satorimedia

Homonymophobia: not just for breakfast anymore.

A friend who's a tech writer recently mentioned that one client has begun complaining about "violent" language being used in tech documents. Among the offending terms:

• Bullets, as in bulleted lists
• Cutting edge
• Execute, as in 'to carry out an order'
• Fire, as in 'to cause a function to be performed'
• Hits, as in on a web site
• Launch, as in launching a product or application
• Master/Slave hardware terminology
• Target, as in the recipient of data sent from a source to a target.
• Trigger, as in 'to cause something to happen.'
• War rooms

As I type that, I realize that I just enclosed it in a BLOCKQUOTE. I wonder how they'd feel about that? It reminds me of the (possibly fictional) situation I heard of where a person was fired for using the word "pedantic" in an official document about education...and a reader objected to such perversions in a work environment!

I swear (whups, can't do that) it makes me want to pound (er...) lb. (or maybe £ ?) my head into my desk.

There comes a point, folks, where you just have to say "What the [CENSORED]

Umm...ewww.

I'm a big fan of art, especially art that pushes boundaries. But meatballs cooked in human fat--even your own human fat--and then offered to guests seems a bit farfetched even for me...

"On the plates in front of them was a serving of agnolotti pasta and in the middle a meatball made with oil Evaristti removed from his body in a liposuction procedure last year.

"The question of whether or not to eat human flesh is more important than the result," he said, explaining the point of his creation.

"You are not a cannibal if you eat art," he added."

"The Walking Blood Bank is Activated..."

As a former Marine, reading this makes me feel ashamed I've not done more to help bring my brothers home.

Still, there is beauty and laughter in the sorrow:

"Worst E-Mail Message — "The Walking Blood Bank is Activated. We need blood type A+ stat."  I always head down to the surgical unit as soon as I get these messages, but I never give blood — there's always about 80 Marines in line, night or day."

"Greatest Vindication — Stocking up on outrageous quantities of Diet Coke from the chow hall in spite of the derision from my men on such hoarding, then having a 122mm rocket blast apart the giant shipping container that held all of the soda for the chow hall.  Yep, you can't buy experience."

"Most Memorable Scene — In the middle of the night, on a dusty airfield, watching the better part of a battalion of Marines packed up and ready to go home after over six months in al-Anbar, the relief etched in their young faces even in the moonlight.  Then watching these same Marines exchange glances with a similar number of grunts loaded down with gear file past — their replacements.  Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be said."

Day 1 of Summerwork

(the entries about dance as a metaphor for life are going to have to wait for some updates as this workshop here unfolds)

Today the summerwork started. It's a workshop created by Doug Rosenberg that is designed to mimic, to some degree, the Slow Food movement. Call it "Slow Art"; it's about taking the time and the locale and simply seeing what comes out of it. The workshop is non-genre-specific, as in there are video artists, dancers, sculptors, performers, writers...some of us are collaborating on work, and some of us (like me) seem to be wanting to use the time more for personal introspection.

The idea is to challenge, as much as possible, the "Known": what we know is beautiful, what we know of aesthetics, of technique, our ideas of good & bad. Even to challenge the use of language, of the idea of "art" per se. Rather than the idea of teaching & learning, there's a process of mentoring & collaborating, being anti-monolithic (as in the monoliths of "sculpture", "dance", and the related canons).

To continue the food metaphor, there is a question of "seeds of intentionality." In other words, let's assume there is something you want to develop. In farmwork, you plant corn seeds with the intention of growing corn. What would you plant in yourself, in your time, to achieve whatever it is you want to achieve. As he put it, what do you want to harvest.

In my notes, under that question, is a simple sentence:

   

I'm looking for my voice.

Not that I don't already have a lot to say; my work in performance, education, and activism to broaden the sexual freedom and equality of our culture is extensive enough. What I'm missing, though, is the integrity of vision to unify those works. I spend, I think, too much time thinking about what my audience wants to hear, how they will perceive, and not enough time remaining true to my own message.

And there's also trying to figure out what that message is, exactly...

The theme to think about, I think, is Authenticity. The idea that being your True Self (yes, I hate the Flagrant Use of CapS, but sometimes it works to emphasize concepts) is not only your right, but your duty to the human race. You have to be yourself, the best self as hard as you can, because culturally and genetically somewhere the human race decided it needed someone like you. And if you aren't going to be that person--then who is?

This is not a mantra for over-achieving. Exactly the opposite; the harder you try to be something, the more likely you're going to end up being someone else's something. If I tried to make a blog like 43 Folders, it would truly suck; I am not Merlin Mann. However, in my own blog, you will see his influence, just as you'll see it in my own lifehacking attempts. I can acknowledge his mentorship (even if he'd probably gack at the word) without even having to remotely emulate him; it's open-source, this lifehacking thing, and we can steal snippets of codeliving and splice them into our daily operating systems at will.

In talking about art, especially performance art and dance installations, Rosenberg talked about his response to people's criticism that some pieces didn't "go anywhere": "So what? What if the object doesn't go anywhere, it simply is what it is, and in the process of watching it, you go somewhere?"

Shortly after that, we went for a walk. Here is what poured out of my pen afterwards:

   

Went for a walk.

   

Exactly the kind of walk I hated as a child, a pointless, wandering, end-up-exactly-where-you-started  walk. No point to it but to, well, go for a walk.

   

I heard far off highways.

   

Birds.

   

I felt the myriad textures of leaves and flowers and grass.

   

I enjoyed the shiny black ripeness of the blackberry ready to fall, plucked weightily into my palm, then a smooth bursting onto my tongue with unbearable tart richness.

   

I had several.

   

I saw my wife, pensively walking behind me, and admired her skin and appreciated her presence here with me, sharing the walk in spite of our separate journeys.

   

I resented, a little, following the path. But I stayed with it, because I know there will be time later to cavort.

   

Most of all I was reminded that it really is all about intention. The quality of any experience–sex, a walk, a meal, your life–is directly proportional to the amount of presence you bring to it.

   

There's a part of me that wants this walk to have resulted in something, to have catalyzed some part of my creative self towards a Work. But on the whole, I'm surprisingly willing to just let it be what it is, and see where I'm going, instead.

   

Tags: art, life, summerwork, authenticity

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We're Back!

(sorry about the brief hiatus; account problems, my fault, not typepad's)

Heidi Miller recently riffed off of a post on Kathy Sierra's always-useful Creating Passionate Users blog, a post basically on making things fun. Kathy's focus, on applications and customer experience, and Heidi's focus, on presentations (as highlighted by the hilarious David Pogue talk at TED) reminded me of some of the lectures I heard earning my degree, on the work of Allan Kaprow.

Kaprow (the inventor of the word "Happening" as a noun) was a proponent of the idea of a "life-like art." It's kind of a zen concept, "... lifelike art plays somewhere in and between attention to physical process and attention to interpretation."

It's the attention to interpretation that I think applies itself to Heidi and Kathy's ideas. David Pogue can easily talk passionately and entertainingly on bad software design, because he cares about it. It becomes fun for him. Ask him to give a lecture on the Indian martial art of Kaluripayat and he might not be quite as entertaining...but I suspect he would.

Why? Because like Heidi Miller, he can shift his passion from the subject of his talk to the delivery of the talk itself. Reading the audience, listening to the cadence of one's voice, polishing the grammar so that exactly the right emphasis is delivered at exactly the right time, these are all ways to make the act itself a game, a work of art (performance art, in fact).

Kaprow posited that it would be possible to live one's life as if it were a work of art--no, scratch the "as if", living life as art. I think there is a new breed of "life artist" at work in the GTD culture, ranging from people such as Merlin Mann to my friend Chris Brogan, who makes me look like a slacker with the number of projects he juggles. On the surface, these trends look like people trying to be more productive, make more money, do more in less time. And as anyone who fetishizes organization systems (mea culpa!) will tell you, it often is more of a scramble to try out this new toy and integrate it into our life than any actual improvement in production.

But that's just it--it's a toy. It's play. It's fun. More than that, it is the movement of bodies, ideas, projects through time--and that, my friend, is the textbook definition of a dance. These people are turning the everyday grind and the tedium of modern life into a dance, working on moving themselves and the things they touch more gracefully. I think Kaprow would approve, honestly.

Next week I will be turning my life into a dance, literally, attending a week-long artists' retreat in Oregon, WI with my wife. Not coincidentally, Kaprow's book, as well as another by Jeff Kelley ("Childsplay") will be the recommended reading. I intend to investigate the idea of the whole GTD movement as a new kind of lifelike dance.

And yes, the evolution will be blogivised...

Mosh Pits and the Polarization of America

In a recent post on the always-entertaining "Creating Passionate Users" blog, Kathy Sierra used the metaphor of a mosh pit as a method of networking, emphasizing the difference between a mentored, rigidly-structured, linear progression of knowledge and the world of information sharing, of open-source and blogrolls and IMs and the like.

It reminded me of an essay I read several months ago by a philosopher named Philip Slater. The essay is called "Why America is Polarized" and it's got some very interesting concepts. Rather than take the face-value labels and dichotomies of our society, he instead looks at the symptoms of the conflict and draws a larger picture.

To quote: "This is not a conflict between nations, or between religious traditions, or between left and right. The struggle is taking place WITHIN every nation, every political party, every religious tradition, every institution, every individual.

The old system I call Control Culture, because its underlying focus on order led to the creation of rigid mental and physical compartments. The new system I call Connecting Culture, because its guiding impulse is to bring down walls and permeate boundaries - to bring everything - ideas, people, images, cultures, species - into relation with everything else."

I think to a lot of "control culture" types, the idea of the internet, socialized medicine, public education, etc. smacks of the kind of uniformity promoted by totalitarian regimes. I don't believe this is the case; those were all about making everyone equal, everyone the same, fitting triangles and circles and rhomboids into square holes whether they liked it or not, for the good of the faceless State.

This idea of integration does not mean dis-integration of the self. It's more like those old Japanese cartoons where the individuals of a team could change their shape and form a larger, more powerful being--you always saw parts of the individual team members in the whole, but by integrating their skills they were able to do more.

A better example comes from real life. When I first read the post on CPU, I couldn't remember the name of the essay, or the author, or anything. I had a vague memory of posting about it on one of my blogs, but couldn't find it in the limited time I had. It wasn't in my archives, the hard copy wasn't in my file cabinet, my memory was faulty--all very linear, old-school methods for finding things that are missing.

So I posted a quick question on my personal blog: "A while back I posted something about this subject. Anyone remember the essay?" I didn't expect a response--heck, I wasn't even sure I'd posted in the right blog.

However, within half an hour a colleague--not someone I would have expected to read this essay, much less have printed it out for HIS archives--emailed me with the author and title.

If I'd not shared the knowledge with him (and thousands of others) when I learned of the essay, if I'd hoarded it, kept it to myself as a weapon in a dusty arsenal of knowledge...I'd still be looking. Instead, I have the article again, I have an excuse to buy my friend a beer, and probably a chance to talk about other aspects of the article and thereby INCREASE the spectrum of knowledge.

Oh, and this time, I'll file it better, too.

Fair Use

I've been having a good-natured disagreement with Heidi Miller about the concept of Fair Use. She had, in a recent podcast, a lawyer asserting that every second of every created piece, no matter what, required permission, and that "Fair Use" was "only" a defense, not a right. As a long-time media producer, this didn't ring true to me, and so I was pretty excited when the recent edition of On the Media addressed it. In fact, they led me to an entire comic book written by Duke Law Professors on the subject (much easier to grasp for those of us who are visual learners, and an exercise in Fair Use itself).

The whole thing is worth a read, but the part that I found most supportive came in the afterword:

"To be fair, in many-perhaps most-cases these demands for payment or clearance have nothing to do with copyright law as it stands. Instead, they are a manifestation of a "permissions culture" premised on the belief that copyright gives its owners the right to demand payment for every type of useage, no matter its length, or its purpose, or the context in which it is set. But that is not, and never has been the law."

They also specifically include podcasting in their overview of why Fair Use is essential to the continuing documentation of our culture.

As an artist, I tend to be pretty free with my work, as long as I'm credited--I do not expect to get rich from my art, I simply want the freedom to continue to make it. Fair Use, I argue, is, in fact, a right--not a weaselish way to get out of paying for money. It's also a requirement, I feel, to hold people accountable for the things they say--if I do not have the ability to let you hear the latest lie from [Right Wing Pundit] in my effort to disprove it, then it severely diminishes free speech in general.