Tag Archives: Culture

Be Careful Out There: Shopping Rage

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The title of this post is taken from the sergeant who read the daily assignments on the ground-breaking, 80’s cop show, “Hill Street Blues.”  Every day he would warn his people, “Be careful out there!”

Sadly, the same caution may be needed this year by holiday shoppers, after an incident in southern California that police are calling, “competitive shopping rage.”  At 10:20 pm on Thanksgiving night, shoppers were lining up in the Porter Valley Walmart to purchase discounted Xboxes, when a woman began pepper spraying them “to gain a shopping advantage.”

Ten people were treated for pepper spray, and ten others for bumps and bruises suffered in the confusion.  The assailant got away, and it isn’t clear if she scored an Xbox.  The store is going through register receipts to see if she left a credit card trail.  The woman could face felony battery charges if apprehended.  We all should be thankful she didn’t bring a gun.

I really want to condemn something or someone for this insanity, but that would be false.  A better question would be, how am I complicit in the greed that has come to surround the birthday of the Prince of Peace?  And to reference my previous post on Andrew Weil, how happy is this kind of grasping likely to make someone on Christmas morning?

The 21st Century May Be Bad For Your Mental Health

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To appreciate this post, you need to know a little of how it came about.  Yesterday morning, in my dentist’s waiting room, I started reading an article in  the Nov. 14 Newsweek by Dr. Andrew Weil.  He and others have noted that modern affluence breeds depression.  They have also observed that the Amish, with a 19th century lifestyle centered on simplicity, have only 1/10 the amount of depression of other Americans.  Just as I hit this tantalizing statement, the dentist, who was running ahead of schedule, called me in.  After my appointment, I finished the article.  “Our brains aren’t equipped for the 21st century,” says Weil.

One of the things we are not equipped for is our 24/7, hi-tech, multi-tasking world, a point that made me chuckle as I pulled out my smart phone, photographed the pages, and emailed them to myself.  Just call me a poster boy for the legions of technically savvy neurotics.  It turns out I didn’t need to send the page to myself.  Weil’s article is available online, and I highly recommend it:  http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/30/andrew-weil-s-spontaneous-happiness-our-nature-deficit-disorder.html.

The article is taken from his latest book, Spontaneous Happiness, just released this month, where Weil says it’s not just technology that’s the cupric in our epidemic of depression.  Increasing numbers of psychologists and therapists identify one of our key problems as Nature Deficit Disorder.  Weil says:  

“Behaviors strongly associated with depression—reduced physical activity and human contact, overconsumption of processed food, seeking endless distraction—are the very behaviors that more and more people now can do, are even forced to do by the nature of their sedentary, indoor jobs.
………………………………………………
“Human beings evolved to thrive in natural environments and in bonded social groups. Few of us today can enjoy such a life and the emotional equilibrium it engenders, but our genetic predisposition for it has not changed.”

Weil discusses the bad news in detail, but doesn’t end there.  He is firmly in the camp of “positive psychology,” the discipline that concentrates on human wellbeing rather than pathology.  He summarizes positive measures we can take, things he discusses in greater detail in the book.

  • Find a mindfulness practice.  (I was impressed that Weil listed this as suggestion #1.  I’ll follow this up by posting some resources soon).
  • Spend as much time as possible outdoors.
  • Find some form of aerobic exercise.
  • Sleep in total darkness, if possible, and avoid very bothersome noise, even if it means wearing earphones.  Weil discusses why uninterrupted sleep, and freedom from noise pollution are important.
  • Attend to diet – he has written of this in detail in previous books.
  • Cultivate social relationships.
  • Spend some time each day unplugged from all forms of gadgetry.

Finally, Weil, like almost everyone else who writes on wellbeing, cites gratitude as a critical factor.  This morning I ran into an acquaintance who has had a number of physical problems.  He has paid a price, but also found something diamond-solid that is now at the core of his life:  three times he has been clinically dead, and he’s seen and experienced “the light,” that people in that extremity sometimes encounter.  He knows it is waiting for him, and meanwhile, shares his experience with others he thinks will benefit.  He says he intends to do so, “as long as God decides to keep me around.”

Simply encountering him put me in tune with the theme of the season, and reminded me of all I have to be thankful for.  That is my hope for everyone reading this – may you find unshakeable joy in your life just as it is, and may you be able to share it with others.

A Popular Writer Opens a Bookstore

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“I have no interest in retail; I have no interest in opening a bookstore,” said Ann Patchett, whose Parnassus bookstore opened Wednesday in Nashville.  “I also have no interest in living in a city without a bookstore,” she continued.

Author Ann Patchett welcomes customers to Parnassus Books

Nashville, once called “the Athens of the South,” lost it’s last independent bookstore and its Borders, in what one local writer called, “a civic tragedy.”  Cultural leaders held meetings in the public library, and hatched such ideas as a co-op bookstore, with individual investments of $1000 to startup.  Nothing came of those suggestions.  Then Patchett, the best selling author of Bel Canto and Truth and Beauty, began to think of opening a store.

In April, she met with Karen Hayes, who had worked with a large book wholesaler and as a sales rep for Random House.  The two  became partners and co-owners.  Patchett, whose most recent book, State of Wonder, reached number 3 on the New York Times bestseller list, put up an initial investment of $300,00.  When she went on a 15 city book tour last summer, she was bursting with questions for the owners of all the stores she visited:  How many square feet?  How many employees?  What makes this store work?

“Put the children’s section in the back of the store,” (so if they bolt, they can be stopped before they hit the street).  “If you hang signs from the ceiling, people will buy what’s advertised on them.”  “Make your store comforting and inclusive, smart but not snobby.”  These were bits of advice she gained from others in the trenches.  Like other independent bookstores, Parnassus will use Google to offer ebooks to customers.  (“Novelist Fights the Tide by Opening a Bookstore,” by Julie Bosman, The New York Times, Nov. 16, 2011, p. A1).

Stocking the children's section

In an NPR interview, Ann Patchett said she felt nervous, “like the first day of school,” but added, “I actually think this is going to go really, really well.”  http://www.npr.org/2011/11/16/142413792/ann-patchett-opens-parnassus-books-in-nashville

Patchett says Parnassus is her “gift to the city.”  Compared to the bookstores Nashville lost, Ms Patchett’s store, at 2500′, is tiny, but she says, “This is the way bookstores used to be. This is the bookstore of my childhood, and I feel fantastic being back here.”

I think maybe all of us can remember the magic of childhood bookstores and wish Ann Patchett, Karen Hayes, and the city of Nashville great success with their latest enterprise.

Back When Vampires Were Vampires

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Bella Lugosi's Dracula

When I was 15, my family lived in Europe.  My room, at the far end of the house, opened onto a patio through French doors that you could unlatch with a butter knife.  I decided it would be fun to read Dracula late at night, after everyone else had gone to bed.  Dumb – really dumb!  I know I’m not the only one to seek the thrill of a scary movie or book and get a whole lot more than they bargained for.  Let’s just say that for weeks after that, I took a clove of garlic to rub the French door frame every night before bed.

When I first went to college, we had a saying:  “Wherever two or more are gathered, they will start a film society.”  Friday nights on campus, I watched, Nosferatu, 1922, which made Bela Lugosi’s count seem tame.

Count Orlock in Nosferatu

Then there was Carl Dryer’s 1932, Vampyr, a movie whose plot I have never been able to decipher, but whose haunting imagery gives a truly creepy feeling of being in a coffin and seeing the face of the vampire who killed you peering through the glass in the lid.

The young protagonist of Vampyr. Is he really dead or only dreaming?

Once upon a time, vampires were not sensitive hunks and hunkettes.  Team Orlock?  I don’t think so!  And trust me, you don’t want a date with Dracula’s brides:

Dracula's better halves? Don't you believe it!

But alas, we are so besotted with undead who love poetry and walks on the beach that not even the current owners of Bran castle in Romania, the one that inspired Bram Stoker, are immune to draw of vampire fandom.

Sign on the way to Bran Castle, Romania

It turns out that the castle that overlooks the town of Bran is not even scary, although the real Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, is supposed to have passed through the valley in the 15th century. And NPR correspondent, Meghan Sullivan, says it’s a little disconcerting to see t-shirts on some of the pilgrims proclaiming that, “All Romanians are Vampires.”  http://www.npr.org/2011/11/13/142256325/in-transylvania-sometimes-a-bat-is-just-a-bat

Castle Bran, which inspired Bram Stoker

I guess it will just have to fall to the next generation to restore a fictional world where, to paraphrase Garrison Keeler, “All the women are strong, all the men are good looking, all the children are above average, and vampires are nobody’s sweetheart!”

Another Thread in the Social Fabric Unravels

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My wife and I both come from (different) upstate New York factory towns.  My family moved to San Jose when I was nine.  Mary moved to California after high school, while her brothers stayed in Rochester and went to work for Kodak.  In the early ’70’s, that was a reasonable path to choose.  Kodak was a solid Dow Jones company and historically, one of the first to offer generous benefits to workers.

Over the last three decades, Mary and I have gone back for fun, for weddings, and funerals.  Rochester isn’t the same city.  Weeds grow in the parking lot of many silent factories.  Birds fly out of smokestacks once touted as the tallest in the country.

Kodak is a textbook example of a successful company blindsided by a “disruptive technology.”  But textbooks are the last thing on the minds of many of Kodak’s 38,000 retirees.  Late to the digital party, there is now talk of Kodak going bankrupt, and unfortunately, Kodak retiree health care is tied to the company’s fortunes.  http://www.npr.org/2011/10/12/141257737/the-picture-isnt-pretty-for-some-kodak-retirees

There are way too many stories like this in the news.  This one caught my attention because I know the town a little bit, and know people who are affected, people who played by the rules and now find themselves getting screwed.  A week from now, their story will be forgotten.

***

I found myself thinking again of the Occupy Wall Street protestors and some reactions from our “leaders” to their attempt to give people like the Kodak workers a voice.

According to Paul Krugman of the New York Times, Eric Cantor has called the protestors a “mob” and denounced them for “pitting Americans against Americans.”  Mitt Romney accused them of “waging class warfare.”  Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.”  Senator Rand Paul fears the protestors will start taking iPads from the rich, and according to the talking heads on CNBC, they are “aligned with Lenin.”  http://www.sacbee.com/2011/10/11/3973680/plutocrats-fearing-scrutiny-demonize.html

***

Hard times bring out the best in some people and the worst in others.  These days I find myself paraphrasing the Serenity Prayer – asking for “the wisdom to know the difference.”

Notes on Worldly Success

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Yesterday afternoon I sat for a while on the back porch, watching the rain and admiring my neighbor’s and my handiwork.  Over the weekend, we shored up the fence and gate in preparation for winter.  My neighbor knows a lot about carpentry.  I don’t, and because of that, I felt a huge sense of satisfaction, as much or more than I did a few weeks ago, when I finished a pretty good short story for the Writer’s Digest contest.  I guess with that attitude, I’m not likely to get my face on the cover of Time, either for carpentry or for writing, even though both can bring me a great deal of satisfaction.  Sitting on the porch, I started thinking of various examples of success and failure.

***

I’ve been reading a lot about Steve Jobs in recently published tributes.  Viewing the whole sweep of his life, he seems to have had great self-confidence and an unerring instinct for doing the right thing. Much of that impression comes from his 2005 graduation speech, the reflections of a mature man, sobered by a serious brush with mortality.  I found myself wondering how he dealt with setbacks when he was young and first starting to make his way?  Lives written in history books and obituaries often leave out the messiness, the dark nights of the soul, the nights we wake up a 3:00am wondering what to do.

Somehow the story of Jobs’s trek to India leads me to think he connected with his heart and intuition – as he talked about in his speech – at a pretty young age.  You don’t venture to a strange continent, in search of something you aren’t sure of, unless you are confident enough to live with uncertainty and believe you can find the answers.  Unlike many creative people, Jobs’s passion aligned with his livelihood, but that did not prevent the devastation of getting fired at 30 from the company he had founded.   He had enough wealth to retire from active life and never know want again, but failure prodded Jobs to come back and reinvent himself – and animated films while he was at it.

Rule for success:  Find a way to believe in yourself.
Another rule of success:  Never give up.
A useful tip:  Love what you do, if possible.

There are clear parallels in the life of Thomas Edison, 1847-1931, to whom Jobs is often compared.  Edison ran numerous unsuccessful experiments (estimates range from 700 to 10,000) before discovering tungsten as a workable filament for electric lights.  Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”  Did Edison ever come close to giving up?  Did he ever know dark nights of the soul?

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration" - Thomas Edison, 1903

Several of the pithy statements he made in maturity sound like things Jobs might have said:  “I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun.”   Like Jobs, Edison never dreamed of resting on his laurels:  “Show me a thoroughly satisfied man, and I will show you a failure.”  Perhaps my favorite Edison quote is this one:  “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”  Might that include a pile 2×4’s and fence boards?

Tip for success:  A sense of humor and a sense of play are marvelous attributes.

***

The list of Abraham Lincoln’s failures is often used to motivate people, because he had so many of them.  Here’s a more balanced chronology of his victories as well as losses.  He won some and lost some, just like everyone else, and like Jobs and Edison, he kept on trying.  http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/education/failures.htm

Lincoln believed that he was an agent of destiny and spoke of “the chorus of Union” that would sound when touched by “the better angels of our nature.”  This sense of calling may have made his task possible but didn’t make it easy:  I’ve heard that he wept at the casualty counts from the last battles of the Civil War.  Like Jobs, he was aware of his own mortality:  a week before he was shot, Lincoln dreamed of lying in state in Capitol rotunda, but just like the men he ordered into battle, fear of death could not deter him.

Close to Lincoln during the last years of his life was another future president, Ulysses S. Grant, who may have been the only northern general able to win the war, but whose life outside the military reads like a litany of failure.  Born, Hiram Ulysses Grant, he discovered when he entered West Point that he had been registered as, Ulysses Simpson Grant.  He never bothered to change the name, and in a similar vein, gained a reputation as a sloppy cadet.  Though he served with distinction during the Mexican War, afterwards he failed as a businessman and a farmer.

As president, Grant was noted for enforcing civil rights and fighting the Ku Klux Klan, but his administration was was rocked by scandal and inept handling of the Panic of 1873, a world-wide financial crisis.  He left office on a note of failure, went into business with a man who cheated him, and died in debt and in great pain from throat cancer.  By force of will, he finished his memoirs before he died, which saved his wife from bankruptcy.

Like so many before and after, Grant was a poster-boy for another truth:  Worldly success is no guarantee of happiness.  This realization raises the critical question of what we really mean by success.  The purpose of life is finding happiness and sharing it with as many others as we can, according to the Dalai Lama, in The Art of Happiness, a book I will have more to say about later.

In the meantime, I come around again to the thought of fixing fences with my neighbor.  When measured by the creation of and sharing of happiness, it may have been even more important than I imagined.

Occupied

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I sat up and took notice the other night when a local news announcer complained that the “Occupy Sacramento” protestors “could not even say what they want.” In other words, they won’t play by the rules – you know, the unwritten rule that says when a TV station sends a van to cover your event, you need to have your sound-byte ready. How else can they work it into a one minute segment and move on? How else can you be neatly pigeonholed?

Actually, there is at least one articulate answer to the question of what the protestors want, supplied by Naomi Klein, a Canadian author and activist, at the “Occupy Wall Street” rally in New York. http://www.thenation.com/article/163844/occupy-wall-street-most-important-thing-world-now. This link comes courtesy of Genevieve’s blog, Look Who’s Blogging Now, which you can find on my blogroll. I suggest you check it out if you are interested in this latest eruption of frustration with the status quo, since Genevieve is off to check out the “Occupy Minnesota” protests, and will likely have more to say.

Occupy Wall Street protestors

Perhaps one reason I took special notice of the protests that night, was because I’d been reading of another famous entity that didn’t seem to be playing by the rules; I mean the universe we live in. If – and this is a big if – a large group of European physicists are right, and neutrinos really move faster than light, then some of our core assumptions about the nature of matter are wrong. Here’s a good article by Jason Palmer, science and Technology reporter for the BBC news: http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/09/this_extraordinary_claim_requi.php

So this neutrino walks into a bar a moment after he’s ordered a beer…

Suddenly we’re faced with conclusions like these:

  • Twentieth century politics no longer works.
  • Twentieth century economics no longer works.
  • Twentieth century physics may need to be revised at its core.
  • As I have often discussed here, twentieth century publishing models are spluttering, and I’m sure you can think of other specialty areas where the past no longer functions as a reliable guide to the present.

Something similar happened a hundred years ago. In 1905, Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, and Einstein published his special theory of relativity. Nineteenth century notions of human nature and the world no longer fit. The start of World War I nine years later marked the greatest failure of business-as-usual in the history of the world (up until then).

So what happens now?

Einstein said, “The mind that creates a problem is not the mind that can solve it.” In other words, we have people who are sick of the status quo, but for the moment, avoid easy answers. Analogies to the Tea Party are obvious enough that even this week’s Saturday Night Live picked up the thread. As I recall, the media was frustrated with the Tea Party in the beginning for the same reasons – no central spokesperson, no succinct Powerpoint agenda. Once they sent people to Washington, the Tea Party got buttonholed pretty fast as a one-issue-movement. “Balance the budget without raising taxes and life will be good again.” Does anyone, even a member of congress, really believe that?

Here’s an observation by a local man:

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend? Despite reasonable differences, tea partyers and “occupiers” have far more in common with each other than with the politicos they elected to represent them. Conversely, Republicans and Democrats have more in common with each other than they do with the people who voted for them.” Bruce Maiman, “Wall Street Protestors, meet the tea partners,” editorial in The Sacramento Bee, Oct. 7, 2011, p. 13

The news media, even NPR, refused to acknowledge the occupiers for more than a week, but they didn’t go away. I hope they stay out in the open long enough for people and especially politicians to really get a glimpse of the underlying disappointment, fear, and outrage that animates so many who can no longer be soothed by simplistic answers.

What do they want? For now, “None of the above,” is a valid answer!