Sunday, September 28, 2008

Queen of the Night


So I mentioned that a complete stranger, whom I canvassed in Iowa City for the presidential election, gave me a cutting of her Queen of the Night plant (her father's favorite plant from India) after I inquired about it on her front porch.

This is no small gesture.

After a little research I learned the Queen of the Night is in the same family (cestrum nocturnum) as the jasmine plant. It is incredibly fragrant and wildly popular in India, producing countless masses of light greenish-white or greenish-yellow flowers several times a year, which open only at night. The intoxicating fragrance from even a small, five-foot container grown specimen can reach for many hundreds of yards. The sweet scent accompanied us in the late night car ride back to Chicago.

All night long I dreamt of Jasmine and India (the woman was from India).

And then I realized the significance of the gift.

The last essay of a soon to be released photographic book of mine, Look and Leave : Photographs and Stories of New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward is entitled

On Jasmine and Recovery

"After inhaling toxic metallic air for days in the ravaged Lower Ninth Ward, I went to a nearby neighborhood for dinner. While walking to the restaurant I passed a jasmine plant.  As the rapturous fragrance enveloped me, I was jolted into the awareness that even after all the destruction; the contaminated soil of the Lower Ninth Ward might yield life once again."

I am once again reminded of the generosity of complete strangers and infused with the hope of a fresh new start for this country.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Just returned from canvassing in Iowa City today and I kept thinking of this famous quote by Mahatma Gandhi. We are living in critical times and can't hope that others will do the work for us. We ALL need to be involved. If anyone is considering voting for the McCain/Palin ticket, I hope you watched Sarah Pallin's interview with Katie Couric. It is frightening to think of her being just a heartbeat away from the presidency.

So I got home and checked my emails and came across this email...
"If you allow yourself to envision the world as it could be rather than the world as it is, what would it look like? And more importantly, what would you be willing to do to help create that world? " Here is the link to the website.
I took a few photographs of Iowa City. Lovely, lovely people. One woman gave me a cutting of her Queen of the Night plant sitting outside her front door (after she told me she was still undecided).

One more thing, 600 volunteers travelled from Illinois to Iowa this weekend to help create the CHANGE this country needs.
It is a wonderful thing..please consider donating time or money to the Obama campaign.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Michael Moore's New Movie

Click HERE to see Micahel Moore's New Movie, Slacker Uprising.

Stream it, download it, burn it now. It's the first time a major feature-length film is being released for free on the internet. You can be part of this historic moment by logging on now!

Enjoy!!

Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com
SlackerUprising.com

Sunday, September 21, 2008

David Foster Wallace on Life and Work

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

(Adapted from a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College. Mr. Wallace, 46, died last Friday, after apparently committing suicide.)

"There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

If at this moment, you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude -- but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real -- you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue -- it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

People who can adjust their natural default-setting this way are often described as being "well adjusted," which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphal academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default-setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what's going on inside me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home -- you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job -- and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.


The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid g-d- people.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth...

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do -- except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am -- it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line -- maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept. who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible -- it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out."

Selected Works

After his first novel came out in 1987, Mr. Wallace became known for blending inventive language, intellect, humor, philosophy and cultural references in his writing. Here are some of his best-known books.


Infinite Jest
Back Bay Books, $17.99
First published in 1996, this comic, postmodern novel, which is set in the near future and tackles the nature of entertainment, sprawls over about 1,100 pages and has hundreds of footnotes.


A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Back Bay Books, $14.99
This 1997 collection of nonfiction includes reporting and criticism. Topics range from the Illinois State Fair to the relationship between TV and literature.


Oblivion
Back Bay Books, $14.95
In the title story of this collection of eight short stories, a man believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring. The book, released in 2004, was Mr. Wallace's last work of fiction.


Consider the Lobster
Back Bay Books, $14.99
The author takes on subjects like the porn industry, talk radio and Sept. 11 in his 2005 book of essays. Also included: an article about his experiences following John McCain's campaign in 2000.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Reflections


Reflections on my state of mind.....

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Critical Crossroads....

I took the El (public train in Chicago) into the city a few nights ago to an art opening. For those of you who don't live in Chicago, traveling on the El is like being at the United Nations. People from all different backrounds...a true United Nations. It was the end of the day and people were tired. A few passengers were hooked up to their Ipods, a few on cell phones. Mostly, people don't talk or have any eye contact with "the other". My eyes searched for something to focus on...Chicago CTA maps, advertisements, scanning tother passengers. About 1/2 hour into the ride I spotted a man with an Obama for President hat on his head. I immediately felt this strange, warm affinity with him. My face softened and I smiled at him, giving him a thumbs up in recognition of our shared values. I had connected with this "other" CTA passenger in a way I had never imagined.

We are quickly approaching critical crossroads in the history of this country and the world.
The world has never been more fragile. I urge anyone who is reading this blog to dig deep into themselves and do whatever is humanly possible to work for getting Barack Obama elected for President of the United States on November 4th.

If you can, please, please please go to a neighboring swing state and help to register voters before October 4th. If you can, please, please please give of your time and make calls to other voters. This country and the world need us NOW! Volunteer!

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Opening At WALLSPACE


If anyone happens to be in Ottawa, Canada this weekend, I will be having an opening at the WALLSPACE gallery.
The portfolios being featured are Visitations and Faded dreams. The gallery director, Lori Wojcik, is dreamy. I look forward to a visit there in the spring when I will mount a solo exhibition.
(Mike, you are the only one I know who lives there...hope you can attend)!

Women and Change

Please join Women for Obama and the DNC Women's Leadership Forum
at the
National Women's Leadership Initiative
National Issues Conference
Friday, October 10 – Saturday, October 11, 2008
Chicago, IL

The National Women's Leadership Issues Conference will be the pinnacle event of the general election to highlight to importance of women's leadership and the women's vote in electing Barack Obama the next President of the United States! Women leaders from all 50 states will convene in Chicago, IL for a two-day conference featuring Senator Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Senator Hillary Clinton and high-level policy makers and senior campaign advisors. This conference will present important policy and campaign strategy updates and provide field tools for women to take back to their communities.

We invite you to join our leadership at one of the levels below:
National Chair – Raise $100,000 or contribute $57,000
National Chair &Private Leadership Committee Reception, Program Listing, VIP Seat, Private Event– TBD
State Co-Chair – Raise $50,000 or contribute $28,500
Private Leadership Committee Reception, Program Listing, VIP Seating, Private Event – TBD
Leadership Committee – Raise $25,000 or contribute $10,000
Private Leadership Committee Reception, Program Listing, Premium Seating, Private Event – TBD

Premium Ticket – Contribute $5,000
Premium Seating and Private Event - TBD
General Admission Ticket – Contribute $1,000
General Admission Seating
https://donate.barackobama.com/page/contribute/OVFWLF?custom1=Linda+Yates

Barack Obama's Plan for America - The Difference an Obama Presidency Will Make
Draft Agenda

I S S U E P A N E L S

National Security & Foreign Policy
Protecting Our Homeland and Restoring American Alliances –
What an Obama Presidency Will Mean for National Security

The Economy
Keeping America's Promise –
The Route Back to Economic Security and Strengthening the Middle Class

Health Care
A Plan for a Healthy America - Quality, Affordable & Portable Coverage for Every American

Energy and Climate Change
New Energy for America – Investing in Renewable Energy and Green Jobs

Standing up for Women
What's at Stake – The Courts, Reproductive Choice, Equal Pay & Work-Family Balance

F E A T U R E D B R I E F I N G S

How We Will Win
Campaign Strategy, Polling Update and the Reasons Republican and Independent Women
are Choosing Barack Obama

Women Stepping Up to the Plate
Highlighting Extraordinary Women Leaders on the Campaign Trail

Let's Get to Work
Ground Game Strategies and Messages for Women to Take Back Home for Election Day


Feel free to contact Linda with any questions!
linda@hollandyates.com

Thursday, September 04, 2008

The Invisible Age

Tomorrow night Leaf Study No. 1 will be exhibited at the Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco at a group show titled The Invisible Age, Photographic Self-Portraits by Women Aged 50-65. I am pleased to be included in a very thought provoking show.

" What is the invisible age? To a large extent it’s a phenomenon of our society, which sees and values younger women for their beauty and energy and also sees and values older women for their wisdom and character. But, in the eyes of this same society, the 50ish to 65ish woman is of little value and practically invisible.

But, what we’re dealing with is not a purely external phenomenon. The invisible age is also internal. It’s an age of transition, when women often must go through the unsettling process of redefining who they are to themselves and to the world."

The work I submitted was created last fall. It was only after I saw the call for work that I realized that Leaf Study No. 1 could be viewed as a self portrait.



To see more of the work in the exhibition, go to LensCulture.