Once, while on a visit to a zoo, I saw a jaguar. This shiny black animal was pacing back and forth in front of his cage, eyes intent on the direction he was headed, muscles rippling with the potential of all the things muscles can do.

I could not stop watching this pent up animal. He was caged, yes, but he also seemed pent inside himself. I wanted to catch his eye to see what he was feeling. Of course, he never looked at me. He was single-minded in his purposeful prowl.

I could not help remembering that magnificent beast when I saw Alanis Morrisette explode onto the stage at the Greek Theatre last Saturday. Her skin-tight black leather pants helped the illusion, but she had the same barely contained pacing that the jaguar had. She loped across the stage in strides that were far longer than most people would take. She stretched her legs, and her voice and her heart out as far as she could.

Her songs have always hit me like a Mack truck. When she sings about love and faith and pain she takes the lid off the things I’ve “kept bubbling under,” and makes me feel the need to move, to act, or to speak.

Her songs, no matter which one, express her spirit. She is not comfortable, she is not complacent. When I saw her relentless pacing onstage, I was not surprised. I feel like pacing too, when I hear her songs.

I am grateful to her, because she grapples with ideas and issues that many people grapple with. Most people, however, give up in exhaustion, willing to believe that answers or even questions are beyond their capacity. Alanis does not give up on them. After seeing her perform in person, I can see that she cannot. The person she is finds it physically impossible to back off.

She engages her experiences and her questions as if in battle. She finds a way to express them, and behind every single song is a harmonic drone, like a bagpipe, of “Why?” She dares to take it on.

And I, along with many others, am very much the richer for it. She’s given a voice to many of us, because she was able to express herself, She did not hold back and say, “that’s too personal, I’d better just be quiet about that.” It’s in the personal, in the subjective, that the universal human experience can be understood.

I appreciate her bravery, and I am so glad I saw her in concert. I really need to buy her latest album.

SOFT MONEY AND SOFT LIES

All of these horrible occurances with the executives and accounting firms at Enron and WorldCom and Xerox, and I forget who else, have been on the news.

Some people say, We need better government protection!

Well, that a good idea to have. But the problem was not that what these folks did was legal. It was clearly illegal. So we already have government protection. There are all kinds of laws on the books about not lying and not stealing.

But it someone decides to lie and steal, they choose to ignore those laws.

I am concerned about the moral fiber of the people in charge of large corporations.

Isn’t it funny that we are so concerned with their dishonesty?

I guess it makes sense, because we have moved away from the system of pensions for retirement to a system of personal investments. 401Ks and investment portfolios are supposed to take the burden of responsibility off the companies and put it on the backs of individual workers.

Well, when that happened, there was a a tremendous explosion of money in the stock market. That’s what you DO when you invest, right? That’s what all the experts tell you to do anyway.

Well, now that a lot of money is in the hands of a lot of people with very little knowledge, it is easy for the execs to fudge the books. Who’s gonna know, right? And they are just trying to build up the stock…

I happened to be reading the Communist manifesto today. Just as a refresher, Marx and Engels defined the Bourgeoisie as those who employ the laborers. Sounds like Enron, WorldCom, etc.

So here are some of his earlier statements:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has…left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’…It has resolved personal worth into exchange value and in indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom–free trade. In one word…it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid laborers.

I just had to look it up…indefeasible means “cannot be undone.”

Well, I find this remarkably current. Aren’t we all complaining about the way the medical system is becoming more commercialized and less concerned with healing sick people? I remember something that that Chris Rock said:

They ain’t never gonna find a cure for AIDS! There’s no money in a cure. They’ll give you a treatment. That’s how drug dealers work, they get you on the come back.

Hmm…Yeah.

Well, when Enron, WorldCom and ESPECIALLY arthur anderson took a look at their balance sheets and their desires for profit, all the people who were affected by their deceitful schemes were merely numbers on a page. I suspect that the numbers on the page were more real to them than any person.

Nothing left between man and man than cash payment.

Personal worth reduced to exchange value.

I don’t know that much about communism. I decided to read the Communist Manifesto, because I realized that the history of the 20th century has been incredibly affected by communism and I am woefully ignorant about it.

It’s not very long, and I haven’t gotten very far into it. I may have more to say about it later.

But..My initial response to this is that we ought to give more value to non-tangible commodities. “Soft Money” as they sometimes call it.

I had the same problem when I was working in video conferencing. How do you measure the return on investment for quick communication? Everyone looked at how much it cost to upgrade communications equipment, but few people would believe that if you made it easier to talk and have meetings, that the company would be more efficient and more profitable.

It seems simple.

It also seems simple that relationships between people are of value. That honesty and diligence and dedication result in greater profitability seems basic.

I wonder if Arthur Anderson had an algorithm to track the value of the company’s honesty assets?

the steamroller

Today, i was thinking about how much I don’t like not having work. This is hardly new. I have a long-standing fear of the bottom dropping out. That I will be completely destitute. It has not happened yet. I’ve never been truly hungry or homeless. But I have been very close. I used to think of it as a steamroller coming up on to me, threatening to outdistance me and flatten me.

I do not cherish helplessness. I like being able to do for myself. And a steamroller coming up and flattening me would have the effect of NOT allowing me to take care of myself.

I had quite elaborate images in my head about the nature of the steamroller, and exactly how it would come up and come closer. I felt like I had to have a certain distance between me and disaster, a buffer. I knew that if I didn’t have a sufficient head start on the flattener that the smallest stumble would mean the end.

I was young and newly married. With the deadly serious naivete of youth, I felt that a single mistake would be the ruin of my entire future. Besides, i had no resources but my own. My family was not in the country. All of my friends had literally and arbitrarily shown me the door. And while I had an overweening sense of the guillotine-like permanence of any error, my husband seemed to think his life was carved every day anew on an etch-a-sketch: “I care not for the morrow!” Nor did he care for ephemeral things such as paychecks and rent.

So the steamroller was ever-present in my mind.

It occurs to me now to wonder why it was a steamroller.

Now, I think of it as a wolf. The wolf nipping at my heels.

This idea became very realized today. I was thinking about that wolf, I was staring him down in my mind. I thought, well, wolf. I don’t have a job, and you are waiting with bared fangs for the moment you can overpower me. But I have fangs of my own now.

And it is true. This time, I have weapons to fight back against destitution and abandonment. I have cunning and a quiver full of skills that I did not have when I was 22, and it was a steamroller I was dealing with. A wolf, you can fight and grapple with. A wolf can injure you, but it does not always kill you. A streamroller, however, is a different story.

A steamroller is a broad impersonal sweep. It has nothing to appeal to. It will flatten inevitably, the only question is whether it will flatten ME.

When I was 22, the forces that granted me employment or a working car seemed unfathomable and decidedly impersonal. I knew nothing about what I had to offer the world. Anything granted me was undeserved largess.

But I have since learned (In only 7 years! Imagine how much I will learn in the next seven!) that the worker is worthy of her hire. I discovered the rules of economics, that my labor and my abilities were a tradable commodity.

I had worth!

I really love feeling that in a job. I love knowing that what I do matters, in a very tangible way showing up on my paycheck. This is perhaps another reason why I find unemployment so decidedly uncomfortable–I long for the affirmation of another to prove my value.

But I also have seen the faces of those who assign worth. I know they are cheaters and liars, quite often.

Perhaps that it why I have left the steamroller back in history and think of disaster as a wolf.

MEL RAMOS AND THE MEANING OF CORPORATE ART

Although the wonderblog is supposed to be “musings about art and the meaning of life,” I’ve been a little short on the art portion of that. At least, I have never really done a critique of a piece of art yet.

Today, that will change. And I invite comment, please. Isn’t good art supposed to evoke a response?

That’s what they say.

Art should challenge you. Art should change your perspective. Art should make you uncomfortable sometimes.

Right.

But the major patrons of art in the 21st century are corporations. Art for the foyer. Decorative sculpture for the drive up to the main office. Ah yes.

Should lobby art make you uncomfortable? Perhaps the “challenge” of corporate art should have it’s base in challenging the workers (dare I say proletariat?) to do their best work for the company.

My company has been going through some renovations, which included my floor. It was several weeks before the renovation process got around to the part where they hang up pictures. There is a poster by Georgia O’Keefe in the mailroom now. Not her best work—I can say this, since I’ve been to her gallery in Santa Fe—but it is an interesting perspective of the trunk of a tree and some of it’s branches. I appreciate it. There is another work by the elevator; I call it the crayon tree. It’s a sort of white abstract tree trunk on a black background, with brightly colored marks or dabs along the sides. It looks like it’s raining crayons, as I wait for my elevator to arrive. Not sure about that one’s merit, but whatever. It’s cheery.

The one by my buddy’s cube is a sort of college-dorm poster. It’s a poster of a stretch of road going off into the distance, and an enormous moon hangs over it in the twilight blue sky. I think that a college freshman with a desire to travel and/or own a motorcycle would really dig it.

My buddy hates it.

These pictures are all of a bland nature. They are there, they give your eyes a place to rest on, but they are mostly non-intrusive.

The piece that really stopped me was on a different floor. It is a piece called “Candy Bar” by Mel Ramos.

Let me see if I can describe it accurately. It is mostly made out of cardboard, and it looks like a Baby Ruth wrapper. There is an edge of the cardboard with what seems to be instructions posted in the upper left corner. I don’t remember what it says exactly, but it starts out saying, “Cut along the lines.” The candy bar wrapper looks partly opened, and the cardboard cutout of a young blonde 70’s-style knockout is inserted into the wrapper. The edges of the wrapper come right to the right spot on her chest, all you see is a bit of cleavage. But the whole thing is mounted on a mirror, so when you come up to get a closer look, or to read the instructions, you can see that her entire backside is naked. You can even see her tan line, a pale stripe running across her back and another blunt triangle across her naked bottom.

This one is hanging up across from a popular video room, so I get to pass by it a lot. The first time I saw it, I was flabbergasted and I had to take a better look. The idea of a woman being in a candy wrapper was so obviously sexist that it seemed to be almost anti-sexist. And when I got closer, I saw that it was mounted on a mirror, and I saw her little tan lines.

The whole thing is only about a foot tall. Probably not even that. She’s not much bigger than a Barbie.

An apt comparison.

But since I have to pass by this candy bar frequently, I am becoming more and more disturbed. Yes, it is a blatant portrayal of women as consumables for male palates. Or even female. It broadly states the objectification of women, and the role women are expected to play in society. How much the artist is aware of this is unknown. Maybe he is portraying his own attitudes, and they coincidentally are widespread.

It’s witty. It is an exaggerated perspective of an often unspoken reality. In the right mood, it might be profound.

I’m trying to be objective and open about it.

But I don’t think it is the sort of thing that belongs in a company hallway. Yes, women are commonly objectified. But they should not be experiencing that kind of treatment at work! So why should this piece of art (and I think it is more artistic than the crayon tree or the dorm poster) be displayed here?

I don’t think that Japanese Americans would like to have artistic photographs of War scenes from WWII posted in the hallways.

I don’t think African Americans would appreciate having scenes of slavery posted in public rooms.

Corporate art has to be more subtle. More bland, maybe.

Art is not art is not art. That is to say, there is a time and a place for different kinds of art. And some of the most profound and life-changing or life-enriching art must be handled carefully. Like a volatile substance.

I have in the past, a long time ago, made snide comments about the meaninglessness of corporate art. Those strange abstract geometric shapes made out of steel or concrete and rise up tall in the parking lot—“What does that MEAN?” I would say. “That’s not art. It’s just a way to fulfill the government’s requirement to spend x percentage of new construction on ‘art’.”

That was before I started going to work in those buildings.

But here is my dilemma now:

Do I swallow it? Do I just ignore Ms. Candy Bar?

Or do I try to get it removed?

People, it’s April 2007.

In April 2002, right as I was graduating from college, I began this blog.

FIVE YEARS! That makes me a veteran, if unknown, blogger.

To celebrate, I am going to do some re-runs. I’m going to re-post some of my favorite posts from the past.

Enjoy! And thanks for reading.