Crossroads Dispatches

We're Not In This to Get Bought

"I’m in this to build something cool, not to get bought."

This quote really stuck in my head because it resonated with my values. I've remembered it since so it was easy to find now four months later when it seems that the right price just hadn't been struck yet: $750 million, naw.

I'm fine with people making a profit and having a roof over their heads, and perhaps Facebook was just a hobby that took on a life of its own. It probably never sprung from a seed desire to better the world or to help people realize their innate potential.

If it's Donald or Martha, I have the expectation that it will be about being bought, and that's upfront and transparent.

Still it's not really a big deal that the Facebook founder changed his mind, but I ran into pre-beta Facebook-like site that purports to really be about changing the world. But something seemed disingenuous when I read between the lines of the investor profiles, biz model, etc. I just wasn't buying "we're not here to be bought" story.

The January 2006 Common Ground Magazine insightfully asks in its article "Markets of Enlightenment": "Can “liberation,” “awakening” and “enlightenment” be bought and sold?" Sufi master Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee, whom I saw speak last November, in the same issue says that, "The spiritual values of the 1970s got hijacked by the self-development movement and became just another form of materialism." Yup. (p.s. Vaughn-Lee has some intriguing things there about places of power, women, and the Internet.)

I can relate to why Chris Locke's next book might just be: "No Love Lost: Narcissism & the New Age". Chris is definitely on the right track but goes too far in lumping all spirituality as bogus narcissism. I reckon if Chris actually met an enlightened person he'd expand his view (they're rarely celebrities - all that glitters is not gold; and I'm not either but I have met). The Bodhisattva ideal and felt sense that everyone is your brother or sister or yikes, even seamless to you, was obscured by the me-feel-good god-wants-what-I-want anything-goes rush of bliss ninnyhood. No wonder Jack drank himself to death.

What would it mean, for example, to seriously consider the implications of the "quantum leap" envisioned by Teilhard de Chardin, which, as Combs tells us, "has its own emergent properties that go far beyond the individual minds"? If we are to sincerely grapple with the implications of "living the integral life," then surely it means daring to open ourselves up to a potential "radiance of being" that is so positive, all-encompassing, and infused with purpose that it may propel us far beyond the relativistic field of our personal "needs and aspirations." - Book Review: The Radiance of Being by Allan Combs, What is Enlightenment? magazine

I understand many many many people may be motivated by their own personal desires. Been there and still dissolving those egoic tendencies in myself.

Last night a fellow artist mentions a friend that might be a suitable partner for our plans: "But he's still about making a killing." I shake my head even though I'm on the cell phone: "Wrong person then."

The right persons? She or he clicks with this:

There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe. - Teilhard de Chardin

Update: On second thought my second blog post at Crossroads Dispatches over two years ago pretty much sums it up:

"In Africa, they say there are two hungers, the lesser hunger and the greater hunger. The lesser hunger is for the things that sustain life, the goods and services, and the money to pay for them, which we all need. The greater hunger is for an answer to the question "why?", for some understanding of what that life is for." - from "Hungry Spirit, Beyond Capitalism: A Quest for Purpose in the Modern World" by Charles Handy

I used to recommend Randy Komisar's book, The Monk and the Riddle, years ago and handed it like candy to freshly minted entrepreneurs with dollar signs in their eyes. Now more than ever that should be the first book a founder reads before they've polished up the Web 2.0 biz plan. (p.s. Randy's a VC these days.)

Spontaneous Surprise Mind

[Ginsberg's teacher in later life after he realized drugs weren't going to recapture his natural mystical experience, his 'Harlem vision',] "Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the founder of Naropa Institute, therefore said:

"Magic is the total appreciation of chance." Magic is the total delight in accident, the total pleasure in surprise mind, the appreciation of the fact the mind changes, that one perception leads to another, and that in itself is a great play of mind. You don't have to go any further in order to create a work of art." - Allen Ginsberg, from lecture "Meditation and Poetics", 1994

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. - William Wordsworth

Bonus Surprises: Ginsberg's Celestial Homework: (Amazing) Specialized Reading List for "Literary History of the Beat Generation," a course taught by Allen Ginsberg at Naropa Institute during the summer of 1977. (btw, Jack Kerouac's favorite writers were Emily Dickenson, William Blake, and Henry David Thoreau.)

Magic of yoga? I love these sections on taking yoga off the mat into your life (or think of it as taking your spontaneous writing off the page into life): Read section "Guided From Within" in this chapter here and the entire chapter "Listening for Guidance: The Practice of Spontaneous Wisdom" from yoga instructor Erich Schiffmann's book, Yoga, The Spirit and Practice of Moving Into Stillness. (Very active online community too.)

20 Amphetamine-Fueled Days

"I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down." — Jack Kerouac (Wikipedia)

"Not all the writing I do is divinely inspired. The difference is tangible. Many writers who have felt guided by unseen spirits testify that the writing poured forth with ease. Much of the time we labor over our words." - bell hooks

Those last posts, graceless labor, and I am haunted read it yourself below & your revelation vs spinning silly tales for money & Richard's comment too:

Just as Thomas Friedman promised us that country’s with MacDonalds franchises will never go to war with one another, so I will guarantee that no blogger will ever provide lasting wisdom to later generations. - Andrew Keen

Yeah they thought that monkeys wrote my stuff too. "That's not writing - that's typewriting." No, you know what I mean. It's the lasting wisdom bit. Jack, I can't believe I missed your exhibit in San Francisco.

It's not my exhibit. So what, anyhow, you didnt hear about it cause you were in Thailand and Sri Lanka with real people forgodsake why do you want to check out rolls of paper?

To keep the rhythm rolling, he fed the long and winding scroll into his typewriter to avoid changing paper and not disrupt the fast-paced, single-spaced story of two friends on the road to becoming iconic rebels by way of cross-country escapades, Mexican whorehouses and Frisco's Skid Row. - San Francisco Chronicle, January 18, 2006

(You know you can put the quotes in later - you're spoiling the flow). Yeh, you're right. Especially about visiting yellow rolls of paper. Hold on, they might not know that you wrote On the Road in 20 days.

20 days. There's 20 days left to go to the 1906 Earthquake centennial.

Enough backstory that earthquake thing reminds me:

...Kerouac's celebrated TV appearance on the Steve Allen show, reading from "On the Road," and there is one naked moment, unlike anything you'll ever hear on TV today, when Kerouac blurts, "I wrote the book because we're all gonna die." Whatever blemishes and indulgences mar Kerouac's writing, that mortality-driven urgency continues to animate it for us. - Scott Rosenberg

This isn't a Cinderella story, Jack implies. He ain't no cheerleader fairy or prince. This isn't a one-night-stand (although you know he looks like my ex-boyfriend). Nope, soul-buds.

Bud, he calls me that sometimes. Of course we're aware that the flowering is ripe. Surround myself with good company on the edge too, that's one of the lessons he learned. Don't rest too long on the edge - that fence is limbo-land too.

Anyway, we don't talk much. Not like when Blake visited Ginsberg in Harlem '48. Not like that at all.

I walked to the park bench in my neighborhood yesterday and a lot was absorbed in silence.

Sometimes he nudges me to read a passage from one of his books, or a poem sketch, or haiku or a letter to Ginsberg or Snyder. Forget the history lessons. Read the work. That's what speaks volumes.

No scolding, ripping apart. Don't have to really rub it in I've been writing crapola. He only inspires. Been blocked on how to do the tsunami writing too. Aghhh, there's no villain, no conflict - hence no plot! Ya think On the Road had a plot? Shit, it's about love for everyone, everything - drug dealers, the down and out, everyone - everyone else thinks is a loser.

"Sketching...everything activates in front of you in myraid profusion, you just have to  purify your mind and let it pour the words and write with 100% personal honesty." - Jack Kerouac in intro to Book of Sketches

I realize now how brave that was. Is.

I walked in nature for the first time since I came home from Asia last Thursday, or Friday. I'm as far as you get from warm dry car on Wildcat Canyon trail, which really does have cougars on it sometimes if you are lucky, when it starts to drizzle. Lately these drizzles flick to torrents around here. Mind leaps, peace shatters, damn, I'm going to get soaked.

Then would come wild hysterical drizzling rain, from the south, in the wind, and I'd say "The taste of rain, why kneel?" and I'd say "Time for hot coffee and a cigaratte, boys," addressing my imaginary bhikkus [hey, you know I, not Jack, met Richard the rebel monk from Penang that does smoke]. The moon became full and huge and with it came Aurora  Borealis over Mount Hozomeeen  ("Look at the void and it is even stiller," Han Shan had said in Japhy's translation); and in fact I was so still all I had to do was shift my crossed legs in the alpine grass and I could hear the hoofs of deers running away somewhere. Standing on my head before bedtime on that rock roof of the moonlight I could indeed  see that the earth was truly upsidedown and man a weird vain beetle full of strange ideas walking around upsidedown and boosting, and I could realize that man remembered why this dream of planets and planets and Plantagenets was built out of the primordial essence. - Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

"Taste the rain!" I recall. Of course. Taste the rain, why kneel? This. This is it. The church, the altar, the pews, the universe in a grain of sand. I let my neck go soft and gaze upward, the creek by my side. Open mouth and lick the sky.

Lick the sky, my mommy-artist friend Ruby would say. Her way of saying the Unnameable Infinity is that close to our face we literally can lick it.

I would have been deliriously soaked but that wasn't in the cards. The rain gently caressed and slipped into stillness instead.

"This is all very nice, because the ideas that Jack and the Beat generation stood for are needed today more than ever. But I'm not so interested in nostalgia," [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti [, City Lights bookstore owner and publisher of Howl & other Beats] said with a guilty smile. "I'm interested in the future." - SF Chron

"Once when Kerouac was high on psychedelics with Timothy Leary, he looked out the window and said, 'Walking on water wasn't built in a day.' Our goal to save the planet and alter human consciousness. That will take a long time, if it happens at all." — Allen Ginsberg (Wikipedia)

[You know the work is not finished. Yeah Jack I know that. I know it got derailed.]

"I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's." — Bob Dylan (Wikipedia)

"But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality...woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don't understand history and the yearnings of the human soul." - Kerouac

"This is Beat. Live your lives out? Naw, love your lives out." - Kerouac

"When you've understood this scripture, throw it away," says Jack in The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. "I insist on your freedom."

...throw it away and lick the sky

credits Unattributed Jack quotes from Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and The Beat Generation (highly recommend); photo from Desolation Peak in National Geo's "Hiking Jack Kerouac's North Cascades".

tags licking the sky making a difference beatblog art innovation startup passion buddhism inspiration jack kerouac beat generation counterculture literature creativity spirituality

Sound Familiar? Apple's Psychedelic Psychographics

Daring Fireball chastises and riffs on SF Chronicle's Sunday story on "Stubborn Apple at Risk of Making Same Mistake Twice":

In a way, Apple’s survival is remarkable, author Kahney said, like a dinosaur living beyond the Ice Age. All the early PC-makers like Amiga, Commodore and Acorn crumbled, but idiosyncratic Apple hung on.

Daring Fireball's reponse: "Is it not perhaps the case that Apple “hung on” not despite its idiosyncrasies, but because of them?"

My guess is Apple doesn't look to newspaper columns for advice on bucking trends. The subtitle for Time Magazine's October 24, 2005 cover story reads, "Conventional wisdom says its strategy is wrong, yet it keeps turning out great products. TIME looks inside the world's most innovative company."

In a January 2004 Fast Company article chides Apple for its relentless emphasis on innovation and underscores that Apple's execution and revenues fall short. It warns of the folly of following in Apple's footsteps: "If your cool new thing doesn't generate enough money to cover costs and make a profit, it isn't innovation. It's art."

It is about art. Sunday Times UK writer recently says, "I couldn’t have written this article about Dell, BMW, BP, Microsoft, Sony or IBM. No company I can think of is quite as consistently interesting as Apple, and I can certainly think of none that might qualify as a corporate work of art."

"The [Apple] store is done in iPod shades of white. "We chose hand-selected Tuscan stone for the floors--a stone that's somewhere between sandstone and limestone," Johnson says. "It's the same stuff Florence was built on." - FC

Apple is all about "overtly challeng[ing] convention." Lest we forget the Renaissance didn't flourish through contentional thinkers and artists either we can slide across its stone floors to jog our history brain cells.

Apple Insider reports that maybe it's Fast Company that got it wrong: "For fiscal 2005, the Company generated revenue of $13.93 billion and a net profit of $1.335 billion, reflecting annual growth of 68 percent and 384 percent, respectively, and representing the highest annual revenue and net profit in the Company's history."

What most people miss in all of this is that the suggestion Apple needs to sell to the corporate market to succeed is flawed, because Apple's carefully cultivated brand image will never appeal to the bean-counters of the world. From a brand point of view, Apple sells to the "Think Different" market irrespective of whether the particular customer works in the corporate sector, in design, in film production, or in education. Apple appeals to an attitude choice and not a market segment. Market segmentation is a conservative marketing tool that fails to recognise the strength of brands working at a deeper level. - "The Branding of Apple: Apple's Intangible Asset"

"Reacting to an overwhelming number of messages each day, people filter out the chatter and focus on what resonates with them. On an emotional level, what appeals to a 47-year-old mother of two from Boise might be the same thing that appeals to a 21-year-old college student in New York. This revelation from consumer psychographic research is changing marketing and creative development as we know it. What has been traditionally a conversation about age, race, gender, location and income has been transformed into a dialog about lifestyle, mindset, behavior and feeling." - "Trend:  Psychographics Once More with Feeling", Spring 2006, Create Magazine

Mindset - Attitude - Feeling - We filter out chatter and focus on what resonates. (In other words, you don't flip-flop from Revolutionary to Establishment and expect your core follow suit.) 

Something is happening and it affects us all. A global revolution is changing business, and business is changing the world...

Here's What We Set Out to Do: Identify the values of the revolution and the people who are building companies that embody them: a commitment to merge economic growth with social justice, democratic participation with tough-minded execution, explosive technological innovation with old-fashioned individual commitment, from Handbook of the Business Revolution: Manifesto, 1995.

Why don't you get Fast Company anymore? I asked Enrique, a first-issue subscriber friend more than a year ago. He shrugs, "It doesn't speak to me anymore."

The San Francisco Chronicle reporter continues: “The reality doesn’t fit with the image. Jobs is the only cool guy there.” I beg to differ; and it's not about 'cool' because you can copy-cat cool. I live in the epicenter of Geekdom and yet Apple employees I know don't entirely fit the geek mold.

Ah well, it's all so banally familiar. Those Squares never get bohemians ("They were committed to a life of freedom, work, and pleasure, and eschewed the corruption and rotten values of conventional society"), even since the days of Cafe Momus, do they?

"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the trouble makers. The round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them, because they change things, they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do." - Apple Computers, Think Different campaign

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars." - Jack Kerouac

p.s.  In the 2005 book What the Dormouse Said, New York Times reporter John Markoff quotes Jobs describing his LSD experience as "one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life." (Wikipedia)

Update: SF Chron reporter Dan Fost responds.

images: I was at Caffè Macs yesterday (ate lunch at Apple's cafeteria) and couldn't help thinking the new iPod posters look inspired by the psychedelic poster art of the sixties. Someone else noticed they seemed inspired by Eninem ads. You can still purchase this collector's Bob Dylan psychedelic poster "Dylan, Blowin' In the Mind (20" X 30")" (yep, Mind as in tripping or enlightenment, not Wind as in lyrics).

tags web2.0 blogs sixties art innovation startup passion entrepreneurs inspiration inspiration beat generation counterculture apple brands creativity marketing

A Psychedelic Quest into the Beat Heart

"And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice." - 1 Kings 19:12

Simon Wincester in his book about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake,  A Crack in the Center of the World, recounts how the arts and literary scene and the soul of San Francisco didn't revive until the 50's Beats scene came along.

Wincester says that revival efforts did not "bubble up naturally through the cracks in the wrecked pavement" but were organized in a top-down manner by the Chamber and others. Thus, there was "a kind of artifice about it", and "boosterism" to the whole affair.

"Artists generally prefer to work at their pace, with their own instincts, gathering themselves into groups and movements and schools at their own behest. Though there are exceptions, [footnotes to Depression era national projects where artists might have starved; whereas with the SF quake they could simply move away] artists do not care much to create at the whim of officialdom. - Simon Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake

So I'm tripping through Google (aka web surfing) and books and stuff and can't help noticing the wild & historic connections of Bohemian influences, plus mysticism, LSD, art & philosophy & spontaneity linking Henri Murger - the original Bohemian - to Jack Keroauc to Timothy Leary to Steve Jobs to personal computers to today's DIY Web 2.0 hipsters (aka those digital utopians, according to "cultural critic" Andrew Keen).

On someone else's blog (hint above), I wrote that where blogs are "truly helpful is to explore a hypotheses, in other words throw out the experiment's premise, and use the blog to chart the progress and process. Blogs aren't as good for totally final results because they unfold over a length of time - but are wonderful in allowing one to share the process of an experiment in the making, and participate in the discovery itself."

I'm itching to explore and not know where it'll take me. Maybe the bohemian Beats as a touchstone and then we'll groove into the sixties and somehow end up here in 2006.

The Beats were about living life to the hilt, and joy, and deep reverence, and experimentation. They're often mistaked for nihilists rather than mystics, anarchists rather than freedom-lovers. They definitely did not want to become like the Zombies (as Kerouac named them in his first novel) who blithely followed the bleak soul-stifling conventions of the early Cold War era.

There are many reasons that Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Synder, Whalen and the crew were called Beat. Here's how Jack himself looks at it: "Yet it was as a Catholic, it was not at the insistence of these`niks' and certainly not with their approval either, that I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood (one of them ), Ste. Jeanne d'Arc in Lowell Mass., and suddenly with tears in my eyes and had a vision of what I must have really meant with 'Beat' anyhow when I heard the holy silence in the church...the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific..."

Adj. 1.  beatific - experiencing or bestowing celestial joy; "beatific peace"

"All I want is as far as life-plans are concerned from here on out, is compassionate, contented solitude - Bhikkuhood is so hard to make in the West - it would have to be some American streamlined Bhikkuhood, because so far all I've done is attract attention," Kerouac wrote in a letter to poet friend Allen Ginsberg.

Wistfully, that's August 1955 months before Howl put them all on the map, and before On the Road (1957) made Kerouac a literary celebrity and poster boy for a generation. Not all rebels are so mainstream successful, yet...

What strikes me is Kerouac's font of his creativity. And that's something I'd like to dig into further. (He valued solitude, meditation, personal experience & spontaneity.) Here a few nuggets I'm floating:

Office memo's from Viking dated as early as 10/22/53 from Helen K. Taylor, a Viking senior editor said: "The writing is a torrential force that comes directly out of the material, instead of being applied to it. It is almost as if the author did not seem to exist as an outside agency of creation."  - "Forty Years of On the Road 1957-1997", Dharma Beat, Issue 9

Starting with the assumption that "words come from the holy ghost" Kerouac reminds readers that "Mozart and Blake often felt they weren't pushing their own pens, 'twas the `Muse' singing and pushing." - Interview with "bell hooks | Buddha Belly", Shambala Sun, May 1998

"Meditation is when you sit down, let's say that, and don't do anything. Poetry is when you get up and do something. Somewhere we've developed the misconception that poetry is self-expression, and that meditation is going inward. Actually, poetry has nothing to do with self-expression, it is the way to be free, finally, of self-expression, to go much deeper than that. And meditation is not a form of thought or reflection, it is a looking at or an awareness of what is there, equally inside and outside, and then it doesn't make sense anymore to mention inside or outside." - Norman Fischer, Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry (via Whiskeyriver)

Background themes (mixing up historical context setting posts with pure spontaneous writing) over the next 22 days or so may include:

• Spontaneity & Freedom
• Silence
• Seamlessness
• Opening the Doors of Perception
• Beatific Joy
• Thusness
• Personal Witness
• Art & Creativity

Bonus: I'm gathering with some friends (limiting to small group, say, 8-10) for a three-day nature-silence-imbued retreat with creative-priming poem sketches and photography thrown in over Easter weekend at Hidden Villa Wilderness Preserve in Los Altos hills of California. Email if interested. (Reserve your own space  early: 650-949-8648 or email hostel -at- hiddenvilla dot org. Lodging from $22 for non-HI members in dorm quarters. Private cabins also available: $37 single, $54 double).

p.s.  Why 22 days? It's 22 days to the 100th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake. And it looks like 22 ("it contains the secrets to many esoteric questions") is a quite an auspicious number.

images (Top) 1968 Earthquake poster is available from Lead Pipe Posters; (right) 1968 concert poster available at MC5.

tags web2.0 blogs beatblog art innovation startup passion entrepreneurs inspiration inspiration beat generation counterculture literature creativity spirituality

Edgy is Hot & Has Blogging 1.0 Souled Out?

I find the Beats sexy because they weren't Yes men (yeah, most of them were men, a few misogynists, and check out Diane di Prima). (Psst...the opposite of Yes-men isn't a No-man).

As I write I recall a line from a SXSW panel from Ponzi on how she hooked up with Chris: "Funny is hot."

Me? Edgy is hot.

I've been pondering Apple's mystique of late. Maybe 'cause this coming April 1st is their 30th birthday, maybe 'cause they rose from ashes of near-death, maybe 'cause my friends that work there are the most religious folks I've met in high-tech, maybe 'cause their products are sexy, maybe 'cause they're within walking distance of my front door and are an easy target.

All in all though Apple is edgy. What's the opposite of edgy?

"Mass marketing demands mass products. And mass products beg for mass marketing.

This equation leads to a dangerous Catch 22, one with two parts.

Part One: Boring Products. Companies that are built around mass marketing develop their products accordingly. They round the edges, smooth out the differentiating features and try to make products that are bland enough to work for the masses. They make spicy food less spicy, insanely great service a little less great (and a little cheaper). They push everything—from the price to the performance —to the center of the market. They listen to the merchandisers at K-Mart and Wal-mart or the purchasing agents at Johnson & Johnson and make products that will appeal to everybody." - "Purple Cow", Seth Godin

The zone of mediocrity sucks you into its vortex the minute you start smoothing edges and nodding mindlessly along with the masses.

The reason I love the Marketing4Artists guys? They start with: 1) Don't pollute, compromise or dilute your art.

They're certainly not advocating starving artists (there is a 4-part method to their madness). Ultimately if it doesn't enthrall you first, (satisfy yourself first, says Kerouac) it's gonna be a real tough sell.

I felt something happening when I first stumbled onto reading blogs in 2001 post-O'Reilly P2P Conference. In the words of Beat salonist Kenneth Rexroth: "Something's happening man." The energy of a renaissance was palpable even as the dot-com flame was extinguishing.

Practically the first thing Allen Ginsberg did when he hit San Francisco was to seek out poet Kenneth Rexroth, whose Friday night literary salons were legendary.

"What's happening? Who's interesting? What's going on?" asked Ginsberg, 29, fresh out of Columbia University in black horn-rim glasses and a sack suit.

It was 1955. The San Francisco Poetry Renaissance was in full swing, with the erudite Rexroth and poet Robert Duncan of San Francisco State at the white-hot center. - "HOWL: When Allen Ginsberg hurled his shattering poem at a San Francisco audience in 1955, it proved to be the depth charge that started the Beat movement", San Francisco Chronicle, October 4, 2005

Artists flocked to San Francisco ("the last refuge of the bohemian remnant") partially because it was as far, far way as you could get from the Old Establishment in New York, according to Rexroth.

The blogosphere used to push my edges. Po Bronson in his bestselling What Should I Do With My Life? talks about the establishment of the Writers Grotto, a workspace where the creators encouraged each other to take creative risks. In isolation, Bronson confesses, he might be tempted to chuck it and take that editing job after all.

"The first time I heard him read was a revelation. Here was a man talking about real things in his own voice and not trying to cover his feelings with a lot of slimy poetry." - Allen Ginsberg speaking of his own influence, poet William Carlos Williams - The Beat Papers of Al Aronowitz, "Chap 6: The San Francisco Renaissance"

How many times has reading a blog been revelatory lately?

Fine. Maybe it's all projection, and maybe I'm preaching to myself "don't dilute your art", "don't smooth your edges" "you teach best what you need to learn (Richard Bach)" but the more blogs I read, the more they sound alike - the more they sound rounded.

Hmmm, Richard Bach also said, "Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself." Now the $64,000 question: How do you do that? (Can you do that?!) In the words of another immortal poet whom influenced the rucksack raw quality of the Beats as well as Williams himself:

"Don't seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise: seek what they sought." - Basho

The rest here are random splatterings. Connect the dots yourself:

"...blogging 1.0 having been completely consumed and repurposed by a cabal of MSM and faux-hip-and-late-to-the-party-but-hell-let's-trash-it-anyway PR bods - and blogging's core hacker ethic is finally sullied beyond sauvage after one too many commercial pisses in the proverbial punchbowl." - "Quit Pro Quo", Gary Turner

"It is impossible for an artist to remain true to himself as a man, let alone an artist, and work within the context of this society." - Kenneth Rexroth (impossible? difficult, yes...)

In response to Rebecca Blood's The Real Threat of Blogging, Chris Carfi comments:

rebecca, well put. one line stands out:

"First and foremost, they ask themselves if they can sell it. If they don't think they can, they pass."

spot-on. in a similar vein, had a set of buddies who were in an incredible band with a strong, significant local following in chicago. they played regionally, hundreds of gigs, had a bunch of critically praised discs out. they went to NYC to play at the mercury lounge for the industry types. three execs showed up, two left during the gig. the third waited around, wanting to meet with them afterwards. the conversation went like this:

"you guys are incredible. i love your lyrics. i love your sound.

but i could never sell you. i'm sorry."

and with that, she turned and walked out.

"The only significant fiction in America is popular fiction...fiction indistinguishable from the advertising columns on either side of the page." - Kenneth Rexroth

A Cautionary Tale? "[Keen said that] blogging opens the door to too many mediocre voices. When he tried to apply this critique tonight, Des Jardins shot it down with a single line that exposed its irrelevance to the conversation: "The cream also rises in the blogosphere." - "Blogs: threat or menace?", Scott Rosenberg

How the Beat Generation Ended: "It would seem that every high school senior who thought he or she could write poetry hitchhiked to the Bay Area immediately upon graduation — or flunking out. This was not all to the bad. [In fact the Beats were for the democratization of arts.] If you’ve got enough milk some cream is bound to rise to the top — unless the milk is homogenized. Unfortunately the counterculture was busy homogenizing itself, so there was less cream than might be expected.

The Twenties are supposed to be the time when little magazines of experimental verse flourished. There are probably more such little magazines [mostly published by hand press!] being published in the Bay Area in recent years than were published in the entire country and Paris-America in the decade of the Twenties. Are they in fact magazines of “experiment and revolt”? With very few exceptions they are not. They are conventional and conservative, but like the art school, conservative of a convention — the convention of experiment and revolt.

Something had happened to the preceding generation who had broken the fetters of the conventions before them. They had become the Establishment and they don’t know it to this day. They had also become celebrities and cult figures. They sold more books of poetry than were sold by all living poets between the wars except for Robert Frost and Edna Millay. (Editions in those days numbered a thousand copies or less.) They drew enormous audiences who dutifully absorbed whatever they were given — except for those who walked out in anger. It is unbelievable that Allen Ginsberg could force an audience in North Dakota, who had traveled to hear him from all over the central Northwest, to chant “Ah-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-” for three quarters of an hour followed by “singing” by his friend Peter Orlovsky. This certainly defines a cult figure. - "The Beat Era: The End of a Golden Age", Kenneth Rexroth

[And the final food-for-thought:]" "Jack Kerouac may have worn khakis, but he didn't get them at the Gap," yet "even Ginsberg did a Gap ad before he died."

This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. - Hamlet, by that edgy hottie, Shakespeare

Bonus: Tom Foremski tells us about a re-enactment of the infamous Howl reading TOMORROW Friday night at The Beat Museum, 1345 Grant, SF, 8 p.m. (He he: Be there or be square.) He also starts the new beatblog tag.

more Apple tattoos http://www.theapplecollection.com/Collection/objects/tattoo.shtml

tags web2.0 blogs beatblog art innovation startup passion entrepreneurs inspiration inspiration beat generation counterculture apple creativity marketing

World Water Day Poem

messages in (m)(w)ater
terra mater
earth: planet drops of pooled ambrosia
cadillac deserts of desire

she, the clay jar against crown
well-meeting
water-gathering
he, the tum-pli-nes against forehead
forest-meeting
wood-gathering

day
in
burn
day
out
quench

school-time: children of maíz fields
reading husks
day
in
writing mica-soil
(layers slide like pages in a book)
day
out

where
mammacita, la agua?

actions ripple
day
in
day
o) only
u) us
t) together

Inspired by: Yvonne at Lip-sticking, my friend David who told me about a new 1/2 cent per gallon water filtering technology, desert living, Colorado River and Guatemalan journeys, and Google. (Plus yeah I noticed Starbucks doing the good cause thing in their retail stores.)
photo WaterPartners International

Ten-Minute Poem, Really

I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by validation

& paying rent
the galleries spit 'this won't sell' can you make it blacker please

i nearly disengage from the software salesman
the voice (isaiah 30:21) cocks my head
why i ask (i'll never know) what is your passion?
pilgrimage, journeys in swahili = safari

lsd can be ego-shattering, please don't try this at home

and I drove no radio sf through reno through the $5 buffets of Wendover
through the searing white washed luna-scape of the salt flats
a meditation on lust twisting through my mind
2 months before the divorce 2002
this isn't about him haunting my mind
god spoke

the Word is not printed
'over one million people a day do a search on the Internet for a spiritual term'

(according to Global Media Outreach)

not there either

lust, possession, I WANT you ripens melts into forgetting yourself
forget yourself, forget yourself, forget
your
self
merging
tao

sex, skiing, sado (tea ceremony): pale orgasms without shattering forgetting self

watch the waves from Pacifica 10 months after the tsunami
dead kelp artichoke, calamata colors, italian salad
roar slams the chain link fence rusting the trailer home
tell me where does one wave start? and next begin

where do You begin? and I end

ocean: no boundary - no shore -> no tsunami

p.s. thanks, Jack. isaiah 30:21 "Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, "This is the way; walk in it."

Ambrosia for the Muse: 'Developing Talent' Blog

RARELY do I add new blogs to my reading anymore.

Just added to daily fix list: Developing Talent: the inner experience of creative talent.

Too much synchonicity not too. Salons AND 1984?

from "Salons and Blogging": "While the old-style literary salon such as the Bloomsbury Group may be impractical for most of us, blogging can be a way to express ourselves, connect and gain support and inspiration. In my article Gifted Women: Identity and Expression, I note that one of the issues related to being exceptional such as creative, may be social isolation."

from "Places to be Creative": "George Orwell chose to write Nineteen Eighty-Four while living in Barnhill [photo], an abandoned farmhouse on the isle of Jura in the Inner Hebrides. He noted in 1947, “The weather here is as disgusting as in England, but it isn't quite so cold and a little easier to get fuel... These islands are one of the most beautiful parts of the British Isles and largely uninhabited.”"

image Bloomsbury Group's Vanessa Bell 's portrait of fellow salonist Virginia Woolf

How Bloggers Ate the World

"In some futuristic hell, robotic serfs gaze at a giant screen showing the crazed rantings of what is plainly George Orwell’s Big Brother. An athletically clad girl races in. She is pursued by helmeted goons and she carries a sledgehammer. With a cry, she hurls the hammer at the screen. It explodes. The serfs gaze on, bewildered and open-mouthed, as a voice tells us that, thanks to the Apple Mac, 1984 will not be like “1984”. Join us and be free." - "How Apple Ate the World", Sunday Times UK, March 19, 2006

In retrospect renegades may be revered, in real-time they're most often reviled. 

Don't hold your breath for praise. Don't spin your wheels legitimizing pointless debates. Continue with the work at hand, digging into the soil and staying true to the muse.

"While he was alive, academia (for the most part) dismissed him as a joke," writes blogger Erik Lerouge on his March 12 birthday tribute to Jack Kerouac.

Beatnik was once a derogatory term given to those Beat poets. Today one single poem from a beatnik, "Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail", raises $10,000 for the 80-year-old publisher of Charles Bukowski's earliest works made homeless by Hurricane Katrina.

'Blogger' may one day be a badge of honor, but does it matter, really, right now?

Decades later, beatnik Marxists met in salons at Kepler's bookstore and spun gold from flax and entertained wild-eyed ideas. Wild-eyes ideas like the personal computer.

Very (very) doubtful the folks at Sperry-UNIVAC were singing their praises. Computers aren't for everyone - they're for elite scientists, donchaknow.

First they ignore you,

then they ridicule you,

then they fight you,

then you win. -  Mahatma Gandhi

Update: Keen: "Either we are pro-transhumanists or we are Luddites." Me: "Either we are pro-Keen or we are Marxist digital utopians." (The world's not so black and white. I actually like Keen's edgy thought-provoking blog even if I only agree with half of it. His "Confessions of a Silicon Valley Thief" is a FANTASTIC piece of writing.)

Inspired by: Many, many comments re: Sunday's Berkeley Cybersalon on Elitism in the Media, Blogging & Podcasting, Tara Hunt's "Marx is Back - Get Used to It" (I especially enjoyed Tara's last tag), Scott Rosenberg's "Blogs: threat or menace?", and The Berkeley Blog's writeup Berkeley Cybersalon: Blogging vs. Journalism = Yawn (I especially resonated with reference to Shakespeare's "a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing"), Lisa Stone's "Cybersalon: I'll always be both Daddy's and Mommy's girl", Steve Gillmor ("maybe just maybe the next time we have this conversation we can pick up where this one ended, in the streets at the intersection of What used to be and What might be"), Andrew Keen (and blog), Apple Computer (Happy 30th!), and What The Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff (coincidentally a panelist).

Related: (My first post - last night - over at Corante's Media Hub ->) "Is It Journalism Debate Getting Banal"'; "An Internet Fed Mostly By Amateurs is Fascinating" (in response to a SJ Merc column titled "An Internet Fed Mostly By Amateurs is Frightening"); "LSD, Litmus Tests, Hackers and Blogging For Dollars"; and yesterday's "Salons, Primal Howl and Satisfying Yourself First."

p.s. I did not grow up in privilege. Many realize that the privileges we do enjoy now comes with responsibility to give back. Which is where blogging's origins stem from - the old-time hacker ethic of giving, sharing.

photos Steve & Steve (miniscule print reads: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage, ca: 1975), Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski top to bottom.

tags web2.0 blogs citizen journalism art innovation startup passion entrepreneurs inspiration inspiration beat generation counterculture apple steve jobs amateurs rule