MotherPie

Lucy in the Sky (Or Lennon from Toronto)...

This is for my husband, who has just finished reading the new John Lennon biography and urges me to read it but...gee... it is just so heavy. What? 800-something pages?  Maybe better read as a Kindle book.  Anyway, once we were in Toronto staying at the same hotel where Lennon sat in bed for a spell and where this recording now embellished with art, was originally made by a 14 year-old. As first an artist, Lennon would appreciate the creative way the recording is presented in remixed form, using yet another medium - youTube, for his message.

So while I'm home alone getting physical therapy while the two college kids are off with Dad, I'm putting this up for him as I pick up that heavy Lennon tome.  If you've been reading my posts this week, this is a progression of Lennon from music, then spoken words, to cloud, remixed with additive art worth. Not Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, but Lennon in the clouds...

The Fountain of Youth, Spouting Off...

Birthday today. Thinking of the fountain of youth.  I'll sip to the future that will be embedded in my progeny.  I'll fill my cup with actions based on what will be important to the seventh generation.  I'll twirl my toes in the placid place of gratitude.  I'll smile more and thirst less and gulp with appreciation every drop of life.  May every swallow enable aging with grace.  Let me float in today, always hopeful of tomorrow's possibilities, but not living with what Black Swan author Nicholas Taleb, (whose hedge fund was up 65 to 115 percent for the year) calls future blindness. Yesterday is already down the drain. May the waters of living artfully never ebb, nor the choice to live responsibly, for oneself, for others, for the world around us.  May the act of leaving a place better for my having been there continue to be a refreshing experience, a way to quench any sense of living on the take.

My gift: a bicycle. My day: with family and friends, in Tejas. My mother tells stories of times around when I was born. My children pay attention. Or not. We watch family movies taken when my father was a teenager in the 40's and 50s.

Cheers. To all of my years.

Culture of Connection...

When media theorist Marshall McLuhan said media would become extensions of ourselves, I don't think he thought we'd be forever connected.  Apparently, our culture of intangible connections through our cell phones is becoming so significant it has become a burial accountrement, as much as our clothing signifies our self beyond our skin.  We are left naked and bare without this symbolic link to our identity.

This tech appendage makes presence less literal, in life as well as death.

A deceased Manhattan lawyer was buried with his cellphone and his number is inscribed on his headstone under the words Rest in Peace. His family still leaves messages and pays the bill, according to the article in December's New York Post (via textually.org). 

So much for the idea that you can't take it with you.  Hang on to that number. It is you. The mobile you, six feet under even. I never thought when we kept our Atlanta cell number when we moved to NYC then to Santa Fe that I would be forever marked as a Southerner.  My friends know me as 404, still. Sometime after we left Texas cell phone numbers could be kept and are no longer linked to place. I think I need a new permanent number.  I never thought about heavenly connections in quite this way. Death does no have to be the end. If the bill gets paid.

These Times: Best Quotes...

Time for a few favorite quotes:

Every elegant man should have a nice fountain pen and a nice watch.
    - NM Gov (named Commerce Secretary) Bill Richardson - Esquire

Barack Obama: The economy is likely to get worse before it gets better.

Warren Buffett:
--Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
--It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.
--In the business world, the rear view mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

Benjamin Franklin: A penny saved is a penny earned.

G.W. Bush: I will leave the presidency with my head held high.

The Dead Dog Story Goes Visual...

The story that never seems to die, that keeps readers coming to this site, is one about an urban legend that somehow got attributed to my daughter and I wrote about it two and a half years ago: Dead Dog Story: Not My Daughter.  Three months later (this, mind you, is back in 2006), it took on a life of its own. 

The story inspired a short film in and I was sent the link in comments on my original post.  Produced in Edinburgh (or released there) the short film was made as part of the 2008 48 Hour Film Project under the genre urban myth.

So, as part of the never-ending story, here's the film (and my daughter is not the star).
Pettsitting

The Art and Names of The Global Financial Crisis...

Yesterday it officially became a Recession with experts saying it will be a deeper and longer recession than any we've seen in three decades and it is now being called a Global Crisis.  Looking at the art of it all of these things we are now naming, Time magazine's cover for October 13 takes us back to images of The Great Depression.  What is interesting is that this Time cover art with the cover story headline The New Hard Times is on all four global regional issues for the week.  Usually these covers are tailored for each market.  Another digital visual of the moment: the U.S. National Debt Clock ran out of digits to record the spiraling failure as it passed $10 trillion.

Time also had a good visual illustration of the global meltdown, and the cultural art as we go through this is part of the studies for the U.S. Economic Crisis Media Study I'm working on.  Today the G7 meets and takes on the crisis.

The $700 billion Bailout is now called Troubled Asset Relief Program while in the UK it is called a Bailout Plan as our crisis spreads globally.  For us, we're thinking about the visual reference to the Soup Lines of the 1930s which makes us think: The Great Depression, redux.

Mother this week reminded me of the saying: Eat it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.

Related:

The Syntax of Sarah and EconomicSpeak

U.S. Economic Crisis Media Study

Bigge$st Cri$i$ and Mediaand Panic, Collapse and Meltdown

Mexican Mummies, Fall Celebrations...

On my several trips to Guanajuato, Mexico, one of our favorite excursions was a trip to the Mummy Museum - which is also one of Mexico's top tourist sites. The dead are real and in a culture that celebrates Dios de los Meurtos, these are reminders that life and death are but a breath apart.

I've been pulling my Day of the Dead collection from storage and realized we're not yet to All Soul's/All Saint's Day even with all the Halloween decorations out in the stores.  I've just been putting fall harvest decorations up as my red chile ristras hang drying on the portal.

When tourists visit the International Folk Art Museum in Santa Fe, they don't see mummies, but they are, if they aren't from here, fascinated by Alexander Girard's collection of Day of the Dead trinkets/folk art.  This exhibit is just past the one on heaven and hell.  The descanos -- the crosses at the roadsides marking the place of death and seen all over the Southwest now -- hold spiritual meaning for those from Latin America.  They mark the sacred place of crossing over, they are.

The smallest mummified fetus, right, is from that museum and was one of the top email photos of the year on Yahoo! and a Reuters PICTURE OF THE YEAR. The Guanajuato mummies were discovered in a cemetery in Guanajuato, northwest of Mexico City. They are accidental modern mummies and were literally "dug up" between 1896 and 1958 in order to make room for more recent burials.  This photo is one everyone finds intriguing because in our anglo-dominated culture, we stuff death away and don't put it on view, discuss it, celebrate it or live with it.

REUTERS/Henry Romero (MEXICO)

Living Through The Lense: Present & Past...

Memories, Past: Don't memories change?   Over time, what you see in your mind's eye changes?  You are aware of the consequences and what happens over time.  You look at photos of yourself from the past and you notice things you didn't notice then. 

When you take the photos, you think you might be capturing one thing, but later you realize that something much different has been captured.  Your carefree expression; your stupid hairstyle; your trendy clothes that look fruity now; your self as skinny or fat; or your youth and what you were doing...then.

Memories, Present: When you take photos, you lose the moment itself in the effort to be the voyeur and to caputure memories.  You take yourself out of the experience life to view it and frame it for later.  You cease to be the participant, and instead become a creator, a producer, a memory-maker.

Memories, Mixed-Up: We took two of our three children to re-experience, now as grown-ups, something they had experienced as children.  Then, we didn't have cameras with us.  Then, Dad wasn't there.  How they experienced the re-run was completely different.  It was an effort in posing as well as an experience in fun, all wrapped in the excitement of capturing what had once been an outsized memorable adventure. The moments captured were more fun than the moments-as-lived, right then, as we experienced it.  We replayed the moment immediately afterwards to find the best shot.  The fun of the seen shot was better than the moment itself.

Memories, Quixotic: When capturing the present for online presentation, living and life itself becomes an exercise in creative production. At least that is what I've found with my daughters. For me, I captured photos for sharing with close friends and family and the element for presentation was the well-maintained scrapbook.  For my children, the scrapbook no longer tangible, but is an online venture, with personal photos posted for friends and acquaintances but knowing the self as posted online is never a private thing.  It can be public for the whole world and just knowing that makes self-presentation and self-editing an incursion into how we live.  Cameras, with phones, can capture anything most anytime, most anywhere.  Such is the self in the moment as captured for and posted on Facebook.

Worldwide audiences: In June 2008 Facebook has 132,105,000 users (up over 80 million from June '07)and MySpace has 117,582,000 (up three million from June '07) according to Comscore.  MySpace was the world leader a year ago but the surge in Facebook users is attributed to worldwide growth as the U.S. audience is already saturated (49 million U.S. users). 

There are times when I want the cameras and the phones and the blackberries turned off and left out of the moment.  It doesn't happen much anymore when we are gathered together.

Honoring the War Dead in The Netherlands...

My Dad, now 74, wants to go to the Netherlands American Cemetery, to touch the cross that marks the grave of his double cousin, raised as his brother, who died in WWII.

Boyd was adopted as a young toddler by my father's parents, because sister/brother married sister/brother and when Boyd's mother died, he became one of the five of my father's elder brothers.  Boyd's last letter home talked of the risky venture he'd volunteered for -- parachuting into Holland. He knew he might die, he said.  Sure enough, he did.

A  flurry of emails this spring, translated by interpreters, has connected my father to the family living near the Belgian border in Holland, that has, for several generations, maintained his cousin/brother's grave.  I've been involved helping my Dad help these adopters collect geneology information for the cemetery records. We never knew that a Dutch family places flowers on special days on Boyd's grave and have symbolically "stood in" for American families of soldiers who can not visit the graves of their loved ones.

My Dad once, long ago, expressed a desire to visit Boyd's grave.  I've never really been aware of any other yearnings of my father.  After this flurry, he's expressed this desire yet again.  I hope my father can one day place his hand on the cross that marks the grave of Boyd and see his dream fulfilled.

This is the last email my father shared with me from the Holland family:

"When you are planning on coming to Holland in the future, we hope you will visit us.  You are very welcome.  And then we can visit the grave together."

Yesterday, Memorial Day in Margraten, flowers were placed on Boyd's grave by Jo and Finy Sparla.   So on this Memorial Day I honor Boyd and the Sparla family who has, for several generations, tended Boyd's grave in Holland and I thank them for their efforts to contact us to let us know, after all these years, that someone there...cares.

Political Marketing to Women: Bill Clinton's Personal Appeal...

Junk mail and spam and all that noise and clutter. It is hard for marketers to get through to women with the political message.

Oh my. I've just written a huge rant.  I just hate it when I get so verbose and go on and on and on. Is this what happens when women get to be my age? So, I'm putting my verbosious (rhymes with halitosis) rant on the flip. If you care.