Divinest Sense

Getting caught up on my New York Times reading after a trip to Italy, I noticed this article about a project to tag museum art collections. It’s called steve.museum and anyone can participate. From the article:

But can the public be trusted to tag art? Will curators let them?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art ran a test in fall 2005 in which volunteers supplied keywords for 30 images of paintings, sculpture and other artwork. The tags were compared with the museum’s curatorial catalog, and more than 80 percent of the terms were not in the museum’s documentation. Joachim Friess’s ornate sculpture “Diana and the Stag,” for example, was tagged with the expected “antler,” “archery” and “huntress.” But it was also tagged “precious” and “luxury.”

“The results were staggering,” said Susan Chun, general manager for collections information planning at the Met. “There’s a huge semantic gap between museums and the public.”

True. Regardless of how you might feel about how much cultural education the average person receives in this country, there is a disconnect between what you see when you look at a painting and what the curator chooses to tell you about it on the small placard next to it or in the museum catalogue. A lot of assumptions are made about what the viewer knows or doesn’t know.

As the article goes on to point out, there are obvious descriptors of art works that the experts just aren’t able to see anymore, and on the flip side, there are a lot of things that are known about works of art that aren’t evident in the pieces themselves. I think our awareness of this fact creates a psychological disconnect that prevents open discussion of what a work of art is “about”.

I’m especially aware of these issues at the moment, having logged some serious museum time in the last couple of weeks in Rome, where the older museums don’t really tell you anything about what you’re looking at. The Vatican is the biggest example of this - the collections of the Vatican are immense and overwhelming, and you have to know exactly what you are looking for when you go in, because there is very little information there to help you out.

The Vatican’s collections could really benefit from a tagging effort like Steve to make their artworks more understandable and findable. However, since this particular project is funded by the U.S. Institute for Museum and Library Services, it’s only dealing with American museums.
Tagging the Vatican’s collection would be a much more daunting task than doing the same with any American museum. I wonder how the results of an Italian tagging project would differ from an American one.

I know I’m more than a bit biased about this because of my 80’s childhood and the fact that “Purple Rain” has always been on my top ten list for best albums ever - but Prince’s super bowl halftime performance was totally freakin’ awesome. The man is a legend - and not in the same tired and bloated way that, say, Paul McCartney is a legend.

Prince is mysterious figure, a formidable talent, and never afraid to experiment with his music. He’s deeply religious–a Jehovah’s Witness–but instead of feeling limited by his faith, he channels his spirituality into creativity and an abiding love of life in all its sensual glory. His performance at the ball game was just fun. He didn’t come out raging, heaving, and overdoing it like the usual sequined diva or combo of aging rockers.

He was just…himself. He played and sang some of his Purple Rain material and worked in a couple of covers, joking about the rain and throwing in a cute musical smirk with his selection of “Proud Mary”. (It’s not a true medley unless you utter the words “left a good job in the citaaaay…” at high tempo) Ending with the song “Purple Rain”, asking the crowd to sing the soaring “woooo-ooo-oooo-ooo” while swaying in the pouring rain was just lovely. I know, the monsoon was just a lucky coincidence, but it was a lot of fun to watch.

Definitely one of the best halftime performances ever - a demonstration that it’s better to showcase a real artist and seasoned performer instead of mashing together a few big names into an ill-conceived variety show.

I’ve enrolled in a class on Life Stories taught by writer and information designer Thom Haller. I’m thoroughly enjoying myself, and I’m just beginning to write in a way that I’ve wanted to for so long–but didn’t know quite how.

Granted, my “life story” is not nearly as interesting as that of some of the other people in the class. One woman recounted the story of a journey from India to London in a 1964 Chevy, two months on the road traversing such remote locations as the Khyber Pass, all because her father refused to pay the duty for shipping the car. Another woman was a speed-skier like her father (who was also an air traffic controller and a stunt pilot) and now helps negotiate truces in war-torn locales around the world. Another found a world of magic and symbolism in Belize, where she survived a machete attack and went on to forge a close but complicated relationship with the family who came to her rescue.

I loved all of these stories. I think a common thread running through them was the notion of “other”-ness and how unexpected interactions with the unfamiliar change who we are. My story has that theme too, but not on such a grand scale. I’m writing about my experiences quitting school and living with hippies in the Finger Lakes region while working at a police department. Two worlds that were dramatically different on the surface, but fundamentally very similar.
My classmates’ stories generally had optimism at their core, and the exhilarating sense of freedom that comes from broadening one’s horizons. But there exists a darker side of the interaction with the foreign. In our search for life-changing experiences, we tend to forget that our interaction changes the lives of the “others” too, and not always for the better.

When you’re writing a memoir, it’s important to firmly establish the “I” and write her unique perception of the scenes and events. You can’t be omniscient. I think a big writing challenge will be writing from my own memory with the voice of someone who’s flawed and unreliable as a narrator, and somehow conveying the effect that “my” words and actions have on other people in the story, without making assumptions about what they are thinking.

This life story writing is really hard. But also kind of easy. I’m not a compelling nonfiction writer. I’m definitely not a good speaker or verbal storyteller. It’s so hard to get the right words to come out! But in yesterday’s class, Thom gave us ten minutes to write a short scene from our story, and as soon as my pen hit the paper, it just came flying out. Pretty rough, needs some editorial trimming and sharper detail, but a half-decent start - and it was just there, waiting for its cue to come into being.

I haven’t written creatively (and yes, memoir is a form of creative writing) in many years. Blog writing doesn’t count, because it’s like journalism, which is boring and predictable (when I do it) no matter what the subject matter. I’m looking forward to exercising these muscles some more.

DC public media outlet WETA accepted an offer from radio conglomerate Bonneville that they just couldn’t refuse. Now the radio format, which used to be news from the BBC, NPR, and some local issue talk shows, will be replaced by 24-hour classical music. This is apparently the result of an agreement between Bonneville and the public radio station to pick up Bonneville’s WGMS classical radio material and format, which was losing money.

While I’m definitely in favor of classical music and think public radio might be the best place for it, giving up the news programs will mean a critical loss for the DC radio-listening public. It’s pretty sad when the seat of our government and the home of intelligent, diverse people and cultural resources can’t keep alive more than one public news radio station. I guess I’ll be getting my NPR stuff from WAMU now. It’s a decent station but it caters more to the academic crowd, doesn’t do as much local interest programming, and doesn’t carry some of the shows I’ve grown to really like.

The only other radio station I listen to sometimes is WTOP, which is a local independent outlet. Unfortunately, other than providing decent traffic and weather coverage, WTOP is a steaming pile of crap, with stories and features that cater pretty much exclusively to white people living in the Virginia exurbs.

I threw away my candy bar
And I ate the wrapper
And when they told me what I did
I burst into laughter

-Brian Wilson/Van Dyke Parks

I’m trying out a crazy new experiment - eating vegetarian. (No, not eating vegetarians) No particular thought process or game plan, just seeing how little meat I can eat. So far it’s going pretty well - it’s been a little over a week and I’ve eaten mostly vegetable and dairy matter, except for two very tasty pork dumplings and a delicious chunk of a poor doomed mahi-mahi.

I’ve learned that eating veggie is both easy and difficult. Easy if you’re just cooking for yourself, difficult if you’re going out to eat at a restaurant.

I’ve also noticed that we seem to be terrified of beans here in America. Aside from the refried ones that pad our burritos and the french green ones that are basically all pod and no seed, restaurants are not terribly conversant with the legumes. I guess they get a bad rap for being a simple peasant food, and for supposedly causing flatulence. But hey, I don’t know about your intestines (and please don’t tell me), but peas and beans irritate me far less than do meat and dairy.
Beans are a great thing to eat. They’ve got protein *and* fiber, and they cook up so nice and tasty in just about any sauce you can think of. And they’re like 49 cents a pound. So, guess what I’m bringing to your party?

I’m not phoning it in, I swear. I just like to talk about things I’ve read in the paper. Today our topic is “positive psychology”, or “good medicine can’t cure bad art”.

This NYT feature on the emerging discipline of Positive Psychology is pretty interesting. The idea is that lots more study needs to be done on how positive thinking affects physical health as well as mental health. After thinking about this for a while, I don’t believe this should be its own intellectual discipline, but it sure wouldn’t hurt to teach such things in med school. If you’ve ever had surgery or some other serious medical concern (or know someone who has), you know very well the effect that a doctor’s attitude can have on your own attitude, and therefore your stress level, and therefore your general well-being. Injecting a little positive thinking into medical procedures couldn’t hurt.

This topic caught my eye because of my recent prolonged exposure to some very negative-thinking friends of mine. If anyone needs a positive-thinking intervention, it’s these folks. After only 16 waking hours of listening to this couple’s bemoaning and criticism of friends, relatives, neighbors, complete strangers, shopkeepers, various objectionable ethnic groups, the town, the state, the country, the world… I wanted to kill myself. My mood was in the toilet. I was seriously starting to believe that life was just not worth living, and that there was nothing out there to stem the tide of ill will raging unchecked through our universe. After a quick trip to a coffee shop and some venting, I was able to stop the dark whooshing noises in my head.

But the experience got me thinking. Mr. and Mrs. Complainalot have nice lives, live in a cute town, have a nice house, a decent income, family members close by, friends, hobbies, and various things that make life engaging and interesting. They keep busy but not too busy. To the outside observer, life’s not exactly perfect, but it’s pretty good. But they have health problems, and seem older and more tired than other people in their same demographic. It’s hard to believe that their attitude toward life has nothing to do with this. After all, why try to stay healthy and active when everything’s all just going to hell, nobody cares about you, and you’re just going to die eventually anyway?

In a situation like this, positive psychology could potentially save lives. I like the idea of an intervention. It would be really refreshing to shake my finger at these folks and yell YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BED UNTIL YOU TELL ME ONE NICE THING THAT HAPPENED TODAY! NOW SPILL IT!

Another interesting aspect of positive psychology is that instead of being essentially narcissistic, like all those positive-thinking self-help books out there, there is evidence that you can attain more personal contentment by doing something nice for someone else than you can by doing something nice for yourself. I can buy this. In fact, I think the thing that’s lacking in the Complainalots’ worldview is the frequent exercise of altruism, whether in thought or in action. Taken to extremes, the lack of altruism is a personality disorder. But I suspect that in today’s American culture, altruism simply is not valued as a laudable trait, and a lot of us fall into a pattern of thinking that pits us against the horde of miscreants who are constantly trying to take our stuff or elbow ahead of us in the cosmic line.

So, the study of positive psychology has some potential application in medicine and social policy, and let’s not forget religion. As a matter of fact, as the Times article points out, the proposed area of study has some uncomfortable religious trappings. Spread goodwill in the world? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you? Be kind to people whether you think they deserve your kindness or not? Sounds a bit like Christianity to me. Admittedly, these are the good parts of Christianity, so hey, let’s not strike it down as unworthy of our philosophical consideration.

However, like any religion, positive psychology’s relative benefit is in its practical application. My support of the idea comes to a screeching halt when the article starts to talk about schools incorporating positive psychology’s lessons into literature classes. To wit:

This endeavor outstrips the ongoing Strath Haven experiment. The effort there, financed by a $2.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, is limited to the ninth-grade language-arts program. At the school last year, the positive psychologists interwove their teachings with the literature classes. The idea was to buffer the lessons from bleak books like “Lord of the Flies” and “Romeo and Juliet” with some reassuring thoughts — or at least a more positive framework for understanding human behavior than the classics offer. Thus, according to Mark Linkins, now coordinator of the Swarthmore school district’s curriculum, who helped teach the classes, the animalistic and murderous Jack in “Lord of the Flies” shows “what happens when someone is lacking in signature strengths.” And when reading “The Odyssey,” students were asked: “What are the signature strengths that Odysseus lived and breathed? What are the things he might have improved on to make things go better?”

Now, this is taking things too far. It is not OK to fuck with literature by infusing it with contemporary psychology. What are the things that Odysseus could have improved on? Gimme a break. This is basically saying to your teenage students: “Dear students, you have been placed in the special ed class because of your violent tendencies and your inability to understand the complexities of classical thought. Your dignity will be returned to you at the close of school hours.” The very idea of putting Odysseus on the guidance counselor’s couch is just… unfathomable. For those of you who were educated in a dignity-free school system, let’s sum up: Characters in ancient Greek literature were considered to be playthings of capricious gods, and their fates were determined by outside forces, such as whom their grandaddy ate for dinner. Odysseus was never, ahem, in any position to make healthy life decisions.

And, as I can tell you from my experiences in art school, healthy life decisions and positive thinking have no place in art. Rather than attempting to teach teenagers to drop the sulkiness and act more helpful and chipper, we should be teaching them to understand literature and art on a deep level, so that their minds can stay active and engaged. Studying art and literature requires the development of a healthy understanding that sometimes life just has no meaning, and horrible things happen - but that even in tragedy and meaninglessness, there can be beauty. Now there is a positive thought.

Just as we at Divinest Sense always suspected - messy people are super cool, laid-back, and creative, and neat, fussy people are, I believe the quote is, “humorless and inflexible prigs, [that] have way too much time on their hands.” Tongue-in-cheekery from the New York Times. Also:

Mr. Freedman is co-author, with Eric Abrahamson, of “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder,” out in two weeks from Little, Brown & Company. The book is a meandering, engaging tour of beneficial mess and the systems and individuals reaping those benefits, like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose mess-for-success tips include never making a daily schedule.
As a corollary, the book’s authors examine the high cost of neatness — measured in shame, mostly, and family fights, as well as wasted dollars — and generally have a fine time tipping over orthodoxies and poking fun at clutter busters and their ilk, and at the self-help tips they live or die by. They wonder: Why is it better to pack more activities into one day? By whose standards are procrastinators less effective than their well-scheduled peers? Why should children have to do chores to earn back their possessions if they leave them on the floor, as many professional organizers suggest?

That’s what really bothers me about organizational systems - the false morality associated with neatness, and the guilt that is supposed to accompany messiness. Why can’t we just look at these things objectively? Why all the persecution?

When I was a 7th grader, our school hit upon the brilliant idea of hiring a professional organizer to come in and help out the students with special binders and dividers, assignment logs, and individual counseling. I can understand now why they would do such a thing - this was a very tough private school, and 7th grade marked the beginning of “getting serious” about one’s academic performance and extracurriculars. This was the year that the culling and sorting began. High scorers on math tests went into pre-algebra, computational dullards were stuck in “regulars” math. Promising young philosophes and raconteurs continued their study of the noble French language, while those who could not differentiate “et” and “est” were shuttled off to learn the peasant language of Spanish. (This was in Texas, where there are certain attitudes about Spanish speakers.)

Just as we were beginning to understand that the difference between an 80 and a 100 on a test was not simply a determinant of how many appreciative smiles we could win from our teachers but a prognosis for how successful and worthy we’d turn out to be, the seventh grade faculty, exasperated from years of giving lukewarm grades to kids who really ought to be doing better, decided that bad organization was unfairly holding us back–causing our homework to be late, our pencils forgotten, our handouts lost, our attitudes sullen. Perhaps a professional organizer could remove these barriers for us and help us realize our full potential.

But here was the problem: I had no potential, and I knew it. Not that I was stupid or uninterested in learning - in fact, I was pretty sharp, and got sorted right away into the honors track. I had just spent a great deal of my young life thinking about my purpose in it, and had recently come to the conclusion that life had no meaning. Religions were false. People were mean, petty, selfish, and destructive. There was no such thing as magic. Life was messy. People didn’t love each other for who they were, they loved the things that they could get other people to do for them. Certainly nobody loved me.

I’m not sure where this tide of negativity came from, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only thirteen-year-old to ever feel such things. The overwhelming sentiment, even among the robotic miss perfects who always had crisp paper and neatly-lettered filing systems, was that none of this school crap really mattered.

Enter Ms. Travis, the organizer. Ms. Travis was a slim, patrician woman in her fifties with a stiff platinum-blond bob and unbelievably white skin, set off stunningly by ruby-red lipstick and immaculate jewel-tone suits. She sent a letter to our parents before the school year began, asking them not to purchase looseleaf binders for us, because she would provide special binders that would form the basis for our new system of organization.

The binders were slick, flexible plastic with no pockets. Pockets, explained Ms. Travis, represented a deadly temptation to collect hoards of unfiled papers, thus leading to unacceptable rumpling of edges and unseemly shuffling when searching for a particular handout. Everything was to be immedately hole-punched and filed in the appropriate divider of the binder, one for each subject. Within each divider papers should be filed in chronological order, with handouts first, assignments second, quizzes third, and so on. I don’t remember exactly what the program was, because I followed none of it.

The keystone of the binder system was the assignment book, which was a hole-punched affair neatly clasped in front of the dividers. It was a simple unmarked calendar grid, and we were directed to write our assignments for all classes into the block for each day. This was really just fine, and at first I dutifully wrote down as many assignments as I could remember to write down. I relied, however, on the stack of papers and handwritten notes that I kept in another folder to remember what my assignments were. It seemed like a pointless step to write “Science: handout due monday”, with no real explanation, when I could just look at the handout itself, saved in my pile of important stuff.

But my lackadaisical approach to the recording of assignments was not pleasing to Ms. Travis, who would make her rounds during study hall, demanding to see our binders and chastising us loudly for not making full use of the system. After being shamed in this manner on several occasions, I became defiant and rather than promising to try to be a better person, I decided it would be more constructive in the long run to make a complete mockery of the whole system. No, screw that explanation–I was angry and filled with contempt. I saw Ms. Travis as an embodiment of the universe, which was clearly not made for someone like me. If the whole point of life was to be as neat and clean as possible and to wear houndstooth skirts and yellow silk scarves, then what was the point of living?

Doodles began to appear around the edges of my assignment book pages, little spirals and vines and quotes from Pink Floyd songs. Then they began to spread, sprout blossoms of vivid color quite outside the approved ballpoint blue and black, and inevitably broke the rigid bonds of the gridlines to explode fully across the page. Diagonally across December was scrawled “Why be normal?”, the W illuminated by pictures of galloping horses, twisting vines, arrows, bits of cross-hatching, greek borders, irises and pupils and shiny teardrops. Pretty soon the entire book was full of these hieroglyphics of defiance.

Ms. Travis exploded at me during her study hall rounds. My teachers met with me to find out what my damn problem was, citing my excellent work in French and English classes as reasons for their confusion. More talk about my “potential” and my lack of concern for it. Tearful tirades from my parents about how my attitude problem was ruining all my chances. More data to support my theory of the inherent absence of love and joy in the world. In response, I did only the assignments that I cared about, and let the others slide. I erected impenetrable fortresses of papers in my locker. I wore tie dye and wrote poems about loneliness. I was pretty convinced that nobody had my interests in mind, only my production capacity. Then one day the assistant principal, one of the people I loathed most of all for his neat desk, short stature, and creepy concern about possible “problems at home”, made the decision that changed things - “I’m enrolling you in painting class with that new teacher we brought over from the arts magnet school.” From then on, things got better.

The Dixie Chicks’ latest album is topping the Billboard country music chart, which is based on album sales. I’m so proud of my homegirls, who have succeeded based on their enormous talent and original sound, despite the fact that they’ve been frozen out by the country music scene. Other country artists frequently poke fun at them, and country radio stations refuse to play their hits, all because Natalie Maines spoke her mind and said what we were all thinking. Well, guess who has the last laugh? Here’s to the women who single-handedly made country music interesting and relevant again.

A friend of mine found this little gem the other day… the National Review’s 50 greatest conservative rock n’ roll songs of all time! Hooo-eee. I think I actually gave myself a hernia reading this.

Let’s examine the offerings. OK, “Sweet Home Alabama”, I can buy that. Definitely some rage against urban elitism there. Kid Rock? I won’t argue with you. Any 80’s song that’s even vaguely anti-communist? Ummmmm, missing the point, but I can sort of buy it. But “Cult of Personality” by Living Colour? Bwaaaahahahahahahaha! Are you effing kidding me? Will somebody please telephone Living Colour and ask if they’d like to say anything about that?