→ Underachievement and happiness
Ryan published an insightful post over at 43Folders on New Years Eve. It’s one of the better resolutions I have come across recently.
He writes,
I’ve always felt that striving, however futilely—for perfection and transformative self-improvement—was the way to find happiness and purpose in this brutish and fleeting existence of ours.
Yet I’ve lately been wondering whether all this struggling against the inevitable through yes-saying, list-making, and project-contemplating isn’t in some ways contrary to my ultimate goal of finding some satisfaction “when I’m here.”
Extreme expectations apply extreme stress and create extreme resistance and procrastination. In so doing, they undermine our ability to get anything we want. We forfeit perfectly serviceable rewards in the pursuit of enormous and unattainable ones.
And quoting The Underachiever’s Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great,
stop worrying about being perfect. Dedicate yourself to the pleasures and benefits of mediocrity.
Effort and the new bold typography
Super heavy, geometric and counterless (or nearly counterless) type is everywhere these days. I was reading this interview yesterday with Wim Crouwel in which he spoke about the type in his poster Hiroshima from 1957.
Q: If you didn’t know that, you might think that it was conceived on the basis of a woodcut. Real printmakers, such as M C Escher, also did this.
A: Yes, of course, woodcut artists did the same thing, a black pane with fine lines. But I did not start out with black, adding white lines. I went about it the other way around. It was absolutely the construction of the letter itself that caused it to be spaced so tightly. It became a closed block, as it were. I wanted a word image that was itself very heavy and threatening. I had a sort of monolith in my head, in which the white had as humble a role as possible, which is why I chose this form, which would work from a distance as a black, total form, with those scorched chimneys rising up out of it.
Crouwel makes some interesting points (tho he loses me at “scorched chimneys”), but I actually found the question by Kees Broos a bit more interesting. I have dabbled a bit in woodcut recently. The thing I am quickly realizing is that carving into a block of wood takes significant effort; the fact of that exertion (a time as well as physical commitment) pushes you towards a sort of minimal expression – trying to get at what you are trying to get at with the least amount of work (actually not unlike programming).
It’s a bit different in Crouwel’s case, obviously (he says so himself), but the type forms produced by woodcut printmakers back in the day must have been at least partially influenced by this desire to minimize effort while working in the medium – something which is a bit lost in newer incarnations of bold, geometric type, I reckon.
Excerpts from ' The Future of Nature'
“I do not hope coho salmon survive. I will do whatever it takes to make sure the dominant culture doesn’t drive them extinct. If coho want to leave us because they don’t like how they’re being treated – and who could blame them? – I will say goodbye, and I will miss them, but if they do not want to leave, I will not allow civilization to kill them off.
When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to ‘hope’ at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We do whatever it takes.
Derrick Jensen, from ‘Beyond Hope’
“What has happened is that most people in our country, and apparently most people in the ‘developed’ world, have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food, clothing, and shelter. Moreover, they are rapidly giving proxies to corporations or governments to provide entertainment, education, child care, care of the sick and the elderly, and many other kinds of ‘service’ that once were carried on informally and inexpensively by individuals or households or communities. Our major economic practice, in short, is to delegate the practice to others.
...
“The ‘environmental crisis’ is no such thing; it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens.”
Wendel Berry, from ’ The Idea of a Local Economy’
The Future of Nature is an anthology of writing from Orion Magazine and edited by Barry Lopez. Thrilling ideas throughout. The book was a bit of an impulse buy (will generally pickup anything by Wendell Berry). I am glad I bought it and really surprised that I had never heard of Orion previously.
Excerpts from "Relational Aesthetics" by Nicholas Bourriaud
The possibility of a relational art (an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space), points to a radical upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced by modern art.
It is no longer possible to regard contemporary work as a space to be walked through…It is henceforth presented as a period of time to be lived through, like an opening to unlimited discussion…Once raised to the power of an absolute rule of civilisation, this system of intensive encounters has ended up producing linked artistic practices: an art form where the substrate is formed by intersubjectivity, and which takes being-together as a central theme, the “encounter” between beholder and picture, and the collective elaboration of meaning.
Over and above its mercantile nature and its semantic value, the work of art represents a social interstice. This interstice term was used by Karl Marx to describe trading communities that elude the capitalist economic context by being removed from the law of profit: barter, merchandising, autarkic types of production, etc. The interstice is a space in human relations which fits more or less harmoniously and openly into the overall system, but suggests other trading possibilities than those in effect within the system.
Aesthetics
An idea that sets humankind apart from other animal species. In the end of the day, burying the dead, laughter, and suicide are just the corrollaries of a deep-seated hunch, the hunch that life is an aesthetic, ritualised, shaped form.
It’s all excerpted out of context, but the book is a legible and thoroughly convincing read, full of exciting, powerful ideas.
