Alexander McQueen: Why I'll Miss Him

Alexander McQueen. High Heeled Shoe 2009

By whatshewears

Flickr Creative Commons

The death of Alexander Lee McQueen so shocked and upset and touched me that I left my deadlines to spend an hour or so that evening setting up a post, just a few pix, to express my feelings.

Next morning I took it down.  "What am I thinking?" I thought.  What exactly are my feelings?

You see, my formative years were spent in the women’s liberation movement, which still has a beating heart.  We had then, and still have, concerns about the objectification of women.  And here I am, wanting to comment on the death of someone who made his living by objectifying womanhood, if not women themselves, sometimes in the most extreme ways.  I cannot let that go by me.  I have to interrogate myself on that one, I thought.

He was at the pinnacle of a profession about which one must ask questions, and he seemed to be asking them.  Nevertheless, he was hailed as a genius by even its silliest propagandists, sycophants and hangers-on, those one would most want to question, as well as by its serious and thoughtful adherents. Did they not see the questions, or where the questions not there?  Did they not see the anger? I am quite perplexed.

So today I have to spend another hour thinking about that, sorting it out and re-posting.

Now (full disclosure), I am not a fashionista, or even minimally fashionable, come to that. Those who know me might chortle at the thought.  I don’t read the magazines that peddle destructive fantasies to women, nor even flick through them in waiting rooms. All that stuff made me very unhappy once, and I totally reject the rampant consumerism that they promote.  Today I dress for comfort not for speed.

But fashion is not simply clothing (and perhaps on the catwalk its not even clothing), its also art and creativity,  and something about this guy's work got to me.  There is social commentary,  less widely noted than the brilliance and originality of his styling, but the fact that it reached me, about as far from the fashion world as it is possible to get, is evidence in itself of the power of the message, whatever it is.

His work is very, very edgy: teetering like his models at the boundaries of composure, terror, glamour, melancholia, sexuality, the macabre, the sweet and the terribly painful. This teetering is interesting in itself: he manages to convey so much contradiction and complexity, to use the extremes of his industry to criticize it, and to suggest, more than suggest, that things are not quite right, not as they aught to be. 

He was part of Claire Wilcox' hugely successful exhibition on “Radical Fashion” at the Victoria and Albert Museum for the Decorative Arts, way back in 2002.  His models were in glass cages, and thousands of moths were released   Moths?  *blinks rapidly*!  Talk about a many-layered metaphor!

And take a look at this little number, that is so sweet and lovely in concept, and yet so strangely armoured and tense in execution, so threatening.  There's a dissonance there: hard to define, but definitely there, I think. That is what he does - makes you feel uncertain.  And yet a beautiful dress, beautifully made.

And then there are those astonishing shoes of his.  So incredibly extreme and high and sexy, so odd, so puzzling, so outrageous and glamorous, but at the same time so downright ugly, and hinting at disablement: the club foot, the bound foot, limitations in mobility. And talk about teetering ….

 

 Dazed and Confused Magazine.  October 2009

Downloaded from Flickr

....  hints of stilts, the circus, the illusion, the freak show....

This video is fascinating.  I hope you have time to view it.  Its of his last  show, for Spring 2010.  Maybe you saw it streamed live, in itself an innovation.

In stark contrast to the lovely, feminine and familiar McQueen silhouettes, the parallel (literally) between the models and the cameras (or are they machine tools?), different kinds of automata, each on their respective runways, endlessly mirrored in the backdrop, is shocking, isn't it? And perfectly clear.  It's actually a terrifying image of  the self-absorbed, self-referential elements of the fashion industry, isn't it?

And what about the lightly reptilian fabric, and the distinctly reptilian hair-dos, and the stalking gait of the models, forced on them by the shoes? Combine this with the predatory silhouette of the cameras, like a couple of praying mantis: and we all know what praying mantis do with their own, with those they "love".

And what about this one?  The machine tools, this time spray guns, actually attack the model innocently pirouetting between them in her flouncy white dress.  It's very beautiful and original, and got thunderous applause, but it looks like a gang rape, or at least an absolutely devastating hissy fit.




I know nothing of the theory of fashion, nor much about McQueen or his life, so I should not, but I do, dare to comment: there is something about his attention to both the beauty and the horror of fashion that is important, as well as arresting.  He was angry, in fact I think he was deeply angry, and he was asking very big questions about his industry, from deep within it.

Not questions about the objectification of women, perhaps,  more about the cruelty and rapaciousness of the fashion/entertainment world, and perhaps also, by implication, the society of which it is the expression. This last is perhaps not impossible, although the focus was  clearly his love-hate relationship with the fashion world.

And now it is all in the past. And we are left with an enigma, and the awful tragedy of genius dying way too early.

And, sadly, yet another disturbing example of the fashion industry not looking after its own, even its greatest.

And I'll miss him: he had serious things to say.

Alexander McQueen 1969-2010

By Po Li

Flickr Creative Commons

History of the World in 100 Objects

Am I alone in thinking that the sub-text of the rather fabulous BBC/British Museum radio series / media extravaganza "History of the World in 100 Objects" is actually the text?

I haven’t seen a single comment on its lightly argued position that the loot in the BM should stay there, and I’m feeling pretty lonely.

It’s a terrific programme.  Fifteen minutes of un-missable delight every week-day, as one selected object from the past, and its historical implications, are described by the highly-regarded Director of the British Museum, the brilliant, unassuming and engaging, if hubristic, Dr. Neil MacGregor.

Go to the websites, both of them, (BBC and British Museum) see the objects, get the podcasts, upload your own historical object, be a part of emerging intellectual history.     You can listen to the story while looking at the object, brush-stoke close if you want to. New technologies are yielding new insights from old objects, and the latest multi-media communications bring it all alive. 

But there's a bit of a whiff in the air ....

For starters, under all this wonderfulness, its pretty weird, isn’t it,  that all the objects in a programme about world history are in one place:  London.

I mean, seriously, WTF??

And they’re not only in one place: they’re in one institution – the British Museum.

And we all know how all this stuff got there, some of it paid for, some of it not. That world historical process we call colonialism.  Which denied people their own history.

It's almost too obvious to mention, but on the other hand, should we be dazzled into overlooking it? That's the point.

So even while I’m hearing all this terrific stuff about how multi-faceted history is, and how connected we all are, I can’t help remembering that much of the evidence got there through that kind of connectedness we call exploitation.


And precisely because they are there, Dr. MacGregor feels that: "a world narrative can only be told in a museum like this".  Only? (emphasis mine)  If we want to have "world" history, it seems, we have to overlook the rather mixed provenance of the objects: the other history embedded in them.


Here's how the argument goes.  We can understand  world history more easily if, for example , we check out the Elgin Parthenon Marbles and then pop down the corridor and see the Persian sculptures, because Greece and Persia were at war at the time, and we can make a comparison.  

This is true, very true.  And its certainly a very nice thing to be able to do,  if you can, if you happen to be in London, and so much easier for the scholers than having to schlep around all over the place.  But its not the only way to get a handle on world history.  It's not necessary to an understanding of world history.


And how much better if we could look out from their beautiful new museum in Athens and see their original location in the Parthenon itself, and then stroll over and make a comparison with the footworn stones that were there when the marbles were first carved,  and sit on the warm stones in the agora and think about the kind of society that produced both the marbles and democracy, right there where you are sitting.  Feel the heat.  Hear the cicadas, that were also here when the marbles were.  Get a real sense of the place of these marbles in history.  

Through all the multi-media glitz of this glamorous tour de force, the deep message is that it’s OK for us to have hijacked their history because (only) we can tell it as world history, and tell it better.


Bejabers, that’s hubris, if ever I heard it !!

Me, I think its time for the formerly colonized peoples to have their own damn things back, if they want them, and tell their own history.

Then some-one could make a block-buster series about that, and how the objects  transformed knowledge generation in their own communities.  Now that would really be world knowledge.

That would be a great sequel.  

Love it.

Elgin Marbles by Chris Devers

Downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons.

Rosetta Stone

And in case we forget, it’s not only the objects from places like Greece and Egypt that matter, where their governments have made a high-profile effort to get them back.

My friend Leone Ross, the brilliant Jamiacan/British novelist and short story writer, has reminded me that there are plenty of people who bitterly wish they could take back their things when they go into museums, even if their governments havn't made a big show about it, and I can well understand the sentiment.

That makes this particular representation of “world” history seem pretty much a masquerade, doesn’t it?  Pretty darn hollow?

Here’s what I think should happen: there should be a world network of, say, 100 museums, big and small  (especially small), that are collectively, jointly, presenting a holistic view of world history, with the originals where they belong, and copies elsewhere.  We have the technology to make perfect copies now,  and all the networking bells and whistles to bring it alive.

That would be world history.  That would be context.  I think the public would be delighted, and everyone's bottom lines would benefit.  Terrific idea!

I'm hoping that someone more in the loop on these things than me can tell me its already in the works. 

That’s the way to go.  It would be hard to arrange, but would make a cosmic world-class multi-media blockbuster. 

Love it.

 

Mooretown Museum, Jamaica.  By Wayne Gunne

Dedicated to Nanny, a Maroon Heroin, who defended her people right here in this valley.

Downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons License

The Gift

I'm still deep in deadline management (see last post), but can't resist this quotation, courtesy of the always interesting Diet Iced Me.

“ …The task of setting free one’s gifts was a recognized labor in the ancient world. The Romans called a person’s tutelar spirit his (sic) genius. In Greece it was called a daemon … "

"In Rome it was the custom on one’s birthday to offer a sacrifice to one’s own genius.  People didn’t just receive gifts on their birthday, but would also give something to their guiding spirit. Respected in this way the genius made one “genial”: sexually potent, artistically creative, and spiritually fertile…"  

"An abiding sense of gratitude moves a person to labor in the service of his or her daemon. The opposite is properly called narcissism. The narcissist feels his or her gifts come from himself/ herself. They work to display themselves, not to suffer change... The celebrity trades on his or her gifts, and does not sacrifice to them."

"And without that sacrifice, without the return gift, the spirit cannot be set free."

adapted from “The Gift” by Lewis Hyde 1983

I've changed some of the nouns and pronouns to remove any implication that it is only men who have creative genius. Seems that's what they thought way back in 1983.  I made about 10 changes, and left one.  Anyway, it's still a great passage about self-respect and creativity.

Now I'm an Aries, so its not my birthday today, but I don't think we need wait for birthdays.  I find it's fun to dish out gifts to my inner genius on a daily basis, in fact even more frequently.  A walk?  Some journaling?  A little bit of chocolate?  A few moments staring into the middle distance (one of her favourites)?  a stretch?

I am also grateful to Diet Iced Me for reminding me of Kafka:  "the purpose of a story (a book, surely?) is to be an axe for breaking up the ice (frozen sea) within us", or something like that.  It's quite a free translation, but all the better for that, perhaps.

I prefer "frozen sea" to "ice" - deeper and fuller of mystery, but I prefer "story" to "book".  Storytelling has a lot of power for inner healing and growth, more than books themselves, I would say, in general, with some exceptions.

And talking about Kafka .....

Kafka, By Rue Meurt d'Art, StreetArt, Paris, France
Originally uploaded by balavenise

It's difficult to read what Kafka's saying here, especially if you don't speak French.  It says: "A person is not created from bottom to top but from the interior to the exterior." Or something like that.  Its by an entity called "Street of the Death of Art". Not that Kafka actually ever wrote that gobbledygook, but its a nice piece of street art.  Intellect in the midst of decay. Very kafkaesque.


I like Kafka actually, despite my (delightfully? nauseatingly?) bright and sunny take on life.  As I have said elsewhere, positive thinking is my default mode.  Thats how I deal with decay and decadence


And if you pay attention to your inner genius, as Lewis Hyde suggests, it tends to bring out the positive side.  I mean I wouldn't have used Kafka's notion of and "axe", or even a "frozen sea" because that's not how it feels to me, but the message is pretty positive - break down inner barriers.  


And there's nothing like a gift to yourself for breaking down barriers: depending on the barrier of course. Sometimes only an axe will do.

You may also enjoy:


Happiness:  The "Cruise" part of Financial Cruise Control


Food Group Dilemmas


And, for story-telling


What can we do about Berlusconi-think?

Life is Just a Bowl of Dialectics

Pick a Bowl of Cherries by **Mary**
Downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons License

Warning:  Pompous heavy weather and pretentious obscurity up ahead (but I like the topic anyway).


There could hardly be a sillier take on what life is all about than "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries", written in 1931 by the now largely forgotten Lew Brown.   The lyrics are also largely, and advisedly, forgotten, but you can see them here if you want to, and get the ring-tone.  

Nevertheless, the title is a catchy phrase which has passed into idiomatic use, fortunately not without a tinge of irony.

So, as we move right along into 2010, change is in the air as usual, and I am thinking how much I‘m totally lovin’ it.  

The reason I am loving it is that I am analysing it (see my post on Epicurus and the analyzed life).   And when I say "just" a bowl of dialectics, I mean "like totally, dude".  I'm only being slightly satirical.  Life itself is totally dialectical:  that's just how I see it, and that's how I'm analyzing it.

Trouble is, its hard to see a dialectical situation if you don't know what you’re looking for. A change of plan can be forced upon you unexpectedly, as little Miss Newton here is just finding out.  (See the end of this post for more on this little cutie)

What Yoga Pose is This? by Colour

Downloaded from flickr with special permission.  

Thanks Colour.  I love this pic.

So you need to know what you are looking for.


My very first sociology professor said, at my very first lecture, many years ago:  "If you don't know what a carburetta is, when you look at an internal combustion engine you won’t see a carburetta".  

I found this to be very true. It exactly reflected my own experience at car mechanic class.  Once you know the various parts of a car engine, it resolves from a meaningless mass of pipes and caps and wires into a thing of rationality, order and purpose.  

And so it is with life itself, without the sense of rationality, order or purpose.  

Car Engine by Greygoatcoat

Downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons License

Boss 429 Engine by Morven

See what I mean? The colour-coding helps, and that’s what dialectics is in a way: intellectual colour-coding of trends.  Kind of.


Me, I don't care that life is not rational or well ordered, and I can live with all the contingencies of which it is entirely composed.  But I do like to really understand what's happening as much as I can, and here a dialectical perspective can help, because, as I say, life is itself dialectical.  

Dialectics is, in fact, the extremely useful, if complex, theory, or explanation, of how everything changes (which it does, at various speeds, all the time).  It is particularly good at describing the many resonating impacts of a change process, and especially in identifying the underlying factors, and the further factors underlying them.


First elaborated over two thousand years ago by the Greeks (of course), with multiple developments since, including most famously by Marx and Engels,  this body of thought is still very much evolving (along with everything else).  Some people never look at dialectics because of Marx and Engels, but that's just so naff.


I love it because it enables me to see beyond surface appearances to all the movement, contradiction and interconnection of things. It gives the whole picture. I mean, not just a static snapshot, but the total moving picture in all its reflexivity and flux. All at once, in multiple, inter-connected and mutually responsive layers and dimensions.  Marvelous really.  Cosmic.  Exhilarating.  Look it up.

Not only does it help me with change, a dialectical perspective is absolutely best at sorting out the difference between form and content:  that most things contain their own contradictions, and are at the same time both positive in principle but negative in operation, and/or partially or totally the other way around, depending on the context, the actors and the historical moment.  Still with me?

For example, the United Nations, the European Union and good old congressional or parliamentary democracy, all of which I support actively, are in essence necessary and perhaps even “good”, but are, at the same time, I think we can all agree, hopelessly and inherently flawed, not to say corrupt, and part of the problem.  


So a touch of dialectics helps very much in the whole area of critical support for the things we need more of, and informed resistance to the things we need less of: in other words to steer change in the most advantageous direction (as we see it, of course). 


In fact, its really essential for my goal of financial cruise control for all:  its the control part.

So I'm not suggesting we cherry-pick our understanding of life (hahaha).  Quite the reverse.  I’m saying we absolutely need the whole picture: that nothing less will do,  going forward.

Have I been totally pompous? I really believe this stuff -  I think its important. 


Anyway,  Happy New Year, Everyone !!!

So this is It? by Vimrod

Downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons License

You may also like: 

What Leonard Cohen Means to Me, especially his remarkably dialectical "Democracy". (spotify or YouTube - live in London).

Happiness: The Cruise Part of Financial Cruise Control (Epicurus and the Analysed Life)

John Lennon: its Christmas and What have you Done?, and especially this lovely video.  I really like what he is saying here, and the respect he has for his young interviewer, and the message of "pay attention" is pretty much what I am saying.  A little less anarchism might have enabled a little more precision on what we need to watch out for, other than "them", but still, he's really thinking dialectically.

And for those of you who love cats, more pictures of the incredibly cute Miss Newton can be found here, in The Daily Kitten (I kid you not).  Colour and Obularity are terrific photographers.

Oh dear, already breaking my resolution not to bring cats into every darn topic (see last comment of the John Lennon post, which is below)

John Lennon: its Christmas, and what have you done?

For nearly 40 years  a very long time John Lennon has meant something really important to me.  First as a teenage rebel, and then as a pretty serious social and political critic.   Nowhere Boy is my one essential Christmas season film-going this year.

His main message - speak your own truth and hold them accountable - is still right bang on the nail.

And here we are at end of the noughties:  Christmas 2009.  Lennon would have had a LOT to say about everything that has been going down.  One of his catchy lyrics comes to mind:

"And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?"

Indeed Ms. Sarah Louise, what have you done, in 2009, to make a difference?

Including, given the sub-text of Lennon's Christmas Song, what have you done about the knotty problem of war?

With failing heart I set to work to list what I have done, and I find I've done better than I thought.  I set the list out below for those who care to read further.

Meanwhile, let's just say that its all messy, and we all have to do our bit.  The main thing is to stay clear, pay close attention, and hold our so-called leaders accountable.  And I still love John Lennon. to say the least.  Here's how he put it:

Still true, still fabulous and still important!

And from the genuinely influential to my little part - 

First of all, what's still to do, for next year.

1. Join an organisation that is working actively to charge Tony Blair as a war criminal.
2. Join some effective mechanism on energy reduction, or a composite of organisations.  This is such an important issue, and we are being held hostage mainly by the US congress of capitalists and their chinese equivalent.  Some very drastic kind of Greenpeace-type action is needed.  Copenhagen was such a farce:  how can we get these wankers to take it seriously?.
3. Grow my own veggies
4. Cut down on my airmiles
5. Get my finances sorted, by which I mean properly planned, organised and recorded (this is the main one.  If I get this done I'll be way pleased.  Why am I so finance phobic? see I'm Looking for a Financial Adviser).
6. Keep learning more on web 2.0, and come to grips with html
7. Keep working on my fitness.

Here is my list of eight good things in 2009.

1. Family:  I provided part of a framework for my daughter to climb out of the mapless pit of trauma, depression and chaos into which she had fallen.  Using this framework, a huge amount of effort and a strong network of friends that she has built up, she has turned her life around.  I am very proud of her and all she has done, and the threshold of a new life that she has carved out for herself, and I am proud of myself for my small part in this.  For me, this is the single most important thing that I have done this year
2. Family:  I was able to spend several weeks with my father while he was dying over the summer, an incredible privilege which we both loved, and also to share information and pictures with our somewhat fractured family, which helped us all get through this difficult time together. 
3. Work:  I have participated in facilitating a really innovative and effective leadership training programme for United Nations senior staff, which will continue next year.
4. Work: I have been able to help the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) clarify their strategic priorities on women's and girls' rights, and in the case of UNDP work quite a lot on ways to prevent and provide recourse for violence against women.  
5. War: As a great deal of UNDP's work on violence against women takes place in war-torn and post-conflict situations, in a sense I have made a small contribution to mitigating the effects of war. This also will continue next year.
6. War: I participated in several demonstrations against the Israeli invasion of Gaza earlier in the year, and threw a shoe at the Embassy here in London, specially carried thence for the purpose.  I tweeted madly about the war criminal status of Tzipi Livni, and the distinction of Palestinian and Israeli origin for consumer items.  A very important step in my view, and I will certainly be boycotting Israeli goods.
7. Carbon Footprint:  I have worked quite hard on my carbon footprint this year.  First off I have become a vegetarian, pretty much.  I never buy meat for myself now.  This is because of the extreme carbon costs of producing meat relative to veggies, and also, for me,  the difficulty of knowing whether it has been reared and killed humanely.   That's about 25% off by carbon footprint right there.  Secondly I have stopped using my dryer and hair dryer, and have changed all my light-bulbs and turn them off more diligently.  Small beer, but still, that's what I have done.  I have joined the 10/10 campaign (10 % reduction in energy use by 2010).  Third, I have cut back on my car use considerably.  I did an audit on my average mileage for the autumn.  It was 68 miles a week!  Don't laugh, I travel a lot (air miles, oh dear), and I live alone, and I was sick for part of the time.  So, I will do another audit in 2010, what ever, and I will make sure to reduce it by at least 10% less next year, and, much, much more importantly, cut down on my air miles.
8. Personal:  I changed my life with Web 2.0.  Still enjoying tweeting and blogging

So all in all, not bad Sarah Louise.  Room for improvement, but on the right track.  Keep up the struggle my dear.

And the hardest thing I had to do?  Find a new new home for my cats.  And I succeeded in that too,  painful as it was.

Oh, and another thing for 2010 - don't turn into one of those people who brings their cats into every damn conversation.

The Poem that Solved my Leadership Problem.

This is an anniversary of sorts.

I read a poem one Sunday morning in late 1999, and realised that I no longer needed my toxic commute to a toxic workplace, and third, no fourth, toxic boss in a row.

Several months of mulling, of back-burner pondering, resolved instantly to clear certainty.

In less than four short months I was outta there, with my own little biz and never a single regret.  I'm still in contact with the wonderful friends I made there and I'm still doing the same kind of work, but co-creating it now.  And no more brutal, stumbling, neanderthal "leadership".

Thousands love this poem: for me it was life-changing.

Here it is:

Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver 
from her collection Dream Work

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
The world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

The most totally liberating part for me?  The first line.

.

And here's my own little wildgoose.

From her I have learned and am learning almost every other thing I have ever needed to know about loving what I love.  The harshest and most exciting lessons of all, totally wild and wonderful.

Now flying strongly in the clean blue air herself, finding her own place in the family of things.

Wild Geese High in the Clean Blue Air by Under the Influence of Dub

Creative Commons License

And as every graduate of business school knows full well, Wild Geese almost never fly alone, unless they are really sick, and even then another goose accompanies as long as possible.  They fly in formation to benefit from each other's up-draft, and the leadership rotates, so that they all share responsibility.  And, almost best of all, they honk to support each other in flight.

Now, there's a life agenda. To co-create that kind of community.

The follower kind of leadership - that's what I like.  Not only in the sense that leaders pay attention to their  followers, but that leaders are also followers, and vice versa (and its so social networking).

"Real leadership always takes place through 
collective, systemic, and distributed action".  

Otto Scharmer.  MIT 

Florida Panther

Florida Panther : Only 80 to 100 panthers still remain in Florida, making this one of the most rare and endangered mammals in the world.

Originally uploaded by dpfunsun

How awsome is this?  How can we not get together and work out how to share our planet better?

According to Wikipedia, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the state conservation of this wonderful animal has been bungled, and there is no congressional oversight.

The integrity of this animal, and all it represents, is so much more important than the consumption-driven sprawl and road-building that has been running amok in Florida all these many years.

Food Group Dilemmas

Now, you all know the four main food groups, I'm sure: soul food, comfort food, nursery food and chocolate.

Chocolate-coffee Cupcake with Mascarpone and Cream  by Chotda 

Creative Commons License

I try to eat from at least one of these groups every day, usually in the evening, just to round things off nicely.

This is what I do.  I eat delicious wheat-free Pony Food with fruit for breakfast, as seasonal, organic, low carbon-footprint, free trade and local as I can get it:

Don't look at the Blueberries - at this time of year they're from S. Africa, but they are organic, 

and the clemantine now comes by rail not lorry from Spain, a HUGE green development

And for lunch I usually have some delicious wholesome Rabbit Food, ditto

So then, in the evening, I select from one or more of the four main food groups.

This is to reward myself for whatever victories I’ve had during the day, which are usually many and various, if individually small.

Being British, I mainly go for Nursery Food, e.g. shepherds pie (free-range, organic, local), or my special one-pot chicken-and-rice-and-veggies dish (and to keep it local, I use barley instead of rice).  And then I have a little piece of dark chocolate (fairtrade, organic, anti-oxidant), or a big piece.

Sometimes I just have pud, quite often my absolutely all-time favourite food: rice pudding with stewed apple, queen of the nursery food pantheon.  Yumety-yum.

Very delicious and full of comforting nostalgic associations - that's nursery food.

No doubt about the calories however.  Very calorific.  Loaded up with all those big round lipid molecules that roll around the tongue is such a wonderfully seductive way.  But don’t forget portion control.  I sometimes (that is, often) do, but at least I know in principle that portion control is the answer to the calorie challenge.

So higher calorie than ideal perhaps, but not always, and not junk, and as ethical as I can get it: that's my evening meal.

And it does end the day on a deeply enjoyable and comforting note. Which is not without merit as I build my nightly defenses against that bane of financial cruise control – those wee wakeful hours of the morning when life's little challenges can seem overwhelming, even to me, Ms Positive Thinking. (And the very best antidote?  BBC Worldservice)

So I am navigating as best I can the reefs and shoals of health, ethics, sveltitude and happiness, and coming up pretty good on the whole(some).

And after all we can’t take life too seriously, can we.  Its just a bowl of cherries (organic, local, seasonal, low calorie, delicious), isn't it?

Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries  by Slider72

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Happiness: The "cruise" part of financial cruise control

Regular visitors to these pages will know that  "financial cruise control" is what I'm after, and its about way more than money.  I find, not surprisingly, that it has three parts:

Financial -  the money part;

Cruise -      the fun and happiness part, and:

Control -    the strategic, conceptual part, the dialectics of life.

And why am I doing this?  I want loads of boodle?  No, actually.  I'm a control freak?  Not at all.

I'm doing this because I want to be happy in this, the springtime of my senescence (Gore Vidal).  So the middle part is, naturally enough, central to the whole project. 

The best way to find out exactly what it is that makes you happy, so you can get more of it?  Journaling, without question, or as we say today, blogging.

(Actually I still like the old kind, the blank book and pencil kind, and you just have to search "journaling" on Amazon to see how popular it is.  And as for googling or twitter-searching "happiness", oh boy!  We are all getting desperate.  And its not surprising when you think how much shopping we are all doing.  But I'm coming to that).

It turns out that journaling can not only help us find out what makes us happy, the very process of journaling itself produces happiness.

Read on:

If there is one thing you should do, its refresh your memory (or in my case, find out for the first time, can you believe?) what  Epicurus had to say about happiness.  He's is my man, and he lived in a commune, dude.  Way back then in 350 BC, or thereabouts.

He was the first (as far as we know), and he said it all, set the framework.  Everything since has just been details.

Photo downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons License.  Snastopoulos

Epicurus believed we could all be happy, but are looking in the wrong place.  Contrary to popular belief he did not advocate self-indulgence.  He was more interested in frugality and quality: knowing what we really need.  Simple pleasures that really satisfy.  Or, to put it another way, financial cruise control.

That's the whole thing wrapped up, right there.

Epicurus felt that there are three requirements for happiness:-

1.   Friends: good companions, constant communication and interaction among people who like and support each other.  Absolutely.

2.   Freedom.  Don't worry, not the eagle and gun kind: it means not keeping up with the Jones's, which gives you freedom from financial worries.  Doing your own thing.  Modest pleasures.  Simple pleasures, Affordable luxuries.  Self-sufficiency even.  This is actually the hardest one of the three to achieve, thanks to recreational shopping and the advertising that drives it.

And finally, get this ....

3.   An Analysed Life.  In other words, journaling, blogging, the lovely process of stepping back, taking stock, reflecting on what matters, thinking about "your place in the family of things" (Mary Oliver).   What a brilliant guy.

So the first thing you gotta do, as soon as you have about 10 minutes to spare, is click right here and watch this totally brilliant vid. about Epicurus and his ideas about financial cruise control.

And I'm going to keep right on trucking with this little blog of mine, which led me to Epicurus (better late than never), and I have to say is making me very  ..........   happy.

And I'm also working on all that other stuff.  Definitely.

So come back soon to see what I find out, but while your here, why not subscribe or share this blog, or become a follower (right there in the side-bar) ?

And meanwhile, here are some simple epicurean pleasures to enjoy, from Epicurus' birthplace in Samos, Greece:

A simple pleasure  

Downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons License  Vtveen.

Another simple pleasure   

Downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons License  Vtveen

And yet another simple pleasure. 

Downloaded from Flickr .  angelsgermain.

You see, its not so difficult.

And you don't have to go to Samos.  Here is simple pleasure right in my own back yard last Spring.

And don't forget this one (See Duality in the Archive)

What Leonard Cohen Means to Me.

I believe in total democracy (one of the reasons I love the internet, although the battle there is far from over), but we're not there yet (despite what they are telling us) and its really hard!

And Leonard Cohen totally describes what the story is, on every social and economic front, what it costs, and the ugly, ugly battles that are necessary: he is very clear that despite all this, its absolutely what we have to go for.

If you havn't already heard "Democracy", pretty much the greatest work in all Leonard Cohen's magnificent  oeuvre, click on over to to my YouTube channel, and catch up with it right NOW.

What is there not to love about Leonard Cohen? Quite apart from his strange voice and aged cuteness, he's brilliant, and he totally gets the simplicity and complexity of real connections among equal people, and the hideous squalor and corruption of authoritarian controls that we have to struggle through to get there.  He totally gets how little struggles can lead to huge change, but not always, and nothing is easy and nothing stays the same.

So what is to be done?

Well, as the great man says, I'm as "stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot destroy, I'm junk (not really) but I'm still holding up my little wild bouquet" that  that Democracy is coming to the USA (and UK).  So perhaps together, with collaboration, solidarity and social media, we can help to limit the multiple, intersecting, overwhelming corruptions of power that are otherwise in our present and our future..

And perhaps, maybe, just possibly, "the lights in the Land of Plenty can shine on the truth some day".

And don't leave without watching/listening to this one last video.  I mean, really, what's not to love?