I've been going to the same nail salon in Culver City for probably the last six years or so. It's a nondescript but tidy little place staffed by about twenty-five exceptionally cheerful manicurists of Vietnamese descent. They've always done a good job on my feet without gouging me, either literally or financially, and their pedicures last for months.
I went in there early this evening, about six, and plunked down in a chair with the December issue of Vogue. I don't speak Vietnamese, so I generally tune out all of the chatter around me; the women cracking jokes with each other, probably about us, the customers, at least some of the time, and a few male staffers quietly attending to their customers or kits. About halfway through I heard an explosion on the television, and glanced up to see the Mel Gibson film "We Were Soldiers" on.
I've never seen the film all the way through; I can't do movies with that kind of visible violence and bloodshed anymore. It gives me courtroom flashbacks. (people who know me will know what I mean by that and no I am not explaining it.) I looked away and pondered, for a moment, what I was really seeing.
It was nearing the end, a horrific battle scene with all of that shooting and blood and gore. Vietnamese extras playing Viet Cong soldiers against actors playing American ones. Guns and yelling and shots of tattered U.S. and VC flags.
I looked around me and realized that everyone in the shop who wasn't working on someone was completely engrossed in the film, staring up at the television.
What do you feel, as an American, watching a film that takes major liberties with the history of the Vietnam War while you are surrounded by people for whom that war was their history, and their families' histories, too? Where their people are painted like so, and ours are painted like that, and none of it is reflective of reality?
I can't listen to the television, all I hear is U2's "Bullet the Blue Sky" wailing up into my head. The song is about El Salvador but it may as well be about any conflict, really, that we don't belong in.
Across the mud huts where the children sleep, through the alleys of a quiet city street
Take the staircase to the first floor, turn the key and slowly unlock the door
As a man breathes into a saxophone, through the walls you can hear the city groan
Outside, it's America; outside, it's America
Across the field you see a sky ripped open
See the rain through a gaping wound
Pounding on the women and children
Who run
Into the arms
Of America.
Isn't it ridiculous that I, as a professional communicator, have become so wrapped up in a marketing- and advertising-driven universe? My closest friends think it's one part hilarious and one part mystifying. I tell them that the world, as it were, is Flat, as Thomas Friedman likes to say, and it's true that communications and PR and marketing and customer service and business development and investor relations are all squishing together into the back of pickup truck flying for the border of Topsy Town. I'm situated firmly in the center of that right now, and while it is exciting and interesting, it is also anxiety-producing and harrowing, and it is a train I am not always comfortable being on, if you want to know the truth, which you probably didn't, but there it is and it's not like I can take it back or anything. I know, I said it; it is, as Gary pointed out, Shit My Conscience Says.
One of the things I have become over the last few years is a student of the public management of a private emotion called grief.
I was terrible at it in the beginning. Oh, good lord, the things I wrote, the things I said ten years ago. Not that I regret having felt any of it but I cannot imagine putting any of that on the Web for the world to misinterpret and crucify me for now. I got better at it, if you can call it that, mainly because, well, enough practice, and one gets better at these things. I had a lot of practice because I have lost a lot of people to untimely death in the last ten years.
Death is, by nature, an everyday occurrence but these seemed like freak tragedies to me; I guess that's because you never think it can happen to someone that you love. The first one was a friend to murder, in 2001. The second was a friend, and soon-to-be roommate (my last call to her was about the apartment I had booked us to look at) who was in a horrific car accident in 2004. The third was like an uncle to me, a friend of my family for forty years, whose daughters were my age and I'd grown up with, and would have been legally responsible for my sister and I had my parents met an untimely end, succumbed very suddenly to a brain tumor in early 2005. The fourth was the death of a child; the daughter of a close friend, in birth, one month later that same year (2005...kind of sucked). The fifth was someone I loved very much, someone I was always convinced was a case of right person, wrong timing, and that someday, I'd find a way to tell him how I felt about him and we'd find a way to be together; he was taken in a horrific motorcycle accident in 2006. The sixth cause hasn't quite yet been determined; I have heard that so far, it looks like an intentional suicide, which absolutely kills me. I found out this past Friday morning.
These friends all came in and out of my life at different phases and times, and were of varying closeness to me at varying points. I have photographs of myself with each. The earliest was Bill, when I was three; I'm on a rocking horse at his house and he's behind me and their old, crotchety Daschshund, Willy, is milling around in the background. I haven't seen the photo itself in years but it's burned into my brain like any other memory; a hard-fired moment in time: There's Bill, and Siobhan, out in the backyard of Bill's old house in Hope Ranch. I can feel she sun on the top of my head and I can hear him telling me to smile for the camera.
There's a photograph of Britt that I love; it's from 1996, the year we met, and he's standing in my living room in my old fleaflop on Cahuenga Boulevard, and he's holding a gin gimlet and saying something, so he wasn't smiling; he's midsentence, but the photgraph makes him look somehow regal in its candidness. His hair is undone but he's got a bit of eyeliner on and he's wearing a Death t-shirt (for the uninitiated, when I say Death I mean the Neil Gaiman character). I think he's wearing his old leather jacket; I'd had one just like it, with these weird circular pads on the lumbar strip, that I wore throughout high school, only to lose track of it one night at Kontrol Faktory in 1994.
There are other photographs. None of them were posted to Facebook. They're posted to my brain, though, and there they live. But as the space, as it were, has evolved, the collective reaction to the death of the people we love, who have also interacted alongside us online, has changed, as has my own. We interpret the absence, and manifest our grief, much differently now.
When news of C's death started to percolate through the diaspora of those who knew her during her tragic and short life over the weekend, my heart sank. Would this become a free-for-all? I checked her profile, hoping that everyone was being nice, at least. Everyone has friends, but everyone has enemies, too, and when those we love pass on, it brings out the best in some, and the worst in others. Predictably, a particularly nasty, small-minded ex-boyfriend had to weigh in on it. I didn't have access to the post but I heard about it, on Facebook, of course. I shut my eyes and tried to pretend I hadn't read it but I wanted to hit something. She's gone, you jackass, can't you focus on something besides you for once? Focus on the love you once had, who you used to be? Who she was?
(And admittedly, did any of us really know who she was? We all had lost her, over the recent years, as she pulled away, the demons that plagued her forcing her inward, withdrawing from all of us and into a different life but we did love her. We just hoped that she was off straightening her life out and that eventually, she would come back to us.)
But this is Facebook, this is the Web, and even if I see him in a crowded nightclub, I'll never look at or speak to that guy again, I'm so embarrassed and angry. What we do online has an impact offline. I see the words and I can choose how to react; and in this situation, in this place, my reaction is one of deletion. Get out of my brainspace.
And there C's profile sits. Forever thirty-five. Forever frozen there, only the next time that something steamrolls over the Last Great Social Network, she won't make the jump with us. Her mother has posted comments twice in the last two days, desperate pleas of a woman in a grip of pain I can scarcely contemplate. I want to reach out and hug her, tell her it's going to be okay, but I can't do that. All she has are profile pictures and a random assortment of status updates from the last few years. And a lot of questions: what happened? why? and who are all these people? and I think my mother would probably think the exact same thing, if she were in her place.
What happens to a Facebook user when they die? It's not a technical question. It's an emotional question. Certainly not one we asked when Wendy died in 2000; we didn't have social networks, at least, not in their present form, then. Hyatt's Livejournal still exists, though she was removed from life support on my 30th birthday: July 31, 2004. So does Britt's (he had one, too). There they sit; their accounts, untended. As the Web has moved on, there they remain.
I know that so many people know that she's gone, and yet, there's been near-total silence about the whole thing. I don't get it. In an era of the overshare, we've all gone mute. It's scary, and strange. I think most of us are afraid of saying the wrong thing, being tacky, or inappropriate, so we're doing nothing. Saying nothing. Wondering if we should report it, or something. Hoping someone, anyone, posts the details of a funeral date and time and place so we can show up in person for our friend instead of leaving comments she'll never see on a Facebook profile that apparently doesn't accurately represent her or what was honestly going on in her life anyway. Time magazine say they have answers. I disagree.
In her photographs, she looks so beautiful; that never changed. But she also looks happy, and I can see the supportive, cheerful comments to her friends and the upbeat tone to her interactions and that's where the deceptive nature of Facebook kicks in. Everyone looks happy, and relaxed, and normal, and we know now that that could not have been further from the truth; she wasn't happy. In fact, we should probably just assume that nobody is.
Dictators are toppled by people, not by media platforms. But Egyptian activists, especially the young, clearly harnessed the power and potential of social media, leading to the mass mobilizations in Tahrir Square and throughout Egypt. The Mubarak regime recognized early on that social media could loosen its grip on power. The government began disrupting Facebook and Twitter as protesters hit the streets on Jan. 25 before shutting down the Internet two days later.
It was John Gilmore who wrote that "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," so at the time that the Egyptian government tried to pull the plug on it, that just made its pull, and its power, that much stronger.
What this does, effectively, is puts into very sharp focus the fact that in the future, differences will not be settled at the ends of firearms. They will be settled at the speakers on mobile phones and the screens of tablet computers. Control of the neural network that connects those dots, and the information that it can move to the people who are willing to do something with it, is where revolutions will truly be lost or won.
It's been a year.
My return to public blogging? Hardly. But, as with anything, forming a habit takes time and some sort of effort, and so, I pick up the keyboard again hoping that something interesting will come pouring out of it.
(This will not be that post. Sorry to those of you who were hoping for a miracle but in the interim, I have lost my ability to write the way I used to.)
I don't know what I was trying to say a year or two years ago, when I opened this thing. I don't know what I was trying to say when I opened up a Tumblr account, or a Twitter account, or a Livejournal, either. I don't know what I'm trying to say now. I am online all the time, practically, when I'm at work, because the kind of work I do (social business communications) sort of demands it; if I'm not looking at competitors, I'm looking at best practices, I'm trying out tools, I'm checking on client work, I'm answering emails, drafting documents, whatever. It's all about the power of the real-time Web, and I gotta tell you, after watching the world lay itself out online, for good or for ill, for over ten years now, and having to try and wrangle everything I know and everything I feel about it into exceptional client strategies, the very last thing I want to do is put one more iota of myself upon it. My heart isn't content for people to consume.
The personal is indistinguishable from the professional, to many, and I simply lost my ability to explain myself or try to keep the two separate so I disconnected from it, ever so slowly. Odd, for someone who was on the bleeding edge of blogging (I started one in 1998) and lived it for YEARS, with no monetary gain, no impressions generated, partnership deals, BlogHer Ads, conference attendance, or ignition of Social Media Fails. I didn't make a dime, I made a few friends, and I made a lot of enemies. After a while, I could no longer afford, emotionally, to tend to it as I once had, and so submerged, hoping that nobody would notice my absence.
It worked. Nobody has.
Steve Rubel talks about the Attention Crash and for at least the last year, the public Note on my MS Office Messenger has been, "I *am* the attention crash."
What have I done in the last two years? I worked. A lot. I worked so much I didn't date. Then, I stopped working so much, and I tried to date, and that didn't go very well. I fell for someone who abused me so quickly, and so terribly, I still can't find the language to talk about it. But then I put aside some time and I met someone, and he met me, and oh, boy, has that ever been a trip. It's weird to have a human priority in my life. I hadn't had one in ten years, I mean, not like that, not a priority that did me the same favor. I let go of my notions of family, finally. I realized that I have a family that loves me and makes me better and values me, and blood has nothing to do with it. I lost a cat. I have a new roommate. I gained sixty pounds, and lost ten of them. I went blonde. I read a few books; more in '10 than I did in '08 or '09.
Mostly, I've been trying to put myself back together in a world that's completely fallen apart. And I think that's where the problem lies, or the key insight, as they say in the marketing biz. This world, the one I once lived online, is no longer as cohesive as it was when I left it. And in that time, I have changed, too.
I don't know what I'd write about anymore, in this space or anywhere else. I am out of practice, and if the last three years watching the real-time Web unfold have taught me anything, is that very few of us have anything of any value to say, and I include myself in that. I have become completely convinced that whatever I'd put here has no value at all and my resentment of people who assume that theirs does makes me want to slam doors and throw things. I don't know what compels me to even try it again. Perhaps going into this with an attitude of, "I'm writing this for the people I love, so maybe they'll understand what goes on in my head a little better" is the only way through that.
Yeah, this is public, anyone can read it, I'm sick of filtering and password-protecting and ratcheting down everything so some nutbag can't get near me. I did it, got the t-shirt, and my personal life is totally off-limits now, and I like it that way, and it's going to stay that way. I'm using this because a lot of my friends don't care much for Facebook, so whatever. If you're going to go through my entire social-media footprint, scouring for little bits of evidence that prove to you what a rotten person I am, fine. I don't care. I'm not here for you. If I'm just content for you to consume, well, you get out of it what you put into it. Here, I'll lay out what you guys want to know so you don't have to come back: yeah, I got fat. I have another tattoo and my hair is still blonde and the blonde is STAYING so if you don't like it go kick rocks or something. Yeah, I met someone awesome. Yeah, we've had some death up in these parts and the disease isn't far behind. I'm still at Edelman and I like it here, as frustrating as it sometimes is around here. I'm not going to tell you where my love goes. I'm not going to tell you how I feel. I'm not going to bother you with hoping you like me; I know who my friends are, and they make themselves known to me.
This Blog post partly recognizes the capturing of a key tenet in the living, breathing thought process of MoM[S] himself, by friend, former Social Media colleague and now Digital superstar at Edelman, Siobhan O’Neill. It is thus dedicated in part to her. She recently distilled in her own recent Tweet the essence of profound thought for her as occurring predominantly either ‘in airports, or on the freeway’. Right Brain, Randowm & Relevant, indeed. And I know that feeling well, as that “tangential” thought process led directly, [i.e. by accident], to this very Blog posting, which started from that one, random Tweet. Thanks, Siobhan…!
The post is pretty awesome. You should read it.
What I react here to is that apparently the post's genesis was this tweet I made on Monday night as I was leaving the airport.
Ken, it's stuff like that that totally makes my day.
I have a response to this that I am formulating. I might post it later today.
Love!
It's true that Facebook can lead to a false sense of connection to faraway friends, since few members post about the true difficulties of their lives. But most of us still know, despite Facebook's abuse of what should be the holiest word in the language, that a News Feed full of constantly updating "friends," like a room full of chattering people, is no substitute for a conversation. Indeed, so much of what has made Facebook worthwhile comes from the site's provisions for both hiding and sharing. It is not hard to draw the conclusion that some things shouldn't be "shared" at all, but rather said, whether through e-mail, instant message, text message, Facebook's own "private message" system, or over the phone, or with a cup of coffee, or beside a pitcher of beer. All of these "technologies," however laconic or verbose, can express an intimacy reserved for one alone.
My curiosity about networked publics, the private public, and public privacy, continues. And yet, this touches on the subject everyone refuses to talk about but still, it's there, hanging in our air like a subtitle: Intimacy.
A fascinating read.
In the stress of the day-to-day, it's relatively easy to commit leadership malpractice. Leaders carry a heavy burden and, in many organizations, the short-term rules over the long-term and the ends justify the means.
However difficult, leaders have an ethical responsibility to get the work done in a way that enriches the organization and the people within it. As you examine your beliefs and behaviors, try this exercise: Visualize one of your people coming home after a long day. As they enter the door, their loved one looks up and asks them about their day.
Now decide. What do you want them to say?
Wisdom worth printing and hanging on the wall.
(hat tip: uwe hook. thanks, uwe!)
There is a bigger problem, however. Social media tools are only useful for some problems. Managers need to ask, do social media tools solve my key challenges? Consider again collaboration inside companies. Why are people in your company not collaborating better? There are potentially many different reasons for this. As I show in my book Collaboration, some barriers to collaboration are motivational — people are unwilling to share information and look for help, perhaps because they see colleagues as rivals or only care about their own performance. Social media tools are just not going to be good at fixing these motivational problems. You need other solutions for this, such as changing the incentive system so that people are rewarded for helping others.
If you blindly focus on investing in social network tools, wikis, and blogs in your company, without solving these motivational problems first, you have just committed a great managerial sin. You have applied the wrong solution to your problems. You have prescribed cough medicine for a broken leg.
We need to be precise and honest about where these new social media tools have great impact, and where they don't. Then they will be seen as great tools, and we won't hear the snake oil label anymore.
I think that this is an important point. These collaboration tools - everything from Sharepoint to GetSatisfaction - are all very good at what they do, only if people are motivated to use them and the barriers to the collaboration are removed. This is true of organizations that use separate P&L structures for their teams; one team's gain becomes another's loss, and therefore there is no incentive to truly collaborate; it's a situation I've encountered often. I don't know what the solution is - I'm not a change or organizational management expert. I intend to pay attention to the issue over the next year, though, and come back to this thought later and see how my thoughts on it have evolved.
Ever wonder how media outlets find their sources?
A lot of the time, it's old-fashioned beat reporting, word-of-mouth communication, etc. But increasingly, it's posting a query to the Internet. Like NPR just did on its Facebook page to find sources for a feature it's apparently planning on the U.S. military.
I love this. I hate this, and I love this. It's a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster of love-hate.
I don't know WHAT I hate about it, though. I mean, Facebook is like anything else; it's a toolset, and if use of that toolset helps a journalist at NPR get the story done, then I am all for it and who am I to judge the method by which the source is uncovered?
So what do I hate about it? Somebody explain my instinct on this to me because I am having trouble figuring it out. I'm serious; I don't get why I had a moment of "oh, for Christ's sake" upon reading this. Why would I have?
I don't understand my own brain sometimes.
My friend Nicole Jordan had to pass on the opportunity to be a guest speaker and judge in the Social Media Challenge, sponsored by Cal State Fullerton, at the PRSSA National Conference this past Friday. She asked if I would be interested in doing it, to which I said, "of course."
As part of my duties, I gave a 15-minute talk about social media, largely informed by the work I do at Edelman, and very much inspired by the work of Tara Hunt, whose visually stunning presentation, "Happiness as your Business Model," and whose work in general, I greatly admire, and the fine, fine folks at The 99 Percent, whose tips and tricks I turn to for inspiration on a weekly basis. Once I can get the photo credits in, I, too, will share the talk I gave on Slideshare; just haven't quite had the time to get to that.
I received an email from a student who was at that presentation today. The personally identifying information has been redacted. For those of you who are wondering what Camus quote she's talking about, and what the hell it was in my presentation for, let me explain. My icebreaker at these things, especially if I'm wearing short sleeves, is to first introduce myself, and let the audience know that yes, that's a tattoo on my right forearm in red ink. And if I don't tell you what it is, you're going to sit there through my entire presentation, squinting at my arm instead of paying attention, trying to make out what it says. So I put it up on the slide, in the original French, in the font that it's in (it's called Vivaldi), and it says, in French, "Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai decouvert en moi un invincible ete." In English, that means "In the middle of winter, I discovered in me an invincible summer." It's by Albert Camus, from 1968's "Notes and Letters."
Here's what she said. I post this here to remind myself that it's moments like that, when you touch even just one person in the audience, and have made a positive impact, that really matter in work and in life.
Hi Ms. O'Neill,
My name is (redacted) and I am currently a student at (university) majoring in Communication Studies, PR. I attended the PRSSA 2009 national conference and I was really hoping to meet with you after the Social Media challenge event to let you know how much I really loved your presentation! It was probably one of my most favorite presentations, from the overview of social media tools and the internet, to the fun visual imagery you incorporated (especially the visual imagery!) in the presentation and that beautiful quote you shared with us by Albert Camus (and especially that quote). And actually, when you shared it with us, I was so struck and deeply inspired by its richness that I had to pause for a moment of reflection and felt myself tap into that invincible summer that really made me feel like I could do anything. It was so awesomely motivational. Again, thank you so much for coming out to speak at the PRSSA 2009 Conference and thanks a million for sharing that bit of wisdom with us all. It was truly an inspiration. -(student)
A longing for love and approval. That’s the dirty little secret of success.
Yes, you must make something people want. Of course, you must improve and extend it. Certainly, you must give 110% where customer satisfaction is concerned. Definitely, you must convert your customers to evangelists. All of that is true, always has been and will be.
BUT.
But you won’t be able to do those things, not really, not all the way, not as they must be done, unless there is a brokenness in you that continually craves attention and affection you somehow missed out on.
You have to have been abandoned, betrayed, ridiculed, unsupported at some point when you needed it most.
This sounds terrible and it is. But it’s the facts.
A contented person with a whole heart, who has never doubted for a moment that she is loved by God and the universe, should not bother trying to succeed as a creative entrepreneur. She should get a job working for someone else, turn it off at 6:00 PM, and come home to the people who love her.
Only a restless, broken heart can drive you to do what is necessary.
And that’s how to succeed in business without really crying.
I wish that being a contented person with a whole heart and all of that wasn't incongruent with success.
I got sick of my broken life and I set out to fix it. Seems like the minute I did that, I set myself up for failure. How about that. Cue sigh here.
At what price, Jeffrey. At what price.
Battelle asked about the role Twitter is playing with the company.
“It has changed the culture of our company,” Roberts said. Comcast has for a while now been using Twitter to scan for complaints and engage with customers. The idea was not his, but rather rose organically when someone in the company realized that a lot of public complaints were being sent over Twitter.
I think that this is something that a lot of brands have to be prepared for, and willing to do, in order to take advantage of the great opportunities that the social space affords them. Too often, companies try to make social media fit into outdated agency models, internal political silos, and old-school workflow. Stepping into this space demands cultural and business-process changes, bigger-picture issues of who, and how, and why, long before you even think about what your Twitter background looks like.
The Internet is not this great equalizer that rids us of the problems of the physical world -- the Internet mirrors and magnifies them. The divisions that we have in everyday life are going to manifest themselves online.
I've long held fast to the belief that the connections we make online are simply reinforcements of the ones we make offline. I mean, I do sometimes connect to people online first, then meet them later (I hope to meet a few of them at a conference in a week and a half) but generally, for me, it works the other way around far more often; I'll meet someone, determine that I want to keep the connection open, and then find them online in order to do so. Inevitably, I'll see them again somewhere, or we'll make plans to do so, and we'll be somewhat up on the general goings-on when we meet next.
What I have also noticed are the factions. The cliques, the groups, the Cool Kids and the Hipsters and the Runaway Hits. Whatever it is we experience in real life, we experience online, too. That has certainly been my experience, as observed in both my personal and professional lives over the past ten or so years.
What I am now struggling with is how much is too much, and which groups I give too much to. For so many years, I gave unfettered access to my life, my thoughts, my creative process, my art, my insecurities, hopes, fears, secrets, and dreams to those I met offline and connected to online. I did not always make distinctions between who deserved access and who did not, or close friends versus acquaintances. I gave too much, I think, and now, over ten years later, I discovered over the weekend just how much I gave up in doing so. Where my mistakes were, who I let in that I should not have, and how I am paying for that, deeply and tragically, now.
Long ago, I made some of those decisions somewhat unconsciously, not knowing where the semantic, real-time, networked, social, whatever-you-want-to-call-it Web was going, way back then. Back when it was cool to have a Geocities account and Hotmail was the best social tool we had. Before Blogger, and before Google. And now it's all there; in Google, that is, and a huge part of me wishes I could take it back. Growing up online doesn't just apply to teenagers and twentysomethings; I was, apparently, an adult when I first forayed online, and the errors in judgment I made as I clumsily navigated it have followed me here, into a present I never imagined I would live to see five years ago.
And yet, here I am. While I can backpedal a little, I can't undo it. Or most of it. Again with that pesky "what they know, they know" issue.
boyd notes the divide correctly; further, though, what I've noticed is that the divisions we face in both worlds often present themselves inequally (whether they are class or something else entirely). They may present themselves as one thing when in your frame of view, earshot, or access level, but elsewhere, among physical or online worlds that do not include you, they may really be something else. Their intentions may not always be good; and sometimes, they are bad; so bad, as to be injurious. That's the scarier part, for me; not the class differences, but the intention differences. Intent is much more difficult to uncover and it is much thornier once you get to it, nevermind what happens when you try to unravel or extract yourself from that piece of the Web, such as it is.
Words cannot express how much the music of Babyland has meant to me and so many of my friends over the last twenty years. I discovered the band through a most-favorite ex-lover (hi, Jonathan) in 1996, right as "Outlive Your Enemies" came out, and I promptly went to a show and bought their entire back catalogue at a merch table (before the Internet, as the days of the independent record store ended, their albums were virtually impossible to get, and could be found only at shows). I have attended countless shows since; I haven't been religious about attending every single one, but I have been at most of the LA installments since that year. Most of you who have been there can vouch for that.
Babyland is an LA phenomenon. A rather underground one; more than Ozo, or Boingo, or Jane's used to be, for sure. For twenty years, their brand of riotous, glorious, melodious noise has defied categorization, labeling, and pigeonholing simply by existing. Their instruments, in the beginning, were a Mac Plus, a damaged radiator coil, oil drums, steel pipes, and a buzzsaw, which, when lowered to the head of the oil drum, showered the gleeful audience with smoky, dangerous-smelling sparks. They were not, and could not be, mainstream, in any way; the closest they ever got to mainstream fame was the inclusion of the song "Double Coupon" on the soundtrack of 1995's "The Doom Generation;" it was said, by a friend I knew back in the day, that Gregg Araki, the film's director, was a fan; that was confirmed when I saw him again at a show in 2001, I think (I had met him in 1995 during my tenure at New Line Cinema and we spoke briefly before I disappeared into the pit; he said, and I quote, "I love these guys!"). Babyland transcended. The punks loved them. The rivetheads were delighted. Even the goths showed up to their shows. The famous film director, noted, loved them. Among fans I met and befriended over the years, through our mutual appreciation of their music, were a biochemist now working for Amgen and a massage therapist living in Seattle. At their shows, everyone from gutterpunks to corporate attorneys (and me, too) could be seen milling about, everyone on the same, level playing field, revelling in the music, the message, and the energy of the band and the crowd.I shared their music with everyone I knew and extolled their virtues and excellence to anyone who cared to listen or read. Long before online communities, or ShareThis!, or Friendster, several of my friends became fans through that. We defined shared community. We went to shows together, where I sang my little tin heart out. Their show at Bunker on December 3, 2004 was a defining moment in my life. That show was one of the only pits I've tossed myself into in fifteen years; the other was Killing Joke, just last year. In case you needed a benchmark to understand just how important they are. They are, to me, in the same breath as Killing Joke, as Nitzer Ebb, as Cabaret Voltaire. As the old Jane's Addiction, not the Ritual-and-beyond crap.For twenty years, these guys never made a dime off of their music; they played countless shows, often choosing to play for peanuts, or for no money at all, at venues that were all-ages, like downtown's The Smell, so young kids, who showed up in droves, could enjoy the fun, too; one of the coolest moments ever was the day that my friend Jonni showed up with her best friend's son, then seventeen or so, to a show there. I went to a show at The Smell a few months back, and there were parents there with their kids, little ones, aging punk- and rivethead dads, hoisting their own little budding punks upon their shoulders so they could see. I mean, after twenty years, it had been long enough for those early fans to settle into parenthood, but not forget where they came from, and so share it with their progeny. It was awesome.I am dismayed and saddened to learn that Babyland split up in August. Dan has made the decision not to continue the project, and let the fans know today. I understand why; it was just the two of them, a dynamic energy and split personality that would be impossible to replicate with any other performer. I am hopeful that at some point, the boys come back and get it together and soldier on, or maybe come back just for one final show. But right now, the prognosis is grim, and I am crushed by this news and am sadder than I can express knowing that there won't be another Babyland show for us all to rock out at. My heart just broke. Over a band. Perhaps this is ludicrous to you, and that's okay. I don't care. Thank you, Dan and Smith, for so many years of awesome music and equally awesome memories, of shows, of friends, of camraderie, and for writing songs about fighting for what's important. And for writing what is, inarguably, my personal theme song, Worst Case Scenario.I am the lowest of the low.
Everyone knows that MINT has a great product, but few know the strategic moves. To the point, what did it take to get there? How much did it cost to get started? When and how was it smart to raise money such that both the founder and the investors walked away happy? Aaron opened up MINT.com's books - and his old slide decks - tonight to share some shockingly frank details with the startups in attendance. Even more generously, he was happy to have his lessons be blogged for a more public audience:
WOW. Bookmarking this and saving it for later.
The Soul of the Community study offers new insights on the issue, by exploring what draws people to a community – and what makes them want to put down roots and build a life. Conducted by Gallup in 26 communities and funded the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the study probes the emotional factors that bind people to place.
What a great idea. Reading tonight!
What is awesomeness? Awesomeness happens when thick — real, meaningful — value is created by people who love what they do, added to insanely great stuff, and multiplied by communities who are delighted and inspired because they are authentically better off. That's a better kind of innovation, built for 21st century economics.
And how. Oh, look, he's on Twitter. *follow*
I work with a team of about 30 people, split between Canada and the US. Fortunately they’re all smarter than me, so from my perspective my role is to help to set the right direction for them, provide whatever support they need and stay out of the way so they can do their jobs.
good:
The Good Gap: Why Do Chinese Consumers Care More About Responsible Business Than Americans?
Despite—or perhaps because of—the relative immaturity of their economies, people in China, Brazil, and India expect companies to do more good than people in the United States and Europe. A new survey from Edelman Public Relations, a global communications agency, examines how consumers relate to companies and brands around social purpose, and how those relationships affect their decisions to purchase products and services.
…GOOD gives the Edelman Goodpurpose study some love. (Thanks, guys!)
Sage Advice of the Day: Henry Rollins, the relentlessly outspoken hardcore music icon — the Black Flag bearer of modern punk, if you will — recently participated in a “Letters to a Young American” project. What follows is an excerpt from Part 1 and Part 2.
“You’ll find in your life that sometimes your great ambitions will be momentarily stymied, thwarted, marginalized by those who were perhaps luckier; come from money; had more doors opened; where college was a given, not a student loan; it was something that dad paid for; where an ease and confidence in life was almost a birthright. Where for you, it was a very hard climb. … That happens all the time.
Just because you come from nothing, you must not let that be something that holds you back.”
Poignant, and more relevant than ever.
Yes.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the people in charge at the Augusta National Golf Club, a private club, can have whatever rules they want and they’re entitled to them. Personally, were I Rometty, I would fail to care if they didn’t invite me. I would also fail to see why IBM should remain a sponsor of a private club with discriminatory policies that don’t reflect IBM’s commendable commitments to global diversity or workplace parity. Translation: I’d be telling them to shove it either way. Most CEOs would agree that there are better things than sexism and classism to invest the resources of the people they lead in. And also, judging by this latest, I am sure that Augusta National has no idea how ridiculous they are, which is sad and their members should be completely embarrassed and mortified, and if they’re not, well, that says something pretty embarrassing about them, too, but I’m not getting bent about it. There are plenty of organizations and clubs that DO want my participation that aren’t violently slithering towards total irrelevancy.
Dear Sir:
I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.
I like the word screenwriter better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood, but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, contemplation and horsing around.
I have just returned and I still like words.
May I have a few with you?
Robert Pirosh
385 Madison Avenue
Room 610
New York
Eldorado 5-6024
My new favorite job application letter, from 1934. He ended up winning an Oscar for screenwriting!
(via Letters of Note)
We like words too.
(via good)
If we were rational about the new world of work, we would accept the idea that people should work less, since productivity has climbed so much in the past few decades. But will that be accepted doctrine of Western countries? Cab we shift to a 20 hour work week?
Heather Stewart via The Observer
A thinktank, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), which has organised the [recent London] event with the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, argues that if everyone worked fewer hours – say, 20 or so a week – there would be more jobs to go round, employees could spend more time with their families and energy-hungry excess consumption would be curbed. Anna Coote, of NEF, said: “There’s a great disequilibrium between people who have got too much paid work, and those who have got too little or none.”
She argued that we need to think again about what constitutes economic success, and whether aiming to boost Britain’s GDP growth rate should be the government’s first priority: “Are we just living to work, and working to earn, and earning to consume? There’s no evidence that if you have shorter working hours as the norm, you have a less successful economy: quite the reverse.” She cited Germany and the Netherlands.
Robert Skidelsky, the Keynesian economist, who has written a forthcoming book with his son, Edward, entitled How Much Is Enough?, argued that rapid technological change means that even when the downturn is over there will be fewer jobs to go around in the years ahead. “The civilised answer should be work-sharing. The government should legislate a maximum working week.”
People would be able to spend more time in community activities and growing their own food, for example.
However, the inherently Calvinist mindset that animates much of the policy discussion around unemployment and the inequitable distribution of income will likely block productive course of action around new work models. The answer will lie in more people dropping out, adopting a freelance lifestyle, and dialing down their consumption: a bottom-up adoption of slow, no-growth lifestyle.
Meanwhile, the Republicans labor to convert themselves into the party of corn-pone Nazism with all their unconcealed lust to push everybody around under the plastic eagle rubrics of “Freedom” and “Liberty.” Look at the dismal lineup of morons, hypocrites, and religious fanatics arrayed for the Iowa caucus: a doctor who is also a creationist!? A leveraged buyout artist! A grifter fresh from K Street! A lady Christian theocrat wholly owned by the “dominionist” New Apostolic Reformation cult! A George W. Bush imitator showing symptoms of early onset senility! The whole posse is preoccupied with things supernatural. And being so dedicated to things unreal, they’re the prime representatives of the suburban clusterfuck, who will do anything to keep that obsolete machine running, even if it means national suicide, because they lack the brains to understand where history is taking us and what the mandates of reality are shouting at us about the urgent need to reorganize American life. They are also the vassals of corporate despotism - where the Democrats are mere footservants. They masquerade as “job creators,” but they promote the off-shoring of every activity that corporate America can shed in its quest for ever-greater executive compensation. The lip-service they pay to “freedom” is belied by their intent to control everybody’s personal life, commoditize the public interest, and sell out their grandchildren’s future for a few extra rounds of golf.
James Howard Kunstler, 2012 Forecast: Bang and Whimper via Clusterfuck Nation
(via azspot)
Data galore: A screen grab from Radian6.
A rare comparison of the major monitoring & engagement
services: Radian6, Lithium, Attensity360 & 17 moreTarget audience: Brands, corporations, mid-size to large businesses. See Socialbrite’s series on social media…
For later.
From a few weeks ago; the inaugural run of aebelskiver. Verdict: a pain to make, but well worth it.
Four-ingredient Nutella cookies. (Please pardon the steamer basket; I couldn’t find my cooling rack.) Found recipe on Pinterest; from screen to mouth in fifteen minutes.
I’m not exactly sure what possessed me to make a meatloaf on what amounts to the hottest day of the year so far, but whatever. This is Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” recipe, just before it went in the oven.
Turlock frittata. Hot pepper, onion, garlic, and zucchini, studded with cherry tomatoes, all from the farm. Parmesan from TJ’s. There is also dill and paprika in there.
“The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.” -- Ralph Ellison
