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Rhetoric and speeches...

Rhetoric has a new tool, cheap online video distribution, so perhaps quality graduation entertaining ideas might rise up but will a graduation speech ever make the top speech list?   For now you can hear and see Phallus in Chains play Green Day's Time of Your Life at Berkeley's '07 commencement.

I spent quite awhile trying to research graduation speeches for a post I did the end of May.  YouTube might be a place where quality can be found but I'm finding that most of the stuff is mediocre.  That is what you find when amateurs run the show.

This has been the criticism of Wikipedia.  When professionals aren't there to edit and people can contribute for free and access is at little or no cost, how can quality be maintained?  Ah. That is the big question of our times.

Andrew Keen, author of the Cult of the Amateur, wrote an article in the May 21 issue of Forbes, titled "Down with Internet Democracy."  He said, "If you want to supplement artificial intelligence with real human intelligence, you need to reward the real humans with real money in exchange for their services.  Because real people have real mortgages to pay off and real families to feed."  He uses this to justify why professional staffs are needed for Wikipedia.  He is not in favor of "people-powered" projects that depend on "noble amateurs."

The problem is this: with so much information out there and cheap tools such as inexpensive digital cameras and recorders and software to upload and wide bandwith for sharing, who is to stop anyone from producing and sharing at any level? 

We're facing information overloads and the system of managing and profiting from creativity is threatened  with new channels of distribution.  I've termed this a system of "pull" where consumers can pull in what they want rather than a "push" system where professionals function as gatekeepers to push things to consumers.

I have supported the creative commons copyright system as it makes more sense in the digital environment.  Some, though, want to extend copyrights.  The copyright debate will the the gripping one we will face, especially as google gobbles up the printed books ... to extend the protections, or to come up with new terms for our new age.

Hair Matters...

Celine Dione with her 6-year-old son with his long locks (in this month's British Hello magazine) got me thinking about hair.  My Dad and his sister both wore long locks until he grew into big boy pants.  He was always embarrased by this but in some ways it is very old school.  I wanted to call attention to this famous Renoir hanging in the MET.  The child on the right is the little boy of the family in long locks and a dress.

Prince Albert's nephew brought a girl to a big Monaco function who raised eyebrows with her hairdo, below. 

Politically speaking, John Edwards has gotten attention for fussing with his (very expensive) haircut.  Hillary Clinton said to Yale's law class, "Hair Matters."  She learned her lesson!

For me, I've been thinking about grey (hair) matters which I'll tackle later. But on hair matters?  Everyone has an opinion. It is the most dramatic personal style statement.  There is nothing worse than a bad hair day or a bad haircut.  Native Americans understood the power of hair. When I moved to Houston I was horrified with a hideous haircut.  When I moved to NYC I made sure to ask for help in getting a fabulous hair person.  Oh, hair matters.  It really does.

Recommended Reads...

Magazine media trends: Celebrity gossip magazine sales have been increasing dramatically (along with the cable focus on infotainment) while intellectual culture and issue magazines are going up in a counter move.  Vanilla weekly news mags  such as U.S. World Report, Newsweek and Time are having trouble maintaining readership. 

I'm sorry I didn't really discover  New York magazine until not too long before my move.  Last night the editor was on one of the cable channels talking about how their focus is covering culture.  Trends in NYC, especially Wall Street, dominate our country and last night he said NYC right now is all about money.  Boy, is that ever the truth.  Their series on hedge funds (see article below on funny money) was one of the best.  You can sign up to get four issues for free, just to see if you like it.  I think that is a good online strategy.

Dead tree-reading is now balanced much more by online reading, except for books.  On the flip you'll see more of my favorite regular periodical reads...

Life and Death...

Death has been on my mind ever since I took my brother to the WTC site in NYC and there I wondered about the way tourists are reacting to it and connecting to the idea of death. Being a lover of graveyards because of a geneology passion, I captured the Trinity Church old gravestones, left, near Wall Street that day.  Tulips living in bloom next to death markers. Life and death. 

Now I've zipped through Oklahoma City and didn't stop at the graves of my grandparents and great-grandparents buried there but I pondered the OKC bombing memorial.  Then I zipped past the turn-off to Pampa, Texas, where my other grandparents are buried.  I've not been there since I was a kid.  I'm zipping along to my new life in my new little city.  Endings and beginnings.

Death connects you to a place, too. Mother once asked me where I would be buried --me, of the ever-changing homeplace.  After years of pondering this, I had a solution: "buy a Wedgewood vase, put it on the mantle, and voila, there is where I'll be, even temporarily, in ash-form." 

In the midst of my move business, I had enough of death and life on my mind to start a flickr group on the Art and Architecture of Death.

Living connects you to a place, too.  I hope I'm not being morbid about the idea.

Ramble: Penn Square Bank, Surrealism & Funny Money

A quick ramble today as I think my real life ramble needs to be to haul moving boxes and paper to a recycling center and to do a run to put more into storage.  Keep and toss, keep and toss.  Is that what happens when money goes funny?  Or is it the greed of keep, keep, keep and more, more, more that makes some lose their heads?  Money and the lust for more does make people irrational -- hence the reason that objective minds on the matters of money are always needed.  Irrational exhuberance.  Yep.

This surrealist eye (in the MET) is apt for my rambling thoughts about funny money and surreal times that my eye sees. What I'm looking at right now is a front page 6/25 Wall Street Journal article, Wall Street Fears Bear Stearns Is Tip of an Iceberg, about hedge funds. A New Yorker 7/2 article on hedge funds has just hit the newstands. It seems like a surreal bubble reminiscent of Penn Square Bank's hot, loose and fast times back in the 80s.  It is very ephemeral, these fast and furious hedge fund riches  and I've written about it before with lots of links.  I'm not the only one losing confidence.

This week is the 25th anniversary of the folding of Penn Square Bank.  I pulled out Mark Singer's Funny Money and Phillip Zweig's Belly Up as they are the best reads on the subject.  Penn Square Bank was one of my public relations clients back when and my funny money radar has been out ever since those heady oil boom days in Oklahoma. It made me raise eyebrows over Enron's go-go business and I felt the same surreal feeling about the real estate in NYC when we moved there and it has persisted about hedge funds.  There are very interesting studies about how one's thinking becomes irrational when the idea of quick riches sets in. 

I'm not reading the new book, Richistan,  but I do wonder about the stone contractor the author writes of who is now a fast millionaire from building stone houses for the NE hedge fund guys. Funny money trickles; greed is contagious. I'm instead reading New Mexico Governor (and presidential candidate) Bill Richardson's book, Between Worlds.  I appreciate his ability to straddle cultures and see the world in a non-myopic way.

What my eye sees... me, just a regular plain ol' mom thinking about how money matters have moved from surreal to postmodern to????
Rambling non-surreal Cheers.  Money isn't funny when it tanks. Been there.

For related MotherPie articles on postmodern money and Enron, start here and follow links back.

Green Eggs & New Things...

You will like it on the road, you will like the heavy load.  You will like it live or dead, you will like it on your head.  You will  like it on the go, you will like it, you should know.

Sam-I-Am.  Remember? My favorite Seuss book.

Life is full of green eggs and ham.  We must all be open to new things, open to change.  I keep reminding myself that change is life.

How many of us react to change like a breech baby, resisting the easy opportunity for a smooth transition to something new.  I will like it.  I do already.  I do, I really do. Wanh-wanh-wanh.

Life: Eating It Up...

You can eat up life or it can eat you up.  Now that I've left the Big Apple*,   I'd like to say I ate it up.

Crunch crunch.

* (note the redefinition: Big Apple in terms of NYC is now the new Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, generating more revenue per square foot than any other store.   

Ahead, Behind & What's in the Mirror...

How deep, how stormy, how blue-sky this image is.  A reflection, even now, on the present that is ever apt to change, ever likely to never stay the same.  Something is always behind us, something always ahead.  Life in mirrors.

I'd like to see blue skies ahead and storm clouds behind but...hey.  Life just isn't like that.  We can't paint it as we want it.  We just live it as it is.  Our art is in how we interpret and accept it and what we make of it.

This is  me in the mirror, capturing my life at the moment, just outside  Santa Rosa in New Mexico. 

One for the road.

The iPhone & Pop Icons...

If I were still in NYC, I'd buy this week's New York magazine issue as I'm just real curious how the new iPhone will do (scheduled for release any day now) and what the new ad campaign will be like. (update: best review). I twice went through the product description on the computer banks in NYC's Fifth Avenue Apple Store.  The phone is pricey, doesn't have a qwerty keyboard like the blackberry or treos and I just wonder if this will fly.  New York magazine's article asks if the Lazarus of Apple has risen for the last time and has quotes of Jobs' messianistic self-perception.

The pop art cover illustration of Steve Jobs reminds me of Richard Avedon's famous 1967 psychadellic pop art photo of John Lennon, done about a year after Lennon made his infamous remark about the Beatles' popularity as compared to that of Jesus.  The magazine's eye-grabbing huge headline for the cover story made me correlate the two.   (Avedon's Beatles portraits are on view currently at the Whitney as part of the Summer of Love's exhibition and I think his set of pop art Beatles define that psychadellic period as much as Andy Warhol's art defined pop art).

Arbiters of cool & culture: Lennon and Jobs --humans creating crowd frenzies.  But look what Job has done, according to the New York magazine article: Apple racked up $21.6 billion in sales in the last twelve months, and $2.8 billion in profits. Its stock price has doubled in the past year; last month, AAPL was named to the S&P 100, making it a bona fide blue chip.

Related:
The iPhone and Pop Icons
The Architecture of the Apple
Apple: Enough, Already?
Apple Creatively Soldiers On
Mac & Apple: Innovating Beyond the Market Today

Art is a Form of Insanity and So Is Life...

After seeing the art group Ant Farm's bubble environment display at the Whitney's "Summer of Love - Art of the Psychedellic Era" two weeks ago, I was reminded once again of their participatory art project on oil millionaire Stanley Marsh 3's land west of Amarillo, Texas.  Marsh once said "Art is a form of insanity and I do it very well."  My take today: Old things that stick up to haunt us. Marsh sponsored Ant Farm's  1974 installation, the Cadillac Ranch.  It was dug up and resinstalled in 1997.  So I stopped by on my way West to revisit the art, which is a statement about the paradoxical sense of place, roadside attractions and the mobility and freedom of the automobile.  I could hardly breathe for all the paint fumes in the air from the tourist/artists leaving their graffiti marks.  (Not sure which is worse: the paint fumes or the smell of the cattle feed/fattening/lot not too far away.  Both are blows to the nose.)

Marsh had a sense of humor.  He installed signs with slogans all over Amarillo and Leg Sculptures between Amarillo and Canyon, Texas.  Who expects to find much art in the Texas Panhandle.  But voila, it is there. The angle of the half-buried cars corresponds to that of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.  My photo set on flickr of the Cadillac Ranch has more.  Dead cadillacs.  What a way to let go of something -- just bury it half-way.

Leg stretch on old Route 66, thinking about how we only partly let go of old things.  We hang on to the past. Crazy.