zoetrope

So, I finally got to myself to The Happy Show!  Terry and I went yesterday.  Like freeform cheeseballs, we listened to Pharrell's Happy on my itouch as we danced our way into the exhibit.  Why not?!

I've been very excited about the show, having streamed all I can find on-line in the way of interviews and talks with Sagmeister.  For over a decade, he's been researching and experimenting with what makes happiness, and his own in particular, and the show synthesizes some of what he's discovered.

Here's a slide from a TED talk he gave - it really grabbed me, so I screen-grabbed it, and then changed the colours.  It's an outline of what he's discovered "works" for him, a concept I'm now fleshing out for myself (I'll share my list when it's done).

Here's his list.  Some of the maxim's show up in the exhibit.

And here's a bit of The Happy Show, as experienced by me and Terry yesterday.

A very awesome interactive piece, expressing the maxim:     being not truthful works against me. 

This is me and Terry discovering it - then we started dancing in front of it, and running back and forth. 

Yes, we were the loud ones at the show.

Our answers to the question: what is your symbol of happiness.

Trying to look good limits my life.                                                                              Good maxim.

When I read this, first at home and then again at the show, each time I thought it referred to the concern with how we look in terms of our appearance: as in how we're dressed, our hair cut, and so on.  Surface.  (Maybe it's the clothing designer in me.)

Terry read it as meaning a concern for how we appear to others in terms of our behaviour, our choices, our way of living, our gestures, and so on.  Substance.

Either way, the concern for looking good is limiting, restricting our spontaneous expressions of self, arguably (maybe) censoring those most authentic manifestations of who we are.

Grooming vs/ hygiene, and finding the limiting line.  Authenticity vs/ obnoxiousness, and the location of that line.  

Perhaps, the boundaries to watch out for are the ones that maintain balance.  

I've long believed in the social function of beauty, what some call looking good, my take on it extending from surface to substance.  It's good to be reminded of this.

His work plan for a sabbatical.                  
I took notes (well, a photo) to inspire my own scheduling 
                                                              of the impending vastness of time before me,
                                                                                                         the vastness I'm stepping up to.

Another maxim:                                     assuming is stifling.  

What I like about this is its activeness.  

 Unlike that other one, 
assuming makes an ass of you and me, 
Sagmeister's angle tells us 
something useful to consider 
in terms of 
our expectations
our intentions
and most interestingly (to me)
our agency
in the ways we live
and engage 
with what's around us.

My conclusion.
                This is a shot of an old installation I put up in my place a few years back.  

Leaving the Happy Show yesterday, I thought of it as my response to the experience I had there.

dernier mot:
As Terry and I watched the 12 minute clip from Sagmeister's The Happy Film,
 I commented on a sense of melancholy I feel coming off the man and his work;
  Terry called it longing, which is a good word for it too.
Sagmeister rates his own level of happiness quite high,
and there's tangible euphoria in what he makes,
yet ...   
 Maybe Terry and I are off the mark,
yet ...   
  I now wonder about the possibility of being happy and wistful at the same time.
I think it's possible.
I think it's common.
I think it's human.
I think it's ok.

my thoughts on boyhood (the film) by Richard Linklater

Making anything takes time—making something with your hands, making a decision, an observation, a change—it takes time to do, and it also takes time away to reflect. The leisure of allowing time’s force to bear itself upon one’s work is seldom afforded, especially in the case of film. Michael Apted’s Up series is based in the passage of time, but sequentially, across 8 discreet segments that express the 49 years it so far encompasses. Boyhood gives us 12 years, but all within one piece.

So, what we see, Boyhood’s narrative conceit at first reading, is 12 years in the life of a boy, Mason, from 6 to 18, following with him through his own becoming. And it’s true, we do see this. What we also see though, when the screen drops dark and we walk away, is the work of an artist bringing to bear the inimitable insights that only time grants, when invited to.

Boyhood is infused with love and tenderness, cutting us all some slack about what’s imperfect and misguided in the shambolic jumble that is being alive and living a life. In Boyhood, people restrain themselves, without withholding; not settling for too little, yet accepting each other’s limitations because each seems to be aware that they too have their own.

Everything is mundane and anodyne, yet it’s all, also, potent and consequential. Like the fado singer who wails into words the deepest mysteries of what it means to live, Linklater, the mercifully milder balladeer, reminds us about the bittersweet truth that all is finite, and yet, splendidly, as Mason begins to comprehend, all we ever have is now. So use it well.

Linklater does—he uses time to tell this story, longitudinally checking in with now, twelve times. It’s across the passage of time, and through Mason’s growing, that we understand the ripening of self-knowledge and world wisdom; that, in the process of maturation and becoming, there’s no short cut. Time is a constant, and while we’re a part of it, the only way forward is through. So, what’s gained while we witness Mason feeling his way into his life and into his own becoming, is really our own. Witnessing the wilderness of Mason’s intimacies, we know our own; but we’re not on our own, alone, Linklater seems to say. Somehow, we’re all with Linklater, the film’s ultimate witness, a man who seems to have deliberately structured this work to document his own growth, looking back while casting forward from here, and what he sees and learns seems to lay perfectly over, or become embedded within, the gaze of a growing boy. The parallel lives of these two separate people are shared, and the continuity between them reaches across time and the screen to join with all of us.

In Boyhood, Linklater captures and conveys his own maturation as a man, exploring his own understanding of (his) life, and his own maturation as an artist, sorting, still, through his creative cosmos for what matters. And what he seems to be discovering is that these two things cohere: the artist and the man are one; the boy and the man are one; the maker and the witness are one—there is seamlessness between who we are and what we do, or there should be, or can be. And that’s what we can hope for, reach for, and make for ourselves.

We may all be just winging it, as Mason’s father confirms to his son, but what we do matters, and it matters most, Linklater is saying, to ourselves as much in our solitude as in our connections. At some point you’re no longer growing up, you’re aging, but no one can pinpoint that moment exactly, so take care, pay attention, notice the flow of the minutiae, cut a little slack, know that it matters, and take the time to make it so.

It’s the 2nd super moon of the summer;  this one—the middle of three—is the fullest of them in the sky, and the closest to us down here.

Saturday night at dusk I went to the park next door to pay my respects, and stayed till full night fell.  There were only a few of us out.  Four guys on the next bench over were drinking beer from cans, playing guitar and singing together;  they had the lyrics to “Lying Eyes” shining before them on an iphone.  Their voices weren’t great, but who cares.  They asked me to join them, and when I lay down later on the grass to take pictures of the sky, noticing me there, one asked if I was ok.

I was playing with a camera I have on loan till Wednesday, one passed along to me so I can decide if I like it enough to buy.  With a few technical things figured out, I then played with the moon.

Out again in reverence Sunday night, the air much warmer and soft on bare skin, the park’s slope was fuller.  People were out to look up at the sky.  There were small groups, some on blankets, others solitary, like me.

No camera this time, I listened to music: Benediction. (click the link to listen)

A plane passed overhead again, to the north of the moon, following the same flight path as the night before, at the same time.

A shade of cerulean hovered at the edges of the moon, bracketing it—I could see it especially when I looked from my peripheral vision.

Resting on the dry grass of the hill, with the warm air all around, and neighbours out and near, the mottled moon on its slow rise in the sky above all of us out gathered willingly below, we watched its passage through our lives tonight.

I remembered what being in love feels like, feeling myself there falling in love again with everything, anew.
It’s love made of unconditional willingness to be a part of it all, coming after forgiveness, or acceptance, of everything that’s come before, even if that everything’s not all understood, or, in fact, not understood at all.

It all comes surrender me to absolute mystery, where relinquishing of needing anything, even for a moment, busts me open to knowing about my own freedom.

So, I broke more rules last night, and was even better at it 2nd time 'round. 

I saw Frances Ha, in a bone fide movie theatre, and treated myself to a coke and popcorn. I then meandered home along the seawall on South False Creek. 

At Spyglass ferry dock, I came across one of the public pianos, and a young man was playing the entire soundtrack from Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, barefoot.  I sat on a bench and listened for a while, watching a few skiffs skim across the creek dodging sailboat squats.

Further on, I bought a cup of coconut ice cream and continued meandering. Close to home I jumped in a car2go because I was tired, and was then completely enchanted by a song on CBC's The Signal, so much so that I sat in the parked car to hear the song finish. 

Le Fabuleux Hier Soir de Zoe

Here's that Signal song, inexplicably called Obvious Bicycle, which is a great title.  The band is Vampire Weekend.