* Awesome, Awesome speech on diversity and happiness

They provide a great service to the Los Angeles community. They regularly update new concerts in town ranging from the very independent to the very well known, but all good music. They also feature many stories about the happenings in and around Los Angeles. They are a community building site and you should definitely check in.

The Experience Gallery is collaborating with Los Anjealous for an ongoing series of interviews with musicians playing in Los Angeles. Also ranging from the very obscure to the very popular, getting an inside look at how they work and what inspires them.

Check out the first one with Matt from the band Matt and Kim here.

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,

 And there the grass grows soft and white, 

And there the sun burns crimson bright,

And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.

Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,

And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know

The place where the sidewalk ends.

Pictures by marija strajnic

www.TheExperienceGallery.com

 A great commencement speech by a great writer. Wallace speaks of what he believes the reality of education and educating yourself really means. 

Wallace committed suicide in 2008 after years of depression and to me knowing this adds another layer of complexity to the speech. 

Make your own impression of the speech and the ideas he presents. The speech is below in its entirety and may not be here long. So read while you can… 

2005 Kenyon Commencement Address by David Foster Wallace 

If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I’d advise you to go ahead, because I’m sure going to. In fact I’m gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) 

Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says; Morning, boys. How’s the water? And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes; What the hell is water?

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories.  The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be.  I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning. 

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff.  So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think.  If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think.  But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.  If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious. 

Here’s another didactic little story.  There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness.  One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer.  And the atheist says; Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God.  It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing.  Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out; Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.  And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. Well then you must believe now; he says, After all, here you are, alive. The atheist just rolls his eyes. No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp. 

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience.  Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from.  Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys.  As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language.  As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance.  The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help.  True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too.  They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us.  But religious dogmatists; problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up. 

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean.  To be just a little less arrogant.  To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties.  Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.  I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too. 

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive.  But it’s pretty much the same for all of us.  It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth.  Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of.  The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor.  And so on.  Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real. 

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues.  This is not a matter of virtue.  It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being well-adjusted, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term. 

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect.  This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education; least in my own case; is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying  attention to what is going on inside me. 

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.  It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.  Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master. 

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.  It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head.  They shoot the terrible master.  And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. 

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.  Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what day in day out really means.  There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches.  One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.  The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about. 

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again.  But then you remember there’s no food at home.  You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket.  It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad.  So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping.  And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush.  So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating.  But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college. 

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to have a nice day in a voice that is the absolute voice of death.  Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course.  But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year. 

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point.  The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop.  Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me.  About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way.  And who are all these people in my way?  And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line.  And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is. 

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers.  And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on. 

You get the idea. 

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do.  Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice.  It is my natural default setting.  It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the   world’s priorities. 

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations.  In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive.  Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way. 

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have   harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do. 

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it.  Because it’s hard.  It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line.  Maybe she’s not usually like this.  Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer.  Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible.  It just depends what you what to consider.  If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable.  But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options.  It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. 

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true.  The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it. 

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted.  You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.  You get to decide what to worship. 

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping.  Everybody worships.  The only choice we get is what to worship.  And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough.  It’s the truth.  Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.  And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already.  It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. 

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious.  They are default settings. 

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. 

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.  Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom.  The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it.  But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways everyday.

That is real freedom.  That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon.  None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or   dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. 

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

This is water.

This is water.

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.  Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. 

And it commences: now. 

I wish you way more than luck.

 which is not the opposite of forgetting,

 but rather its lining.

We do not remember.

We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.

How can one remember thirst?

 Photos by Anders Linden

Words from Sans Soleil

 I arranged for the interview with John through is manager and when he told me that he was going to be in North  Hills (the valley if people aren’t familiar with Los Angeles) I was a bit taken back.

When you think of a rapper you usually think of urban surroundings. The city, highrises… not the valley. We had planned to get a beer at a local bar off the 101 freeway at 11 in the morning, but the bar was closed so we ended going to a Starbucks next door. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, I had never talked to a rapper in my life but I knew I really liked his music and what he was trying to do with it.

John is immediately warm and welcoming, one of the nicest guys you will ever meet. I think you automatically sense that he has a great sense of humor and has so many interesting stories to tell. He reminded me of what a Jazz musician would be like, very cool, collected, and at ease with his surroundings. He is really an entertainer at heart and wants to involve you in his stories. He has amazing stories too, like going to the Good Life Cafe and rapping with big names from the Pharcyde, Jurrasic 5, Will.i.am. It was really interesting getting his take on rap today and how the industry has changed for the better or worse.

You sometimes go into these interviews with a lot of perceptions and expectations of what these people will be like and it never fails that every person I have interviewed has been completly different than what you expect. Maybe you go in expecting a rapper to live a certain lifestyle and have certain interests and you find out John loves playing with his little daughter, going to the mall with his wife, and reads Charles Bukowski.

To get a better idea what John’s offbeat personality is like here is a poem by Charles Bukowski, someone he was influenced by in his youth:

Love & Fame & Death

it sits outside my window now
like and old woman going to market;
it sits and watches me,
it sweats nevously
through wire and fog and dog-bark
until suddenly
I slam the screen with a newspaper
like slapping at a fly
and you could hear the scream
over this plain city,
and then it left.

the way to end a poem
like this
is to become suddenly
quiet.

Read the full interview with John here.

1. Black Hole- Charles Burns

About 1970s Seatle Teens and a mysterious outbreak that seems to be effecting all the teenagers in the area. Very haunting and dark read. It will create a black hole in you! I promise that.

2. Optic Nerve or anything Adrian Tomine really

Tomine really touches you with his meloncholy tales of the city. Great to read on a park bench under a tree.

3. Asterios Polyp – David Mazzucchelli

Hard to explain why this is so good. Visually it is amazing, and the writing is great.

4. AKIRA- Katushiro Otomo

There are a lot of great Manga series out there but as a self contained book Akira is one of the most densely packed. Action, excitement, and post apoloclyptic philosophy… and motorcycle gangs!

5. Y The Last Man – Brian Vaughan

What if you were the Last Man on earth and hunted down by masses of women around every corner. Sounds like everyman’s fantasy… Not here.

6. Batman- The Dark Night Returns – Frank Miller

Enough has been said about this book. Batman redefined.

7. Bone- Jeff Smith

If you don’t know much about these characters you have to check it out. Very fun Series.

8. All Star Superman – Grant Morrison

( personal favorite of mine, check out his take on the X men which is amazing)

I love all of Morrison’s work, I especially love it when he takes a stab at re-working your favorite superheros in ways you would never expect but are totally in line with what the comics are about.

9. Maus – Art Spiegelman

A powerful account of the holocaust told with the richeness of a novel.

10. Ghost World – Daniel Clowes

“I can’t relate to 99% of humanity. ” -Seymour

1989- Los Angeles. Rap and Hip Hop were being defined on the East Coast in places like Brooklyn, The Bronx, and Queens. 

Gangster rap was flourishing on the West Coast, NWA were the hottest thing in town and was set to define the genre of West Coast rap for years to come…

 Except there were others doing things differently. At a health food center in South Central Los Angeles in Leimert Park, The Good Life Café, something else was brewing. Started by B.Hall and her son R. Kain Blaze, the Good Life Café hosted an open mic workshop on Thursday nights where MC’s and musicians could find refuge and hone their craft. Musicians could perform written songs or freestyle. Gangster rap at the time was marked with harsh drug tales and explicit profanity. The Good Life Café instead had a no profanity policy.  B.Hall in an interview explained “The no-cussing policy wasn’t about us being uptight church people, it was about wanting the atmosphere of a serious arts workshop.”   

The workshop drew diverse artists from all over Los Angeles. Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, The Pharcyde, Fat Joe, Kurupt, Bone Thugs n Harmony, and emerging young artists like Pigeon John, Will.I.am, members of yet to be formed Jurrasic 5, Freestyle Fellowship. Cut- Chemist was the DJ at the time. It brought in people from very diverse backgrounds from those interested in Gangster Rap to those experimenting with Jazz Riffs. 

The influences and reach of what happened on those Thursdays were widespread and started a chain reaction which helped shaped what hip-hop is today.

For more on the Los Angeles Hip hop, stay tuned for the next issue of The Experience Gallery where we talk to a former Good Lifer about his career and hip hop in Los Angeles at The Experience Gallery.

MASKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lucha Libre or “Free wrestling” is a term used in Mexico to describe this sport of Passion, Mystery, and Masked Wrestlers. The mask has always been a prominent piece of Lucha Libre since the beginning. Some say it goes all the way back to Aztec influence. Early masks were very simple and were just meant to hide the wrestler’s identity. Slowly though the designs became more complex to symbolize animals, gods, villains, and heroes.

In fact the mask helps divide Lucha Libre into two camps. The Tecnicos (good guys) and the Rudos (bad guys) are dueling forces in Lucha Libre and often use the mask to make this serious distinction.

Sometimes the stakes are raised when wrestlers agree to put their identity on the line for a Mask fight. The loser of the fight has to remove their mask and reveal their identity. How serious is that you ask? Very Serious! Taking off a mask is a big deal and often wrestlers can never wear a mask in the ring again. If you think about the fact that wrestlers often don’t take off their masks even in public and El Santo, one of the original wrestlers was buried with his mask on you see just how important that piece of cloth is.

Check out our interview with Mexican Wrestling Twins at The Experience Gallery this month here.

Drawing by Grzegorz Kowalczyk via BOOOOOOOM!

“Early unsuccesses shouldn’t bother anybody because it happens to absolutely everybody” – Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson’s story is pretty incredible. He graduated Harvard in 1930 with a degree in philosophy.  He became the director of the Architecture department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for about 6 years. It wasn’t until he was 34 years old until he returned to Harvard to study architecture.

He promoted the theory of “International Style” and as a working architect he designed the Seagram Building, Pennzoil Place, IDS Center, NY State Theater at Lincoln Center and his Glass House.

The most amazing thing about Philip Johnson is his humility and the fact that he went back to school for training in architecture at age 34. He didn’t know that it was his calling until later.

When asked whether he ever doubts his abilities:

“Oh goodness yes. I’m thoroughly discouraged right now. But that goes with the territory. You see better people around you all the time. Not to be envious and not to take that out in bitterness is a hard lesson, but you’d better, because you can’t always be Frank Lloyd Wright. You’ve got to learn to live in this world just as you live in it. You’ve got to stand it.”

by Edgar Allen Poe and Illustrations by Edward Gorey

I SAW thee on thy bridal day -
When a burning blush came o’er thee,
Though happiness around thee lay,
The world all love before thee:

And in thine eye a kindling light
(Whatever it might be)
Was all on Earth my aching sight
Of Loveliness could see.

That blush, perhaps, was maiden shame -
As such it well may pass -
Though its glow hath raised a fiercer flame
In the breast of him, alas!

Who saw thee on that bridal day,
When that deep blush would come o’er thee,
Though happiness around thee lay,
The world all love before thee.

* Edgar Allen Poe a poet out of Baltimore, Maryland. Edward Gorey is an illustrator and writer out of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Perhaps the greatest collaboration between a writer and an illustrator ever.

By Jennifer

I am trolling Craigslist every hour for any possible odd job a recent college graduate with a humanities degree could qualify for. So far, I have gotten involved in several checking scams and a fight with casting company that did not tell me about a registration fee. Yes, I should have worked harder to get into graduate school or looked for a job earlier in this woeful economy. It’s my fault I have gotten myself into this rut and I am not looking for someone to blame. I just like complaining. Everyone older than me is telling me to relax and take it easy. Enjoy my youth, they say. Except to enjoy my fast fading youth, I need some cold hard cash. Thus, I find myself in the position of sifting through Craigslist and dodging my family’s concern for my future.

No one likes telling college students that graduation does not guarantee employment, success, fame, nor happiness. What college does for you is give you the opportunity to run away from home awhile and find out how poor your decision making skills truly are. You may have the privilege of learning a subject you truly enjoy, but most likely you will half heartedly attend classes and wonder why you are even at your choice of higher education institution. You aren’t a horribly ignorant person to think this way and you certainly not the only person doubting themselves. This agonizing state of insecurity is young adulthood. You are old enough to know what’s good for you, but still young enough to do what’s bad for you.

Expect everyone to have answers for what you should do for your future. It’s ok, they only care enough about you to tell you. However, it’s ok to meet up with failure once in awhile. So you aren’t on the fast track to a six figure salary and the adorable family in the suburbs, but maybe you don’t want that. Failing helps you see what you want. Being a bum for a couple months may seem like an eternity to your parents (and you since you are under their roofs and their overbearing questions about the future), but you got at least another 30 years of existing. Make these couple of months of dismal job searching your time to do whatever outrageous or ridiculous plan you’ve had lurking in your mind. After all, it’s highly unlikely you going to get the time to do it later on in life. This is what I tell myself when I find myself wracked with insomnia at four in the morning and worrying over my future.

We’ll see how I am as a progressing a new grown-up in future entries.

Your recent college graduate/bum,

Jennifer

*Jennifer is a recent college graduate and currently a devoted job hunter.

We go to school when we are children to learn and develop our minds, maybe to become productive members of society 

maybe to just stay out of trouble…

Some of us go to college, get our degrees, and start our careers. Others aren’t so lucky, don’t have the opportunity to go to college…

Some don’t have the access to great facilities, resources that help develop the mind.

Yale Open Courses is a great resource. http://oyc.yale.edu/

Yale is providing free courses via the internet to anyone interested in learning. I have taken a philosophy class on this site and it is amazing. They offer quite a wide range of disciplines; from astronomy to political science.

You can download videos, listen to audio, and read lectures at your own pace. The professors are among the best in their field and they teach at a pace that is easily accessible.

I think this is a bold step by a major university. The courses are already being taught, students will want to go to these schools regardless. There is nothing for these universities to loose by providing these courses free of charge. There is only good will to gain.

 This opens the door to amazing possibilities in the future. Perhaps education as a completely free commodity, easily accessible to anyone interested in participating? Think about it. People go to college for various reasons. Some go for knowledge, some go to obtain a degree that is required by employers. Both legitimate reasons. What if a college education was completely accessible to everyone, completely free of charge? People could obtain a degree if they completed the coursework. Some could pay for the experience of physical classrooms, real time interaction with professors; while others that couldn’t afford it could just learn independently.

You might ask, then everyone would have degrees? Obtaining that distinction would be meaningless? Well to some extent that would be true. What is a degree other than a certificate of completion? It doesn’t mean more than the fact that you have completed a series of courses and finished a series of exams. Making higher education completely free levels the playing field, sure, but that is a good thing. It raises the standards, employers will look for new measurements beyond just the four year degree. Perhaps even a greater focus on a person’s work ethic or character.

Don’t we want people to be more educated? Don’t we want knowledge to be free to anyone who is interested in learning? Today just going to college is a huge financial commitment. Going to a state school, which is already cheaper than private institutions requires a big financial investment. After graduating students have to work years just to pay off their student loans and get out of debt. With free education, instead of fees and tuition, the payment becomes just time and commitment.

2. A Photo

3. A Hockney

4. A Fact:  Cacti are real water reservoirs; their inner liquid is not pure, clear water but a thick viscous stuff, but perfectly drinkable, that saved many lives in the desert. It can be obtained easily by scratching an Opuntia or by making a hole into columnar cacti

5. A Treat:

" Am I having fun yet?"

I was circling the blocks on Vermont between Sunset and Hollywood on a Friday night, swerving in and out of a tight two way road. “Where is it?” I asked myself as the blue blip on the map function of my iphone paused. I had found this restaurant on Yelp before I left the house but like other smart phone users had  neglected to really look up directions, thinking that I could always rely on my smart phone when I got there.  After twenty minutes of searching, I finally get there. A small Italian restaurant dimly lit by lights on the inside.

I was there on a date, a second one, and I had to impress. We all know how the first date is important, but not as important as the second one, that is the date where…. wait that’s a story for another day. Anyways when I have to impress I always scour the web for positive reviews for a restaurant. I start by hitting Yelp, usually a good place to help thin out the crowd. Look for an area you are going to be around, find the type of food you want to eat, pick the highest ranking restaurant, and start reading the reviews. I try to answer my more practical questions ones first:  How much does it cost?  Is the food any good? What is the ambiance like? I usually narrow it down to three or four. Next I go to chow-hound or food blogs to see if people have eaten there and taken pictures. I usually end up with two or three restaurants before I start considering which one is the best one for the night. If I am going on a date, which one she will like the best and give me the best opportunity to impress. This seems like a lot of trouble doesn’t it?

If I think about how much my life depends on ratings, reviews, other people’s opinions and critics, it seems like I hardly make a decision without a panel of experts. It’s like I am a contestant on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? and I choose ask the audience for all of my decisions. You maybe saying, “You are exaggerating, you can’t possibly be relying that much on other’s opinions!” Okay. Let me count the areas that I use ” The Audience” option.

When I buy a book on Amazon, it is not enough that I read the critic’s blurbs about the book, I then look at the rating that users have given it and read through a few opinions of the book. Before I see a movie I look at the score on www.rottentomatoes.com; read the blurbs that critics wrote about it, and then look up the reviews of credible critics that I agree with on most movies. Before I download an album on the internet, usually free of charge(Please don’t rat me out) I look up reviews on www.rollingstone.com, maybe www.pitchforkmedia.com, or www.stereogum.com; and that is the prep work I do before downloading an album. Imagine if I was paying for that darn thing. I would probably call the artist himself/herself to make sure that they had a money-back guarantee. What else do I do this for? Electronic goods, apartment listings, video games, salons, dog parks, cell phones, professors, girlfriends. Okay I am just kidding on that last one, but I even looked up reviews of a park just for the off chance that it might not be as green as another park; hence not as park-like.

It didn’t use to be this way though. Not exactly. If a restaurant was good, we would hear about it from a friend, or maybe we would read a review of it in The Los Angeles Times or maybe some other magazine. More often than not we would find out if it was good or not by eating there, forming our own opinion, and deciding for ourselves whether we liked it or not.

We formed our own opinions of whether the soup was too salty, service too abrupt, or dessert being mind blowing. Somewhere with the invention of these web 2.0 websites, we started reviewing everything we experienced. We started relying on the opinions of others to make our own judgement. I find myself sometimes asking these absurd existential questions. “If I like how this soup tastes, do I really like how this soup tastes? Or is it because I had read positive reviews of this soup and therefore am influenced in someway by how good it tastes to me?” Somewhere along the way we lost the desire to be surprised. We lost our spontaneity. Remember the good old days when you would go see a movie out of a whim and not reading anything or hearing anything about it and being completely blown away? That hasn’t happened for me in years. The last movie I saw where that happened was The Descent, and that was a lower budget movie with little or no marketing. Good chance that if it is a big budget movie, you will know the entire plot of the movie by the time you are done watching the trailer. We just don’t want to be surprised anymore.

What is the cause of this? Are we that boring? Don’t we want to have fun anymore? We don’t like excitement? No.

It is that we have begun to economize fun. We maximize output in our jobs, try to maximize our monetary gain, our production in the bedroom; and now we have turned to maximizing the last thing in our lives: our free time. It is not enough that it is there and we can use it how we see fit. We have to make sure that it is enjoyed to the greatest degree. We all know that time is fixed. There is a finite supply of it. When we choose to do one activity over another we sacrifice the opportunity to do Activity A to enjoy Activity B. The opportunity cost of this transaction is that we could have done Activity A but chose to do Activity B; therefore we forgo the enjoyment that may have been possible with A. The same is true when we decide to watch the latest Pixar movie UP! over Terminator Salvation. We have to give up one to see the other on a certain night, at a certain time. This is where the reviews and opinions come in. We want to maximize our enjoyment and satisfaction out of these activities out of fear that the opportunity cost will be too great to forgo. What if I saw UP! and it wasn’t any good? That means that I could have watched Terminator Salvation, a movie that I could have enjoyed. Then the doubts settle in. What if Terminator Salvation turns out to be the greatest movie of our generation? What if it could have changed my whole outlook on life? Do I take the chance? Let me check the reviews… Whew, UP! is better reviewed, I’ll see that.

Slowly we incorporate this way of thinking into every aspect of our lives. This dinner is really important, I can’t have it ruined by a bad meal. This tuesday night is the only tuesday night of the week, I can’t have it ruined by a bad night out.  If I bought this book and read the whole thing only to find out it was crap, I would have wasted weeks! I need to know how good it is from others just to be sure.

 Who thinks like this? Economists, accountants, people dealing in business transactions, the controller of a plastics factory that has to decide whether sustainable plastic will provide more profit in the long run. Do you really want to apply the same logic used by that guy buying plastic to whether or not you should eat at this taco stand? The real opportunity cost of using all these opinions and reviews is spontaneity. We lose the excitement of discovering a hole in the wall that serves the best tamales. We don’t get to be surprised by a real page turner from an unknown author. We knew it was going to be a great thriller, especially in chapter five. Worst yet, if all we eat at are superbly rated restaurants, how do we look at things comparatively then? Sometimes we need to eat at a bad meal at TGIF before we can appreciate the subtly of the food at Mozza. Sometimes we need to see a Fast and Furious to really appreciate a Slum-dog Millionaire.

 “But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.” – Barack Obama

The context that surrounds this speech explains a lot about why it was given. In the midst of political, social, racial tensions over comments given by Reverend Wright, a Reverend whose services Obama had attended regularly, Obama decided to confront the problem instead of avoiding it. The speech itself is so rich with imagery, passion, and clarity that we forget that it is also perfectly timed, executed, and was just the right political move for his campaign. I think this will be one of the great speeches in American History, one that pinpoints this moment in time and how far we have come since our founding. He speaks of the complexity of human nature, the opposing forces that lie within a community, the contradictions we have in ourselves.

I don’t think a politician has outlined in plain English how exactly white people feel about black people and vice versa. It is very refreshing to hear someone say these things explicitly, especially on this platform. We have to remember that this man was running for president at the time. That is the highest position in this country, and to have someone running for the presidency give a speech this controversial is unheard of.

For those who feel like the anger of Reverend Wright’s comments come out of left field than I urge you to take a walk on the streets of the nearest urban center or metropolitan city. The divide is there and apparent. A divide of class, race, and inequalities. This speech doesn’t dwell on them but instead tries to mend that divide.

*As a note, the pictures came from the White House Flickr Pool at http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/

Please see below for the speech in its entirety.

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama
“A More Perfect Union”
Constitution Center
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk – to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave-owners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination – where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs – to the larger aspirations of all Americans — the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination – and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past – are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina – or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

I went on a roadtrip to Vegas recently and rented a Jeep Wrangler to drive there just to see if I liked it…and I loved it! I think more than anything the Jeep just represents adventure, excitement, and Safari. Even if it is on just Interstate 15 on a highway littered with the wild herd of Priuses and the occasional Ford Taurus spotting.

The only thing I don’t like about something like the Jeep is the pricetag. But that’s another story.

“Life is either a great adventure or nothing” – Helen Keller

 The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world.

It is even a trivial place.

The waves forever rolling to the land are too far-travelled and untamable to be familiar.

Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squall and the foam, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of sea-slime.

http://www.rjshaughnessy.com/

* these photos are from R.J. Shaughnessy. I really would like to talk to him about his work.

 A Dream Deferred

By Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

I remember reading this poem in grade school and it stuck with me in the back of my mind. Below are pictures from Langston’s Harlem neighborhood:  

Why a ballet dancer? I don’t really know. I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button a while back and one of the things that stood out most to me was the life of a ballet dancer.

Their performances are graceful, delicate, soft. Yet it takes an incredible amount of training, pain, and sweat to make their movements with such ease. Their work demands so much from their bodies and their youth. I was always curious about what it took to become a dancer and what it was like to do it as a profession. I contacted the Los Angeles Ballet Company to ask if I could talk with one of their dancers. I was lucky enough for them to refer me to Kelly.

We met at a Starbucks on the west side on a Thursday evening. The first thing that I noticed about Kelly was her very upbeat personality. I mean she was cheerful and bright at seven or eight o’clock in the evening. She greeted me with a bright smile and we sat with our coffees and dove right into conversation. She was excited from the get go and eager to share her experiences with me. She told me how she started as a child, the hardships with dancing, the dreams she had growing up, and her expectations for the future. The more she told me about ballet the more I was intrigued. She explained to me the different types, who the masters of the field were, and what her favorite stories were. She had a great sense of humor and throughout the conversation I felt like I was chatting with an old friend. She has that effect on you.

The way she described ballet made me want to go buy some tickets and see a show immediately. I did not realize before then how much work goes into articulating emotion into motion; and in every scene! Every gesture is well thought out and studied because every movement counts.

I walked away infected by her cheer and excitement towards ballet and came away with a much greater appreciation for this art form.

Read my conversation with Kelly at The Experience Gallery

I stumbled upon this speech and thought it was a great piece on living your life passionately. In the picture above you can see a young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s excitement in their early years.

Here is the 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech in its entirety:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

The Experience Gallery

“There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only passion of life”

- Federico Fellini

For first issue of The Experience Gallery we chose the theme Passion because we wanted to meet people passionate in some way in their lives. We talked to chefs, humanitarians, activists, dancers, professors on what they were passionate about in their lives.

What is passion to you?

Is it being able to take a jump off the deep end just on a feeling alone?

Is it feeling so strongly about something you want to remember it forever?

Is it the unspoken longing for someone or something else?

Find out what these 8 individuals are passionate about in their lives:

Kevin Break, Kristy Choo, Neal Fraser, Tom Boellstorf, Issa Sharp, Kelly Sloan, Erin Rank, Tina Park

The Experience Gallery

“It just happened one day, just thought about it one moment and decided to do it”

That is what I tell people I am interviewing for The Experience Gallery when they ask me why I started the interviews.

That is exactly how it started. I was going through a so called “transitional phase” in life and was evaluating various aspects of  it when I realized that I associated mostly with the same circle and group of friends. I didn’t really expand out and try to meet new people.

Why is that? Why not? After all a stranger is only a stranger until you get to know them.  I started thinking about how I take meetings with so many people for granted. The person I pass by on the street corner, the glance I exchange with someone through a store front window, the older gentleman I share the milk with at the coffeehouse. What separates us? Just a hello? An introduction? I started thinking about their stories, their lives, and everything I could learn from these people if I just took the intiative and talked to them.

That’s all there was to it. The Experience Gallery became a place where I talked to 8 people every month from all areas of society, across the social spectrum, from all backgrounds. The goal is just to learn something from them, have conversations with them, and meet someone I knew nothing about.

If the reader can learn something from these conversations that would be great, or just even be encouraged to say hello to that stranger you walk down the hallway with on your way to the elevator.