Category Archives: Psychological Musings

Tavi Gevinson

Americana, Psychological Musings

Until I saw a sort of offhand reference – as if the reader would obviously know who she is – to Tavi Gevinson, I had never heard of her. I don’t know how I missed her as she is about as famous in her world as Fernando Alonso is in his. On the outside chance that there is atleast one other  person who hasn’t heard of Tavi, she is a sixteen year old fashion blogger. The astonishing part, however, is that she started when she was eleven – she was born in 1996 – and was famous enough by the time she was 15 to interview Joss Whedon for her blog ( The Style Rookie).

By the time she was 13, Gevinson was a special guest of Vogue Magazine at the New York Fashion Week. By the time she was 15, Gevinson founded Rookie Magazine which bills itself as a website for teenage girls with advice like How to Decorate Your Room like a Movie, or Ask a Grown Man:Jon Hamm, or Breaking in a Broken Heart : How to draw power from a truly crappy experience. Looking at Rookie Magazine started out as surprising and slowly became an amazing experience. Everything I have read about teenage  girls is written by someone who was a teenager years before and is – sort of – remembering their teenage years from an older perspective, this is written – or edited – by an actual teenage girl and it is so much more sophisticated.

In Breaking in a Broken Heart, Rookie says Develop compassion. Now you know what it feels like to feel like garbage. So you can recognize that feeling in others, and empathize. It strangely becomes a healing experience for both people when this happens. You get over your heartbreak even more, and so do they….Discover that you are loved. Go ahead and try to reject this because it sounds corny and you don’t like feelings. I’m sorry, it’s just the objective truth of the matter. When you understand that you are loved, that there are, really, people who love you, that you DESERVE their love, and that you really do have huge, undying support in this world, from your friends and/or family and/or pets and/or God if you believe in that, the love that you lost begins to feel smaller in comparison.

In talking about Loosing It, Rookie says To avoid having to answer a million questions, I prefer to regard “losing your virginity” as a choose-your-own-adventure. Oral, anal, vaginal, manual, sex toy, something else? YOU PICK! When it comes to identifying as a virgin, only you can decide what “counts.” Maybe you “lost your virginity” the first time you gave oral to your girlfriend. Maybe you it was the first time your boyfriend fingered you. Maybe it was your first-time P in V. There is no wrong way to decide when you’ve lost your virginity. It is an intangible characteristic that only you get to choose whether or not you identify with…That said, maybe you think the whole concept of virginity is stupid. Who’s to say that you ever had one in the first place? Who’s to say that you lost anything when you had sex for the first time? I prefer to think of first-time sexual encounters as gaining a new experience, not losing something. Instead of thinking of things in terms of virginity, feel free to tell someone that you gave oral sex for the first time, or that you haven’t tried vaginal intercourse yet. There is no wrong way to talk about first-time sexual encounters, and anyone who tells you otherwise is likely just as clueless as the rest of us.

I sometimes have a feeling that the next generation will not be able to handle the trashed world we are leaving them. While it is true that we are leaving them a country in which the average kid will not be able to live the same lifestyle as their parents – lifestyle usually being defined as having as much stuff and using as much energy – and we are leaving them a world in which our leaders refuse to even admit that the climate is changing, and we are leaving them a future world in which we did pretty much everything I was taught to believe was responsible for the fall of Rome, this, next, generation just seems better. More capable of looking at real problems.

Reading Rookie, and reading about Tavi Gevison or listening to her TED talk – yes! at something like sixteen – is a hugely reaffirming experience. Check it out, I suspect you will be shocked and thrilled as much as me.

Happy Pearl Harbor Day…I don’t get it

Americana, Psychological Musings

I don’t understand why we celebrate Pearl Harbor Day. After all, we lost, we got bombed by surprise, we bungled it.

In the early nineties  when Kosovo was trying to get away from the yoke of the Serbs, much was made of the fact that a sacred Serbian battlefield was in Kosovo and the Serbs didn’t want to let that battlefield leave greater Serbia. Several newscasters, by way of showing how wrong the Serbs were, commented on how old grudges never die in Serbia and the Battle of Kosovo Field – lost by the Serbs over 600 years ago in June 1389 – was, stupidly, still a big deal.

But we do the same thing in celebrating Pearl Harbor (we even have Pearl Harbor license plates in California so, I guess, the car owner can remember – every time they go to their car – that 2400 sailors and soldiers were killed on December 7th). It is the same thing with The Alamo lost by a hearty group of volunteers fighting for their right to keep slaves which Mexico had outlawed. All three battles were loses.

Why don’t we celebrate April 18 when we killed – by surprise in semi-Pearl Harbor fashion – Isoroku Yamamoto, commander t of the Imperial Japanese Navy that launched that attack on Pearl Harbor? Or the Doolittle Raid when we bombed Tokyo on the same date one year earlier? Or some win in the Texas war against Mexico?

I have no idea. It seems we – humans – prefer to remember when we got our ass kicked sometime in the past. Anyway, Happy Pearl Harbor Day, and many more.

 

The Ironic Election II

Politics, Psychological Musings

The conventional wisdom is that Romney lost the election for alot of reasons – fellow Republican’s boorish behavior towards women that bleed into public perception about Romney, an inability to identify with people outside of his class, being forced by the primary to go anti-Hispanic, his refusal to release his taxes and information on his offshore bank accounts, his robotic demeanor, and on and on – but incompetence was never on the list. He did save the Olympics after all ( yea! sure! with $400M in Federal help, but still).

I suggest that  incompetence should be at the top of the list,  incompetence driven by hubris. For months, leading up to election, the Romney campaign had touted their super high-tech voter monitoring operation to use on Election Day. It would identify which of their committed supporters have voted so they could then get the slackards to the polls. This super high-tech voter monitoring operation was called the Orca Project. Orca because the Obama operation was named Narwhal and Orcas eat Narwhals (cute, huh?).

In theory, Romney is against centralized government and centralized power but, they centralized Orca, controlling everything from Boston (in contrast, the Obama organization pushed the control of their GOTV – get out the vote or ground game – way down the food chain). When Election Day comes, the precincts start sending tons of data to Boston and Orca crashes. What a shock. The structured, tightly controlled, Romney organization is left without a head and like any very structured, tightly controlled, organization with the head removed, it becomes almost useless. Months of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted on over-centralization. Meanwhile, the decentralized Obama Organization preformed flawlessly.

As an aside, Romney also thought their precinct workers – mostly members of conservative religious groups – would be more numerous at 36,000 and much better motivated than the Obama precinct workers who they thought were mostly professionals (read mercenaries, I think). Why anybody would think this after 2008 or after spending five minutes thinking about Obama as an community organizer – maybe it is related to Rudy Giuliani’s comment Community Organizer? What’s that? – is beyond me. I would think that a numbers guy would realize that 36,000 is smaller than the Obama’s estimated 8,000,000. End aside.

Meanwhile, John  McCain skipped the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee briefing on Benghazi to hold a press conference complaining that he was being kept in the dark about Benghazi and it was a cover-up. What a douche.

Finally – I hope, but probably not – Romney confirms that it wasn’t his fault he lost the election. He says that his team ran a “superb” campaign with “no drama” and he only lost because Obama gave “gifts” to blacks, Hispanics and young voters.

The Ironic Election

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings

 

 

It comes down to numbers. And in the final days of this presidential race, from polling data to early voting, they favor Mitt Romney. Karl Rove in the WSJ.

This is what happens when people who don’t know the facts can vote. An after election tweet from a surprised – shocked, really –__fill in the  blank__ completely missing the irony of not knowing that Obama had been leading in the polls for weeks.

….BTW,  one of the more confusing election statistics is the reported 3M conservative voters who did not show up and vote for Romney. I have no idea how to approach understanding this situation. from a couple of emails from an Conservative acquaintance.

Looking at the fantasy map, above, seeing how many states Romney had to win to get the Presidency  I realize – even more – how difficult a time Romney was going to have to win the election. But every strong Conservative I talked to – by email, usually – was surprised by the result. Most were astounded. Stephen Colbert often remarks that Facts have a liberal bias. and that was a bias that the Conservatives refused to see. Romney and Ryan were promoted as numbers guys, promoted as the nation’s saviors  because they were realists. In the end, they were wrong.

They were wrong because they didn’t – or couldn’t – see the actual numbers. They had, along with their fellow Conservatives, lost track of reality.

I have seen this before; in 1966, a Republican actor, Ronald Reagan, ran against two-time governor Pat Brown for governor of California. As the election got close, all the polls showed Reagan leading but my dad, who was a close friend of Brown and one of his biggest fans, thought Brown was going to win in a landslide. In 1966, polls weren’t as accurate as now, but they were accurate enough so that it was obvious to me that Reagan was going to win, but my dad was only looking at the crowds from inside the bubble. This election, the Conservatives were looking at the data from  inside the bubble on a national scale.

That is better, I guess, than Peggy Noonan who thought Romney was going to win because he had more yard signs. Yard signs, it turns out were not the way to predict an election and I would have thought Noonan would know that. But I think that the right was predisposed to ignore all the signals.  Not just the polls but the advantage Obama had in thousands of Obama for America ground volunteers (a Community Organizer, after all, should be pretty good at organizing communities).  Not just the volunteers, but the increasingly large demographic advantage. Not just the volunteers and demographic advantage, but a campaign staff that really knew their stuff. That checked on reality five times a day.

Bleeding heart Liberals are supposed to be unrealistic but the Obama campaign was a hard-headed, tough, ass kicking machine and, very importantly, that is what the soft-hearted Liberals wanted. When Obama did poorly in the first debate, every Liberal I know, complained about it as if it were a personal affront, when Romney did poorly in the second debate, every Conservative I know thought he did great. The Liberals didn’t want to feel good, they wanted to win and, this time around, the Conservatives seemed to just wanted to feel good (they hated Obama so much, I think they thought it would be easy to beat him). Eventually, even Fox’s Megyn Kelly couldn’t take the right’s pundit bullshit anymore, asking Karl Rove if his blather about the number-crunching was just “math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better.”

 

 

Reflections

Art, Photography, Psychological Musings

Last Sunday, Michele went to the annual National Bioneers Conference and we agreed to meet at the end of the day at the Tracy Taylor Grubbs Open Studio.

One of the things that is fun about going to the same Open Studio over a period of years is watching how the artist changes. Sure, sometimes they don’t change and sometimes they change all over the place at random, but, every once in awhile, the change is growth. It is like you – in this case, I – can see the artist try to solve the same, intellectual? metaphysical? problem in a variety of ways, getting closer – but, like Zeno’s paradox – never getting there because the search is really the endpoint.

I first saw this in a Jasper Johns show at the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at Marine’s Memorial – more accurately, it was pointed out to me on a tour put on by the  Stanford Art Department – and it seems to me this is what Tracy is doing. I have heard her talk about impermanence as a condition that interests her and, while I don’t want to speak for her, that seems to be central in what I saw last weekend (especially in her lovely iceberg paintings).

She also had on display some lovely little square images made by smoke that seemed to almost be frozen impermanence.

While Michele went to Bioneers, I took BART into The City and spent the later afternoon taking pictures of reflections.

I thought that a series of building reflections printed as small squares similar to Tracy’s smoke squares would be fun. But, sitting here, I think that these reflections reflect – sorry – my interest in what is reality vs. the distortion of reality as my projection. I see a scene – oaks and rolling, golden, hills on Highway 120 by Oakdale come to mind – and photograph it. Only when I look at the image, back home on my monitor, do I notice the power lines and towers, the dead, dry grass. What I saw is not what was there. Building reflections offer a similar distortion; the reflection on a building – so prominent in my mind’s eye – is often overwhelmed by the building I almost didn’t see.

With all that preamble, here are several reflections.

And a final picture from Southern California where the hold on reality may not be as strong.