Chaos and creation
Chaos and creation
A serving of creative nuggets worth sharing, the dipping sauce is in the details.
This week’s creative nuggets:
1. Documentary about Franca Sozzani, Vogue Italia’s editor-in-chief for 28 years
2. The hippies pulled Hermann Hesse, the ‘poet of the interior journey’ out of the doldrums
3. Efficiency has peaked and inefficiency may just be an insurance policy for catastrophe
4. Ethnic tokenism in the ‘media’ kitchen: How food media flattens ethnicity into identity
5. You didn’t know you needed to know about the French Werewolf Epidemic
Hello good people,
Chaos has been a global theme this year, and while we try to keep calm and carry on creating; it’s not without our own bearing on the cosmic energetics this time has laid out for us. Which has me asking the question; if we try too hard to create a much-needed sense of calm, do we only encourage more chaos?
Over the past while I’ve been rather accident prone on top of plenty intense happenings that have culminated to create a very layered time in life. A few weeks back I cut my hand while dropping a jar and then managed to slam my fingers (other hand) in the car door as I got out at the ER. That’s just one episode in a series of relentless events that have come in waves over the past few months.
Maybe all this is teaching us that we’re simply not in control - in fact, we never were. Maybe the mind sometimes moves faster than the body and we need to slow that thing down (as opposed to move faster, right?). Maybe it’s a good idea to lock oneself in a room full of pillows until the chaos inside (so, was it inside or outside?) subsides.
Curious to know if you’re feeling this chaos-in-a-tea-cup too?
Here are 5 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
If “art is what you can get away with”, then this is true of Franca Sozzani’s visual language. Franca was the editor of Vogue Italia who revolutionised fashion imagery through the decades with her “extravagant, experimental, innovative” and highly stylised editorials. She gave the magazine a stylistic prose, turning fashion into journalistic commentary. Her visual narratives pushed the boundaries of what high end fashion was perceived to be allowed to do and she bravely steered the controversy. Franca used imagery to create dreams; dreams you wanted to climb into and dreams you wanted to wake up from.
Her son interviews her while piecing together the story of her life in the self-titled documentary. Her philosophies are modest, yet casually daring, her answers are somewhat restrained; but you get the sense of her maverick spirit. She was a vessel for creativity in the way she relentlessly explored and exposed the rim-edge ideas of the photographers she worked with. Watch the trailer or dive in on Netlix.
Franca’s obituary on Vogue.com is worth a read too. She passed away aged 66 in 2016.
*Apologies to the great Naomi for putting a pasty on her nipple (just in case).
The Inward Gaze. Here’s an opening line if I ever saw one: In 1963, Timothy Leary, the high priest of LSD, anointed a German author, Hermann Hesse, the ‘poet of the interior journey’. And so began an afterlife for Hesse, who was a red wine drinker and not a psychonaut, by the way; but certainly an interior adventurer right up there with them. This article takes a long lean into Hesse’s life and writing - if Siddharta made you long for a trip to India, you will enjoy traversing Hesse’s universe here.
Efficiency as too much of a good thing. Slowing down for efficiency - please can we make this a thing! The chaos of 2020 has forcibly slowed us down and made us realise how fast we were moving - too fast. As people in our individual lives and as a society on earth, we have been developing exponentially faster than sustainable, leading to an all encompassing burnout and fatigue, and a greatly endangered planet. It turns out, some friction and some inefficiency is like an insurance policy. Meet the word ‘satisficing’.
Food for thought. It’s time to write a new menu as stories of inequality bubble out from the media kitchen. Food writers, chefs and recipe developers of colour speak out about being limited by their ethnic cuisines, while white colleagues get to be ‘food generalists’. Even when they push back, they’re turned into caricatured ambassadors - limited to their personal histories, their cultures, and the foods their grandmothers made. “I’m often asked to add a cultural slant even when one does not exist.”
People-eating wolves. The French Werewolf Epidemic (1520-1630) was France’s version of Europe’s witch trials and executions. Wolf-related mythology is long and rich with stories; there are many about young girls being ‘taken by wolves’ while watching sheep in the fields. For over a century more than 30 000 people were tortured and tried in the courts of France to confess their full-moon secret and hairy crimes. That’s a lot of people for a beast that doesn’t exist - but that’s the power of myth for you. As you were…
“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.” ~ Susan Sontag, On Photography
Gently does it,
Holly Jade
Thanks for reading.
Please subscribe if you’d like Wordstrings in your inbox.
Find me in other places: aitch create - Instagram - Facebook - Twitter