Am I a complete luddite?

I was up early this morning to let the cats out. It was warm and wet out on the roof. No sign of ice in any of the birdbaths. It stays so cold inside the house I was startled when I opened the door to the garden. My fingers and right forearm were stiff & tingling after 3 or so hours of image editing in 56°F. I have no heat in my studio; what heat I get trickles in from the rest of the house. I am updating my design portfolio with the idea of going out to look for a job. It's an idea which appalls me.



As much as I love designing things and as much as I miss the camaraderie of an office full of people, I don't think I have the stamina to weather the demands of this type of employment any more. Actually, any type of employment. I'm too old to be whipped around by the senseless & quixotic demands of clients who never seem to know what they want until you've done the whole thing over 5 or 6 times. But, as it becomes daily more apparent that I will not be selling any more paintings any time soon....

All summer long, I painted in a large, raw [dirty, it must be said] space with only the most basic amenities, and came away with more and better work than I've ever been able to do before. I had no internet. When I needed a distraction from painting, I did things like sew dresses on the old treadle machine that's up there, or string beads into necklaces or pull weeds in a soothing rhythm of large & fine motor activity. I am old enough that occupations like these don't seem to me an unusual way to spend time. But now I'm back in the city, and most activities are harnessed to the computer. I volunteer in an after-school gardening group and my kids are addicted to their electronic appliances. It's hard to get anyone to complete a series of manual tasks when they are texting furiously all the time.

I know, I know. Life used to be slower and whatever. Kids nowadays, etc etc. I realize I am on the verge of fogey-ism. And, of course, we could all be blasted back into the stone age if certain world leaders have their way. I am trying to stay calm in the face of unimaginable possiblilites for the near future. Too much Negroponte & Kurzweil is worrisome. Why? Am I a complete luddite? Probably not, but I am a late adopter. I agree that linear growth is not the model for our time. But technology for its own sake? Such as nanobots interacting with our neurons? 3-dimensional self-organizing molecular circuits? reverse-engineering of the human brain? augmented real-reality & artificial intelligence? Hey, this stuff is really cool! Let's give computers to everyone in the world and see what they come up with.

And of course, there are phenomenally complex problems to solve. The slush and mush of world chaos feeds the exponential growth of technology.

I understand the creative urge, but my father was one of the scientists on the Manhattan project and even though it could be argued that "they" would have gotten there first and it was a win for the forces of good, I learned early what a source of great sorrow it was for us all. Has the world even learned to deal with that Pandora's Box yet?

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Yoga is the answer! I do it everyday to keep my brains from travelling too far in any schizoid direction. And don't ever forget: War is the complete failure of civilization.

Older is NOT Better

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Today is my birthday. I have to "do the math" anymore to figure out how old I am. Let's see, 2008 - 1951 = Yikes!

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Because I am completely unemployed, I have sort of lost my compass. I try hard to get enough exercise everyday, but it ain't what it used to be when I was up and out the door every morning walking a mile to the train and back again at night, feeling the pulse of the city, being connected with people, bitching about how little time I had to do my own work. And there are days when I ...

This can be an opportunity, or a disaster.

It's raining now, for which I am grateful; at least it's not snow. The cold gets harder to take with each passing year. The years are more like hours now. Why is that? T. flew out to the Left Coast a couple of days ago at the request of his aging & [f]ailing father, who heretofore had had almost nothing to do with him (as in, never visited, didn't come to our wedding, etc). Certain that the end was near, T. didn't hesitate to catch the first flight out. But, as with my own parents, this seems to have turned into just the first of many dreary emergencies, which will culminate in a transfer to a nursing home and all the attendant messy details about cleaning out the house and getting his bills paid. F. isn't ready to die, even though he signed on for hospice care.

I remember when hospice care was a new concept, supposed to alleviate the depredations of the medical industry and allow people to die with dignity on their own terms. It has become institutionalized such that I fear it is now just another fancy option you can sign up for, not really knowing the implications. But then, who ever knows the implications of dying. Having no children to sit by my bedside and lurch me over to the commode now and then, I would hope for a modicum of comfort (as in pain control and cleanliness) and a few "Aha" moments before the lights go out for the last time.

May I say that I was shocked & exhausted by the amount of physical work, mental torture and personal sacrifice it took to get my mother through the transition from independence to complete nursing care. Thankfully, her health has actually improved (to the point where she is feisty enough to feel imprisoned by the circumstances), but she won't be going home anymore. Besides, where is home for her?

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So I am alone on my birthday and since we had to ditch our Thanksgiving plans, I guess I'll try to use all this time to do "my own" work.

BiCoastal : BiPolar

The other day, I was in Chelsea because of some X-rays connected with getting a physical exam. So I wandered way west over on 23, 24 & 25 Streets in a neat S-shaped pattern with zig-zag crossings, hoping to keep it simple and easy on my aging bones. What I saw, with few exceptions, was disheartening. Aside from the sense of being shouted at from all sides, there was a lot of unattractive bodily function on display, the kind of frenetic, anxious masturbating that you see in frightened toddlers and mental patients.

Knowing that most artists (and there are a lot of them) come from circumstances of comfort & wealth, I wonder what is at the root of this anxiety. Are they afraid their portfolios are now worthless, or, are they afraid their brand has lost market share? Have they figured out which way the wind is blowing? And then I made the mistake of reading ArtForum reviews of the latest (last?) art parties and auctions. And I learned that it was a "bloodbath" and a "freefall", that the bubble had burst and that I am going to have to go out and get a second job again.

The Richard Prince was Oh so bo-o-o-ring. But there were a few things that caught my attention: a young Philadelphia photographer named Zoe Strauss, who shoots the underbelly and does it well and generously, despite a lot of lo-res funk in the image; an assemblage show at Zoubek of some dead guy, Salvatore Meo, whose work reminds me of T's, but the prognosis isn't good. You can't just make a lot of beautiful stuff in your lifetime and expect the world to recognize you after you're gone; and a couple of other surprises that I can't now recall.

So much of the work looks over-planned and eviscerated by technique. The technique of late seems to consist mainly of producing the ugliest possible digital pictures on any surface that will take them and then scratching them up with a few hand gestures.

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So "customer satisfaction" is the new gospel of the marketeers. Analytics tools! Quantitative data! Kick some major butt! They are putting people into this bucket and that bucket. And then...

"Customer-driven, even though it sounds so nice and politically correct, is another totally illogical concept of the past. At our company..., we trust in an insight of Henry Ford, who once said: 'If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me they wanted a faster horse'."

[an unattributed quotation from the vast world wide web. -ed] 

Oy! you read too much of this stuff and you remember why you go under the radar for half the year. Most people don't get it that I'm completely off-line from May until I get back in the fall. A couple of years ago, I came back to the city looking for a freelance gig and when I said I hadn't touched a computer in 6 months, they said "Do you think you'll have the chops for the job?" It's better to lie.

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T. just called from Seal Beach and F. is not dying, not right away, at any rate. So now what?

And the nurse practicioner called to say that my good cholesterol was good enough to offset the bad cholesterol, so nothing is to be done.

This, from Peter Plagens: "...in desperate search of art with feeling rather than strategy at its core". Took the words right out of my mouth.

I am reading the LA Times (online, of course) because I have an unquenchable addiction to palm trees and I fantasize constantly about moving back. Although, I was back recently because of F's 90th, and when we drove down south, not only could we not get into the Getty because of the fires, we had to drive the 91 for hours under a thick blanket of brown sky which mercifully (because it took so friggin' long) turned dark as night fell.