Crying Indian

According to the Ad Council, the 1971 ad campaign featuring Native American actor Iron Eyes Cody, was their most successful Pollution Prevention campaign.

"During the height of the campaign, Keep America Beautiful reported receiving more than 2,000 letters a month from people wanting to join their local team. By the end of the campaign, Keep America Beautiful local teams had helped to reduce litter by as much as 88% in 300 communities, 38 states, and several countries. The success of the Keep America Beautiful anti-litter campaign led to hundreds of other environmental messages through the years, from many different sources, including the Ad Council."

Every kid from the 70s remembers these commercials with the crying indian. Question is, can a public service ad campaign be as successful today given our level of media and cultural savvy?

I would love to work on marketing campaigns for public service projects. I just wonder how this would take shape and look with the inclusion of web-based media sources. It's strange to me that with all of the advances we have made in media technology how lagging our designs and marketing strategies are. On a design level, we seem to revert back to old designs simply to put a new spin on them. It's as if culturally we can't move forward or keep up.

On another note, I'm very frustrated today. I hate many of the choices I have made or avoided professionally.

Mele Kalikimaka

In my house, there were three albums that were played at Christmas: Bing Crosby's Christmas album (see pic), John Denver's "Rocky Mountain Christmas", and the soundtrack to "Midnight Express".

The differences between Bing's Pre-WWII version of Christmas and John Denver's are pretty significant and were reflected in my parents as well. These were their favorite holiday albums. My dad, who wishes that it was always 1950, loves Bing Crosby and my Mom, with her love of folksingers, goes for John Denver.

Christmas was a reprieve from the year-round, daily chaos of my household. Everything was clean, we had tasty food, people were nice to each other, or at least tried not to scream or yell as much. It was so different from our non-holiday life that usually I would become incredibly depressed during the season. I hated having to face the let-down after the holidays ended. The albums were in constant rotation throughout the whole month of December.

Both my parents are big into denial. My father's approach (pre-breakdown) was to live solely in the past, in the "good, ol' days". But honestly, I don't know when those days would have occured for him because his family situation was far worse than ours. Anyway, every year he would play Bing Crosby, put up his trains, and follow a ritual of holiday that has never once deviated in the 34 years that I have been alive.

My mom's denial is totally different. She can't get into fantasy like my dad. She can however work the martyr role like no one else. Each year she would drive herself into a screaming frenzy by baking, decorating, and designing holiday outfits. I remember one Christmas where she told my sister and I that she had stabbed herself repeatedly while embroidering our Christmas dresses because it was 4:00 AM Christmas morning and she hadn't slept in two days!

My mom is a dark, dark woman. The two most depressing songs on "Rocky Mountain Christmas" happen to be my mother's favorite- "Christmas for Cowboys" and "Please Daddy Don't Get Drunk This Christmas". A typical gift from my mom would be one or two true-crime novels. I got "Fatal Vision" when I was 11.

Which brings me to the soundtrack to "Midnight Express". My mom loved the film and the soundtrack and got the tape as a gift one year. That year we all got drunk and danced around to it. After that, for a number of years, we would put the album on later in the evening, after the gifts were open and the adults and a few of us kids polished off the Cold Duck for a Giorgio Moroder freak-out.

The Darker, The Better...

I think that there are two kinds of people in this world. Those that love licorice and those that do not. I'm in the first group. I can't remember ever not liking it. I would raid my brothers' and sister's easter baskets to eat all of their black jelly beans and I was the only kid eating the licorice allsorts from my grandmother's candy dish. There is nothing in the world that tastes like licorice. It's as if tar was made into a candy. Dark and robust... it tastes like the color black should taste!

When I moved to Chicago, I tried salted licorice for the first time. There was no turning back. Good and Plentys, black jelly beans, even Panda Bear all paled in comparison. It was like drinking coffee for the first time.

Salted licorice is a popular Dutch candy and I could buy bags of it in the German and Swedish neighborhoods. The added flavor of salt makes this candy into a weird sweet and savory hybrid. When I moved back to Philly, I learned that the Reading Terminal Market sells about 15 different varieties of imported licorice, specializing in salted!

Four years ago, I stopped eating sugar entirely. I pretty much gave up ever eating licorice again. Molasses is the base ingredient, even in "healthy" versions like Panda. And there was no way that I was going to try and make a "Macro" version of licorice candy.

After relaxing somewhat on my dietary restrictions, I bought some licorice last Christmas. It was totally worth the headache and jitters that followed. Now, once a year, I treat myself to a bag of licorice. I pass most of it out to other fellow licorice lovers at my office.

I love the Mookum which looks like a moon face and the ones that look like fingers. Kookabura is my favorite non-Dutch licorice.

Hulk Angry!

I've been dealing with my problems with anger for some time. Multi-layed, deep-rooted shit that, in spite of the awareness I've attained in the past few years, still comes over me from time to time like a trainwreck. There is a scene in the new "War of the Worlds" where Tom Cruise and his kids are at a railroad crossing and a burning train hurtles past them. My anger, at its worst, is like that train.

Don't get me wrong, I've come very far in understanding and addressing a lot of my issues but that doesn't prevent them from resurfacing every now and again. I get upset, not at the fact that they resurface, but that I allow them to undermine me. This is where I need to better learn to detach and find ways to move past it.

One thing that I have become acutely aware of in recent years is how much my physical state governs my emotions. Not that I believe that things like PMS, with the increase of hormones, actually create emotions like anger. I just feel that they make me physically vulnerable to experience them more readily and intensely. Paying attention to how I am feeling physically has helped tremendously in keeping my emotional levels balanced. Changing my diet has definitely gone a long way in keeping me not only balanced but also bringing me to a place where I could begin to examine some of this long buried crap.

Another step that I am working on is working through the everyday frustrations and not letting them get beyond a certain point. In the past, I would seethe until I eventually just erupted and in some cases those eruptions would last for months! Lately, I've been trying to step back from my frustrations momentarily to see what is really bothering me about the situation and what can I actually do about it. However, I haven't gotten to the point where I can let go of it when it is beyond my control. That's a tricky one. Acknowledging that in many cases I don't have any control is a big source of anger for me.

Today at work I was successful in detaching from anger. Instead of seething at my co-worker and supervisor, I reminded myself that staying with that emotion actually didn't do anything but harm me. It didn't make them change from who they are, it didn't stop them from what they were doing but it did make me absolutely miserable. What was the fucking point?! I also saw that a number of the frustrations stemming from them actually related back to me. For instance, I was angry at having to listen to my supervisor "glad-hand" his way through a meeting. Not only was his voice loud and disruptive but he wasn't even really saying anything. Outside of the noise irritation, most of my frustration comes from the fact that I am unhappy professionally. No amount of seething at my supervisor is going to change the fact that I need to move on. Let's call it for what it is! I need to stop using others as a springboard for dealing with my own unhappiness!

On another note- I loved the Incredible Hulk TV show! I thought it was always really sad at the end when Bill Bixby would walk down the road, undone by his anger, to yet another town where no one knew him or his "problem". I had a slight crush on Lou Ferrigno. I have absolutely no idea why! I look at pictures of him then as the Hulk, all green with that crazy, square wig. It makes no sense. The hulk costume is hysterical! I love the perfectly shredded pants that hung down in strips.

Elise- Part II

I heard back from Elise! She emailed me last week after receiving my postcard. She sounds happy. She's teaching and still involved with her music. Elise is a classically trained pianist and violinist. She had come to Philadelphia to study at Curtis School of Music. She wasn't accepted and instead studied at Temple Univ.- Esther Boyer College.

She comes from a large mid-western family, very German Catholic. Her time in Philadelphia was to basically explode, away from family constraints. I was along for two years of that ride.

The picture to the left reminds me of how Elise looked when I knew her. All blonde hair and huge blue eyes. Complete spaz! Lots of frenetic energy. Very different from my frenetic energy but very complementary.

For many years, I was focused on how our friendship ended and also wanted very much to distance myself from the person that I was during that time. Reconnecting with Elise has instead let me reconnect with an energy that was left in my twenties. Before any of the downward spiral of my later twenties set in. As soon as I became accountable for my actions, either voluntarily or not, I let go of what it was like to be young and unstoppable. Granted the ego-driven aspects of that time have been gladly discarded, I sometimes wish to know what it is like to be unburdended again.

Bamboo!

I love bamboo. Someday I hope to have land where I can grow a grove of bamboo or at least a privacy hedge. Aesthetically, I think it is beautiful, both in it's natural form and especially when it is used for lumber.

The fact that it has so many uses is also great. Recently, I worked on a project where bamboo had been made into a cloth and was used for lining. Bamboo makes the only natural anti-bacterial cloth, perfect for athletic wear!

Bamboo also feeds Pandas. It makes up 99% of their diet. In places where the bamboo has been over-harvested, the pandas starve. Bamboo also feeds people too. Bamboo shoots are often found in Asian cuisine.

Bamboo is quick-growing, high, straight, very strong, and evergreen. The Chinese have compared "fair, straightforward, sincere people of high spiritual qualities" to bamboo since ancient times. Bamboo is the natural symbol of the wealth of nothingness because it grows into space, which for the masters of Zen represents the center of spiritual development. It is a symbol of fertility, altruism and a happy family in the image of a mother plant feeding her family around her.

Bamboo.

Wingin' it

This morning, as I was working on a pretty detailed class schedule to be placed onto our website, I was told to just "wing it" when I asked for confirmations about several dates. I stopped my supervisior in mid-sentence and reminded him that not only was this schedule going to be online but also be part of our volunteer database. All data needed to be secured and confirmed before I went live with it.

The mentality of "wingin' it" is so completely foreign to me. I am starting to realize, however, that it is wholly American approach to life and everything it contains... self, relationships, business, politics. The fact that we aren't in the slightest bit interested in being accountable for our actions makes everything that we do half-assed and ultimately worthless.

This morning's exchange with my supervisor reminded me of the Greatest American Hero. How perfect William Katt's reluctant superhero summed up the American approach to life. We don't know what to do with ourselves or how to handle ourselves or clean up the messes we've created in the process? Fuck it, it doesn't matter. We're just wingin' it!

Catch the Wind

I got a letter from PECO yesterday letting me know that I am eligible to have some of my electricity supplied through wind energy at an additional cost of $5.00 per month. I did some searching online this morning for some more info about PECO's Wind Energy program, turns out that this has been an option since 2004! I'm curious to know why we are only learning about it now, almost two years later.

It looks pretty legit to me but I learned that there are other companies offering Wind Energy programs in our area as well. I'm going to check those out before making a decsion to sign onto PECO's program.

I hope to god that we start to see more of these alternative energy options. It's clear that the use of traditional fuel sources is nearing it's end.

Check out this link for more info on Wind Energy programs in PA.

Peer Gynt

Grieg's Peer Gynt suite was one of my favorite pieces of music growing up. My mom had a collection of "Greatest Composers" recordings and Grieg was her favorite. She would play the album for my sister and I and tell us her version of what she thought the Peer Gynt story was about. Until I read the book in college, my understanding was that there was a troll that lived on a mountain and he kidnapped a beautiful girl and the girl's grandfather dies of grief over his loss. Not at all accurate but it was enough for me to stage an highly interpretive dance to the piece.

My sister and I would take turns portraying the girl and the grandfather but we both got to be trolls for "The Hall of the Mountain King". This was the climax and we would work ourselves up into a frenzy for this part. We would dress in big wide skirts and shawls and spin around like dervishes until we spun into the walls or got sick. I was banned from playing the song for awhile when I became too "agressive" in my dance. I was climbing on top of the stereo cabinet and trying to leap onto my sister's back as she twirled by.

Fur Elise

The other day I googled an old friend and roommate of mine, Elise Kartheiser. She was my best friend and partner-in-crime for about three years. She and I were roommates for the last year that she lived in Philadelphia. The summer of 1995, she moved back to Minneapolis to be near her family. She wrote me alot the first year but I was not interested in keeping up the friendship. I'm really bad about doing that actually. I am ruthless about cutting ties. I finally understand now that it has to do with the fact that I become so emotionally attached to others that I find it impossible to let them go. It was simply easier to not have any relationship at all.

Last week, I had a dream about Elise and afterwards I really wanted to speak with her again. I went online and found a mailing address and phone number for her. I have no idea if it is a current address but I sent her a postcard on the chance that it was. I hope that she gets it and writes back. I would like the chance to let her know how much her friendship meant to me.