, orphans sheltered, widows comforted, pride humbled, wounds healed, prodigal sons summoned home, cups of sorrow tossed into the ocean, hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation, general merriment and celebration, and the dog Fido, gone astray in the first chapter, turns up barking gladly in the last. Thank you.

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Check out Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude and JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here. 

Tony Matelli, Marlborough Contemporary Art London

Tony Matelli showing at London Marlborough Contemporary Art Gallery, 6 Albemarle Street
London W1S 4BY, until Dec 16, 2017.

Several impulses strike when looking at Tony Matelli's work.  To touch - to wonder what the work is made from - does the food smell ? - are the statues found ?

I'm interested in found work across mediums.  The found sound of drag fabulist Dickie Beau.   The found verbatim theatre of My Name is Rachel Corrie and Alecky Blythe (an aside, even my own Lost in Peru  which is also probably my worse review ever (so far, hah! Alienation and poetic naval gazing, but at least pushing the boundaries of form and style!)  but it did find me love).   The found poetry or heightened poetry of the likes of Charles Reznikoff.

What transforms an object found into something more? How can it reveal a deeper truth? Does it need to?

Place and performance transform.

As does juxtaposition or enjambment.

A sandwich.  In this case almost literally except the food is painted bronze.

Work like this will often produce a superficial response. How hard is it to place a urinal on a plinth? (Duchamp’s famous found art icon / practical joke) Much of where art today provokes such a response. That may be your truth.

I like to judge art differently. Intentionality. History. Thought. The viewer all wraps up in this.

I'm not studied in art. I've read a little. John Berger and Susan Sonntag. The interviews of Francis Bacon. But I reach across several mediums of expression.

So to me.  I see this.  I immediately recall Di Chirico's Uncertainty of a Poet.   (Artist says not influenced by).

There is an absurdity.  The impermanent made permanent. The fragile cast into bronze.  The real and hyper real being not what you see.

The permanent being found.  Made and remade.  The old made a new.  Sandwiched and juxtaposed.

When I think of Di Chirico I always recall Wendy Cope. And her beautiful funny absurd word play of a poem of the same title (see left)

This takes me to the theatre of the absurd. And where life or found art or #realnews over #fakenews seems more strange and bizarre than the strange and bizarre.

And so here, I am. A playwright of no recent plays. An investor attempting sustainability in a world dominated by short term profit. A multiple parallel identity - husband, son, father being an obvious initial three -

Looking at a banana which is not a banana on an old statue that is not old found in a place where it is not found and as the absurd builds on the absurd - that’s part of the human condition as expressed in art.

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If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try:  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or  JK Rowling on the benefits of failure. 

Interested in some more found art, I have some thoughts on watching Dickie Beau and his found sound. The found sound of drag fabulist Dickie Beau.

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here. 

To everything - A time

I rediscovered (for the second time) a poem from Ecclesiastes, which I last looked up in 2008. The cycle is almost 10 years later.  In some ways we are at a peak (eg stock market prices) and in other ways we are at a trough.

To everything – a season, and a time to every delight under the heavens:

A time to be born, and a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck the planted.

A time to slay, and a time to heal. A time to break down, and a time to build up.

A time to cry, and a time to laugh. A time to mourn, and a time to dance.

A time to scatter away stones, and a time to pile up stones. A time to embrace, and a time to be far from embracing.

A time to seek, and a time to destroy. A time to keep, and a time to throw away.

A time to rend, and a time to sew. A time to be silent, and a time to speak.

A time to love, and a time to hate. A time of war, and a time of peace.

Ecclesiastes 3. [Young’s literal / King James / Yeoh translation]