nancynall.com » Conversations with myself.
«
»

Conversations with myself.

I spend a lot of time these days think­ing about work. Not spe­cific con­cepts, mind you, but the idea of work. If Edwin Starr was stand­ing behind me, he’d be singing, “Work, huh! What is it good for? Absolutely some­thin’.”

This is what work­ing for noth­ing will get you: Exis­ten­tial con­flict.

Because so much of what I do these days is unpaid, I find myself on long bike rides, try­ing to con­tent myself with a stu­pid Socratic dia­logue about it:

Why do you work?

Oh, you know, the usual rea­sons: sense of pur­pose, payin’ the bills, beats tele­vi­sion.

But your hus­band is payin’ most of the bills, isn’t he?

I do my part. I con­tribute.

Would those dust bun­nies blow­ing through the fam­ily room count as con­tri­bu­tion? What about the refrig­er­a­tor, that empty space you’re pay­ing to keep nice and cold?

La la la la I can’t hear you la la la la.

So what do you have planned for this sum­mer?

Well, I’m teach­ing…

How does that pay?

Not so great, but it’s some­thing.

Any­thing else?

Writ­ing, as usual.

Writ­ing where?

The blog, of course.

How’s that Google Ads thing work­ing out for you?

Year to date? Two hun­dred sixty-seven dol­lars.

Get OUT.

And 54 cents.

Where else?

Oh, free­lanc­ing here and there. Just fin­ished an assign­ment the other day. I’ll be billing $400. And the night-shift edit­ing stuff; pays well, keeps me read­ing the British papers, where you can learn all kinds of stuff. Did you know that Brits call vac­cines “jabs?” On first ref­er­ence? “Chick­en­pox jabs are avail­able on the NHS.” Seri­ously.

How are you doing vis-a-vis your last year of gain­ful employ­ment in news­pa­pers?

I’m in the ball­park, but not quite to home plate. On the other hand, I no longer work for vin­dic­tive power-mad psy­chos, either. It’s a trade­off.

So that’s it? So you spend huge amounts of time on two web­sites that pay, lit­er­ally, pen­nies per hour? And retire­ment is on the hori­zon?

I have some­thing else. Faith.

Faith in what?

Faith that some day my ship will come in.

Is that also on the hori­zon?

If you look very hard, you can see the tip of the mast. But really, isn’t work worth some­thing in and of itself?

Tell that to the aides at the Med­ic­aid nurs­ing home where you’ll be spend­ing your golden years.

I heard this thing on NPR last year.

Do tell.

It was about a retire­ment cen­ter for artists in New York. I can’t remem­ber the details, but it was about a city-subsidized build­ing where artists can live extremely cheaply, and some of them had been there for decades and were very old. These peo­ple were poorer than poor, lived in no more room than a wino could buy at a flop­house, but they were so incred­i­bly happy. They were artists. They could make a walk to the cor­ner store sound like a stroll along the Seine. The way the light hit a build­ing at a par­tic­u­lar hour of the day could fill them with joy. It’s all in how you look at the world. Do you ever lis­ten to these Wall Street jerkoffs and their hor­ri­ble wives? Do you think all their gold toi­lets and Bent­leys and plas­tic surgery and pri­vate jets made them happy?

Did fly­ing com­mer­cial the last time you trav­eled make you happy?

That’s not the point. My point is, work is its own reward, and the best work I do is on my stu­pid web­sites, and even if they aren’t mon­e­tized — there’s a real Wall Street word — they give me a cer­tain sat­is­fac­tion, and you can’t really put a price tag on that.

When­ever some­one says, “You can’t put a price tag on that,” it means the price tag would read SUPER CLEARANCE! TAKE HALF OFF LOWEST MARKED PRICE.

As the Ter­mi­na­tor would say…

What does the Ter­mi­na­tor say?

Fuck you, ass­hole.

Do you have blog­gage today?

Sure:

I hope what­ever San­dra Tsing Loh got paid for her piece in the cur­rent Atlantic, it was a whole hell of a lot, because in the last 24 hours I’ve heard oth­ers describe her as every­thing from self-absorbed to smug to a nar­cis­sist to a bitch and — this is never far behind when you’ve got two X chro­mo­somes — ugly and unat­trac­tive. On the other hand, the piece, about the breakup of Loh’s mar­riage, wasn’t so great, either, but am I the only per­son in the world who thinks “pleas­ing every­one” should never be on a writer’s to-do list? Also, because I read the British rags, I have learned to appre­ci­ate the bomb-throwing essay, which is designed purely to rat­tle win­dows and make the world a lit­tle less bor­ing and pre­dictable. (This is a stock fea­ture of the Lon­don dailies: I hate kids and they should all be quar­an­tined! Fat peo­ple are a plague and a pox and should wear burkas! And so on. They’re not pol­icy state­ments, they’re conversation-starters. Deal.) Also, I met Loh once at a con­fer­ence and really liked her, so foo.

I also hope FiveThir­tyEight takes a look at this NYT poll, which says peo­ple a) approve of the job the president’s doing, but b) don’t approve of the job the president’s doing. On the other hand, I heard a local councilperson’s vote on a par­tic­u­lar issue crit­i­cized as being for “polit­i­cal rea­sons,” as though elected offi­cials vot­ing on the public’s busi­ness isn’t, some­how, polit­i­cal. I ask you.

A baby beaten to death is not clas­si­fied as a homi­cide: Jukin’ the stats, Detroit-style.

Off to the gym.

Posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 9:55 am in Current events, Same ol' same ol'. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.


45 responses to
“Conversations with myself.”

  1. basset said on June 18th, 2009 at 10:23 am

    don’t think I’d go as far as “ugly,” but she doesn’t do any­thing for me… and based on that one arti­cle I wouldn’t want to be around her even if she were drop-dead gor­geous and bay­ing for impale­ment.

    now to some­one else who’s prob­a­bly no fun at all in per­son, but for dif­fer­ent rea­sons:

    http://​gawker​.com/​5​2​9​4​5​2​9​/​n​e​x​t​-​t​i​m​e​-​i​l​l​-​r​i​p​-​y​o​u​r​-​f​-​i​n​g​-​h​e​a​d​-​o​f​f​-​a​n​d​-​o​t​h​e​r​-​c​h​a​r​m​i​n​g​-​s​t​o​r​i​e​s​-​o​f​-​f​o​x​-​n​e​w​s​-​r​o​a​d​-rager

  2. nancy said on June 18th, 2009 at 11:11 am

    I was going to blog that, Bas­set, but thought it would require too much back­ground. (I’ve been fol­low­ing it from the begin­ning, drawn in by that amus­ing Pho­to­shop.) Another tri­umph of on-the-ball man­age­ment, it would seem.

  3. Catherine said on June 18th, 2009 at 11:22 am

    Oh.my.god, that is almost the exact same con­ver­sa­tion that plays through my head as I drive cars full of girls through­out the greater Los Ange­les area. Mine goes:

    How are you doing vis-a-vis your last year of gain­ful employ­ment [at that enter­tain­ment giant]?

    I’m in the ball­park, but not quite to home plate. On the other hand, I no longer work for [crazy nutjobs who don't know what they want and don't return my phone calls], either, [and I'm spend­ing all this qual­ity time...driving my chil­dren around]. It’s a trade­off.

    Haven’t read the San­dra Tsing Loh piece yet, but loved her last book, Mother on Fire. It made me laugh and cry, some­times on the same page. If you aren’t famil­iar with her other work, she does a great 01:30 seg­ment on life, pol­i­tics, cul­ture & par­ent­ing on KPCC, here:
    http://​www​.scpr​.org/​p​r​o​g​r​a​m​s​/​l​o​h​-life/

    She also does an amus­ing sci­ence seg­ment called the Loh Down on Sci­ence:
    http://​www​.scpr​.org/​p​r​o​g​r​a​m​s​/​l​o​h​-​d​o​w​n​-​o​n​-​s​c​ience/

  4. brian stouder said on June 18th, 2009 at 11:23 am

    When­ever some­one says, “You can’t put a price tag on that,” it means the price tag would read SUPER CLEARANCE! TAKE HALF OFF LOWEST MARKED PRICE.

    As the Ter­mi­na­tor would say…

    At this point Anton Chig­urh would pull out a quar­ter, and say “call it”

  5. MichaelG said on June 18th, 2009 at 11:26 am

    For many years I’ve lis­tened to San­dra Tsing Loh on NPR and read her essays in var­i­ous pub­li­ca­tions and I’ve always loved her. Still do. The point is not whether she is or is not a beau­ti­ful phys­i­cal spec­i­men of fem­i­nin­ity (those were not glam­our pic­tures and she’s not an ingénue, though she doesn’t look all that bad to me in a sort of in the mid­dle of mov­ing her shit out of the house way). The point is what she says. The piece had a melan­cholic feel to me. She seemed sad at devel­op­ments and while not regret­ting her actions. She was sorry that things had come to her hav­ing resorted to tak­ing a lover. I think she did a good job of using the other women’s predica­ments to present her own rea­sons for arriv­ing at where she has come to be at forty seven years of age. I think all the peo­ple who pop­u­late her piece are in tough sit­u­a­tions and while it’s easy to be crit­i­cal of one or another party I don’t really see any bad peo­ple here. Just peo­ple who are not who they were twenty years ago. I’m sure not throw­ing any stones.

    I think Loh’s assess­ment of how things go in a large num­ber of mar­riages is spot on. Not nice, not fun, not pleas­ant to think of, but accu­rate. The specifics in her piece may seem a bit Cal­i­for­nia or a bit yup­pie to some, but the basics are valid. There are some things in there that hit a bit close to home for me.

    When I first broke up with my wife or vice-versa, as she was the mov­ing party, I encoun­tered an amaz­ingly large num­ber of men who expressed a kind of jeal­ousy at my new sin­gle sta­tus. Many of them spoke of their wives in the most dis­parag­ing of terms. All of them noted that it was the finan­cial hor­ror asso­ci­ated with break­ing up and that alone which was keep­ing them together with their wives. I can per­son­ally attest to the fact that the finan­cial real­i­ties attached to break­ing up a thirty year mar­riage are not enjoy­able for either party. I won­der about the con­ver­sa­tions these men’s’ wives would have if they were talk­ing together.

    Fol­low Catherine’s links. You won’t be dis­ap­pointed.

    Notes from my ‘hood. I saw the elec­tric meter reader the other day. He was motat­ing down the street on one of those lit­tle kick scoot­ers with skate board wheels. Made good time too. There are now hook­ers on Broad­way in Oak Park. They’ve popped up in the last few months. Not many and they’re spread over sev­eral blocks but they’re there. Some­times even at five in the AM when I’m on my way to work. What a tough job.

  6. jeff borden said on June 18th, 2009 at 11:35 am

    There’s an inter­est­ing story in the NYT today about how the pros­ti­tutes of Berlin are deal­ing with the poor econ­omy. Appar­ently, even the ladies of the night are offer­ing dis­counts these days, but busi­ness is not good despite the price cuts.

    I’ve now been under­em­ployed for five years. I’ve had brief stints try­ing my hand as a speech­writer, p.r. flack and project man­ager for a travel guide. None of these efforts turned out well. The teach­ing gig is by far the high­light of my life, but it does not pay the bills and must be aug­mented by free­lanc­ing. This is not a life I would have cho­sen as, despite all my pos­tur­ing in col­lege about non-conformity, I really like hav­ing a job to go to every day. The sta­bil­ity meant a great deal to me. Now, I live life in two or three month seg­ments, where I have some jobs lined up in the near future, but the hori­zon looks empty.

    By now, I have more or less accepted that I’ll prob­a­bly never have a job in the sense I always thought of a job: reg­u­lar hours, good pay and ben­e­fits, a place to go to every day. It’s still hard to make peace with that future, but there you go.

  7. Cathy D. said on June 18th, 2009 at 11:40 am

    Cer­tainly we should all pon­der the worthwhile-ness of work, but any blog post that men­tions Edwin Starr auto­mat­i­cally makes me feel 15 again and is okay with me.

  8. Connie said on June 18th, 2009 at 11:46 am

    Jeff, I’m look­ing for a half time PR per­son myself. Com­mute would only be about 100 miles one way.

  9. basset said on June 18th, 2009 at 11:54 am

    and that just made me remem­ber hear­ing it on my par­ents’ Cur­tis Mathes “enter­tain­ment cen­ter” from WAOV at Vin­cennes Uni­ver­sity… we used to hook the TV antenna up to the FM antenna con­nec­tors so we could get a bet­ter sig­nal. for some rea­son I remem­ber “War” and Emer­son, Lake & Palmer’s “Lucky Man”…

  10. Joe Kobiela said on June 18th, 2009 at 11:54 am

    As I read Nancey’s ques­tion and answer I kept wait­ing for her to yell out SQUIRREL.
    Pilot Joe

  11. derwood said on June 18th, 2009 at 12:03 pm

    I ordered 100 bucks worth of Ama­zon stuff…hopefully I used the link cor­rectly. That’s 4 bucks for ya!

    -daron

  12. ROgirl said on June 18th, 2009 at 12:10 pm

    It’s hard out there for a pimp!

    If the old­est pro­fes­sion in the world is feel­ing the effects of the reces­sion, where does that leave the rest of us? The uncer­tainty is the hard­est part.

    With that in mind, I’m going to use the state funds avail­able for unem­ployed work­ers and go to my local com­mu­nity col­lege for a cer­tifi­cate in web devel­op­ment (I already have a BA and an MA under my belt).

  13. MarkH said on June 18th, 2009 at 12:16 pm

    Great top­ics and posts today. And, yes (sigh), what MichaelG said.

    OT — This just in: what are the odds of this?

    http://​wcb​stv​.com/​b​r​e​a​k​i​n​g​n​e​w​s​a​l​e​r​t​s​/​c​o​n​t​i​n​e​n​t​a​l​.​p​i​l​o​t​.​d​i​e​s​.​2​.​1​0​4​9​8​5​0.html

    Pilot Joe?

  14. basset said on June 18th, 2009 at 12:50 pm

    “squir­rel”?

  15. LAMary said on June 18th, 2009 at 12:57 pm

    What MichaelG and MarkH said.

  16. MarkH said on June 18th, 2009 at 1:08 pm

    BTW, Michelle Sin­gle­tary, the WaPo’s eco­nomic colum­nist, leads off today with this very sub­ject of work­ing for free in a down mar­ket, with a cou­ple of good links:

    http://​www​.wash​ing​ton​post​.com/​w​p​-​d​y​n​/​c​o​n​t​e​n​t​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​2​0​0​9​/​0​6​/​1​8​/​A​R​2​0​0​9​0​6​1​8​0​1​7​2​6.html

    EDIT — True, Joe, but I’m still curi­ous about the odds, given that com­mer­cial pilots are so closely mon­i­tored on their health and are always on clean bills. And, yeah, it makes no sense to announce to the pas­sen­gers.

  17. Joe Kobiela said on June 18th, 2009 at 1:08 pm

    Squir­rel?,
    Just a flash­back to the movie up.
    Pas­sen­gers on Con­ti­nen­tal prob­a­ble did not know the pilot died. Cross ocean flights carry relief crews, no worry’s.
    Pilot Joe

  18. Jolene said on June 18th, 2009 at 1:20 pm

    Yeah, it’s hard to see why peo­ple would go to the trou­ble of rant­ing about Loh, whether about her looks or oth­er­wise. (Actu­ally, espe­cially about her looks. She looks pretty much like the rest of us to me, i.e., not heart-stoppingly gor­geous, but nor­mally attrac­tive.)

    Seems to me she has an obvi­ous and valid point: Very often, mar­riage doesn’t work out the way we’d hoped. Maybe we need new ideas about the real­i­ties of love, the needs of chil­dren, and the eco­nom­ics of an upper middle-class life.

    Doesn’t really seem that con­tro­ver­sial, but treat­ing cher­ished ideals with dis­dain or, at best, skep­ti­cism, is, I guess, not a great way to win friends among those who still believe what they learned about love in junior high.

  19. LAMary said on June 18th, 2009 at 1:47 pm

    Off topic sort of:
    I’m lis­ten­ing at this moment to two peo­ple who out­rank me sub­stan­tially, who are the same age as I am, try­ing to one up each other about the num­ber of Thomas Kin­caid paint­ings they own, and how if you light the paint­ings just right, they look dif­fer­ent at dif­fer­ent times of the day. One of these folks has spe­cial dots of light painted on at the time of pur­chase by one of Kincaid’s appointed sur­ro­gates, mak­ing the paint­ing worth even more.
    Don’t feel bad about how much you make. Idiots make lots of money. Peo­ple with crap taste make lots of money. I’m 56, these two make twice my salary and three times my salary respec­tively, and in their 56 years of life they never learned to look at a paint­ing crit­i­cally and see that it’s a piece of shit.

  20. MichaelG said on June 18th, 2009 at 2:04 pm

    Kincaid’s a local guy (Plac­erville) so he gets a lot of play around here. Talk about some­body with a ton of bucks.

  21. nancy said on June 18th, 2009 at 2:07 pm

    One of the fun­ni­est things I ever heard was the queeny home-furnishings buyer at the sporting-goods place where Alan used to buy fish­ing equip­ment, a man whose job it was to teach dull-witted house­wives just how tra­di­tional “tra­di­tional” could be, declaim on the pre­cip­i­tous fall of Thomas Kin­caid. How he shot his already-thin claim to true respect as an artist when he started “whor­ing him­self on QVC.”

  22. Jolene said on June 18th, 2009 at 2:37 pm

    That same Michelle Sin­gle­tary col­umn that MarkH men­tioned also dis­cusses the increase in the sale of gar­den seeds, which the venders say is being dri­ven by the reces­sion (with, pre­sum­ably, some inspi­ra­tion from Michelle Obama as well).

    Is gar­den­ing really a prac­ti­cal way to save money on food? Even if you have avail­able space, you have to buy seed and, depend­ing on your gar­den­ing style, fer­til­izer, insec­ti­cide, and her­bi­cide. Prob­a­bly also need a mod­est amount of equipment–at least a hoe, a shovel, a hand spade (not sure that’s the right name), and a rake.

    If you raise more food than you can eat imme­di­ately, you have to either give it away or put it up, which, again, requires equip­ment.

    I dunno. There are lots of great rea­sons to grow fresh vegetables–good taste, health­ful­ness of fresh food, oppor­tu­nity to spend time out­doors, exercise–but I’m not sure sav­ing money is one of them.

    What’s your expe­ri­ence been?

  23. Connie said on June 18th, 2009 at 2:53 pm

    So what does any writer’s looks have to do with the style and con­tent of their writ­ing?

  24. Danny said on June 18th, 2009 at 2:57 pm

    My gold stan­dard with respect to artists is Dogs Play­ing Poker. That mas­ter­piece just says it all. It belongs on a cathe­dral ceil­ing.

  25. LAMary said on June 18th, 2009 at 3:07 pm

    Danny, the Dogs Play­ing Poker pic­ture at least makes me smile. I respect it more than Thomas Kincaid’s cot­tages in the for­est glow­ing paths.

  26. 4dbirds said on June 18th, 2009 at 3:07 pm

    “they never learned to look at a paint­ing crit­i­cally and see that it’s a piece of shit.”

    Once while walk­ing past one of Kinkaid’s stores in the mall, I men­tioned to my hus­band that I’d divorce him if he brought one of those paint­ing home.

  27. 4dbirds said on June 18th, 2009 at 3:08 pm

    As an avid poker player I love Dogs Play­ing Poker and it hangs above our fire­place in the game room.

  28. Sue said on June 18th, 2009 at 3:08 pm

    Some­one who gar­dens does not usu­ally do it in an attempt to save money. One year I care­fully weighed all my pro­duce just to see what I came up with. It was hun­dreds of pounds, so tech­ni­cally I got hun­dreds of dol­lars of food for free. Add up a cost/hour for just the har­vest­ing duties – pick­ing, can­ning, freez­ing, beg­ging peo­ple to take some of it off your hands (although not the peaches, every­one wanted those) and you’re behind within a few weeks. Pre-season plant­ing and prep time and during-season main­te­nance – don’t think about it if that’s your rea­son. It’s a hobby like any­thing else. No one saves money sewing their own clothes any­more, or wood­work­ing, or any­thing where the reward is the fun of doing it.
    I just had five per­fect lit­tle snap peas, right off the lovely green vine. ‘Nuf said.

  29. jcburns

    jcburns said on June 18th, 2009 at 3:29 pm

    Here’s a fine venn dia­gram that seems to lay out the options for employ­ment, cre­ative ful­fill­ment, and, well, sur­vival in three sim­ple over­lap­ping cir­cles. Mmmm, venn diagrams…is there noth­ing they can’t reduce to heart­break­ing sim­plic­ity?

  30. coozledad said on June 18th, 2009 at 3:30 pm

    Jolene: It’s sur­pris­ing how much food you can grow in a lim­ited space and off­set your food bills some­what if you desire is to eat organic, non genet­i­cally mod­i­fied food. But no, you’re not going to save a huge amount.
    A cou­ple of things con­cern me about GMO seed stocks. One is intro­duc­tion of cross-kingdom genetic mate­r­ial in long dis­tance pol­li­na­tors like corn and wheat. There are seed­stocks that con­tain fish and hog genes. Toma­toes have been devel­oped with hog genes for improved shelf life. Roundup-ready corn, genet­i­cally mod­i­fied so it won’t be killed by glyphosate appli­ca­tion, will open pol­li­nate stands of corn grow­ing miles away. The same goes with the stuff mod­i­fied to pro­duce its own bacil­lus Thuringien­sis toxin. Not only does it desen­si­tize pests to one of the few meth­ods Organic farm­ers can use to kill soft-bodied insects, there are stud­ies show­ing that pro­longed human expo­sure to the toxin in the gut through the con­sump­tion of bio­engi­neered pota­toes is muta­genic.
    I also have a prob­lem with multi­na­tion­als such as Mon­santo attempt­ing to secure patents for seed­stock and devel­op­ing strains that will not nat­u­ral­ize. It can destroy soci­eties that fol­low ancient agri­cul­tural prac­tices by forc­ing them to find cash to pur­chase seed. It’s crim­i­nal, really.
    Prob­a­bly the best rea­son to grow your own stuff is the chance of devel­op­ing your own heir­loom veg­eta­bles that may have spe­cific genetic resis­tance to out­breaks of new or uncom­mon plant dis­eases or pests. It’s also good to know just how labor inten­sive the pro­duc­tion of food can be, if noth­ing else.

  31. Sue said on June 18th, 2009 at 4:04 pm

    Cooz, I’ve been grow­ing and can­ning for 20 years, and it still amazes me the amount of water it takes for preser­va­tion prep. Pick, wash, prep, rinse, parboil/freeze or can (some­times gal­lons here), clean up. Water water every­where.
    And Seed Savers Exchange is doing long-term good for every­one. I try to order from them on prin­ci­ple.

  32. coozledad said on June 18th, 2009 at 4:17 pm

    Sue: I’m wash­ing about 75lbs of pota­toes I picked this morn­ing when the tem­per­a­tures were still in the low sev­en­ties. We’re going to hit 100 this week­end, and the ground is sat­u­rated. Sur­pris­ingly, we only lost about four or five pounds to rot in this plant­ing.

  33. Jolene said on June 18th, 2009 at 5:03 pm

    It’s also good to know just how labor inten­sive the pro­duc­tion of food can be, if noth­ing else.

    Indeed. Agri­cul­ture, no mat­ter the scale nor the type, is damn hard work. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see whether these newly inspired gar­den­ers keep up the effort once they see how much effort is required. Grow­ing fruits and veg­eta­bles is a great thing to do. It was just the premise that this would be a good way for sub­ur­ban fam­i­lies to cut their food bills that seemed implau­si­ble.

  34. LAMary said on June 18th, 2009 at 5:07 pm

    We had a roof gar­den when I lived in Man­hat­tan, and we had enough toma­toes and basil to share. The worst part of that process was drag­ging the dirt up to the fifth floor rooftop in a build­ing with no ele­va­tor.

  35. Sue said on June 18th, 2009 at 5:17 pm

    And let’s not for­get while we’re scar­ing away any poten­tial gar­den­ers to warn them about the tim­ing prob­lems. The green beans will be too small to pick just before you go on vaca­tion and hor­ri­ble fibrous crea­tures when you get back. Leave the cukes or zuc­chini for an extra day and you encounter a piece of obscene lawn art when you go back to check on them. And the toma­toes and peaches will all ripen at the same time, scream­ing for atten­tion when you get home from your reg­u­lar job and just want to sit down and watch tv. Noth­ing ever waits until the week­end to be ready to pick. Ever. Run, poten­tial gar­den­ers, run!

  36. beb said on June 18th, 2009 at 5:20 pm

    Dogs Play­ing Poker was one of the sight gags in “Up!”

  37. coozledad said on June 18th, 2009 at 5:38 pm

    Jolene: Folks liv­ing in the sub­urbs could always use a vacant lot and a labor share sys­tem. Then they could sell the sur­plus, or give it to a food bank. Would that be anarcho-syndicalism, com­mu­nism, com­mu­nity cap­i­tal­ism, or the under­ly­ing cause of a mul­ti­ple homi­cide?

  38. Jolene said on June 18th, 2009 at 5:42 pm

    I dunno, cooz. I haven’t ever talked to any­one who’s been involved in a com­mu­nity gar­den, but it does seem like a sit­u­a­tion that could pro­vide the con­text for sev­eral dif­fer­ent dra­matic and/or comedic offer­ings.

  39. ROgirl said on June 18th, 2009 at 6:08 pm

    Thomas Kin­caid is to art what cheezwhiz is to cheese, what Kenny G is to Miles Davis, what romance nov­els are to James Joyce, what breast implants are to the real thing. The peo­ple who buy the factory-produced can­vases that are dot­ted with white paint are delu­sional if they believe it’s real art. Geez, buy a Monet print instead, not that kitsch. There’s more integrity in a mass-produced copy of a paint­ing by Monet or Van Gogh than any of the crap that appears under Kincaid’s name.

  40. moe99 said on June 18th, 2009 at 6:53 pm

    Thank you beb and Pilot Joe for the heads up on UP! Saw it and adored it.

    Squir­rel has been in my vocab­u­lary for years–it gets my minia­ture dachs­hund run­ning ahead of me, rather than me drag­ging him (and thus earn­ing me dirty looks from passersby–who do not know that when we finally turn the cor­ner to go back home he is SPRINTING fast as his lit­tle legs can go, wear­ing me out)

  41. Catherine said on June 18th, 2009 at 6:58 pm

    What ROgirl said, or (and we’re prob­a­bly start­ing to sound like bro­ken records here): Buy local. Espe­cially for LAMary’s co-workers here in LA, there’s just no excuse for buy­ing that Kin­caid crap when there are so many amaz­ing artists right around the cor­ner. They will open your eyes to media that never would have occurred to you. And you can actu­ally talk to them and learn about their work — most of them are really nice, inter­est­ing peo­ple, even the gallery own­ers. And, and, it’s actu­ally incred­i­bly afford­able. Last and: These artists exist nearly every­where.

  42. coozledad said on June 18th, 2009 at 8:09 pm

    Cather­ine: You might be inter­ested in this guy’s work. Usu­ally I like stuff done in more tra­di­tional media, but the out­ward sim­plic­ity of his work appeals to me.
    His stu­dio space looks like a museum tucked away in a cat­a­comb.
    http://​paper​grave​yard​.blogspot​.com/

  43. beb said on June 18th, 2009 at 10:05 pm

    I love the Amer­i­can Light art move­ment (Lumin­ism), which focused on light break­ing through the clouds illu­mi­nated a rus­tic, wild land­scape. Kin­caid claims to be the mas­ter of light or some such bull but the Lumin­ism artists were much bet­ter, more orginal and prints should be easy enough to acquire.

  44. Catherine said on June 19th, 2009 at 12:31 am

    Coo­zledad, that is some freaky stuff! Thank you for shar­ing. I share his atti­tude that we are all in the process of dying, and appre­ci­ate how he expresses it.

    I think if I were any good at all as an artist, I’d want to be explor­ing the inter­sec­tion of art and NASA pho­tos right now. I mean, the bits and bytes from space probes come back to Earth sooooo sloooowly, and they are usu­ally b/w and kind of hard to really “see” when they get here. Then, peo­ple color them in ways from sub­tle to com­pletely out there, and present them to the pub­lic as “data.” But if you know any­thing about the process, there’s a lot of human inter­pre­ta­tion and enhance­ment that goes into it. Not only do I like the state­ment that they make about the twin notions of “data” and “art,” I just like to look at them.

  45. LAMary said on June 19th, 2009 at 12:53 pm

    There’s this:

    http://​www​.ibib​lio​.org/​w​m​/​p​a​i​n​t​/​a​u​t​h​/​c​e​z​a​n​n​e​/​s​l​/​c​e​z​a​n​n​e​.​c​o​m​m​o​de.jpg

    It’s acces­si­ble and lovely and real.

«
»