Tim Evans
I develop and create theatre.
Founding Artistic Director of The Factory, and Artistic Director of Night Club.
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This guy makes a ton of sense. And then he doesn’t make any sense anymore.
You Have My Permisson
You have my permission
to draw pictures.
You have my permission
to hang them on the wall.
You have my permission
to look stupid,
feel foolish,
and allow yourself to wobble
like a child learning to walk.
You have my permission
to tell the truth on a sheet of white paper.
You have my permission
to burn it when you’re done.
You have my permission
to start something, forget about it,
and remember it again when
you’re half way through a novel
you’ve been meaning to read for years.
You have my permission
to ask me
who the hell I think I am
and why on earth
you would ever need my permission
for anything you wish to do.
“The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times. It’s the equivalent of the dream time, in your daily life, times when things get sorted out and reshuffled.”
Brian Eno
3 things so far today that seem obvious to me:
1. Vast swaths of the comedy circuit is run by deeply incompetent, scatter-brained fuckwits.
2. There is a very successful, well known London theatre that has now properly dropped the ball and shown consistent disinterest in someone who they should be championing and building a relationship with. (not me in case you think that’s what I’m saying).
And 3. Why don’t the tiny-brained, pencil-pushing, desk-monkey bureaucrats of this world ever comprehend the consistent absence of logic in their little systems and ask themselves “when did I decide that being a bureaucrat was something that can actually add value to the world?”
None of the above are related, although I’m sure they are in some cosmic way.
“
Not all disasters can be avoided.
Not all disasters are fatal.
If you accept these two truths, your approach to risk will change. If you build a disaster-tolerant project you will be more willing to challenge the fates and won’t hide out.
The disaster-tolerant approach means that you can focus on the upside of risk instead of obsessing about the worst possible outcome. And once you do that, the upside is more likely to occur.
”A man’s last minutes with his dog.
(via cavesoflilith)
“
It quite frequently happens that you’re just treading water for quite a long time. Nothing really dramatic seems to be happening. … And then suddenly everything seems to lock together in a different way. It’s like a crystallization point where you can’t detect any single element having changed. There’s a proverb that says that the fruit takes a long time to ripen, but it falls suddenly … And that seems to be the process. The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.
There’s no point in saying, ‘I don’t have an idea today, so I’ll just smoke some drugs.’ You should stay alert for the moment when a number of things are just ready to collide with one another… The reason to keep working is almost to build a certain mental tone, like people talk about body tone. You have to move quickly when the time comes, and the time might come very infrequently – once or twice a year, or even less.
Craft- enables you to be successful when you’re not inspired. The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times. It’s the equivalent of the dream time, in your daily life, times when things get sorted out and reshuffled. If you’re constantly awake work-wise you don’t allow that to happen. One of the reasons I have to take distinct breaks when I work is to allow the momentum of a particular direction to run down, so that another one can establish itself.
”Being Popular
Popular is almost never a measure of impact, or genius, or art. Popular rarely correlates with guts, hard work or a willingness to lead (and be willing to be wrong along the way).
…in general, the search for popular is wildly overrated, because it corrupts our work, eats away at our art and makes it likely we’ll compromise to please the anonymous masses.
Vaclav Havel on Waiting
“The world, Being, and history have their own time. We can, of course, enter that time in a creative way, but none of us has it entirely in his hands.
The world and Being do not heed the commands of the technologist or the technocrat; and they do not exist to do his bidding.They resist his sense of time, just as they resist a broad interpretation of their sense of time.
And just as they have their own secrets and their own mystery, which is constantly catching modern enlightenment rationality off guard, they also have their own, meandering course.”
“
Be willing to get hurt, get rejected, have everything conceivable go wrong, and still have the strength to come out the other side in one piece.
Don’t be afraid to start things – anything. Just by starting, you’ll kill the majority of the fear and the resistance you’ll face. Just do it.
Most of all: you only live once. Don’t take this life for granted.
”Dissatisfaction
There are two ways to approach dissatisfaction: passively or actively. Passive dissatisfaction most commonly involves complaining about something, but not doing much to change or transform the situation. It’s pretty much saying “This sucks, but it’s just the way it is.”
Active dissatisfaction, on the other hand, is looking behind the curtain of our unhappiness and asking, “What is this trying to tell me? What is the purpose of this dissatisfaction?”
The second approach sees negative feelings as an indicator for something being off course. There’s a misalignment with what you really want, and your emotional response is telling you that this doesn’t feel good and that you want something different. In that moment of dissatisfaction you can wallow and repeat the pattern, or you can harness it to help you define what you actually do want.
“Your anger is a gift.” —Zack de la Rocha
Taken a step further, the repelling energy from what you don’t want can catapult you to taking transformative action.
“to do” (James Wallace)
Write me a picture
Paint me a song
Dance me a poem
but don’t make it longCry me some sunshine
Burn me some rain
Breathe me some soul
and breathe out againTake me to nowhere
Show me no things
Hide me in someone
see if they singGive me a seaside
Live me a prize
Sieve me a daydream
lifelong in sizeShake me a stillness
Bite me a flea
Halve me a wholeness
and share it with me
