Well Said

I "stumble(d)upon" a beautiful video the other day.  I've started exploring with video a little bit ... adding motion to the drama and emotion of my New York streets ... the questions for me, as always, being:

1) Is the artistic undertaking worth it?  If everybody is a "creator", and everyone CAN, then what's the point, why bother?  My work is decidedly, purposefully lo-fi.  Mainly because, the next question ...

2) Who has time?  I really don't ... to be tweaking, and editing, creating fantasies and adding filters. I'm not an artist ... although doing, being, seeing artistically comes naturally.  It's what I do ... when I'm not doing business or being with family, or hassling with people and work and life ... I do, and be and see, like me.  I'm unique in some ways (... I like to think) but I lack the deep talent, not to mention, the patience (or maybe, I just lack the balls) to full out call myself an "artist".

In sum, it's like this:  Ideas, check.  Creativity, check.  Vision, check.  sort of Style, Tone or Vibe, check, check, check.  Originality?  Guilty!  A body of Work and a name to go with it:  getting there ... check, check again.

But then, I check myself:  I'm a hobbyist.

The "art" enhances what I do, and am able to see, and lucky to be ... but I'm frankly more interested in experiencing life and regretting some dreams, than actually working to express them to you.

That said, there's a fine line between needing expression and needing attention anyway ... and too many in the cluttered online world of "creation" -- tragically, myself included at times -- take time, too much of it, chasing the latter!

Anyway, this is the video I started to mention.  "Unplug" is the message.  Really "share", not just virtually.

I couldn't have put it better, made my own WordSpeak louder ...

 words & video by Gary Turk

Not Very '90s

“If you’re really a mean person you’re going to come back as a fly and eat poop.”
- Kurt Cobain (1967-1994)

I have been asked -- my follower sent me an email -- why I never got around here, or anywhere online, to mentioning Kurt Cobain to mark the 20th "anniversary" of his stupid death.  When jazz guitarist Jim Hall passed, I put up a couple of his tracks on SoundCloud.  I nod in respect to dead writers often ... To "celebrate" the 34th year of a world without love, I posted a piece about Lennon here.

But April 5th came and went with barely a pause ... for remembrance ... stage diving ... a global moment of angst or moshing.  No one seemed to light candles, or say much.  The kids in alterna-clothes, spirited teens once, kept creeping up in age, towards forty ... and Courtney Love keeps being dissed or ignored - in short, regarded like she's batshit and kept in the attic.

While a cursory google, if you will, of the phrase, "Courtney Love found the jet", may induce a giggle or two, the fact that EVERY snarky twenty-something with a phone or keyboard picked up on that "meme" to insult the woman, is wholly sad.

That's the soul difference between us and them ... the gaping divide between our Generation X -- Kurt's, Courtney's, mine -- and our Gen Y, Z and Millennial offspring ... younger siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, eventually grandkids:

Any self-effacement or actual humor is vanished.  Our kids today -- unoriginal, uninspired (except to "share") and largely untalented -- get off on maligning and effacing others ... with no hint of playfulness -- no irony -- and whether or not it's truly deserved, or they have any clue who they're talking about when they're cutting, and pasting ... and narcissistically, or derisively, "sharing".

Apparently, Courtney Love was on the Tomnod website, participating in the online challenge they've got there.  She (now infamously) tweeted,

"Prayers go out to the families #MH370 and it’s like a mile away Pulau Perak, where they 'last' tracked it 5°39'08.5“N 98°50'38.0”E but what do I know?"

According to their website, "(t)he Tomnod mission is to utilize the power of crowdsourcing to identify objects and places in satellite images."  The Search for MH370 would seem to be the perfect measure of that platform, which has previously mapped search campaigns for Super Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and the ruinous Oklahoma tornado of May 2013.

As far as I can tell ('but what do I know?'), Courtney Love was participating.

How is that batshit (or "deranged", as it's actually been nastily written in some places)?  And why are there literally pages on Google, serving up dozens of this obnoxiously mocking "story" about her participating?

I can't help thinking Kurt Cobain would have loathed what the internet has become for most people:  less an information superhighway, and much more a clogged high school corridor of cliques, desperation for acceptance, intolerance, peer pressure and bullying ... from which even the strongest among us prefer to escape.

The damaged and fragile do not stand a chance.

RIP (GenX) KC

"Fade to Memory (Old School)", ©Jeff Glovsky

September... Auf Deutsch

I've begun reading, just for shits and giggles (as they say in the old country), Extrem Laut und Unglaublich Nah - which is Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ... auf Deutsch.

Photo(s) by Jglo

Now the fact that I can't speak, read or fully comprehend Deutsch without a dictionary, or a drunk companion, does not deter me.  I am giving it the college try!   I started at the beginning of this summer.  I am already on page six.  I've found that if I skip around to the English bits -- words that I recognize, like "New York City" ... "Money Can't Buy Me Love" ... "Stephen Hawking" -- the pages turn faster.

Der Herbst, autumn -- in fact, life in general -- is all about the pages turning.  I approach fifty ... My parents, still living, are in their eighties.  My brother, still stuck in the '80's, is forty (Just kidding about my brother ... He isn't really forty!).

We're OLD, dude.  Alten Säcke!  And yet, though I still might rage (or flail) against the "machine" and show petulant, (sort of) tongue-in-cheek truculence toward Facebook and "its" generation, I still dig sounds I know Gen Y finds interesting ... can get up when I fall still, and have all my hair.

Beyond this, I have begun doing the same thing Gen Y is all doing:  putting my "work" out there ... unabashedly, shamelessly tiring you with it - my writing and imperfect photographs ... Words & Images, Random Poetix and Faction by Jeff Glovsky.

The key difference between me -- that is, my own generation, so aptly (nondescriptly) labeled X -- and the Facebook / Gen Y crowd -- the so-called millennials -- is that I leave the house.  While Gen Y hides behind its computers and smart phones and mixers and apps, I enjoy nothing more than walking, live music, fresh air and potential ... while still creating, doing, being, like Y does ...

It's not entirely Y's fault, though - the fear and feeling of What's the Point? that it has.  Gob-smacked with the Great Recession and trying to feed itself and excel in the worst economy in 80 years ... with guns creating daily havoc and so many jobs out there not worth the pennies (or "experience") they insultingly offer ... the running for the comforts of (mom's) home and "man caves" -- not to mention the support and opprobrium of vast "communities" of global strangers -- can be sweetly tempting ... in the same way I loved lying on my bed or sofa, "channel surfing" and talking to friends on my land line back in the day ... I get it.  I get the urge, almost the need, to stay home.

What I don't understand, and never will, is the eschewing of normal, everyday, whole life functioning.  Millennials seem to have collectively blown off driver's licenses, cars, homes, careers, marriages, children ... adulthood.  Intellectual curiosity ... anything with the faintest whiff of active participation.  They are a musical bunch, to be sure - capable of passively (aggressively) tuning out; but give them an instrument, or a book, it will languish untouched - unless it's an i-Something.  If it's a shimmering, vibrant keyboard graphic, or wildly animated guitar or drum kit ... That, they will pick up and click on, to "play"!

But I'm lumping now ... painting with broad strokes.  Like a racist or homophobe, I'm lazily generalizing.  Like every alter Furz (old fart) gone beyond 40, I'm trying to root for my own generation, and the certainties of the world I knew when I made the rules up while going along, and the paradigm shifted for my demographic.

I am over.

As the torch becomes past ... and the leaves of youth fade and fall like sex around my ankles, I can only watch, helplessly mixing metaphors ... hiding away inside a new world I wasn't born into, and don't (yet ;) fully comprehend.

"Verzauberung (Enchantment)", ©Jeff Glovsky

My Night on the Street

I fell down the other night.

I don't do drugs, I wasn't drinking.  Just, walking along the fringe of the fringe, on the south side of Union Square Park, I wasn't paying attention and suddenly, my right foot found itself not finding sidewalk.

Instead, to my surprise and embarrassment, I found myself stumbling off the curb.

In slow motion, I lurched like a grazing animal, suddenly on all fours... then on my side (Tuck and roll, I recall very clearly thinking.  Tuck and roll!).

Then flat on my back in Union Square.

As I'm getting up from 14th Street, looking around to make sure no one's pointing and laughing, a 20-something shambles past and asks, "You alright, man?"

I leap to my feet (or tell myself that I do... Actually, I get up in reverse slow-motion, sadly paused on the grazing animal frame), and mumble, "Fine, I'm fine.  No idea how that happened."

The 20-something's no longer even around - having perfunctorily asked the old man who fell down in front of him if he was okay, but then hurriedly shambling off on his way.

The fact that the old man (me!) was able to "leap to his feet" (in his mind, at least), as opposed to continuing to lay on his back in the street like a testudine, provides no comfort.  The old man was mortified, feeling his years.

All of that notwithstanding, however -- and despite a black smudge on one knee of a new pair of slacks! -- I felt worse for the shambling 20-something.

As he shambled off there, presumably to get back on Facebook, I thought of the void that he found himself in:  the creative cypher of his generation... the utter lack of creative anything.  The cutting and pasting, sharing and "adding", the mash-ups, re-blogging and "liking" without knowing why, or at all.

The propagation of mediocrity... the computer-made images, sounds and graphics, the "music" unwritten by human beings... or written once, but co-opted, "remixed" now by people with exaggerated senses of Self; or self-esteems poking their heads out like flowers (or testudines)... reminding themselves feverishly that they CAN:

They CAN draw.  They CAN paint.  They CAN dance and make music... They ARE artists, producers, DJs and filmmakers.

They DO exist... but on the backs and shoulders of technology; or the original work of others that they feel entitled, and are openly encouraged, to "share".  Today, everything is "open source", like an urban dictionary or Wikipedia... ripe to be right-clicked, picked apart, distributed and contributed to, mainly because it CAN be.

But wait.  It's not yours.  So really, you CAN'T.

Thick-thighed specimen!  Irish step-dancing like Riverdance... sweating and not keeping up with yourself:  yes, you CAN dance.  By all means, you should knock yourself out!  You're allowed.

But you shouldn't.  'Cause really, you CAN'T.

So I lay there... just, not getting up from 14th Street.

From the fringe of the fringe south of Union Square Park, on my back in the dark, I retain no illusions:  pushing fifty and virulently anti-Facebook - unwilling to embrace fully the winds of social media change... having stumbled and fallen with nothing and no one to blame but myself... with only original thoughts, words and images... I am the biggest shambling loser.

I'm the one keeping me down for the count.