Exquisite physical comedy. Symphonie Du Hanneton. James Thiérrée

Dott Cotton

One Clown in forging ahead creatively in circumstances of poverty and uncertainty and it warms my heart.

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Nothing's Going to Change My World

Narrative Life

 

 

Life is a string of moments and as social apes we are predestined pattern recognition units.

The most powerful patterns are narratives, scientific, sociopolitical and personal.

We spend every waking moment of our life asserting and or recompiling our own narratives.

And our societies exist on the scaffolding of collectively held interwoven multi textural narratives.

Sometimes, online I come across ‘news’ ‘information’ reports of pre ported reality and my initial response is to be triggered almost instinctively into feeling strongly, sometimes the elements of a narrative are arranged in such a way that the emotion on the surface that’s triggered is so immediate that further thought seems excess to requirements. I feel angry or outraged or strongly in some way that I am right, that my feeling is undeniably true and because I feel this way and thinking any further would dilute this feeling I’ve learnt that this is an instance, and we all have them, when the power of the narrative uses me and the emotions associated are byproducts of that construct.

Facebook is a wonderful illustration wherein propaganda of all sorts bounces around giving people self important goosebumps. Nothing actually happens other than narratives pay their toll of injecting self righteous flushes of piousness as they multiply throughout the network. Trump, Syria, Oil spills,..placating little squirts of artificial narrative feed into our own, lubricated by cats and sentiment and people falling off skateboards while we stare at screens convinced we are authors of our destinies. when it just as well could be argued that the ultimate sentimentality is to believe we are much more than amplifiers of mostly synthetic and deliberately fostered narratives that serve not ourselves but those who restrict our human experience as the cost of their desires.

Elvis Costello, Gods Comic

Remember Richard Miller.

In these times of adversity remember Richard Miller.

Richard Miller had no arms or legs and grew up and got his very own bus!

People would shower him with cash whenever he attempted to sing about Jesus.

"Take our money Richard" they'd say,

"Get in your bus and fuck off!"

 

 

There’s a couple of things I learnt early in my adult life via a curiosity about the human condition and an interest in mythology and theatre.
One is that ritual has always quantified chaos, that’s its function.
Another is that the oldest ritual is the preparing and offering of food.
Another is that the oldest communal narrative is ‘the heros journey’ and every human places themselves centerstage within this narrative.

Having a virus reducing everyone to a victim rather than a hero kinda fucks with our self identity as a species and also having our oldest ritual becoming our greatest weakness erodes the application of our humanity.

But there are ways to be kind and sterile at the same time which need to become our new instinctives. Without elasticity we're fucked. Without kindness we are beyond fucked.

— with photo by dino morrow.