Category: Me Myself&I

A 70s book for kids. Kind of philosophical and stuff.

When I was about 6 and freshly adopted, my mom used to read the book “El hombre que lo tenía todo todo todo” to me before sleep. Interestingly, the translation in French wasn’t the correct “The man whom had it all, all, all” but “The man who knew everything, everything, everything”.

This book is pretty complex for a kids book but I didn’t care. Just the title was enough to help me create stories by myself. “If you know everything then what? What kind of adventure would you be able to live?” Exactly. No limit.

I always have been like a sponge, absorbing anything that seemed great. It started by reading the family’s dictionary and pictures descriptions, trying to know everything about dinosaurs and volcanoes and from there, I absorbed anything.  The sense of enjoying life from France, Spain and Italia, the engineering skills and rigorousness from Germany, the creativity and adventureness of the UK/US, the Zen and simplicity from Asia… I don’t give a shit. I mix everything and build my own set of rules. There’s no conflict, only challenges. My mistake was to think that you guys were doing the same. The psychological mechanism of standing up for a side is the strangest thing to me. I don’t take sides. I go through. Back and forth. Ponder. Get the best of both and move on.

Looking back at the past three years and last ten years, I feel like knowing everything now. I mean not in full detail but I got answers to everything I needed to know. I know it sounds like I lost it but seriously, I have a much better view of how things work. Systems, bias, human irrationality and human societies’ inertia, our addiction-driven brains. OK, I get it now.

Now all the dots seem connected. Sometimes I’m really bored at how we -and by we I mean you- just stay there talking about things like “OMG, this president was really awful, it’s all his fault and now I want to cry” when it’s been a while that presidents don’t really matter. They just make obvious moves dictated by systems. The war in Iraq is over? Fucking amazing, after nine years of occupation and an overwhelming support to get soldiers back home since forever. You get the idea.

I feel bored. I can’t have deep conversations with people who lack information, I can have infinite masturbatory conversations with people with extended knowledge (I hate this word, “education”). Both cases make me lean toward boredom. I’ve been able to go on and off with both, balancing out for years, but these days I feel more annoyed than ever to see behaviors looping over and over. I don’t know.

I blame this book. You are damn right ignorance is bliss. Though, I’d love to learn and fly a glider or even crazier, a wingsuit. And of course, I have so much more to do with music, games and computers. This shit is deep.

So Louis CK did it and I can’t stop thinking about the fact that:

– Artists are way too often freaking retards with technology and can’t never see how it would benefit them; I torrented every single Louis’ standup, the two seasons of Louie and that’s how I became a fan and paid right away for his thing. Otherwise, I would have just “stolen” his last show or maybe would not have given a single fuck about this fat, swollen Irish asshole. Artists are like old stinking grandparents in front of their TV being scared by everything news say. P2P is one of the best invention ever, period. Learn it and use it. And hurry the fuck up because liberticide laws are rushing on this freedom like white people to a Kanye West’s show.

– How is that only a handful of artists did this? Are they all screwed by contract or are they really not getting the Internet?

Dave Chappelle (excellent and long 2008 interview here), what the hell man? Chappelle’s Show is one of the highest selling TV-series DVD set of all time, right there with US culture pillars that are The Simpsons and Seinfeld.

You freaked out on celebrity. Fine, I totally get that. You explain it and I would have done the same, probably. But man, you cannot do standup comedy in front of your fridge or your cows or whatever animal or dead object you have in your Ohio farm. Like for Louis, I torrented your ass because I wasn’t aware of Chappelle’s show when it was airing -they’re not big on satire by black comedians in France-, and was tired of reruns with commercials. I cried so many times, laughing. I want more.

Get on the freaking internet, Dave. Do whatever you want (as long as it’s funny and make me think), shove the intertube with it, make people pay, be fair and nice and you’ll be fine. You are a comedian, you need this shit. I mean, the past few years ought to bring jokes and ideas to your brain in the order of hundreds of thousands. Your name is huge. You can take some little risk, you own a fucking farm. You are fine, you can just take your time and make great stuff. Total freedom, total control. Come on, son!

And yes, it makes me think about black people and technology. It’s often in my mind these days.

Isn’t everything weird these days?

People protest about the 1% making so much money but cyber Monday generated $1.2 billion, up 22% from last year. I didn’t buy anything.

I thought we didn’t have any money? Modern Warfare 3 made  over $1 billion in 16 days. Sixteen days, one game. Explain that to me guys. Not just the financial aspect but how a war game can be so widely welcomed, over and over. Zynga’s IPO and market cap is just… I mean they might be near dead in two years, all this money and BS it’s so sick, really.

The NDAA and SOPA shit fed by corporations’ motherfucking greed. Right during the end of the year when no one really wants to bother about anything but eggnog and food. And Skyrim. Goddamn dragons, son. #whitepeopleescapism

Google and Facebook filtering more and more. People disappearing from my timeline because I don’t interact enough with them so FB decides to not show them to me? Google putting my friend’s results first, here and there, like I haven’t noticed. And this condescending tone big G, Twitter and too many high tech services have toward users doesn’t say that they give a fuck. Machines are supposed to be neutral. That’s the great thing about them. At least it was.

It’s like all of that makes sense, in a bad way.

France Generation-sandwich.

So people born from 1900 to around 1970 in red: basically, it’s no to Europe. Still scared from “Ze Germans” and still think De Gaulle as the Main Man. They don’t speak or read anything but French. They know though, that Europe needs to happen. Once they’ll pass away, because for now those old ass bitches rather go back to the Franc.

The slim orange Yes to Europe? My generations, which started working with the Euro. If I look around me, 80% of us lived or are living or plan to live somewhere else than in France. Some go as far as Australia or California. We’re all kind of reading  and speaking English and we could totally create this federal Europe because we grew up dreaming of and being fed with the American way of Life, freedom and big spaces. But we also know that we’re kind of screwed you know, globalization, fast food and debt culture and all that shit.

The “don’t give a fuck” generation is this generation which doesn’t really feel the need to build anything because they already have so much. They don’t have a conflict with boomers and my generation is translating everything to them, the entire US cultural influence and internet memes included. They’re probably scared to death for the future though. Or maybe not.

So only the smallest slice of 2011 France population is ready right now for this “political Europe”. Politicians, good luck with that.

har0ld’s groove by Harold

I guess I’ll have to decide which service to use in the future but it’s a tough one.

Disclaimer: high thinking ahead.

I was following a Twitter conversation about race, black people and all that. People disagree, some think that race doesn’t exist and some are saying that fuck yeah it does and both are right.  African-Americans and the history of US slavery created a situation where they cannot not see race. But it brings up a lot of problems.

So there’s race from a scientific point of view and race, from a social-cultural point of view. Science says race doesn’t exist, -one “race”, the human race- and science is right. Science tells us that everybody on earth comes from Africa which has a bigger genetic variation than any other place in the world (I still think it’s amazing). Basically, human race started black and mutated, following the environment and nature.

Socially and culturally, race shows that it’s obviously segregated and racially tense. I know the West economy going down doesn’t help but it is tense, from hard right wings raising up in Europe to heavy segregation in the US. or even something as “light” as asking a black president if he’s really American and to prove it with his birth certificate. And him doing it. I’m so mad at that.

BUT! I know we can live together without even bother about cultural differences. It happens here and there, at microscopic scales right, but it happens, more and more. This is to me where Nature filters things out, where people knowing stuff about other cultures, living with them and in no way afraid of them, and naturally go interracial and build solid ground for the future to be less racist. It’s happening right now, there’s no need of politics. There’s just a need of more of that. The more communities, the less it happens.

It’s a mistake wanting to stand by race or not race. Life isn’t static, it’s moving and changing. Things that are very segregated at one point of the day somewhere in the US are totally not somewhere in France at another point of the day, and vice versa.There is no standing in Life, there is moving. We need directions. For that we need a destination which is pretty clear to me: being able to live with whoever the hell you want with nobody having anything to say about it and knowing as much as you can about all the great stuff of as much culture you can absorb. The more people like that, the better right?

Communities have this paradoxical effect of making your outside you stronger and weakening your inner you. That’s why we should not think too much as communities because it automatically creates a frontal friction between cultures and the dominant one will always win, as every statistics about race issues and history, show. When the friction happens at a more atomic scale -one to one in a work environment for example- things go smoother, change happens. There’s no full rejection of the other, there’s discussion because fear isn’t there. I mean, it’s the only way it works, if you demand stuff in a Black Panther way you just get murdered. And worse, nobody gives a shit.

I know it’s hard. In my 1.5-2% black people in the game industry I feel it, it’s an internal battle that triggers so many questions and often makes me want to be part of a supportive black community, all cozy and shit. I’m condemned to have my ass between two chairs, as we say in French. But somehow I think I change things, this way. And learn so much.

So,  I don’t know. I know it’s easier for me to follow an in-between line with these issues. That’s all I know, I learned how to deal with it. I know science is the most stable ground about human differences (straight line) and we are gravitating around it according to history, our beliefs and personal experiences (blue sine). It’s so dumb, somehow.

Adoption, race issue, and many more stuff are occupying my brain these days. Same as in the streets, I try to evict all these motherfuckers with my brain police but they hold tight, they didn’t get the memo to GTFO, apparently. /insert pepper spray pun

I could lay down exactly what I think about all that but I’ll save you some time. The point is, I just have this particular view and I censure myself a lot more these days. Audience, Twitter/FB and the rest don’t help.

I read this week that adopted people had often this problem of being seen as rude, because of the all detached from birth parents thing. So true. Dear friends, I save our relationship by not seeing you. I fight hard to not make the mistake of saying hard cold shit in people’s face. I just deleted a sentence saying that fake smiles and ethnocentrism in the society I live in are a pain in the ass, see? I swear I fight hard, trying to be as diplomat as I can. At the same time, that’s what people always like in me: honesty. Making them laugh or think by dropping the bomb.

I should write stuff for stand up comedians. Getting paid to tell sulfuric, acid, disrespectful stuff like no one else. Hell I even shock myself sometimes, that’s a good sign.

Laughing is such a good therapy.

We’re living in awful, inefficient, costly houses. The more I know about building houses, the more I cringe with what we use. We have the knowledge and mastering to build houses that cost near to nothing /a year, provide excellent comfort and save the environment while costing pretty much the same. People don’t even know that! They think they have to get a big house (Americans have 3X more personal space now than they did fifty years ago) and a huge mortgage or super high rent for which they are working hard, to feel great. What if the working hard part was used for a real change, something that would make you save money and more importantly, make you happy. Healthy. Your kids.

On the side, it’s funny to me that people go from Black Friday consumerism craziness to extreme low-life tiny house weird trend. Can’t we just try to find a fucking balance instead of going all in, all the time?  Shit is exhausting.

I cannot stop thinking about locally produced prefab passive houses for everybody -kind of Ikea/Lego concept but with your house- and encourage people to deploy over the territory instead of having everybody living on the same spot: almost 30% of the population of England lives around London; Los Angeles population density: 3,124/km², Paris: 25,417/km². It’s ridiculous. There is room. How can we not have allergies and shit with this concentration of people and machines and rats. You see the bad spiral we are in? Buy more stuff. More medicine and air purifier and clean cars and fixing services.

Just this business idea would change so much stuff. Create strong local networks of people building a new paradigm. Cleaning up, spreading out our cities, progressively. No centralized architecture around a megalopolis but a peer to peer network around human-sized cities. Increasing Quality of Life, a house at a time. A neighborhood at a time. Disconnecting the amount of money you make and comfort. Because we can, today. I’m so tired of seeing awesome, functional, zero net energy home prototypes at Inhabitat and just prototypes.

What if people stop thinking that they need to be the 1% to be happy? The 99% hate this 1% but would LOVE to be part of it. That’s the biggest issue to me. Building super great inexpensive houses would kill current property value and make a lot of people unhappy. I don’t give a shit. You have been happy paying and financing your giant useless home and now, after you lose some, you’ll be happy again but with more people around happy too. That would be nice, but some people really get off by seeing others not having as much as they own. I don’t have any plan for these assholes.

I bet states would go nuts, too. People getting more independent, almost off the grid? Less power to them, more to people. Homeschooling would probably get bigger. Going to school sucks, anyway.

Change is hard. But I love to make this first domino fall and watch the rest shift, one by one, at least in my mind.

FocusJam by Harold

And also:

Much more to come… Peace.

The process is always the same: play music to forget about this stupid world, closing my eyes and forgetting about things that are on the surface, I’m playing. After a while I am not thinking anymore about anything, I’m in the feel, in the patterns, thinking ahead, getting ready to land my fingers on strings and move them accordingly.

And then after a while in the Zone, somehow, my brain jumps to a memory. Often one that I never or barely thought about before. Some are insanely old, some are insignificant, but always feel real, like the exact feeling of being in a swimming pool around Lyon when I was like 13, the exact feeling of being in this small room to change clothes. Or a stormy weather over my small French village and going back home and eating sautés mushrooms when I hadn’t been even adopted yet.

These portals are only happening when playing music closing my eyes, improvising. Sometimes it’s so disturbing, so real, that it puts me out of the Zone. In some cases I was so amazed to remember something that I had to immediately stop playing, and being like “but… How? How do I remember that right now, how is that so crystal clear?” 

It’s awesome and scary at the same time. Often, it gives me a sense of what I have accomplished or it gives me a sense of “wow, that feeling was so great”, even if it’s just like a memory of making a left turn on Sunset Blvd with the sun reflecting on cars windshield or sitting down in the grass in Vincennes, watching people. It’s the little things and the perspective from them.

Of course, pot enhances that feeling. Sometimes I swear, even smell and odors are almost coming back. Like I can almost get a sense of it. I cut so much information by closing my eyes that everything else gets bigger.

It’s all about spending hundreds of hours listening, I guess. Listening to music, copying notes, listening to my copy/paste play, listening to my own play, listening to my breathing, listening in general, at some point I suppose that my brain kind of gets split up in two with an half being a spectator and the other being like “btw, I have this little super HD 5.1 4K in odorama movie of you being lonely, wanna watch it?” and I’m all like, “shoot”.

But it’s not just that. I can’t count how many times I found solutions to problems by improvising funky bass lines and bam, “Jesus fuck, of course!!”, or “oh smart, I totally need to try that in fact, I’m gonna do this right now”. /puts his bass back on its stand.

Music and non-visual focus are so different from this visually over-saturated world we live in. It feels damn good.