Fringe 2025 – Ego Tourism: How the Tao Made Me (a bit less) Weird ⭐⭐⭐
'The fish tale changed my life. I realised you become what you do,' he says. 'I wanted to be happy like a fish.'
Saltveit, 63, the author of three books including 'The Tao of Chip Kelly', which analyses the coaching philosophy of a former National Football League head coach and suggests his leadership style and team-building strategies can be applied in other fields, works in the library at Middlebury College, a private liberal arts college in Vermont, where his wife, Olga, is assistant professor of theatre. He's also 'a palindrome pundit' and, well, as happy as a fish.
A bookish, 'goofy' child, whose parents bought a bargain-priced home in a well-heeled part of Portland, in Oregon, in 1968 after its owners wanted shot of it fearing it had been damaged by work blasting a tunnel for a highway, Saltveit draws lessons from good fortune as well as ill. Landing a $15,000 home in a nice part of town was not great for him as he stood out as gawky and was bullied. However, he was a smart kid. 'I did learn one place bullies will never chase you was into the library.' He spent a lot of time there reading sci-fi and at 13 'stumbled on two books of Chinese philosophy'.
His enthusiasm oozes out in his love letter to the 2,300-year-old (or so) Chinese philosophy that charts his course from a socially awkward eight-year-old to 'a physically worthless, totally in my head' teenager at a working-class Catholic school and on to a motley array of jobs. These included being a crew member on films such as 'Drugstore Cowboy', but realising he was not cut out for 'LA schmooziness' he packed it in and landed a post at Shenzhen University in China as a professor of English, for which he had no training or credentials (but, usefully, an American accent). 'I was never a barrister, but I was a barista,' he says, adding that he became a stand-up comedian at 38 and several years later a sportswriter.
His tales are illustrated by sweet pictures on a spiral-bound sketchpad of him growing up, including one with thick-framed black glasses which his frugal father had got cheaply, and sprinkled with moral-rich readings from Thomas Merton's 'The Way of Chuang Tzu', a spiritual interpretation of the classic philosopher of Taoism. Plus there's slow-mo demonstrations of Saltveit doing tai chi, 'a sort of meditative martial art' (in one of which he accidentally kicked one of the ten-strong audience members in the tiny room), to instrumental music including 'Pigs in Zen' by Jane's Addiction. Jimi Hendrix's 'Midnight' would also have featured but a low battery on Saltveit's technical equipment put paid to that.
There's also a reading from 'The Huainanzi', a collection of teachings from Taoist sages, which is the source of 'The man on the frontier loses his horse' story charting the ups and downs of the loss of a horse, its return with other horses, making its distraught owner suddenly wealthy, the hobbling of his son after a horse-riding accident, followed by the son's inability to serve in the army when a devastating war breaks out. Unintended consequences abound in life; don't make comparisons all-important; be yourself as best you can, Saltveit suggests.
In the middle of it all, in a clever feat of going against the flow, he recalls working his way to the front at Simon and Garfunkel's free benefit concert in Central Park in 1981 by hiding behind trees with a friend to avoid the surging of the 500,000-strong crowd and then moving forwards when the press eased. 'Taoism is the subversive, mischievous, dissident alternative to the mainstream culture of Confucianism, which is the traditional, orderly philosophy of China,' says Saltveit helpfully.
Equally helpfully, he's self-deprecating. 'Welcome to my little patch of mud. I can read social cues better now and I know you're ready for this show to end.'
PBH's Free Fringe @ Carbon (Room 3)
(Aug 7 to 11, 13-18, 20-24)
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Edinburgh Reporter
4 hours ago
- Edinburgh Reporter
Fringe 2025 – Ego Tourism: How the Tao Made Me (a bit less) Weird ⭐⭐⭐
Mark Saltveit could have trained to be a lawyer like his mother, his grandfather and his great grandfather; but having read 'The happy fish' tale in a book on Taoist philosophy, which suggests that by letting go of striving and embracing one's natural state, à la a fish in water, one can find fulfilment, he decided not to. 'The fish tale changed my life. I realised you become what you do,' he says. 'I wanted to be happy like a fish.' Saltveit, 63, the author of three books including 'The Tao of Chip Kelly', which analyses the coaching philosophy of a former National Football League head coach and suggests his leadership style and team-building strategies can be applied in other fields, works in the library at Middlebury College, a private liberal arts college in Vermont, where his wife, Olga, is assistant professor of theatre. He's also 'a palindrome pundit' and, well, as happy as a fish. A bookish, 'goofy' child, whose parents bought a bargain-priced home in a well-heeled part of Portland, in Oregon, in 1968 after its owners wanted shot of it fearing it had been damaged by work blasting a tunnel for a highway, Saltveit draws lessons from good fortune as well as ill. Landing a $15,000 home in a nice part of town was not great for him as he stood out as gawky and was bullied. However, he was a smart kid. 'I did learn one place bullies will never chase you was into the library.' He spent a lot of time there reading sci-fi and at 13 'stumbled on two books of Chinese philosophy'. His enthusiasm oozes out in his love letter to the 2,300-year-old (or so) Chinese philosophy that charts his course from a socially awkward eight-year-old to 'a physically worthless, totally in my head' teenager at a working-class Catholic school and on to a motley array of jobs. These included being a crew member on films such as 'Drugstore Cowboy', but realising he was not cut out for 'LA schmooziness' he packed it in and landed a post at Shenzhen University in China as a professor of English, for which he had no training or credentials (but, usefully, an American accent). 'I was never a barrister, but I was a barista,' he says, adding that he became a stand-up comedian at 38 and several years later a sportswriter. His tales are illustrated by sweet pictures on a spiral-bound sketchpad of him growing up, including one with thick-framed black glasses which his frugal father had got cheaply, and sprinkled with moral-rich readings from Thomas Merton's 'The Way of Chuang Tzu', a spiritual interpretation of the classic philosopher of Taoism. Plus there's slow-mo demonstrations of Saltveit doing tai chi, 'a sort of meditative martial art' (in one of which he accidentally kicked one of the ten-strong audience members in the tiny room), to instrumental music including 'Pigs in Zen' by Jane's Addiction. Jimi Hendrix's 'Midnight' would also have featured but a low battery on Saltveit's technical equipment put paid to that. There's also a reading from 'The Huainanzi', a collection of teachings from Taoist sages, which is the source of 'The man on the frontier loses his horse' story charting the ups and downs of the loss of a horse, its return with other horses, making its distraught owner suddenly wealthy, the hobbling of his son after a horse-riding accident, followed by the son's inability to serve in the army when a devastating war breaks out. Unintended consequences abound in life; don't make comparisons all-important; be yourself as best you can, Saltveit suggests. In the middle of it all, in a clever feat of going against the flow, he recalls working his way to the front at Simon and Garfunkel's free benefit concert in Central Park in 1981 by hiding behind trees with a friend to avoid the surging of the 500,000-strong crowd and then moving forwards when the press eased. 'Taoism is the subversive, mischievous, dissident alternative to the mainstream culture of Confucianism, which is the traditional, orderly philosophy of China,' says Saltveit helpfully. Equally helpfully, he's self-deprecating. 'Welcome to my little patch of mud. I can read social cues better now and I know you're ready for this show to end.' PBH's Free Fringe @ Carbon (Room 3) (Aug 7 to 11, 13-18, 20-24) Like this: Like Related
Spectator
7 hours ago
- Spectator
The mysteries of ‘spoof'
'Spook or spoof?' asked my husband, throwing a copy of the paper over to me, and only missing by a foot. When I'd picked it up, I read the headline: 'Fully Chinese-made drone spooking Ukraine air defence.' Then I read the introduction of the report: 'A new Russian decoy drone used to spoof Ukrainian air-defences is made up entirely of Chinese parts.' Well, to spook a person or an animal is to frighten them. It has been in use in America since between the wars and comes from the Dutch for a ghost. Spoof is a more mysterious word. Since the 1970s, to spoof has acquired the meaning 'To render (a radar system, etc) useless by providing it with false information'. Originally the noun spoof in the 1880s meant 'A game of a hoaxing and nonsensical character', or so the OED says. But I think it got things wrong from the first. In 1914 it published its entry for spoof, noting: 'Invented by A. Roberts (b. 1852), comedian.' Arthur Roberts was famous then and nine years later published his autobiography Fifty Years of Spoof. I've just read it and in a way it won't do at all, being full of unconvincing, unhilarious anecdotes. It has, however, a flavour of the late 19th century: champagne, the Prince of Wales, Dan Leno, night houses in the Haymarket, Phil May drinking. But by 1923, Roberts was not claiming to have invented spoof. He says that he was at a racecourse and saw men 'engaged in what seemed to be an entirely new form of confidence trick'. Asking the name of the game, he was told: 'Oh, it's only spoof, Arthur.' He does not explain the game. Our own Michael Heath has depicted the venerable Soho game of spoof, where two players simultaneously reveal how many coins are in their hand after declaring the total number while their fists are still clenched. It may be different from Roberts's racecourse spoof, but if not it predates Roberts's adoption of the term.
Spectator
7 hours ago
- Spectator
Successful modern design follows no rules
It is more than 40 years since Tom Wolfe said to me, in a Chinese restaurant on Manhattan's Lexington Avenue, that 'Modern' had become an historical style label. He meant it was not, as the high modernists believed, the inevitable conclusion to all artistic progress, but had a beginning and an end as nearly precise as, say, Baroque or Rococo. And I should write a book about it, he added. This was a brilliant suggestion which I flubbed. I wrote about design instead. But 'modern' and 'design' are inextricably linked. Franco Albini's handrails for the Milan metro? Raymond Loewy's Studebaker Avanti? Charles Eames's chair, which he designed for Billy Wilder? Ubiquitous Apples? All are frequently cited as masterpieces of modern design. But what exactly is the property they have in common? 'Design' was the last style of the Analogue Era, even if its high priests rejected such a frivolous notion. It was a utopian cult with religious texts all of its own, not dissimilar in character to the Shakers or the Perfectionists (who believed they had designed the perfect shoe, unalterable and eternal). It was intended to be a cure for various ills. If we had more modern design, more beautiful and useful things, people would be happy. Luxury would be democratised and everyday objects would be aestheticised according to some rules which we can now see as being daft. 'Form follows function' they said, and suggested that when it did, beauty would result. But some things that are impressively functional, a B-52 bomber say, are beautiful only to those with specialist tastes. The people who fly those ruthless planes call them BUFF, which stands for Big Ugly Fat Fuckers. Or what about 'truth to materials' – a moral demand that makes sense if you are working with stone? But just what truth does graphene beg to express? It really was mostly about exciting consumer desire by streamlining a fridge, or making clunky data compression technology into irresistible iPods. Steve Jobs said you know a design is good if you want to lick it, nicely suggesting an occult eroticism in these matters. This was what the Marxist critic Wolfgang Fritz Haug grumbled about – that design was a shameless accomplice of capitalist desire. Now with off-shoring, blurred national identities, the monetarisation of everything and a general weariness about material goods, here comes Maggie Gram to explain what happens next. She is a writer and teacher who leads Google's Experience Design Unit, or UX in the parlance. That's 'User Experience'. Her perspective is explicitly American, so readers will have to tolerate expressions such as 'black tenure-track design faculty' in what is otherwise a thoughtful and carefully argued book, even if the old modernist principle of less is more might profitably have been applied to the word count. Gram begins with an engrossing chapter about the ceramicist Eva Zeisel, an adventuress and one-time lover of Arthur Koestler. She follows with an account of the career of Walter Dorwin Teague, one of the pioneer design consultants who set up shop in New York in the 1920s. Teague began as a draftsman of decorative borders for advertising but was soon designing gas compressors. Gram has fun with the absurdity of this, because the innards of a gas compressor are invisible and have no need to be aestheticised. But this allows her to develop her central theme, which is that designers have a unique way of seeing and organising things, a vision that is either above or below reason but certainly not subject to it. In 1940, Teague published Design This Day – The Technique of Order in the Machine Age. Fifteen years later he designed the interior of the Boeing 707, establishing our common assumption of what the UX of jet travel should be. The way designers can help in problem-solving is Gram's preoccupation, as is the way design has evolved from being a simple description of what someone does, to a larger concept which may lead to Google creating a unified theory of it. But long before Silicon Valley, designers had seen the opportunity to apply creative principles not just to products but to whole organisations. When IBM's Thomas Watson asked his friend Eliot Noyes (a protégé of the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius) what he should do about the messy look of his sprawling conglomerate, Noyes said: 'You would prefer neatness' – surely the most succinct management advice ever given. Noyes went on to supervise IBM's products, graphics and architecture. This was called 'corporate identity' by Gordon Lippincott, the designer of Campbell's soup's red and white tin. The great value in The Invention of Design is that Gram has thought long and hard about decision-making. She is especially interested in Herbert Simon, not a designer but a Nobel prize-winning 'general problem-solver'. Of course, the problem with problem-solvers is that they tend not to find solutions but to restate problems in a new way. Thomas Piketty, gets a look in, too. Design is essentially intuitive and not systematic. That Eames chair was inspired by a baseball mitt. You are not going to get that from Simon's explanation that you must create 'conditions for the existence of positive solution vectors for input-output matrices'. Try telling that to Jaguar Land Rover's Gerry McGovern, who has taken inspiration from the sight of Lycra-clad bottoms on the exercise bike in front of him at the gym. You can see that in the fine surfacing of the latest Range-Rover. Gram concedes that the results of applying scientifically determined design principles are mixed, at best. She discusses how problem-solving designers systematically failed to improve the troubled city of Gainesville, Florida, although similar methods did lead to an increase in legibility of American census forms, so that's something. In the 18th century, builders used pattern-books, which established standards, and this is why we all like Georgian architecture. But design doesn't have fixed principles. We work in the dark. We do what we can… we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. Or so Henry James believed. And I agree. This is a good and important book, even if it's inconclusive. Weirdly, it has few pictures, demonstrating that design thinking is difficult to illustrate – a nice paradox. At the end, Gram seems almost humbled by her task of enlarging what design thinking can actually achieve. No need to worry! Design is unpredictable and its processes chaotic, led by people who won't be told what to do. Just like the Baroque.
