I don’t exactly know why but I’ve always loved a great line. A perfect phrase made out of great words.
Usually just ordinary words that on their own are plain and useful but put together in such a way that thrills — in skilful hands it makes you want to shout them aloud.
These lines have the knack of getting to the heart of the matter.
Katerina Gogou wrote the following and it sort of blows me away.
“Then through dark ages strange creatures reveal themselves riding on horses made of winds. With two metallic birds they strike everywhere right and left possessing the wings of a black crow pasted on a head covered with plastic membrane.
Their mouths are painted and their tongues of eagles on fire they explode at the moment of careful balancing a little before they strike down vertically. They have come by here many times before. They know exactly where everything is on this land.
They used to call them in the old times “heretics” and “witches” and they always ended up burning them. Now they call them “punishers” and “avengers” for they are about to deal justice and reclaim all that there is to be reclaimed.
And as it happens all the time anytime, anywhere they are always the same under a different name, the same name they rain down the wind gasoline and fire crying “The end is nigh” to the coming generations. They herald life with a flute and they rebuild a sun again of common blood rising and revolting every morning on their burning shoulder.”
Well to me what mattered was simple. It grabbed my attention. At the throat. It took me somewhere and gave me something to think about. It sucked me in. It challenged me. Like all great prose or stories. I had to read it several times to understand the nuance and the hidden messages. But I just got taken along with it.
Technically I think what mattered was the juxtaposition of expressive words and the way it built into story. It connected with me and left me feeling engaged, it gave me an emotional buzz.
Don’t Go With The Flow. Cause It
You ever get the feeling that life’s sometimes just too bloody hard? Right there in front of you. Plain as the skunk round your neck you can see that there’s a far better way of doing something — a better solution to something that makes total sense and yet no matter how much effort you put in you get diddly squat support from those around you to change it.
All around you people don’t seem to care or focus that much on what actually makes a difference. What matters.
Maybe they have become blind to it. Have they ever even stopped to think about it. Is it only me that sees the waste and stupidity? No, fuck no. Everyone complains bitterly about the same damn thing. All the time. Bitch. Moan. Nobody engages.
We are happy to go through life with things going on around us that consistently pisses us all off. Stuff that we rage at but don’t do anything about. We just seem to let things carry on without question. This means we are constantly wasting our precious time on this planet. That’s our lives dripping away. We are left to piss around — tackling the wrong things. Every Day.
As with all ‘story’ — pictures have a powerful role in helping us understand what matters.
I’ve noticed that by getting people to look at a big picture of the stupidity of it all then it can shame us into thinking differently about what actually matters. We don’t dispute the power of seeing things — either with our eyes or in our minds. Sometimes — often we confuse the two. No matter. The mind and our eyes do the ‘seeing’ in different ways but both make powerful mojo.
Try wandering around a third world town. Look at everything that’s going on. Visit the market. Watch what people are doing. Watch what they are not doing. Nothing is done without reason. It all matters. It’s all life or death to someone.
Images come up as words and unfold as ‘story’ in our heads — typically that’s what sticks. Words and images immediately take us back to some historical (or hysterical) moment — or projects us into cyberspace to visit a brand new one.
When we are confronted with things that are unusual then they have more meaning. Our daily western lives are increasingly bereft of meaning. This signals a miserable future for humanity unless we can drive out the crazy dehumanising automated existences many folk now have. We seem to be baking the stupidity in yet more.
Pictures — in your head, on a wall, on the page — they’re a must have for the progression of human existence. We need designers with dreams and plans that will change and interrupt this frightening decline. Such a picture is life and death if we hope for any progress. A plan, a diagram, a map a framework or blueprint. Nothing ever got made without one. They depict what matters.
We now need plans and blueprints that put meaning back into our lives.
To get us back to what truly matters.
In my mind I have a very wide but important definition of ‘picture’. To me it’s the landscape that we have created or dreamed of for ourselves.
In the west our urbanisation has developed into mundane and generic banality. So much so that that I want to scream.
It’s driven me to an anarchistic admiration of underground cultures. I feel rebellious. I’m now drawn to street art rather than anything galleried, to simplicity and eastern forms of spiritualism and teaching rather than the nonsensical irrelevant religions, bureaucracy and politics. Everyone I know feels the same.
We’ve all seen that mad scribble on a wall that evoked something so powerful that people died for it — mere words alone could never quite do it justice. But the scrawl, the design, the ‘logo’ inspired people to rise up. It mattered. Crusades of nations marching off the back of that slogan — that mark on the wall. It truly mattered.
We’ve all seen the incredible drawings of future ideas and then stood in awe of the finished thing. That really mattered.
We’ve also been through the hell of bat shit presentations written by unthinking morons being laid out in a ‘deck’ to claim some intellectual position that they know little about — translated into a death-filled document bereft of anything human. It didn’t matter.
“What matters is how and what the scene says — how it speaks to us — that’s always been the basis for society on the move. If that image is deeply meaningful and speaks to those that need to consume it then that’s what matters — nothing else.”
A Call To Arms
What I strive for is always that perfect hybrid — that balance of linguistics and imagery that solves the puzzle, the cracks the code. Whether a page of a book or film or an admirable piece of architecture there’s unwritten rules as to why it works.
As I unpack it I can point to why — the following conditions always seem to apply. They are what matters.
- There’s an unusually arresting juxtaposition of words or ideas. They are most often quite perfectly uncommon arrangements.
- There’s a care and a grace about how they work with the main attention grabbing piece of scene — cornice, headline or image it matters not.
- It’s unexpected.
- The images are neither conflicting nor so safe (literal) that they don’t need to be there. They just play a different and yet vital character in the whole.
- The shape and scale of it all is just right. There are no real rules to that.
- It knows you.
- Without trying the whole thing conveys so much meaning that no speaker is required.
- You can remember it vividly days and weeks later. When you return it’s an old friend.
- One thing stood out but it had the capacity to take the rest with it without complaint.
And Finally
10. I read this in the Onion recently. It requires no further comment.
Billions worldwide agreed that, by this point in human civilization, they would have expected a better process than entrusting all their political, commercial, and social decisions to vindictive, self-absorbed fuckers.
NEW YORK—Noting that it has had thousands of years to develop a more agreeable option, humankind expressed bewilderment this week that it has yet to devise a better alternative to governing itself than always letting power-hungry assholes run everything, sources worldwide reported.
Individuals in every country on earth voiced their frustration that, in spite of generations of mistreatment, neglect, and abuse they have suffered at the hands of those in positions of authority, they continue to allow control over the world’s governments, businesses, and virtually every other type of organization and social group to fall to the most megalomaniacal pricks among them.
“We’ve all seen what this system leads to, so you’d think that by now, someone, somewhere would have sat down and thought up another way to keep our societies functioning without giving all the power to arrogant, amoral dicks whose only concern is improving their own status,” said Mumbai software designer Ankan Rao, one of 7.1 billion humans who conveyed continued surprise that their species has so far proven incapable of formulating a method of governance that was even slightly more tolerable. “Everybody dislikes the people in charge and everybody knows they’re only serving their own personal agendas at the expense of everyone else, but we just keep allowing these jerks to make our decisions time and time again. And it’s not just here—it’s everywhere in the world.”
“Boy, maybe we shouldn’t do that anymore,” Rao added. “Anyone have any better ideas?”
Speaking with reporters, citizens across the planet unanimously expressed their bafflement at the consistency with which they either formally or informally select corrupt and self-obsessed sacks of shit for leadership roles in all facets of life, including positions atop corporate boards, judicial and legislative bodies, religious institutions, parent-teacher associations, the military, intramural softball teams, and international and national professional associations, as well as groups of friends deciding where to eat.
In addition, sources offered countless examples of the counterproductive and perplexing practice of entrusting power to the world’s least scrupulous individuals, ranging in scale from a domineering dictator who plunges his country into civil war in order to consolidate his power, to a Foot Locker shift manager who forces his subordinates to close up without him so that he can go home early.
Moreover, everyone across the planet acknowledged that the tradition of allowing an exploitative asshole to take charge of a given situation has been the principal system for group decision-making from the earliest formation of tribal societies to the present day, an admission that caused each member of the human race to either emit an exasperated sigh, shake his or her head, or mutter a profanity.
“My old boss, my sorority president, my congressional representative, my current boss—they’ve all been soulless, backstabbing dickheads whose only concern is getting what they want,” said administrative assistant Sheryl Gittens of Forth Worth, TX, who went on to list the bully back in her seventh grade class, her homeowners association president, and the coordinator of her Bible study group among the legions of selfish jagoffs who have inexplicably been granted commanding roles by the acquiescent masses. “What’s even more annoying is that we essentially reward these people for only thinking of themselves and repeatedly screwing us over. If you stop and think about it, that’s pretty messed up.”
“Jesus,” she continued. “What the hell’s wrong with us?”
Given the prevalence throughout history of compassionless, two-faced leaders whose lust for control and inflated self-importance have led to disastrous results for society at large, many individuals questioned if, going forward, they should instead try giving power to someone other than a greedy, self-serving bastard.
“Maybe we should try letting a kind, responsible person run things for a change,” Cairo resident Nathifa Bakhoum told reporters.
“I, for one, don’t want to be told what to do by another narcissist who’s drunk on power and who has absolutely no regard for my well-being. It’s just a thought, but perhaps we could go with a good, decent human next time, or at least someone who’s not a completely egotistical pile of dogshit. That seems like a good thing to try at least once, right? Could we even do that? It’s probably worth a shot.”
When pressed for further comment, however, every member of humanity agreed that the current system, though deeply flawed, remains far better than one in which they actually have to make decisions for themselves.
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