Sometimes you just need to look at the beauty in the world. I'm stuck in Houston at the moment with all the Republican presidential candidates swarming into town so for a little break, I decided to get out of my head a bit and enjoy this 4K thrill ride that is a hyper-lapse of Paris. Shot by Tyler Fairbank using a bevy of lenses on his Sony A7s, the hyper-lapse is lush and, at only two minutes, a quick escape from the office and politics that are palpable in the air today.
Enjoy.
The date January 25 probably doesn't hold too many memories for most people. It's close to February so It's still cold and bleak, unless you live in Houston like me, and you're probably recovering from the holiday spending and trying to make some sort of feasible budget for the year. In 1995 it was probably the exact same for most people, unless you realize that the world cam just minutes from an all out nuclear war. Business Insider proclaimed "The World Was Never Closer To Nuclear War Than On Jan. 25, 1995" in what has become known as the Norwegian rocket incident. It started when Norway launched a missile that carried scientific instruments to study the aurora borealis. Former Soviet Russia, led by President Boris Yeltsin, apparently didn't get the memo from Norway to the proper channels and mistook it as a nuclear launch that was headed straight for Moscow. Remember, this is post-Cold War Russia. The Berlin Wall had fallen, supposed democratic elections had taken place and the U.S.S.R had been broken up into its various nation-states. Sure that doesn't mean that tensions weren't still high, but we at least had more open communications with the Politburo at that point.
Nevertheless, a missile was launched and Yeltsin and his advisors came minutes away from launching a counter-attack towards the U.S. that would've started an all out nuclear war. Five minutes. We literally came within the length of a Youtube video of the nuclear apocalypse. That's a pretty sobering thought.
Why not take five minutes today and write down what you're thankful for because in 1995, we came that close to losing everything.
Here's a quick video that recaps the incident.
There’s a piece in 12 Rules Of Creativity by Michael Atavar that says;
At all times in the creative process, great care must be taken to protect your soft and vulnerable qualities.
I wrestled with that statement for a long time. I was always taught that creativity was being vulnerable on a page or canvas or so on. The whole thought of bleeding out onto your art was something I totally got. Leave nothing on the field, as my baseball coach used to tell me, was how you lived. Well it turns out that only leaves you empty and with nothing left to create with the next day.
I wrote poetry for a long time that was marginal with the occasional okay piece of work. It was how I coped with a lot of stuff in high school and college. You could find me scribbling in coffee shops, furiously taking notes and then rewriting until only the most essential words were left. Sometimes I came up with some good stuff, but most of the time, I just left tired. I see now that all I was doing was taking my vulnerabilities and pushing them onto other people instead of actually dealing with them myself. Atavar calls this “working with shadows,” and encourages the creative person to have a network of people around them to bounce ideas off safely. I struggle with being told my work isn’t good enough, even if it honestly isn’t. My vulnerability quickly turns into shame when there’s push back, shame of not being good enough, not having a proper education or simply not being creative enough. Some days I’m a walking bag of doubt that comes from my shame and it totally kills my creative spirit.
In her book Rising Strong, Brené Brown writes, “Curiosity is a shit-starter. But that’s okay. Sometimes we have to rumble with a story to find the truth.” As creatives we are constantly curious, looking for that beam of light that glints off a building in just the right way to pique our imagination. We have to be vulnerable, chase down the story and wrestle it until it comes out looking like something that we knew it could be.
In college I wrote poems about drug use and being a rock star, not because I did or wanted to do anything of those things, but because it insulated me from writing about my real self.
Untitled #74
Sometimes on Friday I dream up
how easily I could become a cokehead.
Cutting lines with my friend's razor blade,
I would never keep my own in case of
horrible binge nights. An ornate mirror
would sit majestically in the middle of an
imaginary French coffee table that my parents
got at some antique barn in Indiana.
People would beg to do lines next to my gold
records and ’72 Telecaster Custom.
“Just one more before I drive home,” my
girlfriend would say, but I wouldn’t let her.
Even cokeheads have limits.
Maybe I would be involved in some type of
Eastern European supply chain that decided it
was easier to move the dust in through airports
in Kansas. Who’d expect that?
“Stuff’s good this month,” I’d snipe at the
Mafioso who switched bags, only to settle
in close to my Parisian throne.
Sometimes on Friday I dream of being
a cocaine addict, only to realize that it’s
Saturday morning and I’m too broke
to even afford prescription meds.
You can debate how good or bad that poem is, but what you can’t debate is that I was being vulnerable in a completely different way than I should have been. I was being risqué just to be risqué. I grew up pretty conservatively in the South and drugs were never something I would have dreamed of doing. So instead of being truly vulnerable and talking about my struggle with appearances or commitment, I daydreamed scenarios that were completely nonsensical. Needless to say, it didn’t really connect with anyone.
Atavar writes that you have to “work with small parts of your personality” to be creative and stay sane. I think this is what David Bowie did when he changed looks, costumes, names and hairstyles all the time. He was slowly letting us into his world just enough every time, so we could handle it.
I used to think that art was all about abandonment, but now I realize that only leads to losing yourself. A creative life is a life that shines a light onto things, however small that may be, so that others can enjoy the same view as you. That doesn’t take abandonment, just courage.
Last Sunday we spent the entire day taking my in-laws on a scavenger hunt through San Antonio. From eating at the spot where they got engaged to watching "A Charlie Brown Christmas" at the children's theater that my wife performed at when she was little, it was a walk down memory lane. There were no tacky Christmas ties or small kitchen utensils that would probably go unused, just a family spending the day reminding themselves of some of the great times they've had together. It was beautiful.
Co.Exist writer Jay Cassano took a look at this idea of experiences over things in his article "The Science Of Why You Should Spend Your Money On Experiences, Not Things," published earlier in 2015. For the article, Cassano interviewed Dr. Thomas Gilovich, a psychology professor at Cornell University who has spent the better part of two decades looking at the connection between money and happiness. The interesting thing that I picked up on is that money can actually make you happy, but the feeling that it leaves us with is usually short-lived. "We buy things to make us happy, and we succeed," said Gilovich. "But only for a while. New things are exciting to us at first, but then we adapt to them."
I really like to play video games. It's relaxing to me, although my wife may not agree, and I usually spend a short time after work playing to help wind down from the office and switch into home mode. The problem is that there's always a new game that comes along and offers a new experience, and usually comes with a $60-70 price tag. I kid myself into thinking it's an immersive experience and helps with my hand-eye coordination but in reality I'm just sitting on my couch while my wife colors next to me with only a few words said between us. That's not experience, just distraction.
Me in Paris at one of my favorite spots, Fontaine Saint-Michel, on our honeymoon in 2015.
I'll also be the first to admit that I'm really bad about spending money on things instead of experiences. I love to travel and will jump at the chance to go anywhere new, but find that if I just saved some of my money for such things instead of buying the latest Star Wars game, which was a bit of a let down anyways, it'd be a hell of a lot easier to afford some great weekend trips.
"Our experiences are a bigger part of ourselves than our material goods," says Gilovich. "You can really like your material stuff. You can even think that part of your identity is connected to those things, but nonetheless they remain separate from you. In contrast, your experiences really are part of you. We are the sum total of our experiences."
My MacBook Pro can't recreate the experience of sitting along the Seine on a cold day and feeling the river lap against the concrete of Pont Neuf. That's poetry, words and wind mixing together to create a timeless experience that imprints itself onto your consciousness. You don't normally hear much poetry written about gaining the high score on Halo or Black Ops 3. I'm sure it exists, it's just probably not very inspiring.
"Turns out people don't like hearing about other people's possessions very much," Cornell doctoral candidate Amit Kumar said while speaking to The Atlantic in 2014, "but they do like hearing about that time you saw Vampire Weekend."
At the end of Cassano's article, Gilovich talks about how we as a society should put more emphasis on experiences, noting that currently it's much easier to just purchase things. "By shifting the investments that societies make and the policies they pursue, they can steer large populations to the kinds of experiential pursuits that promote greater happiness," write Gilovich and coauthor, Kumar, in their recent article in the academic journal Experimental Social Psychology.
This is an approach that I'm all for. Gilovich even goes as far as positing that our priorities are skewed and that we should be making it easier to have these experiences, including more paid leave from work and better recreational spaces to have them in. What good is a public park if it's not kept up or safe? We owe it to ourselves to care about the places we live so we can experience beautiful things in them.
So as 2016 looms large and heavy upon us, I'm committing to spend less money on stuff that usually breaks and lets you down and more on living life with my family and friends. Besides, you have more to write about that way.
P.S. I'm not against video games at all, I just personally need to play them less and spend more time being creative for my own personal sanity.
There's something stark about Soviet design and propaganda art. The harsh lines. Limited colors. Lenin lurking ominously in the background. There's also something very intriguing in it. Those same harsh lines speak of a reality that I have no experience in. They draw me in to a world that still exists, just in a different fashion. Sure the fall of the U.S.S.R in 1989-90 put an end to a lot of the feelings that Westerners had about the Russian motherland but a lot of the harsh lines in those posters from the late 1910's to early 1970's still hold significance.
I'm a big fan of Wassily Kandinsky and his geometric style of modern art. My favorite Kandinksy work is his Yellow – red – blue (1925) that ultimately broke with the constructivism and suprematism that came to be the hallmark of Soviet propaganda posters, showcasing freedom from organization and order. It was his own way of rebelling against the revolution occurring around him in his homeland, shortly before moving to Germany and then Paris.
My first formal introduction to Soviet propaganda art was at London's Tate Modern where in the late 2000's they had an exhibition featuring great examples from that era. I was blown away by the intricacy of these pieces that were meant to inform, and ultimately model, a new society. Constructivism pushed using art for social purposes, a natural extension after the Russian revolution and the forming of the Soviet persona under Lenin. Art as a way to serve the political and cultural means of a country sounds completely counterintuitive to the art I think of now, which seems to be more countercultural than ever, pushing boundaries and holding governments to accountability.
Nowhere else but Mosselprom - 1925
One of my favorite examples is 1925's "Nowhere else but Mosselprom." It's almost an exercise in branding for a communist department store. Part of the appeal is the Russian alphabet and the otherworldly nature that it gives the composition. It's almost what you're used to, but not quite. I think this went a long way in shaping how Americans saw Russians. We didn't understand the letters in their language, immediately throwing their culture into a far off category.
The arrows point to the building in way that signifies 'this is the only place a true Russian would shop.' It's a powerful symbol. Also, notice the utilitarian design of the building, stark and made for a purpose that could easily change to a defensive stronghold at any moment. The use of red in the propaganda posters also made them stand out. The black and white backgrounds that usually accompanied the red accents played into the juxtaposition of the pieces. These weren't merely artworks, but advertisements from the government, not far off from a tweet from the White House today.
Liberated woman – build up socialism! - 1926
One thing that struck me was the inclusion of women in Soviet art. For a movement that was marked by macho-male figures, and still is to an extent, the female population was readily included in the worker's movement. In 1926's "Liberated woman – build up socialism!" you see a very strong portrayal of a female worker that contributed to society in the factories and fields alongside the men. This piece also highlights the use of red for declaring a message and black and white for the scene. The poster leaves what the women is holding in her hands a mystery. Is it a gun, broom or tool? That's up to the viewer, leaving room for any woman to see herself as part of the worker's movement.
For the part that it played in shaping how the common person saw the communist Soviet movement, it has to be hailed as one of the greatest ad campaigns ever executed. It rallied people behind a common cause and belief and allowed the government to use graphical representations to push its message. If that's not modern marketing, I'm not sure what is.
You can read more about Soviet design and propaganda art here.
