Words from the world...

Awake and extremely dangerous in Zurich. Middle of the night, musing outranks slumber again. Stream of consciousness begins with ...... Ta Dah ..... (inspired title for a CD by the way, big up Scissor Sisters).

But whatever you do, do not buy this CD on 25th November. In fact DO NOT buy anything on 25th November because it’s ...

Every year, for 24 hours, we remember we were not born to shop, and join International Buy Nothing Day. At least, an interesting phenomenon, at best a test of the consumer led culture we’ve become, thanks to the Church of Immaculate Consumption. I dare you, buy nothing, not a sandwich, not a bus ticket, on Friday 25th November (needs a little preparation beforehand), and you’ll be joining like minded brothers and sisters all over the world in a day of rest.

Inspired hugely by Anna Lempriere’s beautiful link to Juan Mann (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e3Emjk3Zko%20%20), and my location, an idea envelopes me tonight. I'm staying on the banks of the Rhine, and as you look across to the other side of the river, you see Germany, the first village right there in view. A really short stretch. You could throw a stone across to the other side. Wonder what it must have been like to live here 60 years ago and how many people were shot trying to swim it. Makes me think of the borders of all war torn people. Wouldn't it be great if across all the war torn borders in all the world, we could stage a hug, one person from each side, one foot in each territory, bodies joined in a hug. Palestine and Israel, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Congo and Uganda, there are enough uneasy neighbours for a couple of dozen great pictures. Wouldn't that be awesome for when we’re teaching and talking about the need to connect with rather than control each other? Bet with the

1. Sophistication of the worldwide web and its tentacles
2. Network of contacts we have in our multi-national rolodex of friends

We could stage a kick ass photo-shoot. This is either a good idea or I need to go to sleep.

Life Writes Itself on Your Face.

I’m at the end of a trip, a long one. I saw two plays in NY. Wrecks, the new Neil La Bute, at the Public. One man play performed by Ed (La Beaut) Harris, beautifully eulogising his dead wife, staggered revelations of an internal monologue woven into his disapproving commentary on ‘the happenstance of life’ and the ‘way the universe likes to play it.’ Customary La Bute twist at the end is always welcome, however expected, and my friend Molly and Alan and I went to Indochine after to drink and think some more. Bumped into the playwright in the SoHo Grand a couple of mornings later and got to thank him personally. Ed’s the right kind of haggard. Connected.

The wrong kind of Haggard is Ted. Two weeks ago he stepped aside as senior pastor of the 14,000-member New Life Church and resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, after a rent boy decided his hypocrisy was too much too bear. The hoisting of Father Ted’s petard was inspired by his consistent, vocal opposition to same sex unions, and after three years of being paid for sex and supplying metamphetamine, Mike Jones decided enough was enough and met the press. Gotta love that the church has ceded the moral high ground to a drug dealing gay hooker. His Sunday morning service the week before began with a prayer that ‘lies would be exposed.’ Be careful what you wish for Ted.

The Vertical Hour is David Hare’s new one, playing on Broadway starring Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy, directed by Sam Mendes. All that bloomin’ talent in one sentence, on one stage. Didn’t work. Hare’s play was surprisingly pedestrian and self important, full of lines that make clever people laugh at how clever they are. (“In America you’re building an empire. We’ve dismantled one.”) I think Julianne’s a fine actress on film, but she was dry and passionless and hard to watch. Can’t believe Sam Mendes let her go out with wet hair. Bill Nighy’s eccentric Englishman felt like an over-affectation at times, but if there was a show there he’d have stolen it. I ended up counting the Nicole Farhi props (all of them) and wardrobe (all of it). The whole thing looked good. Vacant.

Annie Liebovitz and Ron Mueck bring faces to life and death. The Brooklyn Museum’s currently housing both exhibits. Annie’s photos of both Susan Sontag and her father in death are juxtaposed with her own very-un-Demi-Moore pregnant belly (holding her first child, Annie aged 52). Ron’s portrayal of Dead Dad and the Giant Baby make a more gargantuan point. Faces all, naked, exposed, un-masked.

To Atlanta to visit our wonderful US Lawyer, who shows me what it means to be a human being as much as what it means to be a world class lawyer. Every so often she hosts an evening at her home, say for an artist who’s work she loves, I spoke at an evening there a year ago. This week she had a woman called Nan O’Connor, who’s just published a book called ‘A Walk in the Woods’, the story of an incest survivor. Nan must be sixty something now, and she’s a beautiful spirit. Gentle, kind, knowing, strong. She talked to us about the genesis of the book and her hopes for it. There’s no doubt in my mind that she’ll be sitting beside Oprah (another incest survivor) very soon. Walkinthewoods.org is the website, and if you know anyone who could use a walk in the woods with Nan, anyone who needs a compassionate home from which to heal, this is the place. You should know we’ve also made a donation to the website, to fund books for those incest survivors who don’t have the means to pay for them.

Finally, it wasn’t all work. Teddy and I had a blissed out week together, one of the highlights being the Halloween Parade in the village. As we walked back up West Houston to the pool hall where we misspent some of his youth, we passed St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church. As you know, the Catholics have a saint for every eventuality, and this one is invoked to guard against fires. Many believe he’s helped the village have less than its share. Hanging temporarily over the door of the church is a Peace to the World sign and the way it was framed, and the light of the moon, made me and Teddy stop. Later, in bed that night, when we were toasting our toes and our day, I remembered it. Said ‘wasn’t it a lovely moon tonight’. He agreed, all innocence and high voiced. And I followed through. “It’s never not a lovely moon. I mean there’s never a time you look at the moon and feel disappointed in it, whether it’s a sliver or incandescent, clouded or clear, the moon’s always a marvel isn’t it?”

As are we. Thin sliced or complete, wholehearted or only what we can give that day, we’re always marvels.

Night night.
X






Head into the dark...

Sitting in Canary Wharf in between students. It’s a dank, grey day. I’m playing Sigur Ros and pretending I’m in an Ingmar Bergman film ....

There’s a lot to be said for saying.

Saying things out loud. Embarking on a thought without knowing where it’s going. Especially in an atmosphere or a space where you feel free to do so, where you don’t feel not judged, but observed. It’s often not until you say things out loud, or write them down, that you stabilize your thinking, or maybe de-stabilize it.

As I hear me talk, I’m always on the lookout for anything that begins to feel untoward and for the past few months I’ve become increasingly convinced that the seven words I often reference when I’m teaching one of our classes have become less right than they felt when they were conceived. Of course they work, it’s not that they don’t, it’s just that the alchemy feels imbalanced and they feel too rigid, too categorical.

Presence, Charisma, Confidence, Conversation and Self all feel spacious enough to be interpreted with objectivity. The two words I have issues with are Action and Certitude. I think they arguably have a place, just one less higher up the hierarchy of aspirational words.

Action I describe as the difference between knowing what to do and doing what you know. The cliché suggesting ‘information is power’ has always felt like a pile of poop to me. Information is information, and I know a lot of clever people who are frankly not very powerful. It’s acting on the information that makes you powerful. You may know what will make you more successful, but not have the courage of your convictions. Until you do, they won’t empower you.

Certitude I talk about as a coalescing of three things ... Opinion, Certainty and Passion. It’s a pretty obvious talent when you ascribe it to Mrs Thatcher, and indeed it’s a perception held of Dubya by his fans, that you may not agree with him, but he’s absolutely, passionately convinced that he’s doing the right thing.

I think it can be misleading at times though, since often people with high certitude are those who sit back and ask incisive questions.

I can easily make a case for both of these words, but I’m relegating them.
Because I keep hearing myself say ... ‘these seven words are neither exhaustive nor comprehensive, and of course there are words I’d like to have a place at the table, but we only have a limited amount of time together. Words like Humility and Curiosity for example.” I must have expressed this sentiment a couple of dozen times before I realized I was trying to tell me something.

Humility is one of those words that’s come to mean something entirely different from its root, so the first thing to do is reappropriate it, and give it back its original definition. The word humility comes from the Latin word for the earth, "humus." To have humility is to acknowledge your grounding, to be proud of your humanity. It has nothing to do with lowliness, self-abasement, being overly mild or meek. In fact anyone who is subservient to everyone, and puts him or herself down isn’t humble. That kind of behaviour shows incredible ego, and constant claims of inferiority are frankly unbecoming.
Humility doesn’t hold you back. It suggests a sense of your own diminishing of Ego for the pursuit of something bigger. The greatest of those I talk about .... Gandhi, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Mandela, Maya .... All of them have tremendous humility and it’s viscerally recognised by people every time they talk about or watch such individuals so completely in their truth.

Today I’m checking out the Da Vinci exhibition at the V&A, and Curiosity was one of da Vinci’s seven principles for unlocking genius, the other six being:

• Arte/Scienza - Studying the science of art and the art of science (creatively using both sides of the brain)

• Dimostrazione, a commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence and a willingness to learn from mistakes.

• Sensazione, the continual refinement of the senses.

• Sfumato (going up in smoke) – a willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, uncertainty.

• Corporalita – the cultivation of grace, fitness, poise.

• Connessione – an appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things

Curiosity is both a childlike preoccupation and a touchstone of one of the finest, most complete artists the world has ever known. I’m certainly more interested in what I can’t prove than what I can. Curiosity is a hunger for knowing and thinking more deeply, a state of mind that’s a question mark rather than a full stop. Rumi told us to “sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment.”

If you feel you’ve arrived, you get it, you’ve ripened, the only thing left to do is to rot. Curiosity is for the ambitious, not determined by the greasy pole or the next big job, but ambition for being richer tomorrow than you are today. Every day.

So by all means Act with Certainty.

But then with your feet on the ground, head in to the dark.

An Inconvenient Truth

My letters from America aren’t as frequent or as colourful as America. And of course by America I mean New York. Get yourselves a cuppa.

Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth would be the perfect platform for him to wrest back the leadership of a country he won the first time around, though he swears he’s not interested in running again. I’d rather he did it than Hillary. I think the world’s desperately in need of some female energy, but I’m not sure having this woman in the White House would provide it. She may have a vagina but she’s slowly but surely taken the middle seat on just about every issue worth backsliding for. Dissenting voices are already being heard in the democrat ranks and the republicans don’t need any help to brand her brittle. I like Gore’s face and I like what he represents, penis notwithstanding. The documentary’s a powerpoint presentation on legs and utterly compelling.

At the Guggenheim Jackson Pollock and Zaha Hadid are sharing the space, Zaha with the lioness’ share. Wonder what they’d have made of each other. His work is shown under the title ‘No Limits, Just Edges’. Zaha is the only woman in a man’s world of architecture, and despite her middle eastern curves she’s most known for her aggressively angular work, edges up the wazoo. At id:ology we talk about swallowing metaphorical whales as a means to growing confidence (all the real Free Willies are our friends, honest guv). Feels to me like Zaha’s swallowing leviathans publicly, he swallowed the sauce till it drowned his. The Guggenheim’s the perfect space for both.

Then, two things happened.

First, Warren Buffet gave away $37 billion.

He was interviewed by Charlie Rose that night and talked about it. He sat alongside Bill and Melinda Gates, who’s foundation he’s asked to distribute the money. That in itself struck me as an incredible act of magnanimity. No ego demanding his name above the foundation’s door. If you’d seen him that night you would have seen a child. He was interrupting, he couldn’t sit still, giggling.





He’d famously said that he’d give away his fortune when he died, so when Charlie asked him ‘how’s your health?’, he said something like “I can’t believe how healthy I am. I don’t get enough sleep, my diet is terrible, I don’t get any exercise, but for some reason my health is great.” Like Karma had washed away this 74 year old body and left in its place a 6 year old boy.

He was so happy. He said “it doesn’t get any better than this.”

A week later, the day after the fireworks, Kenneth Lay died.

Due to be sentenced in September for conspiring to perpetuate one of the biggest frauds in US history, his heart exploded. Probably fear. It just couldn’t take the stress. His lavish lifestyle came under intense scrutiny, not least the fact that he withdrew $70 million dollars personally in the year that Enron slid into bankruptcy, the year that thousands of his employees watched their retirement funds disappear.

Such a jarring comparison between one wealthy individual and another. One who’s lived an impersonal life, a universal life, who believes that you only truly own what you give away.

The other suffering from affluenza, his focus on amassing, acquisition.

And if what I believe is true, that life writes itself on your face, take a long hard look at both.