November 2007 Archives
What’s the connection between Arne Jacobsen, the great Danish designer and architect, and McDonald’s, the not-so-great-although-bloody-delicious fast food chain? When the young Arne won an award in Paris in 1925 for an essay he’d written, his father peered down at the programme notes and, seeing the words ‘Artiste Arne Jacobsen’, exclaimed, “But Arne, you are too fat to be an artist.” Is obesity the missing link between the two then? We think not.
From that moment on Jacobsen junior kept what was a blossoming belly in pretty good shape. So, no, obesity is not the link. Indeed, I don’t think there is one. So why did McDonald’s feel the need to throw out the existing and entirely unremarkable furniture in some of its restaurants (should we even call them that?) and replace it with original Jacobsen designs? Why not go for something not quite so expensive but which still improves on what went before? By all means perk things up a bit, but we all know about McDonald’s. We go there knowing full well what we’re going to get. A choice paint job might have sufficed.
Despite many people’s reservations about such a peculiar partnership, perhaps they could make it work, perhaps they COULD improve on the somewhat brittle ambience, surgery lighting, cheap laminated surfaces and fake plants. If that was going to happen, they’d have to stick to their guns. Clearly they selected Jacobsen designs because they believe wholeheartedly in original design and wanted to provide its customers with a suitably cutting edge experience. Only the best, eh, nothing else will do. And, comforted by the knowledge that McDonald’s were doing this for all the right reasons, Jacobsen himself might have delighted in seeing his egg and swan chairs used for all the right reasons, symbols of modernism at its best, serving a mass audience without compromising on style.
Unfortunately for McDonald’s, they screwed things up. Really? McDonald’s? Surely not. Having bought up a bunch of Jacobsen originals and put them to good use in the first of its pilot stores (on the Edgware Road), they were recently found to have placed fakes right alongside them. So their premise, it seems, was this:
LET THE WORLD SEE THAT WE EMBRACE CREATIVE BRILLIANCE AND VALUE AUTHENTIC DESIGN (i.e. JUMP ON THE BACK OF A GREAT DESIGNER’S WORK AND CLAIM SOME OF THAT EQUITY FOR OURSELVES), BUT THEN, WHEN NO ONE IS LOOKING, BUY RIPPED OFF IMITATIONS IN THE HOPE THAT NO ONE WILL NOTICE.
Predictably, the world did notice, and Fritz Hansen, manufacturers of Jacobsen products, pulled the plug on their multi-million pound deal and demanded all its furniture be removed from the stores immediately. CEO Jacob Holm released a statement:
"We simply will not cooperate or trade with companies who accept piracy, cost what it may. The fact that McDonald's has chosen to use pirated copies is even more surprising since the company itself is legendary across the world in pursuing trademark and copyright suits to safeguard its product and name."
So McDonald’s remains a monolithic corporation so devoid of imagination that they go ripping off other people’s. Having passed off all sorts for genuine beef down the years, perhaps they thought they could repeat the sting with this. We say stick to what you do best Ronald - making damned good but totally inauthentic beef burgers.
And to finish, a quote of Jacobsen’s that describes his own take on the creative process, one not far removed from our own:
“The key thing is seeing everything grow, setting out with a small sketch and seeing the whole and the details spring to life. It may sound affected - but it is the act of creation itself, and it is equally exhilarating whether one is working on a teaspoon or a national bank. There is always a point when one senses one's lack of skill, the doubt. Carrying out the thing, getting it to the point when one might say: There, now it is good - that point is hard to reach. Often, one sets very high goals for oneself. Perhaps too high.”
Nowhere else in the world will you find such a burgeoning street art scene than you do in Buenos Aires. Why though? Perhaps it’s to do with a politically involved population. BA is the social and political centre of Argentina so it’s inevitable that political commentaries be played out on the walls of its many streets; in Buenos Aires, there is much to say. Take the Dirty War of 1977, six years of military dictatorship and state-sponsored violence against activists, radicals, students and anyone with remotely left wing views. In 1976, a year before the violence began in earnest, one general made a sinister prediction: “We’re going to have to kill 50,000 people: 25,000 subversives, 20,000 sympathisers, and we will make 5,000 mistakes.” In reality, the number of deaths was nearer 30,000. They were known then, and still are, as ‘The Disappeared’, taken from their homes, their bodies thrown like lifeless sacks into the Rio de la Plata. Their families (mostly the mothers) met every Thursday at the Plaza de Mayo; they became known as Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, and many still meet today in the hope of being reunited with their children. Around the square itself, images of their white scarves (symbols of their plight) have been painted on the tiles (see above). It’s disturbing stories such as these that inform much of the art you see around you when walking the streets of Buenos Aires.
But not all the street art there is overtly political. DOMA, an Argentine collective of artists who emerged during the now defining year for Argentinean street art, 1998, are not so interested in a turbulent political past as they are in the present, the here and now. Since ‘98, they’ve set out to interfere in all the information channels available to us in today’s media saturated environment (Argentina is widely considered to be the most European city in South America), specialising in motion graphics, animation, filming, VJing and toy design. They move all over the world, intent on studying people’s reactions to their works. After all, what is the point of art if there’s no reaction, no interaction? “We could write a book about reactions,” they say. It’s what interests them most. They put their Giant Dummy (pictured) downtown in Buenos Aires and the way most people reacted to it was, I believe, a little sad, if not entirely predictable. On their way to work, briefcase in one hand, papers in the other, people walked by as if it wasn’t even there. Most didn’t even look at it. Some people, or rather most people, just aren’t interested in anything remotely creative, imaginative or just plain fun. They haven’t the time; there are serious matters to attend to. I often think that about people in this country. People walk the streets with eyes trained on the ground in front of them. They notice nothing, stopping only when pedestrian lights tell them to, on a one man mission to nowhere. Of course, it was the younger generations that fell in love with the Giant Dummy, perhaps the ones who haven’t yet surrendered to the pressure to conform.
I know people living in Buenos Aires at the moment. All I hear is good things, snapshots in my inbox of a place where anything goes, a city regalvanised by its thriving culture, whose city walls are but great canvases to the imagination.
Read about DOMA’s views on corporate sponsorship of street artists and graffiti, their love of Nintendo, their analog appreciation of the world, and recent collaborations with Kidrobot in a great little interview here; and be sure to check their own website here.
And for "trends, innovations and inspirations about Buenos Aires - a true map of the city", this will do the trick.
We just had to put this in. For those who’ve never heard of Tony Henry from St. Albans, Hertfordshire, allow us to explain...Last Wednesday, Tony became a rare thing indeed: a popular Englishman on the pitch at Wembley. At least to the Croats in the stands he was. Charged with singing both national anthems, Tony kicked off with the away team’s song and, instead of singing “Mila kuda si planina”, which translates roughly as “You know my dear how we love your mountains”, he in fact sung “Mila kura si planina”, which translates accurately as...
“My dear, my penis is a mountain”.
What’s this got to do with SUSO? Well, we like to think he did on purpose, that he saw a chance to do something imaginative and took it with a determined pair of hands. Yes, that’s why.
“Even graffiti, if you see it in a different way, can be celebratory. I don’t think it and these buildings always need to be associated with violence. They are quite grand structuresin their own way.” DAVID HEPHER
Or, at least, they were once grand. They were once modernist symbols of regeneration and great concrete odes to Le Corbusier’s infatuation with “breton brut”. In the UKin particular, this strain of modernism, the one that spawned structures such as The British Film Institute and The National Theatre on the Southbank, became known as Brutalism, and it accounted for many concrete high rise housing blocks like those we encounter in Hepher’s pictures. Structures like Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower in West London once represented modernism’s last stand. Goldfinger himself lived on the top floor of a similar building to try and demonstrate the benefits of high rise living to a cynical public; tall buildings served a worthy function at a time when local councils were still reeling from war damage. But then came tales of women raped in the elevators and children robbed by heroin addicts, and so the buildings earned a reputation. Today, these tall, dank buildings, once upon a time built for the good of society, are seen as towering symbols of inner city angst.
Hepher, it seems, wants to remind us of a more illustrious past. His pictures are not intended, as I presumed, as social commentary or doom-laden depictions of degeneration. They aren’t as predictable as that, and that’s why I like them. Painted on canvases of concrete, making them both of the city and about it, Hepher combines graffiti and photographs of these buildings to try and shift people’s opinions about objects they uniformly condemn as ugly or dangerous. He sees beauty where others don’t.
The conservative view puts both graffiti and tower block living in the same hat as gun crime and gang culture, but Hepher, a man of 72 years no less, uses his creativity to show us that this isn’t necessarily the case.
Have you ever been so determined to do something that you’re willing to risk actual bodily harm, if not the permanent use of your body, to get it done? Have you ever wondered what it might be like to try something that hadn’t been done before, to redefine the boundaries of your discipline, to rewrite certain rules, to seek change rather than settle for straight up passive acceptance? Have you ever dreamed of being at the forefront of the thing you love most? Have you ever set out to get there? Have you devoted your entire life to getting there? And did you get there?
Zach Shaw has done all the above. That’s why we’ve signed him up - because he’s retained that same attitude throughout his career as a rider, that imagination, that creativity and that determination to succeed, to be at the front not the back, to change the way people think about the things he does. He invented the 360 flip on a BMX. Today it’s called the Zakflip, although we’ve no idea why.
How the trick came about tells you everything you need to know about what it takes to succeed, not just in BMX and others sports, but in anything. He imagines something in his head. It seems crazy; no one has done it before. Even so, he then sets out to learn how to make it happen. And he doesn’t give up.
“I came up with the idea after doing the Mansfield Demo with Mat Hoffman in 1990 where he pulled the first flair. It got me thinking that a 540 flair was possible but I had to learn flips first! When I finally got the opportunity to learn flips I started messing with flipping and spinning (on a jump). I could do 180 flips no problem but getting the extra rotation was really hard and I never could get more than flip 270s until I went to the jump at Crowhurst in Hastings.
When I first jumped there I realised that this was THE jump i could do it on. I didn't say anything to anyone there and just rode in to try it. The first one I rotated full 360 and landed then my back wheel slid out. The second attempt the same thing happened and on the third attempt I landed sideways and blew the spokes out of my back wheel and had the wind taken out of me as I landed on my ribs. I vowed to pull the trick the very next weekend. When I went back to Crowhurst it took me 2 attempts to pull what’s now known as the Zakflip.”
Zach’s won pretty much everything in his time, yet he still bases himself in the UK and continues to give something back to the sport here by nurturing local talent.
And so you don’t all go to bed tonight disillusioned by football, take a look at this. This is football as it should be. It’s been lovingly put together by someone for whom the great man clearly meant a great deal; check the sound effects that go with it...
Why do we love football? Because it’s the beautiful game. Because of the artistry. Because of the little half turn. Because of the angled pass with the outside of the boot. Because of the team. Because of togetherness. Because of the fight, the heart, the steel, the passion, the belief. Because of the power. Because of the love. Because of the control. Because of the subtleties, the unseen touches, the flicks and the feints. Because of the theatre, the crowds, the loyalty, the support, the devotion, the passion. Just because.
Year upon year of predictable failure and campaigns devoid of any of the above left me clinging to a few faint traces of hope leading into last night’s game. Might we, for once, play well? Might I actually enjoy an England game? 90 minutes later, all hope was gone. What is the point exactly? I’m not happy we failed. Nor am I hopeful that this will elicit some kind of reaction deep within the FA or at grass roots level so that, in a gazillion years time, we’ll win the World Cup. Nope. I’m just beyond caring. I woke up this morning entirely ambivalent about the whole thing. The Euro will be a better place for it. When have we ever contributed anything to major tournaments beyond false dawns writ large across back pages. We will win the world cup, we scream. The rest of the world just laughs, and rightly so.
Last night, Lawrenson described Croatia as a ‘technical’ team. Um, yes, they are technical insofar as they can control a ball, turn around, keep hold of it and pass it accurately to a teammate who can then do something similar. But we’re not talking about Zico, Platini and Best here. This is Croatia. What Lawro should have said, perhaps, was that Croatia are a ‘technical’ side compared to England, who, as a collective, are a sad and abject wasteland devoid of anything even resembling technique.
Continue reading THE GREAT CREATIVE VOID.
Magenta. We love it. It’s had something of a renaissance these last few years. It’s like those batwing tops women are wearing again which enable them, in tight situations, to jump off buildings and float to safety like the Dark Knight himself.
Yes, Magenta is back, and has been for some time now. But there’s a chance it will be taken away from us by that malevolent b*****d T-Mobile. They claim ownership of the colour in Europe. No one else can use it, they say. Ban us from using one of our most beloved creative tools? O2 monopolise the iPhone, and now this?
We will not be moved. Rebel here.
Yes, Magenta is back, and has been for some time now. But there’s a chance it will be taken away from us by that malevolent b*****d T-Mobile. They claim ownership of the colour in Europe. No one else can use it, they say. Ban us from using one of our most beloved creative tools? O2 monopolise the iPhone, and now this?
We will not be moved. Rebel here.
Peter Schneider’s superb novel, The Wall Jumper, reminds us that, even in difficult times - in this case a city gripped by the effects of the Berlin Wall - there’s plenty room for a little imagination, creativity and determination. This excerpt makes the point, albeit with a decent helping of irony...
“In the early sixties a circus acrobat had used a high-tension wire as a tightrope to walk into the West. And hadn’t a pole-vaulting champion used the Wall as a bar and cleared it with room to spare? There was no end to the list, and on the basis of sheer imagination, it would be difficult to select candidates for a hall of fame (of wall jumping).
The suppression in the DDR of sports that might lead to border crossing - ballooning and scuba-diving, for instance - had loosed a tide of fantasy and produced a generation of inventors. Snorkels, diving masks, and oxygen tanks had hardly disappeared from the stores before hobbyists of all kinds began fashioning replacements out of bicycle inner tubes, home heating gas containers, and rubber aprons. Where in a hall of fame would one place the auto mechanic who developed a miniature motor to pull him across the Baltic under water? And how would one rank the engineer who, after searching the specialty bookstores in vain for textbooks on aerodynamics, rediscovered the principal of the hot air balloon?
The one sure thing - and here the dialogue on the Wall could take a philosophical turn - was that every improvement in the border system had spurred the creative drive to find a new loophole. The urge to master the Wall didn’t differ in substance, perhaps, from the impulse to climb K2: the Wall, like the mountain, was there; and the challenge would persist as long as the Wall remained standing.”
“In the early sixties a circus acrobat had used a high-tension wire as a tightrope to walk into the West. And hadn’t a pole-vaulting champion used the Wall as a bar and cleared it with room to spare? There was no end to the list, and on the basis of sheer imagination, it would be difficult to select candidates for a hall of fame (of wall jumping).
The suppression in the DDR of sports that might lead to border crossing - ballooning and scuba-diving, for instance - had loosed a tide of fantasy and produced a generation of inventors. Snorkels, diving masks, and oxygen tanks had hardly disappeared from the stores before hobbyists of all kinds began fashioning replacements out of bicycle inner tubes, home heating gas containers, and rubber aprons. Where in a hall of fame would one place the auto mechanic who developed a miniature motor to pull him across the Baltic under water? And how would one rank the engineer who, after searching the specialty bookstores in vain for textbooks on aerodynamics, rediscovered the principal of the hot air balloon?
The one sure thing - and here the dialogue on the Wall could take a philosophical turn - was that every improvement in the border system had spurred the creative drive to find a new loophole. The urge to master the Wall didn’t differ in substance, perhaps, from the impulse to climb K2: the Wall, like the mountain, was there; and the challenge would persist as long as the Wall remained standing.”
There’s been some debate where we are as to just how good a film Ridley Scott’s American Gangster really is. I loved it. Others here didn’t. I thought part of its beauty hinged on us never quite knowing who to side with in the film. I wanted to love Denzel (playing Frank Lucas, the Harlem-based drug lord who, rumour has it, was making over $1 million a day from selling heroin shipped directly from Asia by the US military during the VIetnam years) but he just kept doing annoying stuff. You know, little things like reshaping his cousin’s head with the roof of a grand piano. Not much, but enough to make me think twice.
In truth, there are, admittedly, flaws to the film. Both leads, Denzel and Russell Crowe, who plays the cop that eventually bring Lucas down, are perhaps a little dull, and the movie takes a while to gather pace. But I left the cinema with that unmistakable feeling of awe I get from films that make me wonder at the sheer effort and skill required to create them. Visually, like all Scott productions, it’s stunning, but as a whole, as an all-singing, all-kicking movie experience, is it a genuine silver-screened embodiment of imagination, creativity and determination, or does it fall some way short?
All those in favour...
In truth, there are, admittedly, flaws to the film. Both leads, Denzel and Russell Crowe, who plays the cop that eventually bring Lucas down, are perhaps a little dull, and the movie takes a while to gather pace. But I left the cinema with that unmistakable feeling of awe I get from films that make me wonder at the sheer effort and skill required to create them. Visually, like all Scott productions, it’s stunning, but as a whole, as an all-singing, all-kicking movie experience, is it a genuine silver-screened embodiment of imagination, creativity and determination, or does it fall some way short?
All those in favour...
Barely a day seems to go by without news of someone killed. On the street where I live, three people have been murdered in the last six months. Last week I came out the tube and all the roads around had been cordoned off. It was six o’clock. A young man had been knifed. A young man had died.
These and other issues affect Amanda Greenidge and the city at large. But Greenidge is determined to do something about it, to say something about it, to try and bring to light social problems through more powerful means. We hear about these things happening, but what do we do about them? We read about them in the paper and listen to the newsreaders on TV but, again, not much seems to happen. I found looking at Greenidge’s pictures different, more moving, and so here I am writing about them. She has perfectly captured the issue in line and form, presenting here two kids with nothing to do, no one to tell them what to do, no school to go to; even the playground beyond them, a symbol of the things that once kept kids occupied, holds no interest to them. But judging by the look on their faces, a gun certainly does.
In these pictures, Greenidge finds a more penetrative route to social commentary and presents to us far more vividly than any newspaper column ever could the fierce realities faced by many kids growing up in under-privileged areas of the UK. And in so doing, she makes us stop and think, even for a moment.
It’s using creativity to hold a mirror up to society. And it doesn’t always look good.
Check out Amanda’s other works here.
Cyclists. Unnecessarily tight clothing. Difficult to get past in your car. That’s about as much as I knew about those who choose to cycle mile after mile on their beloved weekends. But that’s because I didn’t understand the sport at all. And not understanding something invariably means it means nothing.
So I began Tim Krabbé’s much acclaimed cycling classic The Rider with some hesitation. I’d enjoyed The Vanishing, but a book about cycling? Please.
A hundred and fifty short pages later, I was thinking about getting some tight shorts myself while browsing through lightweight bike frames online. Through the story of a single mountain race (the Tour du Mont Aigoual) and all its little nuances - the strategy, the relationships, the climbs, the descents, the flats - seen through the eyes of a rider, and interspersed with intriguing anecdotes plucked from the annals of cycling history, Krabbé perfectly describes what is, in fact, a wonderfully rich and complex sport. The structure of a single race lends itself ideally to a narrative such as this, and with his story - based on fact, with a few details elaborated - we experience the slightly disturbing tactical ingenuity required to succeed, all played out on a unique canvas of peer-to-peer etiquette.
But besides all that, what makes cycling all the more extraordinary is the sheer will of the riders who partake. Surely there are few places where determination is made more explicit than on a mountain climb, four hours into the race, aboard two wheels and a saddle - in a pair of tight shorts...
Continue reading WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT EH?.
I get angry when I can’t sleep. I start trying really hard, as if closing my eyelids tight, squeezing them shut, will help. I become so determined to sleep that I forget how to. But when I forget determination and return to the beginning, to my imagination, is when I start to drift into slumber. I start to think about all the things I ever want to do; and it calms me. And I sleep. For me the imagination is a constant refuge, by day or night. I like listening to it. In my imagination, it’s as if I can do anything and go anywhere. Emily Bronte says it better than I ever could:
When weary with the long day's care,
And earthly change from pain to pain,
And lost, and ready to despair,
Thy kind voice calls me back again:
Oh, my true friend! I am not lone,
While then canst speak with such a tone!
So hopeless is the world without;
The world within I doubly prize;
Thy world, where guile, and hate, and doubt,
And cold suspicion never rise;
Where thou, and I, and Liberty,
Have undisputed sovereignty...
Continue reading TO IMAGINATION.
This is the Reebok Miami Vice limited edition. Why? Good question. Well because this was one of the early examples of the worlds of Miami Vice and trainers colliding and any excuse to feature a pretty disgusting bit of footwear is not to be missed. Michael (Miami Vice, Collateral, Heat) Mann has directed a new commercial for Nike, thus generating another collision between 'the Vice' and the shoe. It's work so good, it almost makes me want to roll the sleeves up on my jacket in homage to the mighty Crocket and Tubbs. More than this, Mr Mann has managed to get us excited by American Football, making it look more than just a turgid stop/start,stats laden romp between men in tight trousers and pads. Anyway, check out this awesome piece of work from a master of cinema and never buy shoes with palm trees on them. Ever.
Lego. Oh how I used to love it. If you’re a guy, you probably did too. And if you’re a girl, then you’ll remember swallowing a few of your brother’s bricks.
Darren Neave and John Cake, AKA The Little Artists, still do love Lego, and they use it rather mischievously to question what it means to be an artist in today’s commodity-driven and throwaway culture by recreating famous artworks (particularly those of the YBA artists of the early 90s) with Lego bricks and people. No glue, no painting on the figures. Pure Lego. In themselves, the works are imaginative, creative and, more than anything, amusing.
But I think there’s more to them than that. Lego has always placed great emphasis on encouraging creativity in young children by getting them to dream something up in their minds before making those dreams happen with the tools (the little bricks) they supply. Neave and Cake’s works are, in effect, a silent homage to that Lego aesthetic: little bricks that, with a little imagination and creativity, as well as a great deal of determination, eventually became art.
We’re not sure if they did this, but it’s worth a look anyway.
Darren Neave and John Cake, AKA The Little Artists, still do love Lego, and they use it rather mischievously to question what it means to be an artist in today’s commodity-driven and throwaway culture by recreating famous artworks (particularly those of the YBA artists of the early 90s) with Lego bricks and people. No glue, no painting on the figures. Pure Lego. In themselves, the works are imaginative, creative and, more than anything, amusing.
But I think there’s more to them than that. Lego has always placed great emphasis on encouraging creativity in young children by getting them to dream something up in their minds before making those dreams happen with the tools (the little bricks) they supply. Neave and Cake’s works are, in effect, a silent homage to that Lego aesthetic: little bricks that, with a little imagination and creativity, as well as a great deal of determination, eventually became art.We’re not sure if they did this, but it’s worth a look anyway.
Orange have a new website to support their unlimited text promotion.
http://unlimited.orange.co.uk
They say you can get to the bottom. Apparently there’s someone out there, somewhere, who did it. Once.
It’s digital at its most imaginative. It plays on your mind. It’s sick. It made me spend half an hour scrolling and scrolling and scrolling... and scrolling. I gave up. Where was my determination when I needed it most? Whoever created that site had plenty - the range of little Flash games and widgets is just mind boggling, and every one of them is a little world of imagination and creativity in itself.
As a whole, the site is pure digital mastery.
So Roger Federer lost his first game in the Shanghai Masters. You just know it will only make him more determined to win the tournament outright. It’s just the nature of the man (and all great sportsmen for that matter), to overcome adversity despite not performing at his peak. The will is the wings that carry talent across the line, and pure determination so often the difference between maestro and wasted talent, between fully fledged genius and meaningless potential.
And for a reminder as to just how brilliant Roger Federer is, take a look at this piece by David Foster Wallace (it’s over a year old now but no less evocative today) that compares watching the great man to something verging on religious experience -
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html
Here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite:
“Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws. Good analogues here include Michael Jordan, who could not only jump inhumanly high but actually hang there a beat or two longer than gravity allows, and Muhammad Ali, who really could “float” across the canvas and land two or three jabs in the clock-time required for one. Federer is of this type - a type that one could call genius or mutant or avatar. He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan and Maradona, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces. He looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light.”
And for a reminder as to just how brilliant Roger Federer is, take a look at this piece by David Foster Wallace (it’s over a year old now but no less evocative today) that compares watching the great man to something verging on religious experience -
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html
Here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite:
“Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws. Good analogues here include Michael Jordan, who could not only jump inhumanly high but actually hang there a beat or two longer than gravity allows, and Muhammad Ali, who really could “float” across the canvas and land two or three jabs in the clock-time required for one. Federer is of this type - a type that one could call genius or mutant or avatar. He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan and Maradona, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces. He looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light.”
BBC1 launched their Heroes and Villains series on Monday with a look at the young Napoleon. Despite what he might represent today - particularly in Britain where we like nothing more than a nice bit of gentle Frog bashing - you can’t deny it, Napoleon was a thoroughbred genius of the most imaginative, creative and determined kind. Just out of interest, what do you want to do by the age of 31? Or what had you done by 31? Napoleon? Why, he crowned himself Emperor of France. As you do.
One well documented quote of his stood out in Monday’s program as he confronted the French revolutionary whom, to put it lightly, he disliked somewhat:
“GLORY IS FLEETING, BUT OBSCURITY LASTS FOREVER.” Something worth remembering, we think.
One well documented quote of his stood out in Monday’s program as he confronted the French revolutionary whom, to put it lightly, he disliked somewhat:
“GLORY IS FLEETING, BUT OBSCURITY LASTS FOREVER.” Something worth remembering, we think.
Freddie and Hollie are a pair of young and imaginative Londoners, plying their trade in advertising, who also run their own blog on the side where they post up ideas they think could make a difference, however small. Anything goes - it’s just a bunch of ideas in need of the determination to make them real; apparently Freddie and Hollie don’t have time. There’s a web widget that changes the colour of popular websites so you don’t get busted at work; a Poppy ‘gift’ on Facebook to raise funds for the appeal (can’t believe they didn’t do this); recycling ideas for piles of freesheets polluting the capital’s streets; and my favourite, a direct mail idea for Sony’s ‘Colour Like No Other’ campaign which involves sending brightly coloured bin bags to one city street so that, when rubbish day comes around (assuming people remember - we often forget!), the street comes alive.
I am Burial. No, really, I am. Not. Burial himself was once told, in no uncertain terms, that he was in fact a girl. Someone had met her, you see. He isn’t of course. He’s a man. A young one - in his early twenties. And that’s about as much as we know.
A few weeks ago I was in Manchester to see Underground Resistance live at the Warehouse Project. For those that don’t know, UR are a Detroit-based musical collective and record label (and entirely deserving of their own post here - anyone?) who have continued to pioneer the sound of techno ever since their humble beginnings in the late 80s. They have always been keen to conceal their identities - not so much these days but certainly earlier on - and up in Manchester each of them was wearing a mask. Drexciya, a duo who released on Underground Resistance, went to similar lengths to conceal their identities. The idea was to put the music first, meaning people’s appreciation of it would not be tarnished by what they knew about them as people. It’s music for music’s sake, and in today’s climate of almost fetishistic obsession with the artist (however worthy) rather than the art, in which people have become slaves to the cult of personality, that’s quite refreshing.
But it can have an inverse effect, and Burial is a case in point. So good has he been at keeping his real world identity from the hungry masses - only a handful of people know he makes tunes - that his new album, Untrue, took on an almost mythical status even before its release. This meant that, as I clambered into my car last Monday evening (is there a better place to get one on one with music than in the car?) and slipped the new album into the CD player, I felt like I’d almost have to like the new album as a matter of course. It was as if it was no longer a case of music at face value.
That was until the wonderfully awkward vocals of Archangel began to drift in and out of that unmistakable swamp of skippy percussion, hollow snares and tear-inducing melodies, all smothered, like an Impressionist picture, in a thick impasto of trademark crackle. There and then, only a minute into the album, I forgot the hype and I belonged to the music. I was submerged, and I didn’t come up for air until the 4x4 rhythms of Raver had subsided into the long and distant crackle. The legitimacy of the hype had been confirmed.
Burial is routinely talked about as dubstep. But he’s not really is he? Dubstep is incredibly diverse, but it’s becoming increasingly self-referential as its popularity continues to boom and, as a consequence, a little unoriginal. You can’t say that about Burial (or, for that matter, Hyperdub, the label he releases on - check their latest 12 by Quarta 330). It’s the mark of a great musician, as it is with a great painter or writer, that you recognise their work in an instant. That’s how it is with Burial. And, on top of all that, he does it all with a battered PC and an aging audio editor, as if substantiating our own belief that you don’t need external resources to do great things. You just need a little imagination, creativity and determination.
Burial has them in spades.
http://www.myspace.com/burialuk
SUSO is using creativity to make something of the things we imagine. It’s the will to succeed, to do what others say can’t be done. It’s the struggle for success, the challenge of the unknown and belief in the self. It’s now, right now. Not yesterday, not tomorrow. Now. It’s seeing the possible and never the impossible.
It’s Imagination, Creativity and Determination. And it’s the confidence to use all three.
IMAGINATION
Close your eyes. See the world as you want it. Think what might be rather than what is. Fly. Breathe underwater. Dance on the moon. Do what you dare not do. Say what you’ve always wanted to say. Speak to her. Speak to him. Dream and then dream some more. Go where you’ve never been. Scrawl a masterpiece across the mind’s eye and forget reason, just for a moment. This is the world according to you. This is the bright untroubled sky, an escape from reality and her legion of limitations. Forget reality, and think - really think - about the things that you see.
Listen to your imagination. It’s where ideas are born.
CREATIVITY
Do something about the things you see. Turn desire into action, dissatisfaction into motion. Embrace discomfort and make the unknown known. Learn something. Free yourself from the constraints of reality. Remain resistant to reason. Choose active change over passive acceptance. Be enthralled by the future and disrespect the past. It doesn’t matter anymore. Progress. Generate. Create light from dark and discover order in chaos. Listen to yourself, and then bring method to the imagination.
Use your creativity. It makes the imagined real.
DETERMINATION
Believe and persist. It’s too easy not to. Know the difference between success and failure, between genius and curiosity, between maestro and musician. And know what it is to make a difference. Take the road less travelled, and take it to get back, too. Fall down. Get up. Fall down. Get up again. Swim against the tide. Take criticism and defy convention. Determine your own limitations and resolve your desires as the mind sees fit.
Lean on your determination. It can take you anywhere you want.
NO CAN’T DO
People say it can’t be done, that pipe dreams and ambition are too divorced from reality to ever be made real. Quit dreaming, they say. Wake up. Welcome to the real world, a place where the imagination is a momentary escape not a source of success, where creativity is a luxury we can’t afford, where determination need get you no further than nine to five. Accept what you’ve got and blend seamlessly into the fabric of modern life. No one else will see you there. And no one else will care. You’ll be safe that way.
This is popular wisdom, but three little words can reveal wisdom as flawed. Three little words with the power to change the world:
IMAGINATION. CREATIVITY. DETERMINATION. Together, they represent the SUSO attitude of NO CAN’T DO.
Continue reading INTRODUCING SUSO.
