Jean Michel Jarre - The China Concerts, 1981 (full)

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkTaMf3ToiA&w=700] The first proper outdoor concert I went to was Jean Michel Jarre, when he played the Docklands in the early/mid Eighties. Mad crazy space music and lasers all over the shop. I didn't know about the China concerts. Must have been an amazing experience. Synth-pop pioneer!

VientDeMe says: "The Concerts in China was a concert tour by Jean Michel Jarre, notable for marking the opening of post-Mao China to live Western music, in 1981. Five concerts were held in the two biggest cities, for an estimated audience of 120,000 spectators, on October 21 and 22 in Beijing, and on October 26 through 28 in Shanghai.

"The concerts were filmed and recorded for commercial releases. Due to the low quality of the recorded sound, the tracks were enhanced (overdubbed) for the release of the double album The Concerts in China.

"An 80-minute documentary entitled 'Jean-Michel Jarre - China Concerts 1981' was made by producer/director Andrew Piddington for Central Television in the UK. It was shown once in 1982 on the ITV network in the UK, and did not receive a video release until 1989, when a VHS-video was released. The film was partially released by Shock DVD in Australia in 2008, but they were prevented from selling it by Jarre and record label Disques Dreyfus. The release was not from the master tapes, but from an 'off-air' Australian TV showing, so the quality was imperfect. The film has yet to receive an authorised, high-quality DVD release."

Philosophy Football

Now that the season has ended, it's a perfect moment to remind ourselves of one of the great games of last century. Greece vs Germany. Two distinct teams, two very different styles. Excellent work from the ref and his assistants. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5fGSBsfq8&w=700]

Schopenhauer's comment sums it all up succintly: "Greeks were very lucky that day. We were in far from our usual form, and even then the goal was clearly offside as Marx claimed. I am pretty sure that we could beat them in another game, which unfortunately never took place again. And this actually vindicates my general thoughts on life: one should keep his desires at minimum and try to avoid trouble and hence suffering."

Better names for things...

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzdUEQvuBrw&w=700] Pleated Jeans says "I make them. A few days before I filmed I went to the store with a tape measure and measured the dimensions for each sign size. I also took pictures so I could copy the design. Then I recreated them in Photoshop and printed them out."

How to Be Gracious, and Why

be-gracious-kills-you-thumb-500x290-29269A nicely-put piece by Tom Chiarella in Esquire. Is "gracious" the right word? Perhaps not, gracious is...polite. I'd perhaps go for interested or something. Doesn't matter, the message works either way.  

 

In business, the little things — a favor acknowledged , a favor returned, proper introductions, smiles, attentiveness — are really the big things

Graciousness looks easy, but of course it is not. Do not mistake mere manners for graciousness. Manners are rules. Helpful, yes. But graciousness reflects a state of being; it emanates from your inventory of self. Start with what you already possess. You, for instance, have a job. Live up to that.

When wandering the world, forget your business cards. Don't look for more contacts. Instead, observe. Say hello to the people you see every day, but don't make a fetish out of it. Stay interested in others. Be generous in your attentions but not showy. Don't wink, snap your fingers, high-five, or shout, though laugh with those who do. It bears repeating: Look around. Remember names. Remember where people were born.

On the street, in the lobby, square your shoulders to people you meet. Make a handshake matter — eye contact, good grip, elbow erring toward a right angle. Do not pump the hand, unless the other person is insistent on just that. Then pump the hell out of their hand. Smile. If you can't smile, you can't be gracious. You aren't some dopey English butler. You are you.

Remember that the only representation of you, no matter what your station, is you — your presentation, your demeanor. You simply must attend. Stand when someone enters the room, especially if you are lowly and he is the boss, and even if the reverse is true. Look them in the eye. Ask yourself: Does anybody need an introduction? If so, before you say one word about business, introduce them to others with pleasure in your voice. If you can't muster enthusiasm for the people you happen upon in life, then you cannot be gracious. Remember, true graciousness demands that you have time for others.

So listen. Be attentive to what people say. Respond, without interruption. You always have time. You own the time in which you live. You grant it to others without obligation. That is the gift of being gracious. The return — the payback, if you will — is the reputation you will quickly earn, the curiosity of others, the sense that people want to be in the room with you. The gracious man does not dwell on himself, but you can be confident that your reputation precedes you in everything you do and lingers long after you are finished. People will mark you for it. You will see it in their eyes. People trust the gracious man to care. The return comes in kind.

Read more: How To Be Gracious - Graciousness Meaning - Esquire Follow us: @Esquiremag on Twitter | Esquire on Facebook Visit us at Esquire.com

James Rhodes: 'Find what you love and let it kill you' (The Guardian)

My life as a concert pianist can be frustrating, lonely, demoralising and exhausting. But is it worth it? Yes, without a shadow of a doubt 'Isn't it worth fighting back in some small way?' Pianist James Rhodes. Photograph: Dave Brown 2012

After the inevitable "How many hours a day do you practice?" and "Show me your hands", the most common thing people say to me when they hear I'm a pianist is "I used to play the piano as a kid. I really regret giving it up". I imagine authors have lost count of the number of people who have told them they "always had a book inside them". We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity. A world where people have simply surrendered to (or been beaten into submission by) the sleepwalk of work, domesticity, mortgage repayments, junk food, junk TV, junk everything, angry ex-wives, ADHD kids and the lure of eating chicken from a bucket while emailing clients at 8pm on a weekend.

Do the maths. We can function - sometimes quite brilliantly - on six hours' sleep a night. Eight hours of work was more than good enough for centuries (oh the desperate irony that we actually work longer hours since the invention of the internet and smartphones). Four hours will amply cover picking the kids up, cleaning the flat, eating, washing and the various etceteras. We are left with six hours. 360 minutes to do whatever we want. Is what we want simply to numb out and give Simon Cowell even more money? To scroll through Twitter and Facebook looking for romance, bromance, cats, weather reports, obituaries and gossip? To get nostalgically, painfully drunk in a pub where you can't even smoke?

What if you could know everything there is to know about playing the piano in under an hour (something the late, great Glenn Gould claimed, correctly I believe, was true)? The basics of how to practise and how to read music, the physical mechanics of finger movement and posture, all the tools necessary to actually play a piece - these can be written down and imparted like a flat-pack furniture how-to-build-it manual; it then is down to you to scream and howl and hammer nails through fingers in the hope of deciphering something unutterably alien until, if you're very lucky, you end up with something halfway resembling the end product.

What if for a couple of hundred quid you could get an old upright on eBay delivered? And then you were told that with the right teacher and 40 minutes proper practice a day you could learn a piece you've always wanted to play within a few short weeks. Is that not worth exploring?

What if rather than a book club you joined a writer's club? Where every week you had to (really had to) bring three pages of your novel, novella, screenplay and read them aloud?

What if, rather than paying £70 a month for a gym membership that delights in making you feel fat, guilty and a world away from the man your wife married you bought a few blank canvases and some paints and spent time each day painting your version of "I love you" until you realised that any woman worth keeping would jump you then and there just for that, despite your lack of a six-pack?

I didn't play the piano for 10 years. A decade of slow death by greed working in the City, chasing something that never existed in the first place (security, self-worth, Don Draper albeit a few inches shorter and a few women fewer). And only when the pain of not doing it got greater than the imagined pain of doing it did I somehow find the balls to pursue what I really wanted and had been obsessed by since the age of seven – to be a concert pianist.

Admittedly I went a little extreme – no income for five years, six hours a day of intense practice, monthly four-day long lessons with a brilliant and psychopathic teacher in Verona, a hunger for something that was so necessary it cost me my marriage, nine months in a mental hospital, most of my dignity and about 35lbs in weight. And the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is not perhaps the Disney ending I'd envisaged as I lay in bed aged 10 listening to Horowitz devouring Rachmaninov at Carnegie Hall.

My life involves endless hours of repetitive and frustrating practising, lonely hotel rooms, dodgy pianos, aggressively bitchy reviews, isolation, confusing airline reward programmes, physiotherapy, stretches of nervous boredom (counting ceiling tiles backstage as the house slowly fills up) punctuated by short moments of extreme pressure (playing 120,000 notes from memory in the right order with the right fingers, the right sound, the right pedalling while chatting about the composers and pieces and knowing there are critics, recording devices, my mum, the ghosts of the past, all there watching), and perhaps most crushingly, the realisation that I will never, ever give the perfect recital. It can only ever, with luck, hard work and a hefty dose of self-forgiveness, be "good enough".

[youtube=http://youtu.be/gXa_iycbnQM&w=700]

And yet. The indescribable reward of taking a bunch of ink on paper from the shelf at Chappell of Bond Street. Tubing it home, setting the score, pencil, coffee and ashtray on the piano and emerging a few days, weeks or months later able to perform something that some mad, genius, lunatic of a composer 300 years ago heard in his head while out of his mind with grief or love or syphilis. A piece of music that will always baffle the greatest minds in the world, that simply cannot be made sense of, that is still living and floating in the ether and will do so for yet more centuries to come. That is extraordinary. And I did that. I do it, to my continual astonishment, all the time.

[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/81071502" width="100%" height="166" iframe="true" /]

The government is cutting music programmes in schools and slashing Arts grants as gleefully as a morbidly American kid in Baskin Robbins. So if only to stick it to the man, isn't it worth fighting back in some small way? So write your damn book. Learn a Chopin prelude, get all Jackson Pollock with the kids, spend a few hours writing a Haiku. Do it because it counts even without the fanfare, the money, the fame and Heat photo-shoots that all our children now think they're now entitled to becauseHarry Styles has done it.

Charles Bukowski, hero of angsty teenagers the world over, instructs us to "find what you love and let it kill you". Suicide by creativity is something perhaps to aspire to in an age where more people know Katie Price better than the Emperor concerto.

* James Rhodes performs at the Soho Theatre, London 25-27 July and 1-3 August.

As seen in The Guardian, spotted by Charlie W.