Taking a break. Hope y’all have a safe and happy New Year’s. I’ll be back Jan. 1, 2019 with my annual top 100. (PS. I took some liberties with the La Mancha sign — they actually open back up tomorrow.)
Winners and losers
Here is one of my favorite shots in Booksmart. It sums up one of the big messages of the movie: If other people have to lose to make you feel like a winner, something is broken — in you, and in the system in which you participate.
I mean, how many teenage comedies have made me think about Ursula Franklin? Here is one of my favorite passages from The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map (juxtaposed with a clipping from an article about the president):
…many people are hypnotized by the mentality of zero-sum games. In this mentality, if you want to win, someone else has to lose. If you want to gain, someone else must give something up. It is not difficult to point out the many instances in which this scheme falls down.
Franklin said that if we want to change our ways of operating, we have to pay close attention to our language and to the metaphors that we use. “We should consciously avoid representing all events as conflicts, and in an either-or framework,” she wrote. “There is a great need for us to avoid either-or presentations and images of confrontation, of teams, of winning.”
Related reading: Further notes on Scenius.
Kintsugi and the art of making repair visible
I have seen The Star War. No spoilers from me (not that I believe in them), but you should read up on Kintsugi before you go see it. (If you have seen it, here’s the part of the movie I’m talking about.)
Kintsugi (“golden joinery”), also known as Kintsukuroi “golden repair”), is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
Kintsugi is connected to the Japanese idea of wabi-sabi.
“Wabi-sabi” writes Leonard Koren in Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, “is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.”
Things wabi-sabi “may exhibit the effects of accident, like a broken bowl glued back together again.”
The thing I love the most about Kintsugi is the visible trace of healing and repair — the idea of highlighted, glowing scars.
Often when I am driving around town I will see a car with some sort of exterior damage — a dented bumper, a broken headlight, a torn and dangling side-view mirror — and often after I notice this damage, the car will make some sort of illogical move on the driver’s part that, if I weren’t paying close attention to it, would’ve resulted in my car inflicting the same exact damage to the car.
After these encounters, I’m grateful that the driver didn’t have the visible damage repaired. The damage acted as a warning sign: BEWARE. Not that all these drivers were responsible for their damage, but it is obvious that many of these dented bumpers are a sign of some kind of a blind spot.
I fantasize now about a world in which all body work is carried out with Kintsugi methods.
Humans have scars, too, of course, but the really important scars are often internal and invisible to the naked eye. You can’t tell right away whose soul has just suffered a fender bender. How much easier life would be sometimes if we could see each other’s scars right away, know each other’s blind spots and weaknesses…
If only there were a Kintsugi of the soul!
PS. After I wrote this post, I remembered Kottke’s observation that my wife had kintsugi’d our couch cushions.
You are forgiven!
Here is one of my all-time favorite performances: The Who doing “A Quick One (While He’s Away)” in 1968 as part of The Rolling Stones Rock And Roll Circus, uploaded in HD quality last month to their official YouTube account:
From Aquarium Drunkard:
Though no official story ever seems to have been given, rock legend has it that the above video is what kept Jagger from handing the tapes over to the BBC. While the Stones had been off the road and were out of practice, the Who were white hot, turning in a showstopping version of “A Quick One While He’s Away.” The song was their first attempt at rock opera, a seven-and-a-half minute medley whose “Dang!/Dang!/Dang!” bridge went on to score Max Fischer and Herman Blume’s acts of romantic terrorism in Rushmore. Here the group tear through the song’s six parts, Keith Moon decorating his bashing with stick-twirls and Pete Townshend whipping furious windmills as the song pushes its way downhill. Keith Richards, decked out in top-hat and eyepatch, gleefully invites us to “Dig the Who,” and it doesn’t take long to see that his bandmates needn’t have worried so much about their inability to top their openers: Very little has ever been better than this.
I dig the entirety of Rock And Roll Circus. I love the ramshackle quality of the Stones performances: the “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” is good and nasty (with the slightly sinister “and now…” intro from John Lennon) and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is nice and stripped-down.
But back to The Who: Maybe it’s the season, but what gives me the goosebumps at the end of “A Quick One” is the ending: “You are forgiven.” Over and over and over. “You are forgiven.” (At the end of this performance Pete Townshend yells, “You’re all forgiven!” In the Live at Leeds performance, it’s “We’re all forgiven!” which I like even more.)
I’m now reminded of the ending of one of my favorite movies, Amadeus: “Mediocrities everywhere… I absolve you.”
Your output depends on your input
Shall I repeat myself? Yes:
Problems of output are problems of input.
No input, no output.
If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first.
It was put beautifully by writer Ted Gioia (one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter and author of, most recently, Music: A Subversive History) on an episode of the Conversations With Tyler podcast:
I think the most important skill anyone can develop is time management skills. How you use your day. But there is one principle I want to stress because this is very important to me. When people ask me for advice — and once again, this cuts across all fields — but this is the advice I give:
In your life, you will be evaluated on your output. Your boss will evaluate you on your output. If you’re a writer like me, the audience will evaluate you on your output.
But your input is just as important. If you don’t have good input, you cannot maintain good output.
The problem is no one manages your input. The boss never cares about your input. The boss doesn’t care about what books you read. Your boss doesn’t ask you what newspapers you read. The boss doesn’t ask you what movies you saw or what TV shows or what ideas you consume.
But I know for a fact I could not do what I do if I was not zealous in managing high-quality inputs into my mind every day of my life. That’s why I spend maybe two hours a day writing. I’m a writer. I spend two hours a day writing, but I spend three to four hours a day reading and two to three hours a day listening to music.
People think that that’s creating a problem in my schedule, but in fact, I say, “No, no, this is the reason why I’m able to do this. Because I have constant good-quality input.” That is the only reason why I can maintain the output.
Pay attention to that ratio. Double to triple time spent on input vs. output. (I remember the first time I read Stephen King’s On Writing as a young writer and being blown away by the fact that he writes in the morning and after lunch he spends all afternoon reading.)
As far as maintaining that high-quality input, Gioia says one other thing I want to highlight: getting outside of your comfort zone and being exposed to new experiences is a human effort, best conducted outside of the algorithm. (“More search, less feed.”)
[T]hese amazing curated playlists are just a feedback loop. They’ll tell you what to listen to next week based on what you listened to last week. And because they’re a feedback loop, they won’t show you anything new or interesting.
So what you need to do, if you really want to broaden your horizons as a listener, is to get exposed to new things. Pick somebody. It doesn’t have to be me…. Find somebody who you trust as a guide, and let them open your ears to these new experiences.
If you do that, you will be rewarded infinitely…
Filed under: input and output
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