Creation Out of Chaos

My Dear Friends ~

I keep reading how people are tired of masks, tired of being careful in their dining and entertainment venues, tired of canceling out of events and family gatherings and just plain exhausted holding on so tight that one’s blood ceases to circulate.  Am I the only one who has noticed the effect this is having on my nightly television watching?

As Covid took over our lives, we were forced to isolate ourselves.  Artists the world over were shocked into paralysis and silence.  The painters, sculptors, composers, and some writers woke up first.  They don’t need collaborators.  Patrons, yes!  Collaborators, no!  The gifts of the playwright, the actor, the singer, the dancer, producers, directors, the life blood of entertainment as we know it, cannot create in an isolated vacuum. Theatre, television, movies are collective art forms; the artists involved in these venues need each other to take the disparate parts of whatever form they are involved in to make them whole.  How to do that while everyone is locked away in their solo safety zones?  Those who were married or partnered or sharing living spaces with other artists lucked out.   

Something had to give. After adjusting to the new reality, slowly, collaborative artists brought their formidable gifts to the most available medium, television.  And out of the ashes a Phoenix rose. After adjusting to the reality of being home bound the phrase that most haunted them, “use it or lose it”, shook them awake.  Like any muscle, the creative muscle will atrophy if you don’t use it.  And performing artists discovered ways to flex their muscles. It’s a fact; creative people need to create. As Covid progressed and spread through Greek alphabet variants, artists used what they could to create some pretty wonderful programing. From the Metropolitan Opera soloists singing in their living rooms to American ABT and NYC Ballet along with ballroom and other dancers found places and spaces to create while they isolate. Television was really the easiest creative outlet for our isolated population. Face it my friends, we were literally and figuratively a captive audience.  

There was, of course, the usual la crappe’.   I shall not burden you with my taste in what I consider la crappe’.  I remember all too vividly friends and family who wouldn’t miss The Apprentice, creating the ground swell that brought a certain person to National recognition. I’m not the kind of person that judges another person’s sin.  Don’t bet on it.  I was the kind of hungry captive craving the food and drink of entertainment not only as a distraction but as a necessary vehicle for thoughts, ideas, opinions, past and present situations encompassing subject matters that kept my brain ball alive and challenged.   

During this recent drought, the networks and most particularly streaming channels opened their doors to quality producers and directors begging for projects to fill their empty schedules.  We were witness to a wonderful creative surge.  I know the beginning of Schitt’s Creek happened before the pandemic but its popularity took flight after.  The streaming channels gave us newly released movies, concerts, foreign programming.  

We connected with each other after viewing to compare our thoughts, ideas, and feelings with what we were watching.  And it was only getting better: Ted Lasso, Julia, Ricky Gervais, PBS documentaries. Let us not forget the many creative people who produced videos sharing their own pandemic realities.

What were your favorites? 

I think it’s Netflix who actually has a subtitle of selections entitled Binge Worthy. Binging and pandemic are synonymous.

I am now finding it more and more difficult to find programming that challenges and stimulates. My dinner hour is spent surfing channels looking for something to watch as my dinner gets cold. I am waiting for my television set to blow up.  I can’t tell you how many shows I start and then 10 to 20 minutes later I am forced to surf for something else. I find myself spending whatever time I have allocated to watch going from one unfinished movie or show to another.  Like I said, my television is going to explode from the discarded mediocre fare I refuse to watch. 

All right already, I am a snob.  However, I shall not abuse my aging eyes and earballs. I know so little of the world and other peoples. I used to know more, but that was when I traveled. As I do that “thing” nobody wants to talk about (aging… sshhh) television has become my means of exploration and discovery. It is the miracle that allowed us to view the landing on the moon.

I don’t know.  Could we have imagined it without seeing it?  I think some of us actually could.  But I think most of us were really grateful for those moments that brought history into our living rooms.

Here’s the truth of it for me.  I hate being dumbed down to.  And for a while as the pandemic was frightening and isolating, I found it was also a stimulant for more authentic, interesting and challenging material.  

Does this mean creation is born only out of fear and chaos?

I seem to recall a book about creation coming out of chaos.  Something about taking a week to create a new world with lots of animals and a man and a woman?  Anyone remember the writer????

In the real world I live in, I recently watched the HBO new 6 part series, The Last Movie Stars, about Paul Newman and Joann Woodward.  In the height of the pandemic, the Newman/Woodward children asked Ethan Hawke if he would write and produce a documentary of their parents’ story.  He assembled a group of gifted talent to help tell their story.  As Hawke put it together, it is so much more than Newman and Woodward.  However, without them, there is no story.  

And all of this and other excellent material was created during the fearful and isolating pandemic. Proving what? I am not sure.  

What I do know is that it is very difficult today as I attempt to return to life as I once knew it, which to my thinking is never going to happen… get over it S.J.. During the heat of the crisis there was so much more to choose from.  Now I have to allow more time to choose my evening’s program before I take my dinner out of the oven.  I can’t stand cold food.

Right???  Of course, right!!!

Love, Sally-Jane ❤️

P.S. I just thought I might remind you of a few videos in the world of the arts that went around during the height of the pandemic. 

P.P.S.

Such a continuity of originality, spirit, and talent connecting each of us to the other… ain’t it amazing.  It absolutely freaks me out.  So tell me, please, What happened?  Like separating the yolks from the whites of eggs, how did our isolation separate us enough to stop caring?

Come on guys, don’t tell me we have to be in dire trouble to come together.  Not that we all have to agree.  Never that.

How? Anybody…?

HUMAN WILDFIRES SET BY KNOWN ARSONISTS

How is that for a headline???

I don’t know about you but even before the pandemic and certainly before the election, I began to worry about what was happening to cause the ever-widening gap between citizens in the United States.

How had the words of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our very laws been made to look like yesterday’s mashed potatoes.  How had “reasonable men and women” become frightened enough and desperate enough to lose their good old American Horse Sense and verbally and physically hurt their fellow humans who had another opinion. I had always known that the Civil War was still an open Southern wound, slow, if ever, to heal.  In my opinion, the way the South voted as first a Dixiecrat bloc and presently a Republican bloc, proved that to me. However, there are so many good people of good intent working to heal those wounds, I had hopes.  

Daily my hopes are being pounded into dust. I didn’t understand. Usually, after an election, there is elation for one group, dejection for another. Eventually, as a nation, we pull up our socks and hoping for the best, pull together for the good of all. After my own disappointment in 2016, I really did hope for the best and was willing to give one and all the benefit of the doubt. A doubt, unfortunately that over the years expanded exponentially. I digress.   

How did we forget that the American Way is to come together? Furthermore, life isn’t just about me, right?  It’s about me in concert, cooperation, and coordination with my family, my friends, all my relationships… which  includes my citizenship. Even if elected officials negate their responsibilities, that doesn’t absolve me of my duties as an American citizen. 

Little did I know that working against all that good old American way of thinking were some of my social media choices. I have written before about the use of propaganda in this digital age. How did I get snookered into the very action I was wailing about?  

I had written about Cambridge Analytica and how they invaded through algorithms people’s privacy ….  and forgot that one of the major contributors to their success and ultimately their downfall was Facebook.

Yesterday, a good friend asked if I had seen a recent Netflix Documentary, The Social Dilemma. I hadn’t.

STOP.  WATCH IT. THEN DELETE.  

I saw it last night. 

If they can’t find you, they can’t influence you. And if you think you can withstand their influence, make an appointment with your therapist. Denial and Delusion is not the name of a law firm, it is what I am guilty of.  How can I continue to wonder why this growing rash of violence, separation, discord evolved from air? It didn’t.  

Corporate greed from a new corporate breed: PROFIT OVER PEOPLE

Until these social media corporations have the same regulations as telephone, radio, and television companies have, you can personally take action.  And it is an action that is totally in your hands… literally in your hands.          

DELETE

LOVE, Sally-Jane ❤️

P.S. Whatever Holidays you are celebrating I wish you love and joy. Herein are my gifts to you all:

P.P.S. I got some interesting responses to my latest Blah, Blah, Blog… Here are 2 of them:

1.This isn’t the first time Heather Cox Richardson and I have explored similar topics. Hers from an educated historian perspective me from the seat of my opinionated pants:

In Houston, Texas, today, police arrested a former police department captain for running a man off the road and pointing a gun at his head in a misguided attempt to foil a massive voter fraud scheme. Sixty-three-year-old Mark Anthony Aguirre claimed to be part of a citizens’ group investigating voter fraud. Believing his victim was hiding 750,000 fraudulent ballots in his truck, Aguirre rammed the truck with his SUV and held the driver first at gunpoint and then with his knee in the man’s back until police came. Upon inspection, it turned out the truck was full of air conditioning parts. The district attorney, Kim Ogg, said “His alleged investigation was backward from the start—first alleging a crime had occurred and then trying to prove it happened…. [W]e are lucky no one was killed.”
And the reason for this crazy man’s head bent full of these crazy ideas is Greed.  Greed by big corporate players like Facebook and greed by right wing hucksters like Doug Jones who draws attention to his website by gorging out conspiracy theories in order to keep his audience outraged which makes them keep coming back for more and let’s him sell them more and thus pull in huge amounts of moneyAs they say in all of the detective stories:  If you want to catch the criminal follow the money. 

2. What do you think about THIS…?  Facebook Doomsday Machine 

Am I Out of Touch, Out to Lunch, or Just Plain Out of IT??

I have children and grandchildren so I spend some of my time working hard on being “with it”.

I haven’t gone as far as wearing short skirts and dresses (not with my knees, please), or styling my hair a la early Barbie (if I had a Ken, I might think differently), or buying 5 inch stilettos (I’m Chair of the CLSW… The Committee for Licensing Stilettos as a Weapon).

Here is my rationale for my commitment to electronical living…

I love my children and grandchildren and I want to be able to communicate with them. Somewhere in that rationale is a glimmer of truth, but only a glimmer.

I am your basic garden variety guilt-ridden judgmental person.

So of course, THIS HAPPENING IS NOT MY FAULT.

Here is the backstory… I was dragged kicking and screaming into electronic living.

One of my sons-in-law took time away from work to educate me and hook up my first computer. A friend bought my first iPad to help me navigate that new phenomena. An ordinary cell phone was not enough, I had to become an iPhone owner.

Like I said… Not My Fault.

Slowly, but ever so surely, I have been co-opted by the tech and social media industry.

Don’t you believe it.

I went willingly to the gallows.

Without having to resort to short skirts, long hair, stilettos, I was a with it mother and grandmother.

I was plugged in! (Sorry!)

Over the last two years, I added texting to my growing bag of tricks. I was so with it, I frightened myself.

Then, like a character in a Rod Serling Twilight Zone episode (if you haven’t heard of him…that is really what the internet is for… research), I began to see and hear things that no one else was seeing or hearing.

Very recently, I hosted an immediate family picnic by the lake. So great! So lovely! Good Food! Good drink! Good people! Good texting!

Did I say texting???

Yes, I did.

You see I am old enough to remember family picnics when we ate, we drank, we talked, we played and then we went home.

At this gathering, everyone… and I mean everyone, including me at some point eventually hauled out the cell phone and started texting.

I had developed one rule over the years and that was no cell phones at the dinner table. Everyone agreed, charitable to me out of family title and respect. But this was a picnic… buffet and chairs all over the lawn… so I watched and I timed. If I thought I was frightened before, that was nothing to what I was feeling then.

And this was just one instance of what I have come to believe is a really serious communication problem.

We all think that texting is communicating!

Really???

How can that be?

How can a one-sided text be likened to a dialogue between two people?

There was a time when if there was a misunderstanding I took the time (not the trouble… the time) to connect with the person involved and work it out. Of course I am older, and truly my friends, at this stage of my life, no matter how clever the machine, I cannot afford to lose any more friends and family than I have already lost… so if there are problems, I want to work it out.

Texts don’t do it!

Sorry!

They never will.

Does that mean I want more in a relationship than a text will give me?

You bet I do!

So, what to do??

NOTHING!

I cannot change the world. I can change me. I don’t want to misunderstand or be misunderstood. I prefer to hear your voice. I want to discuss, challenge, interest, invite, share… but I do not like sharing my thoughts with a machine.

‘Tis a puzzlement… how to be in this world but not of it. I have a dear friend who shares my conundrum… Recently, she sent me this article from The Week, reprinted from an op-ed in the New York Times.

THE LAND WHERE THE INTERNET ENDS By Pagan Kennedy

It is a gift. Isn’t it nice to know we are not alone? I would like to offer this gift to any who would receive it in the spirit in which it is sent.

Right?? Of course, right!!!

Love, Sally-Jane

DIGITAL AGE? SCHMIGITAL AGE!

My Dear Friends,

After a recent conversation with a loved nephew, my busy brain began ruminating. That happens on its own. Ideas hit my headball, and I am once again in rumination.

Our tête-à-tête moved as it does from family to our favorite subjects… social and political issues.

He was describing his research into how propaganda and mind persuasion for the American public existed way before digital inventions. Before computers and cell phones there were newspapers, radio, movies, handbills, and pamphlets to dispense political and social points of view. Points of view that would influence voters and prepare the way for legislation, always towards goals of one political party or another.

In other words, my friends, even before the bots, people could be and were HAD.

This blog is not about right or wrong nor is it about good or evil. It is about how easy it is for the human psyche to be manipulated.

Not so long ago a television series called Mad Men illustrated the birth of advertising as we have come to know it. Mostly men… and a lone female, understood how to use the many powerful tools of persuasion, aka propaganda. Yes, it showed us how they manipulated consumers.

How many times have you said, “I just bought this gizmo. I absolutely didn’t need it. Last night, in the commercial break, my favorite movie star was using it in her home and I just knew I had to have it. So I bought it. I don’t need it. Like I said, I have absolutely no idea why I bought it”?

We know why I bought it! “Gadzooks, someone got into my head! I wuz robbed!”

You would think after years of living with a mother who had a Ph.D. in manipulation and mind control, I would know better. You would think!

And all of this took place, as I said, before computers, cells, iPads. Yes, the radio was a powerful tool but it could only get into homes that had radios. But as radios and then televisions became more affordable there was a seismic shift in the abilities to persuade and influence the public.

Speaking in digitalese, let us fast forward….

In 1976, the first commercial computer was born.

In 1976, I was… [I am pausing here because those of you who know me know I need to take off my shoes so I can use my toes along with my fingers to count.]

I’m back! In 1976, I was 43 years old (Ah, yes, I remember it well!)

Mother of three living and performing in D.C.. You know Washington! Even if it was only smoke signals, it was the spin capital of the world.

To me, computers were part of the old chapter series in the movies of my youth. Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. [Please tell me someone else remembers them!]

I did not get into the digital thingies, computers, cell phones, Ipads… and because of my schedule, I never had the time to watch television. If I wasn’t doing household chores and child activities, I was at rehearsal. Not complaining, just the facts.

In 1997, I was 64 years old. My last daughter finally married (she was and still is very picky) and her husband, my new son-in-law, a very brilliant IT man, convinced me I could learn to use a computer. [I wasn’t kidding… he had to be brilliant!]

He actually did teach me. Of course, it helped that he worked a few blocks from where I was living in Manhattan. When the hysterical emergency calls went out [and they did fast and furiously] he would walk over and bring what I surely thought was a dead thingy back to life.

At 64, I had 64 years of living without digital anything. The life I tasted, sipped, swilled, was dimensional, real, pure uninterrupted life sans machinery.

When I wanted to write to someone, I sat down took out a piece of stationary with my name engraved at the top. I sifted through my thoughts slow enough to really think about what I was thinking and what it is I wanted to share. Yeah, I know what would my Blah, Blah, Blog be without this machinery. As Yul Brynner used to say nightly in The King and I, “… It’s a puzzlement.”

The biggest change for me is in my personal relationships. I made time to get together. It was and still is important to be in each others company. Don’t tell me about Skype… it’ll never replace the hug, the kiss, the touch of one to another.

Today that time is taken up with texts. If I send an email, I have to text the person to check their email for something that carries more portent than a text message can handle. And no one uses a phone anymore.

In pure defiance, I got myself a landline in Florida because I wanted to be connected to the land and not cyberspace. Big joke! Because the only way you get a landline today is through the Wi-Fi of your cable company.

They gotcha!!!!

The biggest change in this digital age belongs to the number of interlopers we let into our lives. As I said before, I can be had. And today, with all the available electronic equipment and all of it pointed in my direction, at least it feels that way, to buy, to read what they want me to read, to join, to contribute, to do survey after survey, I feel abused.

On a daily level, I am bombarded by organizations like Cambridge Analytica. Oh, yes, it is now out of business. What do you know? They got caught. However, there are thousands of similar corporations slithering in and around your computer continuing the dirty business of messing with our heads.

It is amazing but when you hearken back to Nixon and his “dirty tricks”. He was such a beginner! In Trump’s White House, he never would have been caught!

I OBJECT!!!!

At this stage of my life, I do not want to share whatever time is left of my life with what I call The Distractors. It is hard enough to focus when there are forces whose only reason for being is to manipulate me away from being me.

It’s what I told my Generation-X nephew…

I am so grateful I had 64 years without the accouterments of this modern society. I know something they don’t know. Life was definitely not easier, but somehow I think it built up my resistance to the viruses of these manipulator machines.

Not to worry! I am not going to cancel my Wi-Fi.

I won’t de-chip my cell phone.

I will charge my iPad battery.

And push comes to shove, if they come after me, I can always call on my protectors… Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon!

Right? Of course, right!

Love, Sally-Jane

P.S. Thanks to Lynnette for collecting the photos and illustrations.