Subvert Press: The 'Thank You' Sticker You've probably seen this (yep, 27 on daypop), but I feel it's my duty to help spread this subversive idea -- our idiotic energy policy and our rampant oil consumption make nations with terrorists (like Saudi Arabia, because, don't forget, 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabians) stronger, so we have to bomb them because they will terrorize us for seeking hegemony over oil resources so we can drive our SUVs so then they will....lather, rinse, repeat.
Living @ the speed of life... is a blog by Human B Leever, which is highly ironic, given he presents material that tests your faith. Go here to get your daily dose of discontent with fucked society, plus humor, thoughtful asides, and mid-life honesty (not to be confused with High Water). Mr. Leever points to lots of progressive material, including this:
POCLAD - Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy, which begins:
Dear Natural Person:
(... as opposed to an artificial 'Corporate Person') Welcome. We are activists who have spent the last several years researching corporate, labor and legal histories, rethinking our organizing strategies and talking with people about democracy.
You LIve Your Life As If It's Real. Poverty bondage, i.e. the site of a poet. Not a recent addition, but fits right in with "Wealth" and "Human" and he's a good friend and deserves a link.
Chris Pirillo. Have you heard about this guy? A computer freak, an entrepreneur, successful (but not wealthy), a genuine, nice person, an entertainer, ruler of the Gnomies, follower of dreams – an inspiration.
Gnome-Girl. One of the Gnomies. Also Miss Gnomedex. Also funny. And cool.
Open Brackets. I’ll let her tell it: “Gail Armstrong is a hopelessly parenthetical freelance translator, etc. bemoaning the fact that she lives in the South of France instead of her native Canada (of all the nerve!) “ And I’ll add, a great writer. To wit, and excerpt from her Aug. 22 post, “Our town”:
“Kids with coins hot in their palms beg the carnies to spark the rides up a day early. But the carnies are enjoying a last evening of respite, hanging laundry outside caravans, lazing on deck chairs and making the town’s bar happy for the business.”
Imagine a conference both serious and silly. Imagine a conference that is as much about meeting each other as it is about meeting a celebrity. As much about listening to each other, as it is about listening to a speaker. Yep, imagine a conference about conversations (scroll down to "Conversation is In").
Imagine a virtual community becoming actual in one locale. Imagine meeting people you’ve gotten to know through blogs and e-mail (which, trust me, is very cool ). Hearing their voice, shaking their hand, not just reading their blog, but actually seeing them blog in the chair next to you! Talk about putting a face with a blog. Imagine a conference that’s covered in real time by many, many bloggers.
Actuallly, this conference has already happened. It was called Gnomedex II, Attack of the Gnomes. But Bloggerstock will be different. How so? We won’t know until it’s over. Done right, these things have a life of their own. That’s the beauty of it.
On the phone with Dave, and he just said, “We've entered the implementation phase of Cluetrain.” We're talking blogs. I think he's right. – Doc Searls
Imagine getting a whole buncha bloggers together for a conference. All kinds of bloggers: techies, personal, war (a vocal minority, I’m sure) and anti-war, young, old and in between. Imagine having a few brilliant speakers with the theme of “Cluetrain, Phase II.” You know the ones. The Cluetrain authors, and some others, like David Isenberg. Keynote? Definitely Chris Locke.
Imagine the ideas flying, not just through the blogging community, but hand to hand and mouth to mouth. And then back to the blogs. Imagine lots of alcohol flowing, good music, and good times. Imagine the creativity generated. If it’s true that we feed off each other, we’d create some rich and powerful foodstuff.
Bloggers are a cultural movement. An underground, diverse, we don’t care what you look like only what you’ve got brain-wise and heart-wise movement. Blogger doesn’t call itself by the fight-the-power slogan “push-button publishing for the people” for nothing. We’re only at the very beginning of a revolution, and how exciting would a conference around such a concept be?
It’s fun to imagine. And it may be time to make it happen.
I'm scheduled to check out of the downtown Des Moines Mariott today and catch a flight home to be there in time for tomorrow morning's baptism of Audrey, my 8-month-old daughter, but not before enjoying a killer line-up of speakers at the most curious computer conference on the planet, Gnomedex. Speakers include Doc Searls, Evan Williams and Leo Laporte, all bright stars in the tech cosmos. Also scheduled are Phil Kaplan and Mark Thompson, who will talk about avoiding dot-com failure and successful Web development. These guys may be stars too, but since I'm not totally plugged into the tech scene (in other words, I'm not really a geek, but don't tell anyone) I don't really know. Phil Kaplan sounds familiar...has he written "how to" books or something?
I'm on my first pot of coffee, courtesy of my little Mr. Coffee machine here in the hotel room. Then it's down to the breakfast with the sponsors, then checkout, then conference. So bye-bye blogger. Won't see you again until Monday and everything is back to normal. Gnomedex is cool. Gnomedex is a trip. Gnomedex is different. And even though I don't really have the proper computer geek credentials, I was able to answer the Star Wars and some other more general questions during the trivia game last night. And I did, despite myself, yell "Geek!" when one presenter yesterday prompted the audience with "Proud to be a..."
I learned today that Des Moines, home of Gnomedex, is a town of about 500,000. It seems smaller, but that may be counting a large "metropolitan" area. There is no traffic to speak of. In yesterday's paper, I read a story about a local phenomenon, Summer in the City. The story notes that the Saturday night downtown civic event is a "place where you can listen to local musicians, shop for a painting, eat a taco, get your fortune read and mingle with people from different backgrounds all at once, without any cover price. It makes it on the talent in the community and the passions of the volunteers."
That last sentence could apply to Gnomedex as well. It's all about using your talent for something you are passionate about. In this case, that's computers and technology. The brains behind the conference, Chris Pirillo, is from this city. And at lunch today, it was asked how many in attendance were from Iowa, and a good 15-20 percent of the hands went up. This is Sillicorn Valley, after all. Chris also has been on local radio talking about the conference and stirring up more local interest.
Have you ever been to a conference anything like it?
Any particular speaker you came to see? Why?
I'm going to write a magazine story on this conference. Here's your chance to be quoted and to help make it a better story. If you have a minute, leave your answers in the comment box, or e-mail 'em to me.
Saw two folks who looked like they could be Doc Searls, and even asked one if he was, but no. But I believe I saw the famous blogger across the way at lunch. Looked like he was blogging. Don't see anything new on his site though, so maybe just another look-alike.
Shoeless Joe Jackson: Is this heaven?
Ray Kinsella: No. It's Iowa.
-- Field of Dreams
Dateline: Des Moines. George Partington checked into the Mariott hotel in the center of downtown today, completely unsure of wtf he was up to in the heartland of this once-great nation. Ostensibly, he had traveled to this good, American city for a techie conference with a peculiar name, a name that drew him like a tacky lawn decoration -- Gnomedex. With a name like that, he thought, it has to be good.
Plus, it looked like a good time, especially with the inimitable Frank Paynter (see below) in attendance. In fact, Mr. Paynter had enticed the young entrepeneur (as much as one can be of an independent spirit on a corporate dime, that is) with cryptic statements such as, "I KNOW there's a story there." And "we could sell it (the story, not the gnomedex) for mucho dinero."
So, with visions of Hunter S. Thompson and Oscar Acosta in his head, Mr. Partington hopped on a plane (after donating his prized miniature swiss army knife from his keychain to a nice security guard) routed to said city, and, as noted, arrived safely. He was last seen heading for Pitcher's sports bar and mumbling something about having important people to meet. Mr. Paynter, who had not arrived in Des Moines as of this writing, is advised to look out for an average build, average age, average intelligence, bald man holding a beer, but not, however, with a cigarette holder and perpetually lit cig between his teeth.
“It's all good...there is no one situation that is better than
another...it is a part of the continuing musical journey that I've been
blessed to be a part of in this life.” --Alphonso Johnson
In reading Frank Paynter's Sandhill Trek, we get a good sense of a unique personality that revels in the fun to be had with this latest tool for self-expression. He’s always right there in the thick of it, pointing to the best of the blogs, adding pith and wit to the issues swirling in and out of the blogosphere, publishing great blogger interviews (and setting a standard I tried to live up to), and sharing his thoughts on culture and politics. Now's your chance to get to know Frank even better. You’ll probably agree after reading this interview that although the accompanying photo doesn’t show it (what with the sunglasses), there’s gotta be a twinkle in those eyes.
Okay, ready? Need a beer? Redhook okay? Okay, let me turn the stereo down a little bit.
No beer, thanks. I joke about booze and drugs but I'm really all show and no go where intoxicants are concerned. I've abstained completely from alcohol and drugs since 1985. Haven't had a cigarette since 1986. Moistened a cigar in the early '90s and just about passed out where I sat. The cigar was Cuban, a baby celebration freebie, and I didn't want to turn it down. I still drink caffeinated beverages and use refined sugar, that most deadly of white powdery substances. So pass me a Co'cola if you've got one and let's get started.
First, some basics: Where do you live? How old are you? Are you married? How many children do you have and what are their ages? And what are they up to?
My wife and I are in our fifties. We have a little farm surrounded by Nature Conservancy (Waubesa Wetlands) just outside Madison, Wisconsin. This morning we woke up to see a flock of three hen turkeys and more than a dozen youngsters in the back yard! It's a twenty-minute drive to the Capitol, a twenty minute drive to the University, hell... no place in the Madison area is much more than twenty minutes from anyplace else. I have two grown boys from a prior marriage. Matt has graduated from UCLA with honors. He had a double major in Spanish and Economics. Matt's in Mexico right now... says he plans to spend the next year or so in Spanish speaking countries. Ben, Matt's twin brother, has a semester left before he graduates with a degree in Journalism from the University of Missouri. He's working as a white water raft guide in the Sierras right now and returns to school in late August. Earlier this summer he had an internship at the National Geographic Society in Washington DC. Matt's a personal fitness nut, into free weights and running. He played for the UCLA Rugby Club and was on a championship volleyball team in high school. Ben is a surfer, and a mountain biker, and a climber. He racked himself up in a fall his Senior year in high school... spent a lot of time in a wheelchair. Then when he was healed up, he went out there and got right back into his thing. My lesson from this? Detachment, big-time detachment.
Let's start with the first question people usually ask upon meeting: So what do you do?
I'm a project manager and an IT consultant. I compete with Cap Gemini and the-Company-Formerly-Known-as-Andersen-but-now-with-a-name-like-a-japanese-import-automobile. I compete with EDS for contracts. And I compete with other Ronin like myself. I have a long and deep networking background. I have an MBA. I managed a project to implement Portal Software as a billing system for one of the countries largest ISPs four years ago. I specialize in strategic technology planning services for mid-size financial institutions. Part of my challenge in that kind of work is fighting off the jackals from the telcos, all of whom have vested interests and a story to tell. As this market shakes out, that job will be easier because I'll be able to point to specific well known cases of foxes given free range in the chicken coops of American business.
In 1997 I started Sandhill Technologies, LLC because my sense of the market was this: if you worked in a salaried position as I did (I was IT Director for a large Credit Union) you were generally undervaluing yourself, because people were buying the same services from outsource providers at much higher prices than it cost them to keep you on staff. But if you look at the contractors, the outsource staff people were hiring, they weren't making any more than the in-house people. The difference [the money] was going to the body-shop. So my business plan was pretty simple. I would make myself available through my own company at market rates. My overhead would be lower than the body-shop's so I could pocket the difference and make more money, cultivate the illusion of independence, and gain greater control of my time. This was working very well until March this year. When my most recent long term contract lapsed, I discovered that finding the next one in this market was a little harder than it had been for the last four or five years. I made a decision to stick with my plan and not to take the salaried position they offered me as they cut down on their contracted services budget. For the last six months I've been puttering around providing short term support services -- installing wireless LANS, doing clean up on a klez virus problem, that kind of thing.
Meanwhile, I'm working up a couple of concepts on spec. One is a fusion of knowledge management, professional journalism, and intranet services...hmmm, sounds a lot like k-logging doesn't it? Also, I have a chance to use this time to do some work in my community. I have two things going on that eat up a lot of time. I belong to an "unprogrammed" Quaker Meeting and they asked me to be the Clerk. I won't go into the details, but there is a lot of work involved.
Since I'm out about my Quakerism, it won't surprise you to hear that I also work actively with peace groups in Madison. Today I received the following much circulated e-mail that reflects pretty much where I stand:
"Beam me up, Scotty. This is so surreal, I feel that I have become delusional. A right-wing oil gang, having stolen the election, is now being exposed as corrupt and is faced by a serious stock-market decline and a severe recession.
To stay in power, they are preparing to launch a first-strike war, even though the top military is so uncomfortable, it is giving leaks to the press of the impending war plans.
They might drop an atomic bomb on the enemy capital to gain an unconditional surrender, justified to save the lives of thousands of troops before a total invasion and occupation of the country which might last 20 years.
If I have read Gibbons' Decline of the Roman Empire correctly, I would say I was in the last days of a Republic about to be destroyed by a right-wing coup that is willing to destroy democracy to launch a new global empire.
Beam me up, Scotty. Nobody believes me down here anyway."
So you came of age sometime either right before, during, or right after the whole countercultural movement. How did that affect you (then and now)? What were you like during those heady times?
So there we were, the baby-boomers. There were more of us than there were of them, and we were all wired into the same pop cultural currents: Dylan, the Stones, the Beatles, the Dead, acid and pot and bad shit that will kill you. But THEY were in power, and THEY were hanging onto their racial segregation and oppression of women and sexual minorities. They were killing Kennedy’s and Black Panthers and Dr. King and promoting their shitty colonial war in South East Asia, and THEY were scumbags and liars and thieves on a par with the most recent hatch that's crawled out of the political slime and now infests the White House and the House of Representatives and has laced the Senate with anthrax and laid its eggs beneath the Jefferson Memorial and on a dark night you can hear the vermin in there skittering and chittering and chewing at the foundations of our once-proud democracy and nobody is even beginning to wake up to it except for the stalwarts at the Village Voice, some dreamers at Common Dreams, and of course the open throttle freedom loving lunatics of Indymedia
But where was I when the madness went down in the sixties and seventies? Right there, fucked up and alienated and marching in the streets and I learned a profound respect for the monster that is the mob. When you get 10,000 people mobilized in the street there is no such thing as leadership, regardless of what the paranoid right was thinking about leftist cadres and all. The mob mind is all that exists, and the mob knows where it's going and it can be dispersed, but it's like kicking over a nest of fire ants and the glass companies will have a profitable week when the tear gas grenades start flying.
Where was I? Alienated. Profoundly weird as I look back on it. There were more of us, but THEY had the power... and some of us dropped out and detached and lived life off the grid, and some of us copped out and got a haircut and a suit and went to work down on Montgomery Street, and some of us held onto our dreams and provided some continuity for the counter-cultural movement that has never died out and is now re-emerging to address the issues of war and globalization, and the disrespect of the planet that has led to global warming, sheets of plastic in the shrubbery at the high-water line of every river and stream world-wide, accelerated destruction of habitat and mass extinctions, and on the television public polling that allows the question of whether or not we, Americans, should torture our prisoners to gain some information, public policy hearings on whether or not we, Americans, should launch a first strike against a country we suspect has weapons of mass destruction of a type if not in volume to match our own.
I guess I haven't changed much except I've put on weight steadily over the years since I quit smoking cigarettes. Did I mention I also smoked a lot of pot in those days too? I did all those things -- dropped out, copped out, hung on and hung in. I got my Honorable Discharge from the US Marine Corps in 1966. My best friend Steve was a Marine radioman who was on tour in Vietnam during that time. He saw it all come together: the Buddhist self immolations, the ARVN incompetence, the US reluctance to support forward
troops fully, the scary nights when monkeys in the jungle would set off one-sided firefights because what did these kids know about who was out there anyway? Steve died of pancreatic cancer a year ago January. I was a government trained killer, but fortunately I never saw any action in uniform. My brother went to Vietnam with the Army's 101st Airborne Division. He came back mostly unhurt physically, but he was just a wee bit grim for many years.
It's great to talk to someone who was THERE in the 60s. I mean, it's slipping further and further into history. We, or at least I, need to hear this firsthand, not watered down and sold back to us by madison avenue.
"laid its eggs beneath the Jefferson Memorial" -- the PODS! so you too realize that Invasion of the Body Snatchers was actually a documentary.
I gotta ask, were you at Woodstock?
Nope. Missed it. I had a media view of many of the defining events of my generation. The next summer, after Woodstock, the Dead did an open air show on a farm in Wisconsin... I have no remembrance of who the other acts were, only that the concert was a GENUINE Grateful Dead concert... it went on for hours and we were all right there with them. I get a kick out of my fellow deadheads who can tell you "We've attended 39 Grateful Dead concerts." As Paul Krassner said about the 60s... "If you can remember, you weren't there." Here's some jokes on us…
There's a media riff welling up here. "The Other Ones" appeared in their current incarnation at the Alpine Valley venue. I'm not gonna get into how local promoters were ripped off by the Clear Channel marketing model, but there's a story there too. Rather, I'd like to observe something about the publicity for this show. Since Jerry Garcia died in 95 (I think), the Other Ones have appeared in several incarnations. They had a tough time finding a sense of themselves with the lead guitar wizardry of Garcia missing.
They tried a couple of different things, and a couple of different styles. Bobby ("Ace") Weir (rhythm guitar), Phil Lesh (bass), and Mickey Hart (percussion), formed the core of the other ones. The keyboards have been a problem since Ron (Pigpen) McKernan died and getting both drummers, Mickey Hart AND Bill Kreutzman, together has sometimes been an issue. They were together for the tour in 2000, but Phil Lesh stayed behind. Alphonso Johnson played bass that summer. Here's more about Alphonso Johnson
So now comes the summer of 2002 and finally all four survivors of the six who started this whole thing as the Warlocks in San Francisco in like 1964 decide that they can take the show on the road again. Mark Karan and Steve Kimock had been doing good lead guitar work, sacrificing none of their personal style to the "tradition" of the Greatful Dead reprtoire that the Other Ones settled into. This year at what was publicized as "The Grateful Dead" family reunion, Rob Barocco was on keyboards and Jimmy Herring was onlead guitar. They got good reviews.
But this takes me back to where this whole rap started... "The Grateful Dead Family Reunion." The publicity on this event led the general public to believe that this was the first time that the band had been back on the road for six years, and of course they've never stopped performing. This was definitely the first time that Hart, Kreutzman, Lesh, and Weir had all been able to be on stage together, but the Other Ones have been performing in various combinations since they lost their lead guitar and laid down the Grateful Dead.
Ray was telling me about your comment that you would never see Dylan at Newport....how come?
Logistics. I admire Sheila Lennon for blowing out of there if she didn't enjoy it. I probably would stick it out like some slavish fan or something. But I'll never see Dylan at Newport because he's done it twice in 35 years and he might be able to afford the growth hormone and stem cell therapy that will have him doing it again in 2037, but I'm thinking unless it's a cool day and I have wheels on my walker, I won't be there. Just had a flash...you know those handle bar streamers that kids have on their bikes? That will look great on my walker! Jazz it up. Go fine with my Linux Penguin bumper sticker. Nobody will remember the latter but everybody will enjoy the streamers. I'll be styling. Do they still say that?
Okay, let's turn to Da Boy, who was THERE as well. Here you guys are now, on the Net, stirring things up, giving us some alternative ideas...how would you characterize what Chris Locke has meant to what I think is still-nascent Internet culture? And what does his work mean to you personally?
I can't say enough about Chris Locke. He is an authentic voice in the business world, where there are far too few of those. He is a visionary and a bellwether regarding Internet potentials and realizing them. He is always out there ahead of the pack, leading us to make the next right moves. He knows how to recreate himself and keep himself alive. And on top of that, I consider Chris to be one of the emerging important voices in post-modern American literature.
Go to Chris' website and scroll down past all the EGR hype and Callahan Dog Piss advertisement, past the Operating System Manuals (three different dictionaries), to the acknowledgements. It's in these acknowledgements that we find our true commonality of experience with Chris Locke, the author. There are some names that you might not recognize. How many people besides feminist scholars know the work of Julia Kristeva? And Walt Kelly has been dead for a while and Pogo pretty much died with him. But the point of this list for me is the cultural baseline it sets. What it says to me about Chris Locke is that his promethean creativity rises out of an immersion in popular culture, classical culture, literature and philosophy. I value that.
This latest edition of Entropy Gradient Reversals, Locke's 'zine, will also give you a hint about a common bond I feel with him: Locke's 'zine is important and we, his loyal readers are waiting for the next issue. If you don't subscribe yet, you can subscribe from his website and you can find back issues at yahoo lists:
In the short time that I've gotten to know you through your blog writing -- on both yours and others -- I sense that you have an avid cultural curiousity. True? Or would you characterize "it" differently?
Like a salmon I am driven by urges I do not need to understand. One of these is probably an urge to hep myself -- is an apostrophe missing there?...a dropped "el" or is it a vowel transformation... when did hep get hip and has it slipped back again and why? Quick! call an etymologist, or an entomologist if this answer bugs you.
"Avid cultural curiosity...". "Pop cultural" I think. I'm pleased to be aware of classical roots in the cultural artifacts that surround us, but pop culture is my focus. And I'm not sure that "curiosity" is the motivation. I have always been a pleasure seeker, if somewhat conflicted about it; and the artifacts of popular culture give me great pleasure. Understanding the context and effect of work I find pleasing is another layer of enjoyment or, sometimes, frustration. Sharing this understanding with others is similarly enjoyable (or frustrating).
Pop culture is everything. It's the media reports of the eruption of Mount Pinetubo, it's the Boss in concert with the E Street Band on the tide flats of New Jersey, it's frozen one-person Michelina's pasta meals, and it's burning the cardboard with your oven ready pizza. It's the burning oilfields of Kuwait and it's the earnest discussions of that batty old Thatcher woman with the Alzheimer's patient presidente about whether or not we should have a policy of acknowledging global warming.
When I "get it," I find that I need to share my understanding. (Like, did the US drop a huge explosive in the pipe at Mt. Pinetubo just as the Clark Air Base lease expired? Wow! What a concept... if we can't have it nobody can.) Most people don't have the surreal/absurdist slant I do, so they don't necessarily know how to digest what I'm sharing with them.
If you could recommend one work of fiction and one work of nonfiction right now, what would they be? Why?
The Internet. That's the short answer. Why? Because everything is there, or pointed to from there, or if it's missing there, then the gap is obvious and someone will soon research and fill it in. Seriously, I had a college job in a huge library and was awed by the mathematical impossibility of ever absorbing its contents. The net is so much bigger, but linking gives us a way to fly through the information in a way that makes it all accessible. The daunting mathematics of a number of volumes with sequential pagination arranged in rows of shelving across multiple floors of the stacks has given way to an intellectual anti-gravity that makes me welcome the volume and complexity of published content. Keeping track of what is fact and what is fiction is always a careful reader's job, and the Web blends fact and fiction so cunningly that it isn't always easy.
But you would probably like a straight answer. "Russian Spring" by Norman Spinrad tells an interesting story about an isolationist paranoid United States in an ever more Euro-centric world culture. So I'd recommend that book here at 19:20 CST on the ninth day of the eighth month of 2002. Oops, time's up. New recommendation: "Cryptonomicon," by Neal Stephenson. Oops... I mean "Mason & Dixon" by Thomas Pynchon. Oops, I mean "The Compleat Works of Wm. Shakespeare." See why it's hard to answer the fiction question? It's all good.
As far as non-fiction is concerned, well... one should follow one's own interests. There's an interesting book called "The Redneck Manifesto" by Jim Goad, not for the faint of heart, nor for children of privilege really. The London Yearly Meeting's "Quaker Faith and Practice," (1994). The dictionary, you should always have at least two to refer to. Sorry I can't pick just one nonfiction book to recommend. Web site designers might prefer the "XSLT Programmer's Reference" to the "Quaker Faith and Practice." Or to
"The Redneck Manifesto." You might want to read Bates' "Optical Switching and Networking," but I doubt it. Probably one of the most important non-fiction books I've read in the last few years is A.B. Cambel's (that C has a cedille) 1993 work, "Applied Chaos Theory - A Paradigm for Complexity," Academic Press, Harcourt Brace. See, the thing is, I could tell you how much I enjoyed the biography of [Richard] Feynman that I read, but there is another book right around the corner that is sure to knock my socks off,
and I don't even know what it is yet! It's all good.
And what are some of your cultural touchstones? What movies, music, visual arts have spoken directly to Frank Paynter? How so?
I finally saw "A Beautiful Mind" last night with Beth. Great movie, even if the Nash equilibrium has been over-valued as an economic construct... (see, in the Prisoner's dilemma, Bonnie would never rat out Clyde, nor vice versa, so the whole thing goes down the shitter in the face of human behavior based on emotion (love) instead of rational economic behavior... but it makes for some interesting algebraic matrices and Russell Crowe did a great job, and we cried).
I'm reacquainting myself with Walt Whitman, and necessarily then those other New Jersey poets, William Carlos Williams and Whitman's true successor, Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg has always been terribly important to me. My boy Ben is more of a Kerouac aficionado. When I worked for Wang Laboratories I took a cool picture of Kerouac's grave in Lowell, Massachusetts... people still leave roaches and empties and butts there, burnt incense and candle wax and Stella's epitaph to Ti jean: "He honored life."
I have long loved the French Impressionists and our own Abstract Expressionists for different reasons. I also like beautiful nudes of realistic and masterful painters from Renaissance until today. I appreciate the work of installation and/or performance artists like Joseph Beuys (hell, here in Wisconsin it's all sausage and felt), but it doesn't call to me like a serene and beautiful landscape by Monet. Like Denise Howell, I have come to enjoy California Plein Air paintings, but they're still in second place behind the French impressionists. The Art Institute of Chicago is one of our favorite destinations, and no matter what else is being shown, we will wander through their excellent impressionist collection.
My affinity for the earlier and middle work of the Grateful Dead is well known. I used to enjoy hanging in bars like the Matrix or venues like the Family Dog listening to the Dead, and later in bars all over the Bay Area listening to some incarnation of the Jerry Garcia band... Merle Saunders, John Kahn, Bill Vitt, and others played with Garcia and you knew that they loved being there and making the music and it wasn't some strange attenuated stardom trip like the stadium concert scene. I think it may be time for me
to re-visit that club scene. We have some good musicians here in Madison, and I haven't paid enough attention since I eliminated intoxicants from my diet. The complete oeuvre of Zimmerman is very important to me of course. And the Byrds. John Lennon will always have been my favorite Beatle (with appropriate bows to George Harrison, Ringo, and Paul, in that order.)
My simple appreciation of sculpture includes all those beautiful Hellenistic nudes, the recapitulation of same in Rome, the Renaissance, and again in the romantic period. Henry Moore always appealed to me, but Beniamino Bufano speaks more directly to my simple mind. The Bingham Gallery website says this about Bufano: "Henry Miller wrote of Bufano, ‘He will outlive our civilization and probably be better known, better understood, both as a man and artist, five thousand years hence.’ His work, simple in style and monumental in scale, includes smoothly rounded animals in granite and icons sheathed in stainless steel."
There was a Bufano bear on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard in Ross, California, that I always thought of as my own when I lived near it. That bear was an exceptional piece of public art. There was a long running of Bufano's work at the Alcoa Building in San Francisco that I visited whenever I had time for a relaxing walk among the bears and the seals. My boy Matt turned me on to the sculpture garden at UCLA. They have fantastic variety including some real masterpieces. Usually for public art these days, we're gifted with
cor-ten steel monstrosities that speak to the artist's desire to control large masses and impact large spaces, but in the final analysis they're no more interesting than the cor-ten retaining walls that gracefully edge the hilly paths outside the Getty in Malibu. (And no, I have nothing against Calder, but many of his contemporaries sucked big dollars out of the public trough and didn't give us a fair return). The Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis has several of these pieces I'm bitching about, but the variety of work and the sheer imagination that some of it displays makes it worth the trip.
It's all good.
When did you start blogging and why?
Spring, 2001 or summer sometime. But I didn't surface with it. I was isolated, and if you ran across me it was a random event. Rebecca Blood had inspired me quite a while ago, and I was stumbling around with it, then in November Rageboy made me do it, I got on blogger with a "gang blog, then in January moved it to my own domain and left blogger pro for Radio Userland. "Blogging, the new journalism... accretions of bloggers forming micro-markets... brash voices of old innovators in this newest online community."
What do you think of it (both as an activity and as a cultural phenomenon), and has that changed since you started?
First let me say that I started thinking that blogging was new and different and I've come to believe that there's no such thing as blogging. I think there's personal publishing, journaling, content management and like that, but blogging is something we made up so we could traffic in U Blog merchandise over at Cafe Express. In the fourth grade I had this cool little rotary press, with rubber type that you set a line at a time in a metal tray. Transcribing my stories to that press was a son-of-a-bitch and it came to me quickly that it would never make me rich. It's much easier to use my Radio Userland software to create a post and upload it to my domain server and get a worldwide distribution but it will still never make me rich. (Stop the presses! Meg Hourihan is proposing PAID blogging positions!)
What's cool about blogging is that I'm not limited in distribution like I was on the old rotary press. Carl and Bruce and Jeff used to get a kick out of my short-short-short stories. They lived nearby and those three copies plus one for me and a few extras pretty much defined the market for my writing.
When I first started blogging, I was feeling my way, getting to know what the technology would do. I've been a member of OASIS for a while, and have been a minor XML geek since early 2000. But I'd much rather write words than write code, and it takes a lot of effort on either side of the fence. People who do good work on both sides, good writers and famous code choppers, like Shelley Powers, really have all my respect.
How does it intersect with your professional life?
Good question. I have come to recognize when something is an energy sink, a time drain, an obsession... and of course blogging for me can be all three. But I try to maintain my balance. Beth was gone for two weeks recently and I wrote a lot while she was gone. Much of what I wrote ended up in posts and comments all across Blogistan. If I lived alone, I'm sure I would just let go and let blog.
We live in a postmodern world, yet no one can agree on what that means...what does it mean to you?
Straight answer? Postmodernism for me is just an attempt to set some temporal discontinuity in what is otherwise a clear and understandable record of cultural progress from the early 19th century romantics, through the "moderns" of the first third of the 20th century to the pop-cultural iconography of the period following "high modern" when no academic worth his salt would dare study anything because it hadn't been tested yet by time. The labels emerged in the late sixties and were pretty much in place in
academia by the 80s. I remember a NYT Magazine article on deconstructionism at Yale that was so difficult for me to understand that I figured there must be some smoke and mirrors there.
If "modernism was shading out by the seventies and postmodernism was firmly entrenched by the mid-eighties, I have to submit that the differences are one of date rather than substance. The progress in science and technology has permitted instrumentation and gadgetry that wasn't available in World War II, but had begun to be imagined in the days of Kaiser Wilhelm. Postmodernism... right now we can genetically engineer a herd of cows to yield specific medically useful protiens in their milk, but the methods of protein isolation that will permit mass production have yet to be developed. We're still using pipettes and small centrifuges like we did in the seventies, only the DNA we're isolating today has exciting intentionally recombinant attributes that were only imagined in the seventies.
So we've made progress, and people need to label eras so they can pinpoint achievements and philosophical attributes of a given era, and it wouldn't be smart to call this period from 1970ish to 1997 premodern since it follows rather than precedes what we all agree was the modern period (contrary to postmodern thought which might cavil at the concept that we all can agree on
anything.) It has yet to be discerned by our heavy thinkers what this period that we live in today that follows the postmodern period should be called, but I'm sure if we give academia about twenty years they'll label it for us.
And the following definition (from Glossary Definition: Deconstructionism) also flesh out a common understanding of what postmodernism might be if we were all to agree that in English at least (unlike French) shared vision and values can be achieved through a common understanding expressed in our language.
“A term tied very closely to postmodernism, deconstructionism is a challenge to the attempt to establish any ultimate or secure meaning in a text. Basing itself in language analysis, it seeks to "deconstruct" the ideological biases (gender, racial, economic, political, cultural) and traditional assumptions that infect all histories, as well as philosophical and religious "truths." Deconstructionism is based on the premise that much of human history, in trying to understand, and then define, reality has led to various forms of domination - of nature, of people of color, of the poor, of homosexuals, etc. Like postmodernism,
deconstructionism finds concrete experience more valid than abstract ideas and, therefore, refutes any attempts to produce a history, or a truth. In other words, the multiplicities and contingencies of human experience necessarily bring knowledge down to the local and specific level, and challenge the tendency to centralize power through the claims of an ultimate truth which must be accepted or obeyed by all.”
“Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries
to understand its own particular and personal reality.
“The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning.”
(editor’s note: during this interview, I posted some text from a book I was reading, Think on These Things by Krishnamurti, including the following
“We must create immediately an atmosphere of freedom so that you can live and find out for yourselves what is true, so that you become intelligent, so that you are able to face the world and understand it, not just conform to it, so that inwardly, deeply, psychologically you are in constant revolt; because it is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition. It is only when you are constantly inquiring, constantly observing, constantly learning, that you find truth.”
Frank saw this as dovetailing nicely with our discussion of postmodernism, and said so in the comment box for that post. He said, in part, “The part about seeking and creating each our own truth seems to me to be really central to that [our] discussion. This may be the first time in human high cultural history (since we renounced hunting and gathering and settled in cities) when significant numbers of us who are not children of privilege have the opportunity (without mortal risk) to go for it -- to seek what we love and find it -- to renounce the job/survival, (serf/master) pattern and seek fulfilling work instead. This indeed is a positive aspect of post-modernism.”)
Now back to the interview in progress…
What's been the most satisfying thing you have accomplished in the last six months?
My work is more process oriented than spiked with achievements. At the beginning of this "last six months" I presented a collaborative workgroup demonstration to a public agency that consists of a central authority, regional administrations, and local departments... about 100 players in all. I showed them how they could use an existing database system, weblogging tools ("gang blogs" with commenting subsystems), and instant messaging to negotiate contracts among themselves in a win-win context. That demonstration was very satisfying, but nothing has emerged from it so far. Meanwhile, I've developed a course that integrates some principles of personal publishing with legal constraints to same, and I'm flogging it about at the University Extension and whatnot. One of the whatnot's was a local distributor of famous products... our end of the Wintel "supply chain." They have some nice well-equipped classrooms, but I hesitate to partner with them because this is a platform independent set of tools we're using. Oh, I also got the weeds in the north pasture cut before the town sent me a noxious weed notice. I'm not usually that proactive.
Who does most of the cooking around your house (I'm guessing you're a grillmaster)? Or do you guys eat out a lot? What are your favorite things to cook/eat?
My spouse is an original second wave feminist. She led a group in San Francisco called Women Organized for Employment. She taught me the punch line to the joke:
"How many feminists does it take to replace a light bulb?"
Answer: "That's not funny."
Imagine my embarrassment then that she is also a gourmet cook. We do best when we put meals together together. I do do the grilling from time to time, either on the gas grill out back or on the Farberware electric in the kitchen. What we both prefer to make for dinner is reservations. Madison has more and more good eating spots, so we have a lot of choices, but besides some fine dining spots we enjoy from time to time, there's a ribs place that we like a lot, a Japanese place where I order sushi and Beth gets tempura or something, a Mexican Restaurant, and one special place we enjoy Sunday brunch. Net/net we do eat out quite a bit. We do things as a pair much more often than in large groups.
What's your idea of a fine evening?
A very fine evening starts at dinner, continues through a show, maybe a dance performance -- Madison has serial culture -- there's quite a bit to do, a lot to see, but you have to take it as it comes. Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, and the Twyla Tharp Companies will definitely never be in town at the same time, but over a year you'll have a chance to see two out of three and several more besides.
After the show, on to dessert, then home to let the dog out and snuggle down under covers with my sweetie and whatever trash novels we're each reading.
What attracted you to Quakerism?
Wisconsin counties are laid out in townships like New England. We live in a rural township, the Town of Dunn. In 1991, at the Town of Dunn Arbor Day potluck dinner, an emeritus professor of soil science, Francis Hole, joined us and played his violin and put on a one man puppet show for the children of all ages there assembled.
In those days I had a 14.4 modem on a 80286 chipset, running MS/DOS 5.0 (I think) and Windows 3.1. and I subscribed to the Prodigy online service. Prodigy provided me an email account, some okay reference material (if not Compuserve quality) and some online community hook-ups, including a writers' BBS. In that group, I met a woman named Susan Shaughnessy who has written a book called "Walking on Alligators." Everything Susan said was so correct, so right, so true. Turned out she was a Quaker. I thought I could use some of that, and I'd always flirted with meditative discipline but never wanted to wear weird orange robes and shave my head and clink little finger cymbals.
In 1967 I had a professor of Southeast Asian History, Gene Boardman, whose wife Betty went to North Vietnam with a shipload of medical supplies. These people were Quakers and they had left a big impression on me. When war-jerks pissed and moaned about Hanoi Jane Fonda, I could remember that there are plenty of people of conscience who are not in the public eye and whose motives are direct. Nothing against Jane. I always admired and respected her for her principled stands, but as a public person, she was perhaps less than ideal for packaging a message of peace.
So, it's ‘91-‘92 and I'm corresponding with Susan, whose husband is a Vietnam veteran (Marine officer), and I ask her about Quakerism and she basically says check it out yourself, Frank. There's not a lot of proselytizing she intends to do. Works for her. If it works for me, fine. So I try to find the Quakers and there is a listing in the phone book for Friends Meeting, and I call and contrary to the joke, the answering machine is NOT all silence, rather it tells me briefly when there are meetings for worship. Well, I think, I'll check this out on a Wednesday night, and who do I find there but Francis Hole, the soil scientist, fiddler, and puppeteer! The guy has an honesty, and a quiet certainty and a peace about him and I want some of that. So I just kept going and maybe three years later Beth and I inquired about membership and there you have it. I'm now a card carrying Quaker.
What's a good, succinct statement that sums up your approach to life?
This changes, but right now I'd have to say, "It's all good."
More than 20 years ago, Bruce Springsteen released the double LP “The River.” I was 17 years old. I had only recently become a Springsteen fan, but I was completely in love with The Boss. I had all the previous albums. The end of Jungleland gave me chills. Thunder Road was an introduction to poetry.
Screen door slams
Mary’s dress waves
Like a vision she dances
Across the porch
As the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely
Hey that’s me
And I want you only
Badlands and Prove it All Night just blew everything away and left me washed clean, sipping a beer held between my legs on the car seat, and feeling alive.
My car radio was constantly tuned to 96 Rock in those days. Great stuff was on that radio – Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, Bob Seger, John Cougar, Elvis Costello, the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers. And, in the Fall of 1980, Bruce Springsteen singing The River. What was this? I was 17, Bruce was about 30. This was music for a 30-year-old.
Now those memories come back to haunt me
they haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don't come true
Or is it something worse
that sends me down to the river
though I know the river is dry
That sends me down to the river tonight
Down to the river
my baby and I
Oh down to the river we ride iiiyiiyiii
This was mournful, haunting, real adult stuff. It spoke to me anyway. I’d already crashed and burned, in a way. That’s why I NEEDED rock and roll. I already knew that society strips away your dreams, or at least I knew instinctively that my road wouldn’t be the easy, blithely unaware path. I just didn’t fit. No doubt I was romantically in love with that notion.
I had found some friends who felt the same way.
I first became acquainted with Noel when we shared a homeroom in junior high. We weren’t great friends at that time, but in high school we realized we had similar taste in rock and roll. I remember a discussion in the mall arcade, the Gold Mine, on the relative merits of ELO vs. ARS. We both tended to like the poppier side of rock. Even the harder stuff that we liked – Bad Company, ACDC, Led Zeppelin, the first Van Halen album – was hard rock with a pop sensibility.
Then Noel and I discovered Springsteen, independently. And so did Billy (aka Ray Sweatman), a friend of Noel’s who he’d met through their mutual involvement in the high school drama program.
Noel decided I had to meet Billy. Billy was a trip. So he set up a bowling date. We met at the bowling alley, we bowled, and we talked about Springsteen. I don’t remember too much, really, except being the only one who knew all the lyrics to a particular song off of “Darkness.” I was pretty proud of that.
On another occasion, Noel and I were out riding around in my car, listening to Springsteen, and he says, “Billy’s at this party over at so-and-so’s house.” This wasn’t a wild, the-parents-are-out-of-town party. It was adults and young men and women socializing. I forget what the occasion was, maybe somebody’s birthday. But we’re out, listening to Springsteen, and we want to share it with Billy. For some reason, we have the Born to Run album in the car with us. So we decide to crash this party. It’s one of those ideas that you have to psyche each other up for, and with our youthful energy, that’s no problem.
So we get to the house, we park, we knock on the front door, and a perfectly nice and reasonable adult answers, and we say “is Billy here?” And he says, sure, come on in and suddenly we are in the middle of a suburban living room full of folks in mid-party, most of which we don’t know. Billy, of course, is delighted to see us. We exchange awkward pleasantries with everyone, and then Billy herds us into the kitchen. As soon as we get in there, we say excitedly, “Billy! We have Bruce in the car!” And he says, “What? No Clarence?”
Riding The River
By college I’d raised the romance of the doomed outsider to an art form (I even wanted to be an artist). During our early college days, Billy, Noel and I would listen to The River often. We’d put on side one, and end up listening to all four sides, blown away by the depth of feeling.
The River is a lovely album. The production is gorgeous. It’s a pleasure to listen to. The music is intricate, the piano rides atop the base and both are interwoven perfectly with the organ while the acoustic guitar fills out the edge and it all ebbs and flows and crashes with the drums like the surf. “Oooh the price you pay, oooh the price you pay, now you can’t walk away (crash of surf) from the price you pay.” And back behind it all, backing vocals and wonderfully expressive nonwords, oooohhhss, iiiyyiiiyyiiyiiis. Then there’s the rockers, including I’m a Rocker (bring it on home!) and the joyous Sherry Darlin (hey, hey, hey, whataya say, Sherry Darlin --- sax solo!). You had your problems (Fade Away, Stolen Car, Jackson Cage) but you also had the ability to dance all over them.
Did we really understand it, this album about what happened to the kids that met ‘neath that giant Exxon sign, that raced in the streets, that dreamt of escaping the workin, the workin, just the workin life? Did we know about getting shot point blank by the pretty lies that they sell? Or that you can become the hand that turns the key to the jackson cage? We did, and we didn’t. Bruce told us what we were going to face, but we were different. We had the courage and the vision. The Big Chill was for others.
Then came Nebraska. Stark, down tempo, downright scary in places. I knew it was great, but I was a 19-year-old college sophomore. Me and my fellow rockers wanted, naturally, to rock. We listened. We went down in the well with Springsteen, but we needed more air, our limbs were loose and the night was calling.
By the time Bruce was ready to rock again, we’d moved on to The Talking Heads, Richard Thompson, Warren Zevon, Lou Reed, the Psychedellic Furs, The Blasters, John Prine, Marshall Crenshaw, REM, Bob Marley, plus standbys like Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young, the Stones, the Who, and Elvis Costello. And Bruce’s 1984 release, Born in the USA, just didn’t measure up. It was watered down and amped up, it was large and anthemic at the price of depth and musical interest. Whereas The River sounded like a great band tearing it up and caught live in the studio (and mixed to perfection), Born in the USA sounded manufactured. Noel called it “Boring the USA.”
Yet the CD was popular. Everyone was embracing our Bruce. But he wasn’t our Bruce anymore. This was the world turned upside down. Bruce was supposed to be one of us. We were going to take on the world with Bruce leading the way, brandishing his guitar like the ultimate weapon to cut away the dross. Baby this town rips the bones from your back, but we were gonna get out, together. We were gonna rip down that sign on the edge of town that counts how many have fallen away to the price you pay.
Now, he’d left us. Dancing in the Dark? We hated it (synthesizers!?!) Born in the USA? Dull. Glory Days? Weak. What happened, Bruce? we asked. This may sound funny, but it hurt.
The Rising
With The Rising, Bruce is back with his first studio album with the E-Street Band since that dark time. I’m married with two girls. I’m older than Bruce was when Born in the USA was released. Bruce isn’t my idol anymore. He fell and crashed into a million pieces, and I did too. I’ve put myself back together, and I’m groping my way toward a more personal definition of adulthood. I see heroes everywhere now. The independent journalist, doctors, rescue and relief workers, my Mom and Dad, people doing the best they can with what they have.
Oddly enough, I think Bruce is in the same place. His new album is full of admiration for everyday courage, and it’s amplified by casting that against the tragedy of Sept. 11. The album is filled with allusions to the event, images of blood, ruin, loss, empty bed, empty sky. Over and over, Sept. 11 is seen through the eyes of someone who has lost a loved one. And that person is praying that they, and by extension the country, can rise up and face evil down, not militarily, but personally, in their hearts.
Unfortunately, it’s not a very satisfying album. It’s not half bad, or rather, it’s about half good. The big mistake, to me, was to bring in producer Brendan O’Brien. I don’t know anything about his work, but the production is atrocious. “Waiting on a Sunny Day” is a nice pop song, but it’s nearly ruined by the tiring, pound-you-over-the-head sound.
When I read in my local paper that the Boss had updated his classic sound, I knew we were in trouble. Uh, oh, I thought, a producer is going to engineer it to appeal to what is perceived to be the sound people want to hear, circa 2002.
When I bought the CD (the day it was released), my fears were confirmed. Where is the E-Street Band, the guts of that classic sound? Any band could have produced this. It sounds like your average product from your average group of studio musicians. Where is Roy Bittan’s bittersweet piano? How about a “classic” organ solo, as in the middle of “Fade Away”? Could we have a little more harmonica? Shouldn’t there be something here that touches us as does the understated beauty of “Independence Day”?
Yeah, the band is there, but they are lost in the mix. These songs would have been well-served by a more stripped down sound. A little more music, a little less large pop gesture. Some songs couldn’t be saved. Lonesome Day, which reaches for some kind of Born to Run wall of sound, is formulaic in the extreme, especially with its uninspired “it’s alright” refrain. Further On is a hard, hard rocker with a plodding badump-bump base and thudding drums. The Rising is just okay, but again, the “rock” sound here is much more earth-bound than intended.
You’re Missing, at least, proves the exception to the rule, as far as letting the band really put out some good music, including a great organ solo! And Let’s Be Friends is a near-classic pop song, even if it does flirt with a generic beach band/motown sound. With My City of Ruins, Bruce returns to his soul music roots, to stirring effect.
I didn’t like Countin on a Miracle at first, and I think that has a lot to do with the production. It’s a driving rock song with crunchy guitars, which can be a good thing, but the syrupy production smears it all into sonic sludge. Despite that, you can hear a good rock song trying to break out, and the lyrics really get to the personal tragedy of losing a loved one and the struggle to find the strength to continue.
We've got no fairytale ending
In God's hands our fate is complete
Your heaven's here in my heart
Our love's this dust beneath my feet
Just this dust beneath my feet
If I'm gonna live
I'll lift my life
Darlin' to you
But the biggest highlight for me is Mary’s Place. With Mary’s Place, I can imagine Bruce saying to Brendan something like, “look, I know exactly what I want here. This is me and the band, acknowledging the pain and rocking the house. Celebrating it and everything else. Celebrating life. We’re just gonna rock here, okay? You can go take a coffee break or somethin.”
We remember Mary, she danced across her front porch, she got in the car, let the wind blow back her hair, laughed and trailed her fingers in our hair. She married somebody else, but, hey, we’re still friends. And tonight, we’re gonna meet at her place and have a party. All our old friends are gonna be there. We’re much older now. Wrapped up in our own problems, making our way, reconciling youthful dreams and reality. We could use a little life-affirming action right now. So meet me at Mary’s place. We’re gonna have a party.
I got a picture of you in my locket
I keep it close to my heart
It's a light shining in my breast
Leading me through the dark
Seven days, seven candles
In my window lighting your way
Your favorite record's on the turntable
I drop the needle and pray (Turn it up)
Turn it up, turn it up, turn it up
Turn it up, turn it up, turn it up, turn it up
Is in the can. But, alas, it won’t be published this week. I haven't had the time to whip it into shape and give it the presentation it deserves. But next week, for sure, there will be lots of revelations concerning Frank's present and past, including:
"Where was I when the madness went down in the sixties and seventies? Right there, fucked up and alienated and marching in the streets and I learned a profound respect for the monster that is the mob."
Marching against what?
"The scumbags and liars and thieves on a par with the most recent hatch that's crawled out of the political slime and now infests the White House and the House of Representatives and has laced the Senate with anthrax and laid its eggs beneath the Jefferson Memorial and on a dark night you can hear the vermin in there skittering and chittering and chewing at the foundations of
our once proud democracy..."
And now?
"I guess I haven't changed much except I've put on weight steadily over the years since I quit smoking cigarettes. Did I mention I also smoked a lot of pot in those days too? I did all those things -- dropped out, copped out, hung on and hung in."
And there's much more. The Grateful Dead in Wisconsin. Hacking it on your own in high tech consulting. Post modernism explained. Reading recommendations. Art for art's sake.
In the meantime, I’m pretty sure a Springsteen piece will be up today.
The inconsistency of personal journalism is one of its endearing qualities, no?
So last night, Leigh and I were getting ready for bed. The kids were already asleep, and we’d checked our e-mail and shut the computer down. And Leigh says, “Sweetie, I know this job situation has you depressed, but you need to stay positive so you can network and find that next job. I feel bad that last night I just wanted to talk about Eleanor’s birthday, and tonight I read your blog entry about your tortured soul…”
And we laughed, and my soul didn’t feel a bit tortured.
Hello? Can anybody see me? I’m in here, but can you see me? Can you see the real me? Can you? Can you?
Oh yes, we see. You’re angry. You want so bad to make everything right. You don’t think it’s right to be happy when there is so much suffering and injustice in the world.
You’re burned out. I mean, you're 40.
No, I’m 39, but yes, 40 looms. And that anger? It’s only one side of me. And I don’t like it. It makes me ugly. I don’t like ugly.
Well, there ya go. Ya gotta embrace the ugliness with the beauty. You can’t have light without dark. It’s a yin and yang thing.
Well, my yang is dominant right now. I don’t get balance; it’s not part of the package. Can a balanced person write the words that will burn into world’s consciousness, lift it up and, yes, make it better?
We must see the real you, because this is what’s coming off the screen -- an alienated, frustrated, angry middle-aged white guy needing to vent.
And one very badly needing connection?
Yes indeed.
And one with much to give?
Of course.
And one whose heart beats as surely as this blinking cursor?
Can’t you feel it?
Yes, but that may be the problem – feeling it. Feeling too much.
The material quoted is from the first chapter of Think on These Things by Krishnamurti. It is adapted from talks to students, teachers and parents in India in the 1960s.
“Is it the function of education merely to help you to conform to the pattern of this rotten social order, or is it to give you freedom – complete freedom to grow and create a different society, a new world? We want to have this freedom, not in the future, but now, otherwise we may all be destroyed. We must create immediately an atmosphere of freedom so that you can live and find out for yourselves what is true, so that you become intelligent, so that you are able to face the world and understand it, not just conform to it, so that inwardly, deeply, psychologically you are in constant revolt; because it is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition. It is only when you are constantly inquiring, constantly observing, constantly learning, that you find truth. God, or love; and you cannot inquire, observe, learn, you cannot be deeply aware, if you are afraid. So the function of education, surely, is to eradicate, inwardly as well as outwardly, this fear that destroys human thought, human relationships and love.”
---
“To find out what you love to do demands a great deal of intelligence; because if you are afraid of not being able to earn a livelihood, or of not fitting into this rotten society, then you will never find out. But if you are not frightened, if you refuse to be pushed into the groove of tradition by your parents, by your teachers, by the superficial demands of society, then there is a possibility of discovering what it is you really love to do. So, to discover, there must be no fear of not surviving.
"But most of us are afraid of not surviving, we say, “What will happen to me if I don’t do as my parents say, if I don’t fit into this society?” Being frightened, we do as we are told, and in this there is no love, there is only contradiction; and this inner contradiction is one of the factors that bring about destructive ambition.
"So it is [or should be] a basic function of education to help you to find out what you really love to do, so that you can give your whole mind and heart to it, because that creates human dignity, that sweeps away mediocrity, the petty bourgeois mentality. That is why it is very important to have the right teachers, the right atmosphere, so that you will grow up with the love which expresses itself in what you are doing. Without this love your examinations, your knowledge, your capacities, your position and possessions are just ashes, they have no meaning; without this love your actions are going to bring more wars, more hatred, more mischief and destruction.”
(UPDATE: in case you thought the above link was to Amazon.com and, therefore, decided not to click on it, or if you're just too busy to check out links, I'm adding the following description of Krishnamurti from the page pointed to, which is from an IBEX Publishers page for a Persian edition:
"Krishnamurti does not offer any systems, methods, ideologies, or beliefs. He encourages the listener to question and doubt everything — including what he says — and to find truth for oneself. In his talks and dialogues he explores many issues such as education, freedom, love, awareness, relationship, responsibility, conflict, self-knowledge, suffering, conditioning, psychological time, nature of thought, aloneness, and loneliness, observer and observed, beauty, dependence, desire, pleasure, fear, energy, change, creativity, insight, order, meditation, religious mind, and the art of living." I thought this was a great list that pretty much covers the spectrum.)
Coming soon, The Frank Paynter Interview. Yes, Frank Paynter, a blogger with few peers, will be here, real and in the digital flesh. Yes, we interview the interviewer. We know a good thing when we steal it.
We're hoping to break new ground here -- an article *with* illustration. That would be Mr. Paynter's smiling mug. If we can get the coding down. We're hoping Frank himself will help with that.
You don't want to miss this folks. He walked the high wire in the '60s, now he's in the high tech world and on the Net, lettin it fly. He's been here, there, and everywhere. He's the real deal. For a short time, this will be Frank's place -- and what a lively place that is!
We're shooting for next week. We need a goal, something good to focus on, anyway. We're tired of railing, trying to make the whole world see, just open its eyes and see that it doesn't have to be this way. We CAN get along. War is barbaric, period. See, we're depressed again. And draggin you down too. Who needs that?
So we're gonna talk about Springsteen's new album next week. Maybe we'll find the passages in Krishnamurti's book that really were inspiring.
The struggle, as ever, continues. Tune in next week.
If we're against the actions of our government, we have to let them know, some how, some way. I'm trying to learn this. So, in order to protest another (in a growing list) war for oil,
phone numbers and e-mail addresses of U.S. Senators are here.
Here are the numbers of the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
Chair Joseph Biden (D-DE) 202-224-5042
Ranking Member Jesse Helms (R-NC) 202-224-6342
Barbara Boxer (D-CA) 202-224-3553
Christopher Dodd (D-CT) 202-224-2823
Bill Nelson (D-FL) 202-224-5274
Richard Lugar (R-IN) 202-224-4814
Sam Brownback (R-KS) 202-224-6521
John Kerry (D-MA) 202-224-2742
Paul Sarbanes (D-MD) 202-224-4524
Paul Wellstone (D-MN) 202-224-5641
Chuck Hagel (R-NE) 202-224-4224
Robert Torricelli (D-NJ) 202-224-3224
Gordon Smith (R-OR) 202-224-3753
Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) 202-224-2921
Bill Frist (R-TN) 202-224-4944
George Allen (R-VA) 202-224-4024
Russ Feingold (D-WI) 202-224-5323
John Rockefeller (D-WV) 202-224-6472
Michael Enzi (R-WY) 202-224-3424
Some questions for them on the war with Iraq:
What is the concrete evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction?
How long will American troops be in Iraq? What's the objective? What's the plan
to get out?
Do the State Department and Secretary of State Colin Powell support this war?
What about the top military brass?
Why don't our allies support this war?
If we attack, will Iraq find new allies in the region?
How many Americans will die in such a war? Iraqis?
How much money will such a war cost?
Why is America now attacking without explicit provocation?
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But dare I call from work...what will my cubicle neighbors think?
Some of the best stuff on blogs is in the comment sections.
Marek Jastrzebski lamenting the death of Napster (and so much more) in the discussion section of his site : "Funny country. In Poland we usually throw stones to show our frustration. In US people just overeat junk food or drink too much or have a party and get wasted or maybe go to a shrink. This is how mostly everybody deals with frustrations.
God forbid someone would demonstrate or 'petition the government'. What would your cubicle neighbour say the next morning at work? Can't risk losing that job. Got to pay the bills. Don't rock the boat..."
I think a comment I left on Frank Paynter's excellent Peace Blogging post applies here:
"How do we truly express our values through our government? We're being spoken for, robbed of our voice. This administration is proving, with frightening ease, that if you control the media, set and control the parameters of the conversation, you can do whatever you want.
Look at the globalization protestors, the one's who are on the front lines, carrying on the work of the 60s radicals. They make a lot of noise and they have intelligent, humane things to say, but it doesn't carry far. They are belittled in the corp. media. And part of this administrations "war on terrorism" is a war on them (us). They would brand them terrorists. It's the same model as the war on drugs. It's phony, but it sure works in allowing them to demonize whoever they want by branding them either a drug user or a terrorist.
I guess what I'm saying is: the global justice movement needs to grow much, much larger..."
And Margaret Krome also had something to add to this discussion:
"I'm particularly concerned about the media domination to which you refer in #7. It's astonishing how little people care about things that matter to them, simply because they don't know about them. The time is ripe for alternative media to gain stronger constituencies. Also for listserves like this to inform those who are conscious that we're hearing a very filtered and pre-approved version of news about things that are crucial to our lives and the life of the planet."
And over at Kallily Time, lots of great, apropos discussion for her Opiate of the masses? post. Including:
"I think blogging is a tremendous empowering tool, and once empowered, people are capable of so much more -- including important actions. No one, I hope, thinks blogs by themselves are going to have any effect on the political landscape. But people who feel their voice DOES matter might. To not engage in these matters through blogging is, to me, to miss a great opportunity. In the end, it's an important conversation."
That was me, and Steve Himmer adds:
"All over the world we've seen instances of the increased ability to communicate across borders (physical, political, or cultural) result in change and, hopefully, improvement in the quality of living. If anything, I think blogging allows us to make our voices more powerful, because we practice them and share them. And besides, enough people saying something becomes activism."
And Bruce Springsteen adds (didn't think I'd forget him, did you?) "Tell me how do we get this thing started?"
Fall is coming. It was even cool in Atlanta this morning. All praise the wonder and the beauty that is nature's graceful, temporary death, the crisp air, the deep blue sky, the certainty that life is good.
And fallblogging is here! And here (JoHo/David Weinberger) and here(Halley's Comment/Halley Suitt) and here (Sequitur/Tom Bolton) .
I was going to blog something inspirational today about what Krishnamurti said about love, but I keep forgetting to bring the book with me to wor…uh…the place where I spend a lot of time in front of a computer.
But what the hell, I’ll wing it. Basically, he was saying that our education screws us up big time. It’s all about training for the job market, when it should be about cultivating your love and desire for life. It should be about following your bliss and finding your true path, as Joseph Campbell said. We get older, we enter professions, and we lose that love and appreciation for all aspects of life. We become hollow men and women.
It rings true for me, because from where I sit right now, work is a cruel joke. Especially today.
(This is the book: Think on These Things. One Amazon reviewer calls it “A great tool to let you be the beautiful flowers we all are.”)
Sorry, warblogging ahead (or is it peaceblogging? Whatever the subject is the same – war. Are ya for it or against it?) Must be something in the air, maybe, I don’t know, an impending war that will kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
Doc Searls is even doing it here and here. He writes: “We need to face the fact that one reason Islamic militarism and anti-Americanism exists is that we've lost a lot of propaganda battles. The truth about who we are and what we're about is not familiar to much of The Arab World. Telling them their world needs to be humiliated isn't going to win the next propaganda battle, either.”
Well, exactly. We need to look at what our actions say. Propaganda, all is phony, a smart person once sang.
If only the truth about who we are and what we’re about as everyday, normal, good people was the same as the truth about what our government is about and what it proves it is about with its actions. Business. The business of exploitation. For money. For power. The greed, the inhuman desire for more, more, more money and power, which makes men order, persuade, and exploit others to kill and maim in so many ways. With bombs, with death squads, with near slave labor. Propaganda can’t disguise that.
Some other smart person once remarked that, for this reason, our propaganda is about as laughable to others as Soviet propaganda during the cold war years was laughable to us. You can’t point a gun at someone, make them an offer they can’t refuse, AND tell them what a nice, reasonable person you are. (and no, Iraq is not pointing a gun at us, if you want to use that argument for why we’re holding a gun on them. I’m not going to pretend to be a Middle East expert – which most war lovers do to my great annoyance, telling us oh so authoritatively about what Arabs are thinking – but I have read enough to know that Iraq is not interested in a war with us. I wish I could find the link, but I read recently that we had someone very high up at the U.N., I believe, removed from his post because he was going to make this fact about Iraq clear.)
That said, I absolutely LOVE this country. I vacation in it, not just because it’s cheaper, but because it’s so wonderful and fascinating, and you’re always being reminded of humanity’s basic goodness as you meet nice people who aren’t normally in your orbit. It kills me that two of the greatest rock bands ever, maybe the greatest, the Stones and the Beatles, are NOT from this country.
And, I am not trying to justify Sept. 11, the mujahadeen (which “our” government helped create so they could do their killing in our service at one time), hamas, or any other group of fanatics.
If this country is not willing to recognize international law (and it isn’t), all discussion is a moot point. Continual war is what we’ll get. And our gov/business leaders are just fine with that. I believe Cheney’s old firm, Haliburton, is making big bucks lately off of their military logistical services division (no doubt Cheney will go back there once he’s through with his term in office). If you think its about winning some security against terrorist attacks, you are living in a fantasy world. Please wake up. Follow the money, not the propaganda.
And let the meme spread: Glen Reynolds is a clueless, self-important idiot. "Warbloggers are better than anti-warbloggers," he says. Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah. Then he treats us to the most important thing about war with Iraq: who can prove themselves smarter about war strategy. He shows us, via a quote from another war pontificator, how, even before anything gets started, it will be Saddam's fault when we kill innocents. The post goes into all kinds of horrific scenarios. Then ends with "I'm not suggesting that this means Iraq should be left alone."
(And yes, I realize that the Saddam is a corrupt dictator, that other governments do all the evil things our government does. I’m aware of the necessary-evil argument that it's good to live in scary Leviathon, because it protects you from other Leviathons, but war is not the answer folks.)
At the suburban split-level home of Joe12, the High Water editorial board meeting is well under way.
Jackofhearts: Alright Joe, ya got those younguns to bed now? Okay, let me go over it one more time. Readership equals validation equals confidence equals more readership, until, eventually, ta da -- ticket to ride. (takes a swig of Red Hook ESB). So what are we gonna do, there, Mr. George P., chief writer for High Water? How are ya gonna get more readers?
Joe12: (sitting up from where he exhaustedly flopped on the couch) Hang on, Jack. This is fun and I want to keep it that way. This strategy bullshit for world domination…
Jackofhearts: Look, I have your best interests at heart. The day job is a dead end. And if you don’t believe me, try picturing yourself as a corporate executive…… So, any ideas (gives him a raised eyebrow look, a la Belushi)?
Joe12: (throwing up his hands and slumping back down) I don’t know, warblogging?
Jackofhearts: (slamming down his beer on the coffee table) No way, Joe. There are plenty of people doing that. You’ll never touch Brian Lamb. He’s got the goods for your daily ration of humanitarian bad vibes. And once you get your daily dose, you’re ready to get on with your day. Springing that on people unexpectedly…it’s…
Joe12: Yeah, but it’s important to me.
Jackofhearts: Okay, you have a point. High Water is nothing if not a high-wire honesty act. Just try to keep it to a minimum. But if you really have something to say, by all means, say it.
Joe12: (sitting up) Damn straight! …….Hmm. For the last two years I’ve done some serious surfing. I’ve found tons of killer material. I used to send you links on IM nearly everyday, remember?
Jackofhearts: Oh yeah. Kept me from going crazy at that sorry job. We can use those, but we’ve been doing that. We need something new. Everybody has linkage.
Joe12: (slumping back on the couch) Uh…I’m not sure what I did with ‘em, probably never find most of ‘em again.
Jackofhearts: Don’t worry about that. The Internet is a realm of endless abundance. No one’s figured out how to bottle it and sell it yet, though. So it’s all about connecting right now, giving and getting back, and I’m not talking about anything that has to do with Visa.
Joe12: (managing a slight gesture with his right hand) Wait a minute. I thought you said this could be my ticket to ride. Didn’t you mean, ya know, my livelihood? As in money to pay the bills?
Jackofhearts: Well, Joe, there’s work and there’s livelihood, and rarely do the two meet. We’re goin on the theory that more readers equals more energy, equals more ideas, equals something good….what, I haven’t figured out yet.
Joe12: Yeah, you’re right. It may never pay in dollar bills, but it may pay in other ways. Hell, I think it already has. When I was reading stories to Eleanor earlier, I noticed that I was rather effortlessly giving voice to the words. You know, not just a recitation, but actually inhabiting them, hitting certain words, changing tone as the thrust of the story changed.
Jackofhearts: Cool.
Joe12: Yeah, and the other night I was reading Atonement, and I was noticing how the sentences fit together (it was one of the less riveting stretches), watching where and how McEwan was going where he was going. Watching him put words together.
Jackofhearts: (standing, opening his hands) See, I don’t have to tell you anything. It just takes you a while to get warmed up. Need one?
Joe12: Yeah. (Joe12 changes the CD from a recent John Prine release to Springsteen’s latest, The Rising.)
Jackofhearts (returning from the kitchen): Brucey! Oh, hey, that reminds me. You should write a review of this.
Joe12: Have you heard it?
Jackofhearts: Some. It’s okay.
Joe12: Yeah. It’s rather poppy.
Jackofhearts: At least he has heart. The singing sounded good. I was reading somewhere the other day about how he has a hard time with fame.
Joe12: I can imagine. Must be hard for someone so down to earth.
(the two drink beer and nod their heads ever so slightly in time to the music, thinking their private thoughts)
Joe12: Hey, did you see Frank Paynter’s comments on my last post. “Its’ crack, but smarter. It’s wise-crack.” Oh man, that’s fucking classic.
Jackofhearts: Yeah, Frank’s great. “I could be wrong, but I fucking doubt it.” I loved that.
Joe12: Oh, man, this is gonna be great. I got it, man.
Jackofhearts: What?
Joe12: We’re gonna interview Paynter. He’s been doing all these great interviews, but nobody’s thought to turn the tables and interview him --- yet.
Jackofhearts: I love it! Do it!
Joe12: Hee. I will, “you fucking poet!”
Jackofhearts: Haaaaa. Do it. Hits, baby.
Joe12: Yes sir.
Jackofhearts: Yep.
Joe12: Coming soon on High Water: The Frank Paynter Interview….perfect.
Jackofhearts: (lifting his beer) Come on up for the rising!
Blogging is addictive, no doubt about it. I’ve got a life outside this blog, but the damn thing keeps interrupting it. It calls me…
Psst, George. Come on, show us what ya got. Linkage maybe? You have heard about what the Bushies are doing now, haven’t you? It’s an outrage!
Come on, step up and say, “Look at me Ma! I’m somebody! I have something to say, and by gosh, I’m gonna say it. Loud and proud. I’m gonna PUBLISH it! “
C’mon, this is where the action is. Smart people, mixin it up. Sharing. Showing support. Communicating with real care. Sniff. It’s beautiful, George. Bless Evan Williams, bless his pointy head.
What’s that? Day job? Pshaw. You’re NOBODY there. Here, you have a voice, a platform, and, I can personally vouch for 7 readers. 7 readers who are shaking their heads this very minute, saying, this guy’s crazy! But it’s YOUR crazy, George. And by gosh, that’s something. You know it, I know it, and they know it.
So come on. What are you hiding there? Is it….linkage? Is it GOOD linkage? Come on…give it to me...
Click on the above, and "View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons."
(link courtesy of Richard Bott and my lovely wife.)
