Author Archives: oinsketta

Son of Duh!

On August 6th I discovered that one can upload a video into Google Drive and easily embed the link on a website, as I did here on August 6th.  This way it’s possible to show a video on your website without everybody instantly seeing on youTube that it has not begun to go viral.

It is a neat workaround, since on youTube disabling ‘make video statistics visible on the watch page’ does not seem to make video statistics invisible on the watch page.

I’ve spent several hours today, on four computers, on macs and my PC, trying to recreate the simple step of cutting out an embed code for a video uploaded to Google Drive.  If I hadn’t done it so easily here, on August 6th, I’d think I dreamed it.  You can click on the link to Animation by several creative adults to see what I’m talking about.

Google has a helpful link posted on the help subject of embedding a video from Google Drive.  It takes you to a forum, begun in 2012 and extending to the present, where frustrated users complain bitterly about the lack of functionality while others try to find semi-satisfying workarounds to this perplexing situation.

If it’s not the humans, forgetting to wash their asses for days on end, and insisting on dancing vigorously in the tiny, airless room, it’s the humans who program the computers, or the computers themselves, or the companies who hire the humans who do these things, or don’t.

 

 

 

 

Duh!

Here’s a big “DUH!” for you, not intuitive, maybe, but once you hear it you’ll make that exaggeratedly stupid face and say “duh!”, if you’re inclined to such things.

If you have a website to promote your business idea, and it contains links to the product you are selling, visitors must not be able to easily see that only a dozen, rather than many thousands, have visited the links.  YouTube, for example, with its counters, is good for promoting an idea if 75,000 people, or better still, 7,500,000 people, have viewed it.  It is the kiss of death if the counter reads 14, or 106.

“Loser…” the visitor can’t help but think, perhaps also “poor bastard.”

The internet is a popularity contest.  High school has nothing on the internet in that regard.  The numbers don’t lie.  If the thing is good but nobody cares, the number reads 6, maybe 28.  If the LOL cat is funny, or the baby animal irresistible, the number quickly reaches 99,000,000.

Like everything else– or like many things, anyway–  there is a way to fix it.  A workaround, like a dozen I’ve already employed in the creation of my gerry-rigged empire.  No need to show potential customers how few people actually watch the amazing and original animation small groups of strangers are creating.   I’ll get on it tomorrow, it should take no more than a few hours to fix.  Plain foolishness is the only reason to let a prospective customer see at a glance that your most popular, most amazing piece of work has been viewed less than 200 times.

Live and learn, baby.

“Duh!”

 

The Psychology of Self-Motivation

I watched this promisingly named TED talk with great appetite just now.  Finding the secret to self-motivation would do wonders for me as I try to stay focused on pushing this heavy, maddeningly successful but even more maddeningly unsold, program up the hill.   It will succeed or fail as a program and business based on my self-motivation, based on how well I learn to confidently and succinctly package and sell it.  It all depends, now, on my salesmanship.  Salesmanship which I must learn on my own, without dependable feedback, except for one or two people by email.

I watched the excellent presentation by an engaging psychology professor.  During the course of a snappy talk, illustrated by paradiddles, rim shots and other stages of his long ago progress on the snare drum, he reveals the secret: acquire competence by getting good feedback, be encouraged by encouragement, encourage others, avoid the fear of failure and replace it with the desire to succeed because you like what you’re doing, be part of a community of people who give good feedback and encouragement.

Fuck.  

Thanks, professor.  

 

The Error of My Ways

I’m going to try to reconstruct this post, wiped away as though it never existed when I decided to ponder and revisit it, thinking a draft was saved (he said, the passive voice used).   Only the title was saved, as if to mock me.   Another reminder, boys and girls:  when writing on a computer, save your work often!

I had three big ideas for books to write over the course of my life, all of them misguided.  I point out at the start that nobody ever needs to write a book, really, although many people often think:  somebody should write a book about this. Sometimes they do and the book moves, informs, enlightens or entertains readers.  Other times, eh.  Few books change lives, though many who write books probably start off believing their’s will.

The first book I attempted to write was called Me Ne Frego [1], the story of an idealistic narrator’s inevitably losing battle against a soul-crushing bureaucracy, embodied in the unreasonable person of Minnie Frego.  The reader knows how the story ends long before the naive, somewhat sympathetic narrator does.  It’s part of what makes the manuscript so hard for me to read now, more than twenty years after posing as the tough guy narrator.   The manuscript served as my thesis for an MA in Creative Writing, so there’s that.   The letter I got from the one publisher I sent a sample to informed me that, although nicely written, it was not suitable for their house because the main character had not undergone the kind of dramatic personal transformation that apparently drives every great tale.

About twenty years later I had another big idea:  Bird Wins [2].   The idea was given to me by a literary agent, actually, although the title and the subject matter were mine.   In Bird Wins the occasionally droll narrator observes countless one-sided battles between powerless people and a soul-crushing bureaucracy, embodied in the people for whom our hero carries a bucket into which, after  lifting their long robes, they relieve themselves.  These thousand mini-tragedies are set against the backdrop of the narrator’s mother’s slow death from cancer.  I was told by the literary agent I’d regaled with some of the interlocking stories that it was a natural.  “If you write the pitch just the way you told it to me now, I can sell it,” she said confidently, flashing a winning smile.   I believed her, though my attempt to recreate it was nowhere near as engaging as what I’d improvised for her and her son.  Nothing came of it in the end but a few disjointed chapters.

In the decades in between I periodically worked on a manuscript I unfortunately called Get Outta Here, Melz, taking the surname of my fictional alter-ego from an old friend who not long ago died of a rare and vicious disease.   At that time he was alive and well, as far as I knew.  In that story there is no relentless, soul-crushing bureaucracy for the narrator to fight a losing battle against, but, in a refreshing change of pace, Benedict Melzer is eventually chased by a torch-wielding mob of his former closest friends who form a posse in the mistaken belief that he has seduced and run off with one of their teenaged daughters.  They find a seemingly incriminating correspondence between the self-righteously noble Benedict and the, at one time, slightly infatuated girl, but their suspicions could not have been further from the truth.  The last letter the girl writes to BM, coldly denouncing him as a hopeless, pathetic, self-important idiot, which the readers see, is not found by his former friends among the papers.  At the time they take off after him, the girl is in another state with a young man and Melz is far away, alone, on the run from himself and his life.  It was intended as a comedy of errors, although, ideally, a comedy is funny.  I never made much progress with the book, though thinking about it now, and the unfortunately named BM’s all-consuming, impractical, slightly mad belief in the supreme importance of spontaneity and creativity, I find it tricky to escape the psychic ripples of it as a certain alienated desperation dogs me like a hellhound in the uncomfortable silence of just about everybody I know.

As I jotted uncharitably in my former gratefulness journal the other day:

My first two attempts to write a book, Me Ne Frego and Bird Wins, were ass-backwards, spectacularly unmarketable efforts.  Each featured a brave, unquestionably earnest narrator describing a detailed crucifixion, gesticulating stoically from his crude cross as the life dripped from his body.

Another equally compelling book could be written from the POV of a precocious child dying of dysentery in a toxic slum in Lahore.  The world has billions of such books, unwritten by the losers of a billion small, infinitely brutal, rigged games.

The books the world wants, and it’s hard to blame them, are stories of a remarkable individual’s miraculous triumph over the relentless machine that grinds us all down at varying speeds.  The paying world goes, by and large, for moving triumphs or dramatic, fully justifiable revenge stories, a Hollywood ending.  The world, where the scales are so often false and weighted, loves the rousing story of an honest count, against all the odds, or failing that, a good ass-whupping.  Stories by those on the wrong end of the ass-whupping do not sell as well as the other kind, as any marketing expert will tell you.

 

NOTES:

[1] “I don’t give a rat’s ass!” an Italian expression of contempt and bravado famously used by Benito Mussolini.

[2] named for the unbeatable tic-tac-toe playing chicken in the Chinatown Arcade on Mott Street, (the bird always went first, so you figure it out…) may she rest in peace.

 

 

 

 

 

Animation by several creative adults

Animation created by several inventive women in four July 2014 sessions at the Creative Center, NYC.  Beautiful stuff.

with thanks to Django Reinhardt (1910-1953) (I’ll See You In My Dreams, Low Cotton– with Barney Bigard on clarinet) and Paul Greenstein (glistening glissentar on my track “Now Before I Go”)  Although this not for profit use is “fair use” I should get permissions from whoever currently owns the rights to Django’s genius…

On the Q46

Girl gets on the Q-46 bus
all teeth, yelling excitedly
into her pink cell phone
just loud jabbering to me
annoying shouted banalities
to the Spanish-speaking woman across the way
forced to take in every too loud word.

We’d exchanged annoyed looks
without moving our mouths
the girl is way in the back, mind you,
making a racket like a crazed bird or small primate

Finally the woman near me
calls back
“please lower your voice”
and the girl dials it from ten to eight.

Thankfully, she got off the bus
two stops later,
the bus moved quietly
toward the subway
as we unbent our brows.

At that point nobody was upset any more
that the air-conditioning wasn’t working
and the windows didn’t open.

Encouragement

Notice how the word “courage” is the center of that word.   To encourage is to give courage.   Courage is the most important tool we need to forge through difficulty. Being discouraged is the end, temporarily or permanently, of one’s ability to soldier on.

Usually, weighed down with our own troubles, distracted by many distractions, we don’t notice how easy and essential encouragement is.   We may think that nobody encourages us, and we do fine, so what the hell?

I get a call from an old friend whenever his wife, an active volcano, erupts.   She broke the stained glass window of the room he rents to escape from her wrath.   I hear the story, try to be sympathetic, but do I really encourage him?   I give him advice about his strategy, tell him why answering her rage with his own anger may not be the best approach.   He gets slightly defensive, and it’s hard to blame him.   He called for encouragement, he got a bit of possibly helpful, definitely unwanted, advice.

“You are in a war, unfortunately, and every war is different.   I think you’re doing a great job finding ways to hold your enemy at bay.   I commend you, and strength to your arm,” would have been a more encouraging response.

When I told a friend recently that I, with an idealistic and so far unpaid program to save doomed children, am like the man on the falling plane exhorting others to put their oxygen masks on before helping others– while not wearing my own, I secretly hoped he would disagree.   He nodded sadly, thought the image was very apt.    It had the opposite of an encouraging effect, no matter how realistic the image might have been.

When a friend is engaged in a difficult or even impossible quest, do we encourage them or do them more of a favor by gently trying to bring them back into the real world, unacceptable as that real world might be?    Silence, of course the most obvious option, generally does little to advance either of these mercies.

Magical

“It’s hard to know what to say to you, how to start a conversation with someone in your perilous situation,” she said.

“That’s understandable,” he said, trying to distance himself from me. “What do people talk about? Not their terror, too scary. Not their inner feelings, way too uncomfortable. I have no idea what people actually talk about, I don’t talk much these days.”

A long moment of silence, and swallowing, seemed like it might never end.

“Death, there’s something else we don’t really like to talk about, except maybe for which really bad people deserve painful forms of it,” he said, after a while.

In her struggle to get him off depressing, dead-end subjects, she suggested that there was hope. An introduction had been made by email to a possibly congenial collaborator. “I heard she wrote that you were ‘magical’,” she said hopefully.

“Yes, she did, that was the word she used. Said I was ‘magical’ with groups and individuals,” he said brightly. It would only be a second or two, she knew, before he’d manage to turn even this glowing compliment to the dark side.

“Who was it who wrote ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’? If I had a smart phone I could tell you in a few taps, hang on, let’s pretend I do: Joan Didion. You remember that phrase? Magical thinking is a kind of irrational, superstitious belief that if you do things a certain way a bad outcome will be averted. Like Didion thought at one point that she couldn’t get rid of her dying husband’s shoes because if she did he wouldn’t have shoes when he came back from the hospice. By holding on to the shoes she believed she was magically preventing his death, somehow. Grief, derangement, insanity, all very terrible, desperate things, and part of the realm of the magical, you know.”

“What?” she said. “How do you get from a compliment about your ability to turn a group of strangers into a creative, collaborative team into Joan Didion’s meditation on the insane thinking caused by grief and impending loss?”

“It’s really a simple step,” he said, “nobody knows what to say about my program, which nobody, also, really grasps the potential and present reality of. I have seen it at work many times now, how organically my idea works over and over, and I have a few participants who can vouch for how well it works, but to the rest, and everyone I know, absent a compellingly creative and engaging commercial pitch, you have to take my word for it. My word, in a word, magical thinking. You know, if I meet a rich person who generously supports the idea, get the idea to a philanthropic foundation who can picture the vision I present and pay to help make it real in the world, if I can work in the shittiest schools in the city and produce work far better than anything I’ve had them do so far, if… you dig? My word for the odds of success here was ‘miracle’. That’s what it would take for one person to succeed at what I am trying to do alone. Another word is ‘magical.’ The guy is a miracle worker, magical.”

After a moment she said “do you realize how hard it is to have a conversation with somebody like you?”

“Absolutely, I do,” he said, and smiled, after a fashion. He thought suddenly of a man he once met at a friend’s parents’ party. The man was slim, and shy, and had a beaming smile on his face almost the entire night. Every time he looked over the man was grinning like the happiest man in the world. The woman the smiling man was standing next to for most of the evening, also happy looking, was his sister, it turned out. He learned later that they lived together and that the beaming man had died of complications of alcoholism.

“What should I have done at that party?” the ghost of the smiling man asks, “sobbed and wailed about how fucking unbearable my life was? I had one card to play, and I played it, went home and got shit-faced and then, soon after, I was dead. Finally.”

“Whoa,” she said, “that transition was kind of magical, but in a very dark way.”

“Believe in magic and you have to believe in dark magic too,” he said darkly.

“You’ve been painting the floor of this room we’re standing in and we’ve been backing up step by step and now the only door is far across that field of wet paint,” she said, pointing at the tiny door a long way off.

“You’re only now noticing this?” he asked.

“I’m trying to go along with you here,” she said. “You are not the easiest person in the world to talk to, you know?”

“I know, it’s true,” he said softly. What did they tell him at school about writing with adverbs and qualifiers? Fuck if he could recall.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “There are no rules in this world, and nothing is for certain. We stand on legs that will be swept from under us one day, under a light that will go dark and never come back on. We are controlled largely by our fears, and most people do what they feel is the safest thing to do. It is much easier to go to work and come home with money than to stay in a room with your thoughts and wavering beliefs as your existence becomes more and more marginal. On the other hand, you have a dream, even a noble one, and it is very hard work, and you’re not young and energetic any more, but you should either be grateful for your passion and your slow but forward progress or give in and find a way to make a living, however meaningless. If your Plan A is too hard, do Plan B. And I have no idea what Plan B would be in your case.”

“I like that!” he said. “And you said it was hard to talk to me!” He patted her arm, the paintbrush hanging down by his side in his other hand as the two stood in a tiny circle of dirty, unpainted floor. She smiled, and shook her head.

“Now, if you will excuse me,” he said, “I have to paint this last bit of floor.”

Don’t Blow It!

There is a John Philips Sousa march, bluegrass, Chopin, blues, jazz and more. All music, but some of it moves us, some doesn’t. Different drummers, different strokes, fashions change, sometimes stay the same. It’s a nervous world out there, and I know you know what I’m talking about. As the music is about to start a friend yells “don’t blow it!”

Doesn’t yell, in so many words, it’s conveyed by the look on her face. “Oh, God, he’s gonna blow it…” wincing and tension as I wait to jump in, splash, just off the beat. When I’m playing I’m not worried, not counting, splashing in it like a kid, but she’s nervous for me, I can see the blood beating in her temples. Certain I am not suave, in the moment, able to groove along with the groove with no thought but the groove, the whole groove and nothing but the groove.

“When did you turn into Homer Simpson?” she asks and I go “Doh!”. So cruel, even if true, it’s like a hammer right on the fingernail. But not enough to make me drop a beat, and it stings only for a second.

“That’s what 35 years since the last time we made it’ll do for you, dollface,” I tell her, bending a note, raising an eyebrow like a glass.

“What is this raising of the glass?” she asks, “I thought you were on the wagon.”

“The world is a wagon, sweetheart,” I tell her, having no doubt she does not buy a word of it. Here comes the B part, I hit the telltale bass notes going in hard, with body language, land on the chord, nod, signal the other guys we’re here.

“Don’t blow it!” she chants like a mantra as we make our way around the chorus and back to the top.

“The head, you mean,” she says.

“Since the procedure I don’t need to go to the head for hours at a time,” I think to myself. The cops refer to the unwashed room with the toilet in it as the head. Ask for a bathroom they’ll point and tell you “the head’s the second door on the right.” Me, I always piss in the first room no matter what.

“Tough talk from a cartoon character,” she says, not without a small smirk.

“Too bad the guy who does my voice makes all the Doh!” I tell her, and then I’m done with the conversation. The music is too engaging, got its claws raking my back in the most pleasurable way. I have no time at the moment to worry that people are worried for me. I’d worry myself, but we’re heading back into that beautiful B part.