Category: Me Myself&I

A week in. Pretty brutal, let me tell you. #backtofrance #ugh

Designed in 1935, built in 1936. Before rockets exist, 30 years before NASA and 60s futurism, 40 years before Star Wars.

So I went on Mid-Century Modern architecture binge in the past few days. Lloyd Wright (crazy life!), the prairie school, the Case Study Houses, Wright’s disciples like John Lautner, Rudolph Schindler or Richard Neutra.

I adore that modern style. I always loved futurism but what makes me crazy is that some of these houses have been designed almost 100 years ago (1920s), built a little bit later and still, in 2013, look super modern! It blows my mind.

We have Wifi and devices we could not imagine even ten years ago and we live in houses and buildings that look like we’re in 1800s. Even compact or mid-size cars have beautiful design today so why don’t we do that with housing? House design really demonstrates how we suck at big scale change.

Melvyn Maxwell and Sara Stein Smith House. Usonian as fuck. I can’t stop contemplate.

Despite designing houses to a ridiculous level of detail (up to furniture and knobs), which would often double the budget decided, there were not that perfect. Wright’s iconic flat roofs were often leaking after a couple of years and although he used locations to get as much sun as possible in the house –passive heating- or very innovative radiant floors, a lot of these houses were/are hard and expensive to maintain, too cold and too hot.

The thing is today we have the technology to have those problems solved. Wright’s didn’t have triple pane glass for example, which solves the glass problem (lets the sun go through as much as the cold) entirely. Leaking flat roofs? We have rubber technology for that now or even better, green roofs. I’m surprised Wright wasn’t into this, he seemed to love nature and the technique is as old as Vikings are but maybe he didn’t want to think about any old building technique, he wanted to disconnect entirely from Europe and the Old World.

Super fascinating stuff to me. Wright’s focus on harmony and structure talks to me, bassist-composer-passivehaus-lover.

November, an hour ago.

I was wondering why people moving to another country would come back and forth in their lives pretty regularly. Obligations. Now I know.

Meanwhile, constant comparison between my life in California and my life in Ile de France. Just putting them together in the same sentence sounds weird. Who wins? Nobody wins. Through different lenses, different angles and different distances, there are preferences. It’s an endless mind game.

These days I tend to feel an unlimited amount of creativity in L.A. while I feel most at peace in the City of Light. That actually sums it up very well.

Sometimes in France people tell me “tu remontes là-haut?” which means “are you going back up there?”, like the USA are obviously an upgrade or inaccessible, higher. It’s always sounded exciting as hell, especially from France’s countryside. So when I look around me and see a typical US street like on TV when I was a kid and that I’d dream of riding my bike there, it’s always a bit surreal. And still exciting.

Obviously, there’s much more to living somewhere than just spacing out at a LA stop. The American Dream these days looks like a spinning bottle going faster and faster pointing at two things:

It’s total bullshit and always has been.
It’s possible to make it.

It might not matter at all. For now it’s the classic, weird blues a couple of weeks ahead of switching back to Paris for a while.

I often hear that we can solve multiple problems at once. No we can’t! We prioritize. Sure, we can feed a baby, watch TV and put a finger in our nose to pull out some dirt at the same time but we don’t if we want to fully do what we have to do: you need a mirror and to go deep to nicely get that booger. My point is there’s an order to follow always, be it for a mom, an operating system, a company or sending back home a space module. To solve problems aka get shit done you create lists and you prioritize items.

To me prioritization starts with women. Let’s start with half the planet, shall we? Once equality is achieved with them, much better. Then let’s go with race because well the same, it touches a lot of people and it’s been going on for way too long. Let’s reach equality here too.

Well, I’m pretty sure if all that was to happen, a lot of bad things like how we treat our polar bears or how we damage our soil would stop immediately. We wouldn’t even need to fight for it, it would be simply common sense in an equalitarian world. Gay rights? Of course guys. A broader definition of gender? Absolutely. War on drugs? Aborted. I mean who’d give a shit now? Who would be against that in a genuinely equalitarian society? Voted! Bam, the next day it’s reality.

Instead we get super intense on problems that are children of parents that we don’t blame for nothing. We don’t connect the dots: we want more women at the top while they discover their own bodies in their 20s or are still raised as little princesses, it cannot work can it? While same sex marriage is great, I really wish people would throw as much energy against sexism and racism which are thriving forces still, no matter what your political views are. I wish media would be relentless on that, instead of playing on how people divide themselves through archaic values like marriage and who can use it. I wish I would see people posting about saving foster care kids at least once instead of dogs over and over. Yeah. It hurts, I know.

People don’t want or don’t have the time to read the whole story. They simply need an external cause to defend to feel better, preferably popular, and that’s it. There’s no reflection on a question like where the fuck the main problems come from?

So let’s start the sequence, step by step. It doesn’t work? Start over. Connect the dots. That’s how we do.

When I was 12 years old it was perfectly OK to watch Robocop or Predator,” Bleszinski says, “but the second that a breast was flashed on screen, my mother would attempt to toss a blanket or a coat over my head. That probably explains a lot of my adult issues. Americans in general have really weird ideas about sex and violence, and that micro-example kind of summarizes it nicely.

Cliffy, speaking of sex in games. The article describes the difficulty to get sex in “big games” right. The article doesn’t mention anything about app stores ban on anything sexual, like it’s totally normal.

I was raised Southern Baptist, and no one ever talked to me about genital selfplay. So I didn’t ask about it and didn’t cum until I was a 22-year-old graduate student living in Florida.

Twanna wrote about her first orgasm. She is far from being the only one raised like that.

Both Cliff and Twanna are around my age, maybe a bit older. America’s sex culture –or lack of- is frightening and twisted as fuck.

Fascinating article on Japan and the rise of the Single.

SEE WHAT I DID THERE ALL RIGHT.

A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all. (There are no figures for same-sex relationships.)

I say rise of the single instead of “no sex” because well, it’s not the same. Masturbating is having sex alone and only Japanese know what they’re doing in their bedrooms.

"Both men and women say to me they don’t see the point of love. They don’t believe it can lead anywhere," says Aoyama. "Relationships have become too hard."

It rings true for like, lots of people amirite. The point that older generations don’t get is that it really became hard to do everything with someone, with virtually no safety net. when it was possible post WW II (the Great Acceleration), it was in a certain fashion that is no longer acceptable (patriarchy, jobs for life). We knit around those concepts, bearing with more or less of that old system that brought us to adulthood but barely works today with couples working for relatively small wages, struggling much more than their parents, regardless.

So the norm explodes. In Japan mostly, we’re still all fucked up by catholicism and stuff anywhere else. Even more since 9/11 (“we need to stand against Muslims, let’s get married!”). Sigh.

Younger, I was wondering how my generation would hold on in our 30s because obviously, we knew that marriage wasn’t that much of a great thing to do. And that it didn’t matter to raise kids. But in a mix of laws, social pressure and history we’re lagging. It’s coming though. I predict a huge amount of singles in their 40s and 50s in the next decade in Europe and US.

According to the government’s population institute, women in their early 20s today have a one-in-four chance of never marrying. Their chances of remaining childless are even higher: almost 40%.

It makes total sense. It’s totally taboo to talk about that but really, we don’t need more humans around these days, Mother Earth would agree. Nothing personal against kids, just a question of timing. Maybe in a generation, fifteen twenty years from now it will become natural to start a family in Japan because everything will be much easier, cheaper etc so that people can actually enjoy a family life and not try hard to survive it. Until then, hello Single Life!

Older generation don’t understand that you can mainly care about yourself AND still care about your surrounding. Because we know our surrounding are affecting us, so we take care of them. It seems like an equation that hurts their brains. “if you’re selfish, you don’t care about others”.  That was before globalization, grandpa.

Uncut, as you can hear.

The 80s were about integrating two families, discovering the extent of it.

The 90s were about me, discovering what I can do, what I like.

The 2000s were about discovering the outside world, how it works.

The 2010s just started and I guess they’re about making sense of all this. I can’t make sense of it. Between what I’ve been told, what I’ve learned, what works what doesn’t what society accepts or condemned, pretty much nothing makes sense and I see exactly where but what’s the point? It doesn’t change shit.

I mean it does in a way make sense it’s just that it’s way, way way less romantic than I thought.

I was reading this excellent article on Dave Chappelle. He is important to us black dudes because everyone loves him. He quit over pressure and the terrible feeling that he was doing things wrong. The author goes on negritude:

But the broader, more important meaning of Negritude has to do with a process isolated and identified by these poets. It is the process by which Black people, who have been cut off from and made to learn to know themselves again, come to accept themselves, and begin to believe in (i.e. to value) themselves.

I guess I am in that process too. When I’m looking at the game industry, I try to find some ways to feel comfortable and like myself. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed Japanese culture influence so much, there was no black VS white, no rock VS funk. They were showing me that I can be free. That was on paper.

In the real world this is not how it works. This is where Dave’s story is important to me. He went up there and then he was like, “no, man”. The price to pay was too high: ignore who you are and become something you are not. When you are a black dude who had the chance to avoid any trouble, who had the chance to study, who had the chance to be free compared to 99% of other black dudes, the pressure in higher careers is unfathomable. It’s not even pressure, it’s 600 gigatons Blues.

Like Dave had to conform to Hollywood, I have to conform to the Videogame Industry and it’s very hard. I love and always will the solving problems side of game development and how much we can do compared to the real world. I feel genuinely connected to this. But I don’t know how to position myself within current mainstream game development culture. Mainstream game culture. Mainstream western culture.

QUESTIONS. SUSPENSE.

I went to Baldwin Hills two weeks ago.

Wikipedia says it all:

Baldwin Hills Estates (east of La Brea, southwest of Santo Tomas Drive, south of the Jim Gilliam Recreation Center and north of Stocker Street), one of the wealthiest majority-African American areas in the United States, and is sometimes called "the Black Beverly Hills".

I so wanted to see it, you don’t even know. Just neighborhoods with black people, looking good and over Los Angeles. I read about that place. I dreamed of this place. I imagined myself biking that hard hill, needing some water and some nice black people would ask me if I wanted some.

It happened exactly like that. I had to give up and walk and this black woman is there on the other side of the street. She doesn’t even yell, it is so quiet up there. She simply asks me if I need any water and I gently declined, short of breath and walking with my bike on the side.

It took me at least 20 minutes to think that I could have engaged a conversation with someone living there and that I didn’t, totally just high on the beauty, those families living peacefully, that dude asking me wassup walking down his driveway with his 10 year old son, both looking like hip hop stars. Pianos standing in the middle of living rooms.

It’s a weird thing to feel so comfortable somewhere and at the same time, being such a stranger.

So thankful I’ve been in those hills though. I shall return.

“That empty, forever empty”  Oh I know that thing, Louis. It started early when I learned that I didn’t have parents or brothers and sisters and understood that “forever alone” feeling very well. Orphans are some kind of cold ice motherfuckers with the biggest empathy you’ll see but anyway.

I got used to the idea of being alone. Like maybe a little too much. It makes me feel so powerful! I can stay days alone doing music, fighting my own little creative demons, feeling and filling the void, feeling like shit or feeling like the best warrior on earth.

And then I go out and enjoy so many things, kids smiling, the design of an aisle at a supermarket, the weird interaction of a mom and her kid, everything becomes fucking interesting and awesome. Then at some point I realize how much all of that is theater, people playing their roles. It’s all kind of fake and I go back to that sappy (sad and happy) loneliness that brings me to inspiration and analysis of things and overall making me feel good.

It’s a game, you have to be able to perform in both “forever empty” and “social” mode. The problem is –like Louis demonstrates- that we’re way too much into the social part, which is pure construction. It doesn’t really exist, you know? We’re willing to kill other people driving and texting so that we can feel NOT alone. Attention whorism reached its peak.

Disconnect. Take your time. Learn to play an instrument, learn to listen, read stuff. Be alone and deal with it. It’s pretty good. Also, you’ll die alone like everyone so get used to it.

Like Paul Mooney says “oh, death is coming. Just wait.”