"Our current economic situation", variations on this phrase seem to mean the same thing no matter how historical perspective winds up defining that time: economics are uncertain. The best of times are no more than the times of greatest confidence--often viewed in retrospect as times of over-confidence and excess--whether the 1920s, the 1980s or the late 1990s and early 2000s. However each of these brief eras began with the last shivers of fear hanging on from times of economic strife and ended with a growing foreboding that could only result in financial disaster. It's enough to leave one wondering whether the financial world is either good or bad beyond the thought that it is so. In this most current economic situation the non-profit sector is full of fearful wondering, preemptive belt-tightening and, more often than not, dumbfounding success. Is this success merely a matter of exceeding lowered expectations or is there a more positive principle at work?
Investment in capitalist enterprise suggests and even demands capital return. Investors have a wide range of priorities but underlying all of them is financial return. The more uncertain we are of reaping that return the less likely we are to make such investments. Donations to non-profits on the other hand provide highly reliable returns which are no less than two-fold. First there is the return in the form of an improved institution and second there is the federal tax break. Further returns are of a more altruistic bent (to explode that word into its underlying hypocrisy) in the personal satisfaction of one's involvement in a non-profit's achievements and the benefits garnered by its clients and associates. These may take a more personal or interpersonal bent in your continued enjoyment of the local symphony or your satisfaction in witnessing the difference social programming makes in the lives of poor children or even your pleasure in others' enjoyment of that same symphonic performance.
All this is not to say that investment in non-profits is without risk. As with capitalist enterprise investment in a shaky proposition may be a matter of throwing good money after bad. While helping to prop up a promising but struggling non-profit provides the biggest bang for the buck, money does not solve all problems. Maintaining life support for flawed programming may incur significant emotional and financial costs to the community as well as the individual investor in the long run. Responsible investment in non-profits requires as a high, if not greater degree of due diligence than is advisable in the for-profit world.
The non-profit world recognizes that contributions are a luxury, that each of us places investment in non-profits at a different point in our hierarchy of needs. For those at the top of the scale who are accustomed to earning income from for-profit investment and those at the various bottoms where their income is near or below the demands of their chosen lifestyles that luxury may be unaffordable.
In time the scale will shift. Unquestionably challenging economic times are times of reevaluation and resetting of priorities. As we adjust to a world of diminished fiscal expectations and reestablish our investment habits more and more of us will take comfort in the certainty of investment in non-profits.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Sunday, May 31, 2009
owning the faults
My father is a putz. We are talking about major social-ineptitude here, borderline Asberger's, socially inept to the point of accidental sexual harassment. His discomfort makes him inappropriate.
Enough.
Within my family I am a paragon of social ease and coolness. I'm socially affable enough to recognize my father's disastrous social disfunction. Unfortunately I'm also sane enough to see it in myself. I see my father in more and more of my actions and predilections. We're doomed creatures. We share a socially awkward physical build, our very bone structures set us back. We're inclined to a reclined slouch, slack chested, thick waisted, off balance and asymmetrical. We don't know when to shut up. We have excessive vocabularies. We achieve nothing.
I am proud of my father for doing what he needed to do to take care of his family, but the truth is that mom was the bread winner for most of my childhood. Still, my father did a thankless job that sparked no passion in him and had nothing to do with who he is.
Who are you?
We are our occupations.
Graphic Designer, Accountant, Development Director, Nurse, Manager, Teacher, Small Business Owner, Contractor, Doctor, Lawyer, Mechanic.
My father is not his job. He is not a certifier, not a technician. I've worked with him. He even seems awkward on the job. He has more in common with the doctors than the contractors in the hospitals he often inspects, and not because he wears a shirt and tie, but he is not a doctor--though they share the same obsessiveness.
I don't want to be my father. I don't want to be obsessive in that way. I don't want to hold forth on obscure and suspect diatribes to unsuspecting strangers. I don't want to constantly say the wrong thing.
It boggles my mind that my parents got together. My mother seems socially agreeable. She has her neuroses. She is always in control. Perhaps it took someone with her damage to find someone with my father's ineptitude appealing.
Now that the house is empty the tenuous connection is weaker.
I don't know that I believe I'll find someone willing to put up with my ineptitude and neuroses whose damage I can stand.
I don't want to be my father. I don't want to be a failure, to slog away at something that isn't me, never achieving anything that is me, but I'm well on my way into his footsteps.
I believe that I am the progenitor of my own happiness. The right woman will not make me happy. The right town will not make me happy. The right job will not make me happy.
Happiness is something I can achieve simply by choice and I continue to choose something else. I choose to see my self in my father's form and judge that similarity.
On the other hand, the cat is a huge improvement--I only wish for more clarity on her side of the conversation. The city, is isolated but populous enough to maintain my interest when I choose to go out. The job is occasionally boring but not all consuming and a life outside of it is almost possible.
So perhaps I need a better job in a better town and perhaps a woman will provide more emotional fulfillment than the cat.
One can hope.
One can hope for a change.
Enough.
Within my family I am a paragon of social ease and coolness. I'm socially affable enough to recognize my father's disastrous social disfunction. Unfortunately I'm also sane enough to see it in myself. I see my father in more and more of my actions and predilections. We're doomed creatures. We share a socially awkward physical build, our very bone structures set us back. We're inclined to a reclined slouch, slack chested, thick waisted, off balance and asymmetrical. We don't know when to shut up. We have excessive vocabularies. We achieve nothing.
I am proud of my father for doing what he needed to do to take care of his family, but the truth is that mom was the bread winner for most of my childhood. Still, my father did a thankless job that sparked no passion in him and had nothing to do with who he is.
Who are you?
We are our occupations.
Graphic Designer, Accountant, Development Director, Nurse, Manager, Teacher, Small Business Owner, Contractor, Doctor, Lawyer, Mechanic.
My father is not his job. He is not a certifier, not a technician. I've worked with him. He even seems awkward on the job. He has more in common with the doctors than the contractors in the hospitals he often inspects, and not because he wears a shirt and tie, but he is not a doctor--though they share the same obsessiveness.
I don't want to be my father. I don't want to be obsessive in that way. I don't want to hold forth on obscure and suspect diatribes to unsuspecting strangers. I don't want to constantly say the wrong thing.
It boggles my mind that my parents got together. My mother seems socially agreeable. She has her neuroses. She is always in control. Perhaps it took someone with her damage to find someone with my father's ineptitude appealing.
Now that the house is empty the tenuous connection is weaker.
I don't know that I believe I'll find someone willing to put up with my ineptitude and neuroses whose damage I can stand.
I don't want to be my father. I don't want to be a failure, to slog away at something that isn't me, never achieving anything that is me, but I'm well on my way into his footsteps.
I believe that I am the progenitor of my own happiness. The right woman will not make me happy. The right town will not make me happy. The right job will not make me happy.
Happiness is something I can achieve simply by choice and I continue to choose something else. I choose to see my self in my father's form and judge that similarity.
On the other hand, the cat is a huge improvement--I only wish for more clarity on her side of the conversation. The city, is isolated but populous enough to maintain my interest when I choose to go out. The job is occasionally boring but not all consuming and a life outside of it is almost possible.
So perhaps I need a better job in a better town and perhaps a woman will provide more emotional fulfillment than the cat.
One can hope.
One can hope for a change.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Against Punk
Here's my brilliant idea: the atavistic walkman.
Ingredients
1 handcranked eggbeater
1 stethoscope
1 wind-up phonograph head with functioning timpanum and needle
1 small gauge carriage bolt 4"-6" long
4 nuts
1 washer
1 free-spinning baring (to fit between cone and carriage bolt)
1 metal cone 2"-4" long and less than 1" at it's widest diameter
2 rubber wheels such as mouse balls or skateboard or heely wheels
remove beater basket/paddles from egg beater leaving support posts
run carriage bolt through center of eggbeater yoke (not yolk) and secure with nuts
use remaining nuts and...
AND THEN A MIRACLE HAPPENS
the trouble is that the phonograph head needs a support. support it from the center post with a cap that simultaneously secures the record?
support it from below?
...in the end you'll be running around with sethoscope ear buds, cranking your favorite 78--might be good to have a full plate under it instead of just the spike. I don't know that the shellac could take the pressure...
One drunken summer night in a lower east side bar I shared this plan with my hipster-librarian-superhero friend. She said, "I hate to use this term, but that is so steam-punk"--a familiar phrase my students sometimes used but one I'd let pass by without asking for definition. So I went home and looked it up.
Steam = archaic
Punk = ...
And here's my problem. Given three chords, quick songs and the barest minimum of musical talent punk music would seem to be about simplicity, rock and roll haiku, but that asceticism is combined with all kinds of excess--excessive volume and speed (or lack thereof with bands like Codeine) and in the audience a phalanx of carefully disheveled, rebellious clothes set with cheap jewels of metal, leather and grease--it already seems atavistic, and that's just punk. Steam-punk is excessively atavistic as it fakes late 19th/early 20th century aesthetics and technology. What could be more old-fashioned than leather, metal and grease? Evidently it's steam, wood and brass.
Punk is kind of a perfect response to end-of-hippy days. As with all institutions the hippy movement gave up the ghost in a wash of excess. It's all fine and good to go back to the earth, learn to play indigenous, anti-establishment music and make war on war with flowers and songs but the long hair, flowery and flowing clothes do not lend themselves to working the land you've gone back to and they demand a lot of care and funding to create and maintain.
Punk rebelled against this by cutting off the hair, tossing out the crazy colors and patterns and the musical cognates in endless tripped-out solos. Our late 90s and early aughts got closer to our back-to-suburbia-land ideals, buying all our clothes second hand and letting the songs get a little longer. Of course the music was still excessive, maybe more so--to say nothing of the devolution of metal into pop-schlock with screamed vocals. And then came steam-punk--came and went.
Now I don't mean to suggest that the atavistic walkman is remotely simple. It's entirely excessive and unneccessary, but where steam-punk just puts a faux-brass jacket and fog machine over our 21st century goings-on at least the atavistic walkman has only atavistic parts and all of them functioning. It takes the old forms and updates them for our current, disconnected, transient lives. Of course it's inconvenient, but that's a cultural statement in itself. We must demand more discomfort because the world and our lives are utterly horrifying and made all the more so by our wallowing in willful blind comfort.
So pull some clothes off the rack--let the clothes do the work they need to do and no more. Try not to pay for the priviledge of advertising, even in irony. Pick up a guitar or harmonica or ukulele and teach yourself to play some quick, efficient songs. Don't Plug In. Play old songs fast. Conflate lyrics. Apply the hard edge of punk to the hard world lyricism of bluegrass and zydeco. Play reggae too slow. Check out Langhorne Slim and The War Eagles. They've got a shot at making this.
Don't contribute to the petroleum economy. Leave the vinyl and the polyester alone. Wear fabrics that make sense. Wool to contain heat, silk and tightly woven cotton to block wind. Leather to prevent abrasion. Buy clothes from the thrift shop.
Let us leave punk behind. Get on our bicycles and ride.
Ingredients
1 handcranked eggbeater
1 stethoscope
1 wind-up phonograph head with functioning timpanum and needle
1 small gauge carriage bolt 4"-6" long
4 nuts
1 washer
1 free-spinning baring (to fit between cone and carriage bolt)
1 metal cone 2"-4" long and less than 1" at it's widest diameter
2 rubber wheels such as mouse balls or skateboard or heely wheels
remove beater basket/paddles from egg beater leaving support posts
run carriage bolt through center of eggbeater yoke (not yolk) and secure with nuts
use remaining nuts and...
AND THEN A MIRACLE HAPPENS
the trouble is that the phonograph head needs a support. support it from the center post with a cap that simultaneously secures the record?
support it from below?
...in the end you'll be running around with sethoscope ear buds, cranking your favorite 78--might be good to have a full plate under it instead of just the spike. I don't know that the shellac could take the pressure...
One drunken summer night in a lower east side bar I shared this plan with my hipster-librarian-superhero friend. She said, "I hate to use this term, but that is so steam-punk"--a familiar phrase my students sometimes used but one I'd let pass by without asking for definition. So I went home and looked it up.
Steam = archaic
Punk = ...
And here's my problem. Given three chords, quick songs and the barest minimum of musical talent punk music would seem to be about simplicity, rock and roll haiku, but that asceticism is combined with all kinds of excess--excessive volume and speed (or lack thereof with bands like Codeine) and in the audience a phalanx of carefully disheveled, rebellious clothes set with cheap jewels of metal, leather and grease--it already seems atavistic, and that's just punk. Steam-punk is excessively atavistic as it fakes late 19th/early 20th century aesthetics and technology. What could be more old-fashioned than leather, metal and grease? Evidently it's steam, wood and brass.
Punk is kind of a perfect response to end-of-hippy days. As with all institutions the hippy movement gave up the ghost in a wash of excess. It's all fine and good to go back to the earth, learn to play indigenous, anti-establishment music and make war on war with flowers and songs but the long hair, flowery and flowing clothes do not lend themselves to working the land you've gone back to and they demand a lot of care and funding to create and maintain.
Punk rebelled against this by cutting off the hair, tossing out the crazy colors and patterns and the musical cognates in endless tripped-out solos. Our late 90s and early aughts got closer to our back-to-suburbia-land ideals, buying all our clothes second hand and letting the songs get a little longer. Of course the music was still excessive, maybe more so--to say nothing of the devolution of metal into pop-schlock with screamed vocals. And then came steam-punk--came and went.
Now I don't mean to suggest that the atavistic walkman is remotely simple. It's entirely excessive and unneccessary, but where steam-punk just puts a faux-brass jacket and fog machine over our 21st century goings-on at least the atavistic walkman has only atavistic parts and all of them functioning. It takes the old forms and updates them for our current, disconnected, transient lives. Of course it's inconvenient, but that's a cultural statement in itself. We must demand more discomfort because the world and our lives are utterly horrifying and made all the more so by our wallowing in willful blind comfort.
So pull some clothes off the rack--let the clothes do the work they need to do and no more. Try not to pay for the priviledge of advertising, even in irony. Pick up a guitar or harmonica or ukulele and teach yourself to play some quick, efficient songs. Don't Plug In. Play old songs fast. Conflate lyrics. Apply the hard edge of punk to the hard world lyricism of bluegrass and zydeco. Play reggae too slow. Check out Langhorne Slim and The War Eagles. They've got a shot at making this.
Don't contribute to the petroleum economy. Leave the vinyl and the polyester alone. Wear fabrics that make sense. Wool to contain heat, silk and tightly woven cotton to block wind. Leather to prevent abrasion. Buy clothes from the thrift shop.
Let us leave punk behind. Get on our bicycles and ride.
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