Money actually can't buy you everything, yay!

Maybe its all the holiday encouragement to shop and spend, but I have been feeling monumentally annoyed and generally cynical about consumer culture lately (as mentioned in the previous post). Everything – including many of the things I hold sacred (education, love, art) – has become a business venture and creative marketers are seriously cleaning up. A few examples:

Standardized test prep: practically a pre-requisite for taking any school admissions test nowadays. The prep course, the books, the practice tests online, the online communities… cha-ching Kaplan! These courses cost at least $1000 each, and most law-school / business school hopefuls will not even consider taking the test until they have gone through the course. This seems incredibly wrong to me. You can’t get into a top graduate school unless you have a certain score, and the only way to “guarantee” a good score is to take the course. Essentially, fork over $1000 or face immensely fewer options for school. In a world where academic pedigree and alumni networking are essentially the only ways to land a job, paying for test prep has become as much a necessary expense as paying for the degree itself.

The new wave of finishing schools: apparently no one can get a date on their own anymore. I’m not talking about e-Harmony or J-Date (because I don’t even want to get started on those…), I’m talking about seminars for men and women on how to interact with members of the opposite sex. Have you heard about this? Recently, a friend of mine informed me he had taken a new job as a seminar instructor for Charisma Arts: “Dating, Attraction, and Seduction Tips”. Young and middle aged men pay $1100 for a weekend seminar with him, during which they bar-hop in their respective cities (he travels to them for these gigs) and he encourages them to talk to women, providing tips and confidence-boosting. That is a seriously expensive wing-man, if you ask me.

But I must relate a moment of validation I received the other evening on my way home from work. It was the week of the big Radiologists conference in Chicago – when thousands of the highest-paid professionals in the world grace our city, and all the most expensive restaurants, hotels, and limo companies scramble to accommodate them. Among these establishments is, of course, Charlie Trotter’s restaurant, which happens to be one of the places I was passing on my walk home. The evening was cold and rainy – standard for late November – but I had a warm coat, wool hat and a sturdy umbrella, and I was somewhat happily bouncing down the street (for whatever reason… probably just glad to be leaving work). A large group was standing outside the restaurant as I approached, waiting for a cab or car service, shivering and grumpy. One taller, handsome middle-aged man had a petite woman clinging to his arm, her frozen ankles looking ready to collapse any second in 4-inch heels. He caught my eye as I breezed past and drunkenly blurted-shouted in my direction, “I’m jealous of you!”

It all happened far too quickly for me to respond with appropriate humor. As I turned the corner, I thought of a million hilarious retorts. I could have stopped and pointed out that he had just finished one of the highest-quality meals he would likely consume in his lifetime, yet he was still unsatisfied. Or I could have said simply, “that’s ironic”. Or I could have said “welcome to Chicago”. There are too many great one-liners to list. It was just somewhat wonderful (and simultaneously depressing in a way) that after all the money this gentleman had spent on living “the good life,” in a moment of wine-induced brutal honesty, he admitted to little old anonymous me that he was unhappy.

Conclusion: spring for a good umbrella, rich people.

More Inspiring Words

(courtesy of Page)

Responding to your latest blog (the dictionary one)...

jettison: to throw off (something) as an obstacle or burden; discard
i don't know why, but i'm really loving this word, this concept, these days.

also,
arcane: known or understood by very few; mysterious; secret; obscure; esoteric

The Expensive Guitar Ensemble

I started writing a piece a while ago about music theory but never ended up finishing it because I couldn’t make a conclusive point. I was feeling frustrated that my music teachers in the past had focused so heavily on learning theory, causing my understanding of music to be unnecessarily technical and leaving me with an empty feeling when I sat down to practice. I learned rhythm, chord progression, phrasing, and composition – but I felt as though I never developed my emotional understanding of music, or maybe I never let myself express it because I was too focused on “getting it”.

It occurred to me recently that we live in a very scientific society. Combined with the high importance we place on being consumers, we have managed to take a soulful emotional thing like music and turn it into a concrete item the individual can purchase, process, and add to the list of things s/he has accomplished. This thought hit me on the first day of my beginning guitar class when I looked around and noticed a few of my fellow classmates holding guitars that must have cost them several hundred dollars a piece. I wondered: is a scraggly D-chord really going to sound that much better on an expensive guitar? Are we really music lovers or just music consumers?

There is an odd rewiring that has happened in our brains – and I will admit I have been guilty of it too – when our creative motivation becomes a competition. Among high school students, it is a competition to fill one’s free time with activities, leadership roles, and other things to beef up a college application. For young adults, the situation is similar in the increasingly competitive market for jobs – the key is to make one’s self look interesting on paper in order to get an interview. In a strange turn of events, the true heart and soul of the individual is now concentrated into a short list of “extracurricular interests” at the bottom of one’s resume.

While the technical aspects of any creative discipline cannot be ignored, we should move away from equating these with full “understanding”. The intangible aspects of music and art are among the few things that remain un-consumable and keep us in our place.

Let's Play the Dictionary Game

I have been thinking about how single words can inspire days and years of creative thought. The academic type can write a whole dissertation or even a series of thick books on single phrases from ancient texts. The greatest songwriters and poets do the same, transforming a simple concept into a work of art. Its pretty amazing how much significance a small thing like a word can have.

Lately there have been a handful of words that keep popping up in my peripheral thoughts (and in my peripheral vision), but I haven’t quite been able to understand their greater significance. In an attempt to organize the rambling internal prose that these words have set off, I am providing definitions along with a short idea of their possible metaphoric meaning. The definitions all come from my roommate’s Webster II New College Dictionary.

Ricochet: To rebound from a surface

I think, scientifically, a collision between two moving particles (or one moving particle and a stable surface) also causes the particles to slow down a bit in addition to changing directions. I like picturing a person wandering or floating along, focusing on something in the distance coming closer (a career? an event?), bumping into that thing full-force, and heading off in another direction as a result. The person takes a deep breath, turns to face the new path, and heads on their way a bit slower than last time, with another out-of-focus thing in the distance – maybe close or maybe far away.

Pace: The rate of movement or progress; to set or regulate the rate of speed

For years I couldn’t get exercise from going running. I would start out too fast, get tired quickly, and walk home after going only a half-mile or so. When a friend suggested I run as slowly as I possibly could, I realized I could run quite far – I learned the meaning of pacing myself. Now I am able to pick a distance before I run and set a pace that will carry me through it. When we all finished college, its like we flew out of the house in new sneaks and bolted for the running path. Thankfully, I think my short “run” was followed by an even shorter “walk home” and I’m more cognizant of my pacing these days.

Muse: 1. To consider or meditate at length, 2. A guiding spirit; a source of inspiration

No metaphor here, really. I was just thinking that most of the people or things I would consider my “muses” are actually just people I disagree with or things that frustrate me. But I always thought a Muse was supposed to be a happy, romantic thing.

Thinking about words is fun. Anyone else have any faves?

Living in Dreams

After seeing 'The Science of Sleep' this weekend, I feel the need to point out the recent thematic phenomenon of what I can only call dream movies. I'm not sure when or how it started, but film-makers have been possessed by the ability to recreate dream-like visions a lot lately. A few examples:
* Mulholland Drive
* Momento
* Waking Life
* Vanilla Sky
* Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (thanks, Joe)
The technical possibilities of the film genre allows these artists to show us exactly what goes on in the deepest parts of their psyches.

I recall the first time I saw Mulholland Drive. I hardly "got" anything about it, and I loved that! The style of the narrative -- the ordered chaos of it -- made me appreciate the filmmaker as an individual whose understanding of the world was very different from my own. A few weeks after seeing the movie, however, I read some reviews that analyzed the plot and events in the movie and explained which parts of the narrative were dream, and which parts were reality. I was frustrated with the reviewer for applying a resonable solution to what I had enjoyed as a rich and chaotic glimpse into the filmmaker's brain, but I also wondered if the movie was supposed to be just that -- a puzzle to be solved and be done with.

There are, certainly, different ways of responding to art -- if you squint at an impressionist painting, you get a better idea of the particular objects depicted in the scene; but if you stand and absorb the painting for a while, you begin to understand the painter's emotional response to his setting. The fact that the artwork is able to portray a feeling is powerful and important. In the same way, dream movies allow the viewer to understand the way real-life occurances affect the subconscious, and how unique our responses are to the experiences we share.

I love the chaos of dream movies, and I can only assume that they are a thrill to make -- showing an audience the most accurate vision of every strange detail of your dreams. But I do wonder where this genre is going. Will the visual of another's imagined world give voice to our own imagination? Or will the chaotic scenes overpower and confuse our creative energy?

"Even the most reluctant imagination will not be able to resist..."

Diane brought in a treasure to work today – a children’s book called “The Mysteries of Harris Burdick”. It is a series of 14 single illustrations from 14 different stories, which were to be written and the artwork completed by their original author, Harris Burdick. Mr. Burdick never contacted his publisher in order to complete the assignment, and the illustrations remained unused for a few years.

Chris Van Allsburg, the author of "The Polar Express", discovered the drawings in the home of his publisher friend. Each illustration was accompanied only by the title of the story and a short caption. The caliber of the artwork and the teasing captions, however, tantalized Van Allsburg's imagination enough that he determined the work was indeed worth printing.

As it stands, the book contains a marvelous exercise for the imagination. The reader cannot help but create stories in her head; I can pretty much guarantee that some of the images will be settings in my dreams tonight. I looked through the book and thought of endless ways to use it as a teaching tool. You could write dialogues between the characters in the pictures, or do a "what happened before/after" assignment. You could even have kids re-create the scene in color (all the drawings are black and white), and see what happens.

When I was younger, I didn't particularly enjoy the imagination exercises we were assigned in class. Now, however, I can see the incomparable value in cultivating this skill. Van Allsburg's book of drawings has just made it to #1 on my list of gifts I will be giving my neices and nephews when they are old enough.

Cliche is the Way

I am reliving angsty college student-ism today. Its fun. One of my friends just bought us tickets to see Ani next Friday at the Chicago theater, so I have been celebrating my relationship with her and anticipating the day (so soon!) when we will finally meet. That's right, I'm joining the hundreds of thousands of young women who have felt the intense need to express what Ani means to them -- and in blog format nonetheless. How cliche.

But wait. Why do I feel sheepish loving her music so? She's an incredible guitar player and the lyrics of her songs are just so exactly, precisely, the expression of my feelings in so many different situations, at so many different points in my life. And just because there are tons of other girls out there who listen to Ani and cry about their respective issues -- does that make it cheesy? Am I just another girl whose favorite singer is Ani DiFranco? Lord, its true.

I was talking to my mother on Monday and she had a new concept she was exploring: institutionalization. (Whenever we chat, there is always some key term that anchors our conversation. Last week it was 'synchronicity' and she was counselling me that moments of synchronicity in life are little signs that we are on the right track. We've actually had that conversation before, but its a good one to come back to.) Anyway, she asked if I had been to my church lately and I said I hadn't because I now work on Sundays and I can never make it. The real reason she was asking, though, was because she wanted to point out that churches are 'institutions' of faith, which is paradoxical in a way because faith should be and is an individual's unique set of beliefs -- that the only reason it is 'institutionalized' is so that each individual "doesn't have to reinvent the wheel". In a similar fashion, she pointed out, education (her profession) has been institutionalized to help guide each individual toward a life doing something they enjoy.

Now, of course I am not saying that Ani is a religion (I shouldn't have even gone there, but typing that made me laugh), but she is a sort of institution in her own right. There is no question that she layed the foundation of something extremely powerful, and I have some thoughts on what exactly that is.

For many girls -- of all orientations and all backgrounds -- Ani made possible a world of self-expression that is unabashedly literal. I will never forget an open mic performance at The Point in Bryn Mawr, PA where a girl with recently chopped hair and a giant guitar played a never-ending song recounting every detail of her recent break-up with (if I I recall correctly) the first girl she ever dated. And the fact that this performance was viewed by some of my friends as cliche, only tells of the niche that was so accurately met by Ani's style of literalism.

So, rock on, Ani fans. Embrace that tiny part of you that crumbles into uncontrollable emotion when you hear the perfectly stated lyric to the most moving melody followed by an angry strum. If listening to 'You Had Time' makes you want to tell the world how complex love is, then do it. If hearing 'Your Next Bold Move' turns you into a rock star, I'm all for it. Just because she inspires all kinds of people -- weirdos, intellectuals, and 13-year-olds -- doesn't mean you should be embarrassed about that little piece of your heart that wants to write poems. Go ahead and make us proud!

"Excitement... and then disappointment"

I'm currently listening to an interview with Todd Phillips on 'Fresh Air'. He is one of the co-writers / producers of 'Road Trip', 'Starsky & Hutch', and 'Old School' but he's totally not how you would imagine him. The interviewer has been asking him questions such as how he came to focus on the issue of relationships between grown men, and what his childhood was like -- this is NPR, folks, even 'Old School' can be serious on NPR.

Todd went to NYU film school and actually obtained a lot of the story material for 'Old School' while producing a documentary for HBO called 'Frathouse'. The documentary never aired because several of the kids' parents wouldn't sign the releases necessary to broadcast the incriminating footage. But, as part of their research and shooting of 'Frathouse', Todd and his crew went through full-on fraternity rush "hazing". It was several of the grotesque activities they were forced to partake in during that experience that were ultimately incorporated into 'Old School', with a more humorous slant of course.

When he was discussing his personal journey, the path that brought him to a career producing embarrassingly-funny movies -- which have become part of the cinematic canon for my generation -- Todd admitted that he had never been part of a fraternity during college. In fact, at age 18, he was more confused by their immensely popular place in the college social scene. He said when his biggest fans meet him and find this out, he can seen the emotion in their faces go from excitement to extreme disappointment. It is something about his experience outside the world of fraternities, though, that allowed him to synthesize the truest and most humorous elements of this social phenomenon.

He was raised by a single mother who constantly encouraged her children to be individuals and to cultivate their own identities. He said he has found it fascinating that college, the first step in becoming an adult and an independent person, was the time that young gentlemen chose to align themselves fiercely with a group identity. So strong is the group allegience, that men are willing to do dangerous and painful things to belong. At just the moment when these kids first have the opportunity to discover who they are, 80% choose to align with a collective identity.

It is our natural instinct to want to belong. And when we face the most difficult stages in life -- such as that perpetual young adult question "who do I want to be?" -- it is easiest to seek comfort in something larger than one's self. Even if you have supportive adults who encourage you to find your own identity, its often easier to escape the perils of a personal journey in the comfort of a collective one. While Todd Phillips has been able to find the humor in the fraternity phenomenon, and help people laugh at themselves, which is always healthy, his general insight as a fraternity outsider translates significantly to the conflicts in our world today.

In political and personal realms, collective identity has become the norm in our society. The process of self-examination and questioning the status quo is generally discouraged. We are obliged to "stay the course", never flip-flop on tough decisions, and support the nation where we were born. We even do dangerous things to uphold the policies of the collective leadership; resistance and real intellectual evaluation of our policies is difficult to carry out, and young people so often burn out in their quest to answer these questions.

The fraternity mentality is present not only in college society. And while it is healthy to be able to laugh at the most blatantly disgusting examples, I think its important to distinguish between when we are laughing AT the system and when we are actually laughing WITH the system. The kids who met Todd Phillips were disappointed when they realized that he might actually be criticizing their human tendency to seek a group identity, that he is not so much re-living his glory days as he is questioning the silly behavior of a fraternity-based society. It is indeed a disappointing moment when we find that our laughter is at our own expense, but we do have to come to terms with the complexity of our conflicting identities. Kudos to Todd Phillips's mother. We could all learn a lot from her :)

It pretty much is all about what you're wearing

Guess what is cool -- those threadless kids online are actually real people, and they live in Chicago! A few weeks ago, I stopped in at their studio on North Ravenswood (I should start a little series here on cool creative places on Ravenswood... and another one on Bucktown-area spots). I sat on a big fake-suede couch while I waited to use the computer, and one of the guys (who I recognized from several model shots on the website) offered me a Juicy Juice. Actually, he almost forced me to take one. I declined; he drank three.

The studio is a quite a neat place to visit. All the props from the website pictures are strewn around, the conference room double-doors are open wide, and I could see the product of a recent brainstorming session in orange marker on the white board. (Incidentally, I think they will be coming out with shower curtains this fall... don't tell them I told you!) Anyway, I like their style and I like how they encourage the fans of their t-shirts to create their own designs and submit funny pictures of themselves wearing the shirts. Creative funky people, join the movement! Oh, and check out the studio if you are in Chicago. T-shirts are only $10 each if you buy them in person (even the girls' ones)!

Puctuation is a Life Choice

(Re-published from my previous blog)

At a work-sponsored conference in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin several months ago, I took part in an ‘interactive’ closing session along with hundreds of my co-workers. The purpose of the session was to unveil our new recruiting strategy for getting ‘top talent’ individuals to come work for us after graduating from business school. After showing the new recruiting video – which was essentially a montage of people participating in extreme sports with some sort of message about how we ‘go to the limit’ – the session leaders asked for our help in developing a creative message to be printed on ‘Save the Date’ postcards which would go along with our other printed recruiting materials. They gave us a theme to work with – three key words – and a couple of examples of visual triplicates that fulfilled the three-word message (which was a stupid theme, by the way, but that’s beside the point). The challenge was to see which group could come up with the most exciting postcard idea, and the winning idea would be printed and distributed.

I got into it. This was the artistic opportunity I had never been afforded at work. This was a chance to get all these ‘cutting-edge’ consultants to show what they were made of. Come up with a funky ad campaign visual that would attract young, hip professionals – I was all over it.

After disappointing suggestions from my team, I started drawing up some examples. They were willing to go with a couple of them, although most of the team seemed unexcited by the entire project and started having their own side conversations. I blazed on, drawing and writing descriptions; by the end of the allotted 15 minutes, I had 3 concepts for the ad design.

The presentations began with one group’s lame idea – tailoring each post-card design to the recruited school by incorporating photos of competing college sports teams, pennants, crowds of fans, etc. The designs were judged by the volume of applause from the audience, and this one received only some courtesy claps and one shout from the team’s own table.

The designs that followed were equally received, until about the fifth or sixth one in (my team had not yet presented). It was a simple concept, three pictures – a question mark, an exclamation mark, and a period. The period was the same color and style as the period in our company logo; how cute. I paid attention to first five seconds of the group’s design explanation, and went back to perfecting my drawings. Their design was boring and obvious – seriously, punctuation has been done so many times! Beside the fact that they blatantly copied our trademark logo material, the concept was entirely uncreative. When, moments after I had re-buried myself in my own team’s presentation material, the room erupted in applause for the ‘punctuation design’, I was shocked and confused. My team members were pounding on the table – what was going on? As the punctuation people pranced off the stage, wagging their poster back and forth to the claps and whoops of the audience, I put my markers down and decided our team would not be competing. They didn’t mind.

I realize this sounds judgmental and pretentious. I want to explain that I do not really think my designs were worthy of a glance from a true advertising ‘creative’. The point of this illustrative story is that I was faced, in a very stark way, with the unfortunate lack of creativity in my professional sphere and the immense scale of it all. My company, huge as it is, is supposedly trusted to provide ‘expertise’ to management of the largest, most powerful companies in the world. Either we’re not doing our job, or I had the wrong idea of what I was signing up for – and I think it’s the latter, unfortunately.

I have participated in activities like this before; we all have. I can remember some creative presentations in high school where I never had a chance. My liberal inner-city public high school had this great arts program that really encouraged imagination and artistic expression. At the time, I took advantage of the classes that were offered but I didn’t believe it was necessarily my strongest discipline; I saw the purpose of art as a way for people to express themselves and I knew I didn’t have the talent to use it well. Since the Lake Geneva experience, however, I think there is another, extremely important purpose for an arts education – to cultivate creativity and imagination. And I actually feel bad that my co-workers never had the opportunities and the sincere encouragement that I had in my youthful creative pursuits.

One of my closest friends at work was recently asking herself why, after doing everything right – earning high grades, getting a degree in finance, taking a good job after college – she still felt like she had no idea where she wanted to go in life. I wanted to tell her that shouldn’t be something we’re scared of. We should be encouraged, all along the way, to think of these moments of uncertainty as a creative opportunity – to take an art class, talk to crazy people who think about things in unconventional ways, work with kids who haven’t been molded into the ‘system’ yet, take a road trip with no destination in mind. She needs a chance to trust her own imagination; she, like so many of my co-workers, really has a lot of creative potential.

A certain degree of confidence in one’s own creative abilities – ideally cultivated beginning at a young age – could make all the difference in changing the wide-spread notion that uncertainty should be avoided. So many good things could come from a society that is always trying to think about issues and problems in new ways, even if it means taking a risk. Life is only ‘punctuated’ if you’re taught to play it safe.

Get 'em thinking while they're young

After reading the interview with Dave Eggers in the most recent issue of 'Stop Smiling', I conducted a general google-lit review of the 826National project. These are writing centers that have been set up, by Eggers and others in several cities, which are targeted at high school children and younger.

The centers maintain a "low profile" image, always in in a very cute-chic way. In San Francisco (the flagship center), for example, the storefront at 826 Valencia appears to be a Pirate Supply Store. And they actually sell pirate supplies, like eyepatches and fake parrots. Why anyone would enter a pirate supply store is questionable, and that's the idea. Definitely something kids dig.

In Chicago -- I found this hilarious -- they keep the over-stimulated, consumerist populace away by running an operation called The Boring Store. This one sells spy supplies. Again, they actually do sell things here, and all proceeds go to the center.

But aside from the great vibe, the centers are doing some really cool stuff. I looked at the workshop schedule this fall (all of which are offered for free to young students), and started getting really excited about the project. In particular, high school students are challenged to write a story as a group in a workshop called "A Picture is Worth 1,802,773 Words (Give or Take): Image-Driven Fiction Writing". I love this. Here, adults are fostering a supportive atmosphere for creative thinking as well as collaboration. The students have to explore the power of the collective imagination... something I think we could all learn and benefit from in the larger world.

This is my thing, this is it. Because ultimately, how are things going to improve in this world without creative thinking? How will we discover the best solution unless we are willing to discuss those crazy ideas, listen to other suggestions, improve on what's already out there, and formulate our society together?

I want to encourage any readers of this blog to participate in the development of creative imagination and positive self-image through the arts. Get involved with a project like 826, if that's what suits you. Or make music with friends, or take a kid to a dance performance, or volunteer at the local inventors' fair... anything. If we make it possible for each other to imagine things in unique ways and we support this cause, we can create a just world for everyone.