Crossroads Dispatches

long live ephemeral art...even this thing called blogging

"What you writing a book there?" says the Canadian Katrina Relief worker (I only know this because the gathering of men's T-shirts announce such) as I sit to write this post.

"Naw, that'd take way too long to come out," I shoot back from my chair at Caffea.

And in a hyperdrive world, ain't that the truth. I'm not sure I'm the same sack of cells, tissues and sinews that I was last week. I'm pretty certain some moments that it's only because you tell me it's so that this moment's bead is strung together in a rainbow link chain like the beaded necklaces thrown yesterday on Royal Street to the next moment's, but I'm not really so sure. And I definitely don't believe what I did in 2006.

It's not just me. Look around. Thus I believe this is an age appropriate to ephemeral art. (And I'd rather not define that. Let it be it be an open mystery for a while.)

Ephemera can reek of negative connotations. That which is not lasting, or worth lasting, perhaps. (Have you ever noticed cut flowers in a vase in your dining room are ephemeral?)Cultural critics hurl the epithet "ephemera" as a degrading term. 

"This Web 2.0 thing has been brewing for fifty years ever since Marshall McLuhan, the subversive founder of digital media studies, told us in 1964 that the medium is the message. I believe that all the most corrosive ideals and moral assumptions of the last thirty years -- the soft, druggy relativism of the Sixties counterculture and the libertarian Nineties exuberance have merged, in the Web 2.0 movement, to create an ideological cult of individual empowerment, creativity, and community...[Oh, no, not creativity and community!] But the truth of this "authenticity" is the cacophonous din of ephemera: The self-authored content on the contemporary Internet is either irreverent, narcissistic or pornographic (or, as in Web 2.0 sites like Voyeurweb, simultaneously all three)." - SF Chronicle Guest Blogger Andrew Keen

Yay, long live ephemera!

In New Orleans, I meet artists of all kinds everyday. It's not everyone that protests, but I have given up defending blogging as an art form: "That's not writing," shoots back the poet at the gallery opening a few weeks ago. He doesn't read blogs though. And he's still pissed at a friend that wrote something about their dinner on her blog for the whole wide world to peruse.

Whatever. I'm doing this no-writing thing or whatever ya callit anyhow...

sure and (and not that I measure up to the Beats) Truman Capote accused Jack Kerouac of "typing, not writing."

"What if you lost all your blog archives?" I'm asked.

I shrug: "There's more where that came from."

Anyhow, that's a long winded way of introducing the topic and my love affair with ephemeral art. I'm sensing this exchange says a lot about the present future of 'art' too:

Doug [Aitken]: The weight of film production is a heavy one. We're coming into a new era of lightness and nomadism, where a sixteen-year-old with a Mac can direct, shoot, and cut a film. I'm interested in seeing how this changes the Hollywood studio system.

Matthew [Barney]: Hollywood blockbuster films are so over the top, they have become something else entirely. Like you, I am interested in either end of the spectrum. It is everything in the middle -- the straight-on storytelling stuff -- that I am not really that interested in, like so-called independent film. - from Broken Screen: 26 Conversations Expanding the Image Breaking the Narrative With Doug Aitken, by Doug Aitken

p.s. It's surreal to read a comment today referencing one of my posts written way back in September 16, 2004.  Well, had I submitted a manuscript on September 16, 2004 there would be a good chance that it'd be on bookshelves now. And Whoa! it'd be off the mark in terms of what I'm into these days.

Also, the feedback loop dynamism of this medium is vital. I'm not communicating to dead compressed piece of wood chips chemically treated to look like flat ivory parchment as when I write in the journal, nope, I'm communing with you. And I actually know a lot of you face to face. Yes, that makes all the difference in the world.

Tucked in that ancient 2004 post are two quotes that also reveal  that at the core essence of our soul purpose, "the more things change, the more they stay the same". Those quotes are:

"After all is said and done, after all of our grand self-actualization and accomplishments, our self-esteem and degrees, our meaning-making and our financial success - we still feel lonely. What drives us in the world is our attempt to move from our loneliness to a place of relationship, connection, and loving. Our soul prints [our essential unique selves] seek to reach out to the prints of other souls - to touch them, and to be touched by them in turn. The more our soul prints connect, the sharper their signatures, and the more sustained and expansive our souls will be. Our soul prints are driven to other soul prints... Nothing is more important to us than the need to share our lives with another...to imprint and be imprinted upon." - Soul Prints, by Marc Gafni

"We have faith in the potentialities of others, of ourselves, and of mankind because, and only to the degree which, we have experienced the growth of our own potentialities, the reality of growth in ourselves, the strength of our own power of reason and of love." - Erich Fromm

images Joan Cox' Angel Trumpet Dance - the ephemeral angel trumpet flowers are lovely here (yep, still in New Orleans); Georges Clairin's Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt (seen at current NOMA exhibit) I admire Sarah Bernhardt, something about live theater has totally captivated me of late; so I was happy to luck into a six-week ten-minute play writing class taught in the Quarter

three years of Showing Up & Doing the Next most Obvious thing

"People in the West are always getting ready to live." - Chinese proverb

I came across an old journal this weekend, and among the eye-opening to-do list for 2003 (my desires tend to have more substantial longevity than I would have imagined given my restless & dilettante soul) were:

"write a consistent (~3x/week) blog"

"live my life as continually unfolding creative expression."

I abandoned the 2003 blog somewhere in the vicinity of the Duomo in Milan. It's pretty hard to be lured behind a computer in Italia. I cannot put the blame entirely upon the Italians for infecting with me (ha, it's always mutual influence) with la dolce far niente ("the sweetness of doing nothing"). There was already something beckoning toward that simplicity.

So when I restarted a blog on February 6, 2004, I did it with a Zen sensibility: I'd just take one day at a time, and I'd show up to write something, hopefully that something was fresh and immediate. I'd let go of past posts and not concern myself with future posts. This. Just this post.

Even after three years of blogging I still have to be reminded by other bloggers that this is an art form in its own right. I started this, my second uptake at blogging, to prepare for and chronicle a journey across the world to the creative centers of the world for a future magnum opus, you know that masterpiece book out there yonder over the horizon.

A new reader writes privately in response to "Higher Purpose - Now or Later?": "My own thinking on this topic has very recently shifted... just last week, I decided to quit waiting for the "right conditions" and the "big audience" for my higher purpose efforts. " And voila! she took the next most obvious step.

Funny, last night at the homey Chinese dumpling nook in my neighborhood, my fortune cookie read: "You create your own stage. The audience is waiting." I wasn't going to share that because it sounded arrogant at first glance. But it's not something you grasp at first glance.

Oh, how many times have I heard (have you heard?): A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step? I suppose if I learned anything about running 50-mile trail races it's that you don't think about the finish line during the race. It's one foot in front of another, and if I have an aim at all it's too get to the M&Ms and bananas (yes, they do have M&Ms at ultramarathons) at the next aid station.

As I've said in my about page, instead of going to Iran, and Israel, and Ireland, and India and other creatively juicy locales for a book, the blog took me on a journey. Over time it was not a means to an end (maybe a book deal?!), it was its own reward for its own sake.

Today I can say I have blogged on average 3 times a week over the last 3 years. Who shall know when the adventure ends? And when anyhow is anything truly done?

"To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture." - Picasso

There were highs and there were lows in those three years. Yet something had grabbed of hold of me that wanted to keep showing up. On his 10th year anniversary of teaching, my spiritual teacher Adyashanti writes:

"Never did I anticipate or imagine the size and growth of this Sangha [community]. There were some evenings in the early days of my teaching when I was the only one who came. On such evenings I would sit in silence for an hour or so before gathering my things and returning home. Other times two or three people would come, and over time more and more. From the beginning, the numbers were unimportant. I always felt that if I could help just one person to truly wake up, I would feel fortunate. And how very fortunate I have been! - Adyashanti

In her book "Watching the Tree: A Chinese Daughter Reflects on Happiness, Tradition and Spiritual Wisdom", Adeline Yen Mah says that the word for physician in Chinese is yi sheng. In contrast to the prevalent western view of a physician as curer of disease, yi sheng means healer of life. The main problem with the western approach is that one's focus is then on observing and avoiding disease, while the other observes and embraces life.

"Physician, heal thyself," echoes to me with every keystroke I've taken here. Maybe I write about the creative mind or about marketing or about food yet ultimately these strides and stumbles that come out in the form of blog posts are lines in a neverending devotional song to life and a giving over to that surge and force of life and inviting you to join the celebration too.

I don't even know why, but this story is what is fresh and immediate and today's:

"The Longs were heirs to one of the greatest fortunes in America. One day Dr. Tony Temple, a physician friend, visited his patient John Long in his home in Florida, where John was recovering from a recent heart attack. Tests done while John was in the hospital had revealed that he also suffered from high cholesterol as well as prostate cancer.

On entering the house, Tony noticed six shabbily dressed Chinese workmen laying butterfly tiles in the backyard. John's wife explained  that she was building a Chinese garden and had hired this crew from Suzhou, in the People's Republic of China. Though uneducated, the men were experienced and skillful at laying tiles.

John was sitting up in bed eating lunch. Tony was horrified to see cream of mushroom soup, lamb chops with French fries and apple pie a la mode on his tray. "This meal is full of fat and cholesterol. It's bad for your heart and prostate. You need fresh vegetables and bean curd. Why don't you try the Pritkin diet?" he admonished.

"It's so tasteless! I tried it but I can't eat that stuff. I want to enjoy my food! Eating should be a pleasure, not a duty."

At that moment they became aware of the most delicious aroma of sizzling onions and garlic emanating from the garden. Tony opened the shutters and peered out. Sitting on their haunches around a portable stove, the Chinese workmen were lunching on fresh tomato soup, steamed rice, stir-fried cabbage and a wokful of spicy bean curd sauteed with garlic and chilies. With a shock, Tony and the Longs suddenly realized that six penniless laborers from China were eating healthier and better-tasting food than their billionaire American employer!" - Watching the Tree, by Adeline Yen Mah

images "At the Table" by Oleg Zhivetin: "I show in my paintings what people cannot see in real life. I show individuality, the intelligence, dreams and emotions, that every human being is different; and because of that, they are beautiful." ; AP Photo by Fernando Bustamante from La Tomatina festival in Buñol, Spain.

indie spirit, the commercial conundrum Fresh from Sundance

"Ms. If you would like photos or footage from Sundance Film Festival please email me your information and it will be supplied.

Footage and images include:
Christian Slater
Nick Cannon
Kristin Bell
Teri Hatcher
Gretchen Mol
Keri Russell
Gwyneth Paltrow
Chris Klug -- Olympic Snowboarding Medalist"

I don't think the above in my email inbox quite qualifies as a social media press release.

Nonetheless it points out an interesting fact that when I told people that I was going back to Sundance this year (last time was '03) one common response was:

"Oh, Sundance." The shake of the head or a wistful sigh is de rigueur here. "It's gotten too commercial."

The above publicist's email seemingly confirms those suspicions that it's all about Bigger is better. Buzz. Celebrity gloss. Although they all sang the very same refrain, just emanating from a different chorus of mouths, when I held on to my Utah driver's license three months after my move to San Jose so I could get in on a locals' pass to Sundance 2003. Conventional wisdom tells you that it can't be getting any less commerical four years later.

I know how they feel, as I've felt this way: "Oh, the blogosphere. It's gotten too commercial."

"Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life." - Jack Kerouac

It has taken a small miracle for me to get back into social media. I spent the better part of the last two years "deep hanging out" which is to say I mostly engaged in live face-to-face (i.e. meatspace) interaction. In many ways, I backpacked across the Bay Area the way I'd backpacked across Thailand and Sri Lanka in winter '05.

I'm not jaded about blogging, or social media. And I'm not cynical:

"you still think all this promises revolution and change? nice to know there are believers"  - email from a friend last week

Though I can be disappointed. The indie spirit that enthused the earliest bloggers and blogging seems eclipsed at times by a different ethos.

"A man who allows wild passion to arise within, himself burns his heart, then after burning adds the wind that thereto which ignites the fire again, or not, as the case may be." - Jack Kerouac

I didn't audibly groan but I came close when moderator Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame asked each of the panelists at the "Community Voice and Social Networking" panel in the New Frontier on Main microcinema (I adore the New Frontier concept! more later) to give an example of using social networking tools "to gain an audience." Now maybe I heard wrong but I swear Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove the day before in "The Business of Web 2.0: Media and the Net Now" panel refer to the whole she-bang as a marketing platform - without dissent or qualifications from anyone else.

So rarely is it questioned that Web 2.0, blogging, and social networking's value lies in its promotional and distribution capabilities: an amplified ripple-effect word-of-mouth network. Just like mass media, albeit fragmented.

(Now how is it that a so-called marketer sees in all this not so much as tool of promotion, but a largely untapped in its potential art medium?)

I think many of us fear that it's too idealistic to expect anything to stay true - in this case, a showcase for independent vision in film - for 26 years with it being eventually compromised and subsumed by the equations on spreadsheets and the machinations of industry.

"The reading at the Six Gallery would be different from any other Bay Area poetry reading. It would be bigger and wilder and far more public. Everything would be allowed. Nothing would be sacred, not even poetry itself... [Allen] Ginsberg explained that the reading was meant to "defy the system of academic poetry, official reviews, New York publishing machinery, national sobriety and generally-accepted standards to good taste." - Jonah Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation

That maybe we're being too idealistic ourselves. That's the natural order of things: start young and energetic and idealistic and well, you know, it's the Woodstock kids that emigrated to Wall Street. Eventually everyone sells out when the rent is past due two months, and you licked clean the last jar of peanut butter. More insidious, everyone knows you definitely sell out when you are flamboyantly successful.

Yeah I am totally weary of the (all too tidy black-and-white) sell out myth.

Sundance 2007 I was relieved to find was big enough to encompass celebrity gloss if that was what floated your boat and it was provocative and exploratory if that was what floated your boat. The ocean is large enough to embrace yacht and dinghy and speedboat and ocean liner and rubber duckies alike.

Going back to Sundance reminded me of the indie spirit,  period. And why this blog is intended for those of the indie persuasion.

To me, indie means your impetus is a vision, and typically one you cannot shake off. The impetus chose you, grabs you, and not the other way around. The impetus is not your pocketbook. (Tara calls it mojo backed by "a higher purpose". Other musings on mojo and signature.)

To me, indie means seeing that vision through uncompromised. Uncompromised doesn't mean you're not influenced by startling brilliant suggestions and eruptions and collaborations coming from others. (Uncompromising does not mean keeping an intact ego).

When I look at a piece of art - and art to me is anything that comes from that place of inspiration, that unshakeable impetus - and if it comes from that impetus it is like a force of nature, sweeping me away like an invisible cyclone, in a breathtaking way, tottering on the edge of exhilaration and terror, beauty and awe. I sense the force kinetically, viscerally, energetically, subliminally, cellularly.

"In the lofty language of Ginsberg and Corso, the "reading was such a violent and beautiful expression of their revolutionary individuality (a quality bypassed in American poetry since the formulations of Whitman), conducted with such surprising abandon and delight by the poets themselves, and presenting such a high mass of beautiful unanticipated poetry, that the audience, expecting some Bohemian stupidity, was left stunned, and the poets were left with the realization that they were fated to make a permanent change in the literary firmament of the States." It was though Dionysus had come back from the dead, and as though art and religion were united again. And that was precisely what Ginsberg wanted - a return, as he put it, "to the original religious shamanistic prophetic priestly Bardic magic!"" - Jonah Raskin, The American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation

Commercial to me means the artist asked, foremost, "What will sell?" and that seed question begat the (oft formulaic) creation. And the end-result almost always leaves me untouched. No soulforce animates it. While others may denounce its crass commercial-ness, to me, it is inert at best.

"We had no idea that when we started it was going to work out. It was never intended to be commercial. It was intended to be a place of discovery... I honestly always believed that documentaries would reach a place equal to narrative film and I wanted us to be on the vanguard of that." - Robert Redford, in The Park Record, January 20-23, 2007, "Redford: It's a festival, not a market"

Here's where the myth-busting starts: An indie artist can be quite successful, quite lucratively compensated (in fact, good on ya as those Kiwis, er New Zealanders, say), and have broad universal appeal (as a literature buff, I inhaled the so-called classics precisely because of their ability to speak in a timeless mythic way).

Myth-busting: You're film can be stamped independent because of its independence from Hollywood (or whatever the normative standard is), and yet be devoid of the blood-pumping wide-eyed indie spirit.

It's the spark that drives creation that distinguishes indie from commercial.

Myth-busting: Indie doesn't need to mean relegated to niche, relegated to the obscurity of the tail end of the long tail, necessarily.

I'm particularly drawn to indie that speaks broad and grows deep and uproots the world more so than indie that nestles into a teeny (safe) nook :

"Although they ascribed to very different ideas about death and rebirth, nature and civilization, they [Beat poets at the infamous Howl reading] were bound together by a love of ancient myths and a penchant for transforming those myths to create new myths about the world. The historic reading at the Six Gallery provided the participants themselves with all the drama and excitement they needed to assert a grand cultural myth about the rebirth of poetry - the "Poetry Renaissance," as it came to be called - in San Francisco in 1955." - Jonah Raskin, American Scream

As much as I gravitate toward all nonfiction genre, documentaries can all too often evoke memories of sleeping through history class. Opening for Sundance, Brett Morgen's documentary spice things up a bit with his unconventional, non-literal take: "For his part, [Jerry] Rubin once called the Chicago 7 trial a "cartoon," and Morgen has taken him literally, rendering teeny snippets of the proceedings in stylized form (1)" splicing together archival footage with capture-motion animation and modern music.

"I wanted to make mythology out of history. Allen Ginsberg didn't really levitate," Brett Morgen, director of Sundance's opening documentary Chicago 10, says. "And I wanted it to be relevant [to youth today]."  

"The reading was an initiating event. Then and there, I set my belief in poetry as a truthful and adventurous art. It was important, I realized, to stand up in front of an audience and not write ivory tower quatrains that would gather dust in books." - Michael McClure, speaking nearly fifty years after the infamous Howl reading launched his indie career, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation

Myth-busting: Indie can resound broadly, and be pop art.

Patricia Zimmerman in “The Times, Did They A-Change?" panel provoked appause with: "Here we have history and archives re-mixed, reactivated, re-energized. We live in a world that wants us to be nice, anesthetized, ... and numb... I admire this film [Chicago 10] a lot because it has the guts to be pop culture."

Myth-busting: Indie spirit is only for folks on the fringe. Maybe, folks,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat 
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of 
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities 
contemplating jazz 
- snippet from Howl, by Allen Ginsberg

The indie spirit isn't confined to a certain type of people or a certain type of budget or certain anything. All one's gotta do, should we rise to the challenge, is allow ourselves  to be bowled over by unbounded indie inspiration:

"But why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?" - Jack Kerouac

p.s. People ask me about marketing, sometimes. This private email underscores my current vibe, which overlaps a bit with marketing: "I guess my true interest is in how [cultural] movements are born, things like civil rights movement, sixties, Italian renaissance, etc. And how communities come together after disaster to rebuild such as Indian Ocean tsunami, 9/11, Katrina, 1906 SF quake." In that vein, I'll be starting some pushing the edges of social media as social art Salons with Click.TV as a sponsor. First one is Feb 7th at Citizen Space at Citizen Agency.

p.p.s. Is Ze Frank selling out? ;-) I'm with Jeff: "I’m a fan and wish he’d stick with the small screen. Ze had created his own unique visual voice and his own comedy HQ."  Yep. I definitely believe social, online media is a viable medium in and of itself - so I don't find the small TV analogy that helpful.

Word fetish: Impetus is... a drift, impulsion, a force that moves something along. Inert is... indifferent, neutral, (having only a limited ability to react chemically; chemically inactive), sluggish, soggy, torpid (slow and apathetic) " 

images Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe; The Beatles poster; Evelyn Axell's La Cible, 1970; Chicago 10 still from Variety Jan 19, 2007 review 

Blogging as Live Theater, A Theater of Engagement

"I remember speaking to one film director who deplored the fact that he had to write an article about his film. In his words, he'd be happy to talk about it as much as he could, but writing was weighing him down. As the person who, instead of a silver spoon, was probably born with a pen, I obviously asked what he didn't like about writing. His answer was that writing was 'a lonely experience'." (from Notebooks, by Julie Delvaux  - a writer's blog which I stumbled onto via a Google search for Andre Breton and homo ludens)

Been diving head first into Living Theatre, Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, Jerzy Grotowski, Antero Alli's Paratheatrical Research, Peter Brook's Happenings (and book by same name) and especially Brook's incredible book "The Empty Space", and performative installations.

More so the ancient theater of carnival, ceremony, festival, rites, and the tour de force of the unknown and the modern theater of World of Warcraft and Second Life, than necessarily Les Miserables on Broadway.

It couldn't have been merely coincidence that as I dwelve into theater, I find myself seated the other day at a tea lounge next to the experimental theater director for foolsFury: ("We crave thought-provoking visceral experiences that use all three dimensions, and multiple senses. [Bingo, I crave that too.] Our work incorporates a wide range of arts, including physical movement, music, audience interaction, circus and dance skills.")

The foolsFury ensemble had just completed a seven-day sequence performance at Yerba Buena Gardens from 365 Days/365 Plays. The idea was conjured by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks after she commits to writing a play a day every day for a year. Starting November 13, 2006, "the 365 Days/365 Plays National Festival will present the work simultaneously across the country, creating the largest collaboration in the history of American theater." (Now that sense of creating daily, unfolding without a sense of beginning-middle-end, and collaboration sounds so like social media.)

"Theatre isn’t about narrative.  Narrative isn’t necessary.  Events will make the whole." - Peter Brook, "The Empty Space"

Below I share some raw (yet moderately edited or they'd be much more muddled) musings from some correspondence with social interaction designer and friend Adrian Chan.

In the post "If Not on the Day I Die, Then Not Today" I wrote that two of my life goals were writing a book, and creating a documentary film. Although I'm not so sure either of those two engage me with people quite enough to suit my inclinations.

Lately I find blogging more akin to theater, more like performance, than the process behind creating either a book or film.

"Theatre exists in the here and now. It is what happens at that precise moment when you perform, that moment at which the world of the actors and the world of the audience meet. A society in miniature, a microcosm brought together every evening within a space. Theatre's role is to give this microcosm a burning and fleeting taste of another world, and thereby interest it, transform it, integrate it." - Peter Brook

I've written for 'mass' media, from my college newspaper (I started off in journalism before switching to computer engineering) to tech magazines, and been interviewed for television. The lack of an immediate, live audience gives it a different feeling all the way around than say blogging.

The last taped TV interview I did, I was engaged with the interviewer, but totally divorced for any concept of people in the 'audience' because there were no people in the audience except for the camera people. I didn't have any sense of connection to any audience due to the recorded aspect of it and the time lag to its eventual viewing.

The distribution is scattered so it feels like the taped interview itself (object) has the connection to the audience, and so it's decoupled from the stage (me, interviewer, and the set).

In social media, the distribution is coupled to the stage (i.e. whether it's the MySpace profile or a blog) and near-live performance, (yes, there is syndication possibility). But I also have a direct distribution mechanism via RSS, Feedblitz, etc and therefore direct, near-immediate, connection to an audience. It's nicknamed the World Live Web for a reason.

"The only thing that all forms of theatre have in common is the need for an audience. This is more than a truism: in the theatre the audience completes the steps of creation." - Peter Brook, "The Empty Space"

Whereas to me mass media, feels more like distribution is coupled with the content: the script or screenplay or newsstory, or to a recording of a past performance.

When I blog, it feels closest to having a live audience - very very cognizant that I have an audience in a way I never ever felt in other writing, and it's not exactly like speaking one-to-one, face-to-face, or to a small group either.

When I talk to artists, there seems to be two kinds. For instance, there's the "I paint for myself" kind that doesn't necessarily feel moved to share their work. I meet artists like this all the time: there's is no driving compulsion to engage and share, and then there are the performers.

"It is hard to understand the true function of spectator, there and not there, ignored and yet needed. The actor's work is never for an audience, yet it always is for one." - Peter Brook, "The Empty Space"

I cannot write solely for myself. And I cannot stretch and learn without another being being involved. Even with the magazine pieces I only completed them because of the back-and-forth relationship with the editor.

"The actor does not hesitate to show himself exactly as he is, for he realizes that the secret of the role demands his opening himself up, disclosing his own secrets. So that the act of performance is an act of sacrifice, of sacrificing what most men prefer to hide - this sacrifice is his gift to the spectator... Grotowski's actors offer their performance as a ceremony for those who wish to assist: the actor invokes, lays bare what lies in every man - and what daily life covers up." - Peter Brook (on Grotowski's theater), "The Empty Space"

When I look back at times I have actually written (and not merely thought about writing some day), it's always involved others and writing in the present, such as:

1. I write during writer's workshops because we are doing exercises right then and there, and then share them aloud within the group. I meet many writers at workshops that only write during workshops and lie fallow the rest of year. They typically beat themselves up for the fact they haven't written much on their own. I'm starting to think that maybe they are simply shared word writers like I am.
2. Blogging. I have a sense of an immediate audience whether they give me direct feedback or not. I know they're there and they encourage me to lay bare, to stretch.
3. I was struggling after a single day of writing THE book last May, until I seized upon the idea of writing whatever happened in next forty days (and that could include fantasies and flashbacks to past occuring in my mind). And writing it as a letter to a single friend. The focus of writing to a friend rather than writing the Great American Memoir to the void did the trick. Then I shared snippets in my journal in progress via email with an actual friend (and it greatly influenced the direction of the book as well, as nothing two-way leaves any side unaffected.)

Maybe that's where I think the "mass" media thing just doesn't hold water for me, I have been very influenced by readers (often whom have a "stage" and a presence online too). And I've been influenced in ways I'd never have anticipated until I blogged myself.

There is a dynamic moving lively human quality in social media that isn't present for me in other media. Only performance.

Bonus: Wonderful paper where a quantum physicists tackles Brook's theatre, Gurdjieff, Attar’s Conference of the Birds, the invisible, and much more.

p.s. I recommend Peter Brook's book, "The Empty Space: a book about the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate" (it's supposed to be about theatre; hmmm, but i saw it about much much more)

"There is only one interesting difference between the cinema and the theatre. The cinema flashes on to a screen images from the past. As this is what the mind does to itself all through life, the cinema seems intimately real. Of course, it is nothing of the sort—it is a satisfying and enjoyable extension of the unreality of everyday perception. The theatre, on the other hand, always asserts itself in the present. This is what can make it more real than the normal stream of consciousness. This is also what can make it so disturbing.

No tribute to the latent power of the theatre is as telling as that paid to it by censorship. In most regimes, even when the written word is free, the image free, it is still the stage that is liberated last. Instinctively, governments know that the living event could create a dangerous electricity - even if we see this happen all too seldom. But this ancient fear is a recognition of an ancient potential. The theatre is the arena where a living confrontation can take place." - Peter Brook, "The Empty Space"

images VeniceExplorer's Venice Carnival performer; and Venice Carnival jugglers at play

Sauntering Towards A Waltzable Web

I stepped off the Aeromexico flight and right away I knew that even the extra days I spent to 'acclimate' in one of the largest cities on the planet - and, yes, to see with my own jaguar eyes the Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera home - hardly prepared me for the landing in Las Vegas.

I had re-entered a new territory, and this terrain came without sidewalks. Not even cracked tottering foot-high sidewalks like in the streets of San Cristobal de las Casas.

Later that evening, my mom who lives in Las Vegas, drove us to the off-strip casino with the adjacent shopping center and we entered into the cavernous cacophany of the Cheesecake Factory.

The street vendor's tamales at the Oaxaca market, the steaming chocolate at the neighborhood cafe in Quetzaltenago a few alley zig-zags from the town square, the tortillas and the sweet pineapple Christmas-fruit drink (and, yes, you can spike it) that Erica made were still vivid to my tongue, to my nose, to my eyes, to my skin right then.

It's now three years later. Today, the aromas are a waft of memory. But some caresses leave fingerprints like they've never left your body though the touch is no longer evident by sight of a hand.

My eyes did not quite register the 360 degree dominos of marquee neon signs, and water fountains synchronicized to symphonies as I drove my mom's car into asphalt football field-sized parking lots of the convention center. Armies upon armies of HDTVs spinning scenes and MP3 players assaulted me as I entered "the largest technology industry event." (This year 140,000 attendees are expected according to the San Jose Merc.)

Las Vegas may not yet be my favorite city in the world, but I'd never ever had such a visceral reaction like this before. And I've never been back to CES since.

I'd just spent seven weeks in Mexico, Guatamala, and a brief sojourn at the Copan ruins in Honduras when I went to CES 2004. The family I lived with for more than three weeks in Quetzaltenago took me in as their daughter, and I lived with their grandmother, grandfather, Erica's sister and her boy, and their own son and daughter. I went shopping with the family, strolled the streets in December following the neighborhood processions of revelers, ate three square meals a day all including hordes of tortillas in the kitchen, watched the Simpsons dubbed in Spanish with the boy, changed ringtones on teenager Jessica's new cellphone, ate barbequed pork and joined in on the firecracker frenzy when celebrating Christmas and New Year's with their extended families.

I wasn't disgusted by Las Vegas. That's not it. I simply...

Ached. There was a longing like the longing a baby that's been left in the crib for too long might have to be held by its mother.

I don't know need to try to dig up my journal from the trip right now to tell you the thought that kept ringing through my head over and over:

This city isn't built to human scale.

I was in Manhattan this September. I found myself walking as much as I ever did in Quetzaltenago, Guatemala. Walking to the meteoritic hole where twin towers once stood (on 9-11-06), walking to the Alex Grey gallery, walking to the Whitney Museum to meet Senia, walking to meet Rita for lunch and then walking through the flower district with her to see her artwork hanging at her apartment, walking that weekend to the yoga workshop in that little Cuban enclave near the Lower East Side, walking to the deli with Tom in Little Italy, walking through the smattering of darling boutiques and cafes in NoLita (adore Nolita).

Walking, walking, walking. Waltzing! Have you ever noticed that walking and waltzing are first cousins?

Walking connects me with the touch and movement and breath of humans.

Maybe that's the real reason that when my car left me stranded at the Colma BART Station this past November 2nd, I was not very inclined to fix it.

Sauntering: not a tour, but a never-ending enterprise. Playful and serious. Thoreau discovers his own etymology for the word. The saunterer may begin, he says, in the familiar fields of Concord, and some time later find himself in a place where "...jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested." - Joshua McKinney, Saunter

I say walking. Henry David Thoreau says walking but likes sauntering even better.

Sauntering's roots are tangled with meditating and musing too. And moreover, it means: "Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere," writes Thoreau.

"To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say Ex oriente lux; ex occidente Frux. From the East light; from the West fruit."  - Henry David Thoreau, Walking

So I smile when I read the CES coverage in the San Jose Mercury News this morning. Sub-headline: DOT-COM GLITZ IS DROPPED FOR FRUITFUL CONNECTIONS

"HP did briefly toy with the idea of bringing in big-name celebrities, but decided against that. "You don't get the value from it,'' said Phil McKinney, chief technology officer of HP's PC business. "It's about building relationships, and the only way to build relationships is with that face time.'' - "Parties Take on a Different Life," San Jose Mercury News, January 9, 2007

Yes, I'm supposed to make some 2007 Web predictions tonight.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay

So I predict that the time of mass scale will be come down like the Berlin Wall in a velvet revolution yearning for the freedom of human scale.

And this time too, when the Wall comes down, there will be dancing in the streets.

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nicked and Dimed shares in her brand-new released-today book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, that "human beings are innately social, naturally taking part in celebrations and festivities that involve feasting, dancing and dressing up. Though these impulses have been suppressed at times,...they can never be kept down; the need for communal joy is a core feature of humanity."

My umbrella prediction (which all other predictions tumble out of) is that 2007 is the year that the Web is likened to a communal table rather than a printing press. Sans piping hot tortillas perhaps or perhaps not, but a gathering that exuberantly explores that human impulse towards collective joy and the delight of sauntering into people on the sidewalk.

Bonus: "We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold grey day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest brightest morning sun- light fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance, as it has never set before,—where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have his wings guilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright—I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman, driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land; till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, so warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn." - excerpted from essay Walking, Henry David Thoreau

Bonus: Speaking of Dancing in the Streets: "The best-selling author of Nickel and Dimed peeks inside the group behavior that breeds joy" will be speaking in S.F. on January 18th. Say hi, I'll be there myself. 

p.s.  Alright, so I'm more of an essayist like Thoreau than a dialogue-and-scene crime novelist. The whole intent is I want to avoid speaking in off-putting gobbledygook like "the timeless spaceless matrix of beingness dissolved into the One which it had always been." The litmus test is if my own family has half a chance at making heads or tails of the post, then I'm happy. He, he, gobbledygook was coined by a guy named Maverick: 'His inspiration, he said, was the turkey, “always gobbledy gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity”.'

Nuff 'splaining Lucy. Like Frida says, ""I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration." Amen, sister.

images La Molendera, by Diego Rivera (yep, she's making tortillas); my friend and local artist Gilbert Marosi's Looney Gamblers; Frida Kahlo's Still Life with Parrot and Fruit; Henry Gasser's The Lord Loves Dancing

Writing, Like Eyes, Are Windows to The Soul

"Words, like eyes, are windows into a person's soul, and thus each writer, in some small way, helps to enrich the world. But it takes courage to share one's life with another, for we live in a world where every sentence penned can be criticized or praised. But it is a risk worth taking, for a greater vision remains: that through our words, be they fiction or fact, we might touch another soul as we share our stories and song. In that moment, however brief, we suspend the walls of separateness that so often cause suffering and pain." - source unknown, a writers on writing anthology (will update when & if I find out)

images "Girl Reading", by Linda Horvay

Web 2.0, Connective Transactions, and the Odyssey of a Fascinating Stranded Musician On the Way Back to New Orleans

Yesterday on Palo Alto's University Avenue I met a guy named Wyatt.

In another time I'd have just packed him up to the bus station and plucked down my credit card for his bus ticket to New Orleans myself. BTW, I talk to people, including street people all the time.

Wyatt's different. He went into denial when Katrina hit. He was touring around on the road, playing music in Humboldt, CA when it hit.

I got the long version of story, he's very cool, very much at a turning point where he can face the loss of everything he'd known in Nola and is ready to go back and rebuild and contribute. He's got a great attitude considering, and he manages to score a roof over his head more often than not and makes a little money playing guitar on the street; so he pretty clean.

"To this day I still never reached 95% of the people on my phone list. And the people I cared about the most I only knew from their first names, that's the scene I'm in we only know first names, like Math from "I Hate God" [band]."

He was telling me about the 1964 Beatles mixing console that's gone forever ("the recording studio was on the edge of the Ninth Ward").

He's a musician, recording engineer, and seems to be a bit of a geek -- knows how to code a bit in C++ and Java and HTML and his nickname is "Wire".

Funny thing, now I think about it, that the most vitally interesting part of the story of 'disaster' and 'loss' is the aftermath, the wake, the recovery. Nearly no one asks me about that myself, mostly people want to hear about the very day of the tsunami.

Thankfully I was in no position myself to hand him a bus ticket (he never asked, it was what I would have wanted to do) or even a quarter. I hunched down to ground level to chat with him and look directly into his peacock blue eyes:

"So are you from Palo Alto?" "Naw. Stranded. I'm from New Orleans. A woman in Belmont gave me a roof last night, dropped me off here."

So instead I came up with a better idea that is a social media experiment...and relies on what Larry Harvey, Burning Man founder, calls connective transactions.

"The great efficiency of the modern marketplace depends on the fluidity of value as it flows in one form of commodity to another. If I should buy something from you, no relationship and no moral connection is left to relate us to one another. The value of the money I have spent speeds on to take new form as further goods and services. This is the fuel that powers our economy and produces a flow of never-ending capital around the world.

But what this transaction does not necessarily produce is connections between people. It does not produce what Robert Putnam and other writers have described as "social capital." Social capital is a very different concept. Social capital represents the sum of human connection that holds a society together, and it is fostered by networks of personal relationship. It is social capital that a culture is made of." - "Viva Las Xmas", transcript of speech by Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, April 25, 2002

Wyatt is an articulate and handsome 30-something and would be great on camera. I just pitched the idea to PodTech folks like the Scobles forgetting they are in Europe right now. Brian Oberkirch who did the Slidell LA Katrina blog just pinged me back and said he'd pitch in to help.

Part of my idea involves getting bloggers and the like to videoblog him each day as he wends his way back to Nola in a "connective" manner.

And maybe we'd help him get to the next leg on his journey using online tools (whether Craigslist to score a ride to Austin, or MySpace to post his music and get a small audience following him on the road, or CouchSurfing.com for a place to crash, etc etc).

Few people know what it's like to have everything you know pulled out from under you, and then go through the stages of denial, anger, resolution, etc. He admits he spent too long in denial, but he also seems to see it retrospectively as a growth opportunity. And getting back on his own to Nola is like a test, like an odyssey, for him.

"So why can't your recording studio boss just get you a ticket home? You said he wanted you back to help rebuild it."

"It's kinda a test."

"He's testing you? Or you testing yourself?"

"Little of both."

I have his cell and email...and I don't know how long he'll be in Palo Alto (I live about 25 miles south, just happened to be there yesterday for an IDEO author talk, Made to Stick:Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die), he's trying to head south as soon as possible. I figure if he can pull together bus fare, he can stay at my place tonight.

"So what do you think was mixed on that Beatles console?" I ask Wyatt.

"Hmmm, 1964." He stops for a minute reflecting. "All You Need is Love, I bet."

p.s. This social media experiment in connective transactions just hatched. I absolutely cannot do this alone. Please pass along, leave suggestions especially how you'd like to participate, trackbacks, etc. Thanks! Blessings! My phone is 408.513.7324 and my email is crossroadsdispatches =at= gmail *dot* com.

images Beatles; Jordon Romney's Burning Man 2004 "The Love Project" photo; and Gary Pirnat's 2002 New Orleans photo

Bento Box: A Piece of Uncensored Corporate Art

Rare, if ever, that I've called a corporate blog a work of art. Most honestly bore me. But I'm highly impressed by Bento Box. My impression of BzzAgent from their first corporate blog was it was a highly controversial arena (word-of-mouth buzz marketing) to be launching such an incredibly transparent no-holds-barred blog.

Naked, you could say. (Patrick, Robert Scoble's teenage son said he fielded questions from school buddies about his dad's porn book. The business blogging tome is titled Naked Conversations.) Fresh blood, Ginsberg could say. Refreshing, I say.

Here's three reasons I find it delectable:

1. Tom Parker, a local writer and instructor in Palo Alto, once said that memoir and fiction writing plays with time. One can stretch five minutes into fifty pages or squeeze fifty years into five paragraphs. Well, blogging is a different animal. Time marches fairly linearly on a reverse-chronological time-stamped blog. I've wondered about the linearity of time and how to unhinge from it on a blog. I've wondered how to play with space, rather than time, via a blog. I've wondered how to experiment with an art installation using a blog. And so I had to smile when I got an email announcing the Bento Box. "Think part Blog, part art show, part essay, part media experience," they said.  Aha, great minds think alike ;-)
   
2. How many companies you know hire two artists-in-residences and allow them simply observe untethered the inner workings of a corporation and then freely express their observations online? None come readily to my mind except BzzAgent. I mean one of the early sketches/posts had a dangling penis forgodsakes! And they still didn't squelch the artist on his second penis portrayal either (or is the plural penii, anyhow you'll have to search yourself to find that post).
   
3. "For the next twelve fortnights (24 weeks, or 168 days, or 4,032 hours), The Bento Box will be open for dining." Limited edition. This season only. It's just me probably, but I adore limited edition. I prefer hand-cranked-one-of-a-kind-never-to-be-repeated because there's plenty more creativity where that came from over cookie-cutter-mass-produced lets-churn-this-cash-cow-out until we're all bored to tears. Plus I like how they slying unveil burlesque-style the 168-day installation: "Each business day, another piece of the box will be available for viewing."

   Like CEO Dave Balter said, "All good things come to an end." Amen to that.

Okay, that's just a few reasons. I'll be sharing conversation tidbits from my chat with Dave as I promised over the next week.

Passport to Understanding: Seeing Through Muwa's Eyes

 

Muwa, top right, took these photos. I noticed she was more interested in being on the other side of the camera: The creator.

At the last session at NewCommForum with Robert and Shel, a woman in the audience comments: "I thought I was up on this [blogging]. I'm starting to see this underlying sense of empowerment. That people want to have a voice. Customers are empowered."

Yeah, and engagement is more fun than passivity.

Best decision I ever made was to take a simple point-and-shoot digital camera that I could hand over to locals. I gave it to the most curious 'kid' in a crowd. It made me a lot of friends along the two-month journey to Thailand and Sri Lanka when language was a seeming barrier.

Muwa's first day shots were formal, posed. The subjects were stiff. I think they're all accustomed to posing for photographs for foreigners - the strangers that swooped in after the tsunami and gave international exposure to the plight of the indigenous Thai sea gypsy community. 

Wherever you go the world over, "cheese" smiles are contrived.

Yet something started to change.

Muwa began experimenting the second day I came over. In the cafe as the volunteers and I got bored with posing, she started to capture shots whether or not we stayed still. I didn't even notice she was still snapping photos of us.

Then she started to use the television set's reflective screen to create special effects: in one haunting photo (above, click to full res) our real-life cafe scene seamlessly blends in with a Bollywood-inspired virtual world.

Later she discovers that it's okay to turn the camera 90 degrees. And then she asks for my permission to take the camera into Tung Wa village proper.

Into areas I wouldn't necessarily have access to.

Villagers on siestas, joyously naked youngsters asleep and astride bikes, artful still-lifes illustrating her and her friend's fascination with motorbike and bicycle, pregnant moms giggling, kids shampooing their younger siblings...

As Muwa eased behind the lenses, and because she was already part of the community and culture even the posed shots took on a natural grace.

I only wish I'd thought of handing my camera to the three black-cloaked women sitting astride on a bench along the old fort wall in Galle, Sri Lanka watching the sun dip down into the waves.

Behind them a meadow fell away among cacti and palms and thirteen snowy egrets. Alas, the Muslim world is the one subculture I didn't get to deeply hang out in on my two-month journey.

In Thai, the word jai or chai means heart-mind (fused for Thais and Buddhists) and kao jai means deep understanding. There are times you enter the jai of another culture through the eyes of an insider - their selection, their framing, their angle, their interpretation, their poetry, their music, their essence. Thank you Muwa.

Bonus: The producers of Voices of Iraq distributed over 150 DIGITAL VIDEO CAMERAS across the entire country to enable everyday people - mothers, children, teachers, sheiks and even insurgents - to document their lives and their hopes amidst the upheaval of a nation being born.

In CHAIN CAMERA, director Kirby Dick relinquishes the video camera to let the students of this multicultural East Hollywood high school tell their own stories. Taking a new approach to the documentary genre, Dick decided to hand out video cameras in August of 1999 to ten teenagers in order for them to document their own lives for a week, at which point the cameras were passed on to ten more students, and so on.

p.s. These are only a fraction of the shots. You can see how this applies to what keynoter Rebecca Blood termed at NewCommForum "The Age of Participatory Culture", or the ProAm revolution; ethnography and 'deep hanging out'; artisan journalism; consumer-generated media; and learning about the world period.

tags social media consumer generated content citizen journalism blogging ethnography storytelling tsunami NewCommForum

 

In a Saturated Blogosphere, How Does Marketing Reach Out to People?

In a saturated blogosphere (most have few hits) how does marketing by blogs reach out to people? [Question #5 in So How Does It Feel to Be a Global Microbrand?]

My answer: No one reads THE "blogosphere" - that just the umbrella term that encompasses every single blog - we actually read this blog or that blog.

You start by realizing this is a social media. It's not a broadcast bulletin.

You start with connecting to affinity communities with common interests. Maybe parenting sites and blogs, offline clubs, parenting press, etc. for Stonyfield Yogurt's baby blog. Talk and link and communicate consistently with those communities.

Any old large audience most likely won't do - you want the right audience.

Figure out your unique "White Hot Center" (see pages 6-13 in What Clients Love, by Harry Beckwith; summary that doesn't do it justice here).

It's funny that Nike is lauded as a company that was built on identifying their white hot center early in running and basketball. Things change. They launched this basketball blog.

But is their own design team the WHC? I'd rather see a community-authored blog with community-rich features where basketfall fans can talk with each other and with rising athletes. Throw in the design team's riffs if you want, but that's secondary.

Social engagement is the next big thing for the entire marketplace. In this age of consumer resistance, people are avoiding brands while seeking one another. Brands must shift away from the single-minded focus on engaging consumers and instead become adept at enabling people to engage with each other. - "Productivity: Meet, Greet, Then Market", MediaPost, February 2006

Bonus: Chris Coulter actually does add value here, see comment 41: He disagrees with the blanket statement: Guy said…“If you take two companies with equally good products, and one knows how to suck up to bloggers and the other one doesn’t, I believe that the former will win.”

So do I. Courting the A-List bloggers only makes sense if and only if that is your WHC. Right now, as Coulter points out that is limited to particular set of products and services.

Bonus: In Copyblogger's Viral Copy report (good read, go download), Brian says:

Back when it broke, posting the Numa Numa dance on your law firm blog would have brought in traffic, but I'm not sure it would have translated into a spike in retainer agreements. (p. 5)

Amen. But then on page 7, Brian says: "You want to write things that truly connect with people, and that also result in a direct, specific and quantifiable action - a link, a Delicious tag, a vote on Digg."

But depending on your WHC, a Del.icio.us tag or vote on Digg may be perfect for your law firm or it could signal a shift to your client base that you're now edgier, tech-savvy, and you're more interested in the next Google as a client than the next Harrod's. (No they're not necessarily mutually exclusive, but trying to be all things to all people doesn't work either.)

From biz book summary: WHC = "This is the key area where influencers who will endorse your product to followers are located. [Which may include but aren't limited to:] These are the editors whose reviews dictate the trends of the industry. [In other words, who are the folks that sway others and where do they hang out? Can you offer a compelling enough experience so they will hang out on your affinity group blog too?]

Nike found the white-hot center of running and later on, in basketball. [Everyday players look up to rising athletes especially ones that came from similar backgrounds as they. Nike recognized potential when they saw it.] They chose Michael Jordan, who wasn't even first choice in that year's pro draft of college players. Nike's earliest contact with Tiger Woods was when he was playing golf as a freshman in high school."