One Black Feather

For many years, I worked on a series of poems called Parables of Famous Economists - think Pokemon-style trading value with Garbage Pail Kids sensibilities. A few of the poems were published, but the trading cards stayed a dormant project, and the parables dwindled in frequency.

When The Economist magazine published a special report on financial risk Feb. 13, I was motivated to write a new parable because of the story of value-at-risk theorists pondering on the frequency of "black swans" - unusual events that were supposed to happen once a millenium - except that the experts at quant theory never anticipated events folding into each other like a feedback loop. The quote from the two economists involved in such theories seemed applicable to environmental theory, energy theory, any chaotic oscillatory loop that had moved into a past-equilibrium state of near-catastrophic breakdown. That, of course, is what happened to our financial system in 2008, and is what is happening to many human systems that are near or beyond tipping points. I'm surprised the black swan analogy has not been applied more generally.

Then I started to think about grains of sand and avalanches. And surfing beaches in Kauai. And blue bottles, the Pacific Ocean equivalent of the Portuguese man o' war jellyfish. And how blue bottles swim in swarms when they sting. And how, if black swans have moved from rarities to commonplace creatures, maybe they sting in flocks. Like a protein kinase cascade, tumbling toward a cancer. Except we're already there. Here's the latest parable:

Parables of Famous Economists - #37 in the occasional series

One Black Feather

(for Peter Bernstein and Till Guldimann)

“Financial markets are not only vulnerable to black swans, but have become the perfect breeding ground for them” – T. Guldimann

Ha’Ena crest bubbles on each breaking wave
Burst in the kinase cascades Judy calls frothy
Blue bottles call ‘tase-me-bro’
Or domino – either form of paralysis

In the beached fever dream I can only insist that
Swans never bred in salt water
Silly mistake,
Lagoon or tsunami, this breeding ground swells
To embrace debt swaps and ice melts and the
Single-nucleotide polymorphs
(you insisted had flown)
That sang in a chorus of tase-me-bro

The one grain of Ha’Ena sand
That became a cascade
Mistaken for blue bottle sting
Since they all swim in swarms
Stings cascading hurt
And the black swan so rare
It was only that fever dream suggesting a flock
No proof, a black feather
Palalia
Feedback storm

Wake-Up Call

This might almost be a follow-up to Alexander. It's about chimes that ring for bravery, as Barry has had to face with his dying mother and his own cancer - and it's about chimes for those that cash out early, as Joe Stack chose to do in Austin with the IRS. Just as bloggers globally were ringing bells for Barry at 2 p.m. Feb. 18, analysts were micro-dissecting Stack's suicide note, in which he excoriates the IRS for not saving him from his own problems.

I know two suicide victims who always chose to follow the path of entitlement, not enlightenment, and wondered why they didn't get an entry-level job at the top executive level, or why people didn't appreciate them stealing silverware. I know a few other people with serious health problems who choose to spend too much time in fear, frightened and wondering how they can garner more sympathy. Barry is an example of those who choose to live in bravery.

A friend who heard about the IRS suicide flight said, "Sometimes living well is the best revenge", and I said that sometimes living is the best revenge. I have no one to seek revenge on, but it seems as though a continued struggle to live, create, and be autonomous is the best strategy to avoid dependency and looking for that magical entitlement. One, two, three, many Barry's, and many bells to ring them on!

Teaching Resilience to Future Alexanders

The maddening thing about learning that fashion designer Alexander McQueen had taken his own life was not just the notion that someone learns suicide from significant others. It certainly must have been hard for McQueen to deal with the suicide of friend Isabella Blow, and the death of his mother. The frustrating thing is trying to spread the message to the desperate that we're all feeling this blanket of exasperation and despondency from time to time, yet those of us who choose our crash helmets carefully can still find the right flowers to focus on. It is a beautiful universe, even for the sentient, and we fail every time we don't get that message out.

It seems like the important balancing act to fall back upon is to live by Richard Buckner's reminder that "kindness calls you out," while being willing to be surly and anti-social enough to speak truth to power when necessary. In the 21st century, there is no civility left to achieve that balance. Terry Tempest Williams, who just started writing a monthly column for The Progressive magazine, argues for the return of the dinner party as the place for civility. Perhaps she's right, but I keep dredging up images of dysfunctional Thanksgivings and "The Dinner is Ruined." Personally, I'd always prefer to stay at the kids' table. But if forced to break bread in the company of grownups, I think it's important to occasionally say (in a civil manner, mind you), "Your opinions indicate you're mentally disturbed, and you really should seek mental help."

What does this have to do with McQueen? A failure to leaven a universal kindness and a mad love affair with the world with an occasional brash tactic can lead to a despair that wins out in the end. This century is going to be tough, folks. We all need crash helmets. The failure of humans to be good stewards will bite us back over the coming decades, and it's important to optimize tactics for being a snarly lover of your surroundings. As Conan O'Brien warned us in his final show, that does not mean living as a cynic. It means living as though kindness could win, as though something you did mattered. Even if you don't believe it, using resilience to mimic a passionate embrace of life is better than living like Alexander McQueen. And letting kindness call you out might prevent another McQueen somewhere.

Hope Who?

Wow, two Curmudgeon posts in a row, suffused with joy. Can't have that. Where's the yang? Actually, focusing on small Pop Rocks of joy might be appropriate when the world seems so intent on showing that small instances of intelligent behavior on behalf of either government or people get overwhelmed by the continuous tide of bureaucracy and stupidity. The script gets so familiar, my sense of outrage is buried in ennui.

No, my problem with Washington bears little resemblance to the tea-party gang obsessed with deficits, though the deficit reduction plan does nothing to win Obama friends. I'm also through with worrying about how an Afghan surge will work, or when Gitmo might close. Rather, it's the constant fallback to the national-security position that often makes the Obama administration hard to distinguish from the previous one:

* A legal, nonviolent protest against a missile-defense test at Vandenberg Air Force Base Jan. 31 was met by greater repression than Bush initiated in the post-9/11 period. Military Police at Vandenberg went outside the gates to dismantle a demo on public property. Meanwhile, the missile test failed, while Obama planned on upgraded Patriot missile batteries throughout the Persian Gulf region. Bruce Gagnon blogs about the crackdown on MacGregor Eddy and compatriots here. (Update: Here's an article on the crackdown, with a photo showing a banner that was displayed for a total of five minutes before being pulled down.)

* Obama's nuclear-weapons budget, Pentagon budget ($708 billion), and Quadrennial Defense Review are more business-as-usual bids for more guns and less butter. At least Pell Grants are increased, but that can't make up for all the offensive parts of the present budget.

* The right wing has gone from crazy to downright dangerous, as revealed in the arrests at Sen. Mary Landrieu's office. But was it a CIA inside job? You'll never know. Just like you'll never know the death count from CIA-directed drone attacks inside Pakistan.

I almost got lifted from my sense of repressive-rerun boredom with Ruth Mowry's wonderful post on Black History Month. But then I remembered that even Woodrow Wilson supported D.W. Griffith and supported the Klan. I remembered that we still have racists who try to bury their hatred of a Black president under stories of Kenyan birth certificates. And I remember that our president who was to serve as an agent of change, isn't able to change much at all. I guess I had better chuckle as much as I can at the small stuff, because I am simply too tired and bored to engage in passionate outrage over a world that still seems bent on unraveling its better works.

The Mainstreaming of Strange

THIS POST IS THE ANTI-GRAMMY.

John Voelcker pointed me to a couple essays last year declaring 2010 to be the year of eclecticism, because with everything tweeted and nothing forbidden, credit must be assigned to esoterica as the New Black. It sure seems as though the undue attention paid to three new music releases from the outer limits is an indicator that the public is willing to tolerate more envelope-pushing than the Official Arbiters of Taste might predict:

* AFGCT is a jam session of sorts between two misfit bands, A-Frames and Climax Golden Twins. They have released a couple vinyl-only noise fests on small artsy labels, but their latest LP-plus-7-inch was released by the almost-commercial indie favorite label Sub Pop, in an elaborate fold-over puzzle package of beautiful black and white silkscreened prints. Surprisingly, it seems to be everywhere at once. Ten or 20 years ago, this sort of music would have been relegated to the "clear the room" shelf.

* Tim Kinsella has hosted a revolving band of musicians under the band name Joan of Arc, whose albums are hit and miss, but always different and noteworthy. This year, he gathered 18 close friends and ex-JoA bandmates to release a compilation and art project called "Don't Mind Control." Some of it's melodic, some abrasive, all of it is innovative, calling to mind a No New York for the 21st century.

* Finally, Vibracathedral Orchestra gave us some of the most interesting drone-instrumental compositions of the 21st century. Once Neil Campbell and Bridget Hayden left for other projects, there was some concern that Mick Flower might not have enough of a center of gravity to keep VCO rolling. Wonder no more. The band has released three full-length albums at once at the end of January on the VHF label, and they're all getting heavy circulation.

So why is this happening when the advent of Internet culture is supposed to have a leveling effect that makes us all tune in to lite jazz and American Idol? Maybe because there's also truth in Chris Anderson's "long tail" observation in Wired magazine, and we are discovering that the fan base for eclectic improvisational works has a very long tail indeed, once the fans can find each other. In the early 1980s, I told a POSSLQ at the time that "I don't deliberately look for the weird and atonal. I instinctively grab what interests me. Sometimes it's million-seller, but often I just have to wait a decade or more for others to jump on board." Right now, that lag time is at its lowest point since I was a wee sprout. I am absolutely convinced that this is not because my tastes have grown more conservative in my old age, but because there are millions of culture vultures willing to explore outer boundary marches they have never explored before. Cheers!

Why Laughter (and Forgetting) Wins

Pay attention to the wrong things, and this seemed to be a week when the great ship of state was seizing up, perhaps for good. Brown wins in Massachusetts. Edwards admits to his love child. Haiti aid distribution gets worse. Rumsfeld's name shows up in the client list of DC's leading madam. Obama expresses frustration that banks need more than spanks. Everyone lines up to oust Bernanke. The Supreme Court says that corporations matter more than you. There is nothing good, there is no "crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."

And yet, and yet.... I went to Thursday night's Studio Bee sessions and saw a band of 17-year-olds from Cheyenne Mountain High School operating under the nom de guerre of Dance Over Anaheim, who played some of the most perfect pop music I ever heard. This never fails to happen, because of tiny miracles everywhere. Even in the depths of the early Medieval period, we got the Venerable Bede. As Pynchon said in some of his most graphic WW2 concentration camp writings, the sky can show us a star. It can, and does.

The Integrity of the Blogger's Voice

My friend and former colleague, Brian Fuller, has a wonderful blog on the future of media and marketing, Greeley's Ghost (link at right). At the beginning of the year, he posted his frustrations at employing Seach Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to help drive blog traffic, and that it hadn't helped. Friends weighed in with advice on crafting the voice to meet the audience. The tiny little voice whispering "No!" in my ear became louder and louder, until I read the New York Times' interview with Jaron Lanier regarding his new book, You Are Not A Gadget, and realized why I was so upset.

Lanier, like Chris Weingarten, thinks crowdsourcing is crap, but not because he prefers elitism. Rather, Lanier said that the means of presenting the self in blogs and social networks should be strictly segmented from the marketing methods to tout products or services. The main point in presenting the digital self should be the preservation of integrity, and in many cases, eclecticism. What would happen if Thomas Pynchon or Charles Bukowski had been told to craft their voices to meet the expectations of the audience? Why, we'd have the literary equivalent of American Idol, that's what.

Yes, millions of people may want to be contestants on American Idol (which follows the law of supply and idiots), but the winners on this show are not musicians. They are crafted creatures of public demand. A musician or writer or artist should make clear to a potential audience that this is the vision or trajectory they happen to be on, "and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful." But if the potential consumer of culture doesn't get it, too bad. The artist need not change a thing. I told Brian this is a variant of what I call my "Train leaves at 12:10. Be there or be square" theory of reviewing books, music or movies: Don't rant and rave. Don't repeat yourself. Drop a pearl of wisdom once, then be a silent sage. People can listen to you or not, but it's better to be inscrutable than popular.

This can work. My good friend Ruth Mowry has hundreds of followers and has had her blog "Synch-ro-ni-zing" recognized globally, while staunchly refusing advertising and keeping self-promotion of the blog to a minimum. And no, she's not a starving artist, thank you very much.

The problem, of course, is that the quest for art with integrity flies in the face of everything we are taught about living with the new rules of social media. Lanier calls it a form of Maoism, I call it lowest common denominator thinking. If we want to preserve art with integrity, we must toss the concept of SEO on personal blogs and marketing of the self, and strive for a unique trajectory that an audience can either adjust to, or ignore. If we fail to set these kind of standards, the hive mind will not be a sum greater than its parts, it will be moronic by nature.