Pick Two

Perfect for a Monday

Bon Iver & Iceland

Two of my loves.

Ode to California

After Coachella I took a 7 day trip through California. I had never explored California like this and it has been one of the most amazing vacations of my life.

In some ways, the mountains and hills remind me of home, but the ocean right next to cliffs adds another depth to nature and to your place in it. Everywhere I drove it smelled like eucalyptus, ocean, and occasionally spices. In the 2,600mi trip I took, I left from Indio where Coachella took place, west to LA, and north to Santa Cruz. The car broke down in the middle of Highway 5, but it was a welcomed adventure.

I didn’t spend much time in Santa Cruz, but headed further north into the Russian River Valley. One of my favorite wineries was Lambert Bridge Winery. There I met Tony, who entertained me with conversations on romance languages, latin roots, and told me about California wines, which are stronger than their European or Eastern counterparts. The winery is intimate and produces limited amounts of wine each year. They believe in quality over quantity and don’t even ship their wines to the east coast, so you can only get them in California.

I reached Yosemite too, which is too beautifully vast to exemplify through pictures. There are waterfalls, glaciers, valleys and endless kinds of vegetation all in the span of a look.

The most beautiful part was the drive from San Francisco to Stinson beach. It’s only a 23 mi ride, but you get the best of all worlds: going over the Golden Gate, passing through Muir Woods, and ending with an almost perilous, extremely curvy, but exceedingly beautiful drive on the coast.

California is magic. Even when you are alone, there are fewer barriers between you and nature than there are on the east coast. You are enveloped by the sea and go through fog and sunshine and mist, all in 20 minutes.

I am in love with California.

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Bon Iver: Calgary

This is really good and very perfect for how rainy New York is today. Download it from his website.

The Kills: Blood Pressures Short

This is one act I missed at Coachella, but I’m getting to see them in New York – my friends who did manage to see them told me they were one of the best acts there. The acoustic versions on this short documentary are really good. Have a listen!

The Truth About Creativity

This is my truth about creativity. I grew up in a land where creativity was looked down upon. In any communist regime, you can only be creative within the limits of the regime. Freedom in creative expression is limited and discouraged, so many myths are created to control creativity, myths that my parents have taught me and I have propagated in my mind until very recently.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Myth #1: Creativity is divine.

You are born with or without a given amount of creativity. It is inherent in your being and it cannot be altered. Or exercise it. It just comes to you. You suddenly get a flash of genius and you create a beautiful masterpiece effortlessly.

Myth #2: Creative people are lazy.

I’ve been repeatedly told me that creative people are disorganized. They live their lives haphazardly, without any scope or goal, blinded by their creativity.If you go down the creative path, you are condemned to an unfulfilling, miserable life.

Myth #3: Creativity cannot be controlled.

In communism, creativity was discouraged for obvious reasons. If you were creative, you were doomed in some way, plagued by your impulse to go against the regime. And that’s all it was: a genetical impulse that you could not control.

I still remember being in brainstorms and being afraid to let my mind explore. I remember secretly questioning well established “truths”. I remember reading books and theses about what it means to be creative. No one ever told me the truth, but I began looking at brilliant people who have worked really, really hard to make things. Writers, painters, sculptors. I read about their creative processes. There’s Allende who just sat down and wrote her first book. But she was a writer long before that. There’s Anne Rice who keeps character files so that she can keep track of their history. There’s Patti Smith who went through so many stages of being a poet before she began singing. There’s Brancusi who made many variations of a sculpture before he achieved the desired result. There’s Da Vinci, who studied the human body by drawing it over and over.

Just like with anything else, practicing being creative leads to better creativity. Just like learning how to write, or how to speak in public, or how to draw, or how to memorize, or how to cook. The more you do something, the better you become at it. The first draft of something will not be as good as the 5th. The more time goes by, the more iterations of an output, the better the end result. It’s not divine and it’s not sudden. It’s quite organized and it needs persistence if you really want to improve.

When I finally started practicing this, I found one of the most satisfying ways to spend my time. My work doesn’t have to be great. It doesn’t even have to be good. But it’s on its way to becoming better and the focus that goes in the practice is filling a void I was unaware of. We are all born creative. But we’ll forget it if we don’t practice it.

Update: Creativity has been all over the internet lately, or I’ve just picked up on it much more in the places where I get my content. The Atlantic’s May edition’s theme was creativity, and the video below that I found today makes a really good point: just do.

Switzerland: Lausanne & Montreux

It was very foggy and rainy the whole time I was in Switzerland, hence the blurry nature of the photos.

 

 

Brooklyn Rider

I saw Brooklyn Rider at Alice Tully Hall tonight. It was the first show that I’ve been to in New York that received a (well deserved) standing ovation. Brooklyn Rider are two violins, a viola, and a cello. It’s worth mentioning that all four players are also members of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble. Tonight they performed with long time collaborator Kayhan Kahlor, who plays an instrument called kamancheh, as well as a percussionist and a bassist, both of which have also worked with Yo-Yo Ma.

Born out of a desire to use the rich medium of the string quartet as a vehicle for communication across a large cross section of history and geography, Brooklyn Rider is equally devoted to the interpretation of existing quartet literature and to the creation of new works.

NPR credits Brooklyn Rider with “recreating the 300-year-old form of string quartet as a vital and creative 21st-century ensemble.” The musicians play in concert halls and clubs, in venues as varied as Joe’s Pub in New York City, the San Francisco Jazz Festival, Todai-ji Temple in Japan, the Library of Congress and the South By Southwest Festival.

The energy on stage was amazing – the group is very relaxed, each holding their instruments with stunning ease, as they smile at each other and you can see that they’re riding the same wave, even with a bit of giddiness. Oh, and they they of course talked about the magic of taking the F train from Brooklyn upon returning from tour.

Enjoy! (even though this video doesn’t even come close to doing them justice.)

Just a Magazine

In November 2009, a Romanian magazine caught my attention online. The quality of writing, of illustrations and of content are different than anything I had ever seen in a Romanian publication before. Decât o Revistă (literal translation: just a magazine), explores and embraces Romanian culture, without glorifying or debasing it. Editor-in-Chief Cristian Lupșa writes an explanation on his blog:

[We want] to make a magazine that will only depend on us and the things we know how to make. [It is] not a protest or an eccentric manifestation, but an example of what a magazine created with the purpose of becoming a collection piece should look like. Generalist, but not superficial. Intelligent, but not condescending. Opinionated, but not didactic. Different, but not an alternative.

We’d like Decât o Revistă to kindle a discussion about the future of magazines in Romania. We’d like the people who read it to start demanding more consideration, more respect and more quality content from other magazines they read. We’d like those who make magazines to listen and ask themselves the same questions we did when we started this project. How can we make magazines better, more useful, more spectacular, more profound? How can we involve our readers? And, of course, how can we work with the advertising world without compromising the product?

Most of these dilemmas should sound familiar to the publishing industry in the US as well. In Romania the answers have been particularly challenging because the culture is drowned in celebrity gossip and sensationalism (more so than in the US, I believe). The credo was written more than a year ago, and since then, Decât o Revistă has illuminated the path for Romanian journalism. They’ve written beautifully and honestly and have grown their audience. They held events, wrote blog posts, asked questions on Facebook. They created an event around memories from the age of 16, and correlated those to coming of age stories. They ran a contest for best personal essay and featured it in the magazine. On Facebook and on their blog, they polled their audience about whether they plan on immigrating or staying in Romania, and followed with an immigration theme in the next issue. They involved their audience from the inception of a subject to its materialization in the magazine; they made people feel part of the story and the creation process.

A couple of weeks ago, they announced their first English edition – a collection of stories from the already published editions and some new ones as well. Soon you’ll be able to order a PDF version, but for now you can browse some articles for a taste of what’s to come. Hopefully more publications, especially in Romania, will follow their sense of purpose:

Decât o Revistă is a search for a nucleus in which we can retrieve ourselves as the world becomes more fragmented. We don’t hunt our subjects to the extreme, we don’t seek newness for the sake of being the first to get there, but we try to understand – documenting, asking, observing – who we are, what we think, what we desire and what we do. It’s not by far a complete image of today’s Romania, but it is a slice we wish to share and examine with you.