os200127 In the shadow of the Gates Foundation: 

Recounting educational compromises 

  I clicked on the Easter egg on the lower left corner of my splash page on my personal website, and it was a mild surprise to see what it’s linked to: The Elephant Print pdf file documenting my artist scrip, and artistscripophily concept.

What a good idea!

Lately I’ve been going to bed with the wish – a nightly prayer one might say – to see the movie in my imagination, Emeralda. It’s the story of a mystery ship and a halfwood press.

Another movie I want to see is Swipe – my autobiographical fantasy about a failed art professor with a happy ending and a globe trotting street kid who inherits a halfwood press business.

South of our Mini Art Gallery is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and I work in the shadows of this mega-philanthropical enterprise. Rumored to be the biggest philanthropical organization in the world, this foundation could finance both movies.

However, it’s not their mission. The closest they come to aligning with my goals is in the area of education. One of their former education executives stopped in the gallery one day years ago, and through him I tried to spark interest in my novel approach to STEM.

Previous to his stint at the Gates he was working for the University of Washington education, but his stay there was short. Likewise, his stay at the Gates! He moved to Colorado to be president of a college.

What is it about Seattle? What is it about Washington State that seems to have a problem with education? I was forced out of teaching at the UW. Carl Chew was forced out of public education. Washington State is no place for teachers who answer to a different master.

While I was reviewing my PDF file, Elephant Print, I wondered, “Where did my enthusiasm go?” It still looks good to me – plausible in many respects. Did I “kill my darlings” as one person put it – a teacher of writing?

They meant not to become too attached to one’s creations, that the way to success in the arts is to keep pushing beyond one’s previous achievements. That’s how I interpret the expression.

In other words, trash the artistscripophily idea – don’t become so attached to it that it drags you down. Move on.

Yet, with the prospect of a visit by a woman named Natalia today who has a common interest in Mavis Nduchwa’s venture in Botswana (called Chabana Farms Kalahari Honey), I can’t help but think the idea has a chance.

I’m ever the optimist – like the expression, “Impatient Optimists,” I saw back when I was learning about the Gates Foundation’s education arm. It was Bill Gates, Sr., who was a co-founder of their foundation, who said:

 "I have an optimistic view of human nature. For the most part, I believe people are good, that we want to help our neighbors. I believe people want to be good citizens. When they see a problem, they want to fix it." —William H. Gates, Sr.

A quick look at this one immediately finds the problem: A critic points out their predilection for charter schools and alignment with people like the Walton’s positions and Betsy de Voss’ – most unfortunate conservatives. With friends like that, a liberal can hardly be optimistic about support for Mavis.

After my review and these words, I conclude it is not the failure of the liberal in a search for a better educational outlook, it is the environment.

There’s a story about a cucumber, bright green, shiny-skinned and hard who finds himself in a pickle jar. All the other former cucumbers are dull, gray-green, wrinkled and soft.

“Wow,” said the new cucumber, “What happened to you guys?”

“Stay here long enough and you’ll find out,” they answered.

ps200119  Upon seeing a big Indian press:  What would E. F. Schumacher say?

 On my Facebook I saw a picture of an etching press – a huge one! I noticed it came from India, in a studio in Chandigarh – perhaps under the direction of Upendar Singh Chahal.

As I looked at it, I couldn’t help but think, “Oh no – this is not right!” Memories of a book came to mind titled, “Small is beautiful” by E. F. Schumacher.

He subtitled it, “Economics as if people mattered.” He meant to comment on the proportional use of technologies, or appropriate technologies. I think his idea was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi. I recall the small spinning devices he advocated which flew in the face of British cotton fabric imports which helped India get independence from the empire.

The new press at Lalit Kala Akademi regional Centre Lucknow

The first thing that struck me was the span of the bed – it appears to be a meter wide, and therefore I assume it’s expected to make prints approaching that scale. It follows then there are facilities to make the plates, and these necessarily are to scale.

Then there are the materials and supplies to consider. If metal is used, then perhaps zinc or, less likely, copper. Sheets of plate glass would be cheaper if they are using vitreography. Paper is next – and I believe there are very good paper mills in India. Nevertheless, large sheets of paper are not cheap.

Consider the quantity of ink, solvents, ventilation for safe handling – all this adds up to an expense that seems out of proportion to me. Of course, on the back end of the process are the buyers of the prints (or monotypes) that come out of making art with this big machine.

Who are the buyers? They must be rich! Here’s where E. F. Schumacher comes in. Is this press a technology appropriate to the people? I picture kids – my favorite people – coming to visit the center. They will say “ooh” and “aaahh” at the specter of this process, but they cannot use it. They probably will never use it although a fraction of their numbers may grow up and in two or three decades, they might be able to buy a print.

A smaller fraction yet will grow up to be an artist or a printer using such a press. However, the bad news is that by that time the press will be junk – discarded because it does not fit the economics of the times – say, 2030, a decade from now.

Already, in America, people are unable to support presses of this scale. Only in group workshops can they do so, and in most instances the plates they print on these presses are only small – plate materials being expensive as well as paper, ink, etcetera.

We make a small, portable, beautiful etching press which appeals to grownups and kids alike. It uses paper that’s so small that kids can even make the paper itself!

What we do conforms to E. F. Schumacher’s suggestion – make etching presses that are appropriately scaled to the economics of today and tomorrow.

vi200102 

Screenplay game: A concept in the making  

  How to play the screenplay game 

Yesterday I was laying out forty-eight cards for the adaptation of Rembrandt’s Ghost and wondering how I was going to pay for the upgrade if my screenwriting software – Final Draft. At $100 I don’t have the cash.

There’s a print from 2016 I call Peace print, and it’s never been published. I could offer this art as an incentive – print an edition of ten and sell each proof for $50 and a share in the screenplay outcome – the least of which would be a perfect-bound copy like Swipe.

“Shalom,” intaglio and chine-colle.

Later another idea came to mind – make a game out of writing it, with a deck of cards. Arrange it along the lines of Game of Goose, or Chutes and Ladders, as mentioned in the chapter on Van Leest’s story.

How would it work?

First, it would be on the web that people played this game.

Second, they would play as partners – twosomes according to the timing of their signing-up. In the end they would share the print and the share in the screenplay outcome.

There needs to be an incentive for me, too. I need ten good reasons to undertake printing this print. Can I list ten reasons?

1.      The cash for an upgrade of Final Draft.

2.      The fun of printing-on-demand.

3.      The fun of making this into a game.

4.      The prospect of a screen adaptation of the novel.

5.      The setting up of a daily routine, i.e., printing and writing concurrently.

6.      Incentivizing adaptation by making a game out of it.

7.      Putting myself printing in the window of the Mini Art Gallery.

8.      Seeing the print’s publication through – having started in 2016 and not finishing.

9.      The story of the print itself, hope for “Peace” in the Middle east.

10.  The Act of Creation, as Arthur Koestler put it.

sp200101 A new year, a new life: The inconvenient truths 

Where there is  life there is hope 

Hope springs eternal. Twenty-twenty is the year now, but it’s also a reference to what amounts to good vision, as in, “I have 20/20 vision.” I can say something philosophical about 20/20 vision of the past, present and – by a stretch of my imagination – the future.

Sadly, it’s not a pretty picture. Since 1992 I have feared what an organization of scientists had said was likely to happen if humankind worldwide did not change it’s ways. I made my own version of 2022 after reading the World’s Scientist’s Warning to Humanity and I called mine “EarthSafe 2022.”

It was in essence a statement about artists’ roles in joining the world’s scientists’ warning and giving a hand in their effort to warn humanity. Artists, after all, play a key role in communicating. An example is when Al Gore tried to warn Americans with his books and slide shows. It was only when artists lent a hand that his message got great notice and won an Academy Award.

But it wasn’t enough. Several other artists in the film industry tried to do something, but as Al Gore said, their message to humankind (and Americans in particularly) was an inconvenience.

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.