intellectual properties

postmillennial hope

“I give thanks to America, a country insane enough to declare the pursuit of happiness to be an inalienable right.”

i’m reading Susan Sontag’s most excellent book In America: A Novel, about a group of well-to-do Polish people who give up everything - for some of them including fame and wealth - to become farmers/settlers in Southern California around 1876. why would these people, who had everything, give it all up to work as field hands? the book is amazing at expounding on the thoughts/ motivations of the such early immigrants - The Dream of America was *so big* that even those who had everything in their homelands were willing to give it all up for a shot at The Dream. how many of those dreams came true?

relatedly, yesterday i shared on gReader and facebook this piece from Adbusters written by Michael Larson, a philosophy teacher from Pittsburgh:

Postmillennial Tension: Can we be the ones we’ve been waiting for?

some excerpts:

That dominant ideal of modernity is tied to a notion of ever-expanding progress and limitless consumption. The oil crisis of 1973 signaled the onset of the postmodern malaise. “Our future was all of a sudden mortgaged,” writes Bourriaud in Altermodern. So while capital has continued expanding its reach in other areas, there has been a lingering denial – an inability to mourn the lost object and the dream’s impossibility. If this was the death of the dream, then our present reality of global warming, water and food shortages, market collapse and the continued proliferation of violent factionalism make it clear that we had better get on with mourning and confront the sorrow we have been trying to repress. Putting it off has only allowed the problems to grow.

We have had a century of continuity in which the basic operating assumptions of the economic system have been hegemonic. In fact this version of “modernity” was to have closed the book on history: We have reached the best of all possible worlds; there are no alternatives. Proclaiming the end of history intimates that our desires have been satiated and that there is nothing further to strive for.

i don’t read adbusters too much anymore because i think a lot of it IS too hopeless/ armageddonist/depressing, but i still subscribe to the online feed and what caught my eye about this one is that there has been something in my mind for a really long time now with respect to my particular demographic - educated middle class americans with plenty of food, clothing, shelter - that goes something like “WE HAVE EVERYTHING.  WHY AREN’T WE HAPPY?”, which seems simple, but it is all heavy with a million questions about both of the words “everything” and “happy”, and extends way beyond myself and my community to America as a whole, and our self-image of always “the best. america is the best. the best of everything is here. it is yours to take if you work hard enough”.

but it turns out that maybe, just maybe, that isn’t true, that the American Dream was a fallacy, or, even worse: what if the “everything” isn’t enough when you get it? what if, when you get to the top run of the ladder - the house, the yard, the boat, the kids, the degrees, the “everything” - what if then that isn’t enough? it must be really depressing to get to the top and realize it’s not far enough.

my speculation is that, like the early Europeans who came from perfectly good lives with solid communities to risk everything on the American frontier, there is a part of human nature that is utterly insatiable, no matter what you give it, and that the “everything” we want isn’t as physical as we’ve been lead to believe - via consumerism, marketing - the “everything” is something intangible, and possibly unattainable. it’s what drives us as humans to do what we do. if it were attainable, how would we evolve?

my generation (X), and the next (Y) seems to be the first in a few to really FEEL this. we were taught, growing up in the 80s especially, that once certain things were attained, peace and happiness would follow. but all after our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents hard work, building industries and fighting for civil rights and freedom, those of us in the educated middle-class who have access to all the things our forefathers dreamed about, here we are, standing on the top rung of the ladder, and we’re still not happy, and the world - and the rest of the world - it’s even more of a mess than before.

that is why the one sentence that hit me most in this piece was “Jean-Paul Sartre described anguish as the recognition of responsibility and the ensuing need to act without guarantee, without hope.“  as Americans, we have a lot of responsibility in this world, as we consume most of the resources and control a lot of the politics. but what hope can we feel now about it all, when it seems we inherited a wealth of square pegs but none of them fit in what turned out to be round holes?

so then finally, the author asks:

So we find ourselves in this moment of rupture, precariously exposed to risk and perhaps devoid of hope. Can we think of these facts as possibilities? Can we confront our situation and imagine what things might be like otherwise, even without guarantees? The end of history has reached its end. Can we be the ones we have been waiting for?

i also felt a lot of this, but wasn’t able to express it, during Obama’s HOPE campaign, like all of Democratic and minority America felt like everything had been done - all the groundwork was laid out, and now everyone was pinning their future on one man/one moment that was going to seal the deal. HOPE is what Obama tried to sell us, and for the election season, we bought it. but here we are 1+ years later, and people are getting depressed because the whole world didn’t change when Obama took office.

so what about now? we have to stop waiting for the thing that is going to save us. we have to stop standing on the top rung of the ladder, thinking there is no where else to go. we have the tools to build a new future. we are what we have been waiting for.

add to the list of things that can blow your mind: sesame street

last night on PBS there was a special about Sesame Street and their global productions.

i had no idea they produced localized versions all around the world, especially in war-torn and developing countries, places where poverty and racism and disease run rampant. and when i say localized, i don’t mean that Big Bird gets dubbed over and everything looks the same.  i mean that they send in teams to develop and film on-site, using local children, local music, local language, different puppets that reflect their surroundings, and, in addition to the Alphabet and 1-2-3’s, focus the content on what’s most important to teach the children where they are: the puppets on Sesame Street in Bangladesh discuss unexploded ordnance, in Kosovo the Serbian and Albanian puppets broach topics of racism, nationalism and genocide, and one of the puppets on the South African version had HIV and talked about her mother dying of AIDS, which caused a national controversy here in the U.S.

watching how hard the producers worked to develop these localized versions for these children who in many cases have no other means of education, sometimes putting themselves in very uncomfortable positions (getting the Serbs and the Albanians to be in one room together proved to be monumental) and even in the middle of conflicts and wars, all to try to get positive, educational television to children  was really perspective-shifting. i never really even thought about how Sesame Street in the U.S. was revolutionary in the early 1970s, having a completely integrated cast and discussion topics like racism and sexism (in 2-4 year old terms), but UXO? AIDS? genocide? wow. kudos to PBS for funding these kinds of efforts and for realizing that, in some places, the children really are the only future some communities have, and reaching them, teaching them, is honestly of global importance.

There are several things that we hope that people take from the film. Number one is reflected in a quote that Anu Gupta of Sesame Workshop said: “Children are not born haters, they are taught to hate.” We were so surprised to find three- and four-year-old Serbians and Albanians in Kosovo talking about each other with distrust and hatred.

starving

last night i read a 4-year-old (2005) Time magazine that had a 30-something page special on the American obesity epidemic (that’s where that last post came from), and one of the articles was Can You Be Fat and Healthy? there was a lot of easy to absorb and interesting comparative information in there about being physiologically fit vs. perceived as healthy just by weight and pant size. and then the question:

If you eat well, work out regularly and walk away from your doctor’s office with straight A’s on your physical, what does it matter if you can’t wriggle into slim-cut jeans?

yes, what does it matter, really? why can’t we just be happy in our bodies as long as we’re healthy? how has body image become so twisted?

and then today, thx to Tiny Cat Pants, i read this article about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment (see wikipedia also), which should absolutely be read beginning to end, especially by any women who restrict their calories for diet purposes, but i’ll post a few eye-opening findings here about the effects of a 1,600 restricted-calorie diet on grown men, noting that 1,600 calories is a lot more than a lot of people on diets, especially people on CLEANSES, allow themselves to eat:

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excessive behaviors

i have known and spent a lot of time with someone for almost 9 years now who drinks at least 2 cups of coffee every day, and never, ever, brings a reusable cup. i have been using a resuable cup every day for the same amount of time. so: 9 years x 365 days x 2 cups = ~6,570 paper cups, with plastic lids, that he has disposed of, while i have used ~1.

this kind of thing drives me nuts. i mean, on a rare occasion, i will get a to-go cup, if i forgot mine, or i am wanting a beverage at unusual place and time and without container. but why does someone who HABITUALLY drinks coffee at the same time, from the same place, refuse to bring a cup? i even bought him one once. he never used it. i, on the otherhand, will often forgo getting a drink when i am thirsty because i don’t have a cup, or getting food to go when i am hungry because i don’t want to get the plastic forks/spoons/containers. it can wait.

people sometimes think i’m being really ridiculous about this. but i do, honestly, i do, think that every. single. thing. matters. but i find i am often alone in this, especially about the cups.

and so i was SO EXCITED when i recently watched this TED video, in which Chris Jordan uses statistics about disposable cups to try to visually show the impact of people not recognizing their individual actions as collectively consequential.

i really like this talk because he gets into exactly why i get so unnerved about things like disposable cups in a way i could never before articulate, and then makes a really beautiful point in the end about our culture and mindfulness.

watch it.. it’s only 11 minutes.

the thing about cups haunts me.
40 million paper cups. every. single. day. mostly for coffee.
410,000 every 15 minutes.

think about it. please. (also embedded below)

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everybody knows the fight is fixed the poor stay poor and the rich get rich

http://www.theplaceswelive.com/

The Places We Live features panoramic photos of slums, narrated by the people who live there (through translators). Really really engrossing. To access the stories in the restricting Flash interface, skip the intro, click on a city, and then on one of the households in the upper left corner.

~via kottke

all the press about Slumdog Millionaire has created a lot of awareness about the slums abroad, which is great, but what about poverty here in america? last night, jay and i watched “Brother’s Keeper“, a documentary about the murder trial of a poor illiterate farmer from upstate NY. it was one of the most heartbreaking, and heartwarming, things i’ve seen in a really long time. i literally ACHED watching this film. related to the website about slums because these 3 farming brothers lived, in the 1990s, without water or heat in a shack on their delapidated family farm, all sleeping in one bed, and when the murder trial hit the news, no one could believe that they lived that way, right here in America. the footage of the news coverage of the way these men lived is downright degrading, painting a sort of “Deliverance” picture of the brothers and their community, not to mention the treatment by the D.A., who basically accused them of being monsters and deviants. there are slums in america too; maybe not as sprawling or populated as Mumbai or Jakarta, but there are places in this country where people live their whole lives without ever having enough to eat, or sleep 3 to a bed, or only own one pair of filthy pants. “hillbillies”, sometimes they’re called, but as this movie shows, in modern america, outside of the visibly homeless in our streets, the impoverished are usually ignored and marginalized to the point that most people don’t even believe they exist.

i also recently watched Reel Paradise, about an american family that moves to poverty-stricken Fiji and opens up a free movie theatre. the movie gets a little tedious, but i think portrays the lessons of being the “rich white people” in a impoverished community, as well as reflections on what it means to be rich or poor in this world.

all of these things make me both incredibly grateful for all that i have, but also incredibly sad that there are so many suffering, and the numbers just keep growing every day, usually due to the rich trying to get richer.

however, unlike in Slumdog, where poverty is portrayed as obviously oppressive, in both Brother’s Keeper and Reel Paradise, there is also a questioning, an implication, that maybe the simpler life isn’t so bad, and maybe being poor shouldn’t be equated with being unhappy.

the new work ethic: just paying attention

Work Ethic 2.0: Attention Control

Columnist David Brooks, commenting in the Dec. 16th New York Times about Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book called “Outliers,” made a statement as profound as it was accurate: “Control of attention is the ultimate individual power,” he wrote. “People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them.”

But why is that truer now than ten or twenty years ago? Why will it be truer still ten or twenty years from now? As I wrote in May, Internet distractions evolve to become ever more “distracting” all the time — like a virus. Distractions now “seek you out.”

Distractions mask the toll they take on productivity. Everyone finishes up their work days exhausted, but how much of that exhaustion is from real work, how much from the mental effort of fighting off distractions and how much from the indulgence of distractions?

Pundits like me are constantly talking about Facebook, Twitter, blogs and humor sites, not to mention old standbys like e-mail and IM. One gets the impression that we should be “following” these things all day long, and many do. So when does the work get done? When do entrepreneurs start and manage their businesses? When do writers write that novel? When do IT professionals keep the trains running on time? When does anyone do anything?

~via axelalbin@twitter. (ha!)

(i suck at the new work ethic.)

“The Medium is the Message”. yes. yes it is.

well, this is more than a little disconcerting.

shepard fairey, a political street artist i’ve long admired and whose art i recently even considered getting tattooed on my body, seems to have really sold out (as jon notes in the comments, he did corporate art work before).

i noted that Obey Giant recently launched a clothing line. it seemed a little odd to me that a voice against social conformity and for revolution - i mean - “OBEY” - come on. - was suddenly selling miniskirts and skinny jeans and handbags, but whatever.

i didn’t want to be hyper-judgemental about the fact that the obey clothing line is obviously catering to current hipster trends. “hipster” is always challenge to try to define, although you know one when you see one, but IMO hipsters can most generically be defined as people who follow along with whatever is hip. and hip changes every, oh, 30 seconds. so the idea of this Revolutionary catering to this group seems……trendy. i mean, yes, the hipster group as a target market has a lot of cache in terms of perpetuating a trend, and a lot of money. so if you want to pick a target market to spread your meme as quickly as possible, obviously it’s the best choice.

so then, spreading the word to Gen Y/ Gen O using their most common mode of participation - consumerism: is it possible to do so without crossing over to the dark side? my gut was still sinking looking at the obey clothing website, and so i defaulted to considering what, to me, is one of the most basic metrics of determining whether someone has, in fact, “sold out”: production.

—–Original Message—–
From: amy.leblanc
Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2008 11:54 AM
To: service@obeyclothing.com
Subject: where is obey clothing made?

sorry if you have an FAQ on your site somewhere, but i can’t find it…..

—–REPLY—–
From: “OBEY Clothing”
To: “‘amy.leblanc’”
Subject: RE: where is obey clothing made?

Hi Amy,

Most of our product is made in China; however, our tee shirts are all made
in the U.S.A. Hope this helps and thanks for the support.

Thanks~

service@obeyclothing.com
SHOP.OBEYCLOTHING.COM
www.obeyclothing.com

—–RESPONSE—–
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:12:24 -0800
To:
From: “amy.leblanc”
Subject: RE: where is obey clothing made?

hm. that’s a bit hard to reconcile.
thx.

—–

HEY SHEPARD FAIREY: CARE TO RATIONALIZE OUTSOURCING IN THE CONTEXT OF THE MESSAGE OF YOUR ART? AND IN THE CONTEXT OF “HOPE” and “CHANGE” and “PROGRESS” FOR AMERICA?

or maybe your message has never been what we believed it to be, and all you really did was “cynically turned graffiti culture into a self-promoting ad campaign, turning street art into a cheap hustle that is no different from corporate advertising” (erick lyle).

le sigh.

.

.

related:

“When a right-wing Republican is the one concocting your anti-Establishment image, you start to wonder if the entire hipster movement has been duped into becoming puppets of Hayne’s billionaire income. Because if we’re all suckers, that just sucks.” –nymag

prop8: it’s not about being gay, or married.

this is one powerful piece of writing: An Open Letter to My Gay Friend; or Gay Marriage Is Not About Marriage.

the main point:

let’s establish something right at the outset. About the fundamental idea of marriage itself, straight or gay, I don’t give a shit. And as I said in a previous post, I’ve always been weary of same-sex marriage being the cause célèbre of the gay community. But the issue of marriage equality is something I have to support because gay marriage is not about marriage…

…Perhaps gay people are apathetic because we’re not hammering home the point that this is an important civil rights issue and, for the hundredth time, not about marriage. Look, it honestly doesn’t bother me that you don’t care about marriage rights, but, as a gay man who knows what it’s like to be teased, shunned, and discriminated against firsthand, it is your responsibility to care about civil rights.

There are people out there who want to change the law to designate an entire class of people as unequal to, as less than, every other class of people.

the poignant ending:

Small acts were what drove the civil rights movement: Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in 1955; black students faced protesters when trying to attend a white school in 1957; people marched for voting rights in 1965. These small acts defied odds; these small acts helped to change the United States of America.

The rights, benefits, and acceptance that you are allowed and that you enjoy and that you take for granted as a gay man are the result of history—history created by regular people, just like you and me, who weren’t activists or politicians or crusaders. They were people who came out of the closet decades before us in a time when it was social suicide to do so; they were high school students who met opposition when they tried to start gay-straight alliances to foster tolerance at their schools; and they are the millions of people, gay and straight, who will vote no on Proposition 8 on November 4, 2008. The latter act is indeed a modest act, but one that will have far-reaching ramifications. One vote may be a footnote in our lives, but that footnote will explain how we stood up for what is fair, what is just, and what is humane. The story of lives tell our history; the footnotes give us depth.

why do i care so much about this, you might ask, as someone who a) isn’t into marriage and b) isn’t gay?

this is why. this isn’t about marriage, or about being gay. this is about equal rights. and i am into equal rights. for everyone.

again, please give even just $5 to the No on 8 campaign, even if you don’t live in California. letting this proposition pass is a cultural slide backwards that we can’t afford to take.

on a lighter note:

During his recent stopover at the Castro Theatre, John Waters quipped that if gays are denied the right to marry, then heterosexuals should be denied the right to divorce. –flavorpill

HA!

symptomatic

the long overdue health report is that since i’ve been back from burning man, i’ve been experiencing some moderate to severe physical symptoms that are vague yet consistent. these include: dizziness, vertigo, weakness, fatigue, strange burning/tingling sensations in my head and up and down my extremities, nerve tweaks/spasms, vision funkiness, pressure in my head, and sometimes nausea.

a few weeks ago i went to see my general physician and she didn’t have much to say - such vague symptoms without anything really “happening”, she couldn’t give me a diagnosis other than i should literally and figuratively get my head checked: revisit a neurologist, given my history of seizures (which were never attributed to anything specific being wrong), and possibly a psychologist/psychiatrist, to see about my anxiety.

after looking at my old records and giving me a few tests and asking a few pertinent questions, the neurologist also figures it’s generalized anxiety, as i don’t actually have what one would call a “headache” (suggesting a scary problem like a brain tumor), and my cognitive functions have remained just fine (suggesting i haven’t had any seizures), but with the continuing persistence of symptoms i am having the MRI and EEGs done again next week.

at the end of last week i thought i was getting better, that every day i was feeling a bit stronger, and i was feeling 90% ok. but then saturday came, and i spent the whole day weak and trembly, and since then i’ve felt horrid.

this has been more or less occupying most of my time, dealing with this, and has kept me from doing a lot of things, being a lot of places, writing a lot of blogs. i’ve been able to function at work just fine, although i’m probably a bit more irritable and surly than i should be, and i’ve tried to go on with my life as though everything is fine, which is maybe the worst thing to do, not ignoring the problem but not letting it take over my life. but everywhere i go, i am monitoring all these strange sensations in my body. when i walk down the street for lunch, i wonder if i’ll fall to my knees. when i’m sitting in a theatre seeing a play, i feel weak and wonder what would happen if i lost consciousness. like the world is so heavy, and my life force so weak, that i just might collapse under the weight of it all. i have also had a couple of standard anxiety attacks - the sweaty palms, the difficulty breathing - but these other symptoms are pretty much nonstop. all day long. the weakness and dizziness, and weird pressure/tingling in my head. i haven’t fallen, i haven’t lost consciousness, but it constantly feels like i might.

it’s so hard to write this here, i don’t know why. maybe because i don’t want to hear everyone’s advice or seem like i’m asking for sympathy. or maybe because it feels like i am overreacting, and putting this into writing here, for everyone to read, feels like making a mountain out of a molehill, exaggerating my symptoms. are they really as bad as they seem? or am i just being hypersensitive? maybe because its so personal, and when things are really deep, really personal, i am usually silent, and this seems like a lot of myself to share. or maybe because regardless of what is or what isn’t, i’m fucking scared.

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the hipster vacuum

i don’t get or read Adbusters magazine anymore, because it was just so…..overbearing. and drumbeat. and depressing. and during the year or so i did subscribe to the print version i wondered if reading it every month was affecting my world view a little too much. but i still subscribe to the RSS feed and click over to the website once in a while, because while i find the imagery and language too much to deal with on a regular basis, especially in the print version (100 PAGES OF DOOM!), the content and values are still right in line with how i think, and they still say the things i have been trying to say, just always so much more pointedly.

We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality, and is leaving a generation pointlessly obsessing over fashion, faux individuality, cultural capital and the commodities of style. — Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization

it appears to me that post-9/11, the ambient insecurity in our culture has brought about the return of materialism in a big way. much like anorexia is not about food but about control and anxiety, national insecurity has manifested itself in various ways in our culture, most prominently through xenophobia (fear of “the other”, e.g. anti-immigration) and consumer materialism (propagated by our own government…remember this? and most recently via the “stimulus package”). not that materialism in america ever went away, but americans are currently more hyper-obsessed with their brands, their celebrities, their media, their image, and their possessions (including home-ownership) than ever before, and we have more and more tools every day to feed those obsessions. unlike previous periods of extreme aestheticism in western culture, this is not just the upper class. the lower classes are just as obsessed with their gucci ripoffs as the upper class are with the real thing. and yet for many, it feels like a vacuum. this culture continually keeps sucking things out of us: our money, our time, our individuality, our creativity, our passion. what we’re left with is a mass of confused, isolated people with lot of debt and insecurity, with closets and garages full of crap. kids are dropping out of school like flies, our healthcare costs are through the roof, and like Al Gore said: “The planet is in distress and all of the attention is on Paris Hilton.”

the article pokes at the specific “hipster” trend (see: american apparel) and its rehashing of everything retro, but i’m applying it to my own scene as well, cuz it fits:

Lovers of apathy and irony, hipsters are connected through a global network of blogs and shops that push forth a global vision of fashion-informed aesthetics. Loosely associated with some form of creative output, they attend art parties, take lo-fi pictures with analog cameras, ride their bikes to night clubs and sweat it up at nouveau disco-coke parties. The hipster tends to religiously blog about their daily exploits, usually while leafing through generation-defining magazines like Vice, Another Magazine and Wallpaper. This cursory and stylized lifestyle has made the hipster almost universally loathed.

in my own scene, this debate over the value we place on our specific forms of fashion and style and image gets rehashed every few months, and now that we’re in The Month of Burning Man, it’s coming up again as there are multiple “playa fashion” events every week, and people are wondering whether burning man is about personal expression, or really just one big fashion show where the HAVEs try to outdo the HAVE NOTs. is burning man anti-consumer as it claims to be, or just its own version of hipster? i’m tempted to go totally anti-fashion this year at burning man. i want to get a pair of coveralls, and just wear that all week.

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.