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Wellsbaum.blog

Writing about life and arts

  • Henry Rollins: The One Decision that Changed My Life Forever

    March 7th, 2018
    Henry Rollins: The One Decision that Changed My Life Forever

    Talent is overrated. Hard work, discipline, grit, and consistency are attributes that increase your chances of getting what you want.

    Luck is a matter of being specific about your goals and two, putting yourself in a position for good things to happen. It is the accumulation of small and steady risks that make the biggest difference and change your life.

    For Henry Rollins, that meant taking a bus from DC up to New York to see his favorite band, only to go on stage and sing with them. To his surprise, they called him back later for an audition and became the band’s lead singer. In other words, he caught his lucky break and escaped a life of minimum wage jobs.

    Some people get lucky by default. Their network leads them into opportunities because of the sheer dazzle of their last name. For others, hitting the jackpot it is the result of striving to achieve a very specific effort and finding those luck circles that help you make it happen.

    Luck draws on the law of magnetism

    Luck may be a random phenomenon but it works like a magnet, gravitating toward those hungry enough to take chances.

    Success is an accumulation of little efforts that build on top of a grateful perspective, a practice of modesty that keeps you doing what you’re doing. Says Rollins:

    “I don’t have talent. I have tenacity. I have discipline. I have Focus. I know, without any delusion, where I come from & where I can go back to.”

    gif via the ngb

  • ‘I wish I was a little bit smaller’

    March 6th, 2018
    giphy.gif

    Nicholas Kulish is 6 foot 8 inches. Towering about the average American height of 5 foot 8, society is simply not built for him. As if a tight plane seat isn’t burdensome enough, “Why do we bob and weave around the New York City subway in a strange dance?,” Kulish writes, “Are we performing for money from our fellow passengers? No, we’re just trying not to hit our heads on the metal bars that others reach up to grab.”

    It’s not easy being a giant, or a little person, or any anomaly for that matter. What we know today as ‘average’ goes back to Belgian astronomer/mathematician Adolphe Quetelet, who in 1817 aggregated the mean chest size of five thousand Scottish soldiers, setting a precedent for human statistics. Abraham Lincoln mass-produced uniforms for the Union army during the Civil War. The US military also went on to standardize both uniforms and airplanes in 1926, “the distance to the pedals and the stick, and even the shape of the flight helmets.” Thus was born the bell curve.

    While homogenizing average body types help simplify manufacturing and designing infrastructure, the industrial mindset makes it a challenge for outliers to thrive.

    “Tall people are always trying to blend in, to keep our giant feet from tripping you at the movie theater, our elbows from cracking your heads on the dance floor. Much of our time is spent trying to shrink, to alleviate the extreme conspicuousness that is our condition.”

    Normal is boring

    Height compels Kulish’s identity, whether he likes or not. It is a part of him he’s come to accept and appreciate, acknowledging his bigness. Brooklynites call him Nowitzki or Porzingis out in public for being the only white guy with arms like tree branches reaching out into a sea of ants. You’d have to be ground level and face to face to pinpoint Lionel Messi in a crowd. But there are some advantages to tallness too; he can see what most people can’t.

    If you invite us into your homes we will know what the top of your refrigerator looks like. (You should clean it. It’s been a while. Trust me.) We do have our uses. It probably goes without saying that we should be taking pictures for you at concerts, not to mention portraits of you, since the downward angle is the most flattering.

    There is no shame in being tall, nor short, for the matter. No one wants to be called a Frankenstein nor a carnie with small hands. Being different makes one forcibly pay attention, develop sympathy for others who have similar disadvantages, and find new ways of surviving that makes them more nimble than others. The weird and different underdogs may have to work a little harder, but in doing so, they are developing advantages that normal folks can’t replicate.

    Read Notes on Being Very Tall

    gif via giphy

  • Alien Hand Syndrome

    March 4th, 2018

    giphy
    via NPR

    What if you woke up one day and had a brand new second hand that moved on its own?

    This is what happened to Karen after she had brain surgery to help cure her epilepsy. After her operation, her left hand immediately took on a life of its own. For starters, it immediately began to unbutton her shirt on the hospital bed while the surgeon pleaded her to stop.

    After she went home the hand started to do other things like slapping her, which reminded me of the self-beating Jim Carrey famously gives himself in the movie Liar Liar.

    What caused her alien hand syndrome?

    Apparently, the surgery had to split her brain and removed her Corpus callosum, which ties the left and right brain hemisphere together. Basically, the operation caused the opposing sides of her brain to switch roles.

    Fortunately, Karen has come to appreciate the moral authority her left hand tries to impose on her decision-making. Any time she tries to smoke, for example, her left hand puts the cigarette out and even flicks the ashes around.

    Karen’s come to appreciate the magic discipline of her hand. However, she still gets in a smoke or two. “I understand you want me to quit,” she tells her hand, “but cut the crap!”

  • We are ‘brilliant only in tiny bursts’

    March 1st, 2018
    linchpin

    “The law of linchpin leverage: The more value you create in your job, the fewer clock minutes of labor you actually spend creating that value. In other words, most of the time, you’re not being brilliant. Most of the time, you do stuff that ordinary people could do.

    A brilliant author or businesswoman or senator or software engineer is brilliant only in tiny bursts. The rest of the time, they’re doing work that most any trained person could do.

    It might take a lot of tinkering or low-level work or domain knowledge for that brilliance to be evoked, but from the outside, it appears that the art is created in a moment, not in tiny increments.”

    Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

    It often appears that discoveries come out of the blue when in fact, they are the result of consistently doing the work. In other words, big results are the upshot of small things with focus and with care. There is no such thing as overnight success.

    Keep dripping.

  • Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence

    February 28th, 2018
    Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence

    Francis Bacon painted ghostly, violent images. Some say he emptied his darkest thoughts on canvass, mostly as a manifestation of his relationship with his sadistic lover, Peter Lacey.

    Bacon cultivated a sense of darkness that gave his paintings an “edgy atmosphere…gambling everything on the next brush stroke.” Says Bacon in the video:

    “We do with our life what we can and then we die. If someone is aware of that, perhaps it comes out in their work.”

    francis bacon

    The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

    Francis Bacon

    Bacon was an untrained artist, an outlier in the painting world. He worked closely with his PR agent David Sylvester to ensure that he continued to stand out, securing an exhibition at the Tate Museum and book of interview transcripts collated by Sylvester himself.

    Francis Bacon was a mystery man who tugged at the most morose moments in his life, leaving the characters in his paintings look as if they are literally gasping for air.

  • Why some children struggle to hold pencils

    February 27th, 2018

    According to doctors, you can blame tech for children’s inability to hold pencils. Apparently all that screen time is doing nothing to strengthen their thumb, index, and middle fingers which work together to form one’s basic writing technique.

    How to hold a pencil correctly for writing, #tech, mobile, students today
    Illustration via The Guardian

    Generation thumbs

    Having grown up with perpetual swiping and speaking in images and emoji, the next generation is obviously going to encounter difficulty with old ways of doing analog things. Do they even teach cursive writing in school anymore?

    We speak in images. But at least early cavemen knew how to draw with their version of a stylus.

    Read Children struggle to hold pencils due to too much tech, doctors say

  • The difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org explained in simple terms

    February 27th, 2018
    The difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org explained in simple terms

    This post may contain affiliate links. Please see the disclosure for more info.

    There seems to be a lot of confusion out there still between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

    Think of WordPress.com as the all-in-one site-building package that hosts all your content and design, pretty much everything! It’s a one-stop-shop that comes with WordPress’s own plugins like Jetpack and WooCommerce.

    Keep in mind that Automatic is the company behind WordPress so if you see a plugin built by Automatic that’s essentially WordPress. 

    Now, think of WordPress.org as half of the core essentials of powering your website. You still need somewhere to store all your parts!

    WordPress.org is both the blog tool and software engine

    WordPress.org is merely the software engine powering your site. For instance, you need a browser to access the web — whether it be Safari, Chrome, or Firefox. Similarly, you need a tool to blog just like you need a car to drive. That tool or vehicle is WordPress, the backbone operating system integral to the entire publishing ecosystem.

    The other half of the blog engine is your host, the critical piece that houses all the data living on your site including your theme and all your posts and plugins. There are a plethora of companies offering their services as hosts — I recommend WPEngine.

    So why choose with WordPress.org + self-hosted if WordPress.com handles everything?

    One of the perks of going self-hosted is that you can make your website fully customizable. You can choose from over thousands of third-party plugins with apps like the SEO optimizer Yoast, special sharing widgets like Social Warfare or monetize your site with Google Adsense. You can see more plugins here. 

    The difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org explained in simple terms

    Keep it simple, get a WordPress.com Business account

    What’s new this year is that you can use WordPress.com like a self-hosted site BUT only if you upgrade to WordPress.com Business!

    Signing up for a WordPress.com Business account gets you the security of everything WordPress provides out of the box plus the ability to add from the 55,000 third-party plugins like those mentioned above so you can customize your site whichever way you want. Basically, WordPress Business is the best of both WordPress.com and WordPress.org in one place. 

    I wrote a whole post on why upgrading to WordPress.com Business is worth every penny. Find it here. 

    I hope the above explanation outlines the differences between WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org. Keep in mind also that you can still blog for free on WordPress. WordPress.com will always offer a version that will always be free!

    Choose your WordPress.com flavor today!

  • The tools of our tools

    February 27th, 2018
    The tools of our tools

    Technology is not neutral. FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) wants to make all decisions for us and dissolve us into all-consuming bots while the machines do all the thinking and making.

    Humans are workers, not to be hedonistic jobless throwaways. 

    We seek meaning and identify ourselves through our labor. But our biggest misconception is presuming that the job we don’t like also defines us. The only benefit to rising automation is that it opens up opportunities to do what people enjoy. 

    The artist Brian Eno once offered this prescient advice: ‘Try not to get a job.’  

    By not working for cash, we can follow our deepest passions, thereby subverting the Sex and Cash theory that says that we must toil in our office cubicles so we can do what we intend to on the side.

    “Men have become the tools of their tools,” quipped Thoreau, who was lucky enough to leave his job for Walden’s pond because he enjoyed the relief of a big bank account. 

    As Frank Chimeo once tweeted, “Thoreau had enough money to go to Walden Pond because he revolutionized production methods at his father’s pencil factory.”

    The book of nature has no choice but to accept the permanent integration of Frankensteins and robots. 

    Those enthusiastic and creative, especially those augmented by brain chips, will still find meaningful work and develop an abstract relationship alongside the programmatic and ultra-productive automatons. 

  • ‘Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it’

    February 26th, 2018
    ‘Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it’

    If you are thinking in absolutes, the fickle world will shake you.

    Uncertainty is what keeps you on our toes, never in a standstill.

    Predictable patterns try to lull you to sleep.

    You compel yourself to ride with the pendulum.

    Comfort meets chaos with patience and confidence.

    If you need reassurance, read Rudyard Kipling’s 1895 poem, “If”:

    If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…

    If you can wait and not be tired by waiting…

    If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim…

    If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you…

    Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.

    Rudyard Kipling
  • Blasphemy? This artist sets works of art on fire 🔥

    February 25th, 2018
    chetan-menaria-2108-unsplash.jpg

    What is new instantly becomes old, a permanent attrition.

    At least that’s perspective of artist Maaren Baas, who took a blowtorch to Gerrit Rietveld’s iconic Red and Blue Chair and turned it into something completely new.

    “I do not want to destroy, says Baas, “… burning is not something negative. Standstill is. If things remain as is, there is no progress. It’s about changing of what we already know. It’s very human to keep things as they are. While it is very natural to continuously adapt. In nature nothing ever stops changing. It is an ongoing process.”

    If a museum is where pieces of art go to congregate in dust, then remixing a version of them at least gives them the potential of new form.

    What is great should remain preserved. But it is the pattern of nature’s interest to evolve from past states on top of so-called originality, at least to keep the remix going.

    Stagnancy is the work of the devil.

  • Visuals: Faceless portrAits

    February 23rd, 2018

    Atop

    Adrift

    Adjacent

    Afar

    All photos by Wells Baum

    People from behind + Story + Favorite place + Faceless

  • Einstein: The World As I See It

    February 22nd, 2018

    c8nIHtU00MvV35U2Q“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”

    — Albert Einstein, [easyazon_link identifier=”1494877066″ locale=”US” tag=”wells01-20″]The World As I See It[/easyazon_link] (1934)

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