Mark K December 24th, 2007

After spending time in France, I became fascinated with stories of writer’s, artists and philosophers, intellectuals and politicians spending time in their favorite coffee house, working for hours and days on their creations and “networking” with their fellow creative types long before that term was hatched.

Napoleon, Benjamin Franklin, and Voltaire all spent time at Le Precope, which claims to be the world’s first coffee house. I love the story that Napoleon, in the days before he gained fame and power, used to leave his hat as a deposit when he ran up a tab, with the promise of returning to pay later. I could imagine Napoleon, standing right where Heidi is, in his famous pose with his hand reaching into the opening of his jacket, pretending to pick up the tab – “No, Jacques, I insist. I’ve got this one!”

In more recent years Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir held court at the Tres Magot, a popular destination for tourists and locals to this day.

What really grabbed my attention was to hear that Hemingway had written The Sun Also Rises at the Brasserie Lipp across the street. I wasn’t so much impressed that he had written what many consider to be his finest novel, but that the management and wait staff had allowed him to linger there every day, taking up table space which he worked! I guess that I’m conflicted between the part of me that is a writer and the part of me that is a restaurateur, but I can’t imagine that he was ordering enough food and drink throughout the day and night to justify occupying a table that might be put to a more practical use by the establishment!

During my brief time in Paris and later in Limoux, I searched for the perfect coffee house, where I could at least spend an hour or so journaling – one with the appropriate ambiance and where I would feel comfortable lingering.

When I returned to California, it dawned on me that I know just such a place, and it’s my own favorite coffee house in my home town!

Tags: Le Precope

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Mark K December 1st, 2007

My sister and I were having coffee at a Starbucks in downtown San Francisco yesterday when the young woman sitting next to us asked us if we would watch her computer while she went to the bathroom. I said that we would and then kidded her that I liked her extension cord.

She was sitting at a small table in the middle of the room. Since all of the tables on the perimeter near the wall outlet were taken, she had plugged in a heavy-duty black extension cord, which snaked across the room to her table where she was working on her laptop. My sister chastised me for embarrassing the woman as she walked away.

When she returned and thanked us for guarding the computer, I apologized for my wisecrack about the cord. I said that the truth is that I have my laptop with me as well and that I guess that I was feeling insecure about the fact that I only had the puny cord that was supplied when I bought the computer.

“He has cord envy,” my sister offered in the way of further explanation.

The young woman laughed and said that that’s okay. She said that she needs a long extension cord to make sure that her computer doesn’t lose a charge and that she can continue doing her homework for a long period of time. She said that she has to come to a public place like Starbucks because if she stays in her apartment, she won’t get much done.

As a fellow laptop writer and procrastinator, that caught my interest and I had to ask her what happens when she stays at home – does she get sidetracked by standing in front of the refrigerator trying to decide what to eat?

She says that she finds any and everything to do besides her assignments, including cleaning the apartment from top to bottom.

I asked her if she wasn’t distracted just as much by the noise around her at Starbucks, such as the nosy people at the table next to her?

Her answer was very interesting. She said that in fact, the opposite was true. She felt that when she did her homework at Starbucks, her fellow customers were keeping an eye on her and would notice if she were slacking off from her work. This keeps her motivated and helps her to get more done.

I felt better about being such a wise guy about the extension cord, knowing that I was part of the team in the coffee house, helping a student finish her paper on time.

Tags: tools for creativity, writing process

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Mark K November 23rd, 2007

Since when did they start calling the day after Thanksgiving “Black Friday”?

It struck me as an odd term for one of the busiest shopping days of the year – after all “Black Tuesday” was the name given to the day when the stock market crashed in 1929. As I began asking friends what they think the name means, they came up with two theories: some feel that the “black” refers to “being in the black” as opposed to “being in the red” – that business owners are hoping that sales from this day will insure them a profitable year.

Others believe that “black” describes the horror of seeing hordes of shoppers invading stores as early as 4:30 in the morning, trampling one another in an effort to put their hands on special items which are on sale for this day only.

My daughter and my sister decided to brave the crowds on Black Friday and I tagged along for a few minutes just to see what the experience was like. After that I branched off and took this picture of the shopping mobs being sucked up the vortex of the spiral escalator at the San Francisco Centre. Of course I was just an observer, documenting the scene and chuckling at the fools caught up in the craziness.

I took the escalator up a floor or two, just in case I might find something interesting and before I knew it, I was swept along with the human tide to the tune of a $200 plus shoe purchase from The Walking Company. I had resisted the impulse to buy something for a full fifteen minutes!

The shoes are black, my checking account is a little in the red, and I’m still not sure why they call it Black Friday.

Tags: consumerism

• mindfulness , musings
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Mark K September 4th, 2007

My friend John and I were talking about what kinds of activities put you in a meditative state that is most conducive to creativity. We both agreed that it would be something physical, but not too demanding in terms of effort or technical ability. It helps if it’s something that you’ve done many times so that you don’t really need to think about it and that it involves repetitive motion.

“Shaving,” John offered. “I’ve heard that shaving is the ideal activity for encouraging creative bursts.”

I thought about that for a moment. While I was thinking about it, I was engaged in the repetitive activity of stroking the 3-day old stubble on my chin, thinking about the beard that I’ve worn almost constantly for the past 30 years.

“Oh, so that’s my problem,” I said.

We got a good chuckle out of that one and both agreed that showering was also a great activity for creative inspiration – and something that I have done several times in the past three decades, I might add.

Then I started to tell John about my new job – I’ve been filling in as the morning bread baker at our restaurant for the past three weeks. When I tell people about learning this new skill they often have the same reaction – they say that working with dough and baking bread must be a very zen-like activity, that getting up early and working alone with your hands, kneading the dough must be very much like a form of meditation.

My first day on the job, I was trained by Gerhard, who had owned his own bakery for years and is now semi-retired. As we were kneading the dough, he tried to explain to me how you know when it’s the right consistency.

“There’s not really an English word that describes what you’re looking for,” he said. In German, the word is fingerspitzengefuhl – literally “fingertip feel.”

I guess that what he was telling me was that my mind might not comprehend when the dough is ready, but my fingertips would let me know.

Thus started my training in this fascinating combination of analytical chemistry and gut-level intuition.

I found that you had to measure everything precisely and set the mixer to knead the dough for an exact number of minutes. But five minutes into the mixing, you had to eyeball the mixture and throw several unscientific handfuls of flour into the bowl if it didn’t look or feel right.

The same could be said for the baking time. When the timer goes off, you need to look at the loaves and see if they look right, take them out and thump them for the correct tone and sneak a peek at the bottom to find out if the crust is darkened, but not burnt. Day after day, the bread comes out slightly differently and you get to use analysis and hunch to theorize what caused the variation.

So now that I’ve progressed from a novice baker-in-training to a slightly experienced baking assistant, what do I think about the therapeutic benefits of baking bread?

I like doing the work, and I think that it’s good for body and soul. Why? I think that it’s because for me bread baking requires a perfect balance between being comfortable and confident and being pushed out of that zone. Learning something new is always a challenge, but there’s a routine, a schedule, recipes and repetition that make it do-able. And then there’s the measurable results that you can view (and eat!) Feedback is almost immediate and there are plenty of complements when you get it right. But then there’s that something that’s hard to quantify – the art, the trial and error, the intuition, the – how can I explain it?

Fingerspitzengefuhl!

Tags: fingerspitzengefuhl

• bread baking , favorite posts , mindfulness , slowing down
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Mark K September 4th, 2007

Some friends of mine and I were discussing the movie Borat. Whether laughing or cringing while we watched the movie, we had to have a certain amount of admiration of Sacha Baron Cohen’s willingness to take tremendous risks in his pursuit of finding a good laugh. Posing as a journalist from Kazakhstan named Borat Sagdiyev, Cohen climbs aboard a New York City subway and starts introducing himself to the passengers on board. He insists on trying to kiss each of them on both cheeks, with predictable results. Some people pull away from him and ask him what the hell he’s doing, while others make no bones about what they will do to his face if he touches them. Undaunted, Cohen proceeds to meet and greet throughout the subway car and then across the United States.

I talked about similar “risk/reward” decisions I’ve made while playing the “dictionary game”. In the dictionary game, players take turns choosing a word from the dictionary that most people wouldn’t be familiar with. The “chooser” then writes the correct definition on a piece of paper and folds it up. Each of the other contestants then makes up a definition and writes it on a piece of paper. The “chooser” then reads each definition and the contestants try to guess which one is actually from the dictionary. You get a point if you guess the actual definition and you also get a point for each vote your phony definition receives. So, if you want to win the game, your goal should be to write definitions that are plausible, that sound “dictionary-ish”. But, of course, many of us would rather get a good laugh than win points (or maybe I should say that we consider THAT to be a form of winning points), so we write ridiculous definitions filled with puns, sexual references, inside jokes, and other forms of poor taste!

As I was explaining this, my friend Tucker’s face lit up, he knew exactly what I was talking about and admitted that he had used the same strategy many times. He then told a story about his own risk-reward decision involving humor.

He had just taken a teaching job at a prestigious private high school in Marin County. It was a couple of days before the beginning of the school year and he was attending his first faculty meeting. He hadn’t yet had a chance to meet the vast majority of the faculty, so this was their first exposure to Tucker and an opportunity for him to make a good first impression.

The faculty members had been told that they would each be receiving a brand-new computer that they could use during the school year. At the meeting, the headmaster made the announcement, “Now, what you’ve all been waiting for – you are each going to get your own laptop!”

Tucker, I might add, is one of the kindest and most considerate people and a fantastic teacher. He is also scary-smart, Mensa smart and teaches physics, which he can explain with such clarity that even the most “science-challenged” person can understand. So, I’m sure that Tucker’s brain made lightning-quick calculations, somehow weighing the risk of blurting out what was on the tip of his tongue versus the reward – the coveted full-audience hysteria.

Calculations completed, decision made. And this is what he said:

“Laptop? Oh, for a minute there, I thought you said we were each going to get a Lapdance!”

As they say, you only get one chance to make a first impression. But then again, how many times do you get a chance to deliver a line like that?

After further cogitations Tucker has concluded that such lines would be better saved for a game of Dictionary among equally ill-bred friends.

I can’t wait.

****

I’m curious to hear other stories about times you walked the tightrope of risk, hoping for the reward of a good laugh. Were the results heroic, or disastrous? Is there a little voice prodding you to take the chance with an outrageous line?

Tags: dictionary game, embarrassing moments

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Mark K July 29th, 2007

It was about two years ago when the Jamba Juice machine almost drove me to a breakdown in the midtown Manhattan. My family and I had stopped for lunch at a Whole Foods store on the bottom floor of a high rise complex near Central Park. I became separated from my family, had to wait in line with about 30 people to buy my food and then had to search for the family and an empty chair in an extremely crowded dining room. Finally I found the family and a place to sit, but soon realized that I was mere feet away from an the incredible whirl and roar of several blenders at a Jamba Juice stand smack in the middle of the dining room. I wanted to scream and knock over a few fellow diners on my way to silencing the offending juicers.

It was not long after this that I discovered a book called 50 Places to Find Peace and Quiet in New York. I had always told myself that I would like to live in New York for a year, but after the “Jamba Juice incident” I decided that the only way I could manage would be if I knew some places where I could find sanctuary when things got too intense. In fact, that’s part of the appeal of the city – the frenzied pace and din that fascinates me, but only if I know when I can back off.

This summer Heidi and I visited New York for our 25th anniversary. One day we each went our own way and I took my 50 Peaceful Places book with me. The irony is that I was rushing down the street with the rest of the New Yorkers, making a brief stop at each sanctuary, clicking off a few pictures and then continuing on down the sidewalk.

A couple of days later Heidi and I were riding in a cab, stuck in traffic when I spotted a New Yorker who seemed like he had figured out a way to manage the city. He was traveling on roller blades and jaywalking, threading his way through a row of cars waiting at a red light. He was calmly chatting on his cell phone as he made his way to the sidewalk, passing our cab. He disappeared briefly into a crowd on the sidewalk and reappeared in a moment – he had put his phone away but was now eating some food he had purchased at a sidewalk stand, a Styrofoam container in one hand and a fork in the other. He peacefully continued munching and skating as he traveled down the sidewalk, ran a red light in front of our cab and disappeared up Madison Avenue.

Somehow, he had managed to immerse himself in the craziness while skating with the calm of a Buddhist monk – beautifully multi-tasking at the same time.

This summer I’ve been so busy running around that I haven’t taken time to write or to add to this blog. Somehow it doesn’t feel right to write about pausing and slowing down when you’re running around like a madman.

Maybe I can take a clue from the New York rollerblader and pause while I’m still in motion.

Tags: finding quiet time, peace and quiet in New York

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Mark K May 12th, 2007

I met someone not long ago and I was telling him about my recent travels in the countryside of Spain. I told him that I noticed that people could have long conversations with complete strangers in which they talked about food, where each of them is from, family, travel, but they never seemed to get around to asking the other person, “So, what do you do?” or “What do you do for a living?” We agreed that people in the United States often ask this question early in a conversation when they meet someone new, as if that’s a way of finding out what the other person is all about. My new friend said that he had even learned a technique for remembering a person’s name when you are introduced: ask the person what they do for a living and then imagine that person doing that job while you say his name.
It made we wonder what would be a better question to ask a person when you first meet: “What do you like to do?” “What are you passionate about?” Maybe we can remember the name by imagining him doing this thing that he loves instead assuming that his work is what defines him. Any ideas on what question toask the next person that you meet that will really give you an idea of what that person is all about?

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Mark K May 11th, 2007

You never know what might come to you if you stop and notice. Somewhere, a heartbroken author penned this mini-novel and then published it for a dollar bill!

She tears off her rings and other expensive things and says “You can’t buy my love.” I fell back head over heels over something so beautiful I never knew existed.

Tags: found item, found literature, found poetry

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Mark K February 16th, 2007

My friend John passed along this list from Jack Kerouac’s “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose”. Reading “On the Road”, I’m sure that it’s pretty clear what he meant by “Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition”, but does anyone want to take a stab at “Be crazy dumbsaint in the mind” or “Visionary tics shivering in the chest”?

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Tags: men's group

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Mark K February 16th, 2007

My friend Tucker shared this quote with me, which relates to the idea of creativity. It seems to me that one can interpret it in a number of different ways, some of which are in direct contradiction with others. What does it mean to you?

“In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be
understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But
in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.” – Paul Dirac

Tags: Paul Dirac

• mindfulness , on writing
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