Adroytly Shifting Gears!
The Stein Salons courtesy of SFMOMA
If you are a frequenter of Roaming by Design, you may have noticed I haven’t been posting as much lately as I have in the past. That’s because I’m putting all of my efforts behind my new social media consultancy, adroyt, and its blog. We’re delving deeper into subjects relating to SoMe and hoping to encourage some great exchanges through our new initiative, the adroyt salon. Inspired by the fervor with which Gertrude and Leo Stein discussed and dissected the subjects they surveyed with A-list visionaries in Paris, we will be posting new questions each Thursday, which we hope will be bandied about at length during the following seven days.
Our first salon post speaks to Gertrude Stein’s influence in my life, and in case you’re not familiar with her, one of the interesting things about the author is that she thought of her writing as a literary form of cubism. A peek into her book Tender Buttons is proof that she was working toward a unique melodic quality that had never been accomplished before: “A closet, a closet does not connect under the bed. The band if it is white and black, the band has a green string. A sight a whole sight and a little groan grinding makes a trimming such a sweet singing trimming and a red thing not a round thing but a white thing, a red thing and a white thing.”
The sound is not extant but this is a home movie of the living, breathing legend (it's worth sticking around for the great smile at the end)!
Another book Stein penned is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. In it she described the Saturday evenings on the rue de Fleurus as “a kaleidoscope slowly turning” (writing as Toklas, of course). These salons hosted two of cubism’s founders—Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. About them Stein wrote, “…cubism is a purely spanish [sic] conception and only spaniards can be cubists…Americans…are like spaniards, they are abstract and cruel. They are not brutal they are cruel…”
It’s interesting to me that she took the stance that Americans express cruelty because the Spaniards are known for one of the world’s most barbaric sports, bullfighting. “I always remember Picasso saying disgustedly apropos of some germans who said they liked bull-fights, they would, he said angrily, they like bloodshed. To a spaniard it is not bloodshed, it is ritual.” We hope one of your new Thursday rituals will be to join us on adroyt where we will discuss myriad topics and maybe even kick up a skirmish or two!
To follow along with the salon discussions, here are links to the adroyt salon posts, from the first to the most recent:
It's the Adroyt Salon: Belly Up to the Bar!
Exploring the Salon as a Social Conversation
Approaching a Big City and Our Social Media Selves
