Crossroads Dispatches

it's a jungle out there... and the ecosystems they co-create

"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

On a visit to Indiana in April, witnessing the bloom of purple allium and the elm trees through the window, I happened upon a New York Times op-ed piece that became the stepping-stone to why I returned to engage with the San Francisco Bay Area ecosystem, again:

"When [Peter] Thiel is talking about a “monopoly,” he isn’t talking about the illegal eliminate-your-rivals kind. He’s talking about doing something so creative that you establish a distinct market, niche and identity. . . 

His lecture points to a provocative possibility: that the competitive spirit capitalism engenders can sometimes inhibit the creativity it requires.

Think about the traits that creative people possess. Creative people don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map. Creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream. Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows." - "The Creative Monopoly," New York Times, April 23, 2012

Today via Fred Wilson's blog, I was acquainted with Sep Kamvar, a professor at MIT Media Lab with an artistic sensibility, who wrote an essay on the principle of cyclicity. Cyclicity is another phrase for the ineffable philosophy I keep being drawn towards. Last week the closest phrase I could come up with was "generative ecosystem." And it's the generative and regenerative ecosystem aspect of Silicon Valley that drew me here, even though in other respects I feel like an odd man out. Sure, it's not in everyone's DNA, but it is here.

I'm on my laptop at Coupa Cafe, with its rustic, earthy beauty redolent of Latin America--high ceilings, hexagons in skylights, thick stone floors inlaid with colored mosaic, walls the color of blood oranges--and I read about the 26-year-old co-owner of Coupa Cafe, Jean Paul Coupal:

"[He] didn’t quite expect the Palo Alto cafe to become such a tech magnet. But he has encouraged it, adding a zippy 50 megabit WiFi network and encouraging people to camp out with their laptops. Since the beginning we wanted it to be a place where you aren’t kicked out,” Coupal says. “At a restaurant, they bring you the check and you feel you have to leave. We didn’t want that. We wanted people to feel at home.”"

From last week to this week I notice a new item, handcrafted* toffee, displayed at the counter (I'd spotted "Toffee Talk" at the downtown San Jose Farmer's Market the previous Friday and the samples I enjoyed were luscious). Coupal gives newly-seeded projects and ideas a chance to take root:

"There are many people and institutions in Silicon Valley willing to help new startups, including incubators, universities, angels, venture capital firms and big tech companies. But local small businesses like Coupa that are willing to give new startups a shot are  another important part of this ecosystem." - "Coupa Cafe: Where Start-ups Meet, Work, and Test Products," Forbes, December 5, 2011

As I type this, a man to my left interrupts my absorption in blog-writing to ask if there are any extra power outlets by me.

At first I say, "No, there's not," since it is true.

Then, I find myself double-checking my laptop battery. It's at 100%, so I offer him the power outlet I'd been using as his laptop is drained. It doesn't always work out this way, yet it's not usual for the ones who thrive. We tend to think of 'power places' like NYC and Silicon Valley as spots that abide by the law of the jungle--it's either you or me, we must take from and be predatory for our mere survival--yet do jungles actually thrive through cut-throat means? Tachi Kiuchi and Bill Shireman, in, What We Learned in the Rainforest: Business Lessons from Nature, say:

"Rainforest species are not solitary organisms fighting myriad others to be the last to survive in a hostile environment. They all depend on each other to collectively build an ecosystem, each defining an exclusive niche vital to and dependent on the other niches that border and overlap it.

...the most valuable resources of the rainforest [are] not the trees or other physical resources, but the relationships, the complex array of [symbiotic] designs [among the species.] 

"This cooperation is not conscious, as human cooperation sometimes is; it is a consequence of specialization and interdependency. As they specialize, living things find it to their advantage to cooperate. Whether they like it or not the parts come together, in cooperation, as wholes.

Ecosystems are not isolated entities with impenetrable borders. Every ecosystem is nested within, borders on, or overlaps with other systems.

A verge is a rich mixture of ecosystems that happens where two distinct forms meet with each other and begin to intermix. Verges are places of conflict, but also of positive change. They bring together diverse systems and set the stage either for their integration or for their destruction.

Our economy, too, is on a verge. " 

Even after The Creative Monopoly op-ed instigated pondering a move, I wasn't certain (I'd sworn I'd never return to Silicon Valley--primarily as it couldn't fulfill my desire to express myself beside the cerebral facet of myself). And it seemed absurd to risk returning to the Bay Area ecosystem on a drained battery (i.e. shoestring budget). A few days after The Creative Monopoly omen, Oakland, CA resident, publisher, and author of Starting Your Book and MotherWealth, Naomi Rose e-mails me:

"I just found you on the Internet in a way that I can only call "inspired." I have come to realize that, as a sole proprietor doing everything, I really do need help, and especially in the area of marketing. But when I looked online at marketing help, it was all the same old high-powered competitive-oriented thing. A lover of slowness (and working that way, with my clients and my books), I asked myself, "Could there be such a thing as 'slow marketing'?"

 

So I typed it in. When the term came up in Wikipedia, it cited you as the originator of the term. Then I went to your blog, read much of it, and found you."

That's what cinched it for me. Something I wrote in 2006, "Slow Food, Slow Sex, Slow Marketing" while I still lived in the Bay Area, spoke to someone else there. At the time of writing, I truly felt like an outlier (and it was only a matter of time before I left in January 2008 to find somewhere that my way of being might be welcomed as a contribution to the whole).

So I was particularly warmed and inspired today, to read, in full--"Cyclicity: Missions and Metrics" by Sep Kamvar (his and Jonathan Harris' entire essay series are worthwhile) which I include here: 

"There is an old Zen story about a man riding a horse, galloping frantically down a path. His friend, who is sitting by the side of the road, calls out "Where are you going?" The man replies: "I don't know. Ask the horse!"

When we build our tools, we often depend on metrics to guide our development. We keep graphs of unique visitors and pageviews and watch them closely. This keeps us honest. It's hard to convince anybody that we're building a useful tool if our metrics show that nobody is using it.

But we must take care when we use metrics. Metrics can be like the horse in the old Zen story. Once we decide on them, they have a habit of setting the agenda. As the old adage goes, what gets measured gets managed.

The standard metric for a country's economic welfare is GDP. I find this strange. If the government decided to give millions of dollars to the country's richest people so that they can buy yachts from one another, that would increase GDP. So would clearcutting our national forests to build strip malls, outsourcing the raising of our children, and incarcerating large swaths of our poor.

If we temper the language a bit, we might find that this description is not so far from reality.

My point is that metrics shape behavior. Joseph Stiglitz describes this mechanism nicely: "What we gather our information about, and how we describe success, affects what we strive for." Political leaders who want to grow the economy, he says, will focus policies on things that increase GDP, even when GDP does not correlate with societal well-being.

Which brings me to my second point: all metrics leave something out. Often, they leave the most important things out.

In 2007, Stanford offered a course called "CS377W: Creating Engaging Facebook Apps". The course assignment was to build a Facebook application that, according to the course website, would "focus on solving a problem for a broad audience." It was an intensively metrics-driven class, and the key metric was user numbers. By the metrics, the results were astonishing: in the course of the 10-week term, the apps collectively reached 16 million users.

The flipside was that the applications themselves were underwhelming. Most of them allowed users to do things like rank the attractiveness of their friends, send virtual hugs and have virtual pillow fights. The substance of the applications reflected what the metric left out. If it were possible to measure the value of a user's attention, or how enriching an application is to her life, the course projects would likely have been quite different. But sometimes, the important things can't be measured.

It is useful, therefore, to have missions to balance our metrics. Of course, each tool should have its own mission. But if I were to suggest one mission for all tools, it might be this:

Every tool should nourish the things upon which it depends.

We see this principle at varying levels in some of our tools today. I call them cyclical tools. The iPhone empowers the developer ecosystem that helps drive its adoption. A bike strengthens the person who pedals it. Open-source software educates its potential contributors. A hallmark of cyclical tools is that they create open loops: the bike strengthens its rider to do things other than just pedal the bike.

Cyclical tools are like trees, whose falling leaves fertilize the soil in which they grow.

At the top of the stack, all tools depend on nature and human nature. They depend on the sun, trees, minerals, and fossil fuels to provide their raw materials and energy. They depend on the creativity of builders to give them form. And they depend on the attention of their users, without which they would languish.

An ecosystem of cyclical tools would therefore nourish nature and empower people. A fully cyclical software application may, for example, use peer-to-peer data centers powered by its users, consisting of biodegradable, fertilizing microprocessors. It would be open-source and provide APIs to empower the creativity of builders, and a clean design and useful purpose that cultivates the concentration of its users.

If some of this sounds like science fiction, so did manned lunar vehicles in 1950, or self-driving cars in 2000. We have a tendency to achieve what we focus on.

It’s difficult to build cyclical tools because the alternative is so tempting. Cars are faster than bikes. FishVille reaches more people than Moby Dick. At first, cyclical tools appear to be lower-power, slower-growth, and more expensive than extractive tools.

But you can’t measure the impact of tools on their own. You must measure them by the ecosystems that they co-create."

* "Catherine is adamant that her toffee remain an artisanal, handmade confection and continues to prepare every batch herself." - Toffee Talk website

ART CREDITS: Henri Rousseau's The Dream, Exotic Landscape with Playing Monkeys, and Two Monkeys in the Jungle.

what can be explained is not poetry - w. b. yeats

“Publishing a volume of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo,” said author Don Marquis, speaking from experience. Something you’re considering, Leo, may seem to fit that description, too. It’s a project or action or gift that you’d feel good about offering, but you also wonder whether it will generate the same buzz as that rose petal floating down into the Grand Canyon. Here’s what I think: To the degree that you shed your attachment to making an impact, you will make the exact impact that matters most. Give yourself without any expectations.” - Rob Brezsny

I'm not a Leo per se, yet that truly spoke to me. And poetry is more than lyrics and lines, more fathomless in category as W.B. Yeats says, “What can be explained is not poetry.”

My last post here was back in October. Once I was locked out from updating (I hadn't paid my monthly fees), it didn't take long to see that I could appreciate a respite.

Recently, I picked up the Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon series on DVD at the local library (no spoilers, I'm only 2/3 through). It begins in an alternate world with its own cosmology. This world is divided into four elements, with their attendant lands and kings. They are in the midst of a hundred-year war instigated by the Fire Nation wiping out many of the people and cultures in their world, including the Air Nomads and their temple.

A small tribe of Water people are deciding whether or not to banish a new-comer: a twelve-year-old named Aang whom might just be the Avatar (by balancing the four elements within himself, the Avatar can restore balance outside, ending the war). The debate ensues around whether he is too reckless to be among their serious warriors.

This is the dialogue that spoke to me, and I might just make it my mantra (internally) going forward:

Kitara: Don't you see? Aang's brought us something we haven't had in a long time. Fun.
Sokka: Fun? We can't fight Firebenders with fun!
Aang, the Avatar (smiling earnestly): You should try it sometime.

I can see some of you rolling your eyes at this point. Does it seem like fun = frivolous, or is it fun = harmonizing the imbalances in the world while having fun in the process? Fun = inventing and inspiring joyous ways of living?

This is where the line in the opening of the post: "It’s a project or action or gift that you’d feel good about offering, but you also wonder whether it will generate the same buzz as that rose petal floating down into the Grand Canyon" resounds. This blog, Crossroads Dispatches, celebrates it's 8th anniversary on February 6th. It's time for a shift that's closer to my gift: Less explaining, more exploring. To that end, I'm focusing on experiments in imagination and improvisation and fun; starting off easy and going into the more far-fetched and revolutionary as we go. That doesn't mean explaining shall never occur, but yeah, I'm aiming for exploratory, adventurous, experiential.

A glimpse of EXPLAINING:

"Today, the sci-fi novels of the sixties feel like artifacts from a distant age. "One way you can describe the collapse of the idea of the future is the collapse of science fiction," Thiel said. "Now it's either about technology that doesn't work or about technology that's used in bad ways. The anthology of the top twenty-five sci-fi stories of 1970 was, like, "Me and my friend the robot went for a walk on the moon,' and in 2008 it was, like, 'The galaxy is run by a fundamentalist Islamic confedereracy, and there are people who are hunting planets and killing them for fun."

[Peter] Thiel's venture-capital firm, Founders Fund, has an online manifesto about the future that begins with a complaint: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." He believes that this failure of imagination explains many of the country's problems--from the collapse in manufacturing to wage stagnation to the swelling of the financial sector. As he puts it, "You have dizzying change where there's no progress."" - "No Death, No Taxes," The New Yorker, November 28, 2011

I don't relegate the dynamic of unfolding change to technology alone. I am more interested in questioning and stretching the horizons of the possible. Sometimes that is a simple shift of perception that affects identity, culture, and society.

Here's a glimpse of EXPLORING:

Speaking of sugared petals, here's an exercise:

imagine you are host to a 101-course meal (I believe Senia gave me this seed idea originally in NYC 2006 after an adventure in the Whitney Museum).

What might you serve?

Well, here's an actual 100-course meal conceived of by artist Mitchell Dose, held at West Bank Social Center, a  laboratory for social engagement in Minneapolis.

Spring roll, raisin, red pepper, Mung bean, tomato preserve,
pancake and mini pancake, maple syrup, kombucha, polenta rounds with basil and tomato, red Russian kale, thistle flower coffee, guava juice, blackberry, jalapeno, red currant, Morbier cheese, fennel seed were among the 100 bites of art offered.

Now imagine like the boys in Peter Pan that you too can be fed by the energy of envisioned food.

Or as Robert Irwin puts it, “It’s strange. With food, for instance, people seem able to understand what’s involved: you savor the taste rather than just feed the body. But people have a hard time understanding that it should be the same way with visual experience.”  Actually, I'd omit visual and broaden to "the same way with experience."

So now what might you serve that nourishes the senses, spirit and soul as well?

I'd have sugared rose petals.

And pinecone, an hourglass, peanut butter on a sterling silver spoon, a jar of royal blue moist tempura paint, match tea powder (unsteeped), a haiku printed on cloth, confetti, a pincushion stuck with pins with colorful threads through them, cottonball, typewriter ribbon, swim goggles, leaf, lit tealight candle, shower curtain ring, Pocky (Japanese snack), an ice cube... and on and on.

What would you serve?

p.s. Essence of exploration: The venue above, the West Bank Social Center’s tagline is 'UNPREDICTABLE THINGS ARE HAPPENING.'

p.p.s. Although I was not active on this blog, I have been on Tumblr. I have a free Tumblr blog on public space, public art, placemaking, reuse of empty spaces by the community, cities as software, urban interventions and improvisations. Also, it is very inspiring to follow certain search terms if you have an account on Tumblr, in particular "installation" is consistently amazing.

Photo credits: Deer Creek Canyon in Grand Canyon National Park panafoot on Flickr; sugared petals via encoreuneminute.tumblr.com

yet another way to Demo, to Launch, to Lunch, to Flock, to Frolic

I want to jump in the fray around Demo this week with a pre-announcement. Since everyone's asking what I'm baking these days, here's a peek inside the oven:

Imagine walking right into a set, a living theater of sorts, a pop-up teahouse and brasserie evoking the artistic foment and intimacy of the Parisian salon.

A laidback running showcase for eclectic installations of provocative and live social art, aesthetic and green designs, Web 2.0 demos (including a boutique digital screening room, etc.)

A convivial spa of conversation catalyzing fertile verges.

A community space for people to commune with people of every stripe. (Devoted but not pushy about transforming "the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.")

Each production comes once around for less than a season, never to be repeated again, to instanteously pop up in another incarnation somewhere else in the Bay Area (initially).

This time, the swirling philosophers and literati of a Vienna coffehouse with Art Nouveau vibe

(exit stage left)

Now, the Silk Road beckons saffron and cinnabar colored plush pillows spice-laden opium den  (sans opium)

(exit stage right)

Now, what does your fantasy fancy?...

"All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players" - Shakespeare, As You Like It

I haven't seen anything quite like it I can point you to. But something about Colette's in Paris reminds. Something about New Frontier on Main at this year's Sundance Film Festival reminds: 

"New Frontier on Main is Sundance's newest venue, showcasing moving-image [video] installations, live performances, microcinema screenings, new media technology, and the Rabbit Hole, a DJ lounge cafe." (more in this great article, "Sundance's New Frontier preserves artistic integrity", Variety, January 17, 2007)

"I've always loved DEMO-style conferences (like the one going on in Palm Desert today) where entrepreneurs show off their creations for the first time to an audience of their peers, the press, and investors." - Jason Calacanis, "Taking the payola out of DEMO-ing: The TechCrunch 20 Conference (or, I'm back in the conference business baby!)

This doesn't replace any expos or conferences, but I'm yearning for gatherings more sassy than a conference, and I'm willing to bet others are too.

I applaud the launchpad that Mike and Jason are giving visionaries to demo their dreams based on merit, not who's able pony up fees:

"It is a well known secret that if you are willing to pay the $15,000+ fee, your startup will really need to suck to be turned down." - Mike Arrington, "The TechCrunch20 Conference"

I don't have my model entirely cranked out, yet. But, claro que si, it's about the artists, innovators, entrepreneurs pushing the edges.

p.s. Comment, blog, email, text, or call 408 513 7324 if you are interested in participating in anyway.

dancers? investors? musicians? VJs/DJs? sponsors? videographers? filmmakers? accountants?  real estate gurus? conceptual artists? chefs? burners? producers? set designers? experimental theater folks? etc. etc?

(I'm notoriously behind on email, but I will get back with you.)

Slow Food, Slow Sex, Slow Travel...Slow Marketing

In a recent conversation with a friend and business associate, I bring up the "slow food, slow sex, slow travel" movements. He perks up, "Slow sex?"

I purposedly chose the provocative title of "Barbershops, Trading Posts, Coffeehouses, Parisian Salons: How Intimacy Seals Deals" for a session I led at MarCamp held Tuesday at France Telecom/Orange because marketers' intentions are nearly always suspect.

Seals deals? Sounds slimey, eh?

And people sometimes think that's who I am: I'm a role. I am a marketer (pssst, I'm just me). So if I'm a marketer, I must confess that I'm into slow marketing lately. Not that it's necessarily opposed to buzz marketing, but slow marketing is a focus on human, one-on-one connections sans stress ("yikes, will it scale?!?') rather than a focus on the mass, aggregate, broadcast-blast level.

Slow marketing is intricately tied to slow conversation, naked conversations. It's  very very old-world. I learned it by osmosis in the piazzas of Italy, the cafes of Vienna, the chicken-buses of Guatemala, and I let it seep inside while chatting on donated furniture in a makeshift wooden shelter where a family that lost everything, including a son, shared tea and cookies and their tears with me.

Slow marketing's a bit harder to map out a concrete campaign for. I had no intention of spending the entire afternoon at Vino Locale in Palo Alto (I was checking them out for an upcoming interview series, and a potential hosted salon). I hadn't anticipated that Mary Beth's favorite book was East of Eden, or that she was a English Lit major/Art History minor who worked in high-tech marketing for 25 years and is working on a novel herself or that Mike Mann of Mann Cellars (yes, they grow wine not just garlic in Gilroy) would walk in and open his silky Syrah 2004 for a tasting or Lynn Fielder, a talented jeweler and art curator for Vino Locale to sit down beside me, or Kirpal, a rosé lover and software entrepreneur, to waltz in after his lunch at Zibbabu because he heard the laughter.

"Everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn." - Elizabeth Lawrence (from one of my favorite slow magazines, La Vie Claire)

"No sane adult moves to the Bay Area for the lifestyle," says Paul Kedrosky. He, he, well, my sanity is questionable, but I am living here precisely for the lifestyle. I live a Mediterranean-inspired slow-food life right in the heart of Silicon Valley (yup, I reside near HP and Apple).

And I'm not alone. "There was an increased hunger for connection, and people were eager to find out about these things - the farmer, the fisherman, the cheesemaker," says Jim Denevan of Santa Cruz. Jim's company, Outstanding In the Field, brings one-evening impromptu restaurant right to small farms. In 2004, he took his farmer dinners national rippling out from his Northern California roots.

Denevan says it was modeling in Europe in his twenties that planted the seed: "Seeing the richness there inspired me. When you ate at little cafes and agriturismos, it was all very intimate, very direct. I remember a beautiful old farmhouse with a kitchen garden and vineyards right out the door. It really left an impression."  (All Denevan quotes from article "Feasts of the Field", La Vie Claire, Fall 2006)

Slow marketing? Denevan: "It's amazing hearing from the people who make the products, who create the culture of the table.  You get to hear the farmers telling their story, how and where they spend their days."

Slow travel? When life is a possible poem, then it becomes one grand adventure. Even marketing. A pilgrimage of discovery, mystery, serendipity, synchronicity, spontaneity. Joy:

For one friend who had difficulty remembering details from his travels,  I suggested he take on the task of writing a poem every day during his journey abroad. The daily task proved impossible for him, so he decided to focus his attention on a one-week stretch through Paris, Prague and Florence. To this day, his memories of that time are the fondest of all his travels because, as he has told me, "when everything is a possible poem, the world is suddenly far more interesting." - from The Art of Pilgrimage, by Phil Cousineau

And slow sex? What's the hurry, we'll get around to that eventually too.

p.s. I'd love to go to the next Outstanding in the Field dinner (that is one that's not already sold out). Email if you want to come along too: Details: October 15: Soquel, California at Everett Family Farm (photos from I Love Farms). Guest chef: Justin Severino, who is busy opening his butcher shop, "Pigs in Zen," makes a return appearance to Outstanding in the Field. $150/pp.

images 1) Photo by Wyatt Dexter from Outstanding In the Field's site 2) Gary Ibsen, host of the Carmel Tomato Festival. Mike Mann - "Are you the winemaker?" "I'm the wine grower, salesperson, delivery person too" - reminded me I justed missed the Tomato Festival (slow travelinig in Manhattan). Yet another reason to live in the Bay Area: heirloom tomatoes. Photo by © Tana Butler from I Heart Farms: Stories and Pictures of Real People and Real Food blog (a heavenly slow blog).

John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath and Thundering Inspiration

Ten years later, he recalled those months working on The Grapes of Wrath: "A few times I have in work heard the thundering and seen the flash which must have been the universe at work.  In that participation there was a glory that shadows everything else." - "A Journey Into Steinbeck's California", by Susan Shillinglaw

Flipping through A Journey Into Steinbeck's California (highly recommend), I stop at the black and white photo of a book burning in Bakersfield. The Grapes of Wrath was banned in many libraries throughout California as "unfit for its patrons." Even John Steinbeck's hometown of Salinas burned the tome. "A lie, a damned lie," foamed Congressman Lyle Boren of Oklahoma on the floor of the Senate. "We would not want our women and children to read so vulgar a book," wrote Executive Secretary Harold  Pomery of the Associated Farmers.

I spotted a hardcover edition of The Grapes of Wrath in my mom's bookshelf when I was woman-child of eleven, or twelve. I snuck off to my room where I'd hungrily wolfed children's classics like The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and the Nancy Drew series. To say reading The Grapes of Wrath was a turning point in my life would be an understatement. Books opened up a window to worlds I knew not existed -  inviting fresh air, natural sunlight, moist rain - into my overwise parched, caged immigrant upbringing.

I grew up in that reading of Steinbeck's classic. Plus it plunged me headlong into classics and my adoration of electrified writing that continues to enrich my life.

A flake of the croissant descends like an oak leaf unto the biography and I think about Steinbeck conceiving his signature works Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath surrounded by the orchard blossoms of apricots, almonds, and plums in his hillside home with vistas of enveloping oaks and the town of Los Gatos below. It's also later in Los Gatos at the Biddle Ranch where Steinbeck "recovered from his exhausting pull to write The Grapes of Wrath in five months."

Five months.

The thunderbolt of inspiration sometimes pulls you in a rarified, accelerated, dizzying direction. Pull is an apt word.

Years ago up on the ridges above Estes Park, Colorado, I felt the electric charge vibrate through the grasses, smells were heightened as if all the live things overflowed perfume and everything pulsed in advance anticipation of the splitting sky.

The first time I circumnavigated the ivory gingerbread 1891 Victorian mansion, a gem lying deserted in Los Gatos, I saw the whole thing. Even though the how was a mystery. Still is a mystery. I can't claim the vision. It simply is there. The seeing is like a current, like the perfume before the thunder. There, I saw a contemporary arts center with working artists' studios and a Colette's of Paris-like showroom. Here, I see a tea salon for writers and for those who venerate the sung word (lyrical prose, poetry, songwriting) to congregate. And I saw it before I learned anything about Los Gatos' artistic legacy, or Steinbeck's pull there.

It's a white grey day in California. So I justify being inside, writing here, on a rare September day where the sunny Mediterranean aura makes way for more reflective Irish pasture haze. I realize anyone that can afford to set foot in Palo Alto, stroll the broad University Avenue and walk upstairs to the Caffe de Doge with strawberry jam, a croissant and Italian espresso certainly can afford to be a philanthropist. It's all a matter of putting your wealth, in all its guises, where your heart is.

There is a persistent myth that one needs to be as wealthy as the Medicis in their day to be a patron of the arts, or to a philanthropist. I fell for it myself. I think the final dissolution of the fantasy came when I read about the postal clerk and librarian jointly earning less than $50,000 a year residing in a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment.

Nothing surprising there. Yet over the decades they cultivated friendships with artists and bought paintings, drawings, sculptures from the likes of John Cage, Christo, Donald Judd. This modest couple donated their $10 million art collection to the National Gallery of Art in  Washington.

It came down to their love of art, not their salary, in the end.

p.s. This post is in honor of Banned Book Week, September 23-30. Outright book burnings are rarer these days; stifling  challenging, controversial, provocative books has become more sophisticated.

p.p.s.  Upcoming Literacy and Literary Arts events I'm supporting/attending:

October 2nd. Very next salon has a The Red and the Black theme. Private home in Noe Valley, San Francisco. Inquire for invite. (Think red and black visual art, food, and couture plus life imitating art, human rather than omniscient Godlike narrator, Napoleanic empires and clergy.)

October 5th. Literacy for Change Benefit dinner in support of First Book, Room to Read and Bring Me a Book Foundation, sponsored by Kepler's Books. In attendance: Jason Roberts (of The Writer's Grotto), Andrew Sean Greer, Beth Lisick, James Dalessandro and others. Tickets are $85 per person. Private home in Atherton. Call Kepler's 650-324-4321 for more information.

October 6-14th. Various events. LitQuake Festival.

October 10th. Next meeting of my new Bluestocking Lit Salon (named after 18th century London meetings: "The entertainment was rigorous intellectual conversation, mixed with tea and literature readings," at Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Coffee (every other Tuesday, 7-9 p.m.). Teri Hope, the owner, is an enthusiastic supporter of community arts and an artist herself.

October 17th. An evening with the lyrical word (tentative, but 92% sure date) at Vino Locale in Palo Alto (they're all about local wine, food and art). I'm encouraging them to reinstate their Tuesday open mic by hosting Salon #5 there on a Tuesday night and thus inviting salonists to participate in original song and prose.

Bonus: "It's a beautiful morning and I am just sitting in it and enjoying it. Everything is ripe now apples, pears, grapes, walnuts. Carol has made pickles, and chutney, canned tomatoes. Prunes and raisins are on the drying trays. The cellar smells of apples and wine. The madrone berries are ripe and every bird in the country is here - slightly tipsy an very noisy. The frogs are singing about a rain coming but they can be wrong. It's nice." -  letter written by John Steinbeck writing from their ranch off Santa Cruz Highway circa 1938

Fertile Verges, Belle Epoques and Salons

"Salons are an example of what the historian Daniel Boorstin would have called "the Fertile Verge" - "a place of encounter between something and something else." Boorstin (and here I am wholly indebted to Virginia Postrel) pinpointed such "verges" as being nothing short of the secret to American creativity.

Postrel sums up what Boorstin was saying as follows:

"A verge is not a sharp border but a frontier region: where the forest meets the prairie or the mountains meet the flatlands, where ecosystems or ideas mingle . Verges between land and sea, between civilization and wilderness, between black and white, between immigrants and natives...between state and national governments, between city and countryside - all mark the American experience." - Jeremy Geelan (oh, I tweaked one teeny word, exchanging salons for Web 2.0, in above snippet)

The next salon is an afternoon tea nestled in a Belle Epoque evoking tearoom in downtown San Jose kitty-corner from the upcoming Central Place, part of the future urban revival of San Jose (imagine highrise penthouses, tree-lined promenades, shops, outdoor cafes, public art, galleries).

"There are few hours more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea." - Henry James

Why Monday? Galleries, restaurants, fashion boutiques, chocolatiers, jewelers, jazz clubs are often closed and thereby these artists are free to salon Monday evenings, and the intent of a salon is to hand-select an "eclectic combustible crowd of people that aren't "supposed" to go together like the fusion chefs mix ingredients into culinary taste explosions." What happens next is unpredictable: renaissances, movements, improvisations, belle epoques perhaps.

"Occurring at the midpoint of the Third Republic, the Belle Époque was considered a golden time of beauty, innovation, and peace between France and its European neighbors. New inventions made life easier at all social levels, the cultural scene thrived, cabaret, cancan, and the cinema were born, and art took new forms with Impressionism and Art Nouveau. Art and architecture in the style of this era in other nations is also sometimes called "Belle Époque" style." - Wikipedia entry

Gwendolyn: You have filled my tea with lumps of sugar, and though I asked most distinctly for bread and butter, you have given me cake. I am known for the gentleness of my disposition, and the extraordinary sweetness of my nature, but I warn you, Miss Cardew, you may go too far. - Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest

Let's go too far: Let's verge to beauty, innovation, peace. Details: Date: Monday, September 18th, 4 to 7:30 pm Location: Chic Chateau, 96 S. 3rd Street, San Jose, CA (corner of San Fernando and 3rd) Map Please request an invitation if you are to grace us with your charm, wit and artful verging banter. Limited to an intimate prime number 23. RSVP required. Yes, by all means, your confidants, collaborators, muses, lovers, and aseres (Afrocaribbean/Cuban slang for soul sibling) are warmly invited too. Cost: $15 includes exquisite teas, delectable old-world inspired treats served by owner Luvi Navarro whom left high-tech corporate HR to share her trio of passions with us at her new boutique: fashion, tea, and home decor. (Includes all tax & gratuities.) p.s. Look for upcoming salon at the gorgeous "live in the moment, live in the season" Tanglewood Restaurant, Santana Row, San Jose.

Wordplay: (I love etymology)

verge (n.)

"edge, rim," 1459, from M.Fr. verge "rod or wand of office," hence "scope, territory dominated," from L. virga "shoot, rod stick," of unknown origin. Earliest attested sense in Eng. is now-obsolete meaning "male member, penis" ( c.1400). Modern sense is from the notion of within the verge (1509, also as Anglo-Fr. dedeinz la verge), i.e. "subject to the Lord High Steward's authority" (as symbolized by the rod of office), originally a 12-mile radius round the king's court. Sense shifted to "the outermost edge of an expanse or area." Meaning "point at which something happens" (as in on the verge of) is first attested 1602. "A very curious sense development." [Weekley]

verge (v.)

"tend, incline," 1610, from L. vergere "to bend, turn, tend toward, incline," from PIE *werg- "to turn," from base *wer- "to turn, bend" (see versus). Much influenced by verge (n.) in its verbal form meaning "to be adjacent to" (1787).

image Closeup of the Chic Chateau tearoom.

Whisked to 1740s Paris: Next Salon Sept 6th, Gervais Restaurant

"For more than a century, pilgrims from all over the world seeking romance and passion have made their way to the City of Light. The seductive lure of Paris has long been irrestible to lovers, artists, epicureans, and connoisseurs of the good life..." - film historian and author John Baxter's memoir, We'll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light

Inspired by 1740s Parisian salons, join us at Gervais Restaurant in downtown Saratoga village (right next door to the yummy Saratoga Chocolates!) on Wednesday, September 6th. Enjoy a Paris-styled menu, engaging renaissance-sparking conversation in a cozy sidewalk patio reserved for 20 of us, and a private reception for the evocative paintings of a French-born painter and friend of mine, Gilbert Marosi.

Parisian journalist and video-blogger Jean-Baptiste Su lives in Silicon Valley covering the high-tech world for La Tribune, France's Wall Street Journal equivalent, shares his passion for food with his newest creative baby, the Gervais, along with his chef-partner Vietnamese-born Vanessa Van Trang. They are totally in tune with bridging and mixing the ingredients of the food, arts, social media and technology worlds. And they totally get the European-styled slow scintillating foreplay of conversation.

We're still dreaming up a 1740s salon-inspired menu...but expect delectable temptations in range of $25 (excluding alcoholic beverages).

Please request an invite if you are attuned to slow food, slow conversation, inspiring living and a Silicon Valley renaissance. We are limiting to 20 to assure camaraderie and intimacy.

More details forthcoming, but I know this is enough information to follow your heart's desire. Again Wed, Sept 6th, we'll start gathering the salon at 6 pm. The patio is ours for the evening. Please, yes, your partners, significant others, mistresses and lovers (well, perhaps use your discretion!) are most certainly warmly invited.

"The [Paris] salons of the 1740s [composed of writers, artists, nobility] were, as has been well put, "un lieu de brassage social intense (places of intense social ferment)." - Madame de Pompadour: Mistress of France

Oh, the rest of the backcover of Baxter's "We'll Always Have Paris" is too lusciously tempting to leave out, especially if you, like I, wish to be whisked to Paris at the very least in spirit, if not flesh:

"...a delightfully salacious tour of the sultry Parisian corners most guidebooks ignore: from the literary cafes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and de Beauvoir to the brothels where Dietrich and Duke Ellington held court, where Salvador Dali sated his fantasies, and Edward VII kept a sumptuous champagne bath for his favorite girls." 

Au revoir,
Evelyne (nom de plume for the next salon)

images Three Graces, Arms Akimbo, and Rome by my friend, Gilbert Marosi

Silicon Valley Salon: Ferragosta, Celebrating the Fertility and Slow Modernness of August

"It's unhealthy to eat alone," Fiorella says. She welcomes guests to the table with an innate sense of hospitality. Another plate or three or four, what's the bother? At a summer dinner, Marco looks down at the row of plates and says, "It's good to have at least twenty at dinner," and he's right. - Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

Diane Michlig and I invite you to a midsummer night's Italian holiday feast and conversational salon at Diane's intimate garden patio within Legends Fine Crafts Gallery, downtown Menlo Park, Tuesday, August 15th 6 p.m. Guests of honor include artist-couple Stephen and Jacqueline Osborn (current works will be on display).

If you are passionate about digging deeply into the locali soil and being engaged in a fertile Silicon Valley renaissance and cross-pollinating among the agriculture/gastronomic, arts plus technology communities, please request an invite at c r o s s r o a d s d i s p a t c h e s -at- gmail -dot- com. Your significant other is certainly warmly invited (after all, lovers and muses inspired much of the Renaissance beginning with Dante and Beatrice). Limited to first 20 guests.

Ferragosta, August 15th, is an Italian holiday originating from 18 BC "when the Roman Emperor Augustus declared that all of the month of August would be dedicated to the Feriae Augusti, a series of festivals and celebrations that paid homage to "Diana, the Goddess whose task it was to oversee the woods, the phases of the Moon, and Maternity" and "celebrate Vortumnus, God of the Seasons and therefore of the ripening of crops, Conso, the God of the Harvest, and Opeconsiva, who personified the abundant harvest. In short, the Feriae were a celebration of fertility and maternity."

These long summer Mediterranean days often has me dreaming that the defacto capital of Silicon Valley, San Jose, is poised and sitting on the cusp of where Florence was perhaps in the year 1492, and given enough passione and clarity dreams manifest into the world as marble Davids, and concrete Googles (this Friday San Jose Mercury News thought the same possibility too):

"Both in country and in town, according to humanist precepts, Lorenzo [de' Medici, ruler of the Florentine city-state during the Italian Renaissance] established a convention whereby there was no pecking-order in the seating at meals: those first to arrive either took the 'highest' seats, or simply sat where they chose. In addition to scholars, translators and philosophers whom he subsidized and encouraged, he also gathered around him such cultivated men as the book-dealer and chronicler of his times Vespasiano da Bisticci, the musician Antonio Squarcialupi, the painters Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, the sculptor Bertoldo, now a relatively old man who was the last surviving pupil of Donatello; and, towards the end of Lorenzo's life, the difficult, fiery, teenaged prodigy, Michelangelo. He provided a forum for all these artists and art lovers and under his aegis they flourished." - Il Gigante: Michelangelo, Florence and the David, by Anton Gil

Shopping list: Ripe fruits in the farmer's markets including lusty heirloom tomatoes (pineapple, brandywine, etc), figs, white peaches and fresh basil, Bravo Farms cheese, Bay Bread roasted garlic loaf, Spenger balsamic vinegars, Saratoga Chocolates, variety of iced and hot peach black and oolong teas...basta?...

Ferragosta, at first, baffled us as a holiday until we began to understand it as a state of mind. We, gradually, have entered this state of mind ourselves. Simply put, ferragosta, August 15, marks the ascension of the corporeal body and soul of the Virgin Mary into heaven...But the day itself is only a marker in the month, for the broader meaning of the word is August holidays and a period of intense laissez-faire. - Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

images Stephen Osborn's La Morra, Jacqueline Osborn's Beach Hut and Afternoon Affair.

Bonus: The coalition of Silicon Valley CEOs and cultural organizations, 1stACT.org, includes in its reading list Carl Honore's In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed (2004) saying:

Canadian born, London-based journalist, Honore, goes in search of balance and illustrates how changing the pace of life is changing the face of commerce. This book is a useful augmentation to reading on creative economies and particularly adds to thinking about cultivating your distinct advantage within a community whether it’s a village of hundreds or city of millions.

p.s. The Slow Food movement began in Italy. If anyone has talents to share -- whether its playing a mandolin, or concocting the cocktail art of a Bella Bellini, please do share and let us know.

Italy on My Mind

"I thought -- and now I know -- that Italians claim more time for their lives." - Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

It was love at first sight. The first post I saw front and center on the new Simona Invites You to Italy blog was about chocolate. (Thanks Yvonne for the announcement.)

Ah, Italy. Memories of 2003. Memories of abandoning my first blog (titled The Big Picture):

"I abandoned my first blog somewhere in the vicinity of the Duomo in Milan. Strolling in the shadows of the cathedral, I noted families walking slowing in the plaza, laughing, immersed in the languid Sunday evening tradition.

Waiting in line that thick July evening for my nocciola gelato was savored just as much as the first lick of the cone.

Italians perfected “Il Dolce Far Niente" ("the sweetness of doing nothing") to an art and I was an ardent student." - "The Artistic Gifts of Women Bloggers", New Communications Review, July 22, 2005, Evelyn Rodriguez

I've been noting a definitive love affair for all things Italy (and it has hardly anything to do with the World Cup game) especially within the Palo Alto/Menlo Park vicinity.

I only have time for one anecdote: A friend shares that his Stanford semester abroad program was at a lush villa outside Florence. Back home, his Palo Alto dormitory was called Casa Italiana and everyone spoke Italian in the hallways and their Italian chef was the envy of the campus. Tom recounts, "In Italy, I'd walk into stores with my sister-in-law [Italian] and she nods, 'Bella' when just the right shirt or tie is brought out. Whereas here, I'm greeted with clerks asking what color I need or if it the jacket is for an interview. I know bella when I see it, feel it. It's not a matter of function."

In Italy that April 2003 it felt ludicrous to be squirrelled away after hours in my client's offices flinging out blog posts when the streets and smells of Italy beckoned.

"Whatever a guidebook says, whether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct." - Frances Mayes

Back in Silicon Valley, I never picked my original blog back up because I realized it was missing an essential vital ingredient: passione. I was too self-conscious. Or, in other words, I was contained.

"For many Italians, passion is an emotion we simply can’t contain. If it is there, it must come out." - Simona

The other day I wrote in my journal: The secret to life -- Don't resist it. I believe it's not physically going to Italy that calls us so much as psychicly going to Italy. It's living the vita Italiana that's highly contagious.

Contagious? I should say seductive. "Go to Piacere Mio. It's a very seductive kind of store," Sara, my calligraphy instructor says. Yummy, I can't wait to go:

Owner Nancy [Verdtzabella] is enthralled with Italian culture. "I love the beauty and care they put into everything," she said of the Italian merchants. - "New downtown stationery store offers paper imported from Italy", Los Altos Town Crier, December 17, 2003

Murano glass pens, luxuriant Italian paper, a flamboyant love of writing personal handmade letters and notecards rather than e-mail, and they visit, know and like the suppliers they carry -- what more can one ask for in a store? (Btw, I'm making my own business cards by hand now. Each it's own piece of art. That's another story.)

Yesterday, via Jeff Nolan's blog, I stumble onto a new VC blog from Tom Cole at Trinity Ventures that was love at first sight too. The first post I saw front and center on the new Consuming Ambitions blog was about chocolate. Déjà vu.

Called Consuming Ambitions, it might just as well be called Consuming Passions (uh, but that site is already claimed by a porn site). Any VC that blogs about the top 5 ways to enjoy heirloom tomatoes rather than the top 5 tips on negotiating your term sheet is on my ever-shrinking list of blogs to read.

"I'd never guess that Amy would gravitate to gardening," says Jerry, a former Hollywood film executive and now a marketing consultant. A lifelong urbanite, Amy [Giaquinta] had been involved in media too, working in television production about ten years ago." Now, their two-acre Napa Valley estate is home to organic heirloom tomatoes with "names like Moonglow and Aunt Ruby's German Green...Today she has an informal business, supplying seedlings and tomatoes to friends and local chefs with kitchen gardens." - "Tomatoes: A Love Story", Food & Wine, August 2006 (I noticed this eco-epicurean issue of Food & Wine laying at IDEO's offices the other day.)

The Italian mindset flourishes in the angel community too. Via Tom Cole's blog, I revisit the Angel Forums site. In addition to the usual suspects, I note the Angel Forums portfolio is onto this post-industrial boutique artisan trend:

• A very avante garde restaurant experience (restaurant, art-gallery, stage and club) named the supperclub  ("Supperclub is founded by artists and therefore art will run through the veins of the club forever.")
• The yummy Charles Chocolates (hat tip from Charles Chocolates: invite blogger connoisseurs to your press tastings and tours, merci beaucoup oops, grazie.) The founder was an art major, btw. ("Everything is made by hand in very small batches using traditional techniques, and all of the chocolates are shipped to our customers within three days of being created.")
• Speciality's Cafe and Bakery ("You will always see ovens, mixing machines, dough, flour, grain, and many other odds and ends a real bakery needs and uses...healthy, wholesome products from scratch")
• Tea Living (children's apparel, global aesthetics with tagline "the world is a big place, especially through the eyes of a child". Plus: "We envision with a sense of art, approaching the process of our work organically—moved by the distinctive beauty of a global source towards the creation of an inspired, original interpretation.")

Va Bene!

p.s. This is the last weekend of the Tuscan-inspired Napa Valley Festival del Sole ("music, art, cuisine, wine, wellness"); you'll have to catch it in Cortona, Italy for its next stop.

p.p.s. Have you evere noticed that Panera Bread's warm colors - mustards, olives, plums - and its ambiance seem Tuscan-inspired too?

images from August 2006 Food & Wine, chocolatier Andrea Slitti from Simona's blog, cover of Chocolate Therapy: Dare to Discover Your Inner Center, and the Chocaholic event poster at supperclub from Tom Cole's blog

Art is Either Plagiarism or Revolution

It was either that quote by Paul Gauguin, or this these two interrelated ones for a headline. Gaugin won out as I'm in Parisien frame of mind, but I still want to share the two runners-up.

• "Thus the tea-master strove to be something more than the artist - art itself." - Alexandra Stoddard

"It is time to come out as yourself." - Neil Crofts

My little contribution to a new renaissance in Silicon Valley? Reinstating the Parisien tradition of the salon:

In the early 17th century, the behavior of male aristocrats still reflected the idea that physical strength and military prowess were a man's most important virtues. Around 1610 a young noblewoman, fed up with the prevailing loutishness, did something unprecedented: she abandoned Louis XIII's court and set up her own "alternative space." The Marquise de Rambouillet remodelled a mansion near the Louvre, creating a suite of adjoining salons, or large reception rooms, culminating in her sanctum sanctorum, the so-called chambre bleu. In this room (also known "the sanctuary of the Temple of Athene"), the marquise received her visitors from her bed. - Salon.com's "Brief History of Salons"

Centuries of salon culture ensued. It was a salon hostess who published James Joyce's Ulysses when no one else would. Women were instrumental in arranging that the leading thinkers of the day attended: artists, writers, philosophers, politicians, scientists.

These are busy influential men, and as Salon.com rightly caught on: "Without erotic intrigue, it is unlikely that so many 17th-century men and women of, uh, affairs would have sacrificed their evenings to debates over Racine's prosody." This wasn't simply idle gossip, it was an intimate private place where folks were introduced to people that were outside their normal public social spheres (for instance, politicians don't hobnob with avant-garde painters).

Anything I say here is just tip of iceberg. I'd love to converse more. Face-to-face. If you live in the Bay Area, come over to an open house this weekend at Legends Fine Crafts Gallery, 516 Santa Cruz Ave, Menlo Park from noon to 8 pm Saturday and noon to 6 pm Sunday (coincides with 20th Annual Connoisseur's Marketplace, so tons of art, food but not parking).

Ben Franklin went to Paris salons to raise funds for the American revolution. Later he'd present his scientific ideas such as electricity to these same salons.

The French, certainly, loved Franklin. With his fur hat and his Poor Richard homilies, he was everything they imagined America to be. Or at least he knew how to play the part. He also loved the cosmopolitan whirl of pre-Revolutionary France, and apparently made out like a bandit in the Paris salons. The beautiful Madame Helvétius (to whom Fontenelle, at age 100, was moved to say, "Ah, madame, if I were only eighty again!") took a liking to Franklin and scolded him for not coming to see her. "Madame, I am waiting until the nights become longer," he said. (Take my word for it, in the 18th century that was pretty risqué.)" - "It's Mostly About the Benjamins", Rob Macdougall blog, 12/2/04

John Adams accompanied Franklin to one Parisien salon and was rather appalled. Adams was a bit puritanical.

The Parisian salons were the opposite - provocative, scintillating.

Sort of how Menlo Park used to be. A little controversial even.

Steve Jobs waltzing into Don Valentine 's office (yep, 3000 Sand Hill Road is a Menlo Park address) for Apple's funding wearing cutoffs and barefoot (or maybe it was flip-flops) was controversial.

Imagine Ken Kesey tripping out (it's research, man) at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital on LSD while he worked the night shift in the psychiatric ward. He spawned not only his own novel but Tom Wolfe's too. The Grateful Dead hanging out in Kepler's bookstore in Menlo Park and playing bluegrass and folk at a nearby field in Palo Alto. Marxists meeting at Kepler's and working by day at the national labs. (John Markoff, New York Times technology columnist, writes that the whole personal computer revolution can be traced to within a ten-mile radius with Kepler's as the hub.) The Homebrew Computer Club gathering at a garage in Menlo Park ("From the ranks of this club came the founders of many microcomputer companies, including Bob Marsh, Adam Osborne, and Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.")

Anyway, in my calligraphy class Monday, that's when I first saw this quote by Paul Gaugin, "Art is either plagiarism or revolution."  And it's stuck with me.  Haunted me. When I'm writing, it feels natural, it's just flowing.  Of course it's original. I'm not trying to be provocative, scintillating -- that would be contrived. I'm just expressing what wants to come out.

So a friend is playing devil's advocate. She mentions a local Menlo Park art institution. They could hold salons. Why would any philantropist invest in mine? (First, the Medicis were hardly philantropists, and second they're not mine. It's more of a platforrm, an API, if you will.) (I'm currently reading Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence. Sure, there's a few parallels with Sand Hill Road and the Florentine  Medicis.)

So I had to check out this institution for myself. Perhaps we could host salons at their location too (I am on look-out for places to host where people already congregate, gather, stroll), I thought. Well, not as is, it's like a purported arts theater that only plays Disney films. I like Disney films, yet....

I certainly couldn't imagine reading my white peach poem there. The dripping juice, the erotic play in the Trevi Fountain symbolic of the dawn after the dark night of soul. "And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) until Crayola and the civil rights movement change it to "flesh" became "peach". And there's Bellini's 'Agony of  the Garden' where Jesus prays until dawn in the foreground with Judas and the trailing soldiers and that painting's pink dawn glow inspires the Bellini made from white peach puree and prosecco at Harry's Bar, Venice, the haunt of  Hemingway and Maugham, and you get idea, yeah, it's a long poem in progress.

I imagine reading there, and I'm tempted to compromise. To fit into what's deemed acceptable, rather than true to me.

This year's tricentennial of Benjamin Franklin's birth, has brought a slew of biographies and articles. Reading one review, it begins: "It is a popular axiom today, that no one with "great ideas" and a passionate commitment to uplift all humanity, can be "politically successful." That's left to the "practical man," the compromiser, the manipulator. No one exposes the falsity of this axiom more completely than Benjamin Franklin..."

Hmmm, you could say the same of the Founding Fathers. They had a passionate commitment to high ideals.

I have a lot of friends pushing me to explain my latest obsession with art. Why? Of course they end this same discussion admitting they were daydreaming about Goya and the Prada Musuem the other day. (Why are you converting your apartment to a boudoir is a second popular query.)

"The idea behind "The Accidental Masterpiece," writes chief art critic for the New York Times Michael Kimmelman, "is that art provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully..."

"I hope to approach the art of seeing here in the spirit of an amateur," he writes in his introduction. "I mean amateur in the original sense of the word, as a lover, someone who does something for the love of it, wholeheartedly."

Art gives me a nudge -  as if we need a license - to be a lover, my natural self.

A lover doesn't compromise. They are. They are wholly themselves. Wholeheartly.

Whole, total, absolute - intero - in Italian. Whole, entire, all - entero - in Spanish. A lover remains open. A lover coasts in the direction of themselves, gently takes the foot off the brakes.

A lover reads white peach poems with aplomb.

p.s. A lover builds cathedrals.

There's an old story about a passer-by who stops to ask three stonemasons: "What are you doing?"

"Doin' me job," replies the first stonemason, gruffly.

"Cuttin' stone," says the second one, irritably.

The third stonemason straightens his back, looks up and says, with passion in his eyes: "I'm building a cathedral."

images white peaches via Flickr by Old Shoe Woman; "Agony of the Garden" by Giovanni Bellini; "Sweet Dawn Study" by James McCallum

Update: A philanthropist and friend reminds me: "Well I think it all depends on the intention. I like to think of Vittoria Colonna as a well-intentioned patron/philanthropist versus any of the Medicis."

That sweet poet and nun (alright, technically: "Although she did not take the veil, Vittoria Colonna lived the last years of her life in a convent, dressed like a nun, and was buried as a nun") and beloved of Michelangelo was a bit of a radical in her day. She lived her intention and ideas:

• The idea of gifting freely.
• The idea of art as a free gift.
• The idea of God's grace as a free gift. (And this during a time when Medicis and everyone else were earning and buying their way to Heaven. At this time, money-lending and banking regardless of interest rate is considered an unnatural sin according to the Church: "It's like money copulating.")

So I'm reminded of my post, "An Abundant Fertile New Renaisssance" about gifts and patronage and renaisssance and Vittoria and Michelangelo.

And I'm re-reminded of my intention. How easy they are to compromise. It all depends on intention.

And there in that post I find another answer to Why art?

"Love is like a painter. The works of a good painter so charm men that, in contemplating them, they remain suspended, and sometimes to such an extent that it seems they have been put in an ecstasy and have been taken outside of themselves, and seem to forget themselves." - 15c Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola