tongue and groove

Our Lady of Monetization

Jesus would have killed on social media. he would have had more Twitter followers than Ashton Kutcher and Justin Bieber combined. think how many hits his YouTube videos would have gotten. he'd have broken viewing records if he'd streamed his sermons at UStream. everyone and their uncle would have been clamoring to be his apostle. he could have been keynote speaker at every conference. his product line could have grown increasingly expensive and his retreats even more exclusive.  his blog could have been such an effective marketing platform. the gospels could have been sold as downloadable e-books, earning important revenue streams for his affiliates.

what a shame he was born way too early.

Mill Valley

(snapped a few years ago one evening when J was playing at Sweetwater with Joe Louis Walker)

seeing Linda's post about Joe's Taco Lounge in Mill Valley instantly made me want to spend a day there. in Mill Valley, i mean, not the taco lounge...though given how much i love tacos, that wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility.

Mill Valley and i go way back. somewhere around 1980-81, i lived there briefly, in a house on the east side of town with two roommates. one was an old friend, a dancer and choreographer; the other was someone i didn't know, a Scientologist who worked at Heath Ceramics in Sausalito.

i was working at an upscale men's and women's boutique in the heart of downtown Mill Valley, on the corner of Miller and Throckmorton. (the last time i was there, a coffee place was in that space.) it was a store geared to the affluent Mill Valley crowd...$400 linen shirts for women, Italian gabardine slacks for men, Lucchese boots. i was paid the whopping sum of $5/hour and was basically in charge since the owner and her partner mostly hung out in the office in the back.

one day a quiet, middle-aged man came in and purchased some slacks. i recognized the name on his credit card. he changed into his new slacks and as i kneeled on the hardwood floor to pin the hems (did i mention that my $5/hour, no commission pay included having to hem every pair of slacks i sold?), i thought how odd it was to have come of age during the Watergate era and now find myself hemming the pants of Daniel Ellsberg. Jim Lange shopped there. i once waited on a barefoot, coked-out woman in ratty jeans who paid for her purchases with a huge wad of hundred dollar bills she had stashed in her pocket.

the first time i ever saw a car phone (back when cell phones were car phones) was while working at that job. i was standing at the counter when i saw a guy in a gold Mercedes convertible (of course) turn left onto Throckmorton. i thought, "was that...? was he holding a phone?!" it looked like something out of Get Smart.  :)

after work, i'd walk around the corner to Sweetwater, sit at the bar and have a glass (or two or three) of white wine. i've spent many a night in Sweetwater--seen lots of live music there. it was  probably my all-time favorite music venue and i was heartbroken when it closed. a friend of mine in Marin actually looked at buying it at one point in the late 90's. i was also sad when Village Music closed since it was one of the most amazing record stores in the country. maybe i sound like an aging baby boomer whining over the old days, but these were cultural institutions. (if you don't believe me, start Googling.) and to replaced by what? another cupcake store?

in the evenings i'd sometimes go to an aerobics class in a studio above a bookstore not far from my house. a bookstore where Van Morrison could sometimes be spotted reading at a table in the cafe. i'd see Carlos Santana having lunch at my favorite sandwich spot. when you live in Marin County (which i did for a total of about 8 years in 5 different towns), you're used to seeing celebrities--it's no big deal.

i love Mill Valley. i've never known why it tugs at me so hard. maybe it's the physical environment. there are redwoods there and since i'm from redwood country, redwood groves instantly make me feel at home. when i read Linda's post, i suddenly realized i didn't know anything about Mill Valley's history. my genealogy research has given me a new fascination for history. so i looked it up at Wikipedia. well, looky there...in the mid-1800's: "Some of the rest of his land was leased out for dairy farming to Portuguese settlers.^[13] A majority of the immigrants came from the Azores Islands." i haven't yet figured out how my paternal great-grandparents made their way from the Azores to Del Norte County. wouldn't that be something to learn that as part of their journey, they went through Mill Valley. and this: "...Ranch 'B' is one of the few remaining dairy farm buildings and located near the parking lot at the Tennessee Valley trailhead." i haven't been to Tennessee Valley in ages, but i've hiked to the beach there dozens of times in the past and probably looked at and walked right by that building.

the more i study my family's genealogy (on all sides), the more i realize just how small this world really is...and just how much wonder is waiting to be discovered.

why the Oscars blew it.

poor James Franco. i'm not going to waste time reading any reviews of this year's Oscars telecast, but i suspect that his work as co-host will take a lot of blame for why the show sucked. but i don't think it was his fault.

last Thursday he posted a photo to his Whosay account of what appeared to be the telecast's writing room. take a look, and make sure you note the large man with the Prince Valiant haircut, red glasses and blue t-shirt. you know who that is, right? Bruce Vilanch. for anyone who might not know, Vilanch has been writing jokes for the Oscars shows for over 20 years. some of you may know him for his uproariously funny work (NOT) as a performer and joke writer on Hollywood Squares. (although it might sound like i do, i mean no disrespect to Mr. Vilanch. he's clearly carved out a very successful career for himself in mainstream Hollywood comedy.)

this, to me, is the crux of the problem: the people who run the Oscars telecast still think we're living in a Hollywood Squares world.

the Academy acted like it wanted to rocket the show into relevance by casting James Franco and Anne Hathaway as hosts. this was breaking the mold! this year was going to be different! this would surely get the kids to watch!

the first sign of trouble in my opinion was when the opening montage (which had been pretty good up to that point) suddenly presented us with the aging Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox in their Back to the Future roles. if you really wanted to skew younger demographically, i'm not sure i'd have gone with a reference from 1985. but that's just me.

i'm trying to understand what the thought process was in the writers' room when someone suggested, "hey, you know what would be really great and funny? let's have 94-year-old Kirk Douglas teeter out there on his cane to present!" or: "i know! we'll put Anne in a tux and then she can sing a really corny song about Hugh Jackman. and then we'll send James out dressed like Marilyn Monroe! because she'll be dressed like a man...get it?! that'll KILL!" because nothing skews hipper than a sight gag that Hollywood's been doing since Uncle Miltie days.

the only reason i even watch televised awards shows anymore is to read the accompanying Twitter snark. if Twitter didn't exist, i wouldn't even waste my time--i'd just watch the video clips online the next day. Twitter's the only thing that makes it tolerable. the only time i laugh is when i'm reading tweets.

during Sunday's show, the consensus on Twitter seemed to be that James Franco was baked. i laughed at all the tweeted Franco jokes as much as the next person, but i actually didn't think he was stoned. (though if he wasn't, he probably wishes he'd been.)  :)  maybe i'm old-fashioned, but he seems to come from a pretty tight-knit family. i guess i have a hard time believing that he'd have his parents and grandmother sitting 3rd row center just get really high before he performed in front of them. i felt bad for him. he could only do what they asked him to do, and they didn't ask him to do much. and the tone was all off. Anne Hathaway is a lovely, adorable young woman and a good actress. but she was coming off like a gushing, fawning cheerleader rather than a host. it would have been even weirder for Franco to adopt her tone. so he was left to stand there in his tux, next to Anne and occasionally recite some corny words written for him by a roomful of highly-paid Hollywood writers.

he was taking some bashing online for his backstage posting, but maybe firing off those photos and very short videos during the show was the only thing helping him get through the show. i was watching the video clips as he posted them and i found one of them very telling. James is with Jordan (Rubin, i think). he says that Jordan is the head writer and points out that it's all his responsibility. Jordan says there are other writers--that he can't take all the credit. to which James replies that, no, it's his responsibility. Jordan says James has improvised a lot. James insists that he's said the lines as they were written for him. watch.  :)

what was the point of Billy Crystal's appearance? (and why in god's name was he given a standing ovation?) was that a nod to the 60+ crowd to say: we didn't forget about you--here's someone you know and love. and just to drive the point home--and make sure that the 80-somethings didn't feel left out--they also included Bob Hope. because lord knows, nothing says 2011 like a hologram Bob Hope.

James Franco often blazes his own path and last night was no exception. and with a mother like Betsy, it's no surprise. my favorite quote from this profile of her last week: "If your partner doesn't understand creativity, just find somebody else." from reading about Betsy and her husband, it's clear that the Franco kids were raised in a home where creativity was not only encouraged, but valued:

"My kids are very, very inspiring to me," said author Betsy Franco. "They are so fearless. I consider myself fearless, but no way, by comparison, when I see what they are doing. If you are willing to fail, you can pretty much do anything. If you pick yourself up and keep going, you can do anything."

James Franco, some will say that you failed as an Oscars co-host. i applaud you for being willing to try it. i'd even argue that it was the Academy and its writers that failed you.

and where is James Franco today? based on this photo, my guess would be he's right where he wants to be...back at school.

screenwriting

this is a fascinating interview with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. Happy Oscars Sunday!

TECLOPOLIS

if you can spare 12 minutes, this is a beautiful stop-motion film. gorgeous visuals. brilliant storytelling.

natural human purpose

this morning i read Gretchen Rubin's assay, Why I No Longer Worry About Having a "Personal Style."  the line that really jumped out at me was this:

I don’t want to think too much about making authentic choices about things I don’t authentically care about.

in my previous post i found myself wondering if big dreams are really only big dreams if we have an audience for them. as we share more and more of our private lives and selves online, it's hard not to fall into the trap of caring about certain things simply because everyone else seems to. at times, the blogosphere and its offshoot, social networking, can feel like high school 2.0, filled with cliques, competition, comparisons, striving, disappointment and hurt feelings.

we can end up caring about our "personal style" not just in our closets and homes, but also in the online environments we create and share. we manipulate our image and style via the photos and videos we share. some develop a certain look online. some develop a look that's appealing to so many people that they spawn copycats. we might look around and think that if only our blogs, images, wardrobes, homes and art looked like that person's over there, then maybe we'd have lots of commenters, followers, fans and subscribers, too. but do we stop to ask ourselves if we authentically care about any of it? or do we adopt caring about it out of a need for acceptance and/or connection? sometimes it seems to me that we're so caught up in witnessing each other's lives that we forget to live inside our own. who are we doing this for?

please know i'm not judging anyone's choices--this is just me sharing what i'm thinking about these days. asking myself, as Gretchen wrote, what i authentically care about. as part of Mondo Beyondo, i created a list of big dreams, yet when i opened the list a week later to re-read it, i found myself wondering: whose dreams are these? are these really my dreams? do i authentically care about them, or are they dreams that someone with my skills, talents, interests should/would/could have? did i write them just to have something to write, or was that really my heart speaking?

if you missed it yesterday, i hope you'll check out my La Salonniere interview with Patti Digh. the last question i posed to her was about desire lines...about natural human purpose. i guess that's what i'm trying to get at: what's my natural purpose? not the one i'm adopting because others have, but the path i would naturally gravitate toward without any outside influence. it's there that my truest big dreams reside.

everyone has a story.

last night i watched episode 2 of season 2 of NBC's Who Do You Think You Are? last night's episode traced the ancestry of country singer Tim McGraw's fraternal lineage. episode 1 last week did the same with actress/singer Vanessa Williams. both were fascinating. what i love so much about the show is not that it's about the ancestry of celebrities--the series uses celebrities to hook our interest, since we might not tune in if the promo said we'd be viewing ancestral research for Bob down the street (Americans are nothing if not shallow)-- it's what i learn about our history that compels me to watch it. what i learn about our nation's history and the people who comprise the fabric of its very existence.

and just like last Friday night, as soon as the show was over, i made coffee (J was at a gig) and logged onto Ancestry to dig further into my own family's history. i did extensive research on my family tree last year at Ancestry, mostly on my mother's side. what's ironic is that prior to that, i knew much less about my maternal lineage than i did about my father's side of the family, yet i've been able to learn tons more about mom's side than dad's at the site. (but not to worry re my dad's lineage, a distant cousin's husband traced my Italian roots back to the 1700's about a decade ago. still working on finding our Azores Islands roots on the Portuguese side.) next thing i knew, 3-1/2 hours had gone by.

i can easily lose hours rooting around in my genealogical roots because each new piece of information leads to more questions. it's like putting together a giant puzzle that has tiny pieces. it really does make one wonder (at least it does me) about the power of DNA when you begin to see certain trends--certain patterns appearing in lives that are separated by generations.

last night i didn't feel like adding to my tree--seeing how far out i could stretch a particular branch. instead i decided to dig a little deeper on just one branch. i began to look for additional information on my nearest great-grandfathers on my maternal grandfather's side. in doing so, i came across a city directory from Omaha, Nebraska that listed three generations of great-grandfathers. i believe this one was dated 1889:

Milo S. Barnum was my great-great-great grandfather, Milo Seeley Barnum. (what a great name!) his son, my great-great-grandfather, was Jehiel R(ichards) Barnum and his son was my great-grandfather, Louis (it's misspelled in the directory) Octave Barnum. their ages would have been about 82, 50 and 20 when this directory was printed. Milo lived to be 88. he died in Omaha in 1895 and last night i found his burial plot information. Jehiel died young--he was only 52. he died before his father, in 1891. both he and his wife Marie-Adelaide (she was French-Canadian) are, i believe, buried in Omaha. my great-grandfather, Louis Octave, died in Port Hueneme, California (Ventura County) at age 75. his wife, my great-grandmother May Emmaline Ludlow (who i vaguely remember visiting when i was about seven) is buried in Weed, California, about three hours north of here. that's where my younger brother and i visited her when she lived in a trailer park next to my maternal grandparents.

my great-great-great grandfather, Milo, was born in Enosburg, Vermont in 1806. Enosburg is in northern Vermont, near Quebec. in 1834, he married Abigail Flint in Shipton, Quebec. in their later years, they ended up in Iowa and last night i learned that Abigail is buried in Dunlap, Iowa. Milo is listed as a farmer in that Omaha directory. it makes me wonder what sorts of crops he grew and what compelled him to relocate to Iowa from Quebec. it's not like his wife Abigail was from there--she was born in Danville, Quebec. did they know people in Iowa? had they heard stories about it being good farming land? Dunlap is near Omaha, even though it's in the next state, so Milo's relocation to Omaha isn't surprising.

Milo and Abigail gave birth to my great-great-grandfather Jehiel in Danville, Quebec in 1839. he married Marie-Adelaide Morin in Quebec at age 26. by the time he was 41 in 1880, they were living in Omaha. the Barnum men lived to ripe old ages (my grandfather lived to be 85)--what was the cause of Jehiel's death at age 52?

Jehiel's son, Louis Octave, my great-grandfather, was born in Quebec in 1868. some documents say he was born in Danville, but the U.S. Naturalization form he completed in 1924 lists his birthplace as St. Johnsburg, Quebec. he married May in 1892 and they were in Omaha in 1900. but they left Omaha and moved to Calgary, Alberta for a time. i just learned this last night when i found them listed on a 1916 Canadian census form. they later moved to Tacoma, Washington and ended up migrating southward. 

i'm sure you see how you could lose hours and hours rooting around digging to find information on just a handful of people, and by now i have hundreds in my family tree at Ancestry!  i could literally spend the rest of my life on this 'work' and if i did, i suspect i'd never find it anything less than fascinating. i realize that reading this may not be interesting to anyone else. but i truly do love hearing about everyone's ancestry, because it's each of our individual stories that has created our grand national story.

as synchronicity would have it, this morning's Daily Om email was titled, "Everyone Has a Story":

It's easy to forget sometimes that everyone has a story to tell if we take the time to listen. We are so accustomed to hearing the stories of people in the news that we sometimes lose track of the fact that the random stranger on the bus also has a fascinating story about where they came from and how they got to be where they are. The sheer variety of paths taken in this world, from farmers to CEOs to homeless people to world travelers, is indicative of how much we can learn from each individual.

that's just my way of saying that if you'd like to share any of your family's story in the comments, please feel free to do so. as Frasier Crane used to say, "i'm listening..."

The Cowgirl Way

in Gary Shteyngart's brilliant satirical novel, Super Sad True Love Story, women in his future America wear transparent onionskin jeans that expose their genitals and porn is part of mainstream media. it seems a bit shocking at first, until you realize...wait a minute, didn't MTV just premiere a teen 'drama' called Skins that's now being called out for child pornography? when we live in a culture where Snooki can have a NY Times bestseller (and i know nothing about Jersey Shore or her book) and the Kardashian sisters are famous for, well, being famous, it's suddenly not such a big stretch of the imagination.

i love to scour the new releases section of our library to discover wonderful books i might otherwise not think to look for. last night i read a wonderful YA book by Holly George-Warren, The Cowgirl Way. who doesn't love cowgirls?! the opening line in the introduction:

"Always saddle your own horse!" That was the motto of Connie Douglas Reeves, a Texan who stayed in the saddle until her death at age 101 in 2003.

it's a wonderful book and i learned about an important slice of American history. while women back East were leading traditional, buttoned-up lives, women who came West in the 19th century were blazing trails:

...for most of the nineteenth century, no woman in America could vote, run for public office, or own property. This began to change in the West, however, before anywhere else in the country. In 1869, Wyoming passed legislation that gave women the right to vote and hold civic office...The leader in the fight for women's rights in Wyoming was Esther Hobart Morris. Esther helped draft the women's suffrage bill there with William Bright. When the legislation was signed into law on December 10, 1869, newspaper headlines declared, FIRST WOMEN IN THE WORLD TO WIN EQUAL SUFFRAGE! The women of Great Britain sent a congratulatory telegram: "To the women of Wyoming on the triumph you have won for all women by the emancipation of the women of your state from political serfdom."

Women were buying ranches and doing their own cattle drives. We've all heard of Annie Oakley, but there were so many other women who performed amazing stunts in Wild West shows. They had to fight to be included in rodeos, especially when they could beat the men at their own competitions. These were amazing women who could ride bucking broncos and rope steers. There are still cowgirls trying to make it on the rodeo circuit today, but given the decline in the ranching life, many have to leave their ranches to seek employment in more urban areas.

how did we get here? how did we find ourselves in a place where our cultural images of women are often ones that objectify rather than revere them? i see it all the time on Facebook, where girls and young women post self-objectification photos of themselves and it makes me so sad. this isn't about Puritanical values or about being a prude--it's about wanting to have female role models that inspire us through courageous actions rather than the size of their silicone breasts.

call me old-fashioned if you like, but i know one thing: the Women's Professional Rodeo Association has just gained a new fan. given a choice, i'll take The Cowgirl Way any day.

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UPDATE:  this NYTimes story was apparently published the day i posted this, but i'm just seeing it two days later via a journalist's tweeting of it. the title of the story? Only Cowgirls Run for Office

does what we share become our truth?

one of the first things i saw at Twitter on Sunday morning was a link to Zadie Smith's brilliant essay, "Generation Why?" in The New York Review of Books. in it, she reviews both the film, The Social Network, and a book by internet visionary Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget:  A Manifesto.  [note:  if you haven't seen the film, you may want to skip to the latter part of the essay...though i haven't seen it yet and reading her review certainly didn't spoil it for me.]

Smith was at Harvard in 2003  when the first version of Facebook broke and she says she remembers the fuss that it caused. she reminds us that this is a program that was created by a college sophomore...

...with a Harvard sophomore’s preoccupations. What is your relationship status? (Choose one. There can be only one answer. People need to know.) Do you have a “life”? (Prove it. Post pictures.) Do you like the right sort of things? (Make a list. Things to like will include: movies, music, books and television, but not architecture, ideas, or plants.)

Zuckerberg created it quickly (in three weeks, she writes) but didn't seem to give much thought about the implications of it until much later.

Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits—none of this is important.

we can be various versions of ourselves with different groups of people, yet Facebook seems not to care about that as evidenced by their cavalier resetting of privacy settings awhile back.

On this occasion, the world protested, loudly, and so Facebook has responded with “Groups,” a site revamp that will allow people to divide their friends into “cliques,” some who see more of our profile and some who see less.

yet how does Groups work with FacebookConnect?

In this new, open Internet, we will take our real identities with us as we travel through the Internet...you’ll also take your likes and dislikes with you, your tastes, your preferences, all connected to your name, through which people will try to sell you things.

this leads her to Lanier's book, which she calls "frightening" and says it "chimes with my own discomfort."

Lanier is interested in the ways in which people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate...We know that we are using the software to behave in a certain, superficial way toward others. We know what we are doing “in” the software. But do we know, are we alert to, what the software is doing to us? Is it possible that what is communicated between people online “eventually becomes their truth”?

the bottom line, in my opinion:

“You have to be somebody,” Lanier writes, “before you can share yourself.” But to Zuckerberg sharing your choices with everybody (and doing what they do) is being somebody.

Smith posits that the real reason behind Facebook is simply to be liked.

If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us...To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.

it's a brilliant essay and i encourage you to read it. 

some corners of the blogosphere are all abuzz over Facebook possibly unveiling an email program today. as we turn more and more (and more) of our online intereactions over to Facebook (well, i don't, but many do), i just thought it might be good to remind ourselves that the bottom line is Facebook's bottom line.

is it art if no one claps?

is it art if no one sees it?

early this morning, i saw this NY Times story linked at Twitter. it's about a group of artists who created an installation under the streets of New York in an abandoned subway station. it's called The Underbelly Project and the artists took great risk to create it. it's illegal to access the property, let alone paint the walls. here's the catch:  they don't care if anyone ever sees it. in fact, after showing it to the reporter who wrote that story, the curators removed the equipment used to access the site. how many artists would invest the time, energy and risk required to create an installation if they knew it wouldn't be seen by an audience? it begs the question:  do we create art for ourselves...or for an audience?

some of us (including me) give lip service to how we blog for ourselves...that we're not writing posts with an audience in mind...that we really don't care whether or not anyone comments. but how many of us really mean that? how many of us would keep doing this without any outside validation? in my years of blogging i've sometimes been mystified by readers' reactions...often confused why some posts that i put so little thought into (junk food posts, so to speak) would garner a lot of comments...and others that i poured my heart into...where i really revealed a slice of myself...got none. years ago, i used to struggle with that. i don't anymore, because when i say i'm posting first and foremost for myself, i mean it. (i learned long ago that having expectations can set us up for disappointment. i had to re-learn that lesson when i started blogging.)

my intention is not to judge anyone else's  path or online journey, and like anyone who's a mass of contradictions, i reserve the right to reverse my course at any time.  ;)  what bothers me lately is the blatant pleading for attention that i see in some corners of the blogosphere, as if it's all a race to the top...but to the top of what? what i loved so much about blogging when i found it seven years ago was that it flattened hierarchies. it didn't matter if you were a CEO or a bike messenger...all that mattered was the quality of your blog. but given human nature and the instilled American ethos to chase after success, the blogosphere created its own hierarchies. (i'm not disregarding my international blogging friends; i honestly believe those elements of the blogosphere were exacerbated by U.S. bloggers.)

i cherish my blogging community, so i'm not implying that anyone shouldn't carve out a successful online life or be paid to do work that they've created and nurtured through a blogging community. on the contrary! i'd love to be paid for my online presence. (and if you figure out a way for me to do that, please let me know...because so far, no one's offering up any money to just "be Marilyn.")  ;)

i'm talking about some who seem to be in a constant quest for more readers, more commenters, more page views, more Twitter followers or Facebook friends. i hear some bloggers lament that they feel left out of certain groups...that some blogging circles are perceived as cliques...and that makes me sad. not sad that they're feeling left out of some group they perceive to occupy some rareified, special place...but sad that blogging can be like junior high redux.

some of you might find that Underbelly Project story depressing. i found it inspiring. i admire the sentiment behind it because it would take great passion to put that much energy and risk into a project just for the sake of doing it. and it reminds me yet again that what's so inspiring about passion is the act of doing. some of my favorite moments in life have been when i've been so absorbed in something that i lose track of time. that, for me, is the outward manifestation of passion. it doesn't matter if anyone ever sees what i've been doing and, in fact, over the past couple of years i've been sharing less and less online. the simple joy of doing it makes it worthwhile.

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UPDATE: my Twitter pal, @p0ps, turned me onto this incredible photo essay of The Underbelly Project. check it out!