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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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Show & Tell
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Game of Thrones Daily
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Emma Hill and Ryan Nolan In-Store Performance at Of A Kind!
Don't miss the lovely Emma Hill's special in-store performance at Of a Kind with special guest Ryan Nolan! The show is free and for all ages! 4:00PM- Ryan Nolan www.ryannolanmusic.com/wp/ 4:30PM - Emma Hill www.emmahillmusic.com http://ofakind.ca/ @OfaKindStore
Wordsmyth Theatre presents The Dumb Waiter
Wordsmyth Theatre presents Harold Pinter's THE DUMB WAITER, May 15 to June 2, 2013 at Odyssey Studio. Directed by Melee Hutton (KICK Theatre’s Dora nominated Miss Julie; Sheh’mah) and by turns ridiculous and terrifying, The Dumb Waiter's surreal events have Ben (Mark Wilson) and Gus (David Matheson) wondering who is in charge, and how they might escape from the structures of their lives. Ben and Gus are holed up in an abandoned basement with a job to do. While they wait for ‘the call’ this comedy of menace moves between the ridiculous and the terrifying. Harold Pinter’s tense, claustrophobic, funny and surreal play asks the questions- how do we cope when the structures we know break down? How do you escape a situation from which there is no exit? “The Dumb Waiter appeals to me on many levels; I love the rhythms and the fantastic celebration of language. I admire Pinter’s penetration of our patter to reveal our patterns. The play is both chilling and hilarious and it pulses with questions about how we live our lives in or out of, Denial.” (Melee Hutton) Featuring Mark Wilson (little tongues) and David Matheson (Disciples, “The Dirties’), costume design by Ming Wong (Canopy Theatre Company), set design Andrea Mittler (2012 Dora Nominee, Wordsmyth Theatre’s Brothers Karamazov and Stratford Shakespeare Festival), sound designer James McKernan (Technical Director, Scenofest 2011), lighting design Siobhán Sleath (Stratford Shakespeare Festival), stage management by Sasha Maslow (Theatre@York) and assistant director and photography by Dahlia Katz (Dying Hard). LOCATION: Odyssey Studio 636 Pape Avenue(Studio Entrance is on Cavell Avenue) TIMES: Thursday to Sunday May 15 8.00pm WEDNESDAY PREVIEW May 16, 23, 30 8:00pm OPENING May 17, 24, 31 9:00pm LATE SHOW May 18, 31 & June 1 4:00pm May 18, 25 & June 1 8:00pm May 19, 26 & June 2 4:00pm TICKETS: $15/25 Online at www.wordsmyth.ca/Tickets.html MEDIA CONTACT: Sue Edworthy ([email protected]) WORDSMYTH THEATRE Theatre that stirs your imagination. We bring you compelling stories and our passion for language. We search for the enduring and compelling elements of our theatrical past, with an ear to the demands of the present. We are committed to producing authentic, sophisticated and passionate theatre.
Wisdom by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
I know, two list articles in a row. This is just some great advice from a great athlete and was originally published in Esquire:
When I was thirty, I was living my dream. I’d already accomplished most of what I’d set out to achieve professionally: leading scorer in the NBA, leading rebounder, leading blocker, Most Valuable Player, All-Star. But success can be as blinding as Bill Walton’s finger in the eye when battling for a rebound. I made mistakes. Plenty of them. In fact, sometimes I wish I could climb into a time machine and go back to shake some sense into that thirty-year-old me. If I could, here’s the advice I would give him:
1. Be more outgoing.
My shyness and introversion from those days still haunt me. Fans felt offended, reporters insulted. That was never my intention. When you’re on the public stage every day of your life, people think that you crave attention. For me, it was the opposite. I loved to play basketball, and was tremendously gratified that so many fans appreciated my game. But when I was off the court, I felt uncomfortable with attention. I rarely partied or attended celebrity bashes. On the flights to games, I read history books. Basically, I was a secret nerd who just happened to also be good at basketball. Interacting with a lot of people was like taking someone deathly afraid of heights and dangling him over the balcony at the top of the Empire State Building. If I could, I’d tell that nerdy Kareem to suck it up, put down that book you’re using as a shield, and, in the immortal words of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (to prove my nerd cred), “Engage!”
2. Ask about family history.
I wish I’d sat my parents down and asked them a lot more questions about our family history. I always thought there would be time and I kept putting it off because, at thirty, I was too involved in my own life to care that much about the past. I was so focused on making my parents proud of me that I didn’t ask them some of the basic questions, like how they met, what their first date was like, and so forth. I wish that I had.
3. Become financially literate.
“Dude, where’s my money?” is the rallying cry of many ex-athletes who wonder what happened to all the big bucks they earned. Some suffer from unwise investments or crazy spending, and others from not paying close attention. I was part of the didn’t-pay-attention group. I chose my financial manager, who I later discovered had no financial training, because a number of other athletes I knew were using him. That’s typical athlete mentality in that we’re used to trusting each other as a team, so we extend that trust to those associated with teammates. Consequently, I neglected to investigate his background or what qualified him to be a financial manager. He placed us in some real estate investments that went belly up and I came close to losing some serious coin. Hey, Kareem at 30: learn about finances and stay on top of where your money is at all times. As the saying goes, “Trust, but verify.”
4. Play the piano.
I took lessons as a kid but, like a lot of kids, didn’t stick with them. Maybe I felt too much pressure. After all, my father had gone to the Julliard School of Music and regularly jammed with some great jazz musicians. Looking back, I think playing piano would have given me a closer connection with my dad as well as given me another artistic outlet to better express myself. In 2002, I finally started to play and got pretty good at it. Not good enough that at parties people would chant for me to play “Piano Man,” but good enough that I could read music and feel closer to my dad.
5. Learn French.
My grandparents were from Trinidad where, though it was an English-speaking country, the school system was started by the French. Whenever my grandparents wanted to say something they didn’t want me to know, they’d speak French. The language seemed so sophisticated and mysterious. Plus, you earn extra James Bond points when you can order in French in a French restaurant.
6. Get handy.
I always wanted to be one of those guys who, whenever something doesn’t work, straps on a tool belt and says, “I’ll fix it.” I like the Walden-esque idea of complete self-reliance. Build my own house, clean out the carburetors, find out what carburetors are. Recently my washing machine broke and flooded my entire downstairs. I was forced to stand idly by waiting for a plumber to arrive while water rose around my ankles because I didn’t know how to shut off the water. That’s the kind of experience that makes you have your testosterone levels checked.
7. Be patient.
Impatience is the official language of youth. When you’re young, you want to rush to the next thing before you even know where you are. I always think of the joke in Colors that the wiser and older cop (Robert Duvall) tells his impatient rookie partner (Sean Penn). I’m paraphrasing, but it goes something like: “There's two bulls standing on top of a mountain. The younger one says to the older one: ‘Hey pop, let's say we run down there and screw one of them cows.’ The older one says: ‘No son. Let’s walk down and screw 'em all.’” Now, to counter the profane with the profound, one of my favorite quotes is from the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “Talent hits the target no one else can hit; genius hits the target no one else can see.” I think the key to seeing the target no one else can see is in being patient, waiting for it to appear so you can do the right thing, not just the expedient thing. Learning to wait is one of my greatest accomplishments as I’ve gotten older.
8. Listen more than talk.
And that’s all I’m going to say about that.
9. Career is never as important as family.
The better you are at your job, the more you’re rewarded, financially and spiritually, by doing it. You know how to solve problems for which you receive praise and money. Home life is more chaotic. Solving problems is less prescriptive and no one’s applauding or throwing money if you do it right. That’s why so many young professionals spend more time at work with the excuse, “I’m sacrificing for my family.” Bullshit. Learn to embrace the chaos of family life and enjoy the small victories. This hit me one night after we’d won an especially emotional game against the Celtics. I’d left the stadium listening to thousands of strangers chanting “Kareem! Kareem!” I felt flush with the sense of accomplishment, for me, for the Lakers, and for the fans. But when I stepped into my home and my son said, “Daddy!” the victory, the chanting, the league standings, all faded into a distant memory.
10. Being right is not always the right thing to be.
Kareem, my man, learn to step away. You think being honest immunizes you from the consequences of what you say. Remember Paul Simon’s lyrics, “There’s no tenderness beneath your honesty.” So maybe it’s not that important to win an argument, even if you “know” you’re right. Sometimes it’s more important to try a little tenderness.
11. Cook more.
After I got divorced I missed home cooked meals and the only person I had to rely on was the guy in the mirror. Plus, I found it impressed women if you could cook a good meal. Once, very shortly after I started cooking for myself, I had a first date with a woman I really wanted to make a good impression on. Of course, I could have done the usual celebrity thing: fancy restaurant, signing autographs, wait-staff fawning. But I wanted this to be special, so I decided to cook for her, everything from soup to dessert. Some women get a little freaked seeing a 7’2” black man with a carving knife and butcher’s apron, but she appreciated the effort. Which was good because the soup was a little salty, the steak a little overcooked, and the flan a little watery…
12. When choosing someone to date, compassion is better than passion.
I’m not saying she shouldn’t be passionate. That’s a given. But look for signs that she shows genuine compassion toward others. That will keep you interested in her a lot longer.
13. Do one thing every day that helps someone else.
This isn’t about charity, this is about helping one individual you know by name. Maybe it means calling your parents, helping a buddy move, or lending a favorite jazz album to Chocolate Fingers McGee. This is about charity, extended to people close by whose names you don’t know. You can always do more.
15. Do one thing every day that you look forward to doing.
It’s easy to get caught up in the enormous responsibilities of daily life. The To Do List can swallow your day. So, I’d insist to my younger self to make sure he has one thing on that list that he looks forward to doing.
16. Don’t be so quick to judge.
It’s human nature to instantly judge others. It goes back to our ancient life-or-death need to decide whether to fight or flee. But in their haste to size others up, people are often wrong—especially a thirty-year-old sports star with hordes of folks coming at him every day. We miss out on knowing some exceptional people by doing that, as I’m sure I did. I think the biggest irony of this advice is that it’s coming from someone who’s black, stratospherically tall, and an athlete: the trifecta of being pre-judged. And I have a lifetime of hurtful comments to prove it. Yet, that didn’t stop me from doing the same thing to others. You have to weigh the glee of satisfaction you get from arrogantly rejecting people with the inevitable sadness of regret you’ll eventually feel for having been such a dick. A friend of mine told me he routinely attends all of his high school reunions so he can apologize to every person he mistreated back then. He’s now on his fortieth reunion and still apologizing.
17. When breaking up with a woman, you can’t always remain friends.
I have managed to stay friends with many of the women I have dated because I truly liked and respected them. But sometimes emotions run too deep and efforts to remain friends, while that might help you feel better, actually might make the other person feel worse. Take the hit and let it go.
18. Watch more TV.
Yeah, you heard right, Little Kareem. It’s great that you always have your nose in history books. That’s made you more knowledgeable about your past and it has put the present in context. But pop culture is history in the making and watching some of the popular shows of each era reveals a lot about the average person, while history books often dwell on the powerful people.
19. Do more yoga.
Yes, K, I know you do yoga already. That’s why you’ve been able to play so long without major injuries. But doing more isn’t just for the physical benefits, it’s for the mental benefits that will come in handy in the years ahead, when your house burns down, your jazz collection perishes, and you lose to the Pistons in a four-game sweep in your final season.
20. Everything doesn’t have to be fixed.
Relax, K-Man. Some stuff can be fixed, some stuff can’t be. Deciding which is which is part of maturing.
Be the CEO of your mind
Thanks to Fancy Hands Blog for this amazing article:
A Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is defined as "the highest-ranking corporate officer (executive) or administrator in charge of total management of an organization."
Melanie Greenberg wrote the below about how to gain CEO-style management...over your own mind:
Buddha said, "to enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to yourself and your family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one's own mind."
You may have tried to control your thoughts at one time or another. With the aid of self-help books, perhaps you really tried to “be positive” and “show negativity the door.” And this may have even worked for a while. But sooner or later, you probably found yourself back at the starting point. I’m here to tell you that there is another way. And that is to become the CEO of your own mind – skillfully directing it to live in harmony with the other players of self - body and spirit.
If you follow the six steps below, you will be the master of yourself in no time.
STEP 1: LISTEN AND ACKNOWLEDGE.
Like all good leaders, you’re going to have to listen to your disgruntled employee, and acknowledge that you’re taking its message seriously. Minds, like people, can relax and let go when they feel heard and understood. Practice gratitude and thank your mind for its contribution. “Thank you, brain, for reminding me that if I don’t succeed in making more sales, I might get fired.” “Thank you for telling me that I might always be alone and never make a family if I don't find love soon.” “These are important areas of life, and I need to pay attention to them, and do my best to take advantage of every opportunity that comes up. I also need to learn from past experiences so I don’t keep making the same mistakes.”
STEP 2: MAKE PEACE WITH YOUR MIND.
You may not like what your mind does or the way it conducts itself. In fact, all that negativity can be downright irritating sometimes. But the fact is, you’re stuck with it, and you can’t (or wouldn’t want to) lobotomize it away. In the book The Happiness Trap, Dr. Russ Harris uses the example of the Israelis and the Palestinians to illustrate your relationship with your mind’s negative thoughts. These two old enemies may not like each other’s way of life, but they’re stuck with each other. If they wage war on each other, the other side retaliates, and more people get hurt and buildings destroyed. Now they all have a lot less energy to focus on building the health and happiness of their societies.
Just as living in peace would allow these nations to build healthier and more prosperous societies, so will making peace with your mind. Accepting that negative thoughts and feelings will be there, that you can’t control them, can allow you to focus on your actions in the present moment, so you can move ahead with your most important goals. You don’t necessarily have to like the thoughts or agree with them, you just have to let them be there in the background of your mind, while you go out and get things done.
STEP 3: REALIZE YOUR THOUGHTS ARE JUST THOUGHTS.
Most of the time we don’t “see” our minds. They just feel like part of us. Dr. Steve Hayes, the founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, uses the concept of being “fused with your thoughts” to illustrate this relationship. To be fused means to be stuck together, undifferentiated. You feel like your thoughts and feelings are YOU and so you accept them unconditionally as the truth without really looking at them. “I’m thinking I’m a failure and boring – gee, I must be a failure and boring.” This kind of simplistic logic seems to prevail because we can’t see our own minds, so we have difficulty stepping outside ourselves and getting an objective observer’s perspective.
In actuality, our thoughts are passing mental events, influenced by our moods, states of hunger or tiredness, physical health, hormones, sex, the weather, what we watched on TV last night, what we ate for dinner, what we learned as kids, and so on. They are like mental habits. And, like any habits, they can be healthy or unhealthy, but they take time to change. Just like a couch potato can’t get up and run a marathon right away, we can’t magically turn off our spinning negative thought/feeling cycles without repeated practice and considerable effort. And even then, our overactive amygdalas will still send us the negative stuff sometimes.
STEP 4: OBSERVE YOUR OWN MIND.
The saying “know thine enemy” is also applicable to our relationship with our own minds. Just like a good leader spends his time walking through the offices, getting to know the employees, we need to devote time to getting to know how our minds work day-to-day. Call it mindfulness, meditation, or quiet time. Time spent observing your mind is as important as time spent exercising. When you try to focus your mind on the in and out rhythm of your breath, or on the trees and flowers when you walk in nature, what does your mind do? If it’s like mine, it wanders all over the place – mostly bringing up old worries or unsolved problems from the day. And, if left unchecked, it can take you out of the peacefulness of the present moment, and into a spiral of worry, fear, and judgment.
Mindfulness involves not only noticing where your mind goes when it wanders, but also gently bringing it back to the focus on breath, eating, walking, loving, or working. When you do this repeatedly over months or years, you begin to retrain your runaway amygdala. Like a good CEO, you begin to know when your mind is checked out or spinning its wheels, and you can gently guide it to get back with the program. When it tries to take off on its own, you can gently remind it that’s it’s an interdependent and essential part of the whole enterprise of YOU.
STEP 5: RETRAIN YOUR MIND TO REWIRE YOUR BRAIN.
There is an old and rather wise saying, “we are what we repeatedly do.” To this, I would add “we become what we repeatedly think.” Over long periods, our patterns of thinking become etched into the billions of neurons in our brains, connecting them together in unique, entrenched patterns. When certain brain pathways – connections between different components or ideas – are frequently repeated, the neurons begin to “fire” or transmit information together in a rapid, interconnected sequence. Once the first thought starts, the whole sequence gets activated.
Autopilot is great for driving a car, but no so great for emotional functioning. For example, you may have deep-seated fears of getting close to people because you were mistreated as a child. To learn to love, you need to become aware of the whole negative sequence and how it’s biasing your perceptions, label these reactions as belonging to the past, and refocus your mind on present-moment experience. Over time, you can begin to change the wiring of your brain so your prefrontal cortex (the executive center, responsible for setting goals, planning and executing them), is more able to influence and shut off your rapidly firing, fear-based amygdala (emotion control center). And, this is exactly what brain imaging studies on effects of mindfulness therapy have shown.
STEP 6: PRACTICE SELF-COMPASSION.
The pioneer of self-compassion research, Dr. Kristin Neff, described this concept as “a healthier way of relating to yourself.” While we can’t easily change the gut-level feelings and reactions that our minds and bodies produce, we can change how we respond to these feelings.
When we judge our feelings, we lose touch with the benefits of those feelings. They are valuable sources of information about our reactions to events in our lives, and they can tell us what is most meaningful and important to us. Emotions are signals telling us to reach out to for comfort or to take time out to rest and replenish ourselves. Rather than criticizing ourselves, we can learn new ways of supporting ourselves in our suffering. We may deliberately seek out inner and outer experiences that bring us joy or comfort – memories of happy times with people we love, the beauty of nature, creative self-expression. Connecting with these resources can help us navigate the difficult feelings while staying grounded in the present.
To be a successful CEO of your own mind, you need to listen, get to know it, acknowledge its contribution, realize its nature, make peace with it, implement a retraining or employee development program, and treat it kindly. It will repay you with a lifetime of loyaly and service to the values and goals that you most cherish.
RuPaul's Drag Race: where camp meets art
The season finale of RuPaul's Drag Race aired on Monday night, [MAJOR SPOIL ALERT] with the crowning of the underdog of the season, Jinkx Monsoon, as the winner of the fifth season.
Although the show is funny and campy, it definitely brings up some serious topics like the difference between drag and being transgendered, plastic surgery, and the fight for marriage equality in the United States.
To the average eye, drag might not look like much more than a man in make-up. But it is so much more. It is performance. It is design. It is art. From designing the costumes, to using makeup to literally change the contours of your face and body (or in one instance, using make-up to give the illusion of being black and white, see photos below), to comedy and dance, performing drag is a legitimate art form and it is about time it is recognized as such.
Young Entrepreneur in Zambia
Check out this amazing story in the Huffington Post of Mutoba Ngoma, a young entrepreneur from Zambia.
28 year-old Ngoma owns his own Bio-fuel company which he runs with his father and a team of seven young employees. Read his story here, about his struggles and triumphs of owning his own business.
Sweet Success by Grace Volpe of Sweet Grace and Co.
Five summers ago my sister and I took a chance on a farmers’ market. With our parents’ mini van full of muffins, pies & brownies, a deck umbrella to shield us from the sun and a few chalk boards advertising the daily specials, we were ready to take on the self-employed world (well, part time at least).
Our gluten-free baking adventures began about 10 years ago when our mother was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Hoping to lessen her medication intake and improve her mobility, she consulted a naturopath. She was advised to eliminate foods that caused inflammation, specifically gluten.
Coming from an Italian/German family that loves to cook and eat EVERYTHING, it was quite a shock when our first ventures into gluten-free baking did not turn out as desired. Cookies with a texture indecipherable from pet rocks and pizzas as sturdy as frisbees from Canadian Tire, were a, thankfully, short-lived reality.
With a number of culinary disasters, chipped teeth and a few friends still willing to try our new gluten-free recipes -- “You HAVE to try it. This one ACTUALLY tastes good!”--we finally got the hang of gluten-free baking. A friend suggested that we sell at a local farmers’ market, as at that time gluten-free products, especially good ones, were hard to find.
After a googling and e-mailing blitz, we received an email from one market that was still taking vendors. We set up a blog, whipped up some crude homemade business cards and presto, we had our own business--one step above a curb side lemon aid stand. After late night baking, early morning fighting (over who had to drive) and hot summer days pushing our product, we started to develop a clientele would would seek us out at the market.
After our first market season we learned a lot about how to run our own business: hard work, trial and error, GREAT customer service and a good product go a long way. We also saw how the ‘tire kickers’ who looked insulted at the very thought of trying a sample of a gluten-free brownie, would in time be converted into repeat customers.
Throughout the years, we have revamped our website, business cards and design (with the help of a friend, Kathryn Barlow, who happens to be a real deal web designer) and continue to work on and improve our recipes. Our new focus is to provide recipes for people to make themselves so they can live a gluten-free life without relying on a box in a grocery store.
Check out our website, www.sweetgraceandco.com, each month for new recipes, blog and tips and tricks!
Happy Eating!
Three honest, real, true words that everyone needs to hear.
'Find what you love and let it kill you' by James Rhodes
After the inevitable "How many hours a day do you practice?" and "Show me your hands", the most common thing people say to me when they hear I'm a pianist is "I used to play the piano as a kid. I really regret giving it up". I imagine authors have lost count of the number of people who have told them they "always had a book inside them". We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity. A world where people have simply surrendered to (or been beaten into submission by) the sleepwalk of work, domesticity, mortgage repayments, junk food, junk TV, junk everything, angry ex-wives, ADHD kids and the lure of eating chicken from a bucket while emailing clients at 8pm on a weekend.
Do the maths. We can function - sometimes quite brilliantly - on six hours' sleep a night. Eight hours of work was more than good enough for centuries (oh the desperate irony that we actually work longer hours since the invention of the internet and smartphones). Four hours will amply cover picking the kids up, cleaning the flat, eating, washing and the various etceteras. We are left with six hours. 360 minutes to do whatever we want. Is what we want simply to numb out and give Simon Cowell even more money? To scroll through Twitter and Facebook looking for romance, bromance, cats, weather reports, obituaries and gossip? To get nostalgically, painfully drunk in a pub where you can't even smoke?
What if you could know everything there is to know about playing the piano in under an hour (something the late, great Glenn Gould claimed, correctly I believe, was true)? The basics of how to practise and how to read music, the physical mechanics of finger movement and posture, all the tools necessary to actually play a piece - these can be written down and imparted like a flat-pack furniture how-to-build-it manual; it then is down to you to scream and howl and hammer nails through fingers in the hope of deciphering something unutterably alien until, if you're very lucky, you end up with something halfway resembling the end product.
What if for a couple of hundred quid you could get an old upright on eBay delivered? And then you were told that with the right teacher and 40 minutes proper practice a day you could learn a piece you've always wanted to play within a few short weeks. Is that not worth exploring?
What if rather than a book club you joined a writer's club? Where every week you had to (really had to) bring three pages of your novel, novella, screenplay and read them aloud? What if, rather than paying £70 a month for a gym membership that delights in making you feel fat, guilty and a world away from the man your wife married you bought a few blank canvases and some paints and spent time each day painting your version of "I love you" until you realised that any woman worth keeping would jump you then and there just for that, despite your lack of a six-pack?
I didn't play the piano for 10 years. A decade of slow death by greed working in the City, chasing something that never existed in the first place (security, self-worth, Don Draper albeit a few inches shorter and a few women fewer). And only when the pain of not doing it got greater than the imagined pain of doing it did I somehow find the balls to pursue what I really wanted and had been obsessed by since the age of seven – to be a concert pianist.
Admittedly I went a little extreme – no income for five years, six hours a day of intense practice, monthly four-day long lessons with a brilliant and psychopathic teacher in Verona, a hunger for something that was so necessary it cost me my marriage, nine months in a mental hospital, most of my dignity and about 35lbs in weight. And the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is not perhaps the Disney ending I'd envisaged as I lay in bed aged 10 listening to Horowitz devouring Rachmaninov at Carnegie Hall.
My life involves endless hours of repetitive and frustrating practising, lonely hotel rooms, dodgy pianos, aggressively bitchy reviews, isolation, confusing airline reward programmes, physiotherapy, stretches of nervous boredom (counting ceiling tiles backstage as the house slowly fills up) punctuated by short moments of extreme pressure (playing 120,000 notes from memory in the right order with the right fingers, the right sound, the right pedalling while chatting about the composers and pieces and knowing there are critics, recording devices, my mum, the ghosts of the past, all there watching), and perhaps most crushingly, the realisation that I will never, ever give the perfect recital. It can only ever, with luck, hard work and a hefty dose of self-forgiveness, be "good enough".
And yet. The indescribable reward of taking a bunch of ink on paper from the shelf at Chappell of Bond Street. Tubing it home, setting the score, pencil, coffee and ashtray on the piano and emerging a few days, weeks or months later able to perform something that some mad, genius, lunatic of a composer 300 years ago heard in his head while out of his mind with grief or love or syphilis. A piece of music that will always baffle the greatest minds in the world, that simply cannot be made sense of, that is still living and floating in the ether and will do so for yet more centuries to come. That is extraordinary. And I did that. I do it, to my continual astonishment, all the time.
The government is cutting music programmes in schools and slashing Arts grants as gleefully as a morbidly American kid in Baskin Robbins. So if only to stick it to the man, isn't it worth fighting back in some small way? So write your damn book. Learn a Chopin prelude, get all Jackson Pollock with the kids, spend a few hours writing a Haiku. Do it because it counts even without the fanfare, the money, the fame and Heat photo-shoots that all our children now think they're now entitled to because Harry Styles has done it.
Charles Bukowski, hero of angsty teenagers the world over, instructs us to "find what you love and let it kill you". Suicide by creativity is something perhaps to aspire to in an age where more people know Katie Price better than the Emperor concerto.
To read the original article in the Guardian, click here.
The brand-spankin' new social networking site is almost ready! Why don't you sign-up and join the community?
In the mean time, here's a little 90's house music for no reason, other than I love this song.
A little inspiration...
Interview: Laura Hopf of Scarffaces and limberlina!
I got to interview Laura Hopf, owner of one of the coolest knit-wear companies on the planet:
Who are you and what do you do? My name is Laura Hopf and I have my own knitwear business, Scarffaces, which I started in 2011, along with a DIY business, limberlina, that I started a few months ago with my best friend Kim Keitner. I’m also a psychometrist, neuroimaging research writer, and the organizer for the upcoming summer Gladstone Fleas!
What led you to starting your own business? I fell in love with knitting immediately after learning how to do it. I would make presents for different friends each Christmas and I would get a lot of requests to make things. When I was on summer break in 2011 I decided to start my Christmas knitting early and it turned into Scarffaces. Before moving back to Toronto, Kim (limberlina co-founder) and I had planned all of these different crafts that we wanted to do, finally when I moved back, our love for DIY and friendship grew into limberlina! Although I also have to say that numerology has played a role, I love numerology and Kim and I are both the number 1. We found our numerology reading online (read your own here - http://www.ofesite.com/spirit/numerology/numer.htm) and it literally says, “you should own your own business in construction or crafts” so I feel like numerology has known all along!
How did you go about starting it? With Scarffaces it was easy because I was still in school, I could knit at the same time as I was reading for class and it came about really organically. On some weekends I would sell at Artists & Fleas in Brooklyn, and when I would get orders from Toronto my boyfriend would deliver them for me. With limberlina, it was a bit more difficult because it’s website based where we have tutorials on our site. Kim has a full time job so we would sit down with our amazing web developer, Adam Graves, and would try to work as much as possible in the little amount of time that we had together. Now that the site is put together, Adam does updates when we have new DIYs and Kim and I are constantly talking throughout the day, online, through texts, or over the phone. I also have two part time jobs that I do mostly from home so I’m living the good life! I’m working on a neuroimaging paper but I can do that at any time of day or from any location. As a psychometrist, I have to go into the office sometimes but the days are few and far between. Other times I am at home editing neuropsychological reports. This kind of flexibility with my real money paying jobs allows me to spend time that I would be commuting, or taking lunch breaks, to be working on my creative endeavors. Sometimes I’ll spend an hour in the morning working on scarffaces, walk to queen west to pick up supplies for limberlina, work on my neuroimaging paper, and then finish the day off with spinning and steam room.
What inspires you and keeps you motivated? My happiness really motivates me, I love what I’m doing, I love knitting and making and designing new pieces, and I love making new things with limberlina. I also love working with someone, it can get lonely running a business alone! You spend a lot of hours questioning yourself but when you have someone else to bounce ideas off of who you feel really comfortable with, it makes it a lot more exciting.
What has been the most difficult part? The most difficult part has been the amount of time spent to actually get something going. Especially with limberlina, things just take time, putting together kits, crafting, writing up DIYs, it is a lot of work where you don’t get paid so you really have to love what you’re doing.
What has surprised you? The most surprising thing so far was when we opened the limberlina shop on etsy and someone from Australia bought our first kit in less than 24 hours after opening!
Anything coming up that you want to plug? Yes! I’m the organizer of the Gladstone Flea and we’re looking for vendors, so if you or anyone you know is an artist, craftsperson, vintage seller, etc. email [email protected] with your information and a few photos of your items! For more info go to the Gladstone website. Also, check out Scarrface's Facebook page.
Shoot for the moon; if you miss, you will still be among the stars. -Les Brown.
So cheesy. Yet so damn true.
Want a job at Google?
According to an article in the Business Insider, Google is no longer paying attention to University or College GPAs or SAT scores when they look at hiring new employees.
Prasad Setty, Google's Vice President for people analytics said that Google has found that the numbers alone don't necessary lead to success and they "are no longer used as important hiring criteria".
These hiring insights come from a very detailed employee data tracking program, also known as Big Data. The New York Times wrote an article on the benefits of companies using Big Data to make their workplace better suited for new recruits by keeping them happy and healthy.
The data comes from surveys, employee feedback, and from experiments from Google's People & Innovation lab, which is designed to calculate the best hiring and retention practices for the company.
For more information about Big Data and Google, check out this article in Slate magazine.