Fortune's Pawn

This from CNN’s website right now:

Americans use enough plastic in year to shrink wrap the state of Texas.

CNN

Okay, when can we start?

I was just walking back to the office from lunch when I saw some college age kids getting microphones and such hooked up, ahead of me on the corner.  As I approached the intersection a young man with a microphone reached it out towards me, his colleague holding up a small video camera.

“Excuse me sir, could you spare a moment for an interview?”

“About what?” I inquired.

“Ephemeral.  It’s for a class.”

“Sure.” I said.

There was a brief pause as the young man with the microphone looked at me expectantly.  A young woman in a yellow and orange striped shirt looked on, equally expectantly.  The man with the microphone had an oddly shaped head, quite asymmetrical.

“Do you know what it means?” he finally asked.

Of course I know what ephemeral means.  Right? For a moment my mind raced.  I do know what it means, don’t I? Or is it one of those words I only think I know, something I have always only defined by context?  This brief moment of confusion was put down when I confidently said, “Fleeting, not permanent.”

“Thank you,” said the microphone man, and stepped back.  I continued on my way, my ephemeral contribution to their student film now complete.

The New York Times is reporting:

The Oklahoma Legislature voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to override vetoes of two highly restrictive abortion measures, one making it a law that women undergo an ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus before having an abortion.

Strict Abortion Measures Enacted in Oklahoma | New York TImes

In the interest of fairness, Pawn feels we should have similar requirements for prescribing certain erectile dysfunction treatments.  Perhaps mandate that all men be required to listen to tapes of crying babies and change a few diapers before getting those little blue pills…

“Are you an artist too man?”

The question came innocently enough. That was James, our erstwhile bartender, after learning that I once knew Carri Skoczek, yesterday at Clem’s.

“Was, I was an artist.”

“What you mean, ‘was’? You don’t just stop being an artist. Maybe you aren’t making any art, but if you’re an artist, you’re an artist.”

“I was a lighting designer,” I told him. “You can’t just pick that up and do it anywhere, you know. You need a stage, and performers, and lights, and…”

“Ooh, I get it. Yeah, you kinda need a lotta help to get that done, doncha.”

“Yeah, you need a lot of help. I make art that needs a lot of help, so I don’t make art anymore.”

“That sucks, man. Shit.”

Okay, that was yesterday, and doesn’t really belong in today’s gazette, but it’s here for a reason. To whit: today we went to the American Museum of Folk Art. This lovely little institution, tucked in next to MoMA and The Modern, hosts one of the nicest collections of naïve, folk and self-taught art around, and although they have precious little space to show it in, they do so in a loving yet erudite manner.

When I look at this kind of art, I find myself always pondering the question of motivation, drive, inspiration… This seems inadequate to my point. Let’s try this; when someone grows up and goes to art school and starts to make art and exhibit it, or perform or what have you, it seems that there is a path, a trajectory, that gets them there. The motivation and drive are clear. For the self taught, the naïve, there is no such path. These are just normal work-a-day people who feel some compulsion to, at the end of a long day laboring over a plow or a broom or a stove, they decide to pick up a paint brush, embroidery needle, or what have you, and start making art.

I never “made art” in the sense of making a durable thing – painting, print, etc. – which one could take away from the experience and hang on a wall. I made art which was of its very nature ephemeral, transient, fleeting. My art was formal, in that it sprang from formalized structures and norms, it followed rules, to some extent, and it had a place in history in so far as it was informed by those who came before me, and was crafted with the tools and instruments available to me in my time. The naïve artist, on the contrary, is working out of time. Their work is singular and apart. Or, at least to my uneducated and impressionable eyes, it seems so.

It was thus that I gazed upon the self-made personal art collection of Henry Darger, on display at AMFA, which shows over 80 pieces of this significant 20^th century self-taught artist’s own works which had hung on the walls of his tiny hovel in Chicago for the 40 years he lived there. It is a departure of a show for this museum, which holds the largest collection of Darger’s work in the world. I am used to coming here and being confronted with rooms of his mural sized hallucinatory fantastical ramblings, paint and tracery works, filling the whole of one or two floors of the museum. Not today, now it is these small, 16” x 20” average, pieces. Why? I wonder. What led this man, who worked 10 hour days in Catholic hospitals, sweeping and mopping, to then return home and write 4, four, 15,000 page epics about his fantasy world, backed by thousands and thousands of paintings?

Anyway, I don’t mean to dwell on this anymore than I already have. I just wanted to share that I realize that there are many reasons people make art. I know that people will probably chide me about this post, like, “Duh? Don’t you get it man, people want to make art!?!?” Yes, I get that. It is just the scale, sometimes, which causes me to ponder this. I guess. Whatever.

I can’t make my art, or I gave up on doing so, in the face of the challenges I faced. These people, these people whose work fills AMFA, likely never even felt that challenge, they just knew they wanted to make art, and they did so. They likely would have regarded me and said, “Huh? What of it, get off yer arse and express yourself!” The thing is that I do, of course. I express myself, now, in words rather than stage paintings. I use the tools of metaphor and simile instead of lekos and fresnels. I use a word processor instead of a light palette. I still make art, I guess, but I paint my pictures in words rather than those fields of light and shadow and color and smoke.

Pawn just read this over at the Gray Lady:

Kristen Stewart, the 19-year-old co-star of the “Twilight” blockbusters, plays a New Orleans stripper in “Welcome to the Rileys,” which also stars James Gandolfini as a damaged businessman. Mr. Cooper noted that Ms. Stewart also has a noncompetition entry: in “The Runaways,” directed by Floria Sigismondi, Ms. Stewart plays a young Joan Jett.
Sundance, With a New Leader, Hones Its Indy Edge – NYTimes.com

Pawn has a warm place in his heart for Ms Jett.  Not only for her great contributions to Rock and Roll music, but for her stand up performance back in Iowa during the 2004 Presidential campaign.  As I journaled then…

Jeneane Garofalo is in town, as is Joan Jett. They are doing a show, kind of an Iowa Perfect Storm USO show to thank and bolster the Dean faithful. Seems that just one floor up is a meeting of the Young Republican’s Caucus Organizing Committee. You have to ask yourself if the facility scheduler had thought this through or not. Anyway, once the YRs find out that the Dean people are downstairs they take a vote of the organizing committee and have a unanimous vote of seven yeas (I’m not making this up, the head of the organizing committee boasted about it on TV) to go down to the Dean rally and do what they can to disrupt it!

Jeneane Garofalo addresses the crowd (photo courtesy RedPeg.com)

This is unreal, these guys have taken compassionate conservatism to a whole new level! They head down to the rally, armed with Bush/Cheney campaign signs (so there is no doubt who to blame…) and start trying to inspire a melee. The Dean folks simply block the B/C signs with their own, not a tough task given the numbers involved. There is a large contingent of Planned Parenthood folks and “Stand Up for Choice” there as well, which further skews the balance of power.

No one is taking the bait, however, no one is rising to fight, nor do anything other than try to block the B/C signs. Then, Joan Jett starts to play the National Anthem. This is apparently too much patriotism for the YRs and much like the effect of Slim Whitman music on the Martians in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks, their heads simply start to explode.

Well, okay, not exactly, but it’s almost the same thing. One of the more compassionate conservatives decides to give Ms Jett a really good shove, while she is playing. Our portly protector of family values seemed to have misjudged his target, however, as Joan (about one third this guys size, and more than twice his age) shrugs off his shove and then comes back swinging. She manages to land a few good ones before Dean people separate the two.

Joan Jett immediately after the altercation (photo courtesy RedPeg.com)

This is all captured by several TV cameras, including that of Joe Jensen, the guy who trained us on Friday. This is a lead story on all of the local news. You just can’t make this stuff up!

Okay then, the gloves are off in the Republican camp at least.

I haven’t rushed out to see the Twilight films, but I can’t wait to see Miss Stewart in The Runaways.

Pawn recently withdrew from the social networking site Facebook following a year and a half involvement.  Friends, and “friends” will doubtless ask why (and indeed, some already have).  The answer is both simple and complex.

The simple answer is that I don’t like what the use of the site did to how I interact with people.  While “social” networking sites bring a lot of promise, they also present many pitfalls.  And these benefits and drawbacks have as much to do with you, the user, as with their own inherent dynamics.  This blog, and the mailing list which preceded it, going back five years now, is itself a sort of social network.  For while it is primarily a forum for me to express my thoughts, etc., it also permits a back and forth, a dialogue, and has even included direct, primary posts by others.  In addition to my personal rants or other writings, I have often featured links to articles and stories elsewhere which thought worthy of attention, posted photographs, music clips, etc.  In other words a lot of what one can do at Facebook, but without the large community surrounding it.

That community, however, can be a both a blessing and a curse.  Facebook, and sites like it (i.e. LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.) provide extensive tools to build community in ways we have never seen before.  This is a godsend for organizers from local grass roots up to presidential campaigns, but works equally well for fear mongers as prophets, for hate groups as for charities.  My very first girlfriend tracked me down via LinkedIn after nearly thirty years, to share memories and catch up on two lives now very separate.  So, too, former lovers have tracked me down whom I would rather not have so done.

Therein lies one of the problems with a media which is at once both public and private.  Anyone who has spent any time at all on social networking sites has seen a friend or friends mistakenly post in a public way what was intended to be a private message.  I actually made it somewhat of a personal mission to help educate people about how to use Facebook with security and privacy in mind.  Just as one can rekindle old connections, so one must cope with the ramifications of doing so, in both the public and private realms.  An old schoolmate wants to be your friend, and has become friends with many people with whom you actually have kept up with since those old days.  If you don’t become friends are you being rude?  What will your other former classmates think of your standoffishness?  It’s the old peer pressure writ large and on the Internet.

Then there is the odd dynamic of “meeting” new people, a friend of a friend or just someone with common cause, say another member of a local political group.  They share your view, or a common link, and in the anonymous and yet connected world of social networking it is perfectly natural to “friend” each other.  In a real world setting there is much more context for such a situation.  A mutual friend can offer either a direct introduction or a muted aside, encouraging or discouraging such a friendship, or in the context of a local political meeting or other event, one may infer more about the other from the goings on.

Not so in the cyber world.  I was friended by a couple of people following a comment I made on the fan page for a long-defunct local punk band.  in 1981 I had done several shows with this band, and had gotten to know some of them quite well.  Following my comment, a few recollections from that era, I received friend requests from these two, one male one female, who were fans of the band and the nightclub where I had managed back then.  Turns out they both used to come there as underage gate crashers whose youth was well hidden by the combination of fake IDs and the heavy makeup and hair dye prevalent in that crowd.  I kept them as “friends” more because they posted interesting links to artworks, but never really interacted with them.

Interaction on social networking sites is another area of potential problems.  The forum provided on such sites can often serve to magnify the tendencies already present when in a group.  Pawn, believe it or not, was a class clown in his youth.  One standout characteristic of a class clown is the tendency to speak first and consider later.  This is bad enough in real life, where the words one utters are heard by a room full of people.  Put it on the Internet, and the potential for regret or embarrassment multiplies.  This is further compounded where one cannot remove, un-say or delete ones utterances.  Just such a situation developed for me in the recent past.

In making what was intended to be a witty, sarcastic comment to an acquaintance’s post, instead I managed to offend them.  My bungled wit came across, even to my own eyes, as mean and rude — and ill considered.  There being no way to retract the comment, no way to unring that bell, it instead hung in the air.  There are examples galore of ill considered public utterances abounding on the Internet, from sites like Overheard in New York to Texts From Last Night, and new terms in the public lexicon, such as Drunk Dialing and TMI.  In the cyber world, when you screw up, it is never just a room full of people who know, or may know.

So, what happened in this situation?  The offended party “unfriended” me, a term which has no real world equivalent.  Perhaps that’s because in the real world when we no longer wish to associate with someone we simply stop doing so.  Now, true enough, anyone who has been stalked can tell you that it is not necessarily so simple (this I know), but by and large if we no longer wish to know what so-and-so is up to, we stop asking, calling, visiting, etc. and our spheres of experience will disengage.  Not so on-line, where we must actively sever the link.  What can be accomplished passively in-life requires active intervention in on-line.

In the world of Facebook, such an action is silent.  It is not like calling someone up and sayng “We’re not friends anymore!” but rather you click a button and that person silently and without their direct knowledge is no longer your friend.  They may never know that this has happened, until they try to reach out to you and find you no longer in their list.  Or they go to a, formerly, mutual friend’s page and see you appear not in the list of mutual friends, but in the list of all friends.  This quiet rebuff is all that is needed to lower the boom of disapproval.

That is how I found that I had been unfriended, and it brought home to me just how absurdly this new media (for that is what it is, ultimately, is media) has wound itself into our lives in ways that are as destructive as they are constructive.  I was temporarily crushed to see that I had lost a friend, yes, but then reflected on the fact that I have only ever met this person a few times, have no history with them, and only really knew them on-line.  The lingering feeling, however, is the shame I felt at my embarrassing comment.  Much like that I still feel for a bad joke told too loudly at a public event over twenty years ago.

But more, I had allowed my interactions with this new media become so central to how I interacted with people I truly do know, love and relate to in-life and not just on-line.  I recognize my peevishness when someone wouldn’t react on-line to things I had posted, or when they failed to keep up their on-line counterpoint to their in-life reality.  And I realized that it was just too easy to pretend that since I was present in my friends lives on-line that I was present in-life, when, in fact, I was absent there.

Thanksgiving is in two days time, and soon after I will begin to make and send my holiday greeting cards.  This, too, is an act of make-believe social interaction, this annual ritual of pretending that we are still connected to all of our aunts and uncles, old schoolmates and neighbors.  I long ago switched to printing out address labels rather than hand addressing, but I still take the time to scrawl a line or two into each card, lending an air of authenticity to this otherwise artificial intercourse.  I will make an effort, this year, to be more present in that process, to be more personal in those wishes, to be more thoughtful as I lick those stamps.

Will I ever return to Facebook?  For now I cannot say.  Every year I make my own Christmas cards, using images I compose or photograph or cull from family archives.  I post those on Facebook, as well.  I am not sure I’ll update it this year.  We’ll see.

Lunch at the Chinese buffet around the corner, seated next to two men from India and one from Australia.  They are all co-workers, just getting to know each other.  One of the Indian men has a much thinker accent and the other one seems to be trying to help him with cultural acclimation.

One thing they have in common, aside from all being Unix geeks to one degree or another, is cricket.  The bulk of their table chatter was about the superiority of one or another team or captain or manager.

At the end of the meal the waitress brings fortune cookies.  The more seasoned Indian gentleman helpfully clues the other into the old trick, “When you read your fortune cookie you have to add ‘in bed’ to the end of whatever it says.”

The Aussie pipes up,  “The Austrailian National Team will best India in their next test match…in bed!”

After a round of chuckles the younger Indian reads his, “You can make that special someone happy with a gift of flowers…in bed.”

They leave, and I read my own fortune, “Your lucky number for this week is the number five…in bed.”

• ‘Horrorcore’ singer suspected in 4 killings

“…The crime scene was so horrifying police would not even describe it, saying only that the victims died of blunt force trauma. After the killings, tow truck driver Elton Napier came across McCroskey: “That was the stinkiest rascal I’ve ever smelled.”

• ROAD WARRIORS

What’s cooking?
How much effort — and money — do airlines really put toward feeding you in flight?

Here’s further evidence that the choice of projectile really does matter.*

• Early release possible for Iraqi shoe-thrower
• Execution date proposed for D.C.-area sniper

* The choice of target probably plays into this as well

“Hope endures for woman missing 3 months”
“KHOU: Female cop abducted by cop, cops say”

And by the way, which three months is that first woman missing? There are some months in my past which I wouldn’t mind if they went missing…