Open & Closed

Yesterday I watched this:


I also watched some friends play in their Experimental Jazz band Maka Kahn (in my defence the support act kept referring to them as 'Marcos' band') and it was inspiring and a privelege to see artists operate in the kind of space Cleese was talking about.

And envious, I don't these days have the opportunity, nor the skill to cut-loose with my own art. It was a reminder that I need to resurrect superfluous h.

And with my own self portrait experiments, I have discovered how addicted I am to narrative. It seems I can only mentally handle construction or deconstruction. I am weak at improvisation. I have to confess as great as watching free jazz is, I feel an unease that is almost indescribable in not knowing where a piece of music is heading, when a set will end, what is going on.

Which is of course all part of the art form. In the same way as reading about and deconstructing your own gender conditioning is a dizzying experience.

But overwhelmingingly there is joy. There is joy to be observed. There is joy in improvisation and it was just a stunning example of the 'open' mode Cleese and the research he sights is talking about.

Last week somebuddy called what I do 'a hobby' which is I guess kind of true, and my personal wealth does lie in having so much time to indulge my hobbies. But I also consider them 'work' for the simple reason that I feel work should be challenging and art and to a lesser extent running are one of the few things in life I have ever found to be challenging.

But this talk sheds new light on what is possibly the degrading moniker of 'hobby' for art, music, sport. I guess I don't take much seriously, except play, and I take play very seriously, and thus I probably always come across as in a state of play. I think I'm in open mode almost all the time.

I don't know and can't say if my peers, friends and colleagues would label me as 'most creative' because of my lack of seriousness. I feel to narcissistic to be regarded as not having an inflated sense of self importance. And at the same time I really don't give a shit about myself at all.

But art, music and sport, they are all work. Damn hard work, they just require an intensive amount of time, space and play.

But they are challenging, I'm sure I have skewed perceptions, but in my life I have found what most people regard as 'hard' to be easy, and what other people regard as 'easy' intensely hard.

I possibly need to work harder at my closed mode.

Then again, seeing trained musicians at play, I feel I need to work harder on my open mode too.