PotD / Social Commentary

Getting By With A Little Help

November 17, 2015

But what we can do, as flawed as we are, is still see God in other people, and do our best to help them find their own grace. That’s what I strive to do, that’s what I pray to do every day.—Barack Obama

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]The cane sits close to my desk, just in case I need the help. I hate the damn thing. I hate the sight of it, and even more the fact that I should probably use it more than I do. Rain will force me to use it today, I already know. Tomorrow may be another such day as well. With winter beginning to set in, the days when I need the help are going to begin outnumbering the days I don’t. I am somewhat pissed off by the knowledge there are 80-year-old men out running marathons while I can’t get down the hall to the bathroom without assistance.

I never have liked asking for help. Somewhere in my head, for some reason, me asking for help is a sign of weakness. I don’t mind others asking for help when they need it, though I am slightly annoyed when a certain five-year-old asks for help tying her shoes when she’s yet to try for herself. I don’t want to ask anyone for help and I don’t like so often being in a position of needing help that, at times, it feels as though I can’t do anything without some form of assistance. Losing any bit of my independence strikes deep at my soul, leads to depression and questioning my own value in the world. I have quite possibly thrown my cane across the floor in frustration.

Yet, here I am again this morning, needing to lean on something, or someone. I woke up this morning barely able to move. Independence is a myth. I’ve become reliant on Kat and some days when she has to be gone for prolonged periods I often limit my own activities for fear that, should something happen, there’s no one here to help (the cats are absolutely no help at all). When I go for a walk, I have to make sure my phone is well charged in case I should fall, become lost or confused, or need a ride home.

I never expected to have these limitations at this age and it angers me to no end that I can’t keep up with everyone else on the planet. Needing help, even from an inanimate object totally under my control, is emotionally deflating.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]I am one of the lucky ones. Despite my challenges, I have always known that someone has had my back; friends who have made sure I had something to eat, that drove me to doctors appointments, and kept a roof over my head. Not everyone is so fortunate. Nearly four million people in the United States will experience homelessness this year. Of those, almost 60 thousand of those are veterans; 1.3 million are children. They’re just out there, on their own, struggling to exist.

The second stanza of the poem on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor reads:

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

At this very moment, there are 10,000 Syrian refugees, and more from other war-torn countries, waiting at our shore, looking for help. Yet, because of the cowardly actions of a handful of Daesh morons, there are many of us wanting to hide behind a wall of fear and not let them in. We would rather let them starve or die of hypothermia than accept the risk that comes with being compassionate.

If America has become this country who is afraid too afraid of the shadow of terrorism to keep the refugees of that terrorism alive, then we have lost every last shred of our independence; our fear cripples us just as severely as arthritis in my back and legs. I have a cane on which I can lean, and friends ready to help. The millions homeless and those fleeing terror need help as well. The time has come to step up and be that help.[/one_half_last]

Art / Photography / PotD

A Heart For Sex

October 23, 2015

Curved (2011)

Sex is the driving force on the planet. We should embrace it, not see it as the enemy.—Hugh Hefner

“Ask your doctor if your heart is healthy enough for sex.”

I have always chuckled a little bit at that line from an ad for a major erectile dysfunction medication. I’ve also heard apocryphal stories about Hef keeping a bowl of the little blue pills by his bed. I rather doubt that story is completely true, but the man is now 89. I think we can give him a bit of a break on the subject. I still find it humorous that an amorous individual might need to check with their physician, calling the poor guy in the middle of dinner, with, “Hey Doc, the wife didn’t burn the roast tonight. Ya’ think it’s safe for me to hump her?”

Realistically, though, sex can take a lot of heart, especially when it’s more than a physical act but rather a primary driver of one’s business. Publishing a magazine where sex is the primary motivator is far from being a romp in the park, despite the fact that Hef managed to make it look that way. Playboy® was never about page after page of increasingly raunchy photos, but about a lifestyle in which sex wasn’t something hidden or repressed as it seemed to be in other publications. Hef once said:

I have very strong theories about magazine publishing. And I think that it is the most personal form of journalism. And I think that a magazine is an old friend.

Hugh Hefner, when he started the magazine in 1953, had a heart for sex that wasn’t all that different from some of his contemporaries in the research fields, such as Masters and Johnson or Alfred Kinsey. The post-war period of the late 1940s and 50s took the cover off sex and sexuality that led to the sexual revolution of the 60s. There was a desire to understand and appreciate and experience sex in ways that extended far beyond the physical act. For all the criticism he received, the content mix Hef brought to his magazine perfectly reflected a heart for sex that fueled a revolution.

If Playboy continues to stumble, it may well be because its current leadership fails to have that heart for sex that Hef has. Current CEO Scott Flanders, who interestingly enough is an Indianapolis native, His academic studies at the University of Colorado were in economics, not journalism, and from there he went on to law school. Prior to coming to Playboy, Flanders took a beleaguered Freedom Communications Company and managed it straight into bankruptcy in 2009, whereupon he left. He sees Playboy Enterprises, which he joined in 2011, as a brand management company, not a publisher.

Playboy’s chief content officer, Cory Jones, who had the unpleasant task of telling Hef the magazine was dropping nudes, is a digital strategist who is successful in generating high hit counts and unique views. While he does have some experience working with men’s titles, such as Maxim.com and mandatory.com, he has no relevant experience in print, which, as titles such as the New York Times and Vogue are discovering, cannot be managed in the same fashion as online publications. Jone’s attention is strictly on the numbers, using whatever form of pandering necessary to get there, as is evidenced at mandatory.com.

The people at the top of Playboy’s org chart simply do not have the heart for sex that Hef had when he founded the magazine and through the years that made it great. Without that emphasis, Playboy is set up to fail. Not everyone was meant to be a magazine publisher. Publishing what was once the nation’s leading men’s magazine reminds me of the Richard Adler and Jerry Ross song from the musical “Damn Yankees:” Ya’ gotta’ have heart, lots and lots and lots of heart.

Unfortunately, the people at the top of Playboy seem to be lacking that heart for sex. Perhaps the magazine could use a little blue pill of its own.

Art / PotD / Social Commentary

Love, Everyone

October 3, 2015

Welcome Home (2013)

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.—Buddha

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]What’s wrong with people? I look through the news this morning and all I see is hate. Republicans hate democrats. This religion hates that religion and both hate anyone who disagrees with them. White hates black, black hates white, and they both hate brown. If I were to do a quick, informal estimation, which is exactly what I’m doing right this moment, I would say that roughly 80% of what has been tossed at me this morning ultimately contains a hateful message. Where is the love? Where is the empathy? Where is any attempt at actually wanting to get along with other people.

Here’s the great paradox of the 21st century: we’re willing to spend billions of dollars (collectively) looking for love, trying to find love, improving ourselves so that we’re more lovable, but we don’t do a damn thing toward actually loving other people. We are as selfish about love as we are everything else in our lives. We want it all to come to us, knock on our door, overwhelm us with emotional goodies, and reaffirm our sense of how valuable we are to the world. We define love not as something we feel toward other people, but by the quantity of warm fuzzies other people give to us.

In other words: we don’t have a fucking clue. For all the talk about love, we fail to realize that love is an act of giving, not an act of receiving. Love is not something that happens to you, but something you distribute to others. Love is not doing something based on what you feel, but what you feel based on what you’ve done. Love is active, not passive. Love is not something to be found, but something we create, from the center of our being, so that we might give it to someone else. Love is not narrowly limited to a familial relationship, but an over-arching sense of inclusiveness and responsibility to the greater good of humanity.

Love holds no bias, nor fear, but includes everyone.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]So, we are, and have been for a while, at this point in the United States where we have had more mass shootings (where more than four people are shot), than there have been days in the year. We foolishly ask why this keeps happening. Some want bans on weapons. Some want tighter control on those with diagnosed mental disorders. Some want everything locked down and stored in a box where no one can get to it. None of those are solutions. We cannot solve with legislation what was not caused by government in the first place. There is only one reason we keep shooting ourselves: we’ve forgotten how to love.

It was a mere 45-50 years ago that we, my generation and those just older than us, were all about peace, and love, and happiness. We were sure that we could change the world with love, and ultimately we were correct, but we didn’t see it in the way we thought we would see it. We thought love would give us things, take away responsibility, make life more relaxed. What we failed to realize is that love creates responsibility and when we fail that responsibility, we fail love. Love doesn’t just chug along like a toy train circling the Christmas tree. Love requires maintenance, effort, and a completely selfless attitude.

Where is the American society failing? Don’t blame government, Republican orDemocrat. Don’t blame religions, present or absent. Don’t blame race or economics. Blame the total and complete absence of love. We’ve stopped loving, we’ve stopped teaching our children to love, and we’ve stopped letting love be the guide by which we live our lives. In a world where we’ve all but thrown love out the window, is it any wonder that society has gone to hell in a handbasket?

Love, everyone. You won’t learn how until you try.[/one_half_last]

Art / PotD / Uncategorized

All Tied Up

October 2, 2015

Creatively bound (2012)

Women’s fashion is a subtle form of bondage. It’s men’s way of binding them. We put them in these tight, high-heeled shoes, we make them wear these tight clothes and we say they look sexy. But they’re actually tied up.—David Duchovny

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Some of you are going to have difficulty believing this, since you possibly have never seen one, but there was once a time when people only had one telephone per family and that one was connected to the wall. You couldn’t take it anywhere. It had a big dial that consumed its face and one had to dial as many as eleven numbers one at a time to call anyone. There was no 911. If you needed to talk with someone in the next town over, it was considered long distance and you had to talk to an operator for that to happen.

One of the worst sins during that period of American history was keeping the phone “tied up.” This was especially serious if you shared a phone line with your neighbors, something called a party line. There was no party. At least, ours wasn’t. Sure, you could pick up the phone and listen in on their conversation, but we had boring neighbors so there wasn’t any fun in that. Instead, they complained that we always kept the phone line tied up. Poppa had calls coming in at all hours of the night and if the phone rang at our house, it rang at our neighbors’ houses, too. They weren’t especially happy.

Poppa had competition for the phone once I became a teenager. Well, sort of. I liked the concept of calling and talking to my friends, but we were all geeky and stuff and once we exchanged whatever piece of information we needed, we’d just tie up the line not saying anything.

The worst was one evening when I called the girl I was sort of dating. We tied up the phone for the better part of three hours. The conversation consisted largely of, “What are you doing?” Followed by, “Oh, not much. What are you doing.” This went on for three fucking hours. I think half the town was annoyed with us by the time we hung up, because anyone who tried calling Poppa during that period couldn’t even leave voice mail. Instead, they just got this frustrating alternating tone called a busy signal. [/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Keeping the phone line tied up became serious in the 90s when we started getting modems and connecting to this thing called AOL online. They gave out free CDs at the stores and for $15 a month you could connect to their computer system and read the same news that was in the morning newspaper. We were cool. We were high-tech. We kept the phone line tied up for hours. I lived several hundred miles away from my parents by that time, but I also had their only grandchild. They tried calling often to see what he was up to, but the phone line would be tied up almost every time.

We don’t have any of those issues now, of course. Talk all you want. Text all you want. Tie up the phone all damn day if you wish. Pay a huge phone bill. I find it interesting that we consider a $50 a month phone bill inexpensive. Heads would have rolled had Poppa ever gotten a fifty dollar phone bill. I remember him once challenging a $36 bill. “No one could talk on the phone that much,” he told the customer service representative. She agreed and adjusted the bill.

Who knows what telephony will be by the time my children are my age. The technology is changing so rapidly that they likely will not have to use a device at all; voice communication will be built into clothes or, at the very least, wearable accessories. Tap an icon, order pizza. Tap a button, have a friend join you. There will be a button for calling your mother; you’ll avoid it. No one wants to tie up the shirt listening to their mother complaining about how she never gets to see the grandkids. Wearable phones means one could, theoretically, be tied up with their phone rather than on their phone. The future could be kinky.

I bet you looked at the title and picture and thought I was going a very different direction with this, didn’t you? Sorry, but I didn’t want to be that obvious. Being tied up has too many possible scenarios. I didn’t want to “tie up” your entire day.[/one_half_last]

Art / PotD / Social Commentary

Shame, No Shame

October 1, 2015

All Wash(er)ed Up (2010)

In the face of patriarchy, it is a brave act indeed for both men and women to embrace, rather than shame or attempt to eradicate, the feminine.—Alanis Morissette

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]I grew up being taught that everyone had a responsibility to work hard. Both my parents worked long hours. I had my first paycheck at 14. Sitting around idly isn’t something I do well. I fail to understand this act of binge-watching television series because after about an hour everything in my body tells me I need to be up being productive. We were taught that it didn’t matter what you did, that all jobs contributed to the greater good and deserved people’s respect. Looking down on, or shaming someone, just because of their occupation was about as rude and ignorant a thing one could do.

So, as I’ve grown up and gotten a taste for how the world actually is, I am continually disappointed when this particular sin of shaming other people shows up, typically denigrating a friend for something they’ve done to feed themselves and/or their family, complete with name-calling and harassment. As this has happened within my circle of friends three times in the past five days, I’m calling bullshit on the shame patrol. There is no shame in working hard, no shame in getting one’s hands (and body) dirty, no shame in sweating hard, and certainly no shame in doing jobs you don’t especially like just to keep the lights on and food on the table.

One of the earliest impacts on my sense of work ethic was a WWII veteran named Warren Hartsocks. A short, stocky man who never lost his buzz cut, Hartsocks had dropped out of school to join the military. The US Army taught him to be a mechanic and that’s what he proceeded to do the rest of his life. If you came across Hartsocks during the day, he was likely wearing a well-stained wife-beater t-shirt and baggy grey pants, equally stained. He was missing most his teeth, eternally had an unlit stogie in the corner of his mouth, had a vocabulary that would make a sailor blush, and in the summer his body odor could get pretty strong. People called him a dirty, foul-mouthed mechanic and tried to avoid him, but he worked hard for every dime he made, was a gentle soul, and took the time to teach me how to fish. [/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]The list of occupations society often shames is too long, but here’s a list of the ones that I see most often:

Retail workers, because, you know, those clothes at the mall just jump on the rack by themselves.
Construction laborers; that house you live in just built itself.
Mechanics, like you can change a fucking tire by yourself.
Strippers, cam girls, etc., one of the truest forms of capitalism’s supply and demand.
Grocery baggers, who carry your chips and ice cream so you won’t snag a nail.
Janitors, because lord knows you’re too busy to empty the damn trash yourself.
Farm workers, laboring sunup to sundown because you just have to have strawberries in December.
Meat packers, constantly covered in blood.
Food service employees, because minimum wage would make them too rich.
Truck drivers, on the road too long to get you those damn strawberries.

I can only think of one occupation that deserves shame: Politicians. Our country’s founders envisioned elected office to be one of public service, not privilege or power, and certainly not one that led to wealth. The concept was that a person would give a period of time to serve the people from their elected districts, not pander to ridiculous ideologues and corporations with deep pockets. Politicians inherently serve only their own interests at the expense of the rest of us. They have taken us from being a democracy to an oligarchy. Public office was never designed to be a position of profit, but one of giving to one’s country.

Too many days I go to bed totally disappointed in the human race. We shame those who work the hardest and praise those who contribute to our demise. Perhaps the real shame is on us all.[/one_half_last]

Advertising / PotD

#BlackBunsMatter

September 29, 2015

Trying to Breathe (2009)

Man who invented the hamburger was smart; man who invented the cheeseburger was a genius.—Matthew McConaughey

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]You know, I generally try to stay away from the really tough, polarizing, hardest-hitting issues of the day because they get so much noise everywhere else anything I might say just gets lost in the mix. I couldn’t let this matter just pass by without comment, though. Fast food burger chain Burger King® has introduced a burger with A.1.® sauce baked into the bun. The result is that the bun takes on a black color, presumably without the bun tasting like burned charcoal. I think this deserves a movement. Therefore, I’m introducing #BlackBunsMatter

Here’s how BK® describes the burger on their website:

Introducing the A.1.^® Halloween WHOPPER^® Sandwich with A.1.^®flavor baked into the black bun. The sandwich is a ¼ lb.* of savory flame-grilled beef topped with melted American cheese, ripe tomatoes, crisp iceberg lettuce, creamy mayonnaise, A.1.^® Thick and Hearty Sauce, crunchy pickles, and sliced white onions on a soft sesame seed bun with A.1.^® flavor baked into the bun.

The chain actually announced the seasonal burger a couple of weeks ago, but CNN and some other alleged news outlets didn’t really pick up on it until yesterday, and then it started hitting my news feeds. Trolling the comments section, it was obvious that no one was gathering the significance of this move. We’ve been eating white buns all these years as though they were the only option. Sure, we might put sesame seeds on some, or twist them to look like pretzels, but they’ve all been variations of the same white buns. Until now. Now, #BlackBunsMatter. Spread the word.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Of course, not everyone is going to be very fast to embrace #BlackBunsMatter. Obviously, there’s going to be a political divide. You’re not likely to catch any of the GOP presidential front-runners with a black bun in their hands, that would just be too controversial. Tensions are high in the bun world after all and not everyone agrees with the #BlackBunsMatter movement. That guy with the funny hair would likely call it ridiculous. The former governor of Arkansas would likely claim the bun is sourced from hell. And that Texas senator Mr. Boehner calls a jackass would probably try to shut down the government over it. #BlackBunsMatter is bigger than any of them, though.

I’m sure someone will come along and try to derail the movement with #AllBunsMatter, but they just don’t get the point. For too long, buns of color have been shunned, especially by the restaurant and hospitality industry. Sure, I’ve created a black bun or two in my time, usually from being distracted after putting them on the grill, and no one would ever eat those black buns because they were prejudiced toward soft, white buns. But the time for buns of color has come. Let there be black buns! Let there be brown buns! Let there be red buns! Let there be tanned buns covered in butter! #BlackBunsMatter!

Yes, we’re joking, and we don’t mean to make light of some very serious and important racial issues dividing our country. It’s a hamburger bun, though. If we can’t have a little fun with this thing, we need to re-evaluate our entire lives. Be sure, if BK® didn’t have the trademark locked down, I would SO be selling #BlackBunsMatter t-shirts right now. Or maybe ball caps, in case anyone wants to run for president.[/one_half_last]

Advertising / PotD

Totally Unrelated To Anything

September 27, 2015

Oops, it slipped (2010)

Providing meaning to a mass of unrelated needs, ideas, words and pictures – it is the designer’s job to select and fit this material together and make it interesting.—Paul Rand

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Welcome to our grand experiment, one which is far from being scientific and authoritative in nature, but still slightly more than anecdotal. You see, for websites like this one to be profitable, one of two things has to happen: either it drives enough traffic to make advertising ratios work, or it drives enough traffic to actually impact business. Neither of those has happened yet. There are a number of factors involved, of course, but one of my frustrations is that the content of the articles seems irrelevant to their popularity. What matters is how provocative are the pictures. Last week proved that premise quite handily. The pictures were totally unrelated to anything. We knew we were pandering, and it worked; our weekly hit count was higher than it’s been in months.

So, this week we continue in the same vein, but going a step further. The articles this week will not only be unrelated to the pictures, but they’ll be unrelated to anything. They may be funny, they may be nonsense, they may occasionally be serious, but you won’t catch us talking about technical things like how the mirror reflected light awkwardly back in the model’s face in this picture. Nor will I tell related stories like how it snowed nearly nine inches while we were shooting this set, or how the place where we shot no longer looks anything like this now, which makes me sad. Instead, I’ll talk about something totally different, like trees.

Except that, for the moment, I’m not really interested in trees. I’ve not done any research on trees. I have noticed that our lack of rain is ruining the fall foliage. Rather than turning colors, leaves are simply dying, turning brown, and falling. How depressing that is. No pretty colors. Rather sucks when you think about it. We had all that rain back in the spring and now we get nothing. I suppose this is making it easier to get in the fall harvest; fields aren’t muddy so farm implements can roll across the crops with optimum efficiency. I have cousins whose business involves leasing combines and such for the harvest. I would imagine their business is doing rather well at the moment.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]For the two or three people who actually attempt to read the articles, this week could be either entertaining or frustrating, depending on what happens. What I’m expecting is that I’ll get up each morning and just go with a stream of consciousness based on how I’m feeling at the moment. Milan Fashion Week wraps up on Tuesday, Paris Fashion Week starts Wednesday. Both require me getting up earlier than usual some days, but at least Paris is only a five-hour time difference versus Milan’s six. That extra hour can be brutal when there’s a critical show at 3:30 AM our time. I’m not sure I’m capable of anything resembling consciousness at that point.

Early morning writing requires help. I have a browser plugin that not only checks my spelling, which can be atrocious early in the morning, but also checks my grammar. Sometimes its grammar checks are a little too strict for this style of writing. I am, after all, being rather conversant. This isn’t the New York Times by any stretch of the imagination. Yet, it pains me to see any writing where the grammar is totally ignored, and when the plugin corrects things it usually does so with good reason. I miss things when I’m tired. I also have difficulty caring when I’m tired. I’ve been tired a lot, lately. The plugin has been working overtime.

Totally unrelated, I’m wondering what would be too explicit; at what point would a photo be so audacious as to actually turn traffic away? Is that even possible? At the same time, I more frequently wonder what it would take for people to actually start sharing these posts; that’s what it’s going to take to really bump the hit counts. I can only reach a limited number of people at any given time. For us to get the big numbers, where the website begins to pay off, people have to share what they see here and that’s not happening. But then, how many people are doing anything more than looking at the pictures, anyway?

Yeah, that’s what I thought. Totally unrelated to anything.[/one_half_last]

pop culture / PotD

Pollution

September 25, 2015

An Early Morning

Must we wait for selection to solve the problems of overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, pollution of the environment and a nuclear holocaust, or can we take explicit steps to make our future more secure? In the latter case, must we not transcend selection?
—B. F. Skinner

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Pollution is an interesting topic, don’t you think? With all the environmental talk these days having turned to the matter of global warming, we have to wonder whether anyone is paying attention to actual pollution anymore. What tops that, though, at least in my heavily weighted opinion, is that we tend to think of pollution as an outdoor thing when indoor pollution is every bit as deadly. No, I’m not kidding. Your gas is shortening people’s lives, man. You need to lay off the burritos.

According to figures released by The Lancet, a respected medical journal, indoor pollution is just as much a contributor to death, 2.9 million people, as is outdoor pollution. Put the two together, and pollution suddenly jumps up to the second leading cause of death in the world, even more than smoking. No matter where we turn, there is so very little fresh air left on the planet it’s a wonder we are still breathing at all. The oxygen we need to survive is running preciously thin and every time you open your mouth you are putting someone else in danger. There, how does that make you feel? Not good, huh?

And just why do we have so much indoor pollution? Someone forgot to crack a window. Seriously. Inadequate ventilation is responsible for 53% of indoor pollution. I know researchers will try to say that it is poor ventilation in factories that are the most threatening to the greatest number of people, especially in developing nations where workplace regulations about air quality are non-existent. But something tells me those researchers would have a different opinion if they’ve ever been hotboxed in a car with three teenage boys who just stopped at Taco Bell®™. Noxious fumes capable of peeling paint come out of the human posterior. Don’t try telling me that stuff isn’t shortening all our lives.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]In an ultimate display of human stupidity, we have chosen for years to completely ignore the matter of pollution. We know it’s there. We know we’re causing it. But the people who control the money are afraid if we do things to clean up this incredible mess we’ve created that it might eat into their over-inflated bottom line. The late (thankfully) President Ronald Reagan tried blaming nature itself for causing the majority of air contaminants. While technically that charge is true, there is one big difference between natural contaminants and manufactured contaminants: nature cleans up its own damn mess, humans don’t.

Yeah, that’s right; the rebellious act of not wanting to clean our rooms as children has spread to the whole damn planet. Wherever we go, we make a mess and we don’t want to clean it up. In a way, the fact that our pollution is killing us is probably just reward for being the colossal brats that we are. One might even go so far as to say that choking on our over-industrialization is nature’s way of attempting to eliminate the problem. We ruin the air we breathe, we die, the air becomes clean again. Isn’t that the way nature works?

Of course, it’s the poor who are most likely to die from the effects of pollution, and the poor don’t have a voice in the political decisions that have turned our planet, indoors and out, into a giant cesspool of stinking corporate flatulence. Those who have the money for expensive air purification systems don’t worry about the health of those who don’t. The same jackasses who won’t roll down a window in the car are laughing about hotboxing the entire planet.

So here’s a message from the planet to humanity: Hey people, you stink. Clean up your shit or leave. And cut back on the burritos. Enjoy the picture. Thanks, Earth. [/one_half_last]

pop culture / PotD

Pure Sweetness

September 23, 2015

Maternity Yoga (2014)

As a culture I see us as presently deprived of subtleties. The music is loud, the anger is elevated, sex seems lacking in sweetness and privacy.—Shelley Berman

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]I’m old enough to remember life before artificial sweeteners, back when sugar was what sweetened everything, not this fucking corn syrup used now. There was sugar in everything and people wanted you to know it. There were Sugar Pops and Sugar Smacks and Sugar Frosted Flakes and Sugared Sugar. Sweetness was something people took seriously. They expected it. They respected it. Diabetes? That was something someone else had, that poor kid in the classroom who had to have plain popcorn while the rest of us had cupcakes. They tended to be weak, puny kids, not very good at football, which was also sweetened.

Then some idiot decided that the world needed a sugar substitute. Why? Was there too much sweetness in the world? Were people just enjoying their lives too much and some fucking jackass decided they needed to ruin it? There was no reason to give us artificial sweeteners, but suddenly we had them. They told us it was healthier. So, my parents ran out and bought some. They tried it first in the sweet tea. It was horrible. Then, my mother tried it in cookies. We dumped those in the trash. Next, we tried it on Corn Flakes. Definitely not a good start to the morning. Artificial sweeteners aren’t sweet. They suck. Every last one of them. How can such a sucky flavor be good for anyone, except that it makes you not want to put that garbage in your mouth so maybe you eat less?

Sweetness is a constitutional right; I’m sure of it. Maybe it doesn’t say so in so many words, but the implication has to be there somewhere. We have an inalienable right to the unspoken affection that comes with being sugared to death. I remember once, in the 70s, when they were doing drive-by diabetes screenings at the health department, next door to where my mom worked. She wanted Poppa to bring my brother and I by to be tested, just to make sure we were healthy. So, you know what he did? He dropped mom off at work and then took my brother and I for donuts! We had two iced donuts each. So when we come back around and have our fingers stuck for the test, guess what? Our blood sugar levels were damn near off the chart! They said we were borderline diabetic. I wonder why![/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Here’s the thing: people think that sugar is the primary cause of diabetes, which is a horrible disease that kills a lot of people. In fact, high blood sugar is the fourth leading cause of death in the world; it kills around four million people a year. There are 29 million Americans with diabetes and that number keeps rising. You know why? It’s not because we’re eating too much sugar, that’s for damn sure. It’s because we’re eating too many McFattyFatFat cheeseburgers with fries soaked in corn syrup and we think we’re safe because we wash it down with a diet soda. All this pretend sweetness is killing us!

What makes all this worse, is that 1 in 4 people who are diabetic don’t realize that they have diabetes. They have no clue. Their diet consists of one fast food drive-thru after another. Their lives are sedentary, sitting in an office all day and their asses parked on a couch all night. The only time they see a hint of fruit is when it’s baked in a pie. They’re dying and they don’t know it. Pass ’em a Diet Coke®™. I’m sure that will help.

Even people who know they have Type II Diabetes don’t seem to care. I knew a lady once who was diabetic and kept wondering why she felt so bad. She smoked non-stop. She ate almost nothing but delivery pizza and cookies. She got absolutely no exercise. She didn’t take her insulin. No, I have no idea why she couldn’t even fucking walk and her feet were turning black.

I fucking like sugar. I like sugar so much my hood name should be Sweetness Letbetter. I’m not stupid, though. I know if I’m going to sit here with handfuls of chocolate during these damn fashion shows, I’m going to have to get up, move around, and eat some fucking vegetables to counter that crack. I like sugar, but I know there’s a limit and I watch it. Apparently, not all of you fuckers are as smart because you’re dying off at a pretty alarming rate and you’re costing the world a lot of money in health care. Put down the damn diet soda, why don’t you. Artificial sweeteners not helping, they just taste bad. Talk to your doctor and get that shit under control.

The ultimate sweetness is being alive. Try staying that way.[/one_half_last]

pop culture / PotD

The Real Skinny

September 22, 2015

Doesn’t Matter (2014)

We were at a beach one summer, and I had a bathing suit on. My wife looked at me and said: ‘Boy, you are skinny, aren’t you?’ I said: ‘Honey, I’d like to remind you that it was minor defects like this that kept me from getting a better wife.’—Lou Holtz

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]For the first forty years of my life, I was thin, at times disturbingly so. It wasn’t that I wanted to be thin, nor that I was trying to be thin. Quite the opposite, actually. I would have loved to have had enough mass to actually develop muscles and such, but that never happened. I delighted in over-eating to excess at buffets but never could gain weight. At 30 I was still able to wear the same pair of Levi’s 501 jeans that I bought when I was 18. Now, for women, that kind of tale isn’t unusual, but for men it’s practically unheard of. I had no muscle mass. If I ate too much and was bloated, I looked like Bloom County’s Bill the Cat (well, maybe not as orange). There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it, no matter how hard I tried, and believe me, I tried.

Then, I hit 40. Boom. Like flipping a switch, I started gaining weight and suddenly staying off the 200-pound mark became an issue. Actually, with my body frame and size, I didn’t need to be above 170, and even that was frighteningly larger than I’d ever been. I started having to buy larger clothes, replace suits, and spend money that I really hadn’t planned on spending. What, when, and how I ate suddenly became an issue, as did the amount of exercise and stress. My health changed. I was sick more often. I had to watch my blood sugar. High blood pressure, which runs in our family anyway, was suddenly a much more important issue. That skinny teenager is gone and is never going to come back. Instead, like almost every other American and a large number of people around the world, I have to fight with obesity.

Fuck. I like fried chicken, chicken fried steak smothered in pepper gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans cooked with bacon grease, cornbread dripping with butter and corn on the cob far too much to have a weight issue. And don’t even get me started on the importance of chocolate, especially this time of year when the fashion shows are one right after the other and I’m not getting nearly enough sleep. I’ve been able to eat as much as I want whenever I want my entire life. What the hell does my body think it’s doing gaining all this weight all of a sudden? I don’t have time for an interpersonal rebellion like this. Pass the pie. Not, not a piece of pie, give me the whole damn pie. And more coffee, damnit. I have work to do. This is just a temporary, thing.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]No, it’s not. I’m well past 40 now and the problem isn’t going away. What I’ve come to realize, though, is that much of society’s view of what’s “skinny,” and our subsequent jealous loathing of that condition, is based almost entirely upon the skewed perspective born of one basic fact: we’re all too fucking fat. What’s more, is that we know we’re fat, we know it’s killing us, and we just don’t fucking care. We’ve thrown caution to the wind and ordered another triple burger with quadruple cheese, bacon, and onion rings. And should anyone actually challenge our obesity, we fight back with something stupid like, “You’re fat shaming me. I can’t help it, I was born large.”

Bullshit. Even if you were a ten-pound baby you were not born obese. Obesity, for the vast majority of Americans, is something we have chosen for ourselves and then proceeded to surround ourselves with a variety of excuses for our slovenliness. Let’s be clear: there’s a difference between being overweight and being obese. There can be many contributors to being overweight, including, but not limited to, water retention, bone mass, and muscle buildup. Being obese comes down to just one thing, though: FAT. The National Institues of Health calculate obesity according to Body Mass Index. If yours is over 30, you’re overweight. If it’s over 40, you’re obese. Want to see what yours is? Click here and don’t fucking lie. This morning, mine is 24.3, which is on the upper end of normal for my height. I need to be careful and exercise more.

Sure, there are people who are too skinny and that’s a problem, but shaming thin people just because they’re not so incredibly fucking fat like you just emphasises that your brain is as fat as your body. Well over two of three Americans are overweight or obese and Indiana is currently ranked number eight as one of the ten most obese states in the country. Try and justify it any way you want, we’re not healthy. Obesity is the third most common cause of death on this planet and it is totally preventable. Even our kids, our babies, are too fucking fat and it’s our fault. Put down the fucking fork. Park a few extra spaces from the door. Walk. Exercise. And stop making fucking excuses. You’re fat. You can either change or die. Your call.[/one_half_last]

pop culture / PotD

Smoking. Hot.

September 21, 2015

Dances With Pearls (2014)

As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain from smoking when awake.—Mark Twain

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]I hate the sight of no smoking signs. Not that I’m this huge smoker by any stretch of the imagination. Cigarettes are, in my opinion, a waste of money; three or four puffs and they’re gone. Why bother? I’ll occasionally smoke a pipe if I’m stressed and trying to chill, or perhaps have a cigar while out in the middle of nowhere, sitting around a campfire. I don’t have this huge oral fixation that requires I put something up to my mouth all the time. Still, the very sight of a no smoking sign angers me because it restricts my right to choose. Am I not intelligent enough to make the right choice? Are you calling me stupid with your fucking sign? Can you not see how horribly insulting that damn sign is?

I understand: clean air. The statistics regarding second-hand smoke are damning. I’ll admit, I don’t mind walking into an office, especially the doctor’s office, and the whole place not smelling like smoke. I don’t mind walking into a restaurant and not having to choose between smoking or non-smoking (we typically chose smoking simply because it was less crowded). I don’t mind coming home and my clothes not smelling like a cheap brand of cigarettes. I get it. I understand what anti-smoking advocates are trying to do. I still don’t like the damn signs.

Statistics are clear: cigarette smoking remains the largest single preventable cause of death in the United States. In addition to killing somewhere in the neighborhood of 480,000 people in the US each year, the direct cost of that addiction in terms of healthcare and lost productivity is around $300 billion annually. Smoking doesn’t play fair, either. One is more likely to smoke if they are male, has their GED, is a former service member, and is racially mixed, according to statistical evidence. Children born to mothers who smoke during pregnancy are likely to have a significantly lower birth rate. Smoking is the second leading cause of death in the entire world. The numbers against smoking are absolutely overwhelming.

There’s just one problem: Uncle Fred.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]If you’ve known me more than five minutes I’ve probably told you about my Uncle Fred. I know I’ve written about him before. Uncle Fred was one of those migrants in John Updike’s The Grapes of Wrath that left dust bowl Oklahoma along with his wife, Aunt Irene, who was my grandmother’s sister. They settled in Turlock, California, up in the Northern end of that state, worked hard from sunup to sundown, raised three boys, were heavily engaged in civic activities, traveled when they could, argued with each other like cats and dogs and lived what was, for their time, a pretty normal life.

Uncle Fred was a two-pack-a-day smoker. He was respectful, he’d go outside, step away from the doorway, smoke two or three, then come back inside. If it were raining and the porch was too short, he’d either find a tree or stand under the eve of the house. All that smoking eventually killed him … at age 96. Aunt Irene, who didn’t smoke and wouldn’t allow Fred to do it in their house, died four years later at age 92. If we look solely at Fred and Irene’s statistics, smoking’s apparently good for you. That’s why I have a problem with those damn signs. Statistics are numbers and numbers aren’t people. We don’t know how many Uncle Freds there are because, since they aren’t dying off too quickly, we’re not studying them.

There are roughly 320 million people in the United States. If we lose 480,000 to smoking each year, that’s a whopping 0.15% of the total. Pay attention. That’s not fifteen percent. That’s less than two-tenths of ONE percent. We’re making all this fuss over a group of people so statistically small that, in almost any other study, they would be insignificant. With over seven billion people on the planet, we’re over-populated beyond the point of sustainability. We need more than 0.15% to die off if we’re going to continue living here. Sustainability is more critical than smoking at this point. Think of smokers as volunteers for population control.

Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em and lose the damn signs.[/one_half_last]

pop culture / PotD

Why Worry?

September 20, 2015

Just Nude (2014)

If you ask what is the single most important key to longevity, I would have to say it is avoiding worry, stress and tension. And if you didn’t ask me, I’d still have to say it.—George Burns

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]I am half tempted to just fill the rest of the page with videos. That would make the morning a lot easier on me. I wouldn’t have to worry about word count or whether anyone reads past the first paragraph. The videos would be cool, too. Madcon’s Don’t Worry was a decent enough hit earlier this year. Since 1973, Stevie Wonder’s been telling us, Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing. Bob Marley assured us, Every Little Thing‘s gonna be alright. Bobby McFarrin has been trying for years to convince us to Don’t Worry, Be Happy. All of those songs have some very good advice, and if we all took that advice we might just live to the ripe old age of 101 as did George Burns, who was possibly one of the funniest people to ever live.

We’re not terribly good at that whole not worrying thing, though, and that in of itself is cause for worry. Why? Because it’s killing us, jackass. Mr. Burns laid it out right there for you: worry, stress, hypertension. All those things result in high blood pressure and high blood pressure is the single largest contributor to death in the entire fucking world. We worry too damn much, and it’s not getting any better. According to an article this past week in The Lancet, and reported by National Public Radio (NPR), the rate of high blood pressure as the cause of death has risen from 6.4 million in 1990, to 10.4 million in 2013.

Don’t worry, we have plenty of songs that can make us happy, right? And if that doesn’t work, there’s always cat memes and cute puppy videos on the Internet to help us forget that our lifestyle choices totally suck. If that doesn’t work, we have mindless reality shows filled with mindless people who become famous for making absolutely no worthwhile contribution to the human race whatsoever. And if that doesn’t work, then hey, there are always babies: pictures of babies making funny faces, videos of babies doing funny things, and plenty of websites demonstrating the various positions from which one can make babies. Why worry? Make babies![/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Wait, no, that doesn’t work either, because then we have to worry about how we’re going to feed, clothe, and educate that baby so that they don’t grow up to be as worthless as that idiot, whomever that idiot may be. Sure, we want our kids to grow up better than us, but how is that going to happen when global wages have gone down over the past 30 years so that our buying power is now less than the same money was when our parents were diapering our shitty asses? Do we really want kids starting their adult lives with more debt than the value of the house in which they grew up? How the fuck is that supposed to be an improvement?

Personally, I think we need to eliminate politicians. Approximately 70 million adults, 1 in 3 people over the age of 21, have high blood pressure and a great deal of that comes from the fact we have this group of fucking imbeciles in Washington, D. C. who keep fucking with our lives. And it’s not so much that we mind being taxed, we are willing to pay our fair share, but those morons keep giving our money to Wall Street fat cats while our roads crumble beneath us. They spend BILLIONS OF DOLLARS on senseless, manufactured wars while woefully underfunding education so that maybe, just maybe, we can figure out how to stop having stupid fucking wars. Kill the politicians, and those things that make us worry all go away, right?

I wish. The bottom line is we have so many things to worry about because we keep making stupid fucking choices. We choose food that kills us. We elect politicians that screw us. We tolerate a banking system that impoverishes us. We work at jobs that bore us for a paycheck too small to house us. We spending too much time on the fucking Internet searching for ways to improve our life instead of actually going out and improving our life. But hey, whatever you do, DON’T WORRY! That worry stuff’ll kill ya’.

Okay, maybe one video below the break. Even I need it after that rant.[/one_half_last]

PotD / Social Commentary

Education

September 18, 2015

Think A Minute (2013)

The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.—James A. Baldwin

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]My mother was a teacher in more ways than one. Yes, there are a few people out there who endured, and survived, the trials and tribulations of being in her classroom. She didn’t stop teaching when she walked out of the classroom, though. Education, she believed, was something that began the moment one woke up of the morning and didn’t end until one was unconscious at night. She saw the potential for making every moment a teaching moment, and she wasn’t going to let one’s education be incomplete.

Mom always said she was 5′ 2″ tall. I’m sure she was at one young point in her life. Most of my life she was about an inch shorter than that, and she continued shrinking. That never stopped her, though. She couldn’t be bullied, by administration, student, or parent. To cross her as an adult meant being on the receiving end of a tongue-lashing that damn-near drew blood. To cross her as a child meant bending over, grabbing your ankles, and being thankful her arthritis prevented her from swinging that paddle as strongly as she might. In her mind, the first thing one needed in an education was discipline and respect. One didn’t begin learning until those two things were present.

At the same time, though, Mother could be incredibly compassionate. Being the preacher’s wife in a small town meant she usually knew when a student’s family was struggling. School policy prevented her from helping a child directly, but she would find a way to make sure a child had food at home, or clean clothes, or in at least one case light by which to read. Hugs were something she handed out readily, even long after one left her classroom. After school tutoring wasn’t’ part of a program; it was just something she did as student’s had need.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Mom would not have done well in today’s schools. She understood that an education isn’t just information one learns to regurgitate on command, but how we learn to take that information and improve our lives and the lives of others. She hated standardized tests because she knew that people can’t, and shouldn’t, be standardized and neither can the education system that teaches us. She taught more by living than by lecturing. She set an example for her students that was worth following.

I look now at how schools have changed and want to cry. We have so woefully underfunded our schools that teachers show up to find absolutely no resources in their classrooms, not even textbooks or dry erase markers. We totally misunderstand the point of education when we think test scores are a sufficient or accurate measure of learning and/or teacher adequacy. Library shelves sit empty because there’s no money for books. We wonder why there’s a teacher shortage in almost every state, not realizing that by the time teachers pay for all their supplies, books for their classrooms, and materials for students, they’re not longer making a living wage!

I’m glad that the little ones can now come home and watch re-runs of Mr. Rodger’s Neighborhood on Netflix. They are thoroughly enthralled as they pick up the values education that are no longer part of the school curriculum. Education for them is a very different experience than it was for my sons, and almost unrecognizable compared to my experience. That we have allowed the situation to deteriorate is inexcusable and everyone is at fault. We have no education system when we refuse to learn. Even Mother couldn’t solve that problem. [/one_half_last]

Art / PotD

Flip Phone

August 28, 2015

Communicate Everywhere (2005)

Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets ― Andy Warhol

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Here is the proof that 2005 was eons ago: that flip phone design was brand new. I’d chosen that particular phone primarily because it reminded me, a lot, of the communicators used in the original 1968 Star Trek series. Of course, they didn’t quite work like that. One still had to push buttons and wait for someone to pick up on the other end of the phone and half the time coverage sucked so you couldn’t hear what the other person was saying. Still, the look was cool, in my opinion, and there’s just enough geek in me for that to matter. I would happily flip my phone, communicator style, and use the voice function to place a call. The future had arrived.

Until I visited New York, where the images for this photo were taken. We were out shooting in Central Park on a horribly cold and windy day in February and, for some reason I don’t remember, pulled out my phone. The model giggled. I thought she was laughing at my geekiness. She then explained that, at the time, flip phones were a favorite of local pimps and drug dealers. While there were probably hundreds of thousands of people running around Manhattan with similar phones, the stereotype was prevalent enough that pulling one out while standing on a street corner was likely to get the unwanted attention of NYPD.

I was careful about where and how I used my phone after that conversation. Placing it in these photos, with the same model, was our inside joke. Nothing said pimp quite like a flip phone on a woman’s naked chest. We convinced ourselves that it was the duty of art to make fun of such social idiosyncracies and that even if we were the only ones who understood the meaning behind what we were doing that the message was still valid. One thinks such things in New York when the snow is falling. Realities of the world are somehow altered and art was as good a justification as any for being naked and playing with phones.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Ten years later, flip phones are making a comeback, largely in frustrated response to the increasingly large smartphones that everyone else seems to be carrying. My phone is so large that people often ask if it’s a tablet. While I like the benefits of my phone, such as being able to see it in the dark without having to squint or hold it at arm’s length, there are times when the shirt-pocket convenience of a flip phone would be nice, at least on a temporary basis. Of course, there would be no facebook on that phone, and trying to send text messages was an absolute pain in the backside. Still, carrying something that is the size of a thin brick isn’t exactly fun and games all the time, either.

The evolution of phones over the past fifteen years has been nothing short of amazing. They have completely transformed our lives and our expectations for communication. It really wasn’t that long ago that we were all tied to land lines. If someone wasn’t home or at their place of employment, they couldn’t be reached. Now, if someone doesn’t respond to their phone, either voice, text, or social media, in a matter of minutes, we are immediately concerned about their health and safety, or upset that they might be ignoring us. There is no escape. Phones have now made us available to everyone all the time. Even in bed.

With the exposure of the recent Ashley Madison hack, I have to wonder how often people used their phones, rather than a computer, to make that connection. Rather than being an object that identifies a pimp, the phone has become the pimp, selling out our information, our lives, our souls, and maybe even our bodies to the highest bidder. They track everything we do, report back to the NSA when we connect with certain people or go to certain places or use a certain vocabulary. Thinking along those terms, I look at today’s image and laugh even harder. Phone. Pimp. Damn straight. [/one_half_last]

Art / pop culture / PotD

Learning To Live

August 27, 2015

Coming Clean (2005)

People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly. ― Andy Warhol

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Late March, 2005, I was preparing for my move to Indiana when a young woman approached me about taking some nude pictures. Her one requirement was that they all be framed and processed so as to keep her identity anonymous. She had recently graduated from a prominent university with her Juris Doctorate, would be sitting for the bar the next week, and had an internship at a prominent human rights organization. I couldn’t help asking, given the direction her life appeared to be going, why she would risk taking any nude pictures at all. Yes, they would be sufficiently anonymous, but should anyone ever see or find her copies of the photos it could be just as detrimental to her career. Her response was nothing I expected.

“How can I defend the rights of other people’s lives if I have no knowledge of how to live myself?”

I have long since forgotten the young lady’s name, so I’ve no idea where her path has taken her, but her statement has stuck with me. Her insight at such an early point in her life was astonishing. Too often, especially when the intent is good, we become so concerned about what other people are doing that we pay little or no attention to the fact that our own life is passing us by. We reach middle age, or later, realize that the flexibility of our youth is gone, and try to compensate with the time we have left, not knowing how much time that may be.

While millennials have been roundly criticized by their predecessors as being too slow to grow up and take responsibility for their lives, perhaps they have more sense than their elders did in their twenties. Young adults today are more likely to postpone marriage and families and long-term responsibilities for one primary reason: they want to experience life before doing so becomes an act of chasing old regrets.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]We have expanded the longevity of life to the point where it is now reasonable to expect a fair number of people to live past the century mark. 65 is no longer the old age marker that it was a mere thirty years ago. Yet, we have to ask ourselves what good it does to exist for longer periods of time if we continually put off learning how to actually live that life? What good does it do us to argue over when life begins or ends when we completely ignore the quality of the substance between those two points?

Time is not nearly on our side as much as we may think. Accidents have always been a risk as long as humans have existed, but an increasing risk is what we are doing to ourselves. Just yesterday, a 24-year-old reporter and a 26-year-old cameraman left television station WDBJ for what they thought was a routine interview, shot live for the station’s morning show. They had no way of knowing their lives would be taken from them on-air. Later yesterday, in Sunset, Louisiana, the lives of a mother and a police officer were unexpectedly cut short. The United States has now had more mass shootings this year (247) than there have been days in the year (238). That we are the only Western, allegedly civilized, country to have such a problem is damning.

I firmly believe that people who understand how to live life neither interfere with nor take the lives of others except as a legitimate act of self-defense. People who learn how to live do not threaten the lives of others. While there are no one-word or single-action solutions to any of the social problems we face, there is something to be said for removing oneself from the mayhem and focusing on living one’s own life. Don’t just learn to live a little; learn to live a lifetime. One never knows what day opens the last page. Embrace each moment. [/one_half_last]

Fashion / PotD

Too Fast Fashion

August 6, 2015

War of the Roses

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. —Oscar Wilde

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]I have spent more of my time as an adult paying attention to fashion than I ever would have anticipated. Part of that is admittedly due to growing up with an inappropriate gender bias that said fashion was for girls. There’s also the fact that I grew up in a rural state where fashion had more to do with whether one was wearing denim or church clothes, and one’s jeans were boot cut or straight legged. Sure, there were stores in Tulsa and Oklahoma City that carried clothes with designer labels, but we were pretty sure that no one ever actually purchased anything with a four-digit price tag; those clothes were just there so that the markup on the cheaper clothes didn’t seem so bad by comparison.

One of the challenges fashion has always had is convincing people that they needed to buy more clothes. Historically, people have bought new clothes for one primary reason: their existing wardrobe had either worn out or they had outgrown it. Prior to the end of World War II, many women, and some men, either made their own clothes or at least knew enough to make minor alterations. One didn’t just run to the nearest store and pick up a new shirt or a new skirt without considerable thought. Clothes were, for the average consumer, too expensive to be treated with frivolity.

Fast fashion has its roots in the early automation that took place in the 1950s. Prices fell as manufacturing made it possible to produce more pieces per day and it wasn’t long before department stores began seeing the benefit of placing these cheaper-priced goods on the floor along with name brand labels. Making clothes more affordable was a strong part of the growth of the middle class. People were no longer waiting until their clothes were threadbare before replacing them and the world’s elite weren’t the only ones paying attention to fashion and style. Dressing well was a sign of being upwardly mobile, a status most everyone desired to achieve.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]While more affordable clothing seemed like a good thing, greed, selfishness, and vanity soon took over. Profits had to be bigger. New clothes had to come out more often. Having the latest style, as in what hit the shelves last week, became a monitor of one’s social standing. Fast fashion stepped up to facilitate all those shortcomings, and more. Designers were suddenly asked to not create two collections a year, but four, then six, and now eight in many cases. Special partnerships between designers and discount retailers drive sales during those two weeks between collections. Fast fashion has become a monster which we are not inclined to control.

Fast fashion has a severe price, though. As more emphasis is put on lower prices, quality has taken a back seat. Conditions for garment workers have gone beyond sweatshop all the way to outright slavery in too many situations. For every shop that is “cleaned up,” five more “dirty” shops open to meet the price demands of retailers such as Wal-Mart, H&M, and Zara. Domestic manufacturing is non-existent because just meeting building codes in the US prices us out of the subpar competition of third-world countries. We spend billions of dollars on cheaply-produced, low-quality clothing to secure a facade of a social standing, while simultaneously ruining the lives of thousands of garment workers and destroying the environment.

If there is a hope for the end of fast fashion, it may lie in the development of 3D printing that would allow people to print their own clothes at home. I’m sure designers would still be paid well for producing the patterns, but the low-price demands of retail could potentially be eliminated. Of course, so could millions of jobs. There are no quick and easy answers to a bad system on which we’ve become dependent. But change we must. Fast fashion is not sustainable and the end is not likely to be pleasant.[/one_half_last]

PotD

Independence For Myself

July 4, 2015

Princess (2011)

“I think it’s neat you do what you want. Not enough chicks do that, if you ask me–just tell society and their expectations to go fuck themselves. If more women did that, we’d be better off.”― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Independence Day. As a country, we are very loud, very proud, and nothing short of ostentatious in proclaiming the anniversary of our nation’s birth. I’m not sure any other country in the world is quite as over-the-top in their celebrations as are we. I’m okay with the annual pomposity to a large degree. Yes, we have a multitude of problems and we’re damn sure a long way from perfect, but that the wheels have yet to come flying off this experimental bus is, in the perspective of political history, quite amazing. So yes, let’s celebrate what we have that separates us from other countries on the planet.

Equally important, though, is that we celebrate our own independence, who we are as individuals and what separates me from you and you from the rest of the pack. We are taught that, at the most basic genetic level, no two people are alike. Yet, we still struggle to differentiate ourselves, men from other men, women from other women, photographers from other photographers, clowns from Republican Presidential candidates (I’m sorry, that last statement really is insulting to clowns and I hope they’ll forgive me). Our world is so overcrowded that it is difficult to find our own voice in an environment where too often we can’t even hear ourselves think.

We also have to face the danger that in our effort to separate ourselves from the pack we lose sight of the fact we are all still human. For all our talk about individuality, there are still some aspects of our existence where we must join together and act as a unit, putting all our differences aside. We do this to protect our common good, provide for the general welfare, and to secure the liberty we hold so dear. When we become so separate as to not participate in the necessary aspects of humanity, we sacrifice not only our independence but our common brotherhood. [/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Anytime we declare independence on any level, we have to realize that we are bucking a system that would prefer we all be homogenous, follow the rules, and do what we’re told. Just as the British fought back against the colonists, we often find ourselves at war to establish our own rightful place in the world. Sometimes that battle is against tradition, values and belief systems that have been handed down from generation to generation. Others fight against strong biases that say, “you can’t ….” Still others end up fighting against their own family when they choose to do or be something that no one in the family has done or been ever before. Fathers scold sons. Mothers chastise daughters. Honor is questioned.

I’ve known more than a few people who had to strike out on their own at an early age, leaving behind what barely passed as a family in an effort to somehow survive the conditions into which they had been unceremoniously dumped. Crack babies can grow up to graduate college with honors. Abandoned children who were almost twelve years old before they found out food was supposed to be hot went on to become strong, solid, caring individuals. A young man whose father was murdered in a drug deal goes on to be a successful entrepreneur. A little girl who was told she’d never amount to anything becomes CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

Independence. Mine. Yours. Some wear it in their hearts. Others wear it on their skin. No matter how your independence evolved or how it presents itself now, that do-or-die individuality within you is worth celebrating. Go ahead, light a sparkler or two, set off a brightly colored rocket, or put a match to a string of firecrackers. Celebrate our Independence. Celebrate your Independence. As different as we all are, when it comes right down to it we’re a great country.[/one_half_last]

PotD / Uncategorized

The Independence of Equality

June 30, 2015

Think Pink (2010)

“With the spread of conformity and image-driven superficiality, the allure of an individuated woman in full possession of herself and her powers will prove irresistible. We were born for plenitude and inner fulfillment.” ― Elizabeth Prioleau, Seductress – Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]When 70s model Kelly LeBrock purred the words, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” women everywhere suddenly rushed out and purchased Pantene™ shampoo. While the line was fully intended as a reverse-psychology ploy to sell beauty products, the problem LeBrock and every other attractive model faced then, and faces now, is that people do hate them because of their beauty. There is this mistaken idea that being beautiful somehow discounts one’s intellect. Sadder still is the fact that too often that anti-beauty bias comes from other women.

I can’t speak for every model, of course, but have the advantage, having photographed the young woman in today’s photo on numerous occasions, to know that she is a strong, intelligent, extremely creative, entrepreneur who, yes, is very attractive and, yes, has enough self-confidence to stride naked into a room full or horny men and leave with their balls in her Gucci® handbag. There is no putting her in a box. She appreciates a sincere compliment, but will verbally eviscerate anyone who tries to patronize her, especially in a sexual context. The fact that she is attractive is a bonus that compliments who she is, not retail wrapping that attempts to define her.

Where we run into problems is that taking pictures of one’s personality is rather difficult. Capturing intelligence on film is playing to a false stereotype at best. I could, in theory, take pictures of her working, but that would require considerable explanation and in the end does no better job telling one who she is than does the picture above. I grow rather tiresome of the crowd that seems to think that physical beauty and being a respectable person of intelligence and depth are two separate things. To disparage beauty for intelligence is just as wrongly biased as those who would mistakenly disparage women in favor of men. Both are equally wrong and equally damaging.

Part of being independent is being able to step up and say, without quiver nor anxiety, this is who I am. Period. No justification, no apologies, and no conditional qualifying should ever be necessary. A woman who dresses in Prada is no better than one who duct tapes the inside seam of her pants together each morning. One of the most brilliant mathematicians I’ve known, a person whose command of numbers makes my head spin, was bare-ass naked when I first met her and didn’t give a rat’s ass what I thought about the matter. We forget that bias too easily runs in both directions and shaming a person for being attractive by assuming she is lacking in intellect is one of the most dangerous mistakes one can make.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]The proposed Equal Rights Amendment has been introduced to every Congress since 1924 and fell only three states shy of ratification in 1982. For reasons I fail to even begin to understand because they are so inherently foolish and ill-considered, these words are not yet law:

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

The fact that it has taken nearly a century and we still are not any closer to seeing those words in the Constitution than we were when they were first introduced is beyond shameful, an example of just how firmly entrenched social biases become. While we’ve made progress in the area of women’s rights, until those words become immutable law everything we think exists, every step forward we think we’ve made, is temporal and can be erased. The concept is so very simple, and the benefits so astonishingly plentiful, so as to make this amendment’s lack of ratification yet another very embarrassing stain on the United States’ record of civil rights.

At the same time, those who would champion women’s Independence hurt their own cause when they allow something such as position or physical beauty to become the basis of judgment. This isn’t a new battle, either. Consider these words from the 16th century:

“If I follow the inclination of my nature, it is this: beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married.”
― Elizabeth I Tudor

If even Queen Elizabeth I felt that the judgments of place and standing impeded upon her Independence, we cannot expect attitudes and practices to change simply upon the force of a social campaign. Attitudes must change, children must be taught, and we must stop looking at beauty and nudity as the antithesis of intelligence and worth.

Being Independent must give one the right to be exactly who and what they are, even when that means being fabulous.[/one_half_last]

PotD / Social Commentary

Beyond The Declaration

June 29, 2015

Patiently Waiting (2011)

“I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.” ― Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Ah, Monday; that point in the week in which boss’s try desperately to pull employees back in from the distractions of the weekend, and last week, to focus on the work that lies ahead, focusing on what needs to be done next. The task is not easy. When such celebration has occurred on so many different fronts the temptation is to try and keep the party going for as long as possible. After all, who doesn’t like a party? Sure, we know one can’t party all the time, but do we really have to go back to work just yet? Can’t the celebration go on just a little bit longer?

Fortunately, there’s Facebook where we can be as shallow and meaningless as humanly possible and therefore totally deny the fact, on a cosmetic level, that there is work to be done. Half my friends have rainbow-fied their profile picture so that, as more than one person has pointed out, my newsfeed looks somewhat like a Skittles™ factory just exploded all over the place. That alone will keep us from ignoring the important strides that were made last week. Everyone jump on the bandwagon, even if you can’t plan an instrument.

Independence doesn’t stop on one event, though, and for many people today is just another Monday. The kids are off to daycare. The car needs a tuneup. Don’t forget to call and make the baby’s six-month appointment with the pediatrician. Sure, Mommy and Mommy may have gotten married over the weekend, but on a practical level the commitment was already there and this morning, well, it’s pretty much back to work. The presence of a ring on a finger doesn’t change the fact that the newlyweds could, in some states, still lose their jobs, be denied seating in a restaurant, or have difficulty adopting. [/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Independence is an every day declaration that one will not let the world overwhelm them, that one will not allow themselves to be injured by the biases of others, that two steps forward does not then require one step back. While the label on this liberty may be new, the challenges of upholding this Independence are much the same today as they were this time last week. One still has to stand firm, one still has to be defiant in the face of ignorance, and in some states one might even still need to engage in acts of some civil disobedience to simply get their government to abide by the law.

Look at the date on today’s picture. When it was taken in 2011, what they were doing, having a baby as a lesbian couple, was groundbreaking. They couldn’t marry. Their families weren’t necessarily supportive (some members were, others not so much). Society totally shunned them. Healthcare laws worked against them. At that point, less than 15 percent of Americans said they supported equal marriage rights. For couples like this, the freedom gained last week merges with, and perhaps adds some glitter to an independence that has been growing for several years.

Make no mistake, there is a shiny newness to the Independence now available to our LGBTQA friends, but as they claim that Independence that realize that this is just a marker along a journey that is not yet complete. An important marker, to be sure, but just as that Declaration of Independence ignited some difficulties between those new US citizens and King George III, this Independence also faces challenges. Maintaining Independence is often more challenging that its declaration. Welcome to Monday. Time to move forward.[/one_half_last]

Photography / PotD / Social Commentary

The Thing of Nightmares

June 19, 2015

My Own Nightmare (2009)

“The 50-50-90 rule: anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there’s a 90% probability you’ll get it wrong.” ― Andy Rooney

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]A lot of people have trouble sleeping for a number of different reasons; for some medical, others emotional, and for some it is totally because they just watched the wrong movie before going to bed. It happens. Nightmares. We hated them as children because they were so wild and ferocious and creative. As adults, though, what we often hate about them is the fact they are too damn real. Nightmares for adults seldom involve exotic monsters drawn from an over-active imagination but, instead, come from real life, involving people we actually know and love, in situations we seem unable to stop.

I rarely have nightmares anymore. I don’t watch movies before going to bed. I’m careful to time my medicine. I pull my adventurous imagination back a couple of notches. And then, I don’t sleep that long. I’m blaming that on getting older. Typically, I can go a couple of hours before my body thinks we need to wake up and check the house for mysterious noises. But then, there are weeks like this one where it has rained every night, causing already problematic arthritis to go into hyperdrive, making it impossible to find a comfortable sleeping position for more than 15 minutes or so. The dark circles under my eyes are almost as black as my wardrobe. When one doesn’t sleep, one doesn’t have nightmares. A small consolation.

Then, there are the nine families in Charleston, South Carolina who are living a nightmare. Wednesday night was prayer meeting night. I remember what that was like. Every Wednesday, usually around 6:30 or 7:00 PM, the church doors would open and 15-20 people, on a good night, would trickle into the small sanctuary. We’d sing a song, Poppa would read a few verses of scripture, then would come the prayer requests. Every possible concern of the community would be raised, both personal and public. After about 30 minutes, they’d start praying, pray for another 30 minutes, then go home. Except, for these nine people, they didn’t go home. They were shot dead, right where they prayed, by someone who had sat through the whole service. A living nightmare in every possible sense.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Today’s photo was meant to be part of a composite where a beautiful young woman was awakened by a more frightening version of herself. The concept required shooting the model twice, once reclining in various states of slumber, and then again as the nightmarish self. Care to guess which this one is? Unfortunately, we only got one finished image from the set. I totally messed up the shoot, failing to mark my tripod settings correctly and thereby throwing off the perspective. Trying to composite the two pieces consumed days as I tried to correct the perspective and make something work. When I say there’s one finished image, it’s only because I eventually gave up and called it done. You won’t find it on display.

When I opened this file and took another look, though, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the makeup work of Kelly Oswalt. Sara Williams is such a lovely little wisp of a thing in real life and Kelly did an amazing job of creating something a little more terrifying. Even without the accompanying “beauty” piece, this makes for an interesting and striking image. I also had to giggle a bit looking at this, as Sara is now eight-months-plus pregnant, about to deliver her first child any day now. Perhaps Sara can threaten the child when she gets older with something like, “This is what happens to mommy when you don’t take a nap.” Of course, then the baby would have nightmares, and that just doesn’t help anyone, does it?

I wish we lived in a world where all our nightmares were those derived from imagination. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. As long as there is hate there will be nightmares like that of Wednesday night. Such events do not happen in truly civilized societies. In fact, the United States is the only first world country where mass shootings such as this are an issue. Our nightmare has repeated itself far too many times and we fail to even bother looking for a reasonable solution for fear it might keep one person from carrying a gun or somehow diminish the shooter’s rights, despite the fact he’s trampling the rights of others to live peacefully.[/one_half_last]

We can’t put a stop to all nightmares, but we can reduce them. We have no choice. Now is the time to seriously put a clamp on gun violence. This is one nightmare we must end.

PotD / Social Commentary

Anonymously Yours

June 17, 2015

Properly Accessorized (2011)

“I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.” ― Edna St. Vincent Millay

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]How bad is it that we are still a good 18 months or so away from the 2016 presidential election and already I’m tired of the whole thing? With so many candidates having already announced their campaigns, each additional name added to the roster feels more like adding to the list of extras at the end of a bad movie no one really wanted to watch in the first place. Sure, eventually we’ll have to vote for a couple of these clowns, but at this point there’s too much noise, too much grandstanding, and too much absurdity to take any of them seriously.

I wonder what would happen if we forced candidates to run anonymously through the primaries, unable to present a name, a photograph, or even appear on Sunday morning talk shows in person. How would it change the process, and the number willing to run, if they were initially assigned a number and were forced to run strictly on the merits of their platform, with no personality involved? Would we be more careful about who we choose as our president? Certainly, we would want to reveal the names of the candidates at the party primaries, but in the circus leading up to that point what benefits might there be in ignoring names altogether and having everyone run anonymously, with no indication of race, heritage, gender, sexuality, or religious beliefs? I cannot help but think the process would be much better served.

Personality and ego are a detriment when one is considering who should hold public office, but yet those are the two aspects voters get heaped upon them the most often. In a crowded field such as what we are already experiencing in this cycle, we are forced to endure a constant battle of who can say the most socially provocative thing in an effort to get even 15 seconds of time on a newscast, or perhaps a small storm of controversy on social media. When over half the field of contestants is more well known for their ridiculous statements and social media gaffes than their actual platforms, we have a serious problem.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Sadly, one of the most frequent areas of unacceptable stump speech involves slut shaming and victim blaming on the part of candidates. We saw it too often in the 2012 election, and already the habit is rearing its ugly head in this one. Candidates mistakenly believe that by pandering to the very lowest and most ignorant form of voter that they can appeal to an under-educated and socially inept base to push them forward in the election. What they fail to realize is that the rest of the civilized world would really like to put those two issues to rest. There is never such a thing as “asking for it,” especially in regard to rape, and what a woman does or does not wear is not indicative of her sexual proclivity.

Such inappropriate attitudes toward sex and violence are one of the reasons we have had to stop giving names, even pseudonyms, to models who appear nude. We have had too many instances where technology allowed a model to be stalked after her name came up in some random Google search. With the increase in facial recognition software, I worry that, without any change in public attitude, we may be forced to limit figure art to anonymous forms such as today’s picture. Yes, today’s picture is quite lovely, but I’m always saddened by the fact I’m forced to crop out the model’s beautiful and expressive face because she rightly fears both social and professional backlash.

Anonymity can work both for us and against us. When it prevents ego and personality from obscuring fact and reality, anonymity is a good thing. When it allows shaming and inappropriate blaming to continue, though, anonymity is something that should perhaps be stripped away. I would dearly love to never have to crop another photo or avoid giving credit to another model to prevent putting them in any form of danger.

Maybe I should just run for president. Anonymously, of course.[/one_half_last]

pop culture / PotD / Social Commentary

12 People Who Totally Suck

May 30, 2015

Indiana Tea Party Republican Governor Mike Pense (2015)

“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” -Richard Avedon

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Ha! I bet you thought we were going to give you a list of twelve individuals who totally suck! Okay, we did think about doing that, but then the number of Republican candidates for President grew to 16 and that just made the list too long.

Kidding. Sort of. Almost.

Sure, we preach being nice and inclusive and loving most the time. After all, that really is the only way the world is going to improve. However, there are certain groups of people whose actions as a group are so reprehensible that they need to be called out and shunned. Furthermore, we as a society should do everything we can to encourage the demise of these groups. Some I doubt will ever go away, but many can, and should. Here’s our list of the most despicable.

Pseudo-Celebrities

Real celebrities, those who have some significant talent that thrusts them into the public eye for good reason, can be challenging enough; there have been many in that group whose behavior is less than stellar. Pseudo-celebrities, though, have no significant talent. They have no significant reason for being popular. In most cases, we have reality television to thank for this phenomenon. When networks find amusement in airing the antics of talentless, classless, and too often clueless people, we all suffer. Greatly. Better they all go away. Forever.

Terrorists

These people are just straight up mean. They do not value life in any form, theirs nor anyone else’s. When people don’t value life, they do stupid things such as see how many people they can blow up. Ostensibly, they all have some cause they are trying to defend, but what cause would anyone support that doesn’t value life? Where on the scale of reason does that even remotely make sense? Here’s the thing: not all terrorist are in the middle east or carry guns. There are more in corporate boardrooms. They’re all just as dangerous and all need to be stopped.

People Who Knock On Doors

When I was little, I would get excited every time I heard a knock on the door because it almost always meant a friend had come to play or the UPS guy had dropped off a package. Now, the UPS and FedEx guys just ring the doorbell and disappear. So help me, I swear they’re using teleporters. I’ve not seen a truck in front of our house in years. Now, when there is a knock at the door, it’s someone wanting to change my religion or ask me for money. I’m not interested in doing either and, quite honestly, even if I was looking to do either I wouldn’t wait to see who showed up on my front porch. If I didn’t invite you or you’re not bringing me something fun, go away. Forever.

Racists

This is one of those groups that, no matter how much we rail against them or point out how totally ridiculous they are, they’re probably not going to go totally away. Why do I think this? Because racists have been here pretty much from the moment hominids developed and separated into different tribes. Just because they won’t go completely away doesn’t mean we should in any way, shape, or form tolerate their unacceptable behavior. To the degree we ignore them, they fester and grow like an untreated cancer. We have to stay on top of them, stopping them at every possible juncture, or else they will take over.

Homophobes

Here we have one group who can, should, and must go completely away. More than anything else, these people are quite simply ignorant. We can’t even complain that they’re believing in ancient myths. These fools are making up nonsense out of the clear blue. While we would like to think we can love them into accepting everyone regardless of their sexual orientation, history would seem to indicate otherwise. We must instead focus on educating younger generations correctly, dismantling the nonsense before it has a chance to grab hold, and hoping that those who refuse to learn die out quickly.

Sexual Predators

Rapists. Pedophiles. Anyone who sexually takes advantage of another person, or commits any sex act against them without their permission and compliance, is someone who needs to be immediately removed from society. There’s actual science to tell us that recidivism among sexual predators exceeds 80% no matter what type of treatment or intervention they receive, or who their parents are, or what reality show they’re on, or which presidential candidates have had their picture taken with them. If we want to keep them from committing further crimes, they have to be removed from society. We simply have no choice at this point.

People Who Don’t Hold Doors/Elevators

Compared to the previous group, this one may seem completely insignificant. However, I challenge that people who don’t hold doors and/or elevators, especially when they see the person approaching is in some form of distress, are more than just rude: they have no respect for other people. Those who have no respect for other people not only don’t hold doors/elevators, they are capable of doing any despicable and mean act of which one can think. Murder is not off the list of choices for these people, given the correct set of circumstances. Note, we’re not talking about someone who is just having a bad day and lets one instance slip. These are the people who, every day, despise everyone else on the planet and do their best to be mean. They can all go away.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]

Justin Bieber Fans

I’m relying on statistical analysis for this one. I’m not sure I’ve ever had the displeasure of actually running into a true Bieber Believer. I don’t go to the places where they are likely to congregate and run in the opposite direction at the first sound of anything that might possibly be the beginning of that noise Bieber calls music. Bieber fans elicit screams and other sounds that exceed the measurable quotient of the human ear. Rumor is they’ve actually had to re-route aircraft to avoid the shockwave of disruptive noise caused by Bieber Fans. Many cities are considering a ban on indoor Bieber concerts due to the screams of fans compromising the structural integrity of the buildings. Fortunately, most Bieber Fans grow up, discover real music, and move on.

Self-Righteous Assholes

You know at least one. They are convinced that they know better than everyone and no amount of evidence to the contrary is ever going to convince them otherwise. They believe they have the best religion, went to the best school, drive the best cars, live in the best houses, and could have just as easily invented Facebook themselves accept for the fact they’ve never been a loser geek. These people delight in putting everyone else down in an effort to make themselves look better. We have another word for them, too: Bullies. Like many others on this list, we have to stand up to them to keep their numbers from growing. Fortunately, there is evidence they can be converted when shown the error of their ways. We have no choice but to try.

Non-Tippers

If you’ve never worked for tips in the United States, you don’t understand the severity of this crime. All over the country, we hear people talking about the minimum wage being too low. What rarely gets any publicity is that groups of very necessary people work for even less, roughly 75% less, on the promise that if they do a good job people will tip them. Your server’s base wage is a mere $2.75 an hour. Who can live on that? No one! And while the concept of tips sounds good, the fact is that as meal prices have gone up, and the quality of food has in many cases declined, tips given to servers, who control neither prices nor food quality, get shafted. Not tipping should be a crime. The punishment: working three doubles in a row at a busy restaurant … with no tips.

Murderers

This one is a no-brainer as well. Murder is probably the worst crime of them all, and often the most difficult to catch. Police can’t look for a murderer until they have evidence that the crime has been committed and contemporary murderers have all kinds of methods preventing that from happening. Murderers can be divided into two groups: passionate murderers who were simply pushed to far and killed in the heat of the moment; and psycho murderers who think, plan, and prepare before carrying out their nefarious deed(s). The first group probably isn’t all that dangerous with a little psychiatric help. The fact that they killed once was totally related to a specific situation. The second group, though, can’t be trusted no matter what. That there are still a huge group of them running loose should make all of us afraid to go to bed at night.

Tea Party Republicans

The Republican party has a grand tradition and holds a valuable place in political conversation. At least, it did until this small group of jackasses calling themselves the Tea Party started taking over. Tea Party Republicans have done more damage to the country, especially at the state level, than ISIS or any other terrorist group ever could. Consider their list of crimes:

They’ve gutted civil rights laws and the 1964 Voting Rights Act,
they deny women the right to control their own body,
they deny much-needed services to the poor and incapacitated,
they deny assistance to military veterans,
they’ve turned education into nothing more than a test-taking machine,
they are systemically killing the environment,
they have attempted to usurp the First Amendment with laws explicitly promoting Christianity while oppressing everyone else,
they claim they do not have to obey decisions made by the United States Supreme Court,
they believe rape is the woman’s fault, and
they refuse to recognize the civil rights of the entire LGBTQ community.

Sadly, that list is just the most common grievances to be held against Tea Partiers. These folks are nothing short of insane. Running on a platform of fiscal responsibility and smaller government, once elected they decimate every necessary program that does not kick back funding to their cronies. They are the very definition of a real and present danger that, if not completely removed from the political system, could single-handedly destroy the country.

See, I made it all the way through the list without naming anyone specifically. Well, okay, there is the idiot in today’s picture, but that’s more implied, don’t you think? Besides, he’s already proven this year just how much he sucks. He doesn’t need my help.[/one_half_last]

PotD / Social Commentary

Blurred Lives

March 14, 2015

Blurred Lives (2013)

How strongly are we influenced by what we hear, what we see, and what we experience without ever actually giving the matter direct thought? Is there such a thing as an original thought anymore or is everything merely a re-interpretation of what someone else created?

[one_half padding=”0 4px 0 2px”]One of the big news items this week was a jury’s decision to award the family of late singer Marvin Gaye $7.3 million for copyright infringement after determining that Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams had used, or been strongly influenced by, portions of Gaye’s “Got To Give It Up” when writing their hit song, “Blurred Lines.” While the amount of the award is staggering, and some naysayers predict this is the end of original music, the fact is we’ve been here before (Michael Bolton vs. the Isley Brothers, 1994) and the music industry will continue to produce “new” material to meet demand.

The larger question, though, is to what degree we are all influenced by the more subtle aspects of our environment? We go through the day with music playing in our ears, but we aren’t consciously listening to the songs. We read various headlines and snippets of stories without paying particular attention to their source. We see ads and commercials almost everywhere we look, but can’t tell someone what product was being sold. How much of what we experience is sticking?

Memory is difficult to quantify and is an extremely large field of scientific study. Just about the time scientists and doctors think they have a complete picture of the situation, there is even more adding to the constantly increasing bulk of information regarding what we remember, why we remember, and how much we remember. Midst all this ongoing research, though, one thing is for certain: we are all affected by the experience of our environment.

Kat and I were recently re-conversing along a topic that is fun to consider: what would a person such as one of the country’s founding fathers think were they to suddenly be transported into modern America? While there would unquestionably be a high amount of astonishment, and perhaps even fear of outright sorcery, one thing almost for certain is that they would experience sensory overload. We have so very much going on around us that our brains are required to process external information almost 24/7. There is little time to relax, to absorb, or to ponder because of the near-constant barrage of new information coming at us.

So, how do we know what part of our consciousness is us, original, new, having never existed prior to this moment, and how much is simply a re-manufacturing of material recycled from all our experiences and the things that influence us? There doesn’t seem to be any consensus on the topic.

National Public Radio’s Ashish Ranpura writes:

Fundamentally, memory represents a change in who we are. Our habits, our ideologies, our hopes and fears are all influenced by what we remember of our past. At the most basic level, we remember because the connections between our brains’ neurons change; each experience primes the brain for the next experience, so that the physical stuff we’re made of reflects our history like mountains reflect geologic eras. Memory also represents a change in who we are because it is predictive of who we will become. We remember things more easily if we have been exposed to similar things before, so what we remember from the past has a lot to do with what we can learn in the future.

[/one_half]
[one_half_last padding=”0 2px 0 4px”]That first sentence is the kicker: what we remember changes who we are. What sticks now helps determine what sticks stronger, later. So, consider the maxim that a lie repeated enough times becomes Truth. The more we experience the same thing, whether it’s a statement, a song, or a photograph, the more likely we are to not only remember that one specific item, but items similar to it, even to the point our memories no longer distinguish between different but similar entities. Everything becomes a giant blur.

Consider the image above. At first glance, it appears to be a double-exposure, what happens when the shutter is opened more than once onto the same piece of film. This is a digital image, though, and what we are seeing is very similar to what our brains must at time experience: an over-abundance of information. Taken at ISO 100, the shutter was open a quarter of a second with a wide-open aperture of f/2.8. The image appears to be doubly exposed because it was left open to an excessive amount of information. As a result: everything is blurred.

So it is with our lives. Very little of our experience is clearly defined. We are so inundated with information that even our own memories can’t be trusted to be accurate. Our very lives are blurred to the point of not being sure who we really are. Are we individuals, or are we a conglomerate of our experiences?

Perhaps we need to step away more often. Psychologists have been telling us for several years now that having quiet time, alone, totally disconnected from all the unending madness of the world, is critical to our development, if not our sanity. Most people try to “get away” perhaps once or twice a year on something called a vacation, but too often even those attempts end up being little more than exchanging one set of overwhelming experiences for another. We rush to get in as much “vacation” as possible before having to go back to work and, as a result. our brains get no rest.

Here’s the kicker: we control, for the most part, how much we experience. We’re the ones who spend hours on social media, keep earbuds glued to our ears all day, watch endless hours of television or streaming media. Little is actually being forced upon us. The blurriness of our lives is of our own doing.

So perhaps, this weekend, we step away for a while. The weather should clear up a bit this afternoon, so step away. Go for a walk in the woods. Sit for an hour or so beside a babbling brook. Take a nap. Better yet, take two. Eliminate all the experiences manufactured by someone else and take some time to create your own; do something that is totally you.

We might be surprised at just how much more focus we have come Monday if we spend more of our weekends defining our own lives.[/one_half_last]

PotD / Social Commentary

Celebrating The Anti-Barbie

March 9, 2015

The Anti-Barbie (2010). Model: Dani Norberg. Styling: charles i. letbetter

I find it sadly interesting that today, the day after International Women’s Day where we celebrate women and all their wonderful contributions to the world, is Barbie Day. Barbie, that representation of all that is superficial, misogynistic, plastic, and objectifying in the historical view of women and the severe lack of reality in how society defines women. I am in favor of this particular celebration not existing.

We actually did a project a few summers ago where we took Barbie dolls and treated them like models. Ultimately, we turned them into zombies and at least one little girl was disappointed to discover she couldn’t actually get the zombie Barbie in a store.

I decided to go a different direction today though and celebrate the anti-Barbie; women who are independent and fierce, perhaps embracing an alternative lifestyle, not afraid to do things differently, to step outside the norm. These are women who wear their ink and body modifications proudly, not caring what anyone else thinks about the matter; women who define life by their own standards, set their own rules, and hold to their own sense of morality.

For too long we have limited women’s role models to those who are the elite, those who go on to college, run Fortune 500 companies, break through barriers at the top to give women more opportunity, and I’m not knocking those women in any way, shape or form; what they have done is nothing short of miraculous. But I also find strong role models in women who hold down two or three jobs to make sure their children are fed, clothed, and sheltered. I find strong role models in women who operate backhoes, drive trucks, and design stage lights. I find strong role models in women who join the military and fight to be allowed on the front lines. I find strong role models in women who struggle in the face of unending adversity and still somehow manage to hold their families together.

I don’t personally know any women who are anything at all like Barbie, and I don’t think I want to though I know they exist. Being superficial and plastic, hanging on to an ideal that was never anywhere close to reality, has no place in this or any other progressive society.

So here’s to all the anti-Barbies, the real women who aren’t afraid to be different. We love you. We thank you. We embrace you.

A Heart For Sex

Sex is the driving force on the planet. We should embrace it, not see it as the enemy.—Hugh Hefner

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All Tied Up

Women’s fashion is a subtle form of bondage. It’s men’s way of binding them. We put them in these tight, high-heeled shoes, we make them wear these tight clothes and we say they look sexy. But they’re actually tied up.—David Duchovny

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#BlackBunsMatter

Man who invented the hamburger was smart; man who invented the cheeseburger was a genius.—Matthew McConaughey

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Pollution

Must we wait for selection to solve the problems of overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, pollution of the environment and a nuclear holocaust, or can we take explicit steps to make our future more secure? In the latter case, must we not transcend selection?
—B. F. Skinner

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Pure Sweetness

As a culture I see us as presently deprived of subtleties. The music is loud, the anger is elevated, sex seems lacking in sweetness and privacy.—Shelley Berman

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The Real Skinny

We were at a beach one summer, and I had a bathing suit on. My wife looked at me and said: ‘Boy, you are skinny, aren’t you?’ I said: ‘Honey, I’d like to remind you that it was minor defects like this that kept me from getting a better wife.’—Lou Holtz

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Smoking. Hot.

As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain from smoking when awake.—Mark Twain

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Why Worry?

If you ask what is the single most important key to longevity, I would have to say it is avoiding worry, stress and tension. And if you didn’t ask me, I’d still have to say it.—George Burns

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Flip Phone

Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets ― Andy Warhol

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Learning To Live

People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly. ― Andy Warhol

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Too Fast Fashion

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. —Oscar Wilde

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Independence For Myself

“I think it’s neat you do what you want. Not enough chicks do that, if you ask me–just tell society and their expectations to go fuck themselves. If more women did that, we’d be better off.”― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

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The Independence of Equality

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But what we can do, as flawed as we are, is still see God in other people, and do our best to help them find their own grace. That’s what I strive to do, that’s what I pray to do every day.—Barack Obama

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Sex is the driving force on the planet. We should embrace it, not see it as the enemy.—Hugh Hefner

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Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.—Buddha

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Women’s fashion is a subtle form of bondage. It’s men’s way of binding them. We put them in these tight, high-heeled shoes, we make them wear these tight clothes and we say they look sexy. But they’re actually tied up.—David Duchovny

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In the face of patriarchy, it is a brave act indeed for both men and women to embrace, rather than shame or attempt to eradicate, the feminine.—Alanis Morissette

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Man who invented the hamburger was smart; man who invented the cheeseburger was a genius.—Matthew McConaughey

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Providing meaning to a mass of unrelated needs, ideas, words and pictures – it is the designer’s job to select and fit this material together and make it interesting.—Paul Rand

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Must we wait for selection to solve the problems of overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, pollution of the environment and a nuclear holocaust, or can we take explicit steps to make our future more secure? In the latter case, must we not transcend selection? —B. F. Skinner

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As a culture I see us as presently deprived of subtleties. The music is loud, the anger is elevated, sex seems lacking in sweetness and privacy.—Shelley Berman

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We were at a beach one summer, and I had a bathing suit on. My wife looked at me and said: ‘Boy, you are skinny, aren’t you?’ I said: ‘Honey, I’d like to remind you that it was minor defects like this that kept me from getting a better wife.’—Lou Holtz

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As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain from smoking when awake.—Mark Twain

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If you ask what is the single most important key to longevity, I would have to say it is avoiding worry, stress and tension. And if you didn’t ask me, I’d still have to say it.—George Burns

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The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.—James A. Baldwin

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Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets ― Andy Warhol

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People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly. ― Andy Warhol

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Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. —Oscar Wilde

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“I think it’s neat you do what you want. Not enough chicks do that, if you ask me–just tell society and their expectations to go fuck themselves. If more women did that, we’d be better off.”― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

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“I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.” ― Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

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“The 50-50-90 rule: anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there’s a 90% probability you’ll get it wrong.” ― Andy Rooney

We can’t put a stop to all nightmares, but we can reduce them. We have no choice. Now is the time to seriously put a clamp on gun violence. This is one nightmare we must end.

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“I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.” ― Edna St. Vincent Millay

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“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” -Richard Avedon

Pseudo-Celebrities

Terrorists

People Who Knock On Doors

Racists

Homophobes

Sexual Predators

People Who Don’t Hold Doors/Elevators

Justin Bieber Fans

Self-Righteous Assholes

Non-Tippers

Murderers

Tea Party Republicans

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How strongly are we influenced by what we hear, what we see, and what we experience without ever actually giving the matter direct thought? Is there such a thing as an original thought anymore or is everything merely a re-interpretation of what someone else created?

Must we wait for selection to solve the problems of overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, pollution of the environment and a nuclear holocaust, or can we take explicit steps to make our future more secure? In the latter case, must we not transcend selection?
—B. F. Skinner