Word is

Words can be toys. Children’s books bank on the likes of those who thrive on words like mugwump and quoz.

‘The idea that language is beautiful and strange and that you can play with it is very appealing for children, and also very important.
Catherine Bohne

Words can be tools. Educators serve the tool-like qualities of words. They give us lawyer, doctor, scientist enthusiasts of orderly abstraction. Or artist grunts who lay down guns and pick up pens of battle.

‘When Oliver Stone returned from Vietnam, he enrolled at New York University, studying on the GI Bill. He's been wrestling with those experiences for years, expressing his feelings through a trilogy of motion pictures about Vietnam.’
Bill Moyers Journal

Celebrities crouch behind impotent words, betraying and braying impossible breaches of honor and love.

'I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart.’
Tiger Woods

Words can be travesty.

Sometimes words are like music is to a child with Asbergers.

"The music somehow evoked a world in which I felt at home, as opposed to the real world, which I did not feel at home in."
Tim Page, Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic

Words can be salve. Friends in foreign times. Anchors in storm. We keep words around on shelves and blogs and owners manuals just in case the world dissolves and leaves us frail and speechless as the wind.

Word is not all, it is some. It isn’t enough; it’s often rough approximation. Sometimes poets get it right by accidentally bothering to try.

Photo credit Victorgrigas

Imagination dust up

‘You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.' 
Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw

A painter friend asks, ‘why paint?’  I answer, ‘because you must - and it brings you comfort.’ Now, Freud and I slipped ‘why pain?’ into the equation first time around. Why indeed.

Peter the Great, my poet friend of large heart, sent me an article about Springsteen, Brubeck and company - the peak parade - receiving honors at the White House. At a reception, Clintons H. and B. toasted their greatness. Bill included a story about hanging a signed song chart for Blue Rondo a la Turk Brubeck had sent him on his music room wall. Peter liked this especially because he’d basked in a Brubeck concert as a younger man. I like it too; imagine the rich and famous pinning the rich and famous’ masterpiece to the wall. Intoxicating stuff.

I asked Colleen what her dream job would be. She combines dance and yoga in her drug-prevention work with at-risk kids. ‘Pretty much what I’m doing right now,’ she said. ‘I love dancing with kids. You never know what they’ll come up with.’

At the aforementioned East Room reception, Springsteen said this about his honor:

‘It's an acknowledgment that you've kind of threaded your way into the culture in a certain way. It's satisfying."

And then there are the people in the middle, like my painter and poet and dancer friends and me, who thread our way into the culture less publicly.

Colleen and I’ve been touring together in Lorain, Ohio, doing residencies with first graders who are learning to read.  I’ve heard John McCutcheon credit his work in schools with preparing him for the concert stage (he figured seventh graders were as good as a bar’s best patrons for honing his act).  Since I’ve put that stage on hold for now, diving into schools full tilt, I’ve discovered a wild truth quite the opposite of McCutcheon’s.  The craft I honed in front of adult audiences prepared me for this, the real story.

You never know what kids will do, but in one way, they don’t surprise you.  They do themselves, really well.  This is a life enhancing drug like no other, with side effects you may be unprepared for.
Imagination dust, seeping into every pore.

Photo credit Hans Lachmann

A few grains

A younger man approved my then long hair, telling me he wished women wouldn’t cut their hair the minute they reached a certain age. 

Approving his approval, I kept it long awhile, perishing the thought of looking middle-aged.  I decided to cut and run from the vanities one fine August day among the gnarled stumps of an abandoned cherry orchard.  Thrusting shears into the hands of nymphs who cut their own and each others’ hair at the merest provocation, I was reborn.

Since then I’ve shorn my coif ever shorter, sometimes feeling more artsy than elderly, other times not so much. The crone goddess stalked me still, until a couple of nights ago when my dear old mother visited me in her June Cleaver garb, a dream I told my sister...

'I dreamed I was sitting at the dining room table with you and Dad and Mariah and Mom. We were smiling and talking, Mom had flesh on her bones and her hair was brown. Mariah was young, in blond pigtails. I went over to Mom's end of the table, gave her a big hug, told her I missed her and we all missed her and loved her and I'd thought she'd died, but here she was with us. She just kept smiling her beautiful smile. She was wearing a beige cardigan and plaid Scottish skirt, maybe pearls. Hugging her sideways as I looked across the table at you guys, I felt Mom smooching my cheek continuously, like a happy child. I said to you sisters, 'this isn't real is it?' and Mariah, grinning back, said, 'nothing's real, Susie!' We all seemed to think that made sense. I woke up, thinking of love.'

 If nothing is real, then everything might just as well be real.  My sister’s take on the dream gives an artist pause.  She said:

'I'm listening to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He talks about reality - how we can't really take it in - we take a few grains of sand of it and that's our reality. There's so much - so much.'

I guess that’s what art does.  Excavate, death defy, populate the world with seers.  There are muses, in pearls, waiting to smooch us unabashed into the light.

Painting by Paul Gauguin, La Baignade

Swiss minarets notwithstanding

Here’s the church.  Here’s the steeple.  Open the doors and see all the people.  Child’s play back in the day, with not a minaret to be seen.

Nearly 58 percent of Swiss voters put the nix on minaret building and the kibosh on religious tolerance.  Of course, it’s never that simple.

My heritage is Swiss.  I grew up high on its famed neutrality, sobered in time by the knowledge of Swiss banks looting Holocaust victims.

The Switzerland I’ve loved is pure.  I’ve hiked its alps, wandered its valleys and worked its farmland.  I’ve hugged its wondrous terrain by cable car, hiking boot and utterly punctual train.  Tilted a bowl of warm milk to my lips in a mountain cabin rocked by June blizzards.  Sung with Tante Anna.  Laughed with Hans.  Had a crush on Peter. Skied with Otti and Ernst.  Church bells and cow bells everywhere.  Not a minaret to be seen.

Wouldn’t it be comforting to knit the inconsistencies into an emblematic wool scarf just now.  Self-preservation so deeply moves us all, preceding love, consuming trust. Religion holds scant sway and no amount of logic makes us holy.

What shall become of a world were mercies languish at the feet of terror, our only lonesome vote: our art?

Photo credit Roland Zumbüh, Sankt Martin im Calfeisental

Command the poises

History is art, because story is art. Able writers interest us in world events by framing them in story.  And by the way, you and I are world events. 

The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War tells the story of Warren G. Harding’s 15 year affair with Caroline F. Phillips.  Of their fiery correspondence, many of his letters remain. The book is a fascinating juxtaposition of personal revelations and global political events. In the heightened patriotism of World War I, Phillips’ German sympathies threatened her personal safety and Harding's political solvency. When she was suspected by the nascent FBI of spying for the enemy, Senator and future President Harding sent her this cautionary plea:

‘You have the intellect, the soul and personality, please command the poises befitting your superiority.’
Warren G. Harding

Sometimes lives of the past can dwarf our ordinary lives, but it’s worth remembering that we know these people through story. Boringness has been edited out. Even primary sources, letters in Harding’s own hand, were sculpted by the author. Ordinary and extraordinary lives, framed and pondered, reverberate through story craft.

This week, Young Audiences of Northeast Ohio asked me to represent myself and 60 artist colleagues for a television interview. Grappling with how best to explain my storytelling work in schools, I wanted to ‘command the poises’ - an artist mantra so aptly penned by Harding. A kind friend sent me these words just before the interview:

‘You are smart, sharp and a role model. You'll be terrific.’

Thus bolstered, I stepped before the cameras. I had a hunch my audience would glaze its eyes at concepts like ‘arts/curriculum integration,’ so I looked my interviewer in the eye and reenacted an Ohio & Erie Canal digger of Harding’s era. I became humble Italian-American Tony, one of my fourth graders’ favorite immigrant entrepreneurs, plying his enthusiasms with twinkling grace. What better way for students to frame, absorb and remember the past?

When story happens, large or small, nerves give way to art, preparation matures into performance, boringness vanishes and the rest, they say, is history.

Photo of Warren G. Harding and Carrie F. Phillips

Be the air

Critics have dismissed Paul Gauguin as an artist who could not draw well, and knew it, who therefore turned to a more primitive style of expression. Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin was the never published companion catalogue to Gauguin’s French exhibition of 60 paintings and block prints completed in Tahiti. The public of Gauguin’s day judged his work harshly, the same work that later left Pablo Picasso in Gauguin’s thrall and fetches millions in today’s market.

These strains of a master’s tortured past were the stuff of two mini-lectures last night in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ingalls Library. As I listened, I remembered Stephen Colbert pointedly asking Tom Campbell of the Metropolitan Museum of Art what makes art “art.” Who decides what’s worthy? Campbell explained that trained experts determine the authenticity and significance of older works, but he had no words for what makes art good, or bad.

Last night, surrounded by a tacto-visual repast the librarians had laid out for us - clippings, postcards, prints and the like - we heard muffled cheers erupting from adjoining offices. Who knew, the CMA staff watches Wednesday night football?

Our hosts explained later that the museum had just learned of a much hoped for acquisition for its collection. “What is it?” we asked. “Can’t tell you,” they answered, beamingly mysterious. We’d have to wait, like everyone else, for the morning paper.

My mother would have loved this story. Then again, she most likely listened in, her beneficent ghost haunting us calmly in that still space. Jane Sylvia Hewes Weber was painter, librarian and mother. She plied shelves at home with art books and dragged her kids and grandkids to museums, including this very Cleveland museum. Thanks to the librarians and Gauguin’s fragrant works, I now know where to find my mother when I miss her too much to ponder. There, on the walls, in the spaces of art she found worthy even as she found her own efforts wanting. Undaunted as the wild Gauguin, she painted on canvas and upon her progeny’s lives with a certain brave innocence. She let us be seers and seekers; she bade us be air.

Her ghost, with a nod to Monsieur Gauguin, inspired these lyrics once:

Watercolor on my shoulder. Watercolor in my hair.
Watercolor on the border, water in the air.
Promise me to be the water. Promise me to be the air.
Susan Weber, Air

Public Domain painting, Paul Gauguin, In the Waves 1898

Dylan agape

Why do boys and girls in schools I visit want to help me pack up when I’m finished telling lavish tales? You know, stories that take us places. There’s a certain reverence to the kids’ soft gestures as they stow my props and paraphernalia. Their desire to lend their service to the magic touches me.

The story goes that when young Bob Dylan asked his Newport audience, ‘does anyone have an E harmonica?’ a cacophony of well-aimed mouth harps flung from pockets hit the stage around him. Late last week, the elder Bard of Hibbing brought this home.

I witnessed my first Bob Dylan concert at Canton’s Memorial Civic Center Thursday night. Never underestimate the power of witness.  In the course of 14 songs and three encores, I was in a state of squeaky clean, ‘I thought this didn’t happen ‘til the life hereafter’ grace.

Tell me how this happened to a lyrics lover who didn’t understand a single word of the show. My brain was not particularly involved in the night’s proceedings, except for a punch drunk awareness that what I never thought possible was happening then. In a wooden stadium seat on a wet November night in downtown Canton, I was unconditionally sated by a work of art.

If any member of the band had called out in need of anything I had to give, my feet would have levitated me to within throwing range. No question. So this is the sublime power of art. Ever since my visit to the great beyond made manifest by six elegant maestros, I’ve heard a sleek internal beauty ask the best I have to offer.

The children understand agape.

Public domain photo, Bob Dylan 1963

Ripeness is all

I once stepped out of my comfort zone into an acting class taught by Scott Plate. Asking his students to journal about their experiences, he promised to read every word. Now, Scott may not have been as overjoyed as Susan who, to her surprise, began to richly dream, and freely add the findings to her journal.

The dreams were more vivid and complex than usual, my sense and sensitivity at full tilt. A gift, I thought, that just when assigned the task of introspection, dreams should surface, ripe with illustration.

Bill Moyers recently aired an interview from 2004. He asked Maurice Sendak, author illustrator of ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ how he calmed his own demons.

Art has always been my salvation. And my gods are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart. I believe in them with all my heart. And when Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can't explain. I don't need to. I know that if there's a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart. Or if I walk in the woods and I see an animal, the purpose of my life was to see that animal. I can recollect it, I can notice it. I'm here to take note of. And that is beyond my ego, beyond anything that belongs to me.
Maurice Sendak, Bill Moyers Journal

Sendak took comfort in art as he ventured into public television.

Like coming here today, I was anxious about this. Would I be all right? And I have a little tiny Emily Dickinson that I carry in my pocket everywhere. And you just read three poems of Emily. She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a sexy, passionate, little woman. I feel better.

So what did the 75 year old writer want to be when he grew up?

My big concern is me and what do I do now until the time of my death. That is valid. That is useful. That is beautiful. That is creative. And also, I want to be free again. I want to be free like when I was a kid, working with my brother and making toy airplanes and a whole model of the World's Fair in 1939 out of wax. Where we just had fun... I want to see me to the end working, living for myself. Ripeness is all.

Sendak’s invocation of ripeness reminds me of the vivid dreams that lined up with my acting class back when. And my vivid dreams now.

By day, I’ve left my comfort zone to make a video about a sensuous song, It Falls Away. At night, dreams sway luscious in the branches, or squish beneath my midnight ramblings.  I’m not so sure about the comings and goings of dreams.   

I used to think imagination preceded art. If dreams run rampant, haunting the day with their memories, that’s inspiration, right? If feelings are ripe, it’s time to create something. Yes?

Except that maybe it’s the other way around. Art comes first. Dreams, and vivid intrigue, follow. As Sendak mused, ‘when Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can't explain.’

This berry bears our artist mission: get our souls away from the languidly familiar, out onto the fertile plain where dreams chase us down to captivate our longing. Each act of art, whether absorbing or making it, is birth and death and depth perception in between.  It's where the wild things are. It’s where the master placed his benediction:

Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.
William Shakespeare, King Lear

Artist candor

‘We have an anti-semitic president.’

Not the kind of thing my sister and I expect to hear the cardiologist say as he listens to our dad’s heart.

My sister’s Israeli, occasioning the doc’s statements of certitude on Arab religion (violent), universities (substandard) and government (violent and substandard).  Oddly, my Jewish sister is left to defend Islamic beliefs subverted by unscrupulous leaders.  The Gentile physician ignores her completely.  The middle east is defibrillating; Koranic teaching is the culprit.  Case closed.

Somehow I’d expect a more nuanced approach to political science from an educated man.  Which only shows my unsubstantiated bias toward the belief set of academia.  As though more intellectual tools and exposure equals broadmindedness and curiosity.  Surely medical science refines itself by embracing more, not less, rational evidence.

A friend of mine circulates ernest emails pitting wise conservatives against pompous liberals in couplets of rectitude:

If a conservative sees a foreign threat, he thinks about how to defeat his enemy.
A liberal wonders how to surrender gracefully and still look good.

I shake my head as I hit delete, thinking that as long as there are voters who practice black and white thinking, we’ll have politicians who pander to them.  This, the unctuous underbelly of democracy, encourages gladhanders to exploit the us-them battleground.

It sometimes feels like hopelessness incarnate.

Enter, artist.  Ply your nuance.  Encourage doubt.  Eschew the easy answers and web-ready glib gloss besmirching your and my and everybody's lips.  As one artist philosopher of the day warns,

The end of the world came and went while you were on Facebook.
Dan Piraro, Bizarro

While you were on Limbaugh, Colbert, CNN, Fox, Hannity and Dowd, clouds of intelligent uncertainty passed you by.  Art is where we explore certitude with a double edged sward.  Slice question marks into the self-righteousness belly of the beast.  Generate beauty, lots of beauty, to remind us all of our capacity for love.

Hear the remonstrations of the muse:  ‘Paint me.  Make me real.’

Photo John T. Bledsoe, Library of Congress

Fellowship of the rope

‘In each of them, we find the amalgam of the child carrying old wounds and the adult who has learned to cope with a world oblivious to his or her individual dream.’
Jennifer Weil, Old Town Playhouse

These are words flung out to a waiting audience by the director of Gene Abravaya’s new play, The Book of Matthew Liebowitz.  Words to secure our ascent up a fictional mountain of contiguous words, astutely drawn characters and a well conditioned ensemble.

And why do we, audience or artist, entertain metaphors of mountaineering, with our own lives already rife with challenge?  Why explore, discern, respond to created worlds?  Charlie Houston, veteran climber, put it this way:

You're surrounded by beauty. No matter whether it's a storm, or a sunny day, or clouds, or not, the mountains are simply beautiful. I've never been a great climber. I'm just a competent climber and I know my limits. But I love getting out and doing it.
Charlie Houston, Bill Moyers Journal

Just ‘getting out and doing it’ for the beauty is impetus behind many a climb, fuel for exhaustive preparation and try.

But there’s more than solo gratification on the line.  Actors, musicians, writers and their audiences - even in the heady free fall of oxygen-lite extroversion - pull themselves together and upwards by means of what Houston, no stranger to death defiance, called a ‘fellowship of the rope.’

You knew that your life was in the hands of somebody else, and his was in your hands. And it made you climb perhaps more carefully. You didn't push the envelope quite so hard. But it also gave you a feeling of... there was an emotional or a psychological bond between us... at least as important as the physical bond. And that's why climbing with rope is... To some extent, it's more dangerous, because if one man pulls, slips and pulls you off, you're both gone. But on the other hand, as happened in our case, the fact that we were roped together saved all our lives.
Charlie Houston, Bill Moyers Journal

I’ve experienced this invisible tensile strength with musical companions, on stage, in studio, at rehearsal; a bond like no other.  Why climb creativity's sheer slopes?  Summoned by beauty, lured by dream, secured by interdependence, we do it in search of home.

I’m reminded of lyrics I wrote once, not yet calling love the rope, but knowing it full well.

Set out to climb impossible mountain.
Could not be done.  I did not care.
Set out to climb impossible mountain. 
I thought I’d find my dreams up there.

Top of the world, you are alluring. 
I can’t deny your mystic slope.
I hear you scream your warning. 
Echo of madness, echo of hope.

Set out to climb impossible mountain. 
I changed my mind, I turned in my tracks.
Set out to climb impossible mountain. 
Love took me home and home took me back.

Susan Weber, Everest

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Photo Felicity and Phillip, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

The people's largesse

A little girl, maybe seven, ploughs into me on her way out of the girl’s locker room.  ‘Daddy!’ she calls into the empty foyer of our local pool.  ‘My dad’s got my bag,’ she tells me.

‘Maybe he’s in the boy’s locker room,’ I offer.  ‘We can call him from the doorway.’  We both try.

‘Daddy!’

‘Anybody in there have a little girl?’  No answer.

So we head back to our locker room with me listening to the girl’s steady stream.  ‘I already have my suit on but I need my bag to put my clothes in,' she points out.

By the time we’ve got on goggles and caps and I’m saying her dad’s probably waiting for her on the pool deck, I notice the girl is studiously ignoring me.  She’s gotten a grip on worry and gotten in touch with something her parents taught her.  Rules.

Ah yes, ‘don’t speak to strangers’ and ‘don’t speak to kids who aren’t supposed to speak to strangers.’  In our rush to fix a problem, we’d both forgotten rules and roles and business as usual.  Strange woman.  Dutiful child.  Zero trust; all hallowed rules.

There are times when our great need, or loss, or even greater love temporarily interrupts the who’s who of trustworthy others.  After 9/11, it’s often noted, a national, even global suspension of distrust between strangers took effect.  Safe distance gave in to compassion and kindness.  It reminds me of cherished reunions with my family, whose Weltanschauung could not be further from my own.  I’m not the only one who loves her kin far more than she misjudges them.

I admire the girl swimmer’s resolve to ignore the stranger lady, as her parents told her to.  I told my little boys the same back when, to keep them safe.

But for grown ups, I’d welcome a person of stature to challenge us all - we the rule followers who curl up in our cozy sense of who belongs and who is never to be trusted.  Lead us not into self-preservation and other-ignoring but toward a role model our seven year olds may one day embrace.  A future where pundits and pols and the overlords who own them are shamed by the peoples’ relentless courage to include.

When such a leader emerges, I pray the stones we throw will miss their mark.  Long enough for us to awaken and think, as adults, for ourselves.

And with each other.

Hold Your Hand | Revolution Pie & Friends

Elsewhere I’ve tracked the rational act of making this video.  Here you’ll find the visceral exposé. 

I’ve been Paul Fresty’s friend since our paths crossed in a songwriter circle many moons back.  Suddenly last summer, my imperious muse bade me go see Paul’s Beatles cover band (Revolution Pie) perform for a crowd of groovers and shakers.  Beatlemania was palpable as the stars, settling over the lovers of magic like a sweet dream.  My hand knew not whither to aim the lens in the midst of this wide angle lovefest.

What you see here, to the sound of one fine band and its devotees, is how one of those Beatles tunes moved me.  To film it.  To seek out images worthy of its joy.  To combine, revise, revisit, refine - and finally send it all up to the webiverse for you and your fond friends. 

Anyone who’s edited video knows you floss your ears many times with the audio tracks...

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Michelle Obama's alleged red blotches

Dear Kim,

I've been so involved in citizen politics lately that I've barely read 'Style & Taste.' Your piece about Michelle Obama caught my eye because I like your writing and sense of fair play.

I admire Michelle Obama's confidence, graciousness and devotion to the good of the country. It's nice that she cares about her appearance and enjoys clothes shopping. But for me, that's a footnote.

If she wants to hire a stylist, that's fine. Maybe the bloggers will critique the stylist from then on -- or Michelle Obama for hiring the wrong one! My point is, fashion is an art form we happen to wear, so art critics naturally pay attention to prominent people. But in a society where class is equated with wealth and the wealthy often lack class (ie. the gilded parachute), perhaps we could let Michelle be Michelle, enjoy her individuality and focus on the good work she wants to do.

Thanks for writing,
Susan


photo Craig ONeal (cc-by-sa-2.0)

To my family, the morning after

Indian summer, from a bare back porch.

This morning, I did two things. Clean the house. Ride my bike.

While I cleaned, I thought of the family I came from and grew into. Our diverse ideas. The choices we make. I considered how the events of the past 24 hours would be met by each of us.

I was moved by John McCain's concession speech, especially his call to come together for the sake of the country.

I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences and help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited... I wish Godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president.
-- John McCain 11.4.08

Like a good family. Like my family, where love is stronger than differences. But I wonder if Senator McCain was calling for more than live-and-let-live. He seems to consider the problems of our time too big for only half a population to manage.

Then I rode my bike to Forest Hills Park, the wild old Rockefeller estate on a bluff overlooking Cleveland. I never know whose path I'll cross over there. Strangers by foot, by bike, with and without dogs, with and without companions, accents, ipods, canes. Just about always with smile. A goodly number of geese surround a small lake I can picture the Rockefeller family picnicking by on a day like this. Now it's here for the common folk, clearing our minds the day after the first black family is invited to live in the great white house.

I want to do my part to mend what's broken in the world. I don't know what this will mean, but I thank John and Barack for taking the high road last night. I think this is the one we'll need to take now. I thank them for the leadership. And you, for inspiration.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world's great religions demand: that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.
-- Barack Obama 3.18.08

photo acaben (cc-by-sa-2.0)

Web 3.0 mandate: time = life

Time is money. So the saying goes. But this one's aging fast.

A body's alloted time is finite and therefore rather precious. Until we come up with anti-death serum, this part won’t change. But when it comes to equating time with money, much has changed already.

Old think

Remember Titanic? That film took a lot of time to make. People time, coordinated by the director, James Cameron. We used to equate the hours of human life consumed in the making of an epic film with great value. We forked over money (earned with hours of our lives) to see Titanic, told our friends to spend their time-money on it and, in some cases, repeated the cycle until we decided to spend our riches elsewhere. A simple formula, really: human life (in hours) it takes to make Titanic translates into human life (hours devoted to getting the paycheck) consumers are willing to give up to have it.

New think

Enter Web 2.0 with media-rich social networking. It’s all about time. Post a video of your baby laughing on YouTube and the time you put into it (relatively speaking, zilch) can yield high viewing time by YouTube fans. Except for the cost of web access, money is irrelevant here. Lots of time is spent in a lopsided spiral. You spend a pittance of your finite life on your baby’s video debut. Millions of baby lovers and laugh addicts spend their finite life hours to see and spread it.

Looks like time doesn’t always equal money anymore. Now small time investment can translate into big time return and every PR guru is out to figure what meme will stick and how to nurture the knack of predicting the next viral spiral.

Artists are not immune from old-think or new-think. We of little money can be smugly proud of using precious ‘time’ making unique masterpieces while our materialistic friends spend their ‘time’ getting all that money which must be spent on useless toys that weigh down the tree-lawns on garbage day. But (secretly) we might like to find an easy way to take the Zeitgeist by storm whereby zillions of appreciative time-owners line up to purchase our humble creation with time-extravagant ready cash, and tell their friends to send us even more money.

Ah, how very hypocritical of us. We claim time is more precious than money, but don’t care to share this gift of time. Consumer money would save us time. We could spend less time scrounging around, more time creating masterpieces. In the end, artists can be just as fond of the idea of time=money as anyone else and welcome the internet’s promise to get us both.

Newer think

Web 3.0 is coming and, politics willing, hope is on the move. We’ll live to see the hive of social mediacs move too. One thing we’ve established is that as long as we’re peering at a bunch of pixels, we’re not grazing the isles of big box emporiums that fill our time and space with junk. It doesn’t appear too likely we'll up and abstain from the wonders of the web, addicted as we are to its virtues. But all is not well. The internet is a great place to put your nonrenewable time stamp unless you happen to derive pleasure from all your senses, including a sense of responsibility for a life well lived. Observers decry the multiple screen sucking ploys that steal our precious time.

The future I see is this. Artist-geeksters reinvent what’s possible online, underscore the finitude of hours, emphasize the sensual breadth of experience and keep in mind the worth of time. In short, we celebrate time as the new wealth. CEOs cease to duke it out over the biggest wad of cash; their reputation will rise and fall on how much they enhance stakeholder time. We’ll see this attitude reflected on the ticker tape, replacing the blingfest. Hey, once the roof’s sound, the body’s whole, and the kids are OK, what’s the point of the gilded life?

Time is the new currency. Though some are slow to notice, money’s lost its luster.


public domain painting Willy Stöwer

Wallstreet smirk

When regulators took over mortgage finance Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac this month, they eliminated $12.59 million in exit payments for executives Daniel H. Mudd of Fannie Mae and Richard F. Syron of Freddie Mac. The executives will now get a combined $9.43 million upon their exit.

The Washington Post with its giant DC circulation may be able to slide mention of this monetary peccadillo into the beltway news without fanfare, but how does it play in Peoria? Tales of yet another incredulous stunt by the mega moneyed do not the happy rustbelter make.

But if we could take a moment and reflect upon the stress of Freddie and Fannie ex-execs who, between them, have nearly thirteen million dollars less to retire upon than they had planned upon, perhaps we'll feel less put upon. For all we know, as we sputter on about small oil sticker shock, Mr. Fannie may be auctioning his condo in Tahiti as Sir Freddie maxes out his credit cards to fuel the yacht.


public domain painting Paul Gauguin ~ Deux Tahitiennes, 1899, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Palin pales

The liberal mainstream media set me up. I tuned in to hear a speech by a spitfire self-starter with maverick creds surpassed by none. Instead, I heard talking points dressed in hocky ma shucks.

It was embarrassing, as a woman, to see her squander her talents by pandering to a mean spirited conservatism. She lied about the Democrats' middle class tax cut.

"How are you going to be better off if our opponent adds a massive tax burden to the American economy?"

She lied about the Democrats' renewable energy policies.

"America needs more energy. Our opponent is against producing it."

She insulted citizens who take responsibility for their communities.

"I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a "community organizer," except that you have actual responsibilities."

She ignored her party's distension of the national debt and generous tax cuts to the well-to-do.

I was led to believe 'maverick McCain' would rattle the cages of his grand old party with a young, vibrant, new-thinking dynamo running-mate. Come to find out, with the glibness of Guliani and the vainglory of her new elitist friends, Miss Congeniality only finds it necessary to embrace the protectors of their own narrow perspectives and swollen purses.

Let the vetting begin.


Image uploaded to Commons by Ranveig licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

Wisdom of insecurity

If we must be nationalists and have a sovereign state, we cannot also expect to have world peace.

If we want to get everything at the least possible cost, we cannot expect to get the best possible quality, the balance between the two being mediocrity.

If we make it an ideal to be morally superior, we cannot at the same time avoid self-righteousness.

If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.

-- Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (1951)

Hmmm....

They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
-- Barrack Obama

Pessl re Dylan

'Artist' can’t make even the briefest public appearance without extensive baggage. The next time you’re at a party and someone asks what you do for a living, boldly say artist, then sit back and watch the jolting effect that little word has upon a conversation. Above 14th Street, you’ll be offered money, food, some tips on where to find free lodging. Below 14th Street, the person will smirk, dutifully ask “What kind?” or appear to start swallowing an egg, which is a disguised yawn. You’ll get a hug in the Midwest. In Santa Monica, you’ll get “sweet” and an invitation to go Rollerblading. In certain parts of the country you’ll get tied up and thrown into the back of a pickup truck, and no one will ever hear from you again. But every now and then, the word perfectly explains a certain person.
-- Marisha Pessl

Ms. Pessl's piece about “Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series,” must have cost her a gold mine of focused attention. She shares her savory perceptions like a spread at a lavish party.

Observations about Bob Dylan are hardly rare. He's an intriguing being.

From the beginning, he’s been a mixed medium artist. He’s never been a straight linear person. He’s had a whole lot of miscellany.
-- Christopher Ricks

There's the bard himself in all his glorious miscellany. Then, the legions who honor his every word, sound, brushstroke. Witnessing his effect on these observers and their works about him, you begin to glimpse the power of a single person capable of silencing every naysayer within and without for the sake of his salient virtue.


photo Walt Campbell

Digital aplomb

She understands her future,
loves the gradual warmth
of the new brain marinade.

Befriending time,
she tells the countess
of caffeinated mediocrity
to leave her shoes on the stair
before coming in.

Youth is beautiful these days,
thanks to structure
evolved by kindly geeksters.

When time is ripe,
she ventures into its elegant mist,
exhales and evaporates.

Chiming.