The Tyranny of the Clock

Break Free from the Tyranny of the Clock

Why should you change things? Because the clock is meaningless — we follow it without really realizing why. We follow it because we’ve been raised to believe we should, and because those who control us (bosses, corporations, schools, etc.) set schedules we must follow. The clock, then, is a means to control us — and that, in my book, is as good a reason to break free from it as any.

For tens of thousands of years, human beings didn’t have clocks. They lived, amazingly, by the sun and the moon and seasons and the needs and rhythms of their bodies.

The clock is a very very recent invention, and even more recent is our modern society’s slavish adherence to the dictatorship of the clock.

Only very recently have we been forced to work from 8 to 5, and to go to school and follow a very rigid class schedule. Only very recently have we become obsessed with tracking and making use of every minute, so that we have things to do when we’re waiting for other things to happen.

Only recently did we begin to lose our humanity, begin to lose the art of conversation and the art of listening to our bodies, begin to lose sight of what’s really important and begin to become robots.

I’m as guilty as anyone else, but as I simply my life I begin to question the culture that surrounds me and wonder why it is that I feel so pressured to do things so quickly, by a timeline or schedule set by others, to be so productive when what I really want is to be happy.

Have you ever felt that way? I know I’m not alone.

I have a solution, and it’s not original I’m sure but it surely isn’t as common as it should be: break free from the clock. Get in touch with the rhythms of life, of your body and of nature. Be more relaxed and reject the notion that time rules us.

The Benefits of Being Free of Clockhood

Now, I’m not saying that we should throw our clocks and watches away (though I don’t own a watch) … I’m not saying we should all quit our jobs and go live in the woods. I know that my reality is different from most people, as I’m my own boss — but ask yourself, is it possible for you to be your own boss? And if not, is it possible at least to find a job where you can set your own schedule? For many people, it is possible. For others, you won’t be able to live all the tenets of this manifesto, but you can change smaller things, here and there.

Article continues here.

Reblog via Zen Habits | hat tip Jakob Lodwick

Short attention span publishing

“Around 1000 characters, give or take a few, is a very managable size, perfect for reading on the go with mobile devices. Its also a perfect length for writers to kick out new, innovative concepts quickly and frequently.” – via Chris Webb | hat tip @eve11.

Read the rest of the piece.

Inverted Commas: Andy Warhol

Inverted Commas:  Andy Warhol:

Interesting Andy Warhol quote via Boing Boing and The Happiness Project:

“Actually, I jade very quickly. Once is usually enough. Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every day, it’s not good any more.”

The Twitstat Poems

April 27th

I’m compiling a collection of poems inspired in part by the Twitstat Twitter Twitgeist.

This is the first installment unedited.

_30 C/W Reckon_

already found fire and followed;
answer. answer anything (!) apparently awesome

when our minds met that night and sensed someone…
exactly: eyes bed better

yeah yedda (wow) and let life’s long looks sound something off for someone making happy sounds.

A:m exactly… give love the old photo party fix.

_30 C/W Reckon_

**rest.**

_(or ide’s wild)

(or Ida, Southwestern Child)_:

**she said the same in shanghai**

she wanted to walk on the wild side while wearing a full body condom;

hmmm…city comments: calm down,

look at the moist mountains in the backdrop

beyond the multiple hotels motels fountains and demo beds;

t.v. on the night-stand tomorrow trying again…

Yeah.

_31 C/W Reckon_

interesting ideas hmmm

adobe ah air

found a polite bug in the peekaboo project

cool china love in the u.s. made for free

feeling coffee today

thx for the feed

_31 C/W Reckon_

1. Online I am _completely_ myself
* Between the **ins and outs** there is no difference hmmm
* Out there in the air this morning I was haiku leaves
* And have felt just as free on flickr
2. Inspired, renewed
* Walls who watch the web werd fall happily
* In love so weak-kneed they slide down the sink
* Watching this my hands get the haha feeling. Behold:
3. Today I almost entered a cave on Bull Creek
* But a beautiful woman wouldn’t let me go
* Be bold her natural milk
* (…and she is neither fat nor old)

_07 C/W Reckon_

Look, Love (Music in the Morning)

add a friend already

beta better in bed

check the cargo going down

gotta hey hello mahalo

it’s a pretty show

c

_07 C/W Reckon_

another connection listening, and it looks like love

or why else would we be meeting in these gaps?

morning must make a dream reality, dreams that is

threaded like popcorn round a gift tree that is

sweating buttery sap.

c

_25 C/W Reckon_

I need a new bed already

a new bed another bed bad

enough to go down eating funlight

hey, let’s move your legs thataway

put yr feet on top of my while I

while I work the sweet spots thinking

tiempo what tiempo?

_25 C/W Reckon_

Ahora always another apple free. A writing storm and the tired headaches caught up to me.

Pretty but claustrophobic.

Big books like dinner.

_25 C/W Reckon_

might mellow tonight, porn video. quick whoa, waiting mellow woman. quick whoa listening love,

hot season enjoying menopause, jesus;

it’s a sweet trip testing the happy hill…

_25 C/W Reckon_

a little light felt so far away in the company of the cool dictionary.

a trip, um, to another place, a drive down webways watching Man get busy and tired

what the fuck – i just wanted to be able to read.

worth it | you better believe

C/W

_25 C/W Reckon_

mmm something rad i had while washing a window:

head and a buncha good squeeze, long sex lunch,

delicious watermelon striped panties in my spit.

_26 C/W Reckon_

Two love sleepy Sunday nova;

actually, folks: sweet-tipped pie.

a bird sings outside the window middle of night.

Yay and yum those are bread crumbs two actually taste.

_26 C/W Reckon_

Let me slide my elbow into the cup at the back of your knee

Measure if you will where my fingertips fit then

While I squeeze your left cheek

apart from the other on the right

Let me chew on the nails of your feet

two by two upwards til two fingers fit

into the grooves of your spine let me climb

down your shiny shoulder …

_26 C/W Reckon_

Exactly.

But there is something about messes that lead to great successes. I think it often has to do with teams that focus almost exclusively on the product and the market to the exclusion of everything else. They don’t build the rest of the infrastructure that it takes to be a stable well executing business and they suffer a lot because of it. But in the process they get the one thing right that really matters. And the fact that they get the one thing right that really matters makes matters worse because the product takes off and they don’t have the resources in place to deal with their success. And mess ensues.

Great post via Fred Wilson | A VC

Hockney donates Bigger Trees near Warter to Tate

David Hockney has donated his largest work ever to the Tate. The breathtaking portrait, of a typical Yorkshire landscape, was first exhibited last year at the Royal Academy. It will be displayed at Tate Britain in 2009.

Hockney’s big paintings of woodlands in the changing seasons have a bounce that’s totally different from anything else in the entire history of British landscape art.

“The painting is massive. It is made of 50 small canvases, adding up to an area measuring 40-foot wide by 15-foot high. The subject is what you might call the ordinary English countryside: a small copse of trees, with another in the background, and one large sycamore in front, spreading its network of branches above your head. To the right is a house, to the left a road curves away. In the foreground, a few daffodils bloom. The work is the solution to a problem that perplexed and defeated many of the great painters of the nineteenth century: how do you paint a mighty canvas outside, en plein air? To make the work, Hockney has employed the most up-todate digital technology, in addition to the most old-fashioned – the human hand, arm and eye.”

via BBC | Royal Academy of Arts

Jack Kerouac’s Typewriter Pillow

Kerouac’s Typewriter (x4) Pillow

Sold

 

New pillow covers

All covers pictured above have sold, but you can custom order yours here.

Inverted Commas: On being avant garde

It’s easy to be avant garde when you don’t know what you are doing.

via @kirkmitchell on twitter

The brand of Oscar Wilde

He pioneered the cult of youth and turned himself into a brand. No wonder Oscar Wilde is still seen as ‘one of us’

From The London Times

by Gyles Brandreth
Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death by Gyles Brandreth will be published by John Murray on May 1

Last Sunday I made a pilgrimage to the Père Lachaise cemetery, in the northeast of Paris, to pay my respects to the shade of Oscar Wilde. I found I was not alone.

The great man’s grave was surrounded by quite a crowd, including a party of Japanese students, a family of Germans (the father was wearing lederhosen) and an assortment of young people in their twenties: French, Italian, British and American.

In his own time, he was an outsider and an exotic. Now he’s one of us. We understand his craving for celebrity. We share his obsession with youth. (“Youth is the one thing worth having,” he wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray.)

As I arrived, one of the young women (an English student from St Andrews) was planting a kiss on the huge Jacob Epstein effigy that surmounts the poet’s grave. She was kissing the marble deliberately, to leave the lipstick impression of her mouth on the monument. “Why did you do that?” I asked. “Because I love him,” she replied. “We all do,” added another of the girls. “He’s one of us.”

Wilde, it seems, is our contemporary. He died in Paris 108 years ago, a near-friendless exile, impoverished, shunned, disgraced. Today, he is world-famous and universally admired. There are 1,000 lipstick impressions on his tomb. He would not have quarrelled with the attention: he was a pioneer of celebrity culture. “If you wish for reputation and fame in the world,” he advised, “take every opportunity of advertising yourself. Remember the Latin saying, ‘Fame springs from one’s own house.’ ” At theatrical first nights, as a matter of policy, during the 10 minutes before the curtain was due to rise, he would make a series of brief appearances around the auditorium – in the dress circle, in the stalls, in the boxes on either side of the stage. He wore outlandish clothes; he said outrageous things. He set out to get himself noticed. He was.

And he is. I am writing a series of Victorian murder mysteries, traditional who-dunnits featuring Wilde as my detective, and, as my publishers cart me about the world, I am discovering that my hero’s fan base extends way beyond Europe and North America. He has a substantial following in South America, the Middle East, India and – wait for it – Korea. Other Victorian writers may be more widely read (Dickens and Conan Doyle, for example), but I reckon that no other individual Victorian, however eminent (no, not Queen Victoria herself), lives on as a personality in quite the way that Wilde does.

[Continue reading the Times article here]