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

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?