June, 2016 - Ina Disguise

The sad tale of Marco Pierre White and son

June 18, 2016 31 Comments

msrco young Here is Marco Pierre White, in an iconic black and white picture taken in the late 80s, before I started cooking. He was an early influence on me, not because I particularly appreciated his cooking, but because he was initially famous amongst chefs for walking out of catering college when they attempted to force him to learn how to use a stock cube. Back in those days, stock cubes were not good enough for Marco. He wanted to learn how to cook, and went from this rebellion to becoming the most well regarded chef in the UK in a remarkably short time.

He was also well known amongst chefs for his hatred of women in the kitchen, as he had decided that it was a brutal job. Some chefs like to play this game, humiliating people into learning tasks quickly to avoid either crying or being fired. I have worked in these types of kitchen, in addition to the more serious, religious style of leadership, and I have to say when I ran my own kitchen, the rough-and-tumble style of leadership was something I grew out of very quickly. It is tiresome having to replace weeping chefs on a frequent basis, so you might as well give them some time and space to make errors. Errors are not only instructive for the chef, they sometimes result in more interesting results.

The third piece of information that I got first hand from people that worked with him, was that he was fond of employing young male Scottish chefs, as they would be unable to pay the trainfare home until they had been forced to work for him for two weeks or more, so he could behave as badly as he wanted to. He liked to keep the meat in the garden after delivery, so that it was well rested, and presumably weathered by the time it got to your very expensive plate. One of my favourite recipes of his, was his water vinegarette, which was one of those confidence tricks that you pull at the top end of the catering trade. If you develop sufficient panache, you can eventually pull off presenting an almost empty plate, a good lesson to learn for your future creative exploits.

This is a more recent picture of Marco Pierre White, who is now famous for advertising stock cubes. He apparently believes that everyone, like the fawning media, has forgotten his initial claim to fame. The Dorian Gray picture to absorb his having sold his soul for money has apparently been lost. Perhaps his son sold it to pay his bills. As you can see, he is not a happy man, but he is reasonably well off. This is not a good advertisement for giving your life up entirely to your dreams, and it is not a good advertisement for years of creating top end dishes. He is only 8 years older than me, and I can honestly say he could easily be confused as being my father, the difference is so marked.

This is a picture of Marco Pierre White Jnr, whose current ambition is to create Marco Pierre White III, as he can think of no other way of pleasing his unhappy father. He has no idea how to please him, because his father has spent all these years chasing glory at the expense of loving his son, who has recently been suckered into a TV appearance, to pay off bills that he ran up running wild as a result of his exhausted father taking his credit and debit cards away. He does not have to work at anything, he is under pressure to maintain the family name, and he has absolutely no idea how to do it. He speaks in a breathy, Marilyn Monroe voice and attempts to please others by filling in the silent gaps with tales of boyish glory as he has no idea how to command respect or earn any genuine admiration from others. What this young man needs, is a father who does not obsess about his own need for admiration, and who is willing to spend some time giving him some self worth.

What he does not need, is publicity whilst he grows out of doing the sort of stupid things chefs do in their time off because they have extremely limited time to come up with a good story to bring back to work.

Raymond Blanc did it, David Dempsey, Gordon Ramsay’s late chef, did it, hundreds of talented chefs have destroyed their own lives doing it. Relieving stress by performing the sort of stupid male stunt that only other men even smirk at as they go about their long and sweaty day, is not particularly smart.

Working people 80-140 hours a week is also not smart, because as someone who has actually done it, despite the misogynistic views of people like Marco Pierre White, I can tell you that you completely forget how to function as a whole person. It takes years to get a sense of perspective back into your life.

People are not machines, and Marco the father needs to drop everything to give Marco the son the time and reassurance he clearly needs to grow into a whole person. Right now he is confused, worthless, and will not live long without some actual love from his father.

Discipline is not always the answer, but in this case, spending some time on a small island with no facilities would do the pair of them the world of good, because the evidence suggests that neither of them retain any connection with reality, and their tiny place in it.

creativity

Mandala Magic

June 16, 2016 110 Comments

So, mother is in hospital, and this means I am running about, crazily doing all the things I have no time to do when she is at home. I do not know if she will be returning, but I have created a self contained annex in case she does as her children have shown no signs of ceasing the usual poor behaviour and attacks. It is much safer to put a locked door between me and them, meaning that she will have to live in another part of the house.

In the meantime, I have taken delivery of another pile of materials to move onto the next phase of Sheep in Wolfe’s clothing, which will set the section up for future additions in the same style. As I said, I am extremely bored with Wolfe, so I am starting a new collection, which is antique inspired, whilst I await the next muse, or muses, to appear. The plan is to expand the Short Misadventures section with people from the public volunteering to muse for new pieces, which should be interesting. I will need youtube videos, personal bios and possibly an interview with these people, but beyond that it can be fairly superficial. This will be next year or so, after I have completed the artwork and books for Wolfe, and kicked off the Ballantine collection of antique stuff. Plenty of time for a press release and more extensive campaign to advertise the opportunity of having your name on a piece of artwork/story etc.

Tonight, as part of my finale grouping for the basic Wolfe collection, I have been researching Mandalas. Wolfe probably likes mandalas. If some big hairy guy made one for him, he would probably become extremely excited and say how far-out and marvellous it was. Since it is me, he will say absolutely nothing, which has become extremely boring. I have learned from my research so far, that I do not like mandalas. I do not like foot jewellery, I do not like knitted bikinis, I do not like hippy artwork, I do not like anything about this scene at all. But Wolfe probably respects Mandalas, so I will make him a mandala and call it Dipshit Hippy Crap. This is entirely in keeping with the rest of the collection and I am sure I will enjoy it slightly more with the perversity of putting work into something I have no interest in at all.

Trying to sort yet another 900 balls of wool is extremely tiring when you have to grade it into shades in your studio, knowing full well that you won’t see much of it for months as you are busy on other things. The more arty the collection becomes, the more impractical and stupid you feel doing it, but in terms of development, the more you do, the more you want to do, so on a personal basis, it is still worthwhile.

Am very much off writing the blog at the moment, as I am too worried about my mother and since I am anxious, I like to combine eating badly with sewing. I hope to have the book finished soon, but I will probably put a new artwork on the cover, so it may be delayed depending on what feels right.

The game will also still go ahead, but I have to get through the next few weeks the best I can, which means a lot of anxious sewing and planning for potential disaster in the form of yet more personal attacks from the family. I also have to think about income streams, so things are a bit up in the air.

creativity, health, motivation

The ego and creativity

June 7, 2016 No Comments

The ego and creativity – Wolfe’s kiss farewell

Today I had an extremely offensive conversation with one particular friend. He has some very strange ideas about creativity, so I am going to address these ideas very slowly, in a format that he is very welcome to absorb in a space where he cannot commit an assault.

There is a chasm of difference between developing an idea, and developing a marketing strategy. We can see from our television channels that shooting for the lowest possible denominator in the hope of viewing figures is not the way to achieve quality. We can also see from many arthouse movies that self indulgence does not always produce something that you would want to watch.

My friend, who makes arty movies which he does not bother to market, likes to prevent me from speaking at all by attacking me verbally whenever I try to explain to him that he has his priorities a little confused, making it impossible for me, as an extremely patient and understanding friend, never mind anyone else to work with him.

Today, it was a possible sit com that became impossible to even conceptualise, because he imagines that finding a marketing person that will make the magic exposure problem go away is more important than developing a product. This means that you cannot even develop your idea sufficiently to make it worthwhile, never mind discuss it to the point that you get any actual work done.

I have previously tried giving him simple open ended tasks to complete alone, with the idea that if he is left to complete something himself, I will not be at physical risk, and he will gain the satisfaction of moving a project on a stage. Even this has resulted in such a strong stress response that it is not possible to get anything done, and so two projects so far have had to be abandoned. He then likes to tell me what he thinks I asked him to do, which is nothing to do with what I actually said, because he was not listening in the first place.

Now this problem is caused by stress. In particular a fragile and super-stressed ego, so today I tried using myself, and then Wolfe, as an example of how other people work. In my case, as money is not an issue at present, I like to spend one third of my time on the piece of work, and two thirds of the time allocated on marketing the piece of work, whether this is over a month, a year, five years really does not matter as long as I have the time and space. Therefore there is a fairly consistent flow. For someone like Wolfe, for whom money is very important, he spends maybe 5 minutes out of an hour doing the work, and 55 minutes out of the hour telling the world that he has done the work. This can be done by passive or direct means, but whether you believe him to be a loudmouth Yank or not, he is certainly more successful, in a very niche market, than anyone else.

You cannot market a product that cannot exist due to temperament. In order to market thin air, you have to be a convincing person with a track record of actually achieving what you set out to achieve. Your cheaply made arthouse movie can do this for you, if you actually bother to develop your skill to the level where you are presenting something watchable. In order to do this, you have to consider the wider public rather than trying to sell yourself to a ‘marketing person’ who probably doesn’t exist.

700 people a month look at my artwork on the website. I maybe tweet it twice a month to achieve that, the rest of the hits coming from the relatively unrelated blog. This is a good use of time, develops my writing ability and expression, and gives me time to dream up more complicated versions of my work. I picked up a lot of information from Wolfe in this respect. Worrying about what people think of you, or failing to promote yourself is not useful to you. Insulting your friends by preventing them from helping you and telling them repeatedly that their views are irrelevant whilst they try to give you the information that you need is also not useful to you, as they will simply stop trying at all.

A master of an art is not an egotist, too frightened to input feedback. Very much like a British academic, they will listen to the most obscure information related to their interest area in an effort to improve quality, improve audience figures, expand their area of interest.

In my case, since my work is usually produced when I am wounded in some way, annoying me is what usually gets you a piece of work in the first place, which is why Wolfe was such an excellent candidate. He lacks understanding or respect for other people, however, which is why it is now more interesting to me to find some fresh meat.

I cannot help my friend with the knot he has tied himself into. I am just not putting myself in that position again, which means conversation is now likely to be severely limited. If I acted towards him the way he behaved this morning, I would now be in hospital. The great pity is that I doubt a single word I said went in, and so nothing will change.

If you are a creative person, bear in mind what I have said. Even if you do not like your work, it is important to either bin it or promote it to allow others to feed back to you. Otherwise you could find your passion drained by circumstance, and unless your spark is as self-healing as mine, you could end up bitter, hostile and unable to access your own genius.

Thank you David, for being careless, rude and a bit sexist and stupid. Without you, none of this would have been possible.

The post The ego and creativity – Wolfe’s kiss farewell appeared first on Ina Disguise – Author.

creativity, motivation

Tired of the dislikes, Wolfe.

June 5, 2016 No Comments

It has been nearly ten years, since my mother’s stroke, a month before my father died. I have reached the end of my productive adult life as a female, in terms of having a career or having a child before it is too late (not physically, I am unlikely to trust anyone enough to procreate before the time is up, given my slow burn mentality.)

I frequently cry about this, I pretty much started crying as soon as I saw Wolfe. Not for the obvious reasons, just the polar opposite, confident male version of me. These are not all good qualities, given the errors in plain sight etc. He makes me feel very battered.

I did wonder, for a long time, whether there was envy involved in my interest in him. I also wondered why, as someone considered very knowledgeable by even my drinking buddies, I would seek what would be considered to the untrained eye a ‘himbo.’ These people would not understand as I do, the amount of time and commitment Wolfe has had to put in to make his extensive knowledge of natural health look superficial and effortless to the jaded European passing interest eye.

I have been horribly bullied since childhood. I wondered, as a child, why I got on better with my teachers than I did with my own family. I remember at ten or so, having to leave the room because my sisters were shrill, inane, and extremely nasty.

Last week I tried to notify one of them of my mother’s impending operation. Her response was that this was not good enough for her. She only really sees things in terms affecting her. The fact that she had already had a letter explaining the operation had escaped her, because apparently my ability to write frightens her. Were I to describe a summer’s day, she would find it weird and patronising.

So, as you can tell, I am not dealing with brains of Britain. My mother used to tell me I would have to look after them after she was gone. I thought this was very odd, given that I was a small child, and they were ten and sixteen years older, and consistently nasty. Now I am less surprised. My mother, herself pretty unpleasant until her stroke, was identifying the stronger party.

Being strong sucks, however. You get dumped on, everyone expects you to cope on your own, and they think it is quite alright to attack you over and over again. I am a bit fed up, to say the least. I have had to say to her, in all seriousness, that either I have to now demonstrate some form of parental discipline, or she will have to go into care as I am not safe from my own siblings, who have proved themselves to be greedy, dishonest, extremely nasty and extremely ruthless in their pursuit of role playing power points and financial entitlement.

I did not take care of their parents for reasons of power-mongering, but this is what they have always been so scared of, and which is now a horribly self-fulfilling prophecy, and the only way out of it, it seems, is for my mother to live elsewhere in case they want to visit. (in my brother’s case, the visits are now every five months, so this seems like an expensive waste) I am not sure that I see a way out, other than our moving so far away that they cannot visit at all, and this would be complicated by my mother’s progressing illness, leaving us open to further legal attacks from her own children.

So there we have it, the opposite of a go-getting, driven, confident and rather slutty male, is a shy, harried, equally loquacious but somewhat different female that gave her life away for a family who neither deserved nor appreciated it. I have distracted myself from misery, by investing myself in amusing my opposite, who remains unamused.

I do realise that part of the reason that Wolfe hates everything is to let me know he has seen it so that I can take it down, and I also realise that I am insufficiently worthy of note to really affect him at all, but it still pisses me off that I could not even manage to get a sensible conversation out of him in the first place. He spotted me, and then apparently made several incorrect assumptions, based on erroneous ideas about worth, purpose and interest.

I just wanted one thing to go right. I wanted one thing to be appreciated and used appropriately, and I wanted to make something of a life that had already been taken away.

You could say that something else was created, but whether it is worthwhile beyond comforting a few thousand other emotionally scarred people, I don’t know. At least it got me writing in the first place, I guess.

It is unlikely that my family will notice that they have messed up until they have lost everything. It makes me very sad that other people cannot even let my mother die the ways she wants to, and that I am becoming less committed to fighting them. Being strong sucks, and being kind sucks even more.

creativity, motivation

Amos Yee and David Wolfe

June 4, 2016 1 Comment

Sorry I have not updated in a few days – I have been catching up with the backdrop for Wolfish, working on finishing some work under my own name, mother has been super – ill and even I thought she was dying of old age, rather than her persistent infection becoming even more persistent. It just goes to show, you must fight even when it seems utterly hopeless. She is now recovering from a particularly virulent UTI in hospital whilst I take a rest from being me from a few days.

Yesterday I discovered the story of Amos Yee, a charming yet precocious 17 year old in Singapore, who has turned performance art into protest and is facing many charges and years in jail for simply speaking his mind via his blog and youtube channel As a formerly spritely 17 year old myself, I recognise the spunk, but I have to say he is exceptionally brave to be putting himself at risk to change his country’s culture in this particular way.

Compare his efforts to the genius Seo Taiji, sometimes referred to as the South Korean president of culture for his efforts to develop his country’s cultural life via his music career and influence, and you can see that Amos has some hope of achieving his goal of encouraging free speech in Singapore, but his methods are scarily brave, and I see from some of the comments on his videos, that even his followers are terrified by the risks he is running. His parents, too, have been frightened of the repercussions, resorting to reporting him themselves.

Singapore has an appallingly repressed culture. The birth rate is low, due to men being encouraged to be ‘too polite’ to girls, and the economy is geared towards commerce at the exclusion of freedom, meaning that there are an awful lot of shopping malls but not much in the way of freedom of expression. I would encourage you to watch Amos and listen carefully to what he has to say. Although I question his need to ‘destroy David Icke,’ I remember only too well the clarity of thought and limited scope of action involved in being 17, and I hope, for this reason, he wins his personal battle with the jackboot of capitalism. Witness for yourself the future for countries indulging business over people. It ain’t pretty.

I see that David has caught my video. I hope he hasn’t missed hating me too much. (he still does, boohiss) I am working on the book, and will be a bit nearer publication in a few days. I will have to spend some more quality time researching Peru.

Kisses,

Ina

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