Pretty Lady

Pretty Lady for Hire

2011-11-26T16:05:00.000-05:00

The Return of Pretty Lady

2011-08-22T18:58:00.000-04:00

Hello darlings!

Truthfully, I have been stalling. I have been unable to decide whether to make Pretty Lady an official archive, leaving her all perfect and unspoiled, or to forge ahead with current events, time permitting. Pretty Lady has therefore been in Limbo, although Time Out NY is now following her, much belatedly, on Twitter.

For motherhood has been the least of recent upheavals. We are living in Philadelphia, in the bleeding-edge community of East Kensington; I am a startup entrepreneur, much to my own surprise; and Joe is producing (and directing, and mopping up after) a heck of a new production for the Philly Fringe.

Since this is Joe's baby, and I've been wrapped up in learning how to grow a business (Inc. Magazine is now my favorite coffee break reading material, I kid you not), I haven't been directly involved in the process. But after reading the original script by Richard Kirkwood, I made the independent decision to get behind it one thousand percent, risking the possibility of embodying all kinds of horrific stereotypes in the process--Stage Wife and PR Harpy among them.

Because not only is it Noises Off-level hilarious, it's relevant. It's relevant to the bleakly absurd economic climate that's driven millions of people out of their jobs and their homes while the top .1% grow ever richer. It baldly displays the cant that pigs use to justify their actions, and the sophistry which makes asses of all of us. It's an extreme play for extreme times, and it deserves all the limelight it can get.

So, will Pretty Lady be writing again? Well, CBS Local in Philadelphia has hired her/me to do a little Primetime blogging, promoting a couple of shows called '2 Broke Girls' and 'How to Be a Gentleman'. Also I'll be working on an e-book entitled, tentatively, Pretty Lady's Guide to Harmonious Relationships. Also, there are about 10,000 things I'd like to say about startup entrepreneurship, which don't quite fit into the theme of my new blog. So that's probably a yes, darlings.

New Blog

2011-02-16T12:48:00.004-05:00

We Are the Dupes

2010-12-19T18:10:00.000-05:00

There's a protest against censorship on the steps of the Met today, because of the Smithsonian banning of David Wojnarowicz' video, 'Fire in my Belly,' above.

I, for one, am disgusted. I am disgusted because people are such goddamn dupes.

You don't have to censor art to get rid of it. All you have to do is ignore it. 'Censorship' was the best thing to happen to Wojnarowicz' work; tens of thousands of people have now watched this video who would otherwise never have heard of it.

We're still completely missing his message, however.

For those of you who are confused as to exactly why an ant-covered crucifix offends some people; it's because the message of Christ is that he was crucified and resurrected. Ants imply the presence of rot; Christ, allegedly, didn't. But we, the people, crucify each other every day and leave the corpses to rot. That's the message.

David Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992. Today, there are saviors dying of hideous diseases all around us, but we're ignoring them on behalf of self-righteous protests, for and against 'censorship.' We are allowing ourselves to be overtly manipulated by the forces which profit from people's deaths.

Because do you know what ELSE happened this week? Republicans, on behalf of the wealthiest .1% of us, filibustered a bill that would have provided healthcare to 9/11 first responders who are dying of cancer.

They did this because it is in the financial interests of the ruling class for the other 99.9% of us to be distracted and at each other's throats. While we're blaming our neighbor for being bigoted, immoral, intolerant, depraved, degenerate, lazy, and generally a Bad Person, we're ignoring the ways in which ALL of us are being exploited by the plutocracy which is destroying this country.

Artists: Christians are not the enemy. Christians: Artists are not the enemy. I know that it is scary to realize that YOU could be the one abandoned by the system when you fall ill, lose a job, or help someone else at your own expense, but sticking your head in the sand doesn't change the reality. Your neighbor is your natural ally, whether he be a starving artist, an offended Christian, an illegal immigrant, or a dying firefighter--as long as you look at who is REALLY pulling the strings, and refuse to be distracted by trivialities.

Wake up.

In Praise of Facebook

2010-11-05T14:28:00.000-04:00

I was beyond delighted, the first time I was 'friended' by someone from elementary school. I had been looking for that girl for twenty-five years. Just because we're not seven years old and living down the street from one another anymore doesn't mean that I stopped liking her; it's a real thrill to know that A. is doing just fine, is happily married with two kids, and living in Dallas.

Is this so strange? Reading the comments in this letter, I get the feeling that there are a lot of people out there who can't understand it. They regard Facebook as an onerous burden, or a popularity contest, or a haven for the self-involved. But it seems to me that there's nothing less self-involved than being interested in other people, whether you see them every day or not.

The reason I love it is that it takes so little effort. What's narcissistic, as well as time-consuming, is emailing a thousand people five times a week; Facebook is great because you can ignore it. You can share as much or as little as you like, and everybody out there is free to take it or leave it.

Also, it helps me to avoid one of my existential terrors--that of Calling At A Bad Time. Thanks to Facebook, I will never run the risk of inviting someone to see the latest Harry Potter film when they're on the way to their mother's funeral. I can limit my guest list to people who are not in labor. I can send congratulations, condolences and silly jokes at the right moments, not the wrong ones. How is this not a fabulous thing?

Of course my Facebook 'friends' aren't all my friends. I'm not an idiot. It's a good way of helping me decide who I want to get to know better, however. If I 'friend' a new acquaintance and discover that she's a member of 'One Million Strong For Sarah Palin,' that saves me the price of a cup of coffee.

Tipping the Proletariat

2010-08-12T12:40:00.000-04:00

Memo to Greg Beato: go pick on someone in your own tax bracket.

But if tipping isn’t exactly a rational exercise, it is an ingenious and metaphorically valuable contrivance. It gives plate-schleppers a chance to act like entrepreneurs. It gave men who can’t afford dessert a chance to act like philanthropists. It imbues the players on both sides of a transaction with a greater sense of autonomy. A waiter isn’t locked into whatever limits his boss might set for him — he can partially determine his own fate. A customer can exert some power in determining the ultimate value of his dining experience.

Greg, forgive me, but you've tipped your hand there. "It imbues the players with a greater sense of autonomy." Not the real thing. The reality of tipping is that it places the livelihoods of the lowest wage earners at the mercy of the whims of the self-righteous.

Ask yourself; how many waiters do you know who have health insurance? Bartenders? Baristas? Estheticians? Hairdressers? Have you ever taken a moment to consider the economic realities of life in the service industries?

Let me clue you in. A massage therapist who works at an average spa (as a not-so-random example) is a contract employee. That means they receive a flat rate per service provided, which averages between 20-35% of the retail price of the service. If there are no clients, they do not get paid. They receive no guaranteed minimum salary, no sick leave, vacation, workers compensation, health insurance or overtime. When they blow their backs out working on an overweight client or catch the flu from a sick one, they're two weeks away from indigence.

Your average waiter or barista has it even worse, because employers use tipping as an excuse to pay less than minimum wage. It is perfectly possible to work a 9-hour shift without even a bathroom break, and net less in wages than your average customer just spent on dinner.

Under these circumstances, tipping is not just a 'metaphorically valuable contrivance.' It's bus fare, groceries, diapers and the gas bill. When a client exercises her option not to tip, she is making a unilateral, uninformed decision to deny basic sustenance to the person who has just fed her, cared for her, and relieved her pain. Is this liberty, or is it exploitation?

As one Facebook friend put it: "The way service providers are treated certainly reflects how people feel about service--as though it were a terrible fate, but one that was deserved, thereby justifying the Darwinian bully attacks." It rarely occurs to the American consumer that service might be an honorable vocation, not a desperate option for the ignorant and the feckless.

The Long Silence

2010-07-12T23:22:00.000-04:00

I almost need to steal the title from Franklin's latest post: Patience With Everything Unresolved. In fact, I almost need to steal Franklin's template. Being is becoming, and blogs are becoming something else.

It's not that I haven't had anything to say. I've shamelessly blogged my way through several major life transitions; maybe it's in the nature of the current one to be different. In any case, I'm not making any promises.

Briefly, the news is this: I've decided to become a physical therapist. It's a doctoral degree that will take me five or six years to complete, including prerequisites. Although I've got two bachelor's degrees already, they're--surprise!--virtually useless. I recently sent for my transcript, and its dominant theme is 'Course Of Study Undertaken By An Adolescent Mind.' People under twenty-five should not be allowed to go to college, I swear.

What this means is that I will be broke and working my ass off for the foreseeable future, which will not be a big change. What will be a big change is that when I'm done, I will be employable at a solid middle-class salary for the first time in my life.

This could not have happened if I hadn't become thoroughly and irremediably disgusted with the state of the art world. It should come as no surprise to anyone that I am an idealist--stubborn, possibly naive, certainly foolish. Art represented part of an ideal to me, and I invested a big chunk of my soul in it, along with considerably more money than my actual income.

And 'art,' as practiced by the self-styled elite of the global art scene, is a giant confidence game. I used to think I could either change it or create a niche for myself within it; now I think that my values are incompatible with its founding principles. Continuing to sacrifice my time, money and attention to this cynical game doesn't make me a dedicated artist, it just makes me a chump.

I've long been aware that I have three vocations--artist, writer, and healer. For the last couple of decades, I've been weighting the 'artist' as the primary part of my identity. Letting go of that is a wrench to my ego, but necessary to my soul. I will have a studio again, I will paint again, but maybe not for a good long time. Now is the time for exercising my lazy but adequate left brain, and taking the adventure that comes.

The Consciousness Painter

2010-04-19T11:43:00.002-04:00

'Sunset Holocaust,' Elisabeth Condon, 2009
Acrylic on canvas, 118.10 x 78.74 inches

Every now and then I meet an artist who reminds me that with all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, art can still be a meaningful occupation. When I do, I often notice that artistic mastery is a non-linear process. Elisabeth Condon is the real deal, and in the last couple of years her work has hit an exponential curve.

Over a year ago, I was lucky enough to visit Elisabeth's studio in Brooklyn with my critique group. I'd seen her exhibition at Lesley Heller Gallery in 2008, and one painting in particular had impressed me; it started to become metaphysical jazz, blurring the boundaries between space, time and consciousness. But it was hard to tell if this was an accident or not.

During her crit, it became clear that Elisabeth throws the entirety of her heart, mind and soul into her work, and she's got a lot of these things to throw. The details of her trajectory make up a respectable résumé--influences ranging from Chinese scroll paintings to Dr. Seuss; trips to China, residencies in Miami, Spain, Yaddo and Taiwan; figure painting intensives, architectural studies, paint pouring. If I were a real art critic, I'd feel obliged to trace these influences in sober detail.

But I'm not. I'm just another painter, who believes that great art transcends both biography and intellect. "The Chinese believe that paintings must have chi," said Elisabeth, and her paintings have tons of it. They come at you like a tidal wave, immersing you in the full experience of color, sucking you into spaces which twist and bulge and drop away, altering the fabric of your mind.

'Gaoxing, Beijing', Elisabeth Condon, 2009

Acrylic on canvas, 118.10 x 78.74 inches

The paintings she was working on when I went to her studio were a quantum leap beyond the work in her Lesley Heller show; bigger, freer, less literal and more graceful. One of them, an enormous blue poured abstraction, was half finished. In standard crit group fashion, we suggested she leave it that way. She replied, "I can't, I just can't." Elisabeth doesn't hold anything back. Art doesn't occupy a cool, political corner of her life; it IS her life. And her life is a joyous and generous one.

Since then, things have only gotten better. In her best work, the distinction between abstraction and representation becomes meaningless--form, space, color and architecture dance among themselves as limpidly as thought. Standing in front of one, you find yourself remembering experiences that aren't necessarily yours. Elisabeth's work communicates directly, without any need for translation.

After Art

2010-04-12T23:03:00.000-04:00

'Tis the Voice of the Asshole

2010-03-18T14:00:00.000-04:00

Some asshole gets hold of the intercom:

Two South Jersey Wal-Mart customers who heard a racist message broadcast over the store's public address system say the whole ordeal is no laughing matter.

Sheila Ellington and Virginia Tinsley were shopping inside the Washington Township Wal-Mart along Rt. 42 in Turnersville, N.J. just before 5 p.m. on Sunday when they say a man came over the PA system and said: "Attention Wal-Mart customers: All black people leave the store now."

"It was a disgusting comment," Ellington said. "Once I heard that, I was absolutely shocked and appalled."

Why do we listen to assholes?

Statistically speaking, we are less likely to be overrun by Mongolian hordes, Roman legions, conquistadors, or renegade cowboys than in the vast majority of human history. In most countries, rape and kidnapping are frowned upon as a means of obtaining wives. Brute force is no longer the final word in most social interactions.

At no other time in history have we had quite the luxury of shrugging off the perspectives of assholes, in the way we do now.

And yet our bruised psyches do not believe it's true. Thousands of years of brutality have left their mark; we still behave as though the Voice of the Asshole will inevitably be followed up by an unanswerable blow to the head.

As a result, the psychic power of assholes is magnified beyond their natural scope. Thus I propose a mantra: call it the Mantra of Emerging Civilization.

The next time you hear some asshole broadcasting his assholery to all and sundry, say to yourself, "Dude, you're an asshole." Then mentally flip the switch. Turn off the Glenn Beck in your head. Consign Rush Limbaugh to the trash heap of history. Open your mind to a new era of freedom.

Pain and Ignorance

2010-03-05T11:50:00.000-05:00

The more I learn about chronic pain conditions like fibromyalgia, the more it is clear to me that medicine is still in its infancy. From the New York Times:

The cause of this disorder is unknown. Physical or emotional trauma may play a role in development of the syndrome. Some evidence suggests that fibromyalgia patients have abnormal pain transmission responses.

It has been suggested that sleep disturbances, which are common in fibromyalgia patients, may actually cause the condition. Another theory suggests that the disorder may be associated with changes in skeletal muscle metabolism, possibly caused by decreased blood flow, which could cause chronic fatigue and weakness.

Others have suggested that an infectious microbe, such as a virus, triggers the illness. At this point, no such virus or microbe has been identified.

Pilot studies have shown a possible inherited tendency toward the disease, though evidence is very preliminary.

Could this be any more vague and tentative? We're only about a decade away from dismissing the whole thing as 'crazy woman syndrome.'

Fibromyalgia is one of the reasons I became a bodyworker. I saw people close to me suffering from it, and I saw the medical establishment making their suffering worse through ignorance, indifference and judgement. I may not be able to cure people's pain, but at least I can do someone the honor of taking it seriously.

People with chronic pain, for the most part, cope with it by coping. That's not a tautology. Coping is a fluid process, different for every person and at every time. Exercise may help, or not. Pain medication, ditto. Massage, sometimes. Acupuncture, heat therapy, yoga may work, then stop working. It never ends.

One thing I have observed, in over a decade of giving and receiving bodywork, is that there seems to be a powerful and complex relationship between fascia and the nervous system. I have noticed that often the subtlest forms of bodywork can have the most profound affects. I don't pretend to understand the mechanism behind it, but there are a couple of areas where I'd like to see some research done.

One is network spinal analysis. The theory behind it is that by stimulating the spinal cord in areas where it attaches to the spine, you enable the body to release spinal tension and adjust itself. After one treatment by an NSA chiropractor, I found my hips releasing the turn-out stress of twelve years of ballet training, and re-aligning in their natural forward-facing stance. This chiropractor reported that many of her clients saw significant improvement from conditions as serious as MS, from treatment over time.

The other is the M.E.L.T Method, a simple self-care technique that uses balls and rollers to rebalance and hydrate connective tissue. It is now primarily used by athletes and personal trainers, but the results I've seen have been so dramatic that I'd like to see more research into its effectiveness on fibromyalgia and other chronic pain syndromes.

The more bodywork I do, the more it seems to me that the mind/body dichotomy is meaningless. I'd describe it as a mind/body continuum. At the very least there is a constant feedback loop going in both directions, both consciously and unconsciously. An adjustment at any point in the loop can have wide-reaching effects; my interest is in finding the most efficient points of intervention.

Satan Unmasked

2010-03-01T18:30:00.000-05:00

Jerry Seinfeld was always abhorrent. It is simply that it took most people a couple of decades to notice:

The one star who appeared to be immune from the curse was Jerry Seinfeld who enjoyed relative success in stand-up comedy despite ill-conceived endeavors such as Bee Movie. But now with his new near-universally loathed show The Marriage Ref his legacy seems more threatened than ever.

'Seinfeld' was not a brilliant sitcom. It was evil and vile. It was wilfully and self-righteously shallow, trivial and vain. It was not funny. It was vicious in its banality.

I may have watched an episode of 'Seinfeld' in its entirety once or twice, but I never managed to do so without feeling that I had been spiritually spat upon. Most of the time I did not last for more than two or three minutes. Even now I feel my stomach seize up if someone tunes to a rerun in my vicinity.

The fact that Jerry Seinfeld's new show is being universally panned merely demonstrates that our collective consciousness is catching up with reality. Smarmy, facile spite is not only destructive of the fabric of society, it is not even good for a chuckle.

Spiritual Necessity

2010-02-26T16:32:00.000-05:00

It's about freakin' time.

What’s missing is art that seems made by one person out of intense personal necessity, often by hand. A lot but not all of this kind of work is painting, which seems to be becoming the art medium that dare not speak its name where museums are concerned.

It's sad, really, how over the top was the reaction to Roberta's editorial. Jerry Saltz's Facebook page exploded with expressions of gratitude from hundreds of artists. The Brooklyn Rail posted a remarkably militant expression of solidarity:

We would go a step further and state unequivocally that many of these individuals have not only shirked their public responsibility, they have turned the museums into playgrounds for an elitist group of trustees and globetrotting art fair devotees, stocking their exhibitions primarily from “powerful galleries.”

Parallels to the financial institution debacle did not go unnoticed:

Sometimes the art world actually lags behind society, and the bursting of its preachy-self-indulgence bubble follows rather than leads the collapse of the economy's credit bubble by a couple of years. In the money world, anybody could borrow any amount for practically anything. In art, anyone could claim to be addressing any social issue with just about any work, and curators believed it.

So the question remains, why should we care?

In my opinion, Roberta's much-quoted phrase 'intense personal necessity' does not go far enough. It conjures up a vision of the obsessive, solipsistic artist working alone in the studio, churning out quirky, useless objects for purchase by wealthy people. Given the dire economic conditions in which we find ourselves, fighting a battle to bring more painting into museums seems a little quixotic, and I say this as a painter myself.

Artists, as a whole, are pretty good at dealing with poverty. We have to be. To look at the 'art' in museums, you'd never know that artists today have meaningful responses to real-world problems; you'd think we were a bunch of useless, smarmy man-children.

What is truly disgusting about the museum playgrounds is the way in which they siphon energy, resources and attention from artists who are working not only out of personal necessity, but out of spiritual necessity--responding to the world in ways that expand our ideas of what is possible. Artists like the members of Urban Farm Syndicate:

Our goal is to turn Central Brooklyn’s biggest problem into its greatest resource by working with landowners instead of against them. 13% of the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood, for example, is vacant land. This vacant land creates opportunities for crime, vermin and dumping, and drives down property values. We believe this land also has the capacity to give rise to the very things that grow a community: dignified living wage jobs; a thriving local economy based on delicious, healthy food and an enduring educational resource for local schoolchildren and academia alike.

Or artists doing what we always do, going into neighborhoods that might as well be war zones and revitalizing them:

Artists are being pushed out left and right, publications folding, galleries closing, all while more and more MFAs continue to be churned out than can possibly be hired on by Manhattan’s service industry. Space is at a premium. Do we continue to go even further east into the cramped, treeless, concrete, PCB infested jungle of Bushwick, eventually reaching East New York’s hour-long commute for valuable studio and exhibition space? Or do we begin to explore other venues west of the Hudson? In the wide-open (*gasp*) NEW JERSEY!? In our case, we're going with Jersey.

Contrary to the apparent beliefs of the curatorial set, 'meaning' does not reside in facile, arcane references within a pile of visual koans. It does not reside in unintelligible wall text. It most certainly does not reside in the cynical manipulation of political and economic systems to grab a share of money and attention that is totally disproportionate to the quality of one's contributions.

Spiritual necessity is about a lot more than making objects. It is about allowing the world to change us, as much as we change the world. Most artists don't plan to become community organizers, entrepreneurs, healers or activists; it's what happens to us when we the irresistable force of our creativity meets the immovable object of the physical world.

How Not to Be a Terrorist

2010-02-20T23:28:00.000-05:00

Glenn Greenwald describes Joe Stack's manifesto as 'perfectly cogent.' Except for his conclusion that 'violence is the only answer,' I tend to agree. Partisan ideologues are running in circles, each trying to blame his act of terrorism on the Other Side, but if you bother to read what he wrote, it's clear that it's not that simple.

Contrary to the various labels that the pundits are flinging around, Joe Stack was not a populist. Neither was he a Communist, a Tea Bagger, or a liberal. He was a smart, creative guy who empirically discovered that Big Systems in this country are designed to drain him dry--specifically, the smart, the creative, the independent and the non-conformist. They drain everyone else too, but they work much faster and more viciously on people like Joe.

Item: The Labor Department estimates that up to 30 percent of companies misclassify employees as 'independent contractors' in order to avoid paying Social Security, unemployment, health insurance or worker's compensation. Among the most often misclassified workers are truck drivers, construction workers, home health aides and high-tech engineers.

Item: The United States has the highest documented incarcaration rate in the world. Over half are imprisoned for non-violent offenses.

Item: A homeless man get a 15-year sentence for stealing $100 and returning it, while corporate officers who steal billions from taxpayers, investors and their own employees keep the money and write the laws.

Item: The average debt of a medical student who graduated in 2009 is $156,456.

Item: The Catholic Church.

I could go on, but as Joe Stack has clearly demonstrated, that way lies madness.

So how do we cope with the fact that institutions which supposedly exist to sustain and connect us--schools, corporations, churches, and government--have turned into parasitic monsters which extract ever more and give ever less, using our finest characteristics--honesty, intelligence, compassion, creativity, discipline--as levers to enslave us?

The reason terrorism does not work, as an instrument of change, is that fear paralyzes the mind. The best weapon against institutional thuggery is not violence; it is the freedom of thought and action which emanates from a mind at peace with itself. This is why institutional thugs bring out their most vicious tricks when confronted with a decent person who thinks for herself.

This is also why we cannot look to institutional leaders to get us out of this mess. They created it; they have a vested interest in sustaining it.

So I have a few suggestions.

Learn to care for yourself--really. Learn to eat well, exercise well, meditate well. Learn to live on less, even if you still have a job. Revel in joys that are free.

Quit looking upward. Quit looking for someone to hire you, fire you, take charge, change the rules, enforce the rules. Quit waiting for the grant, the donor, the collector, the award, the promotion. Stop buying lottery tickets. Consider long and hard before you pay for another degree.

Connect laterally. The person you see as your competitor is potentially your ally. That guy who might take your job, could be your business partner. Collaborate, encourage, experiment and assist.

Nurture love and meaning wherever you find it.

I suspect that before much longer, systems and ways of living we took for granted will vanish, or undergo a radical transformation. We can either give way to panic, violence, rage and despair, or we can take the opportunity to heal ourselves, our society and our planet. It's up to every one of us to decide.

Backlash

2010-01-25T17:32:00.003-05:00

Way back in the Dark Ages, I used to be a College Republican. Not only that, I was a Young Conservative. Of Texas. I spent more hours than I care to remember, actually going door-to-door to get out the vote for some of the most--well. Let's just say that my disgust with the conservative movement was an organic process, derived from direct personal experience of the hypocrisy, chauvinism, bigotry and overt, shameless greed of those who espoused it.

One of the salient characteristics of College Republicans was their knee-jerk submission to authority. I was one of the few true believers--manning the table on the West Mall, attending meetings, debating liberals and making friends with them. Most College Republicans were members of fraternities and sororities, who joined solely in order to boost their resumes. But when the order came down, they went to the polls and voted for the approved candidate, whether they knew jack about the issues or, overwhelmingly, not.

When I eventually defected to the Young Democrats and associated ilk, I found the opposite problem. They were constantly getting side-tracked by trivial issues and splitting into factions. In any group of ten, you'd find fifteen irreconcilable opinions. This may have provided infinite opportunities for personal growth and self-expression, but it was hell on getting things done.

Which brings me to the current moment.

People with financial and political power don't get their power by accident. They know how to seize it and they know how to keep it. Since power is their priority, they don't take their eye off the ball, and they don't give it up for petty concerns like a landslide popular vote, a ruined economy, forty million uninsured, skyrocketing medical bankruptcies or a destroyed city. They're only in it for themselves, and they don't care what happens to you.

Nevertheless, we and Obama have to reckon with them, because they've got 1) tons of money; 2) a huge propaganda machine; 3) the SCOTUS tilting the balance in their favor. Acting as if they'll just go away because they lost an election is naive and foolish.

Progressives, quit your bitching. Quit whining about how Obama has betrayed you, how he didn't fix the economy in 30 seconds, how 60% of the population wants a public option, how this healthcare bill sucks and we should just junk it and start over. What are you, twelve? Did you really think that the Presidency was a magic wand that Obama could wave and recreate the system? Did you think that the stupid, the greedy, the spiteful, the easily manipulated and the sociopathic power-mongers would just go away?

Look, this isn't a joke. This recession isn't going away any time soon, and by the time it does, our lives will be radically different. We have the choice to come together and rebuild our nation into something approaching a decent place to live, or we can keep crying for the moon while the forces of evil quietly suck us dry, separately and alone. There is no place for ego, grandstanding or apathy in this crisis. If the country goes down, we all go with it.

The healthcare bill in Congress isn't perfect, but it makes a start at stopping the most egregious abuses of the current system, while putting pilot programs in place to start improving it, slowly. That's huge. Get on the horn to your representatives and threaten them with disembowelment if they don't pass it.

The Diet-Free Life

2010-01-25T15:35:00.002-05:00

Empty Houses

2010-01-10T11:56:00.005-05:00

Like so many others, this recession hit us really hard. Both Joe and I are self-employed, so when the work dried up, we didn't even have unemployment benefits to tide us over. Recently the unthinkable became our best option--we sublet our Brooklyn apartment and moved in with extended family.

And do you know what? It's kind of fun. Olivia's G-ma is great to live with and has plenty of space to share. Aunts and uncles and cousins drop by, bring breakfast, loan us their baby furniture, recommend yoga studios. Joe fixes their electrical wiring, I share recipes. There's always someone to talk to.

All around the country, people are losing their houses--their big, big, empty houses. They're filling dumpsters with the stuff they bought to fill those houses up. I wonder how many of them bought houses to fulfill some vague dream of 'home,' derived from movies and children's books, full of laughter and games and roaring fireplaces? And I wonder how many people rattle around in them, wondering when the fun is going to start?

I think too many Americans have used their wealth to isolate themselves. They put up gates around their communities, shop online, live in suburbs and drive alone in SUVs built for eight. The more money you have, the more you don't have to interact with anyone you don't want to deal with. And ultimately, even your friends are too busy and far away to visit.

A number of years ago, I leased out my house, put my stuff in storage and floated around the world for a few years. I got good at being a houseguest. I kept my possessions to a minimum, cooked for people, listened, gave massages, and moved on when it was time to go. Since I am relatively introverted and like to control my own space, this was a challenge. But I was fine, my friends were happy to have me, and sorry to see me go. (They're still my friends, so I'm pretty sure they were telling the truth.)

This recession was a long time in the making, and our culture as a whole has a lot of hard lessons to learn. One of those lessons might be that relationships take more effort than possessions, but they give you more in return.

Personal Update

2010-01-10T11:40:00.002-05:00

Order your Mandala Calendar

2009-12-17T13:55:00.006-05:00

Rape and Parenthood

2009-12-10T16:34:00.005-05:00

One of the top priorities on my parenthood to-do list, in addition to paying the rent next month, is to raise my daughter so that things like this don't happen to her. Forget all the horse/barn door advice; I'm going with Franklin's recommendation, and signing her up for kung fu classes as soon as she's walking steadily. Not only will some physical confidence stand her in good stead, but apparently, guys really dig kung fu chicks.

Because I don't want to raise my daughter to be afraid of men. I want to raise her with a little bit of common sense. And that includes giving her a few basic facts about life--for instance, "Guys are going to want to f*ck you."

Lord knows, my life would have been easier if someone had been willing to lay things out like that. I was raised by parents who believed that ignorance = innocence = virtue, and that they could protect me from all the bad things in life by sending me to the right schools. They implicitly believed that if you follow all the rules, you'll be okay, even if you have no idea why you're following them.

There are a number of flaws in this logic. One of them is that it's a terrible idea to teach people to be unquestioningly obedient to authority; that's how you get Guantanamo, the Holocaust and corporate America. Another is that however much you try to shelter someone, they're bound to meet people eventually who don't know the same rules.

So it was that I was sent out into the world by my clueless parents with this view of sex: Men would ask me out on dates. Any man who asked me on a date would 1) not be dating any other women, and 2) would want to be my boyfriend. After we'd been dating for several months, this boyfriend would try to talk me into having sex with him.

And I had my pretty, confident, non-judgmental little speech all ready for him.

Twenty-odd years of mayhem and miscommunication later, I don't know exactly what I'm going to tell my daughter when she's old enough to parse my sentences, but in some way it will include the information, "Guys are going to want to f*ck you. Some of them will be decent guys, and some of them will be predators. Many of them will assume you want to f*ck them, too, regardless of what you say about it.

"So it's a good idea to get to know guys pretty well before you go off into dark, secluded corners with any of them. Don't assume that a man believes everything you say, or that he's even listening; a dude in the grip of raging hormones is just watching your lips move while he maps the fastest route to your panties. Predatory men will get you drunk, tell lies, and use any kind of social or physical pressure they can think of in order to get laid. They'll also use all kinds of rationalizations to avoid the consequences of their actions, physical and emotional.

"That doesn't mean that all guys are jerks. It does mean that you have to keep your wits about you. And when you decide to go into a dark, secluded corner on purpose, with a decent guy, please take a condom with you."

Twelve Months of Meditation

2009-12-09T00:35:00.005-05:00

As a first tiptoe into entrepreneurship, I am designing a 2010 mandala calendar. It is a 12" x 12" wall calendar, with high-resolution scans of mandalas that I've drawn from 2006 to 2009.

While working on the files I notice that the images do what they're intended to do--they calm me down. The fact that they're hand-drawn, and thus slightly imperfect, has a lot to do with it. Each line, each texture, is a record of an actual experience. They took a lot of time to draw, and you can spend time with them--a whole month, in fact--without, hopefully, getting bored.

The first print run will be small, and I'm hoping to keep the price down to around $20. I'll have a Paypal button for ordering, as soon as the proofs are proofed; if you would like to pre-order, please leave a note in the comments. If I get enough pre-orders I'll be able to do a larger print run. They will ship in time for Christmas.

UPDATE: It's going to be 9" x 9". Apparently, only Big Capitalists can print 12" x 12", because this requires an offset printer, and the upfront costs of offset printing are upwards of three grand. I have no illusions that my fan base is sufficient to purchase 500-1000 calendars, so a small digital run it is.

The Art World is Dead. Long Live Art.

2009-11-03T16:28:00.004-05:00

By now, anyone who cares is well versed in the Tragedy of Becky Smith's Bellwether.

Once sales dried up by the fall of 2008, Becky called three of her largest collectors, pleading for some business — “I tried playing it cool, and then I tried playing it direct,” she said. She recounted a typical conversation: “I need to sell you something to continue to be here,” she would tell a collector.
“I’m just not buying,” was the reply.
“Did you hear me? I have this artist you collect who will have to get another job. If I can’t sell you something right now, I’ll have to close,” Becky would say, but the response was the same. “I felt forsaken,” she recalled. “All these collectors who supported me and my artists, they just disappeared. They didn’t care.”

Although I was not the kind of person who ever registered on Becky Smith's radar, I feel about as sorry for her as Chris does. She was something of an idealist; even as she careened into a business that, at its peak, cost her $75,000 a month in overhead--more than most artists earn in two or three years--she thought that it was at least partly about the art. About ideas, creation, passion, beauty, humanity, exploration, the pursuit of excellence, originality and insight. That stuff.

I guess we all do.

I can count on one hand the number of Chelsea art dealers who have ever been polite to me. Polite, as in acknowledging my existence when I say "Hi, I'm Stephanie. You are..?" instead of blankly looking through me for a second before speaking to the person next to me. Polite, as in offering me a glass of champagne and allowing me to accept it, instead of moving it past my outstretched hand to the couple ten feet behind me. Polite, as in saying, "that would be lovely!" when I offer to show them my portfolio after visiting their gallery regularly for a year and a half, instead of "It's a waste of time for me to look at your work."

(Actually, not a single one has ever said "that would be lovely," even though that's my usual response to other artists. As far as I know, there's not a single Chelsea dealer who has any idea what my art looks like, let alone an opinion about it.)

That hasn't stopped them from sending me press releases, once the 'art criticism' business imploded and the art blogosphere took off. Talk about wasted effort. Dudes, get a clue: once you have been egregiously, offensively, unnecessarily rude to me in person, you can inundate me with hype and schmoozing for fifty years and I won't come back. I won't come back to interview you, have a glass of wine, or sneeze on the art. I will ignore you. You are a waste of my time.

But what I realized, after the Fall of Bellwether, was that some part of me still believed that there was some reason to respect these people. That no matter how idiotic, banal, frivolous and inane was the majority of the 'art' I saw in their galleries, nevertheless the New York Art World stood for some sort of quality. Some kind of allegiance to the life of the mind and the exploration of the spirit.

Then I thought, "$75,000 a month in overhead?" That's not art, that's fashion. Fashion, corruption, and excess.

Because a business that generates a $75K monthly overhead for a white room filled with arcane, useless objects can only be sustained by the kinds of people who happily pay themselves multimillion dollar bonuses in taxpayer money after their personal actions torch the global economy. It can only be sustained by the kinds of people who are driven to accumulate infinitely more than everybody else, no matter how many others go sick, hungry or unemployed. It can only be sustained, in other words, by sociopaths.

It's no mystery that I and the New York Art World don't get along. My interests lie in the direction of timelessness and balance.

'Twisted lotus mandala' (study), Stephanie Lee Jackson, 2009

Thus, I have realized that if I am to maintain my integrity as an artist, I have to forget about galleries. Instead I will seek to hang my work in wellness centers, yoga studios, doctor's offices, spas, churches, and any other place that exists to heal and nurture the human spirit, not crush and deride it.

I'm pretty sure this is the right direction to take, because immediately after coming to this conclusion, I started working steadily, despite being blocked for over a year, despite being broke and stressed and taking care of an infant all day.

Does that make me a kitsch artist? Well, it could, except that I'm not going to change into someone else. If people think my art is kitschy, they're not looking very closely. And if there's one thing I've discovered about New York art dealers, it's that very few of them actually know what they're looking at.

One More Thing...

2009-11-01T16:06:00.002-05:00

Blaming the Individual

2009-10-29T11:32:00.003-04:00

for institutional excess:

never have so many members of the nation’s younger generations been so dependent on their parents and grandparents. Should parents set limits, or is this transfer of wealth a social and economic necessity in the long jobless recession? How has this growing dependence changed the country?

Although the various answers to this question are interesting, it's the wrong question. The QUESTION is, 'how has the country's economy created this growing dependence?'

To anyone who entered the job market during a recession, the answer ought to be obvious--while the costs of education, healthcare and housing have skyrocketed since our parents graduated from college, the number of living-wage jobs has plummeted. There is no longer any sane ratio between the price of a college degree and the salary that degree earns you; ditto between the price of a house and the average wage. And I don't even need to talk about health insurance.

The other thing that rarely gets mentioned is that the economy itself is changing so fast that it is impossible to plan a 'career trajectory' that will still make sense five years from now, let alone through 'retirement' (which, for most of our generation, is a fiscal impossibility anyway.) No sooner do you learn one technology, skill or profession than 1) the technology becomes obsolete, 2) your job is outsourced to India, or 3) the industry collapses. Thus, any successful 'career' in this millennium requires an enormous amount of adaptability.

Fostering adaptability is, in itself, not a bad thing (we could all take a lesson from rural China in that respect), but in our certification-happy society, all of us end up further in debt while financing our own retraining. Insecurity generates predation, in the form of absurdly expensive, worthless community college degrees, MFA programs, and arcane graduate degrees. By the time we've attained our certification in holistic health counseling, or DreamWeaver, or Windows OS, the world has moved on to Linux and hypnotherapy.

The fact is, that education, healthcare and real estate are no longer subject to rational market pressures. All three industries have become so enormous, pervasive and mythologized that they are draining us dry, with few 'opt-out' possibilities.

So, New York Times editorial board, give 'dependent' 20- and 30- and 40-somethings a break. We've been sold a bunch of bills of goods, and we have little choice but to sell more bills ourselves, or to curl into a fetal position and give up.

Base Paranoia

2009-10-19T16:12:00.003-04:00

Cheers everybody! It's been yonks. Of course I have had opinions unlimited on the healthcare debate, most of which I cannot now recall. But today's Ross Douthat editorial yanked me out of my haze:

It’s the eventual endgame that liberals pushing a “public option” are aiming for: a federal takeover of the health-insurance sector, paid for by rising tax rates, in which the government guarantees universal access while using its monopoly power to hold down costs.

Let's leave aside, for a moment, the fact that the 'radical solution' that Mr. Douthat propounds is nearly identical to the one that I have been touting for years. I want to point out that the rhetoric he employs above indicates why it it is all but impossible to have a coherent discussion about healthcare these days.

Look: at the 'liberals' 'pushing' 'a federal takeover' with 'rising tax rates' to create 'monopoly power.' For Mr. Douthat, and thousands like him, there is no middle ground. Democracy is not a debate; it's a death struggle between opposing forces of freedom and totalitarianism. Any 'solution' is necessarily 'radical' because it involves the total defeat of one extremist point of view or another.

Granted, there are many progressives out there who think that universal single-payer healthcare is the way to go. On alternate Thursdays, I'm one of them. That doesn't mean that I'm incapable of 1) compromise, 2) seeing other points of view; or 3) seeking out alternate solutions which might be a creative hybrid of existing systems. It is perfectly possible to support a public option without simultaneously sending lawyers, guns and money to the secret Communist Liberation Army that is waiting outside the gates of every U.S. hospital.

Let me remind Mr. Douthat, as well as a few of my 'conservative' friends, of one thing--last time I checked, THIS IS STILL A DEMOCRACY. No 'liberal' is going to 'push' a radical solution down the throats of hundreds of thousands of entrenched and well-heeled interests without a great deal of trouble. The term 'public option' includes the term 'option' for a REASON. IT'S ONE OPTION. AMONG MANY.

On Vacation

2009-09-03T18:16:00.002-04:00

Dash Snow Dies; Nobody Notices

2009-07-22T08:21:00.002-04:00

Speak your truth quietly and clearly

2009-07-21T17:02:00.003-04:00

and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.

It was only after speaking truth and listening for a few decades that I realized a couple of things; first, that you have to repeat yourself a lot, matching your actions to your words, before anyone believes you about certain things. And second, the reason the dull and the ignorant are dull and ignorant is that they don't listen back.

Truthful statements with which I tested these propositions: "I'm an artist." "I'm moving to Mexico." "I'm moving to New York." "I love you."

It was a full decade before my nuclear family stopped tacitly expecting me to get over this 'artist' delusion and go to medical school. I had lived in Mexico for three years, and Brooklyn for two, before people stopped sending me invitations to events in Northern California with 'RSVP' on them. And some people I just stopped loving.

One thing I've learned, from running doggedly against the wind of other people's expectations for years, is that 'individualism' is a myth. Success requires community support. Look at the 'acknowledgments' on any CD, film, flyleaf, or program; the more financially and artistically successful the creation, the longer the thank-yous. The visual arts are no exception, except that visual artists tend to be even more bashful and egoistic than the average actor. Thus we have trouble asking for help, and resist acknowledging the help we get.

Moreover, the institutions which are allegedly in place for 'supporting' visual artists, such as schools, museums, galleries, and non-profit organizations, act as parasitic forces on the vast majority of artists. The art school I attended sucked its students financially dry while sabotaging their careers. Most juried exhibitions are funded by the application fees of rejected artists; grants and residencies are often awarded for political reasons rather than artistic ones; museum collections are still heavily weighted toward the white, the male and the wealthy.

It's easy to say that all of this shouldn't matter. A Real Artist will transcend all of that. And this is, to a certain extent, true. Creative people will find ways to survive, albeit not always comfortably.

But I drove myself to the verge of exhaustion, bankruptcy and despair by believing that people believed me, and now I'm wondering if it's worth it. Because if 'art' is not assessed according to the values with which it is created, it might as well not exist.

To be continued.

Go Placidly Amid the Noise and Haste

2009-07-19T22:30:00.004-04:00

and remember what peace there may be in silence.

Ever since I can remember, the Desiderata was on my mother's dressing table, framed. I didn't think of it as a 'poem,' so much as just 'the Desiderata.' I absorbed it wholesale while having my hair dried as a child, and when I grew up and left home, it only seemed natural to print up a copy, frame it, and hang it by my own dressing table. My last ex-boyfriend from hell once suggested that I take it down and put up some other, different inspirational words, since 'those have been there long enough.' What a nitwit. The ex-boyfriend is long gone, the words are still there.

But lately, in this time of economic struggle and career confusion, I've been thinking about the ways in which my principles have shaped my life. Have they been good ones? Should I keep them? Or should I go in search of some other principles, ones which might bring me--well, if I can't have fame and fortune, solvency would be nice.

So I am inspired to re-examine the Desiderata in light of its specific effects on my life, hitherto. Line by line. If you get bored, there's the whole wide Internet out there. Hie thee hence.

As it happens, I do go placidly amid the noise and haste, and always have. Even when rioting in San Francisco in the early 90's, I was placid. That's probably why I didn't get arrested. I carry with me a serenity that is like a rope attached to an anchor in the center of the earth. When other people are panicking around me, flailing and gibbering and generating drama, I get progressively more placid and serene, in order to balance them out.

This is probably really annoying to people who aren't emotional parasites, which is probably why I have had a lifelong habit of attracting emotional parasites. (Present company excepted; emotional parasites don't read.) In latter years I have found that allowing myself to occasionally freak out--to show weakness and confusion, to admit that I am not, in fact, the Buddha--has allowed me to grow closer to healthy people, and keep the people at bay who like to put serene people on pedestals, then knock them off those pedestals and stomp on them.

Lesson learned: stay away from folks bearing pedestals.

I do indeed remember what peace there may be in silence. If a person has a problem with silence--that companionable silence of sitting in the same room, reading or working alongside one another for hours on end--that's a Red Flag. As in, "I can't do my Pilates workout/work in the garden/have sex with you, with you sitting there reading/sleeping on the couch/sewing like that. Stop it."

Silence is all the more peaceful when one of these individuals has left the building forever.

To be continued.

At Last, Some Light in This Recession

2009-07-16T23:04:00.004-04:00

Crocs are going under, not a moment too soon.

"The company's toast," said Damon Vickers, who manages an investment fund at Nine Points Capital Partners in Seattle. "They're zombie-ish. They're dead and they don't know it."

Normally, I am a fan of indestructible footgear, but you look at a pair of Crocs, and you think 'landfill.' Those are some ugly shoes. I have only ever seen one person wearing Crocs who was able to get away with it; she was a student at SVA, and I think her outfit involved some sort of fifties-style dress with cherries and an apron. The Crocs were red, and they looked properly satirical.

But you would think that any company which lives by fashion would understand that satire has a very short dateline. What on earth did they expect, that after selling 100 million pairs of hideous, non-bio-degradable shoes in seven years, that people wouldn't get sick of them? Already?

Bad Mommies

2009-07-10T10:14:00.003-04:00

Gosh, a lot has changed since I was twelve years old.

Bridget Kevane, a professor of Latin American and Latino literature at Montana State University, drove her three kids and two of their friends — two 12-year-old girls, and three younger kids, age 8, 7 and 3 — to a mall near their home in Bozeman. She put the 12-year-olds in charge, and told them not to leave the younger kids alone. She ordered that the 3-year-old remain in her stroller. She told them to call her on their cell phone if they needed her.
And then she drove home for some rest.
About an hour later, she was summoned back to the mall by the police, who charged her with endangering the welfare of her children.

When I was twelve, the lady down the street knocked on our front door and said, "I see you have a girl about baby-sitting age. Can she come over on Thursday?"

We didn't know this family; they'd moved in a couple of months earlier. Their kids were three, four and six. The three-year old was adopted, after having been removed from an abusive home. She was recovering from some sort of accident involving Drano, and its corrosive effects on two-year-old intestinal tracts.

All I remember about my first twelve-year-old babysitting experience was that at least one of the kids climbed a tree, that paying attention to three kids at once was a challenge, and that everything was fine. I became their favorite baby-sitter, because I played. The girl down the street just talked on the phone and ignored them. "She didn't last," the kids informed me.

I got paid $1.25 an hour. By senior year in high school, I topped out at a whopping $2/hr., except for the H---ls, who paid me twenty bucks an evening, even though their toddler went to bed before I got there and never woke up. Mr. H. drank Scotch while driving me home and made passes at me, which I did not notice as such, because married men with children must leave their wives before dating seventeen-year-olds, and I was no home-wrecker.

BTW, the mall-dropping-off incident happened in Bozeman, Montana.

An outsider, or someone used to a bigger, more crowded way of living, might be shocked to know that I left children that young in the care of two twelve-year-olds. But these kids were a pack. They grew up together in a neighborhood full of children. They walk to and from their local schools together, play together, and frequently spend time at each other’s homes.

My brother got paid $10/hr for mowing lawns. When I started applying for Real Jobs at the age of sixteen, four years of babysitting wasn't considered actual work experience.

According to the majority of commenters on Judith Warner's column, leaving five kids at the mall in Bozeman is 'child abuse and abandonment.'

Sigh.

Judith Warner thinks that this incident illustrates pervasive societal hatred of educated women. I think it illustrates a backlash in parenting philosophy since the laissez-faire seventies, plus an unhealthy dose of mass-media-induced paranoia. Plus a bad case of the butt-inskis.

Toward a Sane Conservatism

2009-07-08T10:08:00.005-04:00

No, it's not an oxymoron, although the way the right wing has been behaving lately, you'd never know it.

Contrary to the assumptions of a few of my dear readers, I do not wish a 40-year stint in the wilderness on the Republican Party. I just wish that so-called 'conservatives' would develop a greater capacity for cognitive complexity. As poor, beleaguered David Frum can attest, most of the right wing is currently undergoing a fatal Failure to Discriminate among some all-important conceptual nuances. So, a primer:

Limited government is not synonymous with corrupt, incompetent government.

Regulation that cripples industry is not the same as regulation that cripples predators.

Listening is not a weakness.

Government-funded is not the same as government-run.

Rationing can be, and is, imposed by privately-run health insurance corporations.

Corruption and waste may be implemented by the military.

America is not a particularly free country.

And last, but not least: Obama is not a progressive.

If Obama were a progressive, DADT and DOMA would be dead in the water. Single-payer healthcare would be right in the middle of the table. Indefinite detention without charge would be off of it. Marijuana would be decriminalized. Credit card interest rates would be capped at 13%. We'd have seen those photos. Dick Cheney would be in handcuffs. Gas would cost $4 a gallon. Banks would have been nationalized. Agribusiness would have lost all subsidies.

I would go on, but it hurts too much.

So, ye self-identified 'conservatives'; be grateful. Our current President is the closest thing to a true conservative we've got.

Palin's Pathology

2009-07-04T10:27:00.005-04:00

I have never been in the business of making political predictions, but here goes: Sarah Palin will run for President. I don't think she'll get very far, but I'm sure that this is her fixed intention.

I'm certain of this because I'm equally certain that Palin is a clinical narcissist. I've known a few, up close and personally, and once you've had your dearest dreams and your greatest projects trampled to smithereens by one of them, you start to pick up on the Red Flags.

...it was easy to learn that there has always been a counter-narrative about Palin, and indeed it has become the dominant one. It is the story of a political novice with an intuitive feel for the temper of her times, a woman who saw her opportunities and coolly seized them. In every job, she surrounded herself with an insular coterie of trusted friends, took disagreements personally, discarded people who were no longer useful, and swiftly dealt vengeance on enemies, real or perceived.

The most important thing to understand about narcissists, beyond the fact that they literally Destroy Everything, is that they are perfectly capable of making monumentally stupid decisions--decisions that a retarded, violent sixteen-year-old boy in a state of hormonal overdrive would reconsider--despite their exceptionally high IQs. That is because their priorities are ordered so as to grab for the maximum ego gratification in every moment, regardless of the long- or even short-term consequences. Thus:

By all accounts, Palin was either unwilling, or simply unable, to prepare. In the run-up to the Couric interview, Palin had become preoccupied with a far more parochial concern: answering a humdrum written questionnaire from her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman. McCain aides saw it as easy stuff, the usual boilerplate, the work of 20 minutes or so, but Palin worried intently.

Can you actually imagine this? Imagine that you are about to be interviewed on national TV while running for Vice President of the United States, that you know next to nothing about the issues you are likely to be asked about, and instead of studying your a** off, so as not to humiliate yourself, you obsess about a tiny project that one of your aides could easily do FOR you?

But anyone who has ever tried to complete a major project on a deadline with a narcissistic colleague will recognize this scenario. The more urgently you have to focus, prioritize and work as a team, the more the narcissist creates dramas out of trivialities. It reaches the point where more than half of the group's energy is deflected into placating the narcissist's fears, obsessions and demands, when all of that energy is required to get the job done.

If you manage to successfully navigate the crisis, moreover, the narcissist will be sure to take the credit for it; if catastrophe results, they will loudly blame everyone but themselves. It doesn't really matter to them either way, because their primary objective--sucking all the focus onto themselves--has been met.

Narcissists do not care about Facts; they care about getting what they want, Right Now. Ergo the Odd Lies:

I should reiterate that Palin's lies are not the usual political ones. They are stark assertions of fact that are demonstrably and provably untrue...The point is not that this is a grave sin. It isn't. Most of her lies aren't (with a few exceptions). They are just a function of someone who makes stories up all the time, who says things that may momentarily impress but that are inconsistent with past statements and with, you know, reality.

I am a gullible person. It simply doesn't occur to me that people would lie to me. I take most statements utterly at face value, even when they are at flagrant odds with what I know to be true. I will stand there and wonder, "huh. I wonder why she would say that? Maybe I'd better reconsider my entire world view," before it will dawn on me that maybe she just MADE IT UP.

So when it finally sinks in that yes, your business partner DID just tell a blatant lie about you, in front of you, to a person who has the power to make or break your career, you tend to remember the moment. You tend to spend a lot of time analyzing the events that led up to that moment, and the motives of everyone involved. You do so because if it ever happens again, you will have to kill yourself.

And when you finally conclude that your partner's motives were nothing more than to 'momentarily impress,' you are impressed, all right.

...no political principle or personal relationship is more sacred than her own ambition. To be sure, Palin is “conservative,” whatever that means, but she can be all over the lot in the articulation of her platform.

Most narcissists are incapable of listening, in any but the most superficial way. Other people's concerns don't really exist for them, except as possible levers with which to manipulate. They will appear to listen; they will earnestly tell you what you want to hear, then do exactly what they please, over and over and over again. And they will be genuinely surprised and betrayed when you get upset about it.

I read a lot of punditry by gullible people like myself--people who spend their energy worrying about Palin's political philosophy, her religious beliefs, her positions on abortion, taxes, big government and foreign policy, as though these were the most important things about her. I see people seriously speculating as to why she'd shoot her career in the foot by resigning her governorship if she really intends to run for President; I see them making prescriptions of what she ought to be doing and learning to prepare herself for the job. And I think these people are grossly overthinking it.

Because the answer is staring them in the face. Just being the Governor of Alaska is tedious and boring when, in your fantasy, you see yourself being addressed as Madame President, holding court to adoring foreign leaders, and orating in front of cheering crowds. That's it. That's all. That is the sum total of thought or motivation that has gone into Sarah Palin's decisions since she was cynically inflicted on the national scene in a moment of desperation.

It's 3 AM. Do you know what your money is doing?

2009-06-30T09:43:00.006-04:00

I have to admit, when I saw the headline, "Madoff Takes Responsibility," I snorted. Dude, it's too late. The only way that Madoff could potentially redeem his debt to society would be to donate his brain to science, in the hope that we can isolate the Sociopathy Factor, and eliminate his kind from future generations. Lame journalism reached a new nadir as the writers solemnly decribed the millions of dollars worth of assets that are being liquidated in order to repay billions of dollars in judgment. His wife only gets to keep her $2 mil in cash, poor thing.

Neither am I particularly a fan of the legions of articles and comments that blame Madoff's victims for being victims. These people, some of them, are having a hard enough time without being excoriated for projected character flaws by others who, at bottom, are just afraid it might happen to them.

But then, I have to wonder--what did these people think their money was up to?

Back when I was an eager, idealistic adolescent, I realized that as a member of a First World nation, the biggest effect my existence has on this planet, for good or ill, is what I do with my money. I can recycle, compost, agitate against plastic bags and for 'green' energy every waking moment of my life; I can work in a 'healing' profession, I can be kind to strangers, children and homeless people. But when global economic conditions are such that a $25 micro-loan can make the difference between starvation and prosperity for an entire Third World family, I have to accept that my point of maximum global leverage is financial, even if I'm at the extreme low end of the income curve in my social circle.

That means that when I get an IRA rollover when I leave my civil service job, or a windfall from a relative, I need to be careful what I do with it. Not only because I ought to be planning for 'retirement' (as if--I'll be painting, blogging and giving meddling health advice until I drop), but because all of my vaunted values are mocked if my money is off pillaging rain forests and propping up brutal regimes while I sleep.

Like many people, I am not consumingly fascinated with the ins and outs of finance, trading or big business. I'm perfectly happy to park my money with a dependable expert and check on it every now and then. But it seems only common sense to park it with some people who are going to do a rainforest and brutal-regime filtering process before they use it. That is why, for the last ten years, my miniscule IRA has been invested with Sentinel Investments, formerly Citizen's Funds, a sustainable investment firm that looks at the real-world consequences of its actions, not just the bottom line.

(N.B.: Sentinel Investments is not paying me a dime for writing this post; in fact, they don't even know I'm writing it.)

I haven't suffered financially more than anyone else for doing this. The paper value of my IRA dropped by about half when the stock market did, but during the years when the market was doing well, it did better. The fact is, not only is myopic greed a lousy principle on which to run a society, it's not even a good investment strategy. You might make a buttload of money smuggling guns to thugs, but you still run the risk that a rival thug might torpedo both your profit margin and your boat captain.

So in the end, I have to assign at least some responsibility to Madoff's bilkees. Not for not understanding investment banking; for trying to get a lot of money without ever thinking about what money is for. Money is not a moral force, in and of itself; it is merely a tool for doing things. And it behooves those of us who have it to take responsibility for what those things are.

Black Art

2009-06-29T22:29:00.006-04:00

Received in the mail today, in an imposingly funereal envelope:

GET YOUR EXCLUSIVE BLACK CARD NOW.

For those who demand only the best of what life has to offer, the exclusive Visa Black Card is for you. The Black Card is not just another piece of plastic. Made with carbon, it is the ultimate buying tool.

The Black Card is not for everyone. In fact, it is limited to only 1% of U.S. residents to ensure the highest caliber of personal service is provided to every cardmember.

• Limited Membership

• 24 Hour Concierge Service

• Exclusive Rewards Program

• Luxury Gifts

• Patent Pending Carbon Card

•Annual Fee $495

Say, wouldn't it be fun to actually get one of these, use it to go on a whirlwind tour of the major continents, and then declare bankruptcy? I could easily write up an Artist Statement about the insidious destructiveness of capitalism, the cultural meme of excess, and the arrogant disconnectedness of the First World. I could ironically call attention to global warming by contributing directly to the problem, flying around the planet on a carbon card.

I would, of course, extensively document my travels and the ensuing bankruptcy (using cutting-edge photographic, video and computer equipment, which I will also charge to my Black Card account), and then someone like Larry Gagosian, Mary Boone or Jeffrey Deitch will have plenty of performance artifacts to sell to the kinds of people who would get this card for real. If they do their job well enough I'll even be able to resuscitate my credit rating, so that I can do it again and again, finally achieving a successful art career.

How to Sell Your Art In Manhattan for Free

2009-06-28T23:04:00.005-04:00

Rumor has it that certain Chelsea galleries are renting out space by the hour, in a sort of Recession Special that is allegedly going to help artists make ends meet in these desperate times. They must suppose that there are still a few thousand artists in the city who have not figured out that the only people who come look at, and occasionally buy, your art when you are not represented by a Big Important Dealer are your friends, and you can invite your friends to your studio for free.

But what if your studio happens to be in a Scary Neighborhood, as so many studios are, and your friends with disposable incomes refuse to visit you there? It so happens that there are other options than renting out six feet of blank wall in a failing gallery on a weekend when all the collectors are in the Hamptons. So here is some practical advice, from an artist who has Actually Been There.

On the sidewalk at West Broadway between Prince and Spring, Saturdays and Sundays year-round, that is. You might also try Fifth Avenue near the Met, or Union Square, but I don't personally know the scene, so don't blame me if you get roughed up by the regulars.

1) Stake your space before 8:30 AM.
You will need a folding table or a display rack to do this. Set it up on a section of sidewalk between the foot-traffic zone and the curb. Do not set up directly in front of the doors of any retail establishment; they will call the police and have you removed if you do. Do not leave any objects of value, such as art, on the rack or table while you are off napping in the car or sitting in the café.

2) Do not expect any foot traffic before 11 AM.
Tourists and other people with disposable income sleep late on weekends, rather like you used to do, when you had a day job and a dealer.

3) Shiny, shiny, shiny.
Artworks that catch the eye of tourists and fashionistas need to be bold, colorful, and executed in a recognizable (read: retro) style. Picasso knock-off prints do very well, as do photographs of NYC landmarks. Small paintings of dogs and flowers are also great sellers, as long as you put in enough consecutive weekends to build up a following.

4) Simplicity of display is essential.
Remember, you are competing with the chaos of a Manhattan retail district sidewalk, and all that that implies. Don't try anything subtle or fussy. Use a simple black backdrop and a vertical display format; sandwich boards are the most stable. Bring folding chairs, suitable attire for the weather, a friend and a sense of humor. Make sure that everything is firmly anchored, especially on windy days; find or bring a few large rocks to chain your table to.

5) Be consistent and professional.
Don't share a display rack with an artist whose style is utterly unlike yours. Don't show art from every phase of your creative development. Don't show anything on unstretched canvas, unless you're just there to drink beer on the sidewalk with the other losers.

6) Package yourself.
Have business cards with your website and your etsy.com store available. Keep works on paper in plastic sleeves. If you can beg, borrow or steal a credit card machine, do so; people spend twice as much with half the consideration if they can charge it. Come to think, you may be able to use PayPal from your cell phone; do the research.

7) Cover your behind.
Go to the irs.gov website and register for an EIN. It should come in the mail within a couple of weeks; keep it to show to the cops if they pester you with talk of business licenses. Be nice to the other artists on the street, even the Chinese guys selling kitschy framed photos mass-produced in China, and stay out of political and territorial wars as much as possible. Remember: the fiercest battles are always waged over the smallest stakes. A few square feet of sidewalk is not worth a night in jail.

8) Do not expect to be discovered. Especially, do not expect to sell your work for anything like Art World prices.
Works on paper move for between ten and forty dollars; paintings for between fifty and a hundred and thirty. Feel free to price them higher, but be aware that you will be sitting there for a long, long, long, long time.

9) Tell your friends.
You may think you're going to display your brilliance for a world of ignorant strangers and bring them to their knees, but round about three o'clock you're going to be very glad to see a familiar face, even if it's only your brother-in-law the IT guy. Hey, don't IT guys make pretty good money? Do his walls need something on them?

10) Appreciate your day job, if you've got one.
Isn't it great to be getting a paycheck for sitting behind a retail counter in a temperature-controlled environment, or for washing dishes, or scrubbing toilets, or painting houses, or laying tile? Isn't being an artist kind of overrated?

Revenge of the Bourgeoisie

2009-06-26T14:09:00.007-04:00

Q: "Do you paint portraits or landscapes?"

A: Only when I'm fundraising.

Face it: most people have no interest at all in contemporary art. I cannot count the number of times I have been asked this question when introduced as an 'artist.' It used to mean misery for all of us, as I embarked upon a condensed, tortuous and unappreciated précis of twentieth century art history, until I finally learned to answer with, "I paint with oil on linen. They're big. Here's my website if you're interested."

Moreover, as a painter who attempts to expand the boundaries of self with work that does not belong to a recognizable genre, I endure a significant amount of contempt and dismissal within the contemporary art world itself. Spokespersons from Big-Ass Art Institutions would never admit it, but there is a not-so-subtle bias against painters when it comes to awarding grants, residencies, solo exhibitions and places in the Whitney Biennial; the unspoken but loudly implied subtext is, "God, another painting. That's so boring, so bourgeois, so Been Done Already, so over."

Of course, painting still gets shown; the problem is that it is often shown as a conceptual conceit, as an interestingly retroactive quirk, amongst the sea of progressively quirky Conceptual Installations. The bigger problem is that such painting is often really bad painting, shown for political and financial reasons, not for any integral qualities of form or execution. The plain fact is that the vast majority of contemporary art impresarios have no earthly idea what a good painting looks like, and couldn't care less.

But now that the market is crashing, galleries are closing left and right, and funding for non-profit institutions is drying up, these institutions are perfectly happy to try to re-capitalize on the backs of the lowly portrait painter:

Don't get me wrong, I love Smack Mellon as much as the next guy, but isn't it a little ironic for an organization that cleaves toward site specific installations, and has little interest in contemporary painting, to rely on painters for fundraising? Please, tell me I'm wrong.

I used to assume, naïvely, that the contemporary art world was a hierarchy like any other--a climbable meritocracy. You'd start out as a student, learning technique and getting to know your peers; you'd exhibit in group shows, apply for grants and residencies, and as your work got stronger you'd win some of them. Art dealers and curators, always on the lookout for new talent, would discover your work in registries, open studios and group shows. They'd remember it from panels. Eventually, if you did good work and paid your dues, you'd build yourself a modest career--not necessarily Fame, but regular shows, a dealer, an income.

Ha.

The truth is a lot darker. The real forces which determine the shape of the Art World hierarchy are simple: "I'm More Special Than You" and "Who's Got the Money." It is constructed of creative cul-de-sacs, mediocre minds, territorial spite and disingenuous protestations of 'fairness and equality.' This is why painting is despised, but never absent.

Because people like paintings. Ordinary, dull people go to look at them in galleries, and hang them in their homes. They get inordinately excited about the idea of having their portrait painted. They like beauty, and think that they have some idea of what it is.

This is well-nigh unendurable for people whose entire reason for being is to be Different and Superior. These people must seek out and produce the arcane, the cryptic and the self-righteous; they must speak and write in polysyllabic gibberish; they must, above all, look with contempt upon the bourgeoisie. At the same time, they must convince a handful of staggeringly wealthy people that they share this superiority of being and perception, in order that they may fund their lifestyles.

It wouldn't do for these patrons to spend billions on objects that a construction worker or a soccer mom might look upon freely, appreciate and enjoy; thus, the piles of inaesthetic goop, fortified by hermetic rhetoric and a total absence of standards. For if once you admit to the existence of Quality, what's to prevent hordes of outsiders from achieving it, and thus devaluing your investment in the Few?

So now that the sustaining patrons are much less wealthy, look for painting to come back into style. Or at least, look for affordable art auctions containing art that you, the Common Person, might actually like.

Cash and Platitudes

2009-06-21T13:46:00.003-04:00

So I'm now on Twitter. I resisted for almost as long as I resisted getting a cell phone, but the Iranian Twitter Revolution and my wellness networking group convinced me. The wellness networking gals said, "It helps your business; you can tweet at your clients when you're having a special, or have a free booking," and that made some kind of sense. Before that it just seemed like extreme narcissism.

About ten minutes after I signed up for my account, I had four followers. Then seven, then fifteen. I was thrilled. Finally, the lurkers were coming out of hiding! People actually DO read my blog! And now I get to find out who they are!

Then I started taking a closer look at profiles. Turns out about half of them were people doing ''affiliate Internet marketing," which is basically social-networking spam, and the others were spewing bulk platitudes "in order to raise the consciousness of the world." Although my loathing for purveyors of platitudes is well known, I signed up to follow a few of them anyway. Sometimes a timely platitude is all right, provided it's coming from a neutral source in a timely manner.

Because like so many others at the moment, we are having serious financial Issues. We have a new baby, a $10,000 deductible, and have been living off credit since January. Both of us are working part-time jobs at the New York Minimum Wage, for lack of anything else. Both of us wake up in the middle of the night and are unable to get back to sleep for worrying, despite new-baby exhaustion.

So the platitude that rather caught my eye was from Jim Kitzmiller: 'Suffering is wanting what you can't have or resisting what you must have. Love what is.'

That, at that moment, helped.

What helped a little less was wasting time on affiliate marketing websites that promised 'Cash for free! Just an hour a day set-up time, and you can make thousands!'

These things are always tempting to look into, even if you Know Better. And maybe they do sort of work, sometimes, for some people.

But I must accept that I'm not one of those people. Because every time I contemplate doing something like that, I come smack up against my True Nature, which is that I cannot, cannot, cannot put energy into creating a system that generates cash without creating value.

Affiliate marketing is about using people, in the most direct and cynical way. You get a Twitter account, 'follow' several thousand people, get them to 'follow' you back, and Tweet about sites which pay you for advertising them. Yuck. If I'm going to 'follow' anybody, it's because I actually like them, and actually want to pay attention to their lives. I can't do that for thousands of people.

So now is the time to econclude with some sort of platitude, about Value, and Alignment, and What Really Matters. But I can't really think of one, and anyway they're coming at me in tweets at about two or three an hour.

WTF? department

2009-06-18T10:48:00.003-04:00

From a recent 'Art&Education' press release:

One intuition motivating this series of talks has been the feeling that there is something deeply problematic about an approach that narrows the possibilities of engaging with art down to the procedures of decoding and encoding its inscription onto the symbolic order. That is: the idea that the primary task of art, as a strategical operation, was to provide conceptual legitimations (to satisfy or lay down the law, among other things) by constructing references that situate the work within an established economy of meaning. No matter how critical this approach may initially have intended to be, it has effectively proven to be coextensive with—and an involuntary ideological support of—an attitude towards art production that is indeed merely strategical and solely about plotting ways of inscribing a practice into the symbolic order, be it through the suicidal heroic mode of bringing the game of art to its logical conclusion by explicating its rules (old-school modernist conceptual) or through the somewhat more versatile mode of implicating a work within its given economies of referentiality as rarified secrets.

Translation: Maybe artists shouldn't be so freakin' obscure. Because I don't think anyone is paying attention anymore.

Abortion: The Non-Debate

2009-06-11T20:47:00.004-04:00

In the immortal words of some pathetic character in a Muriel Spark novel, 'It is with great trepidation that I take up my pen,' to make a few observations on the unending, unresolvable question of you-know-what. Ordinarily I don't get involved. My private opinion on abortion is that it sucks, and that banning it is not the way to end it. Your mileage may vary; I certainly will not try to alter anyone else's opinion.

No, I merely have a couple of observations, speaking as a woman who has now traversed two pregnancies. The second resulted in the most objectively wonderful baby ever conceived in all of time :-). The first miscarried.

The first time I was pregnant, I felt like a glass bubble full of magic. I tiptoed around in a state of exaltation. I made sententious speeches to long-suffering friends, about how my attitude toward abortion, gender, politics and life in general was transformed; how I could never, ever conceive of having one, even though I had been pro-choice for twenty years previously.

Then I came down with a raging fever and strep infection. I was terrified, particularly as a dear friend had recently lost a pregnancy under similar circumstances; I hastened to a doctor, got a blood test and some antibiotics, and miscarried eighteen hours later. The doctor later informed me that my hormone levels indicated that the pregnancy had probably terminated before I'd come down with the strep.

Whatever. I didn't want to talk about it, mainly because if I didn't talk about it, I was okay. It was only when someone said something like "I'm so sorry" that I had an emotional breakdown. It is worth mentioning, however, that exactly one regular reader of right-wing extremist web fodder bothered to say, "I'm so sorry." The rest either ignored the issue entirely or said actively cruel things.

But whenever I did tell people, I discovered that first trimester miscarriages are incredibly common. At least sixty percent of the women I confided in replied with, "Yes, I had one too." It almost came to seem that a miscarriage was a prerequisite for a healthy pregnancy. People just don't talk about it.

So when anti-abortion activists count every first trimester abortion as 'one murdered baby,' this is, on the most fundamental level, not true. A pregnancy in the first trimester is a potential baby, whether abortion is legal or not. Nature is not moral; it is profligate, extravagant and wasteful. It flings the seeds of life around with wild abandon, letting them blossom or rot where they fall, without a focused plan. Human intention is not the master of all.

When I got pregnant again, I didn't tell anyone for quite awhile. My attitude was, "okay, we'll see." When I had my first ultrasound and they said, "There's your baby," I said, "Really? Are you sure? Is it alive?" I got attached gradually, fearful of another betrayal.

But this one was, of course, wildly successful. Which brings me to my second observation; that bringing a baby to term is, in the most literal sense, labor. It is really really hard. I didn't expect to get so stupid; I lost nearly all creativity, mental acuity and physical power while I was pregnant. I didn't make art, I scarcely wrote, I got breathless going upstairs. By my eighth month I was unable to give a massage without almost passing out. Pregnancy was comparable to building a house with my bare hands, in terms of the drain on my mental and physical resources.

It would behoove anti-abortion activists, then, to recognize this fact if they are truly interested in ending abortion for good and all and forever. Expecting a woman to undertake this task without physical, financial or emotional support for the duration is absurd. Too many (mostly male) persons seem to believe that babies are things which just happen if you don't interfere. The reality is a bit more complicated than that.

Birth Story (repost)

2009-06-11T16:20:00.004-04:00

'Behind every baby is an unbelievable story.' This post will be featured in Baby Week, a Discovery Health series, to air Sunday-Friday, June 14-19 at 8P e/p on Discovery Health. Episode premieres are:

Twins By Surprise Sunday, Sunday, June 14, 8P e/p
Little Parents, Big Pregnancy Monday, June 15, 8P e/p
Births Beyond Belief Tuesday, June 16, 8P e/p
Obese & Pregnant Wednesday, June 17, 8P e/p

***
As I write this, my beautiful daughter Olivia Grace is snuggled against my chest, sound asleep in her baby sling; hopefully she will remain that way long enough for me to finish this post. She was born on March 14, 2009, at 3:58 PM, weighing in at nearly 10 pounds. We are both as healthy and happy as we can be.

Warning: pregnant women and squeamish persons, this is all you need to know. Please stop reading now.

Before Olivia was born, I did everything in my power to prepare for a healthy, natural childbirth. I chose Clementine Midwifery as my care provider, did regular prenatal yoga at Park Slope Yoga Center, hired my wonderful yoga teacher Sasha as my doula, and attended childbirth classes with Jada Shapiro at Birth Day Presence. I cannot recommend all of these people highly enough. I got every bit of care and medical attention that I required, plus an enormous amount of practical information and emotional support. I am forever grateful that I ditched the insurance plan that placed me with a male OB/GYN from the Ukraine who was only in the office once a week, and who made me wait in the waiting room for two hours to tell me I was fine.

The pregnancy went mostly very well. As a bodyworker, I see a lot of pregnant women, and I know just how uncomfortable pregnancy can get; I was grateful not to have agonizing lower back pains, excessive nausea, insomnia, gestational diabetes, or hideous acne. I gained the minimum healthy amount of weight, got breathless going upstairs, and took a lot of naps. Childbirth classes were fun, and although I didn't write off the possibility of getting an epidural, I was game to try it without the drugs.

The only thing I wasn't prepared for was not to go into labor at all.

A week past my due date, I started trying folk remedies to bring it on. I got an acupuncture treatment from Laura at Providence Day Spa. I went for walks, and bounced interminably on my yoga ball. I ate spicy food and got a pedicure. Joe and I tried those other things that are supposed to induce labor, wink wink. The baby didn't budge.

The problem was that she was turned around--'occipital posterior presentation'--and wasn't dropping down. As time went by, she got bigger and bigger, to the point where she wasn't able to drop. My body being wise, it simply refused to push a rock against a hard place, and waited for someone to come and do something about it.

Two weeks past my due date, I was induced. I labored for 9 hours without drugs, then broke down and asked for the epidural. Pain is one thing; unending pain without purpose is quite another, and at that point I could sense that the contractions weren't accomplishing anything.

It took 45 minutes to install the epidural catheter, which wasn't fun. They kept stabbing me in the spine, asking "do you feel that?", taking it out and trying again. The last time they hit a nerve which led down my right leg, which was REALLY interesting, but after some twiddling it worked well enough. I was able to get the first sleep I'd had in more than 24 hours.

Eight hours later, after the maximum dose of pitocin had failed to bring the baby any closer to emerging, I agreed to a c-section. They shipped me to the OR, strapped me into the Jesus Christ position and extracted my baby. As soon as we were introduced she recognized my voice and Joe's voice; her eyes moved toward us and she stopped crying. I asked her if the name 'Olivia Grace' was okay with her, and she consented.

Then the epidural catheter fell out.

I know the catheter fell out because when the anaesthesiologist came in two days later to remove it, it wasn't in. I know that it fell out then because I started feeling the c-section in ways they hadn't warned me about. "Ow," I said, politely. "Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow. That's very violent."

They whisked Olivia away and started feeding me drugs, seemingly at random. "Is this better?" they asked.

"Well, maybe a little. Ow." They kept apologizing for putting little pinpricks in my shoulder, which I found ironic and amusing. The anaesthesiologist said, "we usually don't use this one, because it causes hallucinations, but it works as a last resort. Here come the sixties!"

Then the world exploded.

As those who are close to me know, it is my belief that the physical world is an illusion, a projection of the mind, and that reality is complete spiritual unity. This ceased to be a theoretical proposition and became my direct experience. "I am foam," I declared.

I expanded in all directions, becoming one with the Universal Mind, at the same time as a small part of me recalled that there were these things that thought of themselves as people, who were born and got old and got married and died, and wasn't that ridiculous. They sent each other silly coded messages on something called "the Internet" when they could communicate totally and directly at any moment. This might have been a fun game, except that along the way, a lot of suffering happens.

Suffering was a particularly pertinent issue to me, because they started stuffing my uterus back into my abdominal cavity, which was startlingly painful, given that it was only going back where it belonged. "Burrrrrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnnnn," I remarked. "Flame. I am flame. Burrrrrrrrnnnnnnnnn. Why did we invent consciousness? This is a STUPID experiment. We need to stop it RIGHT NOW."

The OB/GYN who performed the surgery told me later, "You were one of the colorful ones." I moved on to shouting Course in Miracles lessons at the top of my voice, and told Joe (who was, of course, part of my own mind, as was the midwife, the anaesthesiologist, and the rest of humanity) "You are the ONLY person I would do this for. Fuck those Christians." The six parts of my mind which were in the operating room at the time all chuckled.

All in all, if every woman who gave birth or had a c-section went through this, there would soon be no more people.

After an indeterminate period of time, my individual identity began to reconstitute itself, in a dim ugly room. One part of me coalesced into a midwife, another into my mom. The midwife appeared to understand when I confided that I loved her, that we were one, but my mom persisted in using this silly 'telephone' thing to 'call other people.' She also kept asking me if I wanted her to leave, and informing me that I'd forget she'd been there, which was just dumb, and I told her so.

Really I was quite disturbed, given that in the act of bringing a child into 'the world,' I had simultaneously gained proof that both 'the world' and 'children' didn't actually exist. Although I was unhappy that Olivia had been spirited away into the NICU because her glucose was crashing, I recognized that it was probably a good thing for me to get used to being me again before taking responsibility for her.

At 9 PM they finally got me installed in a postpartum room and brought her to me for a few minutes. They wouldn't let me keep her; they said it was 'a privilege' that I got to see her at all, which was a little rich. I put up a fight but was overpowered, and they took her away again. I was attached by an IV to a box which beeped all night, keeping me awake, and caused my feet to swell up to the size of small watermelons.

Later, of course, everything was fine. Intense, agonizing pain aside, the week of Olivia's birth was one of the happiest of my life. Midwives and doula seemed to expect me to be sad that 'things hadn't gone as planned,' but as far as I am concerned, things are ducky. If this were 1850, I'd be dead, instead of having a gorgeous, healthy 10 lb. baby and a small surgical scar; why, then, would I waste a second on natural childbirth regrets, let alone sue the hospital for gross negligence in the matter of the catheter?

Unless, of course, they decide to get ugly about the bill.

I'm a user, baby, so why don't you lose me?

2009-06-11T10:56:00.003-04:00

Lately I've been reading Carolyn Hax, who can't be beat for succinct common sense. This letter in particular struck, shall we say, a personal chord with me:

I am having sex with three people right now. (Not literally, but you get the idea.) Two of them have no idea there is anyone else and the third one might. My friends say I'm being deceptive, but I say it's fair game as long as I don't pretend I'm being exclusive and we always use protection. Who's right?

Carolyn, as usual, cuts to the chase:

My evil twin hopes you fall hard for someone who treats you the same way you're treating these people.

The answer to your specific question is that you're telling a lie of omission. If you fear the truth would upset them, then you're being deliberately deceptive...

Indeed.

In my Dark Past, I ran into a lot of these characters. Their primary common characteristic was treating personal relationships like legal contracts. "Well, I didn't SAY we were exclusive, that I wanted kids, that I wanted a commitment, so I have no responsibility for your feelings of grief, betrayal, anger and frustration..."

There's little point in explaining what's wrong with this to someone who doesn't want to see it. But from my vantage point of being a Little Older Now, and having the opportunity to see some of the long-term consequences of this behavior in former associates, let me tell you--the reason that using people doesn't work is that eventually, you run out of things people want.

And then you've got nothing and nobody. Because when you use someone's genuine affection solely as a means of Getting Stuff--as a way of bolstering your ego--eventually you kill the affection. It's not true that Love Never Dies. It dies a slow, ignominious death when it is milked but not acknowledged; when it is used as the paper on which you write your disingenuous 'contracts.'

How You 'Earned' It

2009-06-09T14:04:00.005-04:00

As some of you are aware, it has long been my hobby to dally in Right-Wing Extremist Land, trying to wrap my head around how the other 23% thinks. For years I read extensive diatribes on Those Evil Feminist Baby-Killers, Those Satanist Socialists and Those F*'n Libtards, setting aside the odd surge of incredulous rage and regarding their venomous screeds with scholarly detachment. I came out of it with only a mild case of Stockholm Syndrome, thinking, "Gosh, they're so CUTE. Good thing they're not running the world any longer, though."

But all honeymoons must come to an end, and around the time Obama sealed the nomination, the State of Grace in which I had been dwelling abruptly evaporated. It's not just that I like Obama, and believe that it is High Time that an empath with a balanced global perspective was running things; it's that when a person calls Obama a moron and takes Sarah Palin seriously--well, words and empathy both fail me.

So it is with the full understanding that I am preaching to an empty hall that I take on the issue of Taxes.

There are those of you out there who object to Paying Taxes on What You Earned. You state that Progressive Tax Rates Are Patently Unfair. The horror. The cruelty. The Economic Stupidity. You declare, righteously, that rather than pay those Taxes you will take your marbles and go elsewhere. After all, you EARNED it.

Yes, darling, you did. But if you earned more than a quarter million dollars last year, you didn't do it working freelance. That is, you didn't do a physical job in a measurable amount of time and get paid market rate for it. You didn't dredge up clients one by one, and convince them to pay you for a single object or a single service, one by one.

No, if you earned more than a quarter of a million dollars, you did it by positioning yourself--or being positioned--at a strategically superior position in a very large system. I.e., you were a high-ranking officer in a large corporation, a lawyer, an investor, or an entrepreneur on a large scale. You received a percentage of the profit from the labor of thousands of people. Your 'earnings,' then, are inseparable from both the existence and the smooth functioning of this system, and thus dependent upon the system in a far more pervasive way than the labors of a freelancer at the bottom of the pyramid. To put it mathematically--a freelancer's earnings are linear. Yours, by virtue of your advantageous connections within the system, are exponential.

So you may complain to me about paying Higher Taxes--if, and only if:

• You, and all of your employees, and all the employees of every corporation you invest in, never use roads.

• You, and all of the above, have never attended a public school, including a state university.

• Your business does not utilize any standardized weights or measures.

• You, and all of the above, do not require a working environment free of cholera, malaria, polio, war and pestilence of all kinds.

• You, AAOTA, do not use the Internet.

• You, AAOTA, do not require clean drinking water, sewers, or garbage removal.

• You, AAOTA, and none of your progenitors ever staked a physical claim--say, to a piece of land or a sum of capital--that was upheld in perpetuity by the rule of law.

You may tell me until the cows come home that you don't care about Those Other People, that lazy people don't deserve healthcare, that your right to prove to God that you are a Good Person by Giving Voluntarily is inalienable, and that Government is Evil. Fine. So why don't you go where there is no government--say, the moon--and keep 100% of everything you find there.

The Plight of the Freelancer

2009-06-07T13:04:00.003-04:00

This article describes my life.

Venkatesh also asks people if they work for themselves. Over the years, he has observed the rise in the number of people who say yes. This year, he estimated, at least half of his coffee-shop sample was made up of the self-employed. Increasingly, they talk about their fading prospects. In 2005, 16 percent of the coffee-shop patrons Venkatesh talked to in Brooklyn and 34 percent in Manhattan said they were out of work, were looking or had recently given up looking. In April of this year, the figure rose to 37 percent in Brooklyn and spiked to 53 percent in Manhattan. Many of the coffee-shop patrons told Venkatesh that they had maxed out their credit cards and had no savings. He concluded that it wasn’t just many workers in the sex industry who were living at the edge of poverty — it could be anyone who had hung out their own shingle.

As Chris Jagers points out, a freelancer is not an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs build businesses that eventually function without them; freelancers just do a job. They do a job without a steady paycheck, sick leave, health insurance or unemployment insurance. When a freelancer doesn't work, she doesn't get paid.

The thing that you notice the most when working freelance is the number of systems that are set up to milk you, without any work actually getting done in exchange for the money extracted. Our landlord just jacked up our rent again; additionally, he tacked on a $300 addition to the security deposit. (We signed the new lease and pretended we didn't notice the security deposit increase, because there's no way we can pay it. We figure it will cost him a lot more to evict us than it's worth.) Everywhere you look, there's another fee--taxes, finance charges, ATM fees, bank fees, parking fees, tolls, utilities, maintenance, transportation. The most insidious thing is how amorphous and impersonal it is; it all just...gets....deducted. You're not paying a person for an object or a service that you are theoretically free to decline. You're drained simply by virtue of living in the system.

Of course, the system is what sustains us; I wouldn't want to do without my apartment, electricity, gas, Internet, phone etc. But in order for a system to survive, it has to keep its individual components alive. A system which takes far more than it delivers is ultimately unsustainable.

The Happiness Question: A Conversation

2009-06-05T14:49:00.004-04:00

I have a confession to make: I am a happy woman.

Career-wise, as I have admitted below, my life is less than successful. Financially speaking, I am circling the drain. But in terms of simple, minute-by minute, silly joy, I have nothing whatsoever to complain about.

It would be an oversimplification to say that I am happy because I am in a stable relationship with someone wonderful, who suits me. It would be an equal oversimplification to blame my happiness on having a wonderful little girl, when for most of my life I honestly didn't believe I'd ever have children.

But I do think there is something to be said about every human being's profound need for connection--deep, stable, and unbreakable--and my little family provides that. I lacked it for so long that just the simple fact of its existence is like a long drink of cold water after a marathon.

I bring this up because of a small flap about a recent Ross Douthat column about women, happiness and the lack of it, in which he brings up statistics which suggest that women are less happy these days then formerly, and suggests that more stigmatizing ought to make them happier:

They should also be able to agree that the steady advance of single motherhood threatens the interests and happiness of women. Here the public-policy options are limited; some kind of social stigma is a necessity. But a new-model stigma shouldn’t (and couldn’t) look like the old sexism. There’s no necessary reason why feminists and cultural conservatives can’t join forces — in the same way that they made common cause during the pornography wars of the 1980s — behind a social revolution that ostracizes serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors as thoroughly as the “fallen women” of a more patriarchal age.

Actually, I'm all for ostracizing serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors, but I'm with Ross--it will never happen. Not because modern society won't accept 'sexual stigma,' as he tut-tuts, but simply because high-testosterone, high-earning males will always invoke placation before ostracism. It's hard-wired into our brains and our culture. We're going to have to undergo a few more millennia of evolution before that changes.

But enough of my opinion! The reason this post is entitled 'A Conversation' is that I'm proposing just that. My time is fragmented these days; I can't fit all my thoughts into a single post, nor a post into a single day. So I pose you this question: are you happy? Why or why not? What do you think of Ross's article, and the subject it discusses? Let's take it from there.

The rights of the bigoted

2009-06-03T12:16:00.003-04:00

Ah. To all ye charming, reactionary persons who find delight in hurling accusations of "racism" and "affirmative action pick" at Sonia Sotomayor, let it be known that this lady is on record as supporting your right to make any racially insulting, bigoted remark you choose, and in pointing up the dangers of enforcing politically correct attitudes at the expense of both privacy and the First Amendment in order to maintain one's Public Face.

The facts of Pappas are simple. The plaintiff was a white employee of the New York City Police Department -- working in a clerical position in information management -- when he was fired for having sent blatantly racist and anti-Semitic replies in response to charity requests he received in the mail. Pappas admitted doing it, and said he did it to protest the charity requests. The NYPD fired him for having sent the replies on the ground that it did not want racist employees. He sued the NYPD, alleging that his First Amendment rights were violated by the firing, because he was clearly fired due to the content of the political views he expressed.
The district court judge dismissed Pappas' case, finding that the NYPD had a legitimate need to exclude racists from its employ, a need which outweighed Pappas' First Amendment rights. On appeal, two of the three judges on the Second Circuit panel agreed with that ruling and dismissed Pappas' case. But not Sotomayor. She wrote a dissent emphasizing the strong First Amendment interests of Pappas' that were being violated -- however contemptible it was, it was pure political expression -- and she argued that it he was entitled to a jury trial to decide if the NYPD, under Supeme Court precedent, had any right to fire him for it.

As unpleasant as it may be to acknowledge, the fact is that persons who have been used to think of themselves as the Majority--Caucasian, Anglo-Saxon, Middle-Class Protestants, for example--are fast becoming a decided Minority in this country, and indeed, in this world. Insofar as this is a fact, and one likely to become more true as time goes by, it is in this Minority's best interests to hope that leaders of the New Majority make decisions from an empathic point of view: one that deeply considers your perspective, holding your rights as sacred as that of the majority.

In other words, you had better hope that they do not do unto you, what you have far too often done unto them.

Sotomayor's Aspirations

2009-05-31T12:50:00.003-04:00

I hesitate to weigh in on Sotomayor, since there is already so much overblown and predictable garbage flying around the media about her appointment, 99% of which will be forgotten as soon as she is deservedly confirmed. Face it, the woman is an unexceptionable grind. It never seems to occur to Certain Persons that calling a Latina woman an 'affirmative action pick' just because she is a Latina woman is the definition of racism; this is why affirmative action needs to be phased out as soon as is practical. We don't need to be saddling competent people with the kind of self-doubt and social undermining that affirmative action necessarily creates.

I call her a 'grind,' however, because it is clear (as she states herself) that she has little natural oratorical or rhetorical talent. And I will probably regret this, but--am I the only person who noticed her misuse of the word 'aspiration' in her speech?

I stand on the shoulders of countless people, yet there is one extraordinary person who is my life aspiration. That person is my mother, Celina Sotomayor.

Surely, surely she meant that her mother is her life's inspiration? You can't aspire to be another person. A person can inspire you to be like them. This is a cliché, and she got it wrong.

I hope this was merely a slip due to extreme nervousness. From what I've read about her, she strikes me as far more middle-of-the-road than either the liberal or conservative factions are willing to admit. When are people going to understand that there is not a conflict between empathy and justice? A decision is only a sound one when it resonates with both the intellect and the heart.

Let alone the fact that in several of the most prominent cases being bandied about, Sotomayor has consistently erred on the side of strict, literal interpretation of the law, at the expense of the more touchy-feely outcomes. Which only points up the fact that 'conservatives' are frequently only in favor of 'the rule of law' when the rule of law favors them.

I am a Stepford Mom

2009-05-31T12:09:00.000-04:00

Really. According to the hip, arch copy on the orange Vitamin Water bottle, only Valium-soaked Stepford moms cook breakfast.

I have nothing against Vitamin Water; I drank five cases of the stuff during my last six weeks of pregnancy. (That was the amount left over from the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival promotional samples. We would not, of course, PAY for five cases of colored water.) But people who write hip, arch copy on bottles run the danger of making Too Many Assumptions. In this case, and particularly in this economy, it is not a wise move to disrespect women who get up in the morning and pop a pan of biscuits in the oven--or muffins, or waffles, or bacon and eggs. Cooking breakfast from scratch is not hard, it is not time-consuming, and it's a heck of a lot more cost- and nutrition-effective than popping by Dunkin Donuts.

When you bake something yourself, you know what is in it. My biscuits, for example, contain organic whole wheat flour, butter, sea salt, aluminum-free baking powder, and organic milk. They don't contain high fructose corn sweetener, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, superfine white flour, processed dairy by-products, or preservatives.

(Not that 'preservatives' are necessarily a bad thing. I recently purchased a jar of marinated herring prominently labeled "No Preservatives;" the ingredients were herring, onions, vinegar, sugar, salt, spices, black pepper and wine. Somebody needs to brush up on the history of food preservation techniques.)

In the pursuit of feminist equality, we take the disrespect of 'women's work' much, much too far. I don't consider baking to be a symbol of oppression, but rather of freedom. I like to bake; in times of anxiety it calms me down. It's alchemical, and produces a tangible result, unlike the vast majority of what passes itself off as 'work' these days.

Vanity and Shame

2009-05-30T11:32:00.007-04:00

Transcript of recent interaction between myself and Ico Gallery:

Dear Stephanie Lee Jackson,

I recently been introduced [sic] to your work online, and I must say I'm very impressed. After reviewing your website, I'm extremely interested in finding out more about you and the process of your work. I feel that your work would be a grand addition to Perceptions Of Reality, which is our September collective exhibition that uses the Surrealist ideology of entering a different cosmos, and combines it with that of abstraction and Fauvism, which in effect will create an alternate view of reality, previously unexplored by one artist. This exhibition will the inaugural exhibition in our new flagship location in our extravagant ground floor 3,000 sq ft gallery in Chelsea.

[two paragraphs of pretentious blather about "renaissance," which, in case you didn't know, is a French word meaning "rebirth."]

Upon perusal of the attached proposal, I found the real reason for this 'career opportunity': $2500 in fees. I replied posthaste.

VANITY. GALLERY.

Get a clue. And take me off your mailing list.

Vanity galleries are like Nigerian 419 scammers; usually they crawl back into the woodwork like cockroaches when confronted with the truth about their business practices. I was thus rather surprised to receive a reply.

You do realize why you're [sic] resume is non-existent, right? With an attitude like that, you will not make it in the business of art!

My first impulse was to press the 'delete' button and forget about it. But I have been making a habit, lately, of stating my boundaries when strangers try to shame me, even though this may come across as hysterical and overengaged; it is helping me eradicate the bad habit of taking jerks too seriously.

Hello, could you BE any tackier?

I know enough about the 'business of art' to know that artists who show with galleries that charge thousands of dollars in fees never get any artistic respect, and are unlikely to recoup their fees in sales, because galleries that charge fees have less incentive to build a collector base; their overhead is already covered. They also prey upon artists with 'non-existent resumes' because they are looking for the ignorant and the insecure who haven't yet figured this out, and are thus vulnerable to their scams.

Genuine, respected art dealers make studio visits, spend time getting to know their artists, and build a consistent program over time. They don't do online searches and send out flattering (at first) emails to every random artist they find. This isn't the first solicitation I've received from you; you need to keep a better database.

My 'attitude' is generally just fine, thank you very much. I am just sick of being an object of predation for every fool with an MBA and cultural pretensions. If you believe in art, put your money where your mouth is and start a real gallery. Select your artists for their skill, passion and commitment, not their economic idiocy, and treat them decently. Which means NOT charging them fees.

Good day.

This is pretty much the basic screed, which any artist ought to know by heart. What I want to point out, though, is the levers which predators of all stripes use to control people.

Note in their first contact, the fulsome level of flattery; this is the sort of thing that every adolescent assumes will come as their just due--say, when they first upload their work to Saatchi Online. You have to be working a few years, and have your illusions shattered a few dozen times, before you truly understand that nobody will EVER come across your work online, or on the street, or in a restaurant, and be so blown away that they offer you a Chelsea exhibition and thousands of dollars per piece. (Unless you are Swoon, or Barry McGee. And I'm not even sure that both of these artists are solvent.) Our culture is too saturated with images for that to happen. Plus, anyone who thinks they truly understand what an artist's work is like from an online image doesn't understand visual art at all.

Then, of course, once their cover is blown, out come the nasties: "You do know why your resume is nonexistent, right?" People who use flattery as a tool are highly prone to use humiliation as a weapon, since these are two sides of the same coin. Simply, they're trying to shut me up by hitting my most vulnerable spot.

And the reason I'm posting about this at length, online, despite the fact that it showcases my lack of career success, is that vanity and shame are the forces which keep most of us isolated, helpless, and ultimately unsuccessful. Predators can only survive when they've got a steady supply of weak, ignorant victims who don't share information. Once we learn to step outside of our egos and ask ourselves, "hey, what's this person's agenda? What's the bigger picture? Who is profiting, and who is the loser?" it makes us much harder to manipulate. Then maybe the vanity galleries will disappear--not to mention the vanity governments.

This intuition thing...

2009-05-13T17:46:00.002-04:00

Math lesson

2009-05-13T13:29:00.007-04:00

Deborah Fisher presents an exhaustive discussion of why environmentalists need to get a grip on basic math:

The harder the individual Greenmonger (myself included) worked at trying to minimize her own personal impact, the more egotistically out of touch she seemed to the people around her. The result was a vicious cycle of very little progress: scores of people who really did want to care were put off by the one co-worker who kept digging in the trash and nagging people about Vampire Power. Environmentalists became the ultimate Debbie Downers--the ones who couldn't stop reminding you that this or that product that you use every day is toxic, talking about the horrors of factory farming when you're trying to eat, or the worst--expounding ad nauseum on the benefits of not buying anything unless the canvas bag was at the ready and otherwise living difficultly. Dick Cheney's evil prophecy was more than fulfilled. Environmentalism didn't just become a matter of personal virtue. Environmentalists became Victorian scolds with a wrongly-scaled sense of their own impact on the world and an impaired sense of humor.

'Wrongly-scaled'? Deborah, you are too kind.

Recently I came across a video on Facebook, of a 12-year-old girl scolding the UN for messing up the planet. It was powerful and touching; the conversation in the comments, however, rapidly devolved into a self-righteous group bashing of those evil people who use plastic bags. Plastic bags?

Well, yes, plastic bags are a problem. They strangle sea birds, and off-gas noxious chemicals that mimic estrogen. But defining the total virtue of self and others as a function of how many plastic bags you use is both narcissistic and petty. It also shows a criminal ignorance of proportionality: the ratio of plastic bags used or not-used by a single person, to the total number of plastic bags used by the billions of people on the planet, is so infinitesimal as to approach zero. In other words, even if you never use another plastic bag for as long as you live, your Puritan self-restraint will have virtually no effect on the state of the planet.

The standard response to this is, of course, "So what? It's better than nothing." But if "infinitesimally better than nothing" is the best any of us can possibly do to save the planet, we're doomed. As Deborah so eloquently points out, spreading the news that humans are nothing but pollution machines, with virtually no power to alter their surroundings short of mass suicide, is not the best way to recruit others to your point of view.

As a new mother, I am more sensitive than usual to the plethora of disparaging comments on websites like Salon.com about People Who Breed Irresponsibly, or People Who Breed, period. I see perfectly nice women seriously worrying that they shouldn't have children because Overpopulation Is Destroying the Planet. Some people actually go so far as to verbally assault women with the temerity to write about the difficulties of supporting three children after a divorce; "serves you right," they say, "you shouldn't have had the kids in the first place."

I BEG your pardon? Rude, abusive and hateful, much?

What affects the global population rate is not the decision of one guilty, white, middle-class liberal to have a child or not; it is the rate of education of women in third world countries, or lack thereof. As the education level goes up, the birth rate goes down; it only starts going up again when the culture as a whole starts treating women as full-fledged human beings. So whatever your views on population control, the decline of Western civilization and the advent of feminism, you could do worse than to treat women as people with functioning minds, who are capable of making their own reproductive decisions.

One of the most destructive habits of human thinking, I believe, is the notion that we are just our bodies; that physical action and physical existence demarcate the limits of our sphere of influence. The truth is, our bodies are the least of us. The potential influence of our physical selves is negligible; the potential influence of our spirit is infinite.

This month in the New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch writes about Rwanda's astonishing recovery from genocide, fifteen years after the bloodbath. Incredible as it may seem, hundreds of proven, confessed murderers are living side by side with the friends and families of their victims, in relative peace and prosperity. Part of what has allowed this miracle to occur is the practice of gacaca; village courts which establish a collective accounting of past atrocities by publically hearing confessions, and pleas for forgiveness.

Of course, this has not produced anything like total healing or enlightenment for the vast majority of Rwandans. It has, however, largely prevented a continuation of the violence, and laid the groundwork for a stable, prosperous society. What makes the difference? Largely, Rwandan President Paul Kagame:

...It was Kagame, of course, who had issued the order granting the killers their reprieve, so after the ceremony he called the young man over. "And I asked him, How do you manage? When you meet them, what do they tell you or what do you tell them? What is your feeling? I want you to genuinely tell me how you feel. This young man looked me in the face and he said, 'Well, President, I manage because you ask us to manage.'"

There is a fine line between totalitarianism and inspiration, sometimes a line which is externally invisible. But in any cause for righteousness, our goal should be to inspire others, not to control them.

Sociopaths and Me

2009-04-21T18:59:00.002-04:00

Okay, so I know that 'advertises for massage on Craigslist' is code for 'freelance hooker.' That's why I don't advertise on Craigslist. I have still had more than one client who expected, and requested, a hand job; those clients get sent home with a flea in their ear. Usually I can prescreen male prospective clients over the telephone by the simple expedient of asking why they want a massage. If they say, "My back just went out, and my wife recommended you," they get an appointment. If they say, "oh, I just want to relax..." I'm booked up until the year 2020.

But the 'Craigslist killer' still could have gotten me. It is a measure of my extreme naivete that the first thing I thought was, "why would anybody try to rob a massage therapist? We're not known for carrying large sums of cash."

Actually, that was my second thought. My first thought was, "Oh, a pervert who rapes vulnerable self-employed women in hotel rooms and kills them afterward."

What a checkered life I've led.

I don't want to presume a person is guilty until it's been proven. Thus, it's difficult to comment on the interviews with all of the accused's 'friends', who say what a nice guy he is, how he smiles all the time and always says hello. But it struck me that nobody yet has mentioned any concrete good of the guy. Nobody tells the story of working side by side with him at Habitat for Humanity, or recounts how he let them crash at his place for three months when they got laid off, or helped them move at the drop of a hat, or set their broken bone for free.

No, it was all superficial. He smiled, he said hello, he went to parties and asked how you were doing. It struck me that none of the persons interviewed knew him any more deeply than that, and how it hadn't seemed to occur to them that there was any more depth than that.

Two things: one, that many or most sociopaths come across as 'really nice guys.' Sociopaths are expert manipulators. They smile, they say hello, they ask how you are. Why are more people not aware of this?

Two, that our social habits, as a society, don't encourage deep engagement with one another. To the point that most people don't even know what deep engagement is, let alone notice the lack of it.

Networking in the New Economy

2009-03-04T16:11:00.004-05:00

Lately I've been getting a rash of press releases from galleries, arts organizations and gung-ho Emerging Artists. Some of them I've had friendly contact with in the past, but most are from people that I've either never heard of, have actively snubbed me when I've visited them in person, show work that I have utterly no interest in (Art Cars in Los Angeles?) or are located across the country in places I never visit. Evidently, these people are catching on to the fact that art bloggers, (or artists who have blogs, in my case) are gradually acquiring some of the influence that formerly was the sole provenance of art critics writing for major publications.

I would let these people know that their carefully crafted publicity is going straight into my circular file, except that I'm positive that none of them actually read my blog. They just had an office flunkey go down the list of Art Bloggers, courtesy of Modern Art Notes or Ed Winkleman, and compile the authors' contact information. Email is free, after all!

And of course, you get what you pay for.

Recently I came across a video snippet by Seth Godin, on Good and Bad Networking. He pointed out that what most of us think of as New York Power Networking is basically useless: going to tons of events, handing your business card to everyone you meet, 'friending' thousands of people on Facebook, delivering your 30-second pitch at every opportunity, compiling huge email lists and sending frequent updates.

Thank God he said it. I hate those people. I have, occasionally, been one of those people, but have never been able to sustain the momentum for any length of time. I was too aware that I was acting like too big of a jerk, and could not come close to maintaining connections in any meaningful way.

Because once you've been on these people's mailing lists for awhile, you notice that they never reciprocate. You send them a note saying "Congratulations!" with a short update on your own affairs, and they don't reply. You comment on their blog and they don't respond. You show up at their event and they're talking to someone more important than you, and fail to make introductions. It goes without saying that they'll never come to your show, refer a client, write a review, or hook you up with that agent they know. They're So Busy! Who has the time?

No, as Seth says, the kind of networking that actually works has to do with helping other people achieve their goals. It's all about making referrals, connecting people, taking an interest. If you want an art blogger to review your show, make a habit of reading their blog and commenting! If you need client referrals, make them. And for goodness' sake, if somebody does something nice for you, thank them.

I suspect that the world is changing more profoundly than most people are ready to apprehend. We are inevitably moving from a top-down, authority-driven culture to a lateral one. Large corporations are reducing their workforces and eliminating pensions; newspapers are dying; whole sectors of the economy are shriveling up and disappearing. Fewer and fewer people are going to be able to make a living from one job alone. We will be cobbling together an income from three or four or five sources, and trading assistance with peers will make the difference between solvency and starvation. It seems to me that people who 'network' with a virtual bullhorn are falling prey to the old paradigm; that all you need to do is broadcast your agenda to everyone you meet, until you meet the ONE who will make you FAMOUS. All other people only exist in order to conduct you to that one.

Well, I've got news for you; that ONE publisher, gallery, agent, investor or corporation you were depending on just went bankrupt. Other commoners are all you've got to work with. Treat us kindly.

Personal Update

2009-03-04T16:07:00.002-05:00

Oh, please

2009-02-10T11:49:00.003-05:00

Go read this article: Trying to Live on 500k in New York City. Read the whole thing; it's short. I'll wait.

Sure, the solution may seem simple: move to Brooklyn or Hoboken, put the children in public schools and buy a MetroCard. But more than a few of the New York-based financial executives who would have their pay limited are men (and they are almost invariably men) whose identities are entwined with living a certain way in a certain neighborhood west of Third Avenue: a life of private schools, summer houses and charity galas that only a seven-figure income can stretch to cover.

Yes, the solution IS simple. Not just because there's no reason that the taxpayers should pay for your summer house; because a person who is responsible for managing a financial system which determines people's lives should have some CLUE WHAT PEOPLE'S LIVES ARE LIKE.

Talk about identity politics. There is no social good to be maintained by buttressing illusions of superiority in a handful of drones who shuffle numbers while other people do the work. There is, perhaps, a great deal of social good to be obtained by insisting that bankers be forced to learn to manage money.

For starters, consider this:

A modest three-bedroom apartment, she said, which was purchased for $1.5 million, not the top of the market at all, carries a monthly mortgage of about $8,000 and a co-op maintenance fee of $8,000 a month. Total cost: $192,000. A summer house in Southampton that cost $4 million, again not the top of the market, carries annual mortgage payments of $240,000.

What kind of a jackass buys an apartment with co-op maintenance fees that equal the mortgage payment? I took an open house tour this weekend of a very nice three-bedroom condo in Brooklyn, with views of lower Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, and boats coming into the East River. The asking price was $955,000, with monthly maintenance fees of $510.74, and a projected mortgage payment after tax abatement of around $4000. This, of course, is still obscene, and I only went on the tour as a tourist, so to speak, but it's nowhere near $16,000 a month. That extra $10K or so is just a stupidity tax.

The thing is, all of the so-called hideous costs of maintaining an 'executive aura' can be avoided by the simple expedient of avoiding costs which only exist to maintain an 'executive aura.' In other words, drop your ego. The sordid truth is that nobody ever believed your ego in the first place; they're taking advantage of you. You are paying through the nose for everything you do because you are a shallow, gullible prick. And incidentally, that's also why you screwed up the financial system.

What I Think About The Shepard Fairey Copyright/Fair Use Issue

2009-02-09T16:34:00.003-05:00

Actually, I've done my best to avoid thinking about it at all. But judging by the number of dire emails I've received, containing links to incendiary articles which I have not read, and the number of art blogs weighing in, and Facebook friends on the case, and random headlines passing across my field of vision, it doesn't seem that I can get away from it.

So here it is: I. Don't. Care. I don't care what the overarching issues are; I don't care that My Rights As An Artist May Be In Danger. This whole thing, as little as I know about it, appears to me to be cheap and asinine, for the simple reason that Shepard Fairey has already gotten mind-boggling amounts of attention and publicity for opportunistically generating a two-bit piece of propaganda in the right place at the right time. Whatever happens to him, positive or negative, is so wildly disproportionate to his original creative output that expecting me to care about his fate is to add onus to insult.

Listen: I generate my own source material. Back in the days when I worked from photographs, I took my own photographs, stacks and stacks of them. When I work from designs and drawings, they're done either from life or out of my head. I don't rip off wallpaper patterns, stock images, stencils, or other people's cultures. On the rare occasions when I generate a Celtic knot for a Christmas card, I draw it from scratch without resorting to the photocopier.

Partially because of my insistence on making original art from scratch, cheap publicity has never come my way. In this age of politically correct arts institutions favoring multicultural projects, I persist in writing artist statements and making paintings which emphasize direct personal experience, unexcused by references to Tibetan mandalas or Indian miniature painting or Chinese aesthetic theory. So far, these artist statements and accompanying portfolios have gone directly into the trash, when people making work similar to mine, which does reference these things, earn Fullbright fellowships and appear in major galleries. I don't begrudge these artists their success; many of them are my favorite artists. I merely note that they're sort of cheating.

Good Ideas, Capital, and the Crumbling of the Authority Paradigm

2009-01-30T15:13:00.003-05:00

Conor Friedersdorf has a good idea:

Were I given my way — hey, last time I wrote an essay like this I was, so it’s worth a shot — I’d secure funding for a Web site that aggregated diverse opinions on various issues, commissioned thoughtful magazine pieces of argument and analysis… and then deliberately commissioned the strongest rebuttals, counterarguments and alternate takes, and published them all side by side, facilitating productive conversation whenever possible. (In innovative ways!) An enterprise that gave diverse views a fair shake — and earned the trust of readers necesary for its success — couldn’t be run by just one editor, so I’d set up an ombudsman blog, give access to a couple dozen carefully selected, variously minded folk who all believe in the journalistic project, and guarantee that whatever they penned would appear on the front page, as a check on the editor’s power.

I had a good idea once, too. My idea was that since artists increase property values in any given area, by attracting hipsters and cultured people with money, we should start an enterprise that consisted of moving a group of artists temporarily into fallow real estate, fixing it up, making it gorgeous, holding art events with publicity assistance from major cultural organizations, and then moving to the next space when desirable tenants were found. The radical part of this idea was that the artists would get paid to do this.

To this end, I talked with dozens of artists, event planners, lawyers, investors, businessmen, and cultural organizations. Everyone agreed that this was a splendid idea. I put together a core team of people with diverse practical skills, wrote up a business plan, ran it by some accountants, and applied for funding and fiscal sponsorship. Then all of our financial and political capital (i.e. the business/legal/cultural organization contingent) vanished without a trace.

After I got over my shell shock, I realized the obvious--that the entire foundation of our cultural economy depends on the fact that artists work for free. As much as it is politically expedient for those with cultural and financial clout to pay lip service to the idea of supporting the arts, artists, and freedom of expression, they are never going to back a project which threatens their authority.

This may go some way toward explaining why good ideas like Conor's so rarely become manifest in reality. The difference between an eccentric loser crackpot and a visionary creative mind is merely one of financing. But for every thoughtful, erudite screenplay that languishes in the slush pile, Hollywood makes ten inane, derivative blockbusters that are forgotten in two weeks; for every architect who designs an elegant, energy-efficient, sustainable building, developers put up forty more strip malls; for every thousand hard-working, skilled, reliable employees who lose their jobs, some investment banker pockets another multi-million dollar bonus, courtesy of the federal government.

As has become inescapably clear to anyone who has read a headline in the last four months, 'authority' in our society has become nearly synonymous with 'sociopaths, narcissists, pigs, sadists, and nincompoops.' And yet those of us with good ideas--those of us with skills, ethics, talent and vision--stand around wringing our hands, as we have been wringing them ever since we first graduated from college with honors, and discovered that we had a choice among sacking groceries, waiting tables, and temping.

In days past, when smart people with initiative found themselves crushed by corrupt and oppressive systems of authority, they went somewhere else. They colonized Australia, or Canada, or California. But we have no physical frontiers left on the planet, and the corruption of brainless, brutal authority threatens to destroy us. We have to find another paradigm--one that consists of action, real action, not useless symbolic statements like rallies, petitions, protests, and Marches On Washington.

Because an enormous part of the problem is that we have all been trained from the cradle to respond to authority like children. Meek submission, blind obedience, feeble protest and violent revolution are all part of the same authority-dependent continuum; they all acknowledge that the power of the violent alpha, the one with the money, the connections and the brawn, is what determines our circumstances.

So what might a trans-authority paradigm look like? Could it start with community building? Could it benefit from consensus decision-making? And how can it be financed? Consider this an open question.

Well, damn

2009-01-29T14:45:00.003-05:00

Culture11 is going under. I'm seriously bummed about this, because lately it's been one place where I've seen smart conservative writers engaging with genuine good will and a distinct lack of petty, mean-minded sniping. It is too bad there doesn't seem to be much of a market for this.

On the other hand, I hadn't actually realized that Culture11 was, well, a business. Having been an artist for 20 years and a blogger for 4, supporting myself (barely) by any means I can, and regarding the occasional art sale or ad revenue check as an exciting bonus, it always perplexes me when people make ambitious business plans that rely on getting paid a living wage for generating intellectual property. Particularly when they've been in business for less than a year.

I wish our culture worked that way, but it manifestly doesn't. I never thought I'd see the day when I'd call a bunch of conservatives out on their naive idealism.

Question

2009-01-28T18:18:00.002-05:00

To Set Away Childish Things

2009-01-20T14:25:00.003-05:00

The time has come. Let's get going.

Once upon a time, I was looking for a roommate. I put out an advertisement for a 'mature female.' When one of the candidates arrived at the door, I was in the kitchen; it took me 15-20 seconds to respond to the doorbell.

When I was halfway to the door, the bell rang again, long and furiously. When I opened it, there stood a girl in a spiked dog collar and fuchsia hair. "You said the appointment was at 2, and it's 2 now," she whined, incensed at being made to wait those interminable 20 seconds while I traversed the length of the house.

What I did not say: "I asked for a MATURE roommate. Can't you READ??!!! Why are you wasting my time?"

Instead I invited her in, and it took her only two minutes to discover that my cats had independent outdoor access by means of a cat flap. Her cat wasn't allowed outside. "So sorry. Goodbye." Catfight avoided.

In that moment it dawned on me--immature people don't know they're immature. You can lecture them until you're blue in the face, and they just think you're being mean. Every adolescent thinks he's king of the world, and that he has nothing to learn. The best we can usually do with such brats is to fence them in, be polite, and try to limit collateral damage until they injure themselves sufficiently to inspire serious thinking.

But for too long now, our nation has been run by children, and we have not only failed to fence them in, but have neglected to define what, exactly, makes them so childish. So, in a spirit of hope, and perhaps a start on good parenting, I'm going to spell it out.

Spite: petty ill will or hatred with the disposition to irritate, annoy, or thwart; MALICE.

Making goofy faces is childlike, not necessarily spiteful; it all depends on the context. Spite is refusing to consult an expert on a crucial issue because you need to prove something--even though that expert might be your own father, and even though his counsel could potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives.

On a more mundane level, spite is the deliberate withholding of generosity, whether it be consistently interpreting other people's motives in the most negative possible light, harping on petty issues at the expense of major ones, or habitually making mean-spirited comments that impede productive communication. It is prizing one's egoistic sense of superiority over the concerns of others.

I was going to continue the list, but now that I think about it, everything else flows from this one thing. We have the choice to view other people with compassion, to attempt to understand where they're coming from, to let go of rigid expectations, or to condemn them out of hand and attack, attack, attack. We can cling to our own perspectives and try to force the world to conform to them, or we can have the inner confidence to consider other points of view. We can whine, blame, and take pleasure in the suffering of others, or we can shoulder our responsibilities with quiet good will.

The more I have read about Obama's transition process, the more I have felt--not euphoric, not hopeful--but simply relieved. During the debates, when listening to McCain go on about arcane details of international military engagements, I thought, "This guy would make a great Presidential advisor, if a temperamentally problematic President"; now, lo, Obama is asking him for advice. His appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State appears to have brought out the best in her, judging by her recent address to the Foreign Relations Committee; it productively incorporates her iron will, her ability to assimilate formidable amounts of detail, and her need to be immersed in conflict and drama in order to function. With every decision he makes, I see a renunciation of grievance and a determination to expect the best of people, tempered by a realistic understanding of our human limitations.

Because the tragedy of the Bush administration was not that mistakes were made. It was that avoidable mistakes were made, and not corrected, because the ego aggrandizement of the few took precedence over the well-being of the many. There were advisors available who knew better, at every step of the way--whether the issue was the intelligence leading up to the Iraq war, the handling of the war itself, the warnings about the financial system, the handling of disaster relief after Katrina--but these people were dismissed and ignored, for the pettiest of reasons.

The Obama administration will make mistakes, because that's what people do. We, as a species, are not adults yet. We don't know everything, we're not able to divest ourselves of grievances and blame, and we haven't figured out a way to cope with the complexities of a changing world. My hope is not that Obama will miraculously 'fix everything,' which simply is not possible. It is that he will inspire us to become a little less petty, a little more responsible, and a little more forgiving. Perhaps as a nation we will start to leave adolescence behind.

The Marginal Utility of a Dollar

2009-01-15T18:07:00.004-05:00

Thank you, thank you, thank you, anonymous donors:

It may not seem like much to you. But there's this thing about money that economists call *The Marginal Utility of a Dollar.* It describes the way one dollar means much more to someone who has only a few to begin with.

I've had times in my life when $50 didn't seem like much to me either. This is definitely NOT one of them.

Here's one of the big differences in my life a *small* amount of money just made: I can type some tonight. Why? My hands are now covered with these Lidocaine patches. My *mummy* hands. They're very expensive, nearly $400 for 2 boxes, or even more if you don't shop carefully.

My previous Medicare HMO's refused to pay for them at all, they just weren't covered. Effective January 1, I changed HMO's. This year's HMO does cover them, hooray! OMG! I've waited to get these patches for 3 or 4 YEARS, and now, suddenly, I need them far more than ever before.

However...that new HMO still wants a $20 copay.

Just a little $20 copay, right?

But when you have less than zero money, and you acquire a small sum, first you buy food. So those patches sat at Walgreen's for a week, because I didn't have $20 for the copay.

And now I have my patches, and at least for tonight, I can type.

It's so easy to give in to despair, particularly in times like these--to think, "there's nothing I can possibly do to alleviate the suffering around me, so I won't even try." It happens to me, more often than not. I read about the war in Gaza, slave trafficking in Thailand and India, brutality in Africa, the overwhelming global financial meltdown, and my faith feels like the spark left after a candle is blown out, confronting a tsunami.

Then I ask for help, and help arrives, sometimes from people I don't even know. Miracles abound.

'The Condescension of the Entitled'

2009-01-12T18:20:00.003-05:00

Rob Horning speculates upon the evolution of 'kindness':

A theory: When kindness is performed out of social necessity by those without the privilege of inward-looking selfishness and individualist isolation, it doesn’t register as “kindness.” When one finds they must make a conscious effort to be kind and must trumpet their efforts to have it recognized as such, it’s probably already too late for them to be worrying about kindness—they have already become the beneficiary of an unequal society to the degree that they are conscious of being or not being kind. If you think, “how kind of me,” how kind have you really been? Being kind has already become an expression of class privilege, not human fellow feeling.

Indeed. I don't encourage my friends to assist those in need out of 'kindness,' either in myself or in others; I do so because of an innate understanding that 'there but for the grace of God go I.' Aspiring to some sort of moral virtue in doing so strikes me as hubristic.

It seems obvious to me that some human beings are born with a well-developed sense of empathy; others, not so much. It seems equally obvious to me that codified moral systems, whether they be religious or secular, attempt to lay out a rule book for conducting oneself as though one were motivated by empathy, as though one's neighbor were oneself. This is why I believe that following one of these systems to the letter does not guarantee one the moral high ground, nor do I think that such system-following is the pinnacle of human morality. Religion and law are a training ground for the conscience, no more and no less.

Furthermore, I see that when a sufficient number of citizens in any society follow an empathy-encouraging moral system for an extended period of time, that society continues to extend its empathy in more pervasive ways--by setting up a universal healthcare system, for example. This is an organic process, not a revolutionary one; witness that the brutal feudalism of the Russian empire produced the brutal levelling and totalitarian failures of Marxism, whereas the gentler Christian traditions of Western Europe gave rise to more or less functional socialism. The difference, in my view, is not just one of degree but of genesis.

Moreover, the word 'kindness' itself encompasses such a wide range of acts, feelings and motivations that it is almost pointless to argue whether society is becoming kinder, or more callous. As Horning points out, kindness aligned with power produces the condescension of the entitled; kindness unaligned with power is just common decency. (via Sullivan)

Community, Please Rally Round

2009-01-12T16:56:00.003-05:00

I have a very serious favor to ask of all my readers.

A very good friend of mine is in a very bad way. Due to a combination of severe chronic health problems, and the fact that the makers of the drug Cipro failed to warn consumers of crippling tenosynovitis as a side effect of its use, she is completely disabled and in terrible pain:

Along with the physical loss of the use of most of my fingers, my left hand, and now the right hand, is the most mind-bending pain I've ever experienced. To touch or accidentally brush against anything can make me cry out despite myself. It's the kind of pain that brings you close to vomiting, to going insane, to chewing into your own flesh like a mortally wounded animal.

Every day a new area of attack emerges. It's spread from my left hand to the right, throughout my left arm, left shoulder, left rib cage, both elbows, both knees - front and back - both ankles, both Achilles tendons, and now both feet. This morning it had hit my left lower back. Tonight, just now, I felt it pulling throughout my left leg. All these for the first time, all in the last few weeks.

At the same time, her husband is disabled because of a work-related injury after a heart attack, and both workman's comp and disability are screwing them over:

We're like so many other Americans, living paycheck to paycheck; if one paycheck stops, life can spiral out of control with horrifying speed. We're there. Walter's Worker's Comp was cut off on a spurious basis. Yesterday came a letter saying his disability claim was denied. The basis? They said his disability was from a work injury, so go apply for Worker's Comp.

Like so many others in this disastrous economy, Joe and I are hanging on by our fingernails, with the help of good credit, good health, family, friends and community. We can't wait for the government to step in and solve this; we've got to help our friends in need, RIGHT NOW. This is my friend and she is in need; I have just sent her the amount of my monthly blog income (from the Russian brides, in fact). I can vouch for her character.

Please hit her tip jar NOW. The money will go for food and medicine.