getting's another

The thing that set OK Go apart from their perfectly serviceable opening acts last night at the Metro (The Booze and Earl Greyhound); that sets them apart from any live performance I’ve seen recently, is that these guys know how to play.

I don’t mean instrumentation, although they have that down -- I haven’t yet met an OK Go song I didn’t like -- I mean they know how to PLAY.

Like puppies.

You’ve seen the treadmill video, and the Rube Goldberg contraption that recently went viral. Both have that something that goes on when they take the stage. There were no treadmills last night, no dominoes or paint guns (although the confetti blaster drove the crowd nuts), but that same spirt of fun turned everything they touched to gold.

The intimacy of the space of the Metro made a difference of course; we landed prime balcony seats, so we could be geezers and sit on our bums while the rest of the crowd crushed in tight on the floor. Their playing to a home town crowd also contributed -- OK Go gave their first CD release party at the Metro, and opened for folks like OMD on the same stage -- and they seemed happy to be home in Chicago. But it was more than that.

They were having fun, and they let us in on it. Like the best kind of far away friend who shows up for a weekend and fills the house with laughter and long nights and all kinds of catching up. Or that time when you were 10 and you spent whole summer afternoons choreographing dance routines with your big sister until you achieved perfect synchronicity.

They did that thing all of us should be doing every day when we get busy with our work, whatever work it is that makes it all matter. They did that thing Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi calls flow.

Jesters, artists, seers. They remind us.

Thanks, guys. Needed that.


OK Go's Facebook snapshot from the Metro, Chicago
Saturday 17 April 2010

p.s. OK Go is on tour, OK? Go!

jumpology

When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears.

Photographer Philippe Halsman commenting on why he was in the habit of asking the folks he photographed (Dali, Monroe, Nixon) to jump.



Others he didn't ask, or if he did no record exists: Einstein. O'Keefe.

My search for photos from Halsman's iconic Jump Book resulted from a recent obsession with ideas about identity and the constructed self -- especially the self that we project online -- which was kicked into high gear by the swirl of ideas at the SxSW conference.

(No conclusions yet. Nothing to write about. If anything it's made it difficult to write at all.)

Halsman's idea behind the jump could be considered kin to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's ideas about Flow -- that state of optimal experience where one is entirely absorbed in the work at hand and finding satisfaction in it. The state of flow is also where, according to Csikszentmihalyi, where we find our true selves.

Curiously, at the same moment we forget ourselves.

Another thought that crossed my mind while I was googling Halsman images this morning: What possessed Halsman to merge Mao and Marilyn Monroe? And why can't I stop staring?