MotherPie

Ramble on Our Future: Bye, Bye Bling & What is Really Important...

Well, these are interesting times.  While the Santa Fe paper has local residents concerned about offbeat things like herding deer in downtown at sunrise safely up a hill and how to be cat-like to win back a wife by giving her a bird carcass (seriously! this is so so Santa Fe), I think about manners, etiquette and being appropriate. 

1. Bling is Out: I've not been back to NYC in awhile but The End of the Gilded Age, the end of Conspicuous Consumption is an ABC piece (a very quick watch, go see) featuring the author of the book Richistan and gives a good insight into the end of the bling bling era.  Shameful big (houses, breasts, behavior patterns) is out and the change is everywhere in New  York.  Future Trends: frugality, family, friends, and even...lower heels. 


2. Future Changes: I found much more important things to think about, like how  life is changing. A very interesting article (pdf) on The Internet of Things- Future trends of the Internet: From the Internet of Data to the Internet of Things (Speech of Gérald Santucci January 28, 2009) was something I found fascinating and as we watch media die, and over-the-top living go out the window.  How we interact with tech tools and data and our surroundings will change everything. It is interesting to contemplate:

   The very concept of privacy will change as the Internet of Things develops. Citizens may decide that the information they consider private now – about their health, relationships, and habits – is just too mundane to worry about. Some experts even argue that "for most people, privacy will end in 2013, or a little beyond that." They believe that privacy as we know it will become impossible to attain. ...Issues for security, confidentiality, integrity, accountability, liability, availability in the Internet of Things will bring changes more ubiquitous in nature and to will alter people’s lives more radically than most existing information technologies. Citizens may rapidly become wary of the consequences the Internet of Things will have for their lives and therefore, they may reject the benefits it could bring to them.



3. Populist Trend, Main Street Sets the Pace: While luxury is out, WalMart is still garnering the dollars.  Look at our consumption patterns on how WalMart has spread with interesting data visualization.  This is Main Street, not Wall Street.  But both are changing.

Did you catch the article about the pediatrician who bemoans the children that aren't taught manners? I'm ready for a culture of manners to return. When the 21 Club in NYC drops its dress code requirement for ties at lunch and creates quite the ruckus, you wonder... are we forever changed, or will we return to proper social codes but maybe in a different way?  When Jackie Kennedy took off hats, the rest of America followed, except good church-going African American women who use the semiotics of the hat to message place and to convey self-respect and significance.  It is the way to dress up. We might fist-bump instead of handshake but I would think this is a better way to not get germy with everyone.

Maybe as we focus on things that really count, not material things that are here today and gone tomorrow, we will pay attention to graciousness and etiquette.  Now where is that Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt? 

pink ring bling photo from my Lasting Love Series

Ramble: Santa Ho Ho Hos and Uh Uh Ohs...

5,000 Santas gathered in NYC just for fun. Not for tummy tucks, not for a meeting, but just to gather.  NYTimes Street Fashion Photographer Bill Cunningham captures the whimsical folly of it all.

Wasn't Bristol Palin supposed to be married to her baby daddy by now?  Before she has that (some say second?) baby, due yesterday?

2008 will be seen as the year when online media surpassed print, tv and radio.

Whoa Whoa Whoahs: YouTube Visionary Award was given to Queen Rania of Jordan who says, when receiving the big honor: "We are stronger when we listen and wiser when we share... breaking down the barriers clip by clip."   She and Obama are the two world leaders exercising new tech communication tools the most.

Four days until Christmas Cheers.  I wonder if I'll see a Santa on the Santa Fe ski slopes today.

Ramble: Cultural & Other Trends...

Just thinking of trends and wondering if decorations for the holidays will be cut back in our feeling of austerity. Is under-the-top going to be the way to go?  Well, anyway, my decorations aren't up. But here are other trends I've noticed...

• This morning I clicked into something VERY clever: NYTimes technology columnist David Pogue's gadget-choosing advice.  His Pogue-O-matic is the cleverest online story/advice column and the way he has illustrated this personally is pretty darn cool and anyway, Pogue is fun to watch if you don't even look at the gadets.  As far as media trend stories, this is a step worth noticing.


• Over Thanksgiving my children went to the teen vampire flick and pop-culture juggernaut Twilight which seemed like Sex and the City to pull in the females. A cultural take (go to the link for more on the morality slant): "This not the first time vampires in pop culture have been a perfect expression of the currents and anxieties of their time. In fact, one might argue that that is their purpose.  With immortality, a killer instinct, and a life on the fringes, Vampires are a perfect conduit for musings on the human condition." 


• Mullato Mutts: After our Golden Retreiver Hallelujah died we weren't interested in dogs and my son wants us to get a shelter dog mutt.  I've looked into the cultural trend of designer dogs called hybrids. Labradoodles and puggles are the most popular and there are now over 400 hybrids registered w/ the American Canine Hybrid Club. Will Obama's selection show his cultural duality perspective, too, and fuel this trend?


• From Global Trends 2025: the whole international system—as constructed following WWII—will be revolutionized and ...with 1.5 billion more people, will put pressure on resources—particularly energy, food, and water—raising the specter of scarcities emerging as demand outstrips supply. Water is becoming a huge issue in Santa Fe already and the pollutants from fracing technology in drilling for natural gas is a concern in the Southwest.


• The soft power of American Culture started with the Hollywood movies (more Hollywood tickets are sold outside of the U.S. than within it) and continues on its long roll even while opinions of America or American power has declined. One example of our cultural influence: The television program “CSI” is now more popular in France than in the United States. 

Dogumentary most popular film: Santa Fe's film festival started this week and the most popular film is Weiner Takes All: A Dogumentary and I think it is about racing dauchsunds.

Off to check out the films and get decorations up. Cultural Cheers!

Ramble: Art, Moms & Teenage Sex...

Throw it out and call it art.  Isn't that what we do, moms, when we create?  Glue styrofoam cups together and you, too, might get a $500,000 genius grant.  Seriously I would love to have the holiday times be one of giving of the self and creating, even just writing a letter of love.  It is just not right, I think, that Black Friday came two days after Halloween at Kmart instead of the day after Thanksgiving (the retailer hopes to combat the dismal economy and slumping consumer spending).  That is as bad as Skanky Costumes (my post that pulls in a lot of traffic in late October).

I think we'll all start to rebel, like Marcel Duchamp did with his idea of calling a urinal art and placing his signature upon it (who knew almost a century ago it would be voted the most influential piece of modern art?). So let's create for our gifts.

Rambling on about moms: a brain-damaged girl learns to speak.  First words: I love you, mum.

Teenage sex?  That Bristol Palin thing? New Yorker's Red Sex, Blue Sex is worth a read, is getting a ton of attention, and my exerpts are below:

The five states with the lowest median age at marriage are Utah, Oklahoma, Idaho, Arkansas, and Kentucky, all red states, while those with the highest are all blue: Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The red-state model puts couples at greater risk for divorce; women who marry before their mid-twenties are significantly more likely to divorce than those who marry later.
...in the blue-state scheme, people may postpone child-bearing to the point where infertility becomes an issue. And delaying child-bearing is better suited to the more affluent, for whom it yields economic benefits, in the form of educational opportunities and career advancement. But Carbone and Cahn argue that the red-state model is clearly failing on its own terms—producing high rates of teen pregnancy, divorce, sexually transmitted disease, and other dysfunctional outcomes that social conservatives say they abhor.

Sex and teenagers is the sticky wicket of the moment.  Our cultural tar baby.

Enough of my ramble. Cheers.

Ramble: The Syntax of Sarah & Economic Speak...

Everywhere I ramble the talk is on Sarah Palin, (SarahSpeak you know, talkin' also, too), and the economy (where DepressionSpeak is not politically correct).  Think of Mark Twain or even Dante, both of whom wrote in the vernacular and in doing so, gained a huge audience.  Twain took up American-ese and did not write in the King's English but in the then-Westernisms of plain folk talk.  Dante wrote to the folks not in the high literate language of the day, Latin, but in the language that was spoken everyday.

Syntax as Brain Gum: And so, also, Six-Pack Sarah's syntax is so, you know, stopping us all in our tracks and impact. It has it, too, impact, the impact of it all. Yokel or elitism?  The oddness of it is riveting and the brain-wrap on this has everyone trying to diagram her ordinary/unordinary-ness as if she were a sentence herself. Don't we quickly forget that we've lost our regional colloquialisms.  Educated people and leaders speak with American media-esque standards, which is to say all-the-same and regionally unidentifiable. Just in a generation.  You can hear Boston, Brooklyn,  Charleston and Amarillo tilt and lilt if you go there, but not much on the media main stage.  It is not muy bueno to parler differently. Maureen Dowd writes about her "homespun haikus... her pompom patois" and my mother gets prickly about the meanness of the media.

Economic Unmentionables: It is like a dance around death to hear the way the market sink is all presented. Just as we might pick up our way of speaking from the books we read, the media we pay attention to or the way we talk with those around us (ok, I can't help but falling here into what I've listened to with Sarah on the stage), likewise, also, we pick up the flow unconsciously, too, also. Mention Depression and we all sink.  It isn't done.  Just like dying, we "pass over" the subject. I pulled up the October 24, 1929 NYTimes story that sort of started it all shaking out. If you see or read the headlines, you don't see the panic and it is like how we use euphemisms and tuck away death.  We're so used to consumerism and being told to want and buy that the headlines can't go there, the commentators tip toe around the topic. I started to study Media and the Economic Crisis and a cursory overview is that when the jitters set in, it becomes all about Palin.  Thing Two overtakes Thing One.

The Snippet of Sarah, the naming of our Economic Woes-of-this-Moment: The Great Depression became so,  only after it was long over, like The Great War or The War Between The States became other things generally, like The Civil War.  The naming of the thing becomes it's talking point and the talking point becomes the naming of the thing.  The paradox of mental understanding.

The spin moves so fast, with 24/7 online news that keeping up with the headlines and news is exhausting and vastly different from my media comparisons when papers were printed and news was a once-a-day wrap-up.  Now it is all about the spin of the news of the news and the story about the story becomes more newsworthy and discussed than the original news/story. Example: The Palin/Biden debate was spoofed by SNL's Tina Fey as Palin and Queen Latifa as Moderator Gwen Ifill  and it was the latter comedy version that was clipped and played, not the original, for a Meet The Press discussion of the debate.  Then, Sunday's version of Meet the Press with Gwen Ifill, three days after the original debate, became a top online yesterday morning with the new spin story in a liberal media outlet about how Ifill couldn't control the debate and how Palin used the podium as a stump speech platform.  The latter story generated yet more headlines and attention.  By last night the Digg headline Ifill: Palin Blew Me Off was one of the top ranked stories.  Any Joe, or Jane Doe can remix Sarah until we forget, really, who she is (or we are just bashed by the onslaught and don't work to find out what she is about) and so, thusly, she (or anyone and anything) becomes iconic and we fragment, culturally, her identity in parsing her to a mere idea or quick image like the symbol of the heart or sun, and she becomes, really, just shorthand - Sarah-in-a-Snippet -.Exact example to make my point: 30-Second Sarah.

No wonder we're tuning out with the tediousness of it all.  We work memory in associations and symbols so we subliminally and subconsciously take the blip.  9/11-like. Yet, still, too, I'm hearin' the word ALSO a whole lot more.  Or is it just me????  I'm off to capture today's headlines on yesterday's news with more market downturns.

Cheers, also, too.

Related:

The Art and Names of the Global Financial Crisis

U.S. Economic Crisis Media Study

Bigge$st Cri$i$ and Media

Panic, Collapse and Meltdown

Ramble: In the Clouds...

Rambling through Colorado with several stops to see 12 family members in three cities, two friends in two cities and just back in time to ramble in Santa Fe's mountains where the aspens are just starting to turn here. In Colorado I had ample time to hike in the aspens, rambling along a familiar trail, and amble through four cities and various mountains for photographing opportunities and admiring architecture and development.  I was in the clouds, literally and figuratively.  Doing the corporate hustle through stints in Atlanta and NYC while raising teens never allowed for this sort of "me" time.

Economic jitters continue, even though things are at the brink, they've been tempered graphically, except for Palin threatening we could be facing a Depression.  It had to get political, didn't it?  But I played with the Depression graphic last week.  Durable goods orders are down, the worst holiday shopping in over 20 years is projected and...

Houston friends are reporting thousands of trees down and property damage in the area where we used to live and electricity coming back on slowly (but a million in Harris County still without power) and every hotel booked in the process. One Houston friend had coffee with me in Salida, Co.; she had escaped Houston when the cool spell ended.  Another friend lost a home on Bolivar Penninsuala.  Nothing is there. Nada.

Living with Extended Families & Closer Inter-Generational Relationships: The number of parents, siblings and other relatives who live with adult heads of households grew 42% from 2000 to 2007, according new stats from the U.S. Census Bureau. Biggest change: parents, up 67%, to 3.6 million (the trend is stronger in immigrant communities).  Important shift: parent-child relationships are closer now (think: helicopter parents) with stronger ties between grown children and their parents.  I have two relatives living multi-generationally with parents.

Cheers from the mountain trails where the aspens are starting to turn.  The talk of the town is when they will beek peak here. 

Ramble: The Immediacy of Now...

My internet has been down since Friday.  I can't pull up maps, research my book club review, check email, pay bills, or see what is going on with those markets real time.  If the markets needed to depend on Santa Fe for service, they might not get fixed, ever. I need the internet fixed. Now.

The Now of memory: What did I really need to do on the internet?  Hmmm.  I forget. But with memory and aging -- my Houston friend M. uses the term CRS (can't remember shit) --- we can remember much more than we thought. We get wiser about what we need to junk up our minds with, what we need to know. Studies show that we remember more from our teens and twenties than from any other time, yet we now know from brain science that our brains aren't fully formed until about age 25 or so.  What do brains do in adolescence that enable more memories to stored?  Especially now that tech tools free up the need to memorize certain things.

The Now of Influential Women over 80: Slate's list of 80 Influential people over 80 has only ten women and seven of those ten used media for a tool of influence.  The seven include: journalist Helen Thomas, 88; and Maya Angelou, 80; Mary Higgins Clark, 80; Liz Smith, 85; Helen Gurley Brown, 86; Phyllis Schafly, 84; and Cynthia Ozik, 80.

My Green Chile Stew is ready NOW.  I'm  quitting the internet bakery/cafe Now, plus a minute.  My internet better be fixed four days ago.

Ramble: Think Different

Apple's monochrome logo has been in use ten years.  The motto, Think Different, came out way before.  Tomorrow Santa Fe's fabulous Farmer's Market opens in its new location at the Railyard and the local apples are coming in.  The green chiles will be roasting - the first big sign of fall.  But the Apple apple -- the company wanted to sell 10 million iPhones in 08 and they are going to hit that number early.  AT&T coverage isn't good here - that's one reason I'm still holding out.

But really, we've all been Thinking Differently.  So many changes, everywhere. Even with these elections.  What HASN'T been covered? Incest is all I can think of. 

Dropped Cell Phone Calls annoy me -- whose coverage caused it to drop? Richard Wolpert has a new rule , via Joi Ito:
    1. if you initiated the call and it drops you call the other person back.
   2. if you received the call and it drops you just wait for the call back.

Media is changing.  The NYSun, one of my favorite reads, might go under for lack of funding this month.  New Media is making a profound impact on this election cycle.  One NYU student taking an undergrad new media class has a great write-up on what she sees and what she expects. She notes that there are hardly any guys in the class.  I think: maybe the guys are going for more lucrative careers.  Then I note Jill's post on the odd things happening with men: "Today's guys are perhaps the first downwardly mobile—and endlessly adolescent—generation of men in U.S. history."

Ramble: Wild...

The Fort Worth Zoo, founded 99 years ago, was one of the first places I went rambling once my boot cast was off and so I'm rambling on wild things today.  My oldest daughter and her husband, my husband and our son walked through most of it while over in Dallas the issue of Jenny the depressed Dallas elephant raged. We are fascinated with animals, aren't we, and the story about the WDC man who was unusually befriended by a butterfly popped up this week in the Washington Post. The Butterfly Effect made for a fascinating read. We are drawn to the animal world as our wild world continues to shrink and the natural spaces are removed from us. 

Not natural, but faces can look so? With new techniques such as the 24 carat gold facelifts that have a mesh framework sewn under the skin, faces are "enhanced". New York Magazine had an article on the latest in youthenizing and freshening-up aging faces and it has women talking.  I told my new Santa Fe friend yesterday I'd get the link to her.  Here it is.

The Wild West? Texas is a good place to be, especially if you are like my oldest daughter starting off with her husband to build careers.  From an article in the NYSun: In the last 12 months, Texas has created 245,000 jobs (accounting for more than half of the jobs created in the U.S. in that period). Texas has the second lowest tax burden of the 50 states and the state leads the nation in energy production — 30% of the natural gas and 20% of oil produced in our country comes from Texas. "Using conservative estimates, the benefits of Enhanced Oil Recovery production will result in $200 billion in additional revenue and 1.5 million jobs created in Texas. The Texas marketplace also is on the cutting edge of other clean sources of energy such as wind power."

While in NYC, we felt that London was shifting to be a global center so I thought that a specific look at NYC compared to London by the NYSun provided a good comparison.  My youngest, who earned her high school diploma from a Manhattan school, considered the University of London and other schools abroad but has opted to stay in Texas. For now.  She passes signs in Texas yards that people are putting out letting oil and gas companies know they are ready to sign away their mineral rights in the Barnett Shale natural gas boom. Chesapeake Energy company has billboards all over towns in Texas and Oklahoma boosting the public image of that company in the places it wants to rake in business.  New Mexico is being a lot more cautious about drilling with concerns about water pollution as a consequence.  Water in Fort Worth runs warm out of the tap and fish died in a lake in Arlington from the heat this summer.

Wild Views: The only thing wild in Manhattan besides Central Park might be the glimpse of NYC rooftops via Flickr photos. However voyeuristic interest there is nothing like what you now see with Google Map Street Views.  I used to use MapQuest but have found myself shifting to Google Maps. Do you find this creepy a bit, as I do and others do? Here's a view of Santa Fe's famous historic La Fonda hotel entrance from Google Map Street View. Look up your house and see if your curtains are open. Some places aren't on Google Maps.

Wild statistic: The number of visitors to female-oriented websites has nearly doubled since July 2006. Sites aimed primarily at women, from “mommy blogs” to makeup and fashion sites, grew 35 percent last year — faster than every other category on the Web except politics, according to comScore. Advertising on these sites is going to jump.

Wild Ride: Yesterday I rambled on horseback on trails in the Sangre de Cristo mountain wilderness, spotting elk and horny toads along the way with my new friend who also likes to ride horses, led by a wrangler whose family's outfit is 98 years old. I enjoyed wild places in my youth, unlike kids today.

Cheers.

Ramble: Herbs and Has-Beens...

This year I threw herbs into the porch pots with the geraniums. We're picking off parsley, chives, sage, basil and thyme for cooking.  Had I not been in a boot cast, I would have been on a mushroom eating and hunting hike.  What a fun mountain ramble that would have been!

Has-beens? Big cars. Had you bought Mini stock a year ago, you'd be in a good spot. Mini stock is up 60%.  Mini sales have jumped 33% in the U.S.  The little Mini, getting 37 mpg, is making it big in the worst sales year in 15 years in the auto industry.  One of the reasons people buy Mini's (it was for me): they want to leave the world in better shape. Mini's new theme: Drive Like There is No Tomorrow.  Mini has a new model, the Clubman, which is 9.45 inches longer and I saw one this week in Santa Fe. 

Other things becoming has-beens: 1. anonymity (you can go look for free to see who has traffic tickets in your neighborhood and where the criminals live on CriminalSearches and use it to check out babysitters and boyfriends).  2. Long chats on the phone? Perhaps has-beens, too, since you might get brain cancer. Now you can leave messages on the phone without risking a real conversation. Dial 267-SLYDIAL (267-759-3425) from any landline or mobile phone. Free, and lets you be directly connected to someone's voicemail.  More has-beens? 3. The old Levi original 501 jeans.  It isn't the original jean of the American West anymore but rather, it is being marketed as "carefree clothing" to younger audiences. Now the fabric has stretch and it is being marketed around the world (Levi Strauss is one of the top advertisers online) as a one-style jean -- no more relaxed fit, boot cut, low-rise or whatever.  Do you remember having to buy the 501 jeans and then wash them to make them shrink-fit? Levis lost their cachet when everyone else started selling jeans -- Brooke Shields in her Calvin Kleins was when I can date the trend and I was in college then.  Last has-been? 4) The American Suburb.  The trend to inner-city living continues to grow in cities like Chicago, Fort Worth, Dallas and other cities.  Rising gas prices will fuel the trend.

Herbs and Home Gardening? This is the book I'm getting for my oldest daughter: The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City. The new trend is hiring people to tend to the vegetable gardens in the backyard or tending your own.  My chives will go on a beet salad (beets are the new spinach). My potted parsley is headed for tabouleh, working from this recipe.  My husband hates tabouleh.  That, and liver.