Kiyoshi Martinez – nerdlusus blog the geek wants out

We are not brands, we are human beings

Living in a social-media world isn’t merely transforming us into brands, it’s corroding the essence of what it means to be a real person

The dismantling of Tiger Woods fascinates me for several reasons. Sure, everyone loves a scandal involving a seemingly perfect icon in sports, especially when it involves sex. It goes further than that for me though.

As Gawker pointed out, this celebrity news story encapsulated the perfect media story that could only have developed at this very point in our history because of the Internet tools that enabled its dissemination and could devour it.

But while most of the reaction and analysis surrounding the story has focused on how Wood’s “handlers” mismanaged the entire situation and let it get out of hand to the point where he’s dropping sponsors and costing lots of people and companies money and embarrassment, I think the fallout has a lesson to teach — and it’s not the obvious one you’d expect.

I think we’ve all accepted the fact that celebrities exist now to be brands that others use to leverage other brands. Literally, we buy and sell people like we would the stock of a company. I’m honestly a bit shocked that no one sees this as a depressing development in society, that we find it an acceptable practice that we’re willing to support the dehumanization of real, talented people to be speculated and valued like a commodity. On a fundamental level, this is disturbing.

Whatever happened to the idea of, “I am not a number. I am a man”?

So to add to the chorus of lessons we can all learn from the Woods scandal — from “don’t cheat on your spouse” to “stay in front of the story” — I would add that as we enter an age where we voluntarily position ourselves to transition from individuals into brands that we have to be aware of the consequences of this mentality and look at how utterly destructive the results can be if we place ourselves in a situation where your name is bought and sold by forces larger than yourself.

While the Internet bred the trends of microcelebrity and microfame for the past few years, I don’t think we’ve seen it reach the nadir just yet. Simply put, we haven’t felt the widespread negative consequences of its pursuit as a generation. Instead, we’re still learning (quickly, mind you) how to become the masters of self-promotion to sell and expand our brand.

And I’m not just talking about those chasing a chance to be on reality television or even something to the equivalent of YouTube famous. I’m saying this is occurring on a granular, Dunbar-number level for almost anyone who has a nearly-daily online presence, which is pretty much all of us.

Obviously, we’ve always strived to put our best foot forward and the act of crafting a public persona the world sees isn’t some practice the Internet caused to happen. But the Internet allowed us to use tools that separated the persona from the physical person and being of who we really are.

No longer did our “happy face” have to fade as we exited a situation that required it. Instead, it could remain always “on” in some absolutely perfect format online. We could tweak it, crafting a static portrait from photos, text and video. Our personalities and values (or lack thereof) expressed in HTML (or, heavens forbid, javascript) to be called up at any time.

In reality, these masks we show to society as we interact with others are susceptible to flaws and as we wear them we have a conscious idea of the role we find ourselves in. We knew when the “real” us came out and who we could be such a person with.

The Internet’s tools, however, changed the way we interact with people and essentially forced us to adopt not just a static profile, but it’s now since morphed into an ongoing, dynamic personality punctuated with status updates. Smartphones and virtually constant access to the Internet feed our compulsive desires to continue crafting a narrative for a personality that is not truly us.

And I know it’s not who we truly are for several reasons. When you have complete editorial control over the content that your life produces, you opt to publish only that which you believe cultivates how you want others to see you. The whole point of publication is to put it in front of other people, and we tie ourselves to feedback. Likes, favs, diggs, reblogs, comments, etc., all provide a feedback loop that encourages us to produce more of our lives for public consumption. To continue this, we are discouraged from sharing the things that aren’t the us we want people to see, or at least that which doesn’t play well. As we adjust this content algorithm, we slowly eliminate that which our audience dislikes and focus on what garners the response we like.

It’s a relatively new movement for the masses — crafting a public personality at such a complicated level typically reserved for celebrities, who lived life on a stage. Before, personalities were rampant, but anonymous was the norm. And those who used their real names weren’t exactly out to build their names as brands like celebrities.

Facebook placed an importance on using your real identity online. And then this combined with MySpace, which encouraged the crafting of a personal brand and chasing the “friend” count.

And now here we are — turning elements of our lives into disposable, fast-food content and turning the idea of friendship into something superficial and worthy of mockery. (At least Twitter tried to draw a distinction using the term “follower,” but even this has become futile as users strive to “follow” more than they realistically can pay attention to in an effort to get others to pay attention to them.)

In theory, I really don’t have a problem with people crafting a persona online or even chasing fame if that’s what they want to do and it makes them happy. But most of us aren’t really chasing high-level fame, yet we act in this faux-celebrity, alter-personality way. And let’s get realistic for a moment and really ask ourselves if spending hours on these social networks is making us happy.

Does Facebook make you react negatively to some of your friends? Does Twitter make you think the world’s trite? Does Tumblr make you think you just wasted hours of your time scrolling down your dashboard? Does reading the comments on a newspaper article, blog post, YouTube video or Digg thread disgust you?

What depresses me greatly though isn’t that we voluntarily engage ourselves in these activities — as we all deserve a chance to do some mindless stuff — but that we spend an excessive volume of time occupying this persona instead of being who we really are when we’re not sitting in front of a glowing screen adding to the narrative.

Worse still, we’re encouraging others along this same path and ignoring those who say we shouldn’t spend so much time online — obviously they don’t “get it”!

I’m not completely sure how all of this started to happen. It might be because we’ve grown up with the Internet and it logically intertwined with all of our communications as broadband and mobility became commonplace. Perhaps combined with the fact many of us are overeducated for the jobs we perform we’ve got excess time and this is the only way we can get away with killing our boredom and our creative minds have nowhere else to go. Or maybe it’s a coping mechanism against our generation’s quarterlife crisis. If life is some sort of game and we can’t figure out how to win in the real world, maybe we can take our avatar and compete elsewhere and win over there.

I’m not sure where this delusion of using social media to break through to some sort of success comes from, but I think we ought to strongly caution against it — or at least really think this whole thing through to the end by asking some hard questions.

This isn’t the selling of our souls. We’re actively participating in the dismantling and altering of who we really are to form something entirely new without knowing the societal consequences of what happens when the Internet we used to build ourselves up tears us down. If it does happen, then it’ll happen quickly and thoroughly.

When you fail in real life, you might have someone there to help you deal with it. When you fail on the Internet, you’re alone and others flock to mock you. I’m not sure we’re ready for the long-term psychological effects of such an incident.

We’re building this idea of the “perfect me” online, but we’re forgetting that “me” has flaws, imperfections, limitations and was never intended to be hidden away. We’re running away from parts of us that make us different and force us to confront adversity. Our lives shouldn’t be constructed to project the expectations and perceptions others have of us.

We are human beings. We are not brands.

My best tweets of 2009

Here is a collection of what I consider to be the best original tweets by me during the last year.

I did this project because I feel that in this world of oversharing and constant content creation, we tend to forget what we actually said amid all the turnover of attention we pay to the digital tools that consume our lives.

To compile this list, I left out any @replies or tweets that were meant to share news or links. This list comprises a snapshot of moments of semi-original thought and observations of the world around me throughout the year.

I hesitate to say any of this is profound or relevant, but at points it might be witty or insightful at best — at worst, this list is quite self indulgent. Regardless, the exercise gave me a chance to look at how I used Twitter and remember some ideas I’d forgotten.

With that said, here’s my best tweets:

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Bit of advice. The computer’s great, but meeting people in person is 10x better as far as networking goes. Beer over bits.

I hope the bits that I tweet (and read) end up in conversations over beer with my friends.

Advice: When something in the mail says ****FINAL NOTICE**** you should probably read it.

Facebook has gone mainstream. My friend’s aunt friended him. Weird! Twitter will go mainstream when it’s referenced in a major film.

My friend on people posting minutiae all the time on social networks: “Giving some people Facebook is like giving a baby a gun.”

Obama’s on Twitter, has a BlackBerry, a Tumblr, plus will be President tomorrow. It’s like a frienemy showing up to your favorite dive bar.

Ideal bar: plays non-mainstream hiphop, serves microbrews, classy atmosphere, wifi, TVs play indie films. Am I on to something? I think so.

Can we be honest & admit that a free breakfast at Denny’s isn’t worth it?

I’m coining a new term: metalocal. Definition: a news ecosystem that revolves around me. (Only being 50% sarcastic.)

The hash (#) sign is the new slashy (/)

I’m not interested in the State of the Union, just the state of my checking account.

The more incredible technology becomes the more bored we get.

Don’t be on Twitter to appear relevant. Tweet relevant things.

Everyone complains when you spoil the night’s TV shows, but no one ever complains you spoiled the evening newscast.

No matter how good something is, you could’ve done better. Right?

Instead of going to a #teaparty protest today, just tweet your whines instead. It’s equally effective.

The Pulitzer Prize: the best of “tl;dr” for the American public.

We create a lot of crap & bullshit. And the majority of us, frankly, are completely content with this practice from ourselves & others.

Packing for a move is like playing Tetris in real life.

You never see a skinny pigeon in Chicago.

When will the Twitter equivalent of PostSecret happen? And how soon after that will the book deal happen?

Honest question: Is it possible to lose complete interest in the Internet?

When you say “don’t,” I say “too late.”

Intellectualism isn’t found in a bottle, but emotions are.

Cleaning out boxes. Found old undergrad transcript. 2 Fs, 3 Ds, GPA: 2.59. Still got into grad school. Life was good then!

Irony: a bar in Wrigleyville whose bathroom door reads “Gentlemen.”

What Twitter really needs is a function that tells you in 140characters what you did last nite while drunk.

Is the Perez Hilton vs. will.i.am feud the end of snark blogging & the beginning of online celebrity feuding blogging?

Forget the lawyers & guns, just send money.

I want to rock ‘n’ roll until a reasonable hour and party once every other weekend.

“If you’re gonna start a war, then you better end it. Twice.”

If Hell is other people, then what does that make Facebook?

Thought: Being a part of the Millennial Generation really sucks.

“Did you put that in your iGoogle?” – My mom to my dad.

It’s 2009. There’s gotta be a better way to find a dentist than manually cross referencing a provider list with Yelp.

Thought of the day: direct democracy doesn’t scale very well.

“INTERVIEW HAS BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED.” In the age of the Internet & infinite space, it makes me sad when the NYTMag prints this phrase.

Forget “watchdog” journalism, we’re in the age of “watchpuppy” journalism.

“Wave envy”: When your friend gets a Google Wave invite before you do.

It’s kind of amazing that my dad has uploaded more videos to YouTube than I have.

I look forward to the day when someone legitimately asks for my dishonest opinion about something.

I wish my immune system was more like 50 Cent instead of Biggie Smalls.

The concept of “backspace” & “delete” is as powerful as the rest of the keyboard combined, yet highly under utilized.

“You’re a liar!” “No, I’m just projecting mythology.”

I can’t stomach the idea of eating what I kill. Seriously! I’m too full.

“Drill baby, drill!” Words you don’t want to hear at your dentist.

Some say sleeping in for 12 hrs is a waste. I say it’s an invaluable “reset” button for your life.

In the iPod era, no one gives a shit about radio “talent.”

Dear Internet: That full-page advertisement you make me look at instead of your content isn’t a “welcome screen.” It’s not welcome at all.

meta-napping — def. When one dreams of taking a nap while napping. See also: “Yo dawg nap.”

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And, yes, you can follow me on Twitter here: @kiyoshimartinez

Teeth

Today I went to the dentist for the first of two “deep cleaning” procedures. Yeah, it’s been a while, I don’t floss regularly like I should and now my jaw feels like a mini battlefield of blood and bruises.

Still, the whole process wasn’t all that bad. Granted, getting a shot of anesthetic into your gums isn’t something I loved, but the aftereffects were amazing. The entire right side of my face became paralyzed within a few minutes and I couldn’t feel very much of anything. I remarked to my dentist that I felt like Two Face in Batman.

Sitting in the dentist chair made my mind wander, trying to imagine what “going to the dentist” even meant decades ago compared to now. Or what the earliest dental care was like. Nowdays we’ve got ultrasonic scalers that do some amazing work for your oral hygiene, but you have to wonder what people did without such treatments?

As the pain in my right-side jaw slowly subsides tonight, I’m left wondering how people dealt with pain not caused by treatment, but rather caused by the lack of available care. This led to me wondering how people dealt without modern medicine and survived.

Of course, this naturally led me to think about the national health care debate. As I sit here in my bed, teasing my molars with my tongue, I’m pretty sure I know where I fall in the debate.

People should be able to get health care. It should be reasonably priced, transparent, reformed, non-bureaucratic and available to all. It’s not a privilege, it’s a necessity to survive. Despite this economy, we’re a nation of abundance and wealth. Public health is a public good. It is something that we need to survive as a nation, to be a stronger, healthier workforce to compete in the world.

Should anyone be punished with a lifetime of pain because they get cancer, are born with a disorder, have an accident at work, were a victim of a crime, exposed to a virus or had a “pre-existing condition”? I don’t think so.

We have amazing advancements in medical care to help people who, for whatever reason, were dealt a bad hand in life. It shocks me at the lack of compassion and will to help create a system to address the physical ills of society.

But right now, so many are acting out of fear, driven to radicalism by lies and deliberate misinformation campaigns by pundits tapping into a political counter-zeitgeist for the sake of a few ratings points on the Nielsen.

Eventually, this pain in my teeth will fade away. But for others, they’ll continue to live with it the rest of their lives.

10,000 Angry Journalists (and counting)

My anonymous forum for media professionals hit a milestone today: 10,000 comments from angry journalists.

To begin, let’s look at some statistics. Since February 2007, AngryJournalist.com has had 607,129 page loads, 323,185 unique visitors, 244,455 first-time visitors and 78,730 returning visitors.

For a site that started as a concept executed over a weekend and grew by simply sending an e-mail to a few friends, posting a link on Facebook and Twitter and word-of-mouth marketing, I’m proud of my little experiment and it’s exceeded any expectations I originally conceived.

While I originally started the project to see if others had the same feelings about journalism that several friends and myself shared and to compare notes with a fantastic study by Prof. Scott Reinardy (then at Ball State University, now at the University of Kansas), the site began to take on a unique life of its own and it’s been quite an interesting journey to watch it grow.

The Drudge Report picked up on an AFP article profiling the site, which momentarily turned it into a battleground between angry journalists and those angry AT journalists — leading me to implement harsher comment approval standards.

Recently, one commenter mentioned they were contemplating suicide, which led to me tracking down the commenter’s identity — something I never imagined I’d have to ever do, nor did I want to have to do — and reporting it to the police. Fortunately, things turned out OK.

I hope the site’s acted as a form of stress relief for journalists in what continues to be an extremely challenging — if not bleak — environment. Despite not working in the industry anymore, I do empathize with those still grinding away under a Sword of Damocles. With 86,800 losing their jobs in the print media industry alone during the past 12 months (not including broadcast and online), it’s hard to find optimism.

I don’t have any special knowledge or answers of what will “save journalism” or when the industry will finally hit rock bottom. All I know is that journalists continue to post on the site, day after day, about their struggles. The burnout described by Reinardy will probably continue and I doubt at this point we’ll ever see that reversed.

But there’s the case of Angry Journalist #10,000, who is one of the few to leave their frustrations behind and lucky enough to find a promising opportunity:

I’m cautiously optimistic right now. I just started what seems like a dream job, getting a decent wage to write what I want for smart people. I’m just looking back on the place I left, a family-owned daily run entirely – without exception – by gibbering idiots. Seriously. And I think that situation may be replicated at many papers, contributing greatly to the industry’s mess.

At my old paper, the idiot son of an idiot son inherited the business, and demonstrated his idiocy by hiring drunks, cowards and pompous dimwits for all executive positions. The competent people are all at the bottom of the totem pole, and struggle mightily to put out something credible every day. If the top half-dozen people at the place were fired, the paper would only improve – and the budget would be cut in half. Literally.

At how many papers are half the resources sucked up by people who contribute nothing? I’m willing to bet it’s a lot. If we could all shed that parasitic weight, I think we’d be doing just fine.

I wish Angry Journalist #10,000 and the rest of them the best. They sincerely will need it.

Previous posts about AngryJournalist.com by me:

• Announcing AngryJournalist.com
• Two weeks later, reflecting back at the AngryJournalist.com experiment
• Why I won’t run advertisements on AngryJournalist.com
• More notes on AngryJournalist.com
• On reaching Angry Journalist #5,000
• AngryJournalist.com word cloud

‘Jesus wept’

I don’t blog about religion much (I honestly can’t remember the last time I made a public comment online about it) for a lot of reasons. It’s a touchy subject and everyone generally has made up their mind where they stand about all things religious. In other words, it’s opening yourself up to a flame war — and we all know that EVERYONE loses in a flame war.

With that said, I randomly thought about this verse tonight. I can’t say why, exactly, I thought of that phrase. I don’t attend church (haven’t since college, despite being raised Seventh Day Adventist). I don’t have a Bible in my apartment. And I don’t regularly think about religion or discuss it with anyone — unless it’s in the context of politics, which is a whole keg of dynamite I’d rather not get into here.

So, I have no idea why this two-word phrase entered my head. Perhaps it’s because it’s the easiest memory verse for kids to learn in the entire Bible, which I remember being taught back in the day as a child.

Looking back at “Sabbath School” (this is what we called it rather than “Sunday School,” since the SDA denomination gathers on Saturday instead of Sunday), one thing that struck me was the regurgitation of such “memory verses” as a form of homework of sorts each week. Usually, they were kind of of phrases that you’d probably find placed into greeting cards or inserted onto whatever religious literature that required a touching blockquote of text.

What strikes me now is that these verses were never given a deep study, placed into context and opened for interpretation. This isn’t to say Sabbath School was void of religious discussion, or even debate (God knows that I probably drove some of my instructors on edge with my contrarian questioning), but these verses in particular were presented in a vacuum, which I think is kind of a waste of an intellectual exercise.

And here’s why. Whatever the reason of why the phrase “Jesus wept” entered my mind tonight, I googled it, stumbled upon the WikiPedia page I’ve linked above and learned something and it reframed my understanding of the verse.

I’m not saying that my initial perceptions of the verse was “wrong,” but rather narrow and uninformed of other possible meanings. Simply put, I had a certain amount of ignorance since I lacked the context and introduction to other possibilities of the phrase’s significance.

For reference, check the “interpretation” section of the WikiPedia entry. This list fascinates me, especially this particular one:

The views above interpret his weeping to mean that Jesus was sorrowful for the fact that Lazarus had died (which was the interpretation of the bystanders in verse 36). However, an alternate explanation considers this to be unreasonable, given his full knowledge that he was about to resurrect Lazarus. This view instead argues that every single person whom Jesus talked to was blinded by their misconceptions of Jesus and by their failure to recognize that he himself was “the resurrection and the life.” Thus, “he groaned in the spirit and was troubled.” This view holds that he wept because even those who were closest to him were still blinded by their concepts to the fact that he really was “the resurrection and the life” in spite of all his plain words to them. A striking point in this view is that the only person in the chapter who had no misconceptions was the dead man Lazarus, who promptly obeyed and received life when commanded to come forth. Finally, this view holds that the bystanders, just like most readers today, were blinded by their own misconceptions and so did not understand that Jesus was actually weeping for them, not for Lazarus.

If you’re familiar with the story and had originally thought that “Jesus wept” because a friend had died, then this is a mind-blowing concept! It shows the extremely different thinking behind Christ and what actually drove him to feel such a deep emotional sadness as the Son of God. Plus, it makes Jesus actually seem a whole lot more complex than crying over the death of Lazarus.

Reading this makes me realize another reason why I think I left my religion behind. Originally, I believed what caused a rift between the SDA religion and me came from the overbearing amount of rules that imposed limitations of what one could and couldn’t do and my dislike of those who saw fit to judge you for alleged “sins.” Naturally, I think it’s nearly instinctual for many young teenagers to rebel against authority (to varying degrees, personally I wasn’t off the deep end doing this, I just left the church), but there’s a greater reason why I just didn’t stick with religion — or at the very least never returned to it.

Fundamentally, I don’t have problems with authority or submitting myself to following rules — indeed, lots of the Ten Commandments are GREAT ideas (not killing and all that). But religious worship to me feels very instructional, as opposed to academic and philosophical.

Obviously, religious beliefs can be intellectual pursuits and a great deal of academic study does go into doctrine, etc., but that’s more-or-less on the end of those who wish to act as leaders within the church. On the congregational end, it’s mainly about accepting interpretations and falling into line. This fundamentally turned me off.

As with all things, religion is what you choose to make of it. A part of me does occasionally think about attending a service now and then, but then I shrug it off realizing that I’ve done it before and didn’t find it fulfills what I need from such a significant time commitment.

Part of me thinks this might be part of the explanation behind the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey results from 2008:

The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.

I wonder if as a generation we’ve come to demand a more intellectually curious and unstructured approach to religion, and when these faith-based institutions, which are stuck in their conservative and unchanging ways, don’t adapt, then we simply leave.

It makes you wonder if Jesus weeps over this.

Thoughts on Twitter copywriters and the l33terati

Tomorrow Museum presents an intriguing argument about my generation’s lack “of authors whose love of writing was born from years of geekery, starting in chat rooms and message board,” which jomc dubs the “l33terati” (clever term!), and puts forth a few reasons why such a literary movement hasn’t taken place.

The latter half of the essay then moves into a theory about how this generation would make great Twitter-length copywriters that find a blend of fiction and fact matching the attention spans of our generation and our nature of crafting an online persona. It’s a compelling idea, but I want to get back to the first question of why this l33terati never developed (or has yet to).

It’d be tempting to blame it on the shortened attention span of our generation or the death of print (especially the consumption of literature that isn’t Harry Potter or Twilight), but I think that’s too easy of a target and would largely scrape the surface without finding the foundation.

It’s obvious to say a generalizing statement like, “kids don’t read anymore,” but I think you have to think about why that is — because of the attention economy.

But before the Internet, books consumed my life. I loved to read and it remained one of my core joys and hobbies in life until the Internet occupied my attention. In my school’s reading program, I excelled in a reading competition called Accelerated Reader (hopefully I’m not the only one that remembers this?) and you couldn’t pull me away from my books. Not being very skilled at athletics, I got a sense of adventure and fun elsewhere in the realm of fictional characters and their stories. This went on for a while, until I had access to the computer lab at my mom’s school library for hours after school.

Growing up, I had the unique experience of my generation to watch as the Internet exploded from something only a few computers in a building could access to nearly every home and every computer in the house. I remember the transition from dial-up to broadband. And in college I lived the glutton life of peer-to-peer consumption of all things digital.

All throughout middle school and high school I didn’t read anywhere near the volume of books I did in elementary school. I just wasn’t interested. And while my college years had a few moments of diving into post-modern minimalism (ie: Chuck Palahniuk), I read maybe a dozen books at most. Even now, I don’t read more than half a dozen books a year (and I haven’t been that big on fiction lately).

I don’t think it’s fair to say the introduction of the Internet provided me with one more generational distraction. That’s a huge understatement. The Internet provided my generation with an infinitely expanding distraction that probably gutted one’s path of jumping onto a literary movement.

Consuming the Internet is one thing. It’s another thing to be able to participate in its creation. And then use it to supplement your communication with friends. And share media. And play networked games.

At the end of the day, your life becomes consumed by a culture that’s managed to meld everything together into a seamless experience that places you in front of a screen and machine that incorporates all other media EXCEPT literature.

Long blocks of text never really went over well online. Yes, we read a lot of things online, but there’s something psychologically impossible about reading a whole novel on even the most beautiful of screens, let alone CRTs. And to read a book would mean unplugging one’s focus on the magic box that gave him everything else. Giving up literature seemed like a no-brainer decision that came with minimal sacrifice.

Maybe the reason “l33terati” never happened is all the geek writers value tl, dr above everything else.

Indeed, “too long, didn’t read” exists, but the reason why that attitude came to be roots itself in the simple reason of one’s limited amount of attention. If one’s attention is finite, then it made sense to shift that attention to a place where multiple things happened at once, rather than literature which is quite singular.

Before our generation, the growth of media and distractions could almost be linear. We had print. Then radio. Then TV. But the Internet isn’t linear. While you could only read one thing, listen to one thing, watch one thing, the Internet’s nature of what it could offer wasn’t singular — it is many and exponential.

Something had to get squeezed, and indeed many things did. The lack of a literary movement might very well be one of them.

But, I don’t think that it’s a foregone conclusion or will never happen. It still could, but it’s going to take a unique group of individuals to make extraordinary counter-culture decisions with their lives to refocus on crafting literature.

This means unplugging. It means the end of pointless clicking. It means shutting out distractions and not chasing more followers or web traffic. It will mean filtering what gets in and resisting one’s output to just literature exercises.

I think this l33terati, should it exist, has a grasp of the unique world we’ve witnessed and doesn’t need to play with the rest of the kids anymore. It’s time to make intelligent observations about it and discuss what happened to all of us as a generation.

My love for the samurai

If I had absurd amounts of money, probably one of the first completely unnecessary purchases I would make would be a set of authentic samurai armor dating as far back as possible and with the most ornate detail. I’d want it all. The chestplate, the facemask, the headdress, the gauntlets, the sword and spears and flags. All of it.

Around my sophomore year in college I went through a “samurai” phase where I rented nearly every Akira Kurosawa samurai movie at the local video store and bought a few others. I’ve seen two versions of the 47 ronin story. I actually read up on Macbeth and King Lear to understand Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood” and “Ran” better. I grin when people talk about how great Westerns were, when Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” influenced Sergio Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars” and his “Seven Samurai” influenced John Ford’s “Magnificent Seven.” And watching George Lucas’ roots for “Star Wars” from “The Hidden Fortress” is a complete joy that makes you appreciate the science-fiction story at a new level.

It’s fair to say I have a romantic view of the samurai tradition, heavily influenced by Kurosawa’s films. While lots of people like ninjas for their Hollywood kitsch value, I think there’s something to be admired about the nobility and prestige of the samurai class.

While traditionally viewed as a warrior class, the samurai also embraced the arts. Many were painters, writers, poets and philosophers. There’s a sense of intellectualism in the samurais alongside a steadfast loyalty that went to death.

Perhaps my favorite samurai that I can name is Miyamoto Musashi. Besides being a complete badass when it came to duels, the guy wrote a book and did some phenomenally beautiful sumi-e ink paintings.

Perhaps Musashi’s best-known work is “Koboku meikakuzu” or “Kingfisher Perched on a Withered Branch” that features a bird waiting patiently balanced on a small branch, above a body of water among the shoreline of reeds. At first glance, it appears to be merely a bird on a stick, but closer observation shows you why the bird has landed there. In fact, the bird’s been there quite a long time. It’s been there, waiting, as a small caterpillar crawls up the branch where the kingfisher waits for an easy meal.

The point of the painting, I believe, is to show resourcefulness. While the bird could easily fly off the branch and go for the kill, it chooses to let the meal come to him. The bird is confident in its position of power and knowledge of the fate to come. It feels no sense to rush and has a sense of serene patience as it glances to take in the surroundings. The painting has a sense of peace, but really is a precursor to violence in nature.

Musashi’s “Book of Five Rings” or “Go Rin No Sho” identifies the ideas that I believe he portrays in this painting. While I think the “Water Book” emphasizes a lot of elements of the kingfisher and the samurai way, Musashi mentions this earlier in the book:

There is timing in everything. Timing in strategy cannot be mastered without a great deal of practice.

Indeed, the kingfisher is a master of timing and knows enough to wait. Knowing this, we can see this is an older bird, one that’s wise enough to have the experience of how to best catch his prey, no matter how small.

One other element to look at in the painting is the distinct shape of the branch. It appears to be done in one stroke, or made to look like the shape of a samurai’s sword. Both creatures here are along the edge of the branch, meaning they are along the edge of the weapon. While the caterpillar crawls along the edge, obviously closer to death, the kingfisher also sits on the blade. Why does the bird also find itself on the edge of death?

I believe it sits there because its own life depends on the death of the caterpillar and it killing its prey. If it doesn’t succeed, then it could die also. In a way, this shows the reality of combat. Even if one is in a position of power, he holds the possibility of death in his own hands despite all the advantages. A worthwhile lesson.

Musashi’s tale would end up as a trilogy of films, starring legendary actor Toshiro Mifune as the samurai, the first of which won an Academy Award. I’d obviously recommend viewing them if you have a chance, as they’re often called the “Gone of the Wind” of Japanese cinema.

So, yes, my obsession of the samurai does run rather deep. I admire this particular part of my culture greatly, despite not being well-educated on the rich history of it. Still, a part of me holds an extreme reverence toward this part of my ancestry and influences me to a degree.

Collecting for the sake of cool

Throughout my life, I’ve enjoyed quite a few hobbies, most of them involving “collecting.” Like a lot of young boys, I believe I first collected rocks that I thought looked really awesome. Obviously, these stones I found in forests, driveways and backyards retained no actual monetary value, but I’d put them in my pocket, take them to my room and store them in a drawer of special childhood treasures.

It’s hard to say what, exactly, drew me to pick up one rock over another, but I’m pretty sure the only thought that crossed my mind consisted of, “Wow, this is cool!” It’s this principle that guided (and largely still guides) my collecting as I moved on from rocks to other things: stamps, baseball cards, pogs (remember those?!), action figures, comic books and most recently art prints.

One of the earliest memories I remember having about collecting came when I heavily invested myself in baseball cards. At the beginning, I merely enjoyed opening a new pack of cards and couldn’t wait to see who I got. My brother and I would trade cards, trying to get our favorite players and we’d store them in these huge binders, flipping through pages organized by team.

But then my neurotic nature took hold and I began to want to complete team sets. After all, wouldn’t it be cool to have all the players from your favorite team from your favorite card company? So, I went to baseball card shops and I became indoctrinated in the concept of “greed collecting.”

Greed collecting, as I define it, is when a collector simply amasses a collection of objects for the sake of a perceived, relative and theoretical monetary value. To this collector, his collection is an investment of sorts. It’s not about completing a set or this is really cool — it’s about money, pure and simple. To them, the hobby isn’t a hobby anymore, it’s business. Buy low, sell high. It’s a farce of an economy created by a false sense of scarcity driven by greed. In summary, greed collecting is for bastards and they ruin everything fun about collecting.

For a while, I will admit, I found myself looking up the value of my cards, totaling this phantom number of how much my card collection was worth. Being a math nerd, this exercise was a great way to flex my multiplication skills, but I’d soon come to learn the realities of the phrase, “It’s only worth what someone’s willing to pay for it.” How true!

Going to these baseball card shops, the first thing I realized that it would be impossible to complete my sets at a fair price. Typically, the cards they sold were twice the price of any pricing guide (Beckett’s was the favored price guide back then of determining a card’s “value” — based on what methods I have zero clue), and if you wished to sell them a card, they’d only give you half its value or less! As I said, complete bastards.

Now, later I’d realize that these “collectors” basically bought in bulk and essentially held a monopoly on the market. If you wanted a shortcut to getting what you want, then you’d have to pay a ridiculous premium to get it. I found this absurd. Why shouldn’t everyone be able to get what they want?

Naive, I know, but this epiphany changed my perspective on collecting. My mindset shifted back to, “Wow, that’s cool” instead of “Wow, that’s valuable.”

After a while, my interest in baseball waned (the MLB strike of 1994-95 really turned me off to professional sports for a long time) and my baseball card collecting days ended. Soon though, a new obsession would take over my life: Star Wars.

Yes, the famed George Lucas trilogy couldn’t have entered my life at a more appropriate age. The “special editions” made their way to the theaters and I really couldn’t get enough. Lucas knows how to merchandise the living hell out of his franchise, and the re-issue of Hasbro’s “Power of the Force” line of action figures were beyond anything a complete nerd such as myself could resist.

Once again, greed collectors descended into the Star Wars action figure market. As the years went by, it became nearly impossible to find certain figures because these bastards would treat this hobby like a job. They’d hit every retail store that carried the figures each day and buy out any “valuable” inventory, multiples of the same figure if possible. As a kid who just really wanted to find a Boba Fett or a Snowtrooper, this was a huge frustration. After all, what if you were an honest-to-goodness kid who wanted to take these figures out of the package and play with them? Who were these adults buying shelves of toys and leaving the undesirable figures — like Malakili the Rancor Keeper and Prince Xizor — to hang idly on the pegs of Walmart and Toys ‘R’ Us?

Another perfect example of greed collecting came during the 1990s, when comic books suddenly received a surge in popularity. When people started realizing that old comic books (and I mean golden and silver era, stretching generally from the 1930s to 1970) were actually worth something, a goldrush began on the modern era books.

What no one really thought about though was why these old gold and silver era comics were worth so much. Kids back then usually treated their comics much like you probably would treat a newspaper or magazine today. Folding it over, creasing pages, tearing them, eating them with fingers sticky with soda and candy. No one boarded and bagged them back then. And parents often threw them out. No one assigned them any value. In a legal sense, comics were considered periodicals and even to this day comic books in Illinois are immune to the state sales tax for this reason.

So, essentially, when you fast forward to the modern era, not many copies of these comics were around, let alone in any sort of decent condition. You can legitimately consider these comics antiques and rare — hence, they’re worth something. But that’s hardly the case with modern comics.

Still, greed collectors consumed the industry, speculating that modern comics would one day — in their lifetime, no less! — be worth as much as Action Comics #1 or Amazing Fantasy #15. Eventually, the publishers caught on to the fad and started pumping out tons of comics, filled with gimmicks. Variant covers. Multiple editions. Holograms! Foil!

And it probably all peaked with the Death of Superman, which came in a poly-wrapped bag, thus forcing you to buy one issue to keep unopened and another to open and read. Absurd. I remember hearing about this issue on the local news and stores being completely sold out. Copies went for around $200 (maybe even more) back in the 1990s. A few years back, I remember going to a small comic book convention and seeing several poly-bagged copies in decent condition in the dollar box. I laughed.

Today, I noticed yet another example of greed collecting and it recalled all my other previous collecting adventures. The art print community definitely has a very vocal presence online, filled with those who really can be ruthless when it comes to “collecting” limited-edition prints.

As I mentioned previously, Tim Doyle’s “Change into a Truck” now has a second edition. For more people, like you and me, the mere existence of a second run comes as a nice surprise. While I threw down quite a bit of cash to obtain one of the original, first-edition prints, others might not be so inclined to spend that kind of cash, however, a second edition for $25 is a great deal, looks cool and maybe would make a neat gift for that Transformers and/or Obama fan you know.

But for the greed collectors, this second edition drove them absolutely nuts. In fact, they’re livid. Just look at this comment thread on OMG Posters! to see what I mean. To them, it’s the end of the world. It “devalues” the original print. It hurts their “investment.” The artist who chose to do a second run is “greedy” and “has no soul.”

I really wish they could realize the hypocrisy of their statements: It’s OK for you to make money off of the artist’s work, but it’s wrong for the artist to make more money themselves? Are you kidding me? What a bunch of bastards.

To Doyle’s credit, he admits that, yes, it is about money. He’s got a family and this is the way he puts food on the table, pays a mortgage and bills and makes the point that flippers don’t care about the artists at all, only themselves.

But more importantly, Doyle highlights why he does screen printing in the first place:

I love screen printing because it makes art accessible, and not at inflated gallery prices. And doing prints that sell like this enable me as a business to take risks and push lesser known artists on my site I other wise would not be able to.

It’s about enjoyment of the art form. It’s about accessibility. It’s about fun. It’s about discovery and people being able to say, “Wow, that’s cool” and then buy it, put a frame around it and put it up in their apartment for others to see and enjoy.

To me, this is the essence of collecting for the sake of cool. It’s not about “how much it’s worth” to someone else in cold, hard cash. Collecting is about enjoying an idea so much that part of you wants to own it and share it with others.

I think about all these people who accumulate a huge collection of toys, comics, art prints or whatever and store them away in the perfect temperature, sealed as if they were lost artifacts in a time capsule to be opened and sold “in the future.” The absurdity of it all defies any logical sense of why these objects really exist to do. I wonder how many of these people are parents and warn their children, “Don’t touch!” or “Don’t take these out of the bag!” It’s a sad thought.

Toys are meant to be played with. Comics are meant to be read. Art is meant to be seen. None of these are meant to be hoarded and resold. If you’re stockpiling away these things, then you’ll only find yourself among the miserable company that shares the same bunker mentality you do.

I firmly believe that people create things for the sake of them to be used and enjoyed. And if you’re not collecting with that in mind, well, then you’re a bastard.

DeLoreans are awesome and so are drive-in movies!

Last week when I posted these photos of the DeLorean I saw on the highway. The actual owner of the car contacted me after seeing my photos I uploaded to Flickr with this wonderful news:

Hi,

Nice pic of the DeLorean on your flickr page. That’s my car and I was the one driving past you. If you want to see more DeLoreans, Friday, come out to Westmont for an outdoor drive-in style showing of “Back to the Future”, FREE! It was supposed to be last Friday, but it was postponed due to weather. We were scheduled to have about 6 cars there. I don’t know how many can make it this week.

Westmont Park District

http://www.wpd4fun.org/

DeLorean Midwest Connection (car club I’m in)
http://www.deloreanmidwest.com

– Marty

Yes, his real name is Marty and that’s his car I’m sitting in! The members of the club were really nice and had six DeLoreans on display, which was a really neat sight.

As it turns out, DeLoreans aren’t as hard to purchase if you really want one and it’s even easier to obtain parts for them. There is a DeLorean Motor Company branch in Crystal Lake, Ill., that has spare parts and does restorations. There are also branches in Texas, Florida, California, Washington and even the Netherlands.

You can buy a pre-owned DeLorean from around $25-35,000 or you can even get a custom built new DeLorean starting at $57,500. You can also find DeLoreans on eBay Motors for slightly lower in price.

I asked a few practical questions, such as, “Do you have to have the oil changed every 3,000 miles?” and apparently the car can go 7,000 miles without an oil change — although one owner said he changed his oil every year regardless of miles and Marty said he hasn’t changed his in two years.

I was also surprised to find out that the doors only need 14 inches of clearance to open, which really isn’t that much. Another detail I’d never noticed before was the little red and yellow lights on the bottom of the door. Also, the coolest thing about the dashboard was the “door ajar” light. It’s a profile of the DeLorean’s signature frame with one of the doors opening upward. A tiny, but nifty detail.

The movie in the park was a lot of fun, too. I’d actually never been to a drive-in styled movie before, so it was great to see the film on a large screen.

If you ever want to see a DeLorean in the Chicagoland area, just check out the DeLorean Midwest Connection’s events page — they’ve got a lot of events up and are pretty cool people to meet.

Post script: For those who are wondering how in the world Marty found my photos that I took, it turns out he saw me snapping photos with my camera while we were driving and thought to look up “delorean” tagged photos on Flickr later. Hooray for the Internet!

Are the suburbs killing the idea of community?

Urban planning skeptic Peter Gordon is interviewed by Reason Magazine in 1998 on the benefits of sprawl in the suburbs:

There is the presumption that suburbanites are living these lives of quiet desperation and isolation, and they really hate being there. You see trotted out ideas about community being missing. And to have community, you’ve got to be in Manhattan. There are a lot of ex-Manhattanites that would challenge that theory very seriously.

The article is interesting from a contrarian point of view, but I’m not sure that I agree with the conclusion that everyone wants to go live in the suburbs. Like all things, it’s an extremely personal decision that factors in all elements of your life (family, social, work, etc.).

I grew up in the suburbs, left for college, moved back to the suburbs after graduation for about a year and a half, and now live in Chicago. There’s a lot of upside to living in the suburbs, but in the end it ultimately came down to my commute time. Working downtown with the only viable option being taking the Metra meant a total of 3 hours a day commuting. This left me with less sleep in the morning, less free time in the afternoon/evening and being a lot more tired as a result.

On the upside, I liked being able to drive everywhere and not worry about parking. I know it’s bad for the environment, but whatever. I like the convenience of knowing I don’t have to rely on mass transit. I also — at times — enjoyed the space provided by suburban sprawl. It’s nice to have a driveway, yard and generally more living room to put your stuff at a cheaper price.

The downside though is the complete lack of culture, or rather the complete uniformity of suburban life. Everything is geared toward family lifestyles. When you’re single (as in “not married”), you really find life in the suburbs quite boring. The restaurants are boring. The movie theater will never show an indie film. And good luck trying to find ethnic produce at Jewel or Dominick’s. And that’s just the tip of it.

Are there things I dislike about Chicago? Sure. Outside of traffic, which I will eternally curse, I do regret the lack of abundant green spaces (and, what’s that smell?) and then there’s the high cost of living only made worse by the highest tax rate in the nation. You don’t have to try hard to find things to gripe about here.

But getting back to Gordon’s point about community. I think the idea of community isn’t just dead in the suburbs, but it’s also (maybe?) dead in the cities as well.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I’ve always felt that a sense of community completely depends upon your willingness to seek out and find people like yourself and engage with those people. If you’re not doing that, or your life is perhaps too involved with other things, then you won’t get that community feeling.

The reason why I feel like community might be dying in the city is because when I look at my current generation, I don’t see us becoming more socially involved in traditional community settings. We’ve retreated to the Internet. Even on public transportation we’ve narrowed our vision and hearing to iPhones/iPods. I often wonder what riding the CTA was like 30 years ago, before we had mobile devices that created this media bubble we immerse ourselves in routinely.

For a while, I had a theory that the Internet would become the new townhall or front porch of sorts. I’ve since discarded that theory. When you look at where people are congregating to form communities online, it’s often based on interest, not geography. If anything’s killing the traditional idea of community and people being more active in the place they live, I’d say the Internet is the leading factor.

But I don’t know that’s a bad thing! In fact, it just goes to show how outdated our models for government are and maybe we’ll one day acknowledge the fact that the Internet has been a disruptive force not just for media, but also government. Perhaps it’s time we started to ask the question if our ideas of representation and democracy need to change as we’re becoming untethered emotionally from our physical location.