the price of a zine

The heyday of the fanzine started with the introduction of the photocopier in the 1970s and ended with the arrival of digital publishing and then the interweb (my new preferred moniker for the web- stolen from the gasmonkey garage presenter Richard Rawlins). The 'zine was first music and then football- those were the cool ones- but then lots of others followed. My friend Rich Lisney and I made one a while back- part photo based part comic- it was a lot of fun and sold out quickly even though we charged £4 for it. When something is black and white and looks photocopied means that only people who are into homebrewed comics and zines will fork out real money for them. To Josiah Publik the zine is like the big issue - a charity job and the big issue is £2 or less. So the max price for a zine should be around £2.50 for a skinny one and maybe £2.99 for a fat one. The key thing is to reduce costs. We had ours printed (essentially just hi quality photocopied) so it cost serious money. Instead find a big corp or iindustrie or shcool or org and use their photocopying facility and paper for free...Or get donations. As an analogue activist go round analogue businesses and beg for help. Also beg for postage and envelopes. Your aim: zERo prodiction cost...then the £2.50 for each zine is pure profit.

How to find your process when writing

Art school teaches student to focus on ‘their process’- the optimum way for them to work to make the things they want to make. It is a combination of the manner of working, the speed and timing along with the materials used and the subject matter chosen. It involves everything! Now, as someone with less facility at drawing and painting than writing, I have, over the last few weeks, been forced to look more at process as I have been drawing pages for a rather strange and free illustrated book. First I found a style I liked, and a subject I could draw easily. I like drawing from life, but if I needed to work fast (another one of my self-imposed limits) I needed shapes I was familiar with and could summon up from my memory. I like boats, the sea, prehistoric and shamanic art, islands and…dots. Dots are a great way to mark time as you work out what to do next in your drawing. Using this method I could produce up to eight A4 pictures a day that I was satisfied with. If it all sounds strangely bloodless then that’s a failure of the writing, not the process! It was very exciting and interesting and multi-dimensional to do. However, just as you learn impro acting from some simple external rules; I believe you can ‘learn to be optimally creative’ with simple external ‘process’ rules.

I realise that many artists are TOO skilful. They’re like the slick guitarists who become session musicians unlike the Clash who could only play three chords. But when your palette is three chords you are FORCED into creative overdrive. It’s rather like the lesson on story writing where instead of asking the student to write about their life, or their street or even their house (that’s boring!) you demand a story about one brick in their house. The flood gates often open at that point. We live in a world of fantastic choice and opportunity but that very abundence stymies the creative powers which thrive on problem solving, and for that you need defined problems- which in art are the rules you set yourself which often reflect your limitations. It’s hard to set limiting rules, that’s why real ones created by limitation force the hand and create a ‘no escape’ scenario.

So how can this apply to writing? I think every aspect of the writing process needs examination- the machine you write on, the paper, the printer, the ideas, the subject, the style- all with regard to speed. I don’t just mean absolute speed- so many words per hour (apparently Dr Johnson could manage 1800 words an hour when a deadline was on for the appropriately named Idler magazine) I mean speed over time. It’s not so good if you write 4000 words a day for six weeks and then crash and burn and do nothing for a year. Or maybe it is. That’s how Frederick Forsythe writes his novels. Others drip feed 200- 300 well turned words every single day for a year. Very often you hear of writers doing a 1000 words a day. From my experience the range of the professional writers I know is around 1500-2000 a day. But there are many exceptions and this is all secondary to KEEPING GOING. You have to hone this whole process with one goal in mind- keeping going, because giving up on a writing project is your number one enemy- nothing else. So reverse engineer your process with that in mind. Build in routine, nice little breaks, a policy of having fun as you type (I put in all the stupid puns, rude jokes and pretension I can- all is pruned out later – but it KEEPS ME WRITING rather than self-censoring). You are either in flow mode- downloading and creating or EDIT mode. You can flip between the two, and of course you get better at that, but generally you want to be full throttle in flow mode for good work.

And I think it helps to think about what you are good at and what you aren’t. Don’t try and fix it- try and work round it. Arthur Ransome, when he illustrated the Swallows and Amazons books (and I LOVE his illustrations) was really lacking in confidence when drawing people and especially faces (it’s common and often simply stems from using line rather than shading and as a result, not knowing what the important lines are- in drawing objects that we like, or things that don’t move we find the important lines more easily). Digression aside, Ransome DIDN’T learn to draw faces better- he simply drew people from behind or wearing low hats! And there you have the beginning of a ‘style’. So find the kind of writing you excel at and do more of it. Do less of what you can’t do. If dialogue is not your thing- don’t do it, or, like John Updike, add commentary to any dialogue, thus giving it more resonance. Find your limitations and then get creative- use them to do what you want to do. For example if you want to write a sci-fi book but can only manage travel writing as a genre, write a sci-fi novel which takes the form of a travel book about visiting some place in the future- with all the conventions of a travel book except it is set in an imaginary place. If you can only ‘do’ academic style writing write academically about removing the dog poo that walkers leave behind in those horrid little black bags. Or something! Mix it up. The Nobel prize winner J.M.Coetzee is quite a nerdy left brain kind of writer. He admits to being uninterested in description. But he uses his limited palette to great effect. The creativity doesn’t exist in having a ‘great idea’, it lies in using your limited palette to do more than at first is apparent. The punk rockers could have stayed in their garages playing old rock hits badly- instead they took the tools of old style rock and did something very exciting and new.

Uchideshi- Walking with the Master- book review

Many moons ago and fresh from finishing the Senshusei course in Japan, I, with two fellow aikidoka, Christopher Ross and Ben Forster embarked on a series of travels which ended with us training with the Border Defence Force in India. It was in India, that we came up with the notion of going to the South of France and training with Jacques Payet Sensei who was living near Cannes at the time but did not have a dojo or formal classes. We rocked up and he found us a place to live for free and took us under his wing and it was then I began to understand many of the points he makes in his fascinating memoir UCHIDESHI, that learning is not just about attending classes, it’s about entering the right headspace to be able to practise at any time. As we went in to train at a kickboxing gym, which we had made an agreement to borrow, Payet suddenly jumped up on to a low car park wall instead of laboriously stepping up and over it. It was a signal, now we’re going to train let’s be sharp. Yet when we were in the gym and desperate to do some jyu waza to impress the onlookers he kept us doing basic movements quite slowly but with a focus on what he had earlier talked about- sensing where your centre is (most people get locked into a notion of how to stand without thinking about their centre and so they can’t regain balance easily). The lesson here was obvious- you do what the teacher says, not what YOU think is best. 

Another time we went around to his house (he was immensely kind and hospitable to us all) and instead of speaking in English as he usually did he started speaking in French. And we all had to keep up. And so we did- and then after about half an hour we went back to English. The lesson was gentle but firm- you’re in another country now- learn to speak the language. All his teaching was like that- definite experiences rather than just admonitions to do this or that. These lessons were mixed with things to contemplate- like the connection between balance and centre- because it is a fact remarked on by the rawest beginner- top martial artists don’t lose their balance. But of course what is really going on is they regain it before falling over. They have strategies and ways of moving that mean falling over is just not an option. And one such strategy is knowing where your centre is and keeping it in the right place.

I realise now that Payet Sensei was giving us a little of the experience he had of being an Uchideshi. We hung around with him. We went to see others train, we had meals, we walked about, we drank beer and we saw how he lived in his everyday life and that gave us an insight into how to train even when you are not training. And this aspect of learning by osmosis, by simply having low level everyday contact with a teacher is really how you learn. I once watched the way Chino Sensei used a pair of nail scissors to cut open a rice cake packet for a New Year’s ceremony. It was precise, each move with an exact flair, a pleasure in doing something small in a concise and unsloppy way. There was a lesson there in how to move during any aikido exercise.

This kind of experience is what Jacques Payet details in his memoir of the first five years he spent in Japan, a kind of experience it is getting much rarer to have. He was born on the distant island of Reunion and early on had an interest in martial arts. After military service his interest in getting to the source of jujitsu took him to Japan in 1980 where he was able to train under the founder of Yoshinkan Aikido, Gozo Shioda. He left in 1985. These five intense years studying a Japanese martial art, form his book UCHIDESHI. It is written by someone at the top of their game, and is of interest to anyone who wants to make progress in any art. As well as providing a fascinating look at a lost side of Japan it also provides great insight into the learning process and how one actually achieves mastery. Payet Sensei did his 10,000 hours as an Uchideshi- but it is the manner of the training that counts in determining just much you progress rather than simply repeating errors. He identifies many helpful states of mind that allow openness and transparency when it comes to learning, something Western models of learning - which tend to be over systematised - miss. 

The book’s subtitle is ‘Learning what cannot be taught’ which is an intriguing clue as to the author’s sophisticated understanding of the way any art or skill is passed on. By ‘taught’, in the West we mean ‘put into words and a system of some kind’. But everything of value is more complex than a reduction into words and systems. Sometimes, often, you need to hold two contradictory notions in place at the same time. All kinds of subtleties cannot be ‘taught’ because the teacher may not even be conscious of them, but the students, by deep observation of the teacher in all his or her modes, are eventually able to learn them. But how do you develop the mental state needed to accompany this kind of ‘deep looking’. Well, this is what Payet Sensei does so admirably in showing and explaining, you have to be humble- but not in a passive grovelling way (which is how we often see it in the West) but in an active, looking, but transparent and utterly interested way- but with no premature judging, no ‘what’s in it for me’ mentality. This kind of eager and ‘open for business’ mentality is what gets the deshi through his daily round of sometimes tedious and sometimes strenuous activities. Finally Payet learns about Shugyo which is really a combination of being present in the moment and allowing that to enable you to do your very best. This is very different from straining to do your best, ‘trying too hard’, it is about building an alertness which enables you to pick up from a situation enough to enable you to do your best and therefore strengthen your intuitions and make progress.

There are many wonderful moments in the book – obviously his first hand experiences of the founder, Gozo Shioda, but also his training with the tireless Kimura San, who shared a tiny apartment with a pet rabbit, and was more dedicated to becoming strong than any male aikidoka, encounters with world famous teachers such as Takeno and Inoue Sensei and others still in their relative youth- Chida, Ando and Nakano Sensei, his ‘spirit training’ for the famous powerboat racers of Japan; all this makes the book speed along in the first reading (indeed it is so compelling I read it in one long sitting). However it is the many telling comments on learning what cannot be taught, how to structure one’s own learning program and how to make progress in a skill towards mastery that makes this book such a resource to keep going back to and re-reading time and again. Every serious artist – of any kind – will benefit greatly from reading it.

You can buy the book here:

 http://www.shindokanbooks.com/uchideshi.shtml

Read this book

The legendary 8th Dan Jacques Payet is one of the greatest foreign practitioners of aikido and one of the last to have lived and trained as a traditional uchideshi- a disciple-like student who lives in the dojo and gets a very much more rounded learning experience than simply doing classes. He went to Japan in 1980 in the first instance, when he was training under the founder of Yoshinkan Aikido, Gozo Shioda, and left in 1985. These five intense years studying a Japanese martial art, form his book UCHIDESHI. It is written by someone at the top of their game, and is of interest to anyone who wants to make progress in any art. As well as providing a fascinating look at a lost side of Japan it also provides great insight into the elarning process and how one actually achieves mastery. Payet Sensei did his 10,000 hours as an Uchideshi- but it is the manner of the training that counts in determining just much you progress rather than simply repeating errors. He identifies many helpful states of mind that allow openess and transparency when it comes to learning, something Western models of learning - which tend to be over systematised - miss. As I said, this book should be read by anyone who wants to make progress in some form art- be it martial or otherwise - you can obtain it here:

http://www.shindokanbooks.com/uchideshi.shtml

the kind of review that tells me OTHERS are going to get it even if he didn't

Normally I bin bad reviews or reviews by people who don't 'get' what I'm doing, but as an experiment I decided to 'own' this one. It isn't terrible, I got three out of five stars, but the whole tone is weirdly antagonistic- and it is quite obvious the reviewer has a competitive view of the world which revolves around comparing himself to others. He hasn't yet grasped that being inclusive, seeing what is valuable rather than nit-picking is a better way of proceeding. The model of 'lawyer for the prosecution' is, however 'clever', something limited and lacking in overall insight. He sees something in what I write as a possible threat to his view of himself and his world and therefore will do anything to put me down. He follows the pattern of the 7 Cs- which is a worthwhile mnemonic to observe as an indicator that you have entered the useless zone of comparing self to others. First you COMPARE, that leads to COMPETING, CONFLICT, CANCELLING out CONTRADICTORY evidence, CONSPIRING against and finally CONTEMPT (or crucifixtion in the hardball version). All these are evident in the review- almost in sequence. (His examples are cherry picked and stripped of context to be bent to his point- a classic method of cancelling out contradictory evidence.) The thing is- when we are in this either/or state of mind we think we are behaving entirely rationally. How do we know we are not? How can we check that we aren't simply in the grasp of a mechanical state of mind? Simply by asking the question of yourself- can I suspend judgment here and take an overall detached view- neither for nor against but asking: what is really going on here? This question- which is not limited to your response to a thing (that is only one element) also includes what others might think, what seems to be the real evidence, the view from a helicopter overhead rather than down a sniper rifle's lens.

I am just as guilty as the reviewer of taking at times a partisan viewpoint. And the good thing of being on the receiving end of such treatment is that it reminds me most forcibly that such mindsets are very limiting. Growing up is about getting beyond competition. It is healthy and a great stimulus when used with inisght and precision but is only a tool to be used and then left aside- in other words- do you use it or does it use you?

The final functional aspect of dwelling on partisan reviews is that they obviously ignore a whole swathe of other responses - in fact, mysteriously, they guarantee them - it is as if a shadow is evidence of sunlight. In any case eperience has taught me that a strong dislike betokens a d strong like elsewhere.

poem about Egyptian Dogs

A dog barks in the night outside my window 

A dog barks in the night outside my window

Tethered dogs in the dirt poor yard

This one barks like a car that won’t start

turning over and over 

on a waning battery.

Egypt; the interchangebility of noise, animal and mechanical,

Life inhabiting levels of sound outside and not inside

Our heads.

composing pictures and the almighty rule of THREE

There are rules of composition just as there are rules of poetry. When I started writing poetry I became vaguely aware of them, learned them the hard way, but I also learnt that they can always be broken, every single one. I also learnt that you can write pretty good poetry by not knowing a dam thing about the correct way to write poetry…

Composition means making a pretty picture- but make it too pretty, symmetrical, following the rule of thirds and action along a diagonal and yawn it becomes boring. That is the problem. And, if you are thinking too much about composition you may miss the photograph.

When you only have light and angles you need good composition. And most pictures can to some extent be rescued by cropping (forget Cartier-Bresson on cropping- that’s just smoke and mirrors from a master disguising his tracks). When you have a solid subject- something like Lee Miller’s picture of a dead SS guard half underwater then composition is less important. Instagram can teach a lot of lessons- and one of them is that composition comes second to the overall effect of a picture- only amateurs wax long and loud about the ‘great composition’ of a basically boring and contentless picture.

And a lot of composition is the visual rule replacing what you should know ‘by eye’. Just as a good carpenter learns to estimate and cut by eye, so a good photographer gets an eye for what looks ‘right’.

That said- some rules of composition act like a whack on the side of the head, get you moving to make a better shot. It’s like knowing the trick of comics artists where you try and draw a figure with the shoulders, waist and feet all facing in different directions- if you can- thus giving some extra interest by invoking the ALMIGHTY RULE OF THREE.

The rule of three is the single most powerful tool you have in compositional terms. It’s a reminder to get the best picture you can. In its most simple terms it what taught to me by an AP photographer I met in Cairo, maybe the first professional photographer I knew. He was by no means an artist. He was out to get the news. But he told me he always tried to get something to look at (ideally something interesting) in the foreground, the middle ground and the background. 

But this is limiting- somethings are just one object- but give it three points of interest,  all connected in some way. Or line up three good things in a picture. Or get three people doing something or two and a third thing. You get the idea. Think threes and stuff happens…