What’s sad to me is I can’t really listen to hip hop that much anymore. You know, I mean there’s a lot of great hip hop out there, but I’m not avid fan of hip hop. I always say to people that I left hip hop in ‘97, meaning that I departed from listening to predominantly hip hop and just started really getting into records from the late 60s, early 70s. Once I made that change I realized how much great music was made back in the day and it started to become apparent how much we’d lost in music and that’s why I don’t listen to much modern music anymore because it just doesn’t stimulate me anymore.
Image of Adrian Younge with his records courtesy of Adrian Younge
Jun 24, 2012
Paris, France, July 16 2012
James Fish organized the sculpture" Community "
The following directions were given as follows:
All visitors are invited to choose a balloon and decorate it
It will be added to the sculpture "Community".
Write or draw your wishes, your thoughts, your name, your username, your tag .... Anything you want!
We will help you fix your balloon with others to create a large sculpture.
Feel free to invite your friends, your family, your neighbors and people next to you to participate. "
The following is an image taken to document the evolution.
The event took place in a park in the 3rd arrondisement of Paris, at Square Emile Chautemps to bring together habitants in this neighborhood. An opportunity to meet members of the community and to reinforce the relationships of all habitants young and old.
The sculpture generated many participants and created excitement as it grew larger and larger. It gave form to the participatory nature of community. I look forward to more opportunities to build sculptures and to involve people around me. I would like to thank the members of the 3rd Arrondisment in Paris for their support and the invitation to participate in this wonderful event.
The artist Doug Aitken’s house, a block away from the Pacific Ocean, is in tune with its surroundings in more ways than one. In an exclusive video, Aitken, with the help of his girlfriend Gemma Ponsa and a few of their friends, activate its more hidden charms, revealing that it’s a house that sounds as cool as it looks.
'Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.'
Much has been said about how creativity works, its secrets, its origins, and what we can do to optimize ourselves for it. In this excerpt from his fantastic 1991 lecture, John Cleese offers a recipe for creativity, delivered with his signature blend of cultural insight and comedic genius. Specifically, Cleese outlines "the 5 factors that you can arrange to make your lives more creative":
Space ("You can't become playful, and therefore creative, if you're under your usual pressures.")
Time ("It's not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.")
Time ("Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original," and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.)
Confidence ("Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.")
Humor ("The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.")
The lecture is worth a watch in its entirety, below, if only to get a full grasp of Cleese's model for creativity as the interplay of two modes of operating – open, where we take a wide-angle, abstract view of the problem and allow the mind to ponder possible solutions, and closed, where we zoom in on implementing a specific solution with narrow precision. Along the way, Cleese explores the traps and travails of the two modes and of letting their osmosis get out of balance.
A few more quotable nuggets of insight excerpted below the video.
Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.We need to be in the open mode when pondering a problem – but! – once we come up with a solution, we must then switch to the closed mode to implement it. Because once we've made a decision, we are efficient only if we go through with it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its correctness.
Cleese goes on to caution against a trap in this duality, one particularly hazardous in politics:
To be at our most efficient, we need to be able to switch backwards and forward between the two modes. But – here's the problem – we too often get stuck in the closed mode. Under the pressures which are all too familiar to us, we tend to maintain tunnel vision at times when we really need to step back and contemplate the wider view. This is particularly true, for example, of politicians. The main complaint about them from their nonpolitical colleagues is that they've become so addicted to the adrenaline that they get from reacting to events on an hour-by-hour basis that they almost completely lose the desire or the ability to ponder problems in the open mode.
Cleese concludes with a beautiful articulation of the premise and promise of his recipe for creativity:
This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.
