os191228 Year of hope: The bottom of Pandora’s box  

Why hope?

The end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 puts me in the mood to think about the coming year as I paid for my business license with the knowledge that Emeralda Works will continue to be a legal entity, although maybe for the last year of its existence. What signs are there to have hope?

There is Nellie, for one thing, working for a half-time salary, and she can learn about the business license. It’s not morbid to think about it, but I will die someday – it may not be for many years – but eventually it must happen and then the business may close. Or not.

There is hope. I have a brain that’s like Pandora’s Box, which – when opened – all the evils of the world flew out like a flock of crows. But Pandora, in a panic, shut the box in a hurry, and what remained in the box was Hope. I am like Pandora, curious about this box I’m not supposed to open, and I lift the lid a tiny bit and peep inside.

There is Hope.

Emeralda Works is a sentence, a two-word sentence consisting only of a noun and a verb. Emeralda refers to an imaginary land, a region I like to think exists in the Pacific Northwest. It was formed a long time ago by the impact of a great starship, forming a triangular crater which filled with water – the runoff from the snows of three mountains at each apex of the triangles.

Works refers to the fact that imagining such a region as Emeralda (the word itself proved to be a rare one seldom used by anyone else but me) works in the sense that it feeds my hunger for better things, better situations, better encounters and experiences every day.

Then, too, there is the business of living, the short-range daily tasks that need tending to. It’s here where the matters-at-hand come in, things like business licenses, taxes, bookkeeping and legal matters.

That I have at least this business license – paid for by $61 out of our small income – keeps the legal-eagles away from usurping my time and what remains of our resources. It gives me the freedom to think of positive things and think of Hope.

Our daughter Billie Jane reminded us of the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and we watched it. I’d forgotten about it – although I remembered having been assigned reading the James Thurber short story when I was a student.

After watching the movie with Lynda, I realized I am a “Walter Mitty” in the eyes of people like Tom Kughler – subject to flights of the imagination. Thurber’s message must have been a confession of his, as a creative writer must allow imaginary things in order to be human and follow through on vision and curiosity.

He’s not unique. There is a need for imaginary travels if we are to survive. There is a need to entertain if we are to live.

ri191027 Flipping real estate: 

A difference of scale 

A good day 

I had a good day December 20 – close to the winter solstice. Carl Chew came to visit me, bought me lunch and gave me a piece of their family fruit cake. I listened while I told him about my Play Auction. He listened while I told him about my theory of the nucleus accumbens – that coffee-bean size piece in our brain’s hypothalamus (which both of us have the hyper version and thus we are artists and we meet and talk like this.)

A topic of current interest to us – partly because of our hyper nucleus accumbens activity – is our legacy. He calls his, the archive. I call mine the Artist’s Last Love Letter. Both of us aspire to achieve the same thing: A clean camp and sustainability for our families when we depart this life.

Both his archive and my Last Love Letter need a marketing and sales plan. We don’t talk about this, however. People with an overactive nucleus accumbens, right-side brain dominant, tend to suck at marketing and closing sales.

Later in the day I met a real estate broker and she commented how she “flipped a house,” and this gave her the impetus to go into real estate marketing and sales. Her real dream is to build green homes, so she also took courses and learned about this. However, I made more out of her casual remark than she knows.

I did mention to her in our conversation that there is a demographic with a problem to solve, an itch to buy a solution. I’m part of that – at least, the left side of my brain is. I yearn for a program that can apply to me, and my friend Carl.

I have nibbled all around the edges of this program. Usually I frame it in the Artistscripophily idea, that people will buy the contents of an artist’s archive or their family collection if it is not a high-maintenance, physical and opaque item or items.

A portfolio of stocks, for example, is part of a person’s net worth. A portfolio which includes REITs has a value which is measurable according to the REIT’s value. A REIT which is focused on shopping malls, for example, might be riskier than one which focuses on mini malls.

Green homes, my new acquaintance’s interest, are not popular, really. Judging by the gross mismanagement of resources in America, the environment is trumped by greed and conspicuous consumption. A wealthy person buys a Tesla, and they drive by homeless camps with impunity.

Flipping a house is another way to say selling a home, but it’s a special kind of sale. Flipping a house is a slang term used to describe the act of buying a house and then quickly selling it weeks after purchase. Generally, houses that are the subjects of flipping are somehow out of favor with the purchasing public and therefore tend to be listed at a deeply discounted price. It involves a form of creativity. My new acquaintance has a degree in fine art photography from a major art school (1978), therefore she, too, probably has an over-active nucleus accumbens.

She unintentionally clued me in to a factor of flipping because within the twenty minutes we visited, she remarked that my idea for a sip and print might be a good idea, but it can’t be monetized.

“Wrong,” I said to her. “It can’t be monetized, but the concept of monetization itself has been flipped. Today the key is scalability.” Then I told here where I learned how scalability would make the difference, and it’s relative.

A developing nation in Africa, for example, can’t monetize a new idea by the standards of a developed nation like the United States or the EU. That’s because we are under the illusion of scalability at a higher monetizing level than in a developing, desperate, life-or-death nation like Uganda. I would include my friend Mavis’ country, too, Botswana, even though this country is doing better than most African nations.

“I could run a sip and print for six people right now,” I said, “Because I have three presses.”

This means I could monetize at least one sip and print session. She is a videographer, so between the two of us we’d have pictures to develop the next level – either a repeat of the first one or as a pitch for monetization.

Personally, I believe it’s better to have customers’ money than investors.

As for my friend, Carl, he’d be a step closer to the correct direction for his legacy if he’d tie it to my grand vision, the International Print Center Incubators and Workplaces, and turn the interaction of his legacy, Stamp World, toward artistscripophily.

In a sense, the monetization factor has been flipped in America, because we are a third world nation now. It’s just that few people are humble enough to point it out and live accordingly.

 

 

mr191122 Halfwood Press Book: To be or not to be 

Seven years ago

Seven years ago, I wrote an essay for my video ‘zine on November 7, 2012 after Barack Obama won the election for a second term. From the perspective of this day – after weeks of hearings into the corruption of Donald Trump – I can see it was under Obama that there were signs that teaching might come to restore the damage done to the USA under George W. Bush’ administration.

Today, November 22, is the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy – a reminder to me of what might be considered the end of the United States experiment in democratic government and the beginning of tyranny evident in the Trump era.

I wrote in 2012 that there were ten good reasons to pull back from making presses and turn my attention to the next level of the enterprise. Not that presses would cease to be made because Tom and Margie Kughler stood ready to take it over, even the detailing and shipping of presses, and they could do it continually.

My new enterprise, if there were to be a “next level,’ was to figure out how best to use my skills in marketing and selling presses – not he hands-on work of making them. I could participate in growing the market. My hands were no longer needed; indeed, there are idle hands aplenty that can do the work of finishing, testing, packing and shipping presses.

Today I recovered the 2012 essay – ten reasons to stop - and it struck me how I had often thought of making a book about the first fifteen years of my part of the Halfwood Press project – 2004-2019 – along with writing my memoirs.

It would be a picture book including images of the presses and images of the people, their art, their pets with the presses – anything that showed the relationship of the presses to their lives as artists, crafts people, hobbyists, teachers or whatever. Such variety!

I wrote emails to five people – the first five listed alphabetically on my database of press owners – to ask if they were interested in participating in this project. Two responded to the affirmative.

My memoirs and finishing other books I started got in my way. Now I’m thinking about it again.

ri191116  Wrapping up my story  

I am wrapping up the last two months of writing my autobiography, an exercise in examining my life. It’s a story of many failures and I wonder why I failed, where I went wrong, and what other strategies I might have pursued toward a success.

However, there are successes, too. I can, of course, remember the old chestnut, “He who cannot point to many failures has never tried anything.” There is some truth to this, but it doesn’t make me feel good about the failures.

Especially on a day-to-day basis of what the prospect of the coming day offers. Instead of looking forward to a day at the International Print Center Incubators and Workplaces, I am going to our Mini Art Gallery, there to resume my videos about publishing on the Kindle Direct Publishing platform.

The IPCI&W has always been a fantasy, a mirage on the horizon of my life. In my most intellectual view, the most rational, I see I am in a desert. Seattle – and the whole of the USA (and some might say the whole Earth) is a cultural dustbin.

What I have called the “printmaking community” is not the bastion of technical and cultural innovation and aesthetic development. It’s not the creative economy and experience economy brought to bear on my day.

Maybe in a micro-manner it is manifest in the Mini Art Gallery. There, in that 300-square foot space, I am a big fish. Like a fish, I have adapted to the size of my aquarium. However, I cannot make a larger aquarium where many fishes of all varieties can live and work.

It’s like the recording by Pinto Colvig and Billy May that I listened to over and over when I was a kid. In the song, “Honkety Hank” built an amazing soap box racer and impressed the whole town; but it was only a dream. At the end of the song the kid wakes up, scratches his head, washes his face and goes to school, “Just like any other boy.”

There’s no school for me to go to. I’ve used up all my school days.

ps140509 Growth Tip Revisited: Finding our way in difficult times  

Arms too weak—a dream analysis 

In my dream I was in a wilderness, but there were trails and a road, a bridge crossing a river. I saw a man in the river, and he swam ashore and I gave him a hand getting out. He said he often went swimming in this river, but it was especially turbulent these days—maybe he shouldn’t risk it.

The scene changed, and I was in a queue with many people, and I couldn’t find my place in the line; I mistakenly took a place and I was shoved out for having crowded in. Then I was again in a wilderness—and now on a mission like a guerrilla task. We had to cross a stream and, on the other side, climb a steep cliff and through a small hole.

There were others behind me, and when I was able to get up to a hole which we had to crawl through, and I realized I didn’t have the strength to pull myself up. At 72, I could no longer pull my weight in this kind of warfare. The hole was partly blocked by a flat stone, and I was able to push the stone aside and make the passage a little easier for others.

That was the most I could do, however; and even after I made the passage a little larger, I could not lift myself up to go through. As I was blocking the way of the others, they would have to go around. I was stuck. I could not help in the mission.

I woke up, thinking, “growth tip.”

Growth tip defined

In college I took botany as a science requirement. What stuck with me about plant life was that the tip of a stem or branch had the effect of leading the way in the plan for the plant’s growth. After that, whenever I see some greenery that has poked itself through a crack in a sidewalk or a little tree that has broken through stone, I thought about the growth tip.

The growth tip must have a combination of plant-cellular intelligence, strength, fortitude and persistence to manage breaking through hard stuff. From a seed in soft, moist, accommodating soil, the achievement of easily sending out its first root or stem and sprout in two directions—one toward the sun, the other toward the deeper regions for water and nutrients.

Maybe that’s why I took to the tree as my guide when I was in graduate school and required to state my master’s thesis project. The requirement was to help us graduate students in art to focus our energy and our minds similarly as to what the students in engineering or science must.

Trees became my obsession, which was an obvious choice because I had already started on trees as symbols of life itself when I was an undergraduate.

Wake up

I thought about the growth tip the instant I woke up from the nightmare and the feeling that I can’t pull my weight because my muscles have gone soft, thus useless in guerrilla warfare. But I removed a small obstacle in the pathway. I was of some use, after all. At 72 year of age, are there not things that I possess that will help the young people on a mission we share?

My personal history in art and education suggests that I am a kind of growth tip, having broken through impasses in my work as an artist, designer, and teacher. While I am not a politician or military scientist, my having solved problems that I met in education were good solutions. I continue trying to offer ideas for better ways to teach, research, practice and give service through the arts to young people in America and all nations.

Times have changed, and the problems I met and solved over fifty years are not necessarily problems that are worth anyone’s time to address today. I seem to be getting nowhere in my ten-year plan for the International Print Center Incubators and Workplaces, for example, and maybe it’s a concept not appropriate to these times.

Yet, I can still be the growth tip and find a tiny hole or a crack in the rocky ceiling of indifference and confusion about the place of art, design and education. What stops me from doing what I hope to do? I have to ask myself this question every morning.

There is light out there, somewhere, and, underneath me like a foundation, the enrichment of my past. It is my basis for believing it is possible to save Earth’s human life sustainability through education of the world’s young people.

In corporate language, such a foundation is called the “stock basis.” In two years, we will form the Ritchie Foundation based on our “stock,” our family art collection.

Dependent

There is no mistake in believing that our lives—those of my wife Lynda and mine—depend on an educated, trained and cooperating population of young people, for it is the wages that they will earn if they are qualified to get salaried jobs that will, through our Social Security, Medicare and Pension systems, sustain us.

Therefore, it is incumbent on all “growth-tippers” to mobilize the wisdom to know how to edit, revise, re-define and apply our years of experience in our domains-of-expertise.

 

vi191009 Welcome to my printmaking world -

Where prints are smart 

The printmaking world, according to my lights, is a world where prints are the highest form of intelligence. I learned about such things from a friend of mine, Carl Chew, whose Stamp World was one where artistamps are the highest form of intelligence.

The distribution of 240 Halfwood Presses worldwide.

Many people think that prints belong in the art world, where artworks are the highest form of intelligence. The fact is, artworks in and of themselves have no intelligence at all, let alone high – or low, for that matter. To exist at all, artworks must be given print forms.

The difference between art and prints is negotiation. Prints are negotiable, whereas artworks are not – not without the introduction of prints. For an artwork to be negotiated – that is, transferred from one entity to another – requires mediation.

Generally, art cannot be experienced without mediation – a photograph or digital image, for example – which are prints. I would include plane tickets or museum admission tickets. Such prints – both physical and/or digital – mediate between the art and he or she who experiences it. Print includes text, such as descriptors, textbooks and magazine articles.

Prints that are considered fine art migrate easily into and out of the digital media. Prints are experienced as hanging on walls or in folios. As most prints are on paper, they are highly portable, being mostly of small scale. This is negotiability – the ability to be transferred and exchanged.

Paintings, on the other hand, are less so. That’s why painters make prints – the costs to the buyer being less and the prints themselves more readily shipped to multiple destinations.

The negotiability doesn’t end there because a number of people can experience and own a print from a publication – each print like every other print but varying inasmuch they were printed in succession. Two things are notable about this – one is that they may vary and, two, an invisible link is made among people who have examples of the print.

Stephen Hazel, a twentieth century artist, wrote a paper titled, “The Print is in 4-Space” in which he described this phenomenon as a kind of community-building. However, he didn’t develop this observation – it remained for me to extend into the digital age. He died before he could participate fully in the print as part of the Internet, the so-called IoT, the Internet of Things, defined by Wikipedia as:

“A system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.”

How is this of value to people who need and want prints to be part of both the print world and the art world? The answer lies in economics – the negotiability of prints not only in the sharing of cost-free exchange, such as on an artist’s website where people can experience the visual character of the print, but two economic worlds: experience and creative.

The experience economy is in the replacement of physical objects for sale to the experience around objects. For example, the business models of Build-A-Bear or eating in a restaurant that’s supposed to be in a jungle setting.

The creative economy is business models that rely on artists of all stripes to attract commerce – such as a city boasting of an art district, or a neighborhood that erects an unusual playground to attract visitors.

The print world offers both experience and creativity, making it a world where one’s intellect is stimulated and rewarded easily as well as offering a potential for development of experiences and creativity.

The global map above is my example. It shows locations of owners of etching presses I designed and helped build and sell – the presses themselves capable of making prints for the printmaking world. The owners of the presses are “linked” in the sense that Stephen Hazel postulated and, furthermore, are potential instruments of further extending the scope of the printmaking world.

vp190831 Sharing my world: What remains of my life 

Making use of lessons learned

In a paper by a professor I read that one of the things students hate about professors is that they assign the text he or she authored as reading for the course. “It’s conceit,” was the phrase that stuck in my mind.
This answers my curiosity as to why people at a recent gathering of the Seattle Print Arts registered dismissive expression when I told the group several volumes of my autobiography were available on amazon now – and that these covered the years to generations ago when I was at the UW.
Many of those at the meeting were graduates of the UW, and a few from those years. It was, I felt, not interesting to anyone there; in fact, I felt a sense of dismissal. The article where the professor said students thought it conceited that a teacher wrote the book for the class helped explain the reaction by the SPA members gathered there.
The professor also mentioned a series of books published in the 1980s and 90s which were critiques of US Higher Education and that help understand the problems we have with college today – high tuition costs, for one thing, and loss of the arts and humanities sectors.
There’s no point now in defending myself for my teaching. It’s what I did most of my teaching career and failed. I resigned from UW because I was fired from teaching printmaking, and that’s that. The story is in my memoirs, and I’m glad I write them despite few people will read it; and it’s water under the bridge.
What good is it? There is one good, and that would be that people today can learn from the mistakes made by people in the past and then not be condemned to live the errors over again. I hope young teachers never live through the experience I did; but it’s not likely they will, as the future of printmaking teaching jobs is in question.
What remains of my life that’s of use is not lessons to newly hired printmaking teachers into institutions of higher learning, but what is to be learned from the past fifteen years of my career. I say fifteen years because 2004 was when I detected an alternate universe to that which I was part of in the first twenty years of my art and teaching career.
In 2004, I did not design a simpler, smaller, and extensible printing press – the Mini Halfwood – with the purpose of extending printmaking. It was a joke. The press was a charmer, and people saw something in the design they liked for themselves. They wanted to buy it!
In 2016 had to withdraw from the work of making and marketing the press as my physical and mental limits have been shown to me – plus the failure of American democracy; but it remains to be seen what could be achieved if other people would extend the concept of an alternative printmaking world.
If not in the USA, then somewhere else.
Printmaking Access
I don’t have much time left but following are the four principles I pursue now and wish that I could share with people in the SPA who have concerns about the future of printmaking as it may be important in the world their youngsters are facing.
The first principle is fun.
The second principle is social.
The third principle is STREAMable
The fourth principle is economic.
All the above are topics I am working on, and they are summed up in two words: Printmaking Access.

vp190821 Why take a MOOC-making MOOC? Loneliness of the innovator - 

My dream of teaching 

I’m taking a MOOC in making a MOOC. It’s lonely and sometimes I think it’s pointless. It’s like being in a prison cell, in solitary, and daily they feed you a special formula and you eat it because it’s all there is to eat. And you’re not sure it’s good for you or wasting you.

I feel like writing about it, as though I’m on a therapist’s couch. It’s no wonder. I want to teach, but teaching is outmoded, obsolete and in some cultures in the USA, frowned upon. Especially disliked are new modes of teaching such online learning; these are unwelcome in large educational institutions.

Except those like Harvard, Stanford and MIT where they are less afraid to strike out into untested areas such as Massively Open Online Courses. I’m taking a MOOC so I can measure myself against these kinds of institutions.

These have pooled their resources – including money – to develop MOOCs in their specialties – except in the arts. In Humanities they have developed a few courses, but not in the applied arts such as my field – printmaking.

I am hoping to change this be reinventing printmaking as a technology so that it fits more of the existing MOOCs out there. The fundamental invention is the element of printmaking access, i.e., a press. In my plan, one must have not only a computer and a connection to the Internet, but also access to a press – preferable one designed to complement the MOOC.

My plan goes further than learning how to make an etching for ones’ fun and pleasure. My aim is to take the unheard-of step of pointing to an area of education I care about – STEM. I plan to tweak this by adding Reading and Art to make it STREAM.

There’s more. I want to create a channel for interaction among the people who take the MOOC with a type of social network where they share their work. MOOCs already have forums and other means to exchange images of work and videos, too.

Mine, however, is more specific in that it uses a “moment number” referring to the time and place where the printmaking took place. The intention is to create a virtual world where the highest form of intelligence is the print, date-stamped and including the GIS numbers to give other people a street view of the location where the print originated.

While attention around MOOCs has died down over the past decade, the Coursera company seems to have found a business model for free courses with something it calls Specializations. They’re essentially partial graduate degrees, on the cheap, requiring students to take a series of month-long courses on a focused topic such as data science.

I say, how about printmaking? Although the material is free to anyone to watch, students must pay a fee per course—usually about $70—for a verified certificate proving they successfully worked through it.

I take it further. They must build a press, etch the plate, print the plate (including the paper preparation) and participate in Proximates, the dedicated forum for sharing prints and back stories.

That means these newfangled microdegrees – or Mini MFAs - cost only a few hundred dollars in total.

Beyond that, I take the course to promoting jobs. With this degree, the highest level is the business plan to use the skills (and the press) to start small business selling services such as Sip ‘N Print and Build-A-Press workshops.

But, alas, I’m still in solitary and no one to talk to, no one to share my idea. Back in the days when I was at the UW, I used to find people to tell my ideas to and no matter how wild my ideas were, I usually could find someone to share it with. That was before the ban against new ideas that challenged the leaders’ minds.

ps190718 When an artist dies: The flight of his body of work 

 When an artist dies, the event should be like the soul leaving the body in an artistic way. Some people have told stories and made movies and TV shows depicting the soul departing. Ghost comes to mind. The artist put their soul in their work, and it should fly out like that.

Marvin Oliver was – and is – an artist. I didn’t know him. I may have seen him in the early 1970s because he worked on his MFA degree at the UW, graduating in 1973. If he took a printmaking class, which is unlikely because he was probably in the sculpture program, then his name might be in my database of former students.

He died recently. I read that he was on the faculty at the UW art school. I was a little surprised because I didn’t know him. He taught there from 1974 on, and still I never met him. He was associated with Native American Studies. Stonington Gallery shows he made screen prints besides glass art and mixed media sculpture.

I wonder, what is it about the UW where two people like myself and Marvin Oliver never met? Why is it that I am only finding out about him now? Is it because I’m white and he’s Native? The closest I came to know a Native American artist was when I met and worked briefly with Edward Raub.

Was I being the acquisitive white man, frankly wanting his help to validate my story about the carver who made a halfwood press in his or her own native way?

When I met Edward and warned him, I would take advantage of him, he joked, “It wouldn’t be the first time.” I was innocent, not taking into account his and his people’s history with us white invaders. How deep the feelings run I will never know.

I justify my actions because I meant to work as an artist, to collaborate with Ed. I did work, too, more perhaps than Edward realizes. But why should he care? In the end, we cashed out – I sold the press and paid him what was probably a minimum wage - $750 for his carving and another $50 for his share of the sale of his paddle (which I paid him $150 for, and framed it).

When I die, like Marvin Oliver, and when Edward Raub dies, it should not be left as an article in the local newspaper and a Facebook notice. Death of an artist in the digital, Internet age should not be passive. The event should be like a spring unwinding, our souls may leave the body quietly, but our art should blossom out into the Internet like a persistent online interactive game – a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

That is what I have in mind.

Marvin Oliver, thank you for reminding me, and nudging me toward the realization of my vision of an artists asset management and legacy transfer game.

sp190710 Reason 8 for ARTISTSCRIP  

No more time 

Time is like real estate, there is no more of it. In our life we showed enough wisdom to invest in real estate over other peoples’ projects. First for a home, then for a gallery – which was also a hedge against the growing corruption in our government and corporations.

Those were wise investments. Now the property most important is time, and it’s running out. ARTISTSCRIP is many things, and in the world of investing, it can be important both to me and to those who participate in it.

If it became a movement, it could help save Earth’s human and other life sustainability.

Who will help me? Who?

vp190622 Is this what it’s like to die? All is quiet: 

  I get no emails. No press orders. No comments. Only one Facebook “friend” request. Is this what’s it’s like to die in obscurity – a phrase sometimes found in the annals of art history when an artist or poet, writer or other creative, inventive, discovering and imaginative individual passes?

Or is it, as prefer to think, my mysterious muse’ way of protecting me from entanglements with the distractions that emails, press order and comments on Facebook are to my real tasks of being creative, inventive, discovering and imaginative – in all, a producer of valuable things.

“Be gone, dull care” comes to mind. What? It turns out to be a title of “an extraordinary short animation, Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren painted colors, shapes, and transformations directly on to their filmstrip. The result is a vivid interpretation, in fluid lines and color, of jazz music played by the Oscar Peterson Trio.”

Something my muse dredged up out of my past, a film from the 1960s when I was a junior in college and Ron Carraher was bringing film to my attention. It was like the time Carl Chew and I were playing with video feedback and made the video, “My Father’s Farm from the Moon.”

“So,’ as Elmer Gates said on his deathbed, “this is how it has to be.” Whatever happened to Bill Ritchie and Carl Chew?

“Be gone, dull care.” What did they have in mind when they titled their film? What did Carl Chew and I have in mind? Stories I’d like to tell and, thanks to my freedom, I’m able to tell in my autobiography.

My stories are too long to tell in this age of sound bites and stampedes of people running over cliffs, fearing anything creative, inventive, newly rediscovered and imaginative which has not been vetted to fit on a “smart” phone.

The day after Carl sent me the advice I asked for regarding my Artistscrip idea, I checked out the title of his recommended reading: The art of selling altruism. But it was like the story of the yellow scarf tied ‘round the trees – there were too many books like that. I’m waiting for him to tell me which one to read.

In the meantime, I read one about partnerships for altruism[i], thinking of my strategic alliance with Rewana Nduchwa – my friend from Botswana – whose Kalahari Honey project is my current model. Reading the article, I felt like I could copy-write over it and insert Carl’s and my names into it and come up with a plan to, as I believe it can be done, sell off our legacy for the benefit of our chosen altruistic efforts.

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[i] https://www.marketingmag.com.au/hubs-c/opinion-karen-monaghan-agency-arts-organisations-partnerships/

es190604 Noble, notable links: Inspirational phrase from a TED talk  

He lunches in front of his computer with a TED talk on the screen, lunching and listening to a presentation by Beth Mortimer and her co-worker Tarje Nissen-Meyer and a phrase jumps out at him which reminds him of his current work with Mavis Nduchwa. “Nobl… 

 Paraphrasing Beth Mortimer, scientific researcher on TED talk given November, 2018, I want to connect their inspirational talk with my current project with Mavis Nduchwa:

“Advances in science, technology and business require noble links to be made across seemingly disparate topics.”

Did she say noble or notable? Whatever it was she said, I hear her words and I think of the example of disparate topics farming, conservation, wildlife preservation and the disparate topics of art printing, books, and papermaking.

We hope that agriculture, entrepreneurship and printmaking experience will lead to practical economic solutions in education of young people and their families.

How can we do that?

Begin with the economics of it – the economics of agriculture and art.

However, the word art is not what it appears to mean, it’s not what is conjured up in peoples’ minds, such as art galleries, museums, theaters, dance, concerts and movies. If you’re in a field of maize under a hot sun, the word art is out of place. The work of farmers is unlike anything to do with art.

I grew up on a farm and as a kid I worked under the hot sun and I wanted to die it was so hard. I wanted to leave farming and I became what I thought was an artist. However, teaching in the arts is what I did.

Sixty years later I’m writing books about that; but lately I’m giving most of my time to a farmer-turned-entrepreneur[1] and her goal of creating meaningful work in her community and raising money for educating the kids in her schools.

Economics of farming are not so different from the economics of art in that both depend for their meaning on consumers – one on food, the other for experiences. We cannot live without food and clean water – but if our bodies’ needs are met, then we enjoy experiences of art, craft and design.

We may experience these by looking, but scientific research has shown we are better at problem-solving if we have hands-on experience in art, craft and design.

If we have problems, then education – including creative experiences – will help solve them. It’s best to start young, and that’s where artists, crafts people and designers can help in the same way that farmers make their contributions to the world.

The devil is in the details, they say, and in the world today the devil is money. How does my co-worker Mavis bring money to her community? Surely it is through meaningful paid work – the work of farmers rewarded with sales of their products like any other productive farm worker.

How to bring creative experiences to the kids? Any of the tools for this – whether as simple color pens and paper or something more complicated and intriguing – takes money.

In my mind I go to Mavis’ country. I will not go there physically but I will use new technologies, from simple emails, Google Earth, and other Internet tools. I will show there is another kind of art, craft and design never seen in art galleries, museums and concert halls. It is printmaking intended for users, not consumers.

Adam Smith, one of the thinkers responsible for the wealth of some nations like the United States, is said to have written:

“Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.”

I made a bargain with Mavis – we would exchange ideas. My need is to empty our family’s art gallery. Her need is to bring art experiences to her community schools with the profits of meaningful farm work.

It is from my benevolence that she expects money, but from my own interest – the ability to labor on her behalf as well as the meaningful work that her project affords me.

Science, technology, reading, engineering, art and math comprise the magic pill to the poisons of fear and superstition because they provide for communication and the satisfaction of solving problems creatively.

I am solving my family’s problem creatively. I am inventing artistscrip. I began this work years ago with the help of people like Carl Chew – one of the artists who make stamps (artistamps). My problem is 2,350 unsold artworks that will never find art galleries or other venues for distribution – never will they find consumers who buy art in the old-world fashion.

A new reason for offering art for sale has opened, thanks to current crises facing humankind. We artists in the developed nations, with our wealth of time and resources, can come to the aid of other nations’ people by using our artworks as scrip – like stock certificates.

I can sell my art as artistscrip, providing for my family payroll and also for Mavis’ project in Botswana. Thanks to the Internet with all the creative methods it has brought about (crowdfunding, for example), we can share our resources of time and creative problem-solutions.

As Beth Mortimer said in her TED talk, we can find noble (or notable) links across disparate disciplines and at the same time teach others as we learn together.

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[1] Rewana Ka Nduchwa is an award-winning entrepreneur from Botswana, currently at Fledge, a business accelerator.

sp190220 Designing the XSTREAM press: A smart press for smart teachers

 If I wanted to design a press that works in Africa as well as in America, I’d take a global view and make it competitive with Chinese and Russian press designers.

Cost would be my first target – I’d get the price down to less than $500 and yet make room for a reasonable profit. Plus, in addition to the profit margin, I’d make a rule to provide 5% of each press’ net gain to a fund to grant and send a press to a teacher who doesn’t have the money to buy and ship one.

Start with the rollers of the press. I’d make them of pipe, and the bottom roller would have only enough thickness – perhaps 3/16 or ¼ inch. I’d thread the inside on each end to accommodate an off-the-shelf plug that would require a minimum of machining to make it fit the hub of the driving wheel.

The top roller I’d give a thicker wall – perhaps ½”. It, too, would be threaded on the inside to accommodate a shaft or stub.

All the while I’m thinking about these small changes in what used to be my Halfwood Press, I’d be comparing my thinking procedure to that of a Chinese or Russian designer making a press as part of a STREAM teaching package.

STREAM means augmented STEM by adding an R for Reading and an A for Art through books and art. This will be a press associated with the rudimentary history of STEM, that is, printing – the ancestor of all sciences, technology, engineering and math.

My mind would be blending engineering and art, so I’d incorporate features which have less to do with smart engineering solutions and more to do with art – such as the overall appearance of the press and the back story of how the design got started in my mind.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it is the beauty of my Halfwood Press Design that sold more presses to people for its looks than industrial design features of most etching presses. People paid as much as twice as much for my presses than presses of the same functionality.

There is an entertainment value, too, as the emphasis on printmaking with a hand press is like a performance art. It’s a magical moment when the proof is pulled after the crafts of making, inking, and wiping an etched plate or a collagraph, for example.

When I achieve this, imagine what I could do with a new market, emerging in Africa because of the growing concern of educators in both the sciences and the arts.

It’s likely this demographic is dominated by the X-generation - the demographic cohort following the baby boomers and preceding Millennials. Demographers and researchers typically use birth years ranging from the early-to-mid 1960’s to the early 1980’s.

For example, African educators over 40 are working hard to catch up with developed nations. They do more with less. It’s an old story – by working with available and sometimes cast-off resources, educators in less developed countries have worked near-miraculous results.

They have encouragement, too. Sunny Varkey, for example – in his ‘sixties - sponsors the Global Teaching Prize. It’s a million-dollar award given annually to exemplary teachers and most of these prizes have gone to teachers in developing countries.

As someone who lives a life in a country like the USA of such luxury that we thoughtlessly discard a huge part of our resources (both natural and human resources) I have the benefit of time and money to design an XSTREAM press.

With the help of my friends around America and around the world, I can.

ap190514 Chabana Fun: Sustainable Development Goal realized 

I carry a cache of cards in my shirt pocket to remind me of my goal – to take part in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals with the means I have. To begin I added an eighteenth card to the original seventeen posed by the UN, which I call Printmaking Access.

I will pilot an idea which has been gestating for a long time, which is to turn our family’s art collection into a fund for the good of the Earth’s human and other life sustainability. Thanks to a recent meeting of an African woman, the gestation is complete, and the idea is born.

It was her comment, “We can start the Bill and Lynda Ritchie Arts Center in Botswana!” that made it so. She was half-joking. I had told her – also in a joking manner – since the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is only a little distance down 5^th Avenue from our Mini Art Gallery, my wife and I could call our foundation by a similar name – the Bill and Linda Art Center.

We had laugh, and it was fun.

However, my friend, Mavis Nduchwa was half-serious, too, because it is her wish to bring arts experiences to young students in her community.

“What better way than to do this with printmaking,” she stated in a message: “We work with women in bee keeping, we educate them on conservation and land restoration. I suggest we do the same for kids, kids engage best when there is stimulus and what a better way to do it than art print making?”

I never planned to go to another country to teach. Each time I sent one of my press designs to another country over the past fifteen years, a little part of me went with it. The teacher in me wanted to hitch a ride and go with the press – be there with the owner in a way.

I love prints, printmaking and printmakers, so it is this love that energizes me whenever I see a sign that someone agrees with me. When someone like Mavis sees possibilities for printmaking being more than a mechanical way to make images, but as a blend of science, technology, engineering and even mathematics, I glow inside.

It’s true my enthusiasm is inflated, like a balloon, because printmaking is seen by most people as a kind of “fine art” suitable for making framed things on the walls of homes of people of high accomplishment and wealth. This is truly fine art and it has been my source of income for half a century – and continues!

However, printmaking is to me greater than the sums of money it attracts. For the young, it is a way to learn science, technology, engineering and math. When these STEM education goals are blended with printmaking, Reading and Art generate a mix greater than the sum of these parts.

The reason is printmaking is a group effort. Call it a social art, for in many ways, printmaking can bring about interaction among people – even people at long distances away. That’s because printmaking is a media art, and it is media that has made global communication an ordinary thing.

I titled this essay “Chabana Fun” with the idea in mind to add my efforts to those of Mavis’ for her organization, Chabana Farms – a cooperative and network of small farmers in Botswana. The organization has a fund in order that contributors can invest in her project – money to provide materials, supplies, training and education. Land restoration and conservation – a sample of objectives in keeping with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Where kids are concerned, it may help to fund printmaking experiences because, let’s face it, printmaking is fun. Not only is it a grown-up fine art, it is fun, too, for all ages.

pp190508 Printmaking Access:  The means to communication

The goal is printmaking access. 

The means is communication. 

The objective is trade. 

The trading objects are printing presses and farm honey. 

Review of Stephen Covey’s Quadrants of resource allocation:

On any given day, ask how one is doing in following this guide? As one’s time is running out, this quadrant becomes more important every day; and as the Earth’ human and other life-sustainability is diminished, importance becomes critical.

There is another quadrant in my mind which is one which places cynicism, skepticism, criticism and hope in places in the quadrant, similar to (and complementary to) the above.

It is possible that cynicism fits in the lower-left quadrant, alongside the unimportant, non-urgent factors. A cynic is a personal trait of knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing.[1]

A skeptic might be placed above this, at the upper left. A skeptic allows that there is a value, but it must be measured and analyzed – and soon – because time is running out and the bets bet must be placed and acted upon. The clock is ticking. This is a trait of an old man whose lifetime is shorter than it was when he was young.

In the lower right, the critic is one who can see there is a crisis but there is time to analyze, think, write criticism (as I am doing right now) yet without taking real, physical and tangible work.

The fourth quadrant is hope. When a person has a structure for collaboration, it is like an insurance policy for hope.[2] Many older people will exhibit this, and younger people can only wonder why. When one is old, how can one be positive in their outlook?

In my case, it is because I believe collaboration is possible if one can structure it by drawing from resources.

The first and most important resource is time. Using time with Earth’s human and other life-sustainability as the goal, one can set one’s alarm clock, as it were, awaken and act every day as if it were his or her last opportunity.

Because one day, this will be true.

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[1] Oscar Wilde is credited with this observation.

[2] Rosabeth Moss-Kanter said this.

ri190510 The sign on the bus: Metro features Uptown  

It was a sense of heart-crack (which is something of less emotional impact than heartbreak) that I felt when I saw the sign on the side of a Metro Bus yesterday featuring Uptown. It seemed to be promoting the virtues of my neighborhood based on the arts district designation achieved two years ago.

Arts district was an idea promoted by the city government one of the means to improve the overall economy of Seattle by tapping into the creative economy. It’s well-documented that the presence of art and cultural activities is a driver of consumer activities. Art and culture are – in the view of the city – lucrative and therefore should be promoted.

The sign on the side of the buses had images of arts and culture activities supposedly making Uptown (AKA Lower Queen Anne) a cultural center and a destination. One of the images was difficult to make out at first, but it turned out to be of a person’s hand pulling a squeegee. It referred to the VERA project, a mixed program of printmaking and music.

Also on the sign were the logos of contributing organizations and the Uptown Arts and Culture Coalition of which I was a part until 14 months ago. I left because I was out of money and out of time to participate. It became clear to me that I would get no support for my concept of an international print center incubators and work places.

The scales fell from my eyes when the committee agreed to focus on brand, and a logo, instead of sharing their combined forces to help me with my goal. Partway through the process I was accused of not helping others on the committee.

“When other people raise their ideas, you sort of leave the room,” my critic said.

It was not true. Most often I was silent because I had past experience with whatever it was that was on the table for discussion, but I could not say so lest I come off as a know-it-all, old man and arrogant professor-type. No one likes a smart ass, and old white men are often the worst offenders.

I was even compared with Donald Trump! Slights like these, the decision to give six months or a year to deciding branding and a logo design (provided free by students at Cornish), caused me to give up hope of getting support for a print center in Uptown.

One member on the committee was offended when I said, “Your group reminds me of someone who is more concerned with how they look, their clothing, their fashion, their makeup, than on items of real substance such as a physical center such as I propose.”

There, on the side of a bus, was the logo they worked a year to see made physical and real, and with it the hand of printer (a staged photo-op, probably). Yet were I to go this center – the VERA project, as I do many times of the week, it is empty. The reality is smoke and mirrors, not a full-time activity.

Crack!

Yet, I saw the sign because I was driving to an art supply store to get a set of carving knives and a picture frame for a real, ongoing activity. A woman from Africa is here to see how the creative economy can assist in her development of honey production. Our discussions are divided between business and printmaking.

So, in a way, I have my international print center incubators and work places, although not on the scale I’d hoped for.

es190425 African printing bees 

The sweet teacher-in-a-box 
In a flash! It comes to me that we can exchange Mini Halfwood Presses for honey. The same box that contains the teacher-in-a-box contains honey made by bees from their collection of Kalahari Desert flowers. The boxes go to Maun with presses inside and return full of honey.
Maybe this is the idea I can get my teeth into. Ten days after this “flash” I will show the chief beetrepreneur how to print on my Legacy Mini Halfwood Press. I call it the bee-to-bee project, a play on the popular notion of B2B, or business-to-business.

ap190104 Artistscripophily appreciation

Linking neighbors to Sustainable Development Goals 

Artistscripophily may be the way artists can show appreciation to supporters and connect with Sustainable Development Goals. Like options, sold for a nominal amount, art work may be redeemed at cost plus handling and shipping, or sold through a trust in the artist's family.
The proceeds may return to support artistic innovation toward SDG and the family or the community, or all three, in a manner to pay dividends.
How would this work?
The thought at the outset (the seed of this idea was in January 2019, before I knew about SDG) was by imaginative work, linking neighbors like Dr. Stan de Mello to the startups in the International Print Center Incubators and Work Places.
My neighbor Stan de Mello is a professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Washington. He is a Canadian, too, and lectures for the Canadian Studies Center. Our conversations have helped me learn more about social work.

An example of artistic innovation is linking artists trading card and game design to a farmer cooperative in Africa.

I call it, Chabana Fun.

It’s a play on the Chabana Fund, an as-yet undeveloped feature of Chabana Farms. I hit on this idea five months after I began this essay, having found a game based on chutes and ladders and made my first attempt at adapting it to my eighteenth card, Printmaking Access.

Fortunately, I met a woman from Africa, the CEO of a farming co-operative named Chabana Farms. Today – May 4, 2019 – I will prove my point as I introduce her to printmaking – a technique associated with the arts which may be useful to both of us in an EarthSafe 2022 partnership.

vp190423 Emeralda love 

Why I love to play Emeralda

It’ time like this moment when I go about what has become a daily routine of sorting and reviewing essays that I wrote over the past ten years, getting ready for my next volume of Ritchie Mined, the collected essays of a decade of my musings.

In this instance, it’s finding the words of Mark C. Taylor, who used the phrase, game of life, in a book titled The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Published in 2001, my reading notes run to 20 cards! Apparently, I had a scanner equipped with OCR, because I couldn’t have written such copious notes without it.
On can tell, also, by the mistakes. For example, one finds Viener when it is Wiener (Norbert) Taylor is referring to.
As I read these notes, in the back of my mind is a Botswanan woman at an airport in Johannesburg, South Africa. In six hours, her plane takes off, headed for New York and, after a ten-hour layover, Seattle, where we will meet.
What this has to do with Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life, and Mark C. Taylor, is my current, daily task of checking essays I wrote over the past decade – 2010-2019.
But there is more to it. My task is to develop consciousness of EarthSafe 2022 – a development that came to me in 1992 through learning about the Union of Concerned Scientists. I made up a principle reason to pursue my art, craft and design and named it EarthSafe 2022 with the scientists’ warning in mind: We had 30 years to save Earth’s human and other life sustainability.
The first step is to be conscious of another human being, hopefully one who is, like me, who wants to contribute something to save Earth’s human and other life sustainability. In the case of the Botswanan woman, the lives of bees.
What is an artist/professor to do? Our granddaughter, Matilda, gave me some sense of direction, for she would surely live to 2022 and, looking around, maybe she would wonder, What did grandfather Ritchie do in the face of the scientists’ warning?
Returning to today’s Emeralda Play, I had to smile because Mark C. Taylor’s subtitle, Emerging Network Culture, was, and is, prophetic. If I took the time to re-read his tome, I might find a sense of what to do to achieve a safe earth for our granddaughter.
However, I saw enough in the limits of my time at 6:00 in the morning. I saw it connected with the 18 cards I have in my pocket. Seventeen are those of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (shared with the Botswanan woman, I think) and the 18^th card, Printmaking Access.
Also, there is the game I made up called Proximates. You must invent it to win it, as the saying goes. Taylor’s words I have noted in my reading notes, filed under Art Student in my directories, are surely a rewarding find and proof that Emeralda Works.

ri190410 Farm Game - Building card decks

Building a deck of cards puts me in the mind of playing a farm game. It’s a collectible card game and board game based on several game metaphors such as Monopoly, Go Goals, Farm Game, Magic the Gathering and others. To win this game I must invent it. Or, if I cannot invent it, I must keep trying.
Like my father, who was a farmer, and when disasters struck his crops or the animals he cared for, he kept trying. He asked that the phrase, “He tried” be engraved on his headstone. And so it is.
In evenings I read other peoples’ memoirs. Lately I have been reading the memoir of Paul Allen. Besides the lessons I can use in writing my memoir – things like style, voice and structure – I find little insights I can apply to winning this game I’m calling Farm Game.
For example, there was an exciting turning point in Paul Allen’s story when he was showing a potential buyer of the software which he, Bill Gates and another programmer wrote with the manufacturer’s limited hardware in mind. One keystroke decided the future of Microsoft, and the keystroke (in fact it was before keyboards were part of computers, so it was not a key but a toggle switch on the first Altaire microcomputer) resulted in a reply on screen: 7168 – a reference to memory size necessary to load the program.
Thus it is with winning – by inventing – this card game based on real farms in Africa.
One must know the scope, or size, of the project. This is not a software project, but a dynamic, time-based project based on the end game – sustaining Earth’s human and other life sustainability. The Other Life, in this instance, is the life of the bee.
(There is a new book by an American bee expert: Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild by Thomas D. Seeley.)
It is helpful to know the UN has established a structure for collaboration – 17 principles they call Sustainable Development Goals. Development in this case is understanding the importance of bees to Earth’s human (and other) life sustainability. I add an 18^th card, Printmaking Access.Print, after all, is the technology of communication. Without print we would not have the technology today that is both good and evil. Communication is being used to destroy Earth’s human and other life sustainability; it can also be used to save what is left of Earth’s human and other life sustainability.What I hope for (and a structure for collaboration is like an insurance policy for hope*) is a demonstration of how printmaking can help bees.

The seventeen cards of the UN Sustainable Development Goals plus the 18^th Card, Printmaking Access.
In correspondence with the CEO of a farm cooperative in Botswana, I suggested that an investment club in the USA, based here in Seattle, might be one way to help save and promote the success of her farms honey farming. She said I was a good idea. Do I follow through?
In Paul Allen’s book, he said, “Few things worth doing can be done alone.” He said one must find others and make the thing to do a crusade. So far, I have found others who are willing to help, despite that they have little information to go on. There is Ron Kenyon, who shared his network in finding temporary living space for the visiting CEO from Botswana, Rewana Ka Nduchwa. There’s my friend Carl Chew; and I have met our guests’ first hosts – Lloyd Hara and Liz Anderson.
I have in mind to seek a connection or unlikely marriage of printmaking arts and crafts to the mission of this “investment club.” Frankly, its because I have nothing else to offer in this attempt to mesh farming with art, what I call agriculture/culture-culture. More specifically, apiculture – bee-farming 

ps190419 Reading Paul Allen’s Memoir  

Art Student meets Zineography

Reading Paul Allen’s memoir, Idea Man, I found two comments toward the end of the book that struck a familiar note. One reminded me of Carl Chew’s concept of Art Student back in the 1980s, and the second one made me think of these ‘Zines.

P. 300: “Over the last decade [2000-2010] I began to think about a ‘Digital Aristotle,’ an easy-to-use, all-encompassing knowledge storehouse. … to help people do what they do best, those inspired leaps of intuition that fuel original ideas and breakthroughs.

“ … Running on a laptop or tablet, Halo book could serve as a research aide for working scientists or as a tutor for college and high school students, like a personal digital teaching assistant.

P. 301: “Ray Kurzweil foresees the imminent arrival of ‘strong AI,’ machines as smart as human beings, the first step in an accelerating progression of smarter and smarter machines – to the point that we’ll be able to download our personalities and self-awareness into computers and gain a sort of digital immortality.”

For about fifty years I have been writing little essays of 500-1000 words with no apparent intention of offering them for publication. I do it for writing practice. I do it to document my thoughts. I wrote over sixty volumes of journals, too. On scraps of throwaway paper and note cards, I’ve written millions or billions of words.

Why I do this is beyond me, but I have no regrets. Sometimes I review them, and in these moments, I think of being on a ship on the ocean and watching the wake of the ship streaming behind to the horizon as the ship moves toward some goal. Somewhere on the ship there is a chart room and a navigator whose job it is to make sure the ship and crew reach our destination safely before supplies run out.

The navigator is chiefly concerned about the future. As for the past, he or she calls for a reading of the ship’s speed and the log is thrown overboard and the knots counted off, and this gives the navigator an idea of nautical knots transited. From this and other data, the navigator can estimate the future for the time at hand.

When I read my notes – which is easy, thanks to computers – I can see what I was thinking as far back as the earliest entry. I have them all on several hard-disks. In a book I published in 2010 titled Ritchie Mined, I have listed abstracts of over three-thousand of these up to 2009.

Thanks to search algorithms, I can “ask” to see essays written in the past if I can specify the time I want to know. I usually pick the current date, such as April 19. My search will usually be written in a six or eight-digit, alphanumeric code with the last two digits of the year, the month and the day.

For example, on the computer I’m using to write this: 750919 – which yielded nothing. I entered new numbers for the year (the first two digits) until I hit pay dirt with 910419 – April 19, 1991. It is my notes from an MIT Forum meeting. Reviewing it I find familiar names – Tom Lopez and Peter Mollman. I met both, and they gave advice to me, directly and by example. The notes inform me as to what I was thinking when I was trying to make my way toward today. The article is titled Mammoth meets M.I.T.: Notes from a bystander.

How useful is this? Next week I meet a woman from Botswana, coming here to study business methods to apply to her cooperative farm network back home. I am interested in Africa from a comment in another book, The Retirement Myth by Craig Karpel. It was a comment about retirement funds and where to invest one’s portfolio. Africa was an example offered – but in a roundabout way. Investing in Africa is what I’m doing – in a roundabout way.

Referring back to Allen’s and Kurzweil’s ideas, I feel like I’m coming back to where I started and knowing the place better. My compulsion to write essays makes sense in Kurzweil’s notion of a personality or digital immortality.

That I would nest this data in a printing press makes sense – like a castaway who writes a note in a bottle – cast into the waters but without certainty anyone would ever find it, would read my data, and understand it.

The only valuable purpose would be, to quote Allen, “… to help people do what they do best, those inspired leaps of intuition that fuel original ideas and breakthroughs.”

es190405 Play Me Now

The new portal to becoming an artist

“Play me” is derived from “Draw Me,” the matchbook advertisement a mail-order art school used to promote their program. When I was a smoker in my teenage years, I saw it on matchbooks.

Play Me Now started with dividends, the often-overlooked reward for people who love prints, printmaking and printmakers. What people receive for their time, money and ongoing support would be dividends the same way that stock investors hope for quarterly dividends. In the book, The Ponzi Factor, Tan Lui pointed out that most investors do not receive dividends, yet they invest.

I play every day, it is my reward – the dividend - for being a teacher and artist all my life. While other people work eight-hour days, as sometimes longer and sometimes at two or three jobs, I play. People sometimes take a break and come into our Mini Art Gallery and look around, impressed at my hoard of art, etching presses and mysterious things.

If I put all this in a game, it could be an added benefit for visitors who merely want an brief escape from the reality of their tasks. Some people – and particularly those who wanted to be artists and those who are struggling to have time to make art – might envy me. Some might even be jealous, and who can blame them?

I am a winner in my game, a success in many ways except one – money. I don’t have much money compared to other 77-year old, college-educated and retired professors. For example, I recently met a former colleague who retired a few years ago with Emeritus status. I estimate he receives two checks every month. One is a social security check of about $2,500 and the other from TIAA/CREF, our country’s primary college teacher pension fund in the amount of $5,000.

However, I don’t envy him nor am I jealous because despite he, too, has a gallery in Seattle and he, too, has a studio for his painting, he does not play at it and thus cannot enjoy the dividends of play. Play is something essential in peoples’ lives, like art. It’s good for our brains. It’s like an insurance policy for hope.

Hope, in order to stay alive, requires almost constant activation of a little-discussed part of our brains called the nucleus accumbens. As I consider describing, again, the role of this part of our brains I think of it as a dividend from my investment of time and study I call “play” – pretending I am still a professor and pretending I am on a winning streak.

A game might be a structure for collaboration, as in what is one of my favorite quotations: “A structure for collaboration is like an insurance policy for hope.” This came from Rosabeth Moss-Kanter [briefly I’ve fallen down a chute, as if playing chutes and ladders, because I had to search and correct her name – but in doing so I learned a little more which is an example of the nucleus accumbens taking over my lizard brain].

What can I call a “structure for collaboration”? I think of my friend – and now advisor for the Ritchie Foundation – Alok Mandloi. Is being on the board of advisors the beginning of a structure for collaboration for EarthSafe 2022?

I think so. It’s a winning idea and fits in the larger scheme, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. I only recently began learning about the SDG, and it was through a chance encounter with a woman from Africa named Rewana Nduchwa, AKA May or Mavis.

Back to the topic at hand – Playing. I thought of this topic when my envisioned May’s goal of getting money for her group’s business – Chabana Farms in Botswana. Already she has made progress – winning an award and also winning a place in the May/June sessions let by Luni Libes of Fledge. The latter is valued at $15,000, a kind of scholarship to bring her to Seattle to the Fledge accelerator downtown.

If I had the money Fledge has attracted from investors – mostly Angel investors I assume – then I could bring people from around the world to be part of the International Print Center Incubators. I could adapt Mr. Libes’ books – The Next Step – to find out how to proceed.

However, I keep coming back to a basic fact as to how I won my game – it was through finding buyers for my art, craft and design. They’re what one might call small investors, like those people who join investment clubs and pay $25 a month to be part of a larger pool of money, and who do it to learn how to maximize their investments’ value.

I have written a book about investing in art, titled “Press Ghost Investor,” in which I explain my reasoning as to how investing in artworks-as-certificates is a plausible way to gain dividends of a different kind – not the kind of US Currency backed by a nation with a 22 Trillion dollar debt – but by a nation of people interested in saving Earth’s human and other life sustainability, i.e., EarthSafe 2022.

It is not for money that I labor, it is for other peoples’ regard to their own interest.* I taught for other peoples’ own interests. I made art for other peoples’ own interest. I play for other peoples’ own interest and I do these things to advance science (brain science, for example, in the spirit of Elmer Gates) and I play to promote the Sustainable Development Goals – the SDG.

*”It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. (and) Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. (and) No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” – Adam Smith