afterSonoma

City Hall Park

City Hall Park, originally uploaded by p0psharlow.

Mary, I only have a few minutes here to post something in explanation of why I've been away from the blog so long. It is a combination of several things: 1) my Dad, a lot of phone calls, research and unsettling contingent travel plans (he's responding well to hip replacement surgery and may be transferred from rehab to assisted living this week); work has me doing many fun things, but emphasis on many (I'm making one video a day of a sales rep -- very amateur, samples here) also, on mild weather days, I sit out in the park pictured above, using with my laptop connected thru the free WiFi, promoting our company's blog by submitting posts to the social news sites, like Digg & Reddit (the rules say the writer or publisher can't submit their own stories, so I go under another name, from a publicly connected, private computer so my submissions are not tied to the company -- this is shady, but a common practice aimed at gaining more visibility for our blog -- on harsh weather days, I do it from a nearby Irish pub -- so, I get a kick our of having part of my job being to hit the bar!); 3) on off-time, I'm trying to focus on publishing an illustrated book which I've been working on for 2 years with a friend, Mike Tolbert, it's in its last stage now and I'm having a very hard time keeping interested (just a few more hours); 4) with Ruth, I'm spending our Sunday painting time on our new painting project (in the drawing stage, but we're shooting video of it too and creating a bunch of editing work for me); 5) last, but really first in my attention is my complete addiction to Flickr (I spend every second I can sneak in and out of other activities all day everyday, making new images to upload, checking the uploads of my contacts, checking comments on my uploads and responses to my comments on other's uploads -- it is a community I can understand, because it is all about images -- I really understand how "the kids" get addicted to MySpace, FaceBook, bebo or whatever the hot new social site is now -- my myspace profile has been neglected for months and months because I just can't get a handle on the community and it's just so ugly, I can't spend time there). Of course, I'm doing other things, there's the CD trading site, lala, which takes too much time and there's our recreational DVD (we're into the third season of "The Wire" and find that series t be the best episodic cinema yet) & TV (we watch "Brothers & Sisters, "Medium" and even "Desperate Housewives" still) and we eat and clean house (a little). So, what am I saying? I have time to list all the stupid stuff I'm doing but don't have time to post to our blog? Something like that. If I can just get Mike Tolbert's book off my back, I'll have time to blog (actually, some of the comments on Flickr end up to be like blog posts -- it's just that Flickr's about pictures and I'm so oriented towards the visual). I hope you're doing well with your work. I'm very sorry to hear of the damage to Stanley Park -- I don't remember seeing it when we passed by in the Straight, but I have an idea of what a loss it is. What about David's play? Is it on about now? cheers & ciao, got to go to work -- weather looks good, it's been cold, finally, but not too cold today.

Books? You Want Books?

My daily aim is to use the internet not be consumed by it. Each Sunday, with Ruth, I paint, oil on canvas, very off line, very analog, very traditional. However, after the painting session, I report to the internet with images, text, video and audio our painting progress.

The internet is our means of distribution, it is our communication with the world, other artists, friends and family. It is also our access to news, weather reports, dictionary, encyclopedia and other research. Also, it is where we purchase most of our supplies for daily life. It is our access to entertainment, radio and other recorded audio, DVD movies and other recorded video, reach us via internet. With Skype or Jabber, the internet replaces long-distant telephone.

Because of my temperament and my job, Ruth and I are pushing the possible limits, we are early adopters, but since we are not geeks or hackers, we did not grow up building networked computers, our adoption is simply the leading edge of mass adoption. The rest of society is not far behind. We realize when we update our computer, we are buying a piece of equipment which not only replaces our old computer, it also makes redundant our VCR, or DVD player/recorder, our television, our radio, our audio recorder, our CD player/recorder, our need for phone books, maps, trips to the library, post office, movie theaters, clothing stores, grocery stores and most other retail stores. The new computer improves our abilities to make art, have a high standard of living and still keep jobs. When a piece of equipment accomplishes all this for less than $1500 US, I am thankful we are now living in a time and place where such miraculous lifestyle support is available for such a small percent of our annual income.

Of course, you, Mary, as a book writer, a book lover, when you complete a writing project for publication, you want it published as a book. And you can. Publish your writing through Lulu. You use their book design templates in your word processing software, follow their submission instructions, your work is given a listing on their site, they handle the sale, print and ship the book and give you 80% of the profit. No cost up front, no need to print an edition, books are printed as needed -- I've heard the quality is excellent, they make real books.

Using this method, you would provide your own editing, your own marketing. You'd pay for review copies, gift copies and if libraries weren't buying it, you may want to pay for a few library copies. You'd order a few books to take with you for signing when you gave a reading.

Most of the promotion would take place online, getting online reviews, sending people to Lulu to purchase. Sample chapters could be set up online for printing on personal computer printers. Those who want to read off-line, would print it themselves, others may read online.

In addition, the book could be available as an ebook, although support for this medium is sketchy at the moment. The great "Rocket ebook", which, book lover, Ruth loved in the late '90s, is no longer manufactured. Other player/readers are available, eventually, probably soon, a standard model will become universally popular because the usefulness of eBook publishing and reading is so obvious. The Rocket ebook was about the size of a paperback, carried the contents of ten or more books, four thousand pages, readable on a lighted screen with adjustable font size and face, easy page turning, page marking features and dictionary, which Ruth found more than desirable, she actually preferred it to regular books which, then, seemed dysfunctional because they require a separate light source. A small, but growing community of ebook publishers and readers have gathered, using Rocket ebooks and a variety of PDA or pocket PC devices for reading. Because publishing and distribution cost for a new title is so low, books which may only satisfy a niche audience can be profitably published globally.

Whether a writer's work is published for on-screen reading or for ebooks or for the user to print or for Lulu to print on demand, this availability combined with web promotion can be more effective than what most author's can expect from traditional publishing houses.

This method puts the marketing in the hands of the writer or an agent hired by the writer. After some online research, the details of what to do and how to do it could be discovered, a plan developed appropriate to each published book. In general, an on-line marketing plan would begin by a blog post announcing of the book's availability with "buy now" message linked to Lulu. Then, a link to that posting would be sent to all known interested parties and to blog writers you don't know who could become interested. By searching online groups for like-minded writers, learning from and contributing to their on-going discussions, you give subtle or overt plugs for your book, while you ask the group for ideas on how to market it. Traditional press releases could be written and distributed to all possible on or off-line publications through email and postal mail as appropriate, using the attempt to use online sales and promotion as the newsworthy angle for a possible story or review of the book.

Book store readings and autographing sessions could be arranged where practical, supported by an online version of the event with recorded audio and question and answer sessions conducted through blog page comments. The writer would need to spend a similar amount of time usually taken by a book tour to accomplish the off and online marketing necessary. The writer may want to hire help to handle aspects of it, plus pay for the printing of a few books. But, in this world, a self-publishing writer does not have to pay for a whole edition of books and by using these new methods, the writer appears forward thinking, escaping any vanity press tinge.

Of course, the big benefit is that the work gets published immediately and remains available indefinitely. Icing on that cake is the work doesn't have to be approved by anyone unless you want it to be.

I understand the desire to have a traditional book in your hand, I make paintings for similar reasons. I just want you to know that the published book is available to you and using the global communicative power of the internet. Reaching an audience may be more possible this way than the old-school way.

There are also online publishers and sellers of audio books, which a writer with your radio experience is well placed to use.

The capital required to do any of these methods is so low, and no trying to please some publisher's concept of what would be a top-seller is necessary. Wouldn't that be nice?

Though many wonderful books have been published using the old methods, many others were not, particularly in these last desperate days of old style publishing, with its moral-distorting focus on stock holder profit. The output from new independent publications will likely bring a great and welcome cultural benefit.

In a related development, as an example of distributed publication, my life has been enriched because, unlike most, my media-scape is populated with characters like Comic Strip Blogger, Showbiz Dad, Amanda Congdon, Cali (your fearless leader), Amber Mac, Gillmor Gang, The Tech Guy, Tokyo Dan, Ponzi, Soccergirl, Rock and Roll Geek plus many, many others who are making significant contributions to hundreds of thousands of us tapped into the podcast media sphere. I don't think I would enjoy as many benefits if I was only in touch with mainstream media, especially in this country.

Those who might jump to the gloomy conclusion that media open for everyone to contribute means you just get more crap. I would submit what Joichi Ito says on IT Conversations, "Amateur means doing something for love, a good amateur is better than a crappy professional".

Parting Shots
A bit of irony was heard on a normally excellent mainstream media outlet, NPR, when they carried an opinion piece against bloggers who do nothing but state their opinion.
Think about it.

An illustration of the big swing publishing has taken is that Wikipedia is correcting errors in the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Think about that.

Location, Location, Location!

Regarding the play, which I did not see, I could point out the obvious, a one-actor show places a lot of pressure on the actor's performance to carry the intention of the script and the design of the production. Audiences change, the actor's ability varies from night to night, from place to place, no two audiences see the same show. As for the New York reviewer's published response indicating a provincialism in New York, there are so many New Yorks, one person's published review cannot speak for New York generally.

While stereo-types are unfair and harmful, there usually is some truth behind them. If I, for mean fun, applied the prevailing stereo-types to this case, I'd assume the New York reviewer was corrupt and the Washington reviewer envious. But, I should just stick with having no insights.

I quickly researched the geography of people involved with the play: the playwright, Will Eno, born in Jack Kerouac's home town of Lowell, Massachusetts, now living in Brooklyn, his plays were first produced in London; director,Hal Brooks, a native of Philadelphia, who began his career as an actor and director in San Francisco; the actor, James Urbaniak, born in Bayonne, New Jersey; the NY Times reviewer who praised it, Charles Isherwood, was a West Coast critic, formally writing for Variety, recently moved to the New York Times.

Rather than proving this group had little to do with New York, it demonstrates what is typical of New York. The people who work here, particularly the movers and shakers in the Arts, Fashion, Publishing, Advertising and Finance moved here from somewhere else. Careerists, once in New York, seem to put on blinders, only noticing New York work. They think they don't don't need to learn from developments elsewhere, because it won't matter until it gets here, they think. So, yes, that's provincialism, in their career focus, but then since they all have family and childhood friends elsewhere, they do know something about other places. Often those places are on other continents. The native born and raised New Yorkers are generally as ignorant and intolerant as people everywhere, I guess, but, they travel, for vacations or business, the people I encounter move around the globe quite a bit. Add to that, the beloved internet and other media bringing information from all over, is it really possible for anyone to be provincial, truly unaware of happenings outside their town?

Speaking of Theater
I've been to only two Broadway shows, one where I saw the amazing Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren, another where I saw a favorite movie actress, Jennifer Jason Leigh. Both events were during the post 9/11 period when Mayor Rudi recommended attending a show for the health of us all. The smoke and smell from the "pile" wafting into the mid-town theater weighted the theatrical experience with both poignancy and urgency. As a general rule, I'm not willing to give the hours necessary for attending theater. I wish that wasn't true, it's a symptom of being the artist with a day job. If I painted all day, I'd gladly go out at night.

Since You Didn't Ask
My personal, general opinion of New York is that it's a good place for those who don't know better, unfortunately, I do. For the delights of urban life, my experience of San Francisco was better. As for delightful living, any rural place would be better, I experienced rural living in Sonoma County. But, rather than go back to San Fran or to Sonoma, I'd go some place new. There are many areas of the globe I'd like to live, some for city, some for country living, some for excitement, some for tranquility. My ideal life schedule would be to shift with the seasons from city to country to sea side, to small town, to mountains, to cultural centers, to isolated plains, and on and on. A co-worker asked me recently if I had been to any area I didn't like. I couldn't think of a fast answer, although, after a while, I thought of Indianapolis, Houston and Southern California's Orange County. But, I believe I could enjoy any location, even those.

There is always deep history, natural landscape, cultural curiosities which would bring pleasure anywhere. In the way back era of our early adulthood, the Haight-Ashbury Oracle published "The Houseboat Summit", a long transcription of a conversation featuring Tim Leary, Alan Ginsberg and Gary Synder on Alan Watts' houseboat, (Oracle no. 7, Allen Cohen, ed. 1967) do you happen to remember reading it? I thought Gary Synder made the most sense, unlike Tim Leary, Alan Ginsberg who advocated those in out-lying areas make the Haight or East Village pilgrimage, Snyder encouraged young people stay where they are, investigate the historical and present-day life of their area's indigenous people, study their local landscape and meditate on the heavens. His quotes stuck with me through the decades:

"... I say, okay, get in touch with the Indian culture here. Find out what was here before. Find out what the mythologies were. Find out what the local deities were. You can get all of this out of books. Go and look at your local archaeological sites. Pay a reverent visit to the local American Indian tombs, and also the tombs of the early American settlers. Find out what your original ecology was. Is it short grass prairie, or long grass prairie here? Go out and live on the land for a while. Set up a tent and camp out and watch the land and get a sense of what the climate here is. Because, since you've been living in a house all your life, you probably don't know what the climate is ... Then decide how you want to make your living here. Do you want to be a farmer, or do you want to be a hunter and food gatherer? You know, start from the ground up, and you can do it in any part of this country today...cities and all...For this continent I took it back to the Indians. Find out what the Indians were up to in your own area. Whether it's Utah, or Kansas, or New Jersey..."
Excerpts from Articles about the Vallejo Ferryboat

Cell-Talkers, Keep It To Yourselves!
Somehow this all gets to proposals for definitions you wanted in On The Phone regarding the absence/presence issue involving the proper use of modern communication tools. The line of mine which you quoted made it seem that I was advocating someone enriching their present with cellphone calls, I was not. I meant being enriched by education, whether from research or correspondence. I hate cell phones, not much interested in telephones, either. Some people get a lot from the telephone, I do not. However, I do listen to others speak on radio and internet audio. I appreciate well edited reports or well written and delivered speeches. Without these remote inputs into my life, I wouldn't have half the knowledge I enjoy today. I also read -- sites, blogs, email and books. I was suggesting that education from these sources enrich our lives. That's my story, I'm sticking to it.

I seldom use phones, but if others like to, that's fine -- if they don't call me or conduct their calls within my hearing.

Overhearing any kind of conversation in public places is seldom fun, when I can't get away from them, I'm unhappy. Overhearing a cell-talker is the worst. If two people are present there is twice the chance for them to become aware that their voices are annoying others. One person straining to communicate through a constricted cellphone data stream has little chance of being aware of their voice's affect on others close by. The poor connections and the compressed audio forces the cell-talkers to project their voices unnaturally. Add to this, the cell phone technology causes interjections to wipe out both audio streams, neither party can hear either voice making for a lot of "What?".

People talking while walking on the street, I don't mind, I don't hear them over the street noise and I usually think they are either cleverly multi-tasking, perhaps arranging some family or social business while on a routine walk or they are having a carefree strolling conversation with someone who may be walking on another street. My Dad and I regularly talk by cell phone when I'm walking home, often he'll be walking in his park, it's a good thing. But, when in a crowd, in a building, in a bus or train, I expect all of us to hang up. These are the time for texting. Sadly, too often, they don't. My world-traveling son-in-law tells me Americans are the worst, the most rude, the most publically loud cell-talkers. This shame is another in a long list of embrassments for us.

My idea of the internet communications being a help is as education. Either receiving expert advise, quality journalism or commentary. Analogous to reading a book. One's physical body is comfortable in a safe situation, aware of the environment enough to remain safe from hazards and to enjoy the light, air, temperature. The mind is with the book, gaining it's insights, entertainments, broadening one's life experience.

Studying Western Hemisphere's indigenous people I take a lesson about the danger of trusting isolation. For a variety of reasons, the people here were unknowingly vulnerable to European, African and Asian invasion. Because the people of this hemisphere had no contact with the rest of the world's people, they had no immunity to the other people's diseases. At first contacts, the Chinese, the Scandinavians, then the Italians and Spanish, huge populations of indigeounous people died of the alien infections. By the time European settlement began, I understand, as much as 80% of the indigenous population had died. The remaining "Indians" were defensively weak, in small groups, warring with each other. The Europeans, whose pathological religion and advanced technology gave them delusions of superiority, ruthlessly corralled the Indians into starvation camps taking all the best land for themselves.

Lagnappe
I appreciated hearing a conversation with articulate New Orleaneans about the present state of their city on Harry Shearer - 'Le Show' last January 8th. Check it out, it's all still relevant: A conversation about New Orleans, with Ti Adleaide Martin, Clancy Dubos, and Chris Rose. I've been enjoying Harry Shearer's Le Show for 20 years now. Once in a while he does a "different" kind of show like this -- I count on him to give me unique insights, week after week, he hasn't let me down.

Here and Now

Absence Versus Presence
In reference to your December 22nd post, Famous to Fifteen People.
We often think of new forms of communication replacing the old, when, in fact, the new forms come as additions, augmenting existing communication forms with the new. Letter writing did not replace visitations, but, augmented them. People didn't stop talking face to face when the telephone became popular, they talked to more people, some at a distance, some in person. We did not stop talking on telephones when email became available. Email is written communication with increased delivery speed allowing a different tempo, a different style. Instant Messaging, and internet chat speeds the possible give and take to nearly that of voice conversations. Phone texting brings written word correspondence to the telephone. While using these new forms, postal correspondence is still available and judging by our daily mailbox, still being used.

We do without full sensory input when we use any form of long distance communication. Correspondence through letters, email or telephone are all accomplished through an extremely limited stream of information. Even when using the most fully sensual long-distance technology available now, video conferencing, we are deprived of the 360 x 360 degrees of possible vision and sound, as well as touch and smell, which inform our participation in physical meetings. The visual and audio conveyed is only a narrowed band of information, though we gain more visual and audio cues than we get from written or audible information only.

What is amazing to me is that any of these abstract exchanges work as well as they do. In email or other written correspondence, we gather cues from word choices, spelling, formatting to reconstruct a context for the other's words. When an email correspondence becomes regular, as I've had with my daughter for several years, very small cues in what she says or doesn't say, the format and timing of the message give an immediate and fairly accurate construct of her emotional, even physical state.

Back in the day, the late '70s, when I ran an art gallery, I arranged all aspects of one artist's exhibition, exclusively through the exchange of postcards. Because "mail-art" was a popular communication form at the time, it was amusing for us to agree to this voluntary limitation. What we accomplished was a tricky show involving the transformation of the gallery into a replica of the living and working environment of the artist and her family. It was well executed by all involved without any communication outside the exchange of postcards until we all met at installation day.

Other examples of abstract, sensory-depleted, yet, effective communication are common in our daily lives. All types of human interactions are accomplished from romance and family care to shopping and bill paying. Spectacular examples of successful abstract, communication are the coordinated work of thousands of people involved in manned space flight. Think of Apollo 13, where system failures caused the communication to be conducted by even less capable backup systems. Brilliant improvisations by space and ground crews which safely returned the astronauts from mortal danger were coordinated through extremely limited voice and data channels. As has been often observed, average people now carry with them in cell phones, PDAs or laptop computers more processing power and more capable data communication systems than NASA used throughout the Apollo missions 35 years ago.

My point is that we can achieve effective human communication through very little sensory information exchange.

Social context allows us to extract meaning from information. Consistently, our lives are altered by written words from people we'll never meet or words spoken by strangers from the other side of the world. This information reaches us without much of its original context but resonates within us to form a new context that we can connect to, sometimes, very movingly. Picking up my first point, the communication we make with this distant information adds to, does not subtract from our full sensory present. Our experience of our immediate environment is overlain with information gathered from distant sources and from our own memory. The newer forms of communication create more layers to our daily experience, not less. What we gain from the narrowed, sensory-restricted forms of distant communication enrich our full sensory experience of the present.

Jersusalemites Disagree?
In reference to the first line of your January 3rd post, Centre of the Action.
I agree the Jewish people living in Jerusalem are likely to disagree with me line about NY becoming Jerusalem and the Arab residents may be more likely to think of it as Jerusalem becoming New York. I liked that line in my December 30, 2005 post Fort Giuliani for its rhythm and punch, not it's literal validity. I used it in a conversation with a college-aged Jewish visitor from Jerusalem several months ago, she scoffed, going on about Israeli elementary school children knowing more about unattended bags or suspicious bus riders than the average New York cop. I don't know how New York's body count of terrorist victims might compare with Jerusalem's, we only had three suicide bombings, they had many more, but two of ours had spectacular scale, Jerusalem's killed a couple of dozens at a time, destroying buses and store fronts, while New York's killed a few thousand and pulverized 220 floors of major enterprise space. I think the most relevant statement on this idea is that Arab Nationalists are prone to think of Jerusalem and New York as equal targets. Both cities are cultural capitals of countries which do not acknowledge theft, genocide and enslavement as being basic to their founding but instead hallucinate authority and morality conferred by the some imaginary friend. During my work-week, my co-worker's conversations, informed by family, business communication and frequent travel, keep Jerusalem and Israel present. I regard Israel as a neighboring state in our union. Despite all that, the differences between the two cities are much more prominent than the similarities. The only acceptably truthful statement I might have made is that some of what I expected to find in Jerusalem, I unexpectedly found in New York.