A lot to say, but not right now.
Simply,
Warsaw was awesome.
A quick-fire blog to share thoughts on improvisation, community, resilience, psychology and other things dear to me
1 month ago
At the beginning of this year I was in Germany, France, UK, Malaysia, Newcastle and then India, all for interesting reasons, within the space of just over a month.
I spent 5 weeks in India studying alchemical Tai Chi.
A few weeks after my return, I decided to up sticks and, for a while, take a room in Berlin.
Since I’ve been in Germany I’ve
* Been involved in planning and executing a civil responsibility awareness exercise on the streets of a city
* Performed in shows in three new cities, including my first festival slot
* Helped develop a play
* Teaching kids improv as part of a school initiative, including bits in German (a language I never spoke before last summer)
* Taken four workshops with teachers from many continents
All while maintaining my work blog and doing a big piece of work to ensure I’m not just solvent, but profitable for the period. And driving to Denmark. And seeing family.
Next week I travel to Warsaw to teach more improv, then back to Germany joining an event for an incipient international network. Then on to the UK, where I’m taking classes and performing as part of the London Slapdash impro festival. The rest of the summer is undefined, but includes more festival slots, teaching on a German kids summer camp, and maybe buying a van.
I like 2013.
2 months ago
"
I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.
Nixon laughed when I told him this. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you.”
It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he’s gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive — and he was, all the way to the end — we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.
That was Nixon’s style — and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don’t fight fair, bubba. That’s why God made dachshunds.
"- Hunter S Thompson on the passing of a political enemy - more here
2 months ago
"
Like its hero “Iron Man” takes false steps, stumbles, and even occasionally crashes, yet quickly recovers its footing.
The reason it’s so nimble is that director Jon Favreau (“Elf,” “Zathura”) and his fleet crew of actors grasp the action-fantasy premise and treat it with the looseness and sharpness of improvisational comedy. (Favreau himself has worked out with The Groundlings troupe in Los Angeles from time to time.) It’s difficult to tell how much of what they’re doing is taken directly from the script (credited to four writers, and who knows how many others labored behind the scenes), but even when they’re reciting somber dialog-bubble exposition, they treat it the way an improv actor would: smoothly feeding information into the scene, building a foundation on which everybody can work, and play.
"- Roger Ebert, jamming improv into unexpected places. RIP, Rog.
2 months ago
"
“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world gets smaller every day. At first it was so wide that I ran along and was happy to see walls appearing to my right and left, but these high walls converged so quickly that I’m already in the last room, and there in the corner is the trap into which I must run.”
“But you’ve only got to run the other way,” said the cat, and ate it.
"- Kafka - A Small Fable
3 months ago
| Notes: 1
Source: steelweaver
In which Alex and I struggle with Indian culture, the cult of factuality and substandard audio equipment. Forgive the occasional garbling and enjoy our Indian intellectual adventure! Oh, and also I rant about The Hobbit for about 20 minutes…
3 months ago
| Notes: 4
"It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written."
- ― Robert Hass
3 months ago
| Notes: 1
"When we talk about the brain, we have to choose between one of two models. When we describe or try to understand anything whatsoever, we do it by likening it to something else we think we already understand better. There are only two models available for the brain: the machine and the person. In the end we don’t have a language specifically for hemispheres. We only have the language we developed for people or for machines. Using the machine model is an approximation: so is the person model. A single hemisphere is capable of sustaining human life – and therefore being involved in the processes of ‘wanting’, ‘aiming’, ‘desiring’, ‘liking’, having ‘values’ – this is no more of a distortion than pretending it is simply a machine. When we see two hemispheres in the same person treating things quite differently – clearly valuing and favouring some things more than others – as can be seen in split-brain subjects, for example, it is almost perverse not to allow one to speak of the hemisphere as at least having some of the qualities of the person that relies on it. The fact is that we don’t know what sort of thing the brain is – or even what a single neurone is. The neurone is often modelled as a wire or a chip: however it is a vastly complex self-regulating partially autonomous system, with tens of thousands of channels and ports interacting with one another and the whole context of the body in which it lies, manufacturing, transmitting – it isn’t fully modelled as a wire or chip. Much is left out. Still less is the whole brain fully modelled as a machine."
- More Gilchrist.
3 months ago
"‘Plenty of things that are certain are mutually contradictory; plenty of things that are false contain no inconsistency. Contradiction is not a sign of falsehood, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.’"
- Pascal, quoted by Iain Gilchrist in response to Kenan Malik
3 months ago
"I have some sympathy with McGilchrist’s claim that there is a growing tendency to decontextualise knowledge, to think of the parts as more important than the whole, which is often regarded as no more than the sum of the parts, to substitute information for knowledge. But this is only one side of the story. Another trend, equally important, is the downgrading of reason, the celebration of tradition, intuition and myth, the glorification of the holistic, the organic and the local. If we are forced to use McGilchrist’s terminology and imagery, we might say that the problem is not that the left hemisphere has control over the right but that there has been a tendency to develop both ‘left hemispheric thinking’ and ‘right hemispheric thinking’ in isolation and that both are, in isolation, equally troublesome. Or to put it anther way, the problem is increasingly that reason has become mechanistic, contextualisation anti-rational."
- Kenan Malik, review/response to The Master and his Emissary. I’m pondering this one.
