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

ri190331 If it doesn’t play in Africa - What’s the point?

On my wife’s birthday about seven weeks ago, I experienced a cascade of ideas in the form of ten rules to play a game I call Proximates. It’s a game which is intended to help kids and parents communicate with people all over the world using a printing press.

It’s not meant to make prints and send them by mail to “mates” around the world. It’s not like pen pals, in other words (although it’s not ruled out).

This game uses a printing press and the Internet to share a moment in space and time – or space/time. The time is easily shared on the Internet because every word, image or sound is date-stamped according to the exact nanosecond the return key is hit.

Space, however, is not shared. No two physical bodies can occupy the same space at any moment. The report, however, of what somebody did at the moment can be shared. If not the exact moment in time, then the approximate moment – and the word approximate gave me the name for this game - Proximates.

Following is a list of rules I made up on my wife’s birthday:

1.       Download the Martin press

2.       Print the Martin press

3.       Download the Rembrandt’s ghost plate

4.       Print the plate 3D or laser engrave on acrylic or etch with silitransfer

5.       Prepare paper, ink and ink the plate

6.       Print the plate and moment number-it

7.       Make a digital image of the print

8.       Register the print in Proximates

9.       Mat, frame and sell the print

10.   Send for your badge of achievement.

About six weeks after this, I happened to begin corresponding with a woman in Africa. This happened by a chance occurrence (as many of the best things – and worst things – happen. I encountered her because of a shared moment of admiration for Peter Tabichi, winner of the 2019 Global Teacher Prize. She noticed my comment on Facebook where I saw the announcement.

She plans to come to Seattle, so she contacted me. For the next five days we exchanged many emails – sometimes twice daily! To me, it was an experience of Proximates, a shared moment of homage to Father Tabichi which led to exchanges of information.

It was not printmaking that brought us to exchange valuable information, but it could have been if my old dream of Proximates – The Printmaking Game – had achieved traction.

It’s not over. In fact, I’m almost playing Proximates in my correspondence via email with Rewana (that’s her name). She has sent me pictures, just as I imagined kids would send pictures in Proximates. Grownups, too, exchange images of their prints. I have been doing this for over a decade through my design of Halfwood Presses.

My friend in Africa is not a printmaker – she is a business woman, the CEO of a farming co-operative. What we have in common is teaching and training by any means we can in our domains-of-expertise the improvement of human and other lives.

Our focus is on bees, as her group is expanding their offering to the world market for foodstuffs. Already they produce cereals, pork, beef, vegetables and fruits. They produce honey and her goal is to expand her outlets including the Arab and American markets.

My version of Proximates plays out this way. It’s an educational experience, but also, it’s motivational. As an artist and teacher, I have to find ways to keep moving on, and Proximates works for me. Like Rewana, I need to find ways to bring the joy of “moving on” to more people.

I need help. My way of seeing email correspondence with Rewana is my way of playing Proximates without a press. If Proximates does not play in Africa – which is perhaps the gateway to ways to help save Earth’s human and other life sustainability – then what good is it?

os190328 Structure for collaboration - A life insurance policy for hope 

If printmaking were not therapeutic, would I be in such great health? My mental and physical health is good and it’s partly because I have spent about fifty years in the arts and, specifically, printmaking. You would not think, to watch me over the course…

“A structure for collaboration is like a life insurance policy for hope.” – Rosabeth-Moss Kanter

If printmaking were not therapeutic, would I be in such great health? My mental and physical health is good and it’s partly because I have spent about fifty years in the arts and, specifically, printmaking.

You would not think, to watch me over the course of a day, that I am an artist, however, because I don’t fit the stereotype of artist. I do not socialize with other artists. I do not attend openings and visit art museums and galleries.

If one asks me about this – as recently a woman did – I comment that I don’t really like the art world with which she is familiar. It must have sounded odd to me, surrounded as we were, standing in our family’s art gallery, with art!

I assume she would not understand, and I assume she’s not really interested because I have found peoples’ interest in the arts in the United States goes only as far as consumers. Analysis of art and its relation to the world situation is not interesting.

To me art is nothing if not something for analysis. A physicist (or is he a mathematician?) Richard Feynman, believed artists have nothing because their work cannot be measured, its matter measured in terms of Naturally-occurring phenomena and substances.

He’s correct, for the most part. However, the report of art can be measured, thanks to computers and the internet because art has emotional, sensual value and addresses that coffee-bean-sized part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens.

I will illustrate with the example of a web-based acquaintance who has recently come into my sphere of awareness (again, thanks to the Internet). We met because of a mutual appreciation for the Varkey Foundation’s Global Teaching Prize given to Peter Tabichi.[i]

Her name is Rewana Nduchwa (“You can call me May.”) and she the CEO of Chabana Farms, a farmers’ cooperative in Botswana. She noticed my comment on the announcement of Father Tabichi’s award. I had been following this award because the Global Teacher Prize matches my concept of the Gates Prize. In my comment I related this prize to my own invention of The Gates Prize.

This led to May mentioning she’s coming to Seattle in May to be part of an accelerator, Fledge and since then we’ve been exchanging notes online. Her current focus is bees because she wants to extend Chabana’s product line of honey and Fledge is investing in this, supporting her continuing education so as to increase the market for the honey.

By doing this, Chabana creates jobs and may even help solve a problem which farmers contend with: Elephants. Botswana has the greatest elephant population in Africa, and they maraud the farmers’ fields. Imagine what this means: Cereals is one of the products Chabana offers, and cornfields are a favorite of elephants. Elephants fear bees, so if there are beehives around the cornfields, perhaps the elephants will not trample the cornstalks.

My job, as a teacher, is to bring printmaking into education as a learning experience, so I suggest we form a strategic partnership and explore putting printmaking in Chabana’s marketing plan. Using our Mini Halfwood Press model, Chabana can produce prints designed around bees and elephants, deeply-embossed and colorful images printed on elephant-dung paper. The printing is carried on as entertainment, and the prints themselves are offered to tourists who use Botswana’s safari industry as souvenirs.

---

[i] The winner of the 2019 US $1 million prize was announced on stage by movie star Hugh Jackman. Peter was chosen from our top 10 finalists who come from all corners of the globe. From teaching in remote towns and villages to inner-city schools, they advocate for inclusivity and for child rights, integrate migrants into the classrooms, and nurture their students’ abilities and confidence using music, technology, robotics and science. Peter has dedicated his life to helping others. He gives 80% of his teaching salary to local community projects, including education, sustainable agriculture and peace-building. He’s changed the lives of his students in many ways, including the introduction of science clubs and the promotion of peace between different ethnic groups and religions. He has also helped to address food insecurity among the wider community in the famine-prone Rift Valley.

mr190327 The value of the moment 

An Emeralda Clue 

Searching for the game play and mechanic of Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life, the Emeralda warrior sees for split second the possibility that the moment, as can be applied to a new print which has a moment number on it, is negotiable on the web. Two …408 Words
I am always searching for the game play and mechanic of Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life. It’s my job as the Emeralda warrior. I saw, for split second, the possibility that the moment, as can be applied to a new print which has a moment number on it, is negotiable on the web.I’m reminded of the murder mystery when the investigators attempt to determine the time of death of the victim, only in my world it is the time of life, the moment when the proof is pulled from the plate.How can I share this game mechanic research? I know that in order to win the game, I have to invent it, as invention is part of being an artist and a public intellectual.Two challenges lie before me: One, my former students, Carl Chew and Norie Sato, have an embarrassment of riches in artworks, unsold and apparently unwanted. Two, a woman in Africa named Rewanda Ka Nduchwa, wants to put worker bees and people to work, an investment in labor.These challenges are put before me by my author, who, as Amy Tan described it:“So, let me rephrase: I am the author of a novel told by doppelgänger in possession of my thoughts, who inserts her subconscious into my subconscious, which is rather like being unaware that someone has deftly slid her hands into mine. My hands are not the ones tapping the keyboard, although I still believe they are, and these words you are reading are entirely hers, which I still believe are mine.”
My “author” is that muse whom I described lives in the chips of the computers I have used for forty years – since 1979 when I got an Apple 2+, who uncovers words that are already there.
I trust the day will present the game mechanic on a day and in such a way as to solve the problems of Norie, Carl and Mavis (as Rewanda is known sometimes). Because it is true – the people I meet, whether real or virtually, are chief among the gifts of life.

os190308 The old man leans back  

Art student fantasies

The old man sits down in his favorite easy chair and reaches for his pipe and tobacco. He fills it, lights up and leans back. His canvas is in front of him, glistening with freshly-applied paint strokes, bright in the morning light filtering in over the north-facing, sloping windows. Somewhere a crow caws.

It’s good, he’s thinking. Yes. Good. Thoughts of his upcoming show flit through his mind, mentally anticipating this painting and others displayed under bright lights in the gallery. People gather around him, congratulating him and sipping their wine as he answers questions.

He draws on his pipe. It’s such a good life, living on one’s art this way. It’s been worth it. Fifty years of struggle. True, there were hard times, but it’s been worth it.

Or, picture this.

With a clap of her hands the lights flash on and there, before her, is her latest project – a water-treatment facility in Sacramento. A long, curving wall, 360-feet wrapping around a huge reservoir wall.

This may be my best yet, she’s thinking. Or, maybe that airport in Dallas. No, this is better. People can actually get up close and see the details. Yes. This is my best.

Or this:

Every time he sees a Tesla, there is his masterpiece – that tail-light he struggled and fought for.

Or this:

She always buys that brand of cottage cheese because every time she opens the refrigerator door, there’s her art!

These fantasies were inspired by the news yesterday that the Seattle branch of the Art Institute franchise shut its doors in the face of the students who had enrolled there. I’m tempted to say it serves them right, but I cannot because we paid tuition to AIS when our younger daughter enrolled.

She got out, but not without scars that would affect her for the rest of her life. And my wife and I, too. We were sold by their marketing and sales staff. So, too, were parents and adults who wanted a career in art and bought into their program – paying outrageous tuition fees and investing uncounted dollars in supplies and lost wages.

When I read the news, I thought of the time in California when the great exposition was finished and they furloughed all the craftsman – carpenters, masons, etc. – and Sam Goldman hired them to come down to southern California to build the sets for a great film.

Six-hundred fifty students, the news report said, were shut out of AIS. Some were foreign students, and they will have to go home if some alternative school is not located where they can enroll in a hurry and continue their program.

What a waste of talent. Even a minimally-talented art student has value if they have a dream. Unfortunately, their dreams are only that – dreams and fantasies about what they think is an art career for them in fashion design, film-making, digital arts and etcetera.

While it’s true some of them will find jobs more or less like they imagined are waiting out there (like my new customers, the Anderson/Medaus), few will live their dreams.

There is no such thing as a career, said one of my former students. It’s she and her account of the 360-foot wall that I used, above, to imagine what a student is thinking. Her remark was meant to underline the fallacy put forward by marketers of art schools.

Her point was that advanced education, if it involves art, merely gives students a different mindset, a peculiar way of seeing things sometimes.

Another one of my former students said, “But that was always the case . . . that place [AIS] was a dumping ground for alienated tattooed kids who hated their parents and had some juvenile idea of making it big in the arts . . . the initial partial scholarships sets the hook, makes the parents proud and the kid into a believer that they actually had talent . . . you and I know that the BFA kids end up working at an art supply store or a frame shop . . . most never earn enough to pay back the $100K loan.”

What would I do, the reader may ask. What makes me think I have a better vision? True, I am old, like the old painter in my opening fantasy. In my ‘teens I envisioned myself designing record-jackets and movie posters. What changed my mind was the lifestyle of my college professors. They seemed to have a secret, what I came to understand was a mind.

My mentor suggested I teach college art because it was a life of the mind besides a life of making nice designs and interesting objects of art. Besides, there was a war going on, and I’d be drafted if I tried to get a job in the design field.

My mind is still living, and I would suggest to those 650 orphaned students that they should scrape away the scales from their eyes, take off their rose-colored glasses and do what industrial leaders have done to get themselves in the position where they can collect $22,000 tuition fees from a targeted age group with stars in their eyes.

Everyone does it in a consumer society. It’s the leaders in a producing society who are smart enough to survive. If I could sell those orphans on opening a productive company aimed at doing something for a needy country like the USA to help save Earth’s human life sustainability through education, I’d be worthy of the name of professor, or at least a public intellectual.

Yes, I’d convince them, if possible, to startup my International Print Center Incubators, something even Elon Musk or what’s-his-name, the guy that started amazon, wouldn’t have thought possible.

It’s in the balance, Al Gore said, and getting deeper in shit, I think.