breathe dearheart, breathe

Tag: self-realization (page 1 of 1)

video Interview with a Wild Man – Jim Beattie of Primal Scream

Oh yeah. I am SO good to you baby

Here for your curious pleasure, your whimsical attention, your inner wild liberation is Primal Scream legend, songwriter, musician and all-round wild man, Jim Beattie interviewed in a hazardous fashion by me.

If you can bear the excruciating first couple of minutes of me faffing around with the camera and sounding like a donkey’s ass while Jim demonstrates great patience you may feel wildly empowered after watching the whole thing. (I chose not to cut those minutes, or any of the other bits I could have cut. I am weird that way. I like it real, raw and slow y’know.)

Jim talks with dangerous candour about music, being in a successful punk rock band, writing songs, self-expression, music, creativity, seeing naked breasts for the first time, (at a David Bowie / Ziggy Stardust gig) individuality, Future Shock, fashion, making axes from tin cans as a child, music, karma, how he uses gardening to “lose himself”, fear factors, the Sex Pistols, mindfulness, music, why people should read more, cooking, de-cluttering, being in the now, how to find your inner wild man, google Earth, architecture, music, making furniture instead of buying it, how we’re all voyeurs, woodworking, psychos, his wild take on life’s purpose, music, going hill-walking so he can “breathe” and yes, even religion and politics.

Meanwhile, I talk and laugh too much. Anyway, after the serious ride of being a famous punk rocker and songwriter, Jim has now chosen to be of service to young musos, artists and other creative people by actively supporting and helping them to set up in business through Glasgow-based Ico Ico.

I wanted to interview Jim not just because he is a legendary punk rocker and I was a punk but also because he is one of the kindest, funniest and hard-man grandest people I’ve met. I wanted to get some insights from him that might help other creative wild types live a bigger life.

Wanna hear some of Jim’s tunes? Check out his Primal Scream favorites:

Velocity Girl

Gentle Tuesday

both written by Jim.

For more Primal Scream check out current line-up website, some other Primal Scream website, fab unofficial Primal Scream website, Primal Scream photos, history and songs on last.fm and NME’s Primal Scream news, pics, lyrics, photos, best songs, discography, concerts, gossip and tour dates.

Footnotes:

Filmed in 2010. I’ve interviewed hundreds of people in person, on the phone, via email. You would have NO idea of my interviewing skills watching this video interview!

Video interviewing is a whole other kind of other thing entirely! I am a video interview virgin so be gentle with me.

If you are disappointed not to see me on film – so am I! I had a great outfit on, and lipstick, but forgot to film myself. *sigh* In my next interview I might sit side by side. Oh God, just the idea of that makes me feel a little faint…

The blog I mentioned at one point when we were talking about simple bliss whose name escaped me at the time 1000 Awesome Things – amazing!

Bursting your bubble, OK?

It’s a good thing that as children we learn, with joy in our hearts, the complex psychological concept that our bubbles will burst.

Blowing bubbles. Your breath making globes of gorgeousness. You create them and then you wantonly poke your finger at them to burst them. You giggle when they land globulously with flat bottoms on the ground. How delightful, how satisfying.

Do you remember those feelings? How much you loved the bursting of soap bubbles? Every bit as much as you loved creating them and watching the transcendant perfection of light-refracting bubbles that held your breath suspended inside you and inside your bubble?

As a grown-up I often speak about how we all live in a bubble. Psychological bubbles are our protective shield, the flexible, protective barrier wrapping our value and belief systems.

We all have our individual bubbles, they are our sanity-protectors and without them and their beneficially anaesthetic effect on our lives we would absorb too much pain, too much ecstasy, and explode.

Luckily, our bubbles explode instead of our Selves.

I’ve spent the last couple of years repairing my bubble after some serious negative puncturing. I’ve had to do things I never imagined I would have to do. Things that were not part of my previous belief system and idealistic view of MY world.

When we experience personal trauma, good or bad massive change, realisations that are so outside our beliefs about people and how they might behave, whose reality challenges our core personal values and idealistic views — our bubble bursts.

As children we learned that bubbles can’t be repaired. A bubble once burst is gone forever. Our response is to blow ourselves a new one.

And yet because of the trauma I’ve experienced I’ve found myself attempting to do the impossible: repair an old bubble, it was so pretty, so lovely.

The bursting of protective bubbles can be challenging when you find it difficult to accept that the trauma, the horror you knew happened to other people, but not to you, happens to you. While I might want to pretend it didn’t happen, ‘it’ has definitely burst my bubble. I felt the exquisite vulnerability of the loss of bubble.

During the between-time before making a new bubble, you have to spend time staring at the soapy liquid that was once a bubble. The life view you had, the person you were in that bubble that’s burst.

You grieve for your lovely bubble. Just like you did that very first time in childhood when your soap bubble burst and disappeared and you stared, bereft.

Grown-up, I didn’t like the new world view and its intimate knowledge of nasty. New bubbles seemed kinda scary.

So I sat and blew actual bubbles. And it was good. My mind seemed to tap in to the simple lesson I had learned so easily as a child about the abundance of bubbles, the natural necessity of bubbles and of their bursting. The ecstasy of making and watching them float, the sharp, tiny, pleasurable pain of their popping.

Creating a new bubble for myself, a much bigger one now with my new, more evolved and rounded world view, I realise our old bubbles also grow – and burst – when wonderful things occur.

We break through a soapy ceiling of our own making. A limiting belief is exploded – a miraculous connection, a soul-touching new friendship, a saving arm as you stepped out in front of a bus and there’s a pop followed by deep breath, a slow releasing of breath and a surge as your bigger bubble is blown.

Let’s blow some bubbles today. Blow them up, blow them away and blow some new ones. And maybe make some soap bubbles too.

Image (detail) “Where all life begins” borrowed from Cassandra204.