Cognitive surplus

And what’s next?

I’ve been reading Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky. I haven’t finished it yet, and I haven’t processed it fully. Maybe I don’t fully understand it.

But the idea that new technology has fostered new methods of collaboration is certainly something I’ve experienced for myself working on creative projects with people around the globe.

The idea that it has altered the way we market our creativity is also one I recognize. One, too, that comes up frequently in the work of Seth Godin, one of my favorite bloggers.

Traditional publishing methods of the book and music industries, while still in existence, are losing ground to the tools available to all of us to get our work out ourselves.

Got a website?

Publish your novel, post your artwork, stream your movie or your music.

In addition, the accessibility of pretty much the sum of human knowledge and creative works is altering how audiences approach them. If I can read this book for free, will I want, for very much longer, to pay for that one?

I think the answer is probably no.

And I wonder what’s going to happen?

The gatekeepers have less power than ever before. They can no longer keep you from getting your work out to the public. All they can do is curate. Suggest one thing over another. And the fact that they do it from behind a desk in a monolithic museum is becoming less relevant.

We don’t pay so much to go to a movie, anymore. We pay a monthly fee for the right to watch all movies. Curation by algorithm. Because you liked this one, you might like that one.

So, what happens?

How does the model for how creative people get paid change in the face of this new paradigm?

Because it’s going to change, certainly. It already is changing.

Sometimes I think, on some level, that the whole capitalist endeavor has reached the end of its sustainability and, possibly, usefulness.

I just don’t know what takes its place.

I wonder.

What is it with these dreams?

And can we make them stop?

I am not a person with a strong belief in the predictive power of dreams. I don’t think they are premonitions or portents.

Thankfully.

Because I have been having some very odd ones lately, and I’d hate to think what they presaged if I gave any credence to that idea.

Usually, I think dreams are sort of a mash-up of images from your waking life. With the exception of the Actor’s Nightmare—where you can’t remember what play you are doing or everybody else is speaking lines from a different play or in a different language or, worse, your costume is missing.

That one is an anxiety dream.

I have, in my life, had it in various other incarnations as well. The Director’s Nightmare—where you are at tech rehearsal and no one—not the actors, not the stage manager, not the designers—will do what you ask. The Playwright’s Nightmare—where your reading is starting and you realize you forgot to tell your leading lady and there’s no way she can fly in from the Coast in the next 15 minutes.

Fortunately, those stress-related imaginings are just that. Imaginings. None of them have ever come true. (Although I have stood on stages and watched fellow actors’ eyes go blank and known something perilously similar to the Actor’s Nightmare.)

The thing I am wondering about today is why, all of a sudden, I am having these Grand Guignol horror movie-like dreams. For the last couple of days.

Mafia hit men.

Axe murderers.

It’s not like I’ve been watching horror movies recently. Or even the news.

I’ve been spending my time with BBC period pieces. Edward VII. Downton Abbey. Edward & Mrs. Simpson. (Just as a side note, imagine my surprise to find Sylvia Buchman’s (Paul Reiser’s mother on Mad About You) younger days were spent, in part, as Wallis Simpson!)

And when I haven’t been enjoying tea cups and crown jewels, I have been trekking to the Delta Quadrant with the crew of Voyager. (Someday, I will get even with my niece for this whole Netflix thing, but that is a subject for another time.)

So, I haven’t been basking in terror. And nothing particularly stressful is going on just now that would translate into a fear of getting killed.

I’m just having these horrible dreams. And I’m not enjoying them, and I’d like them to stop, please.

What happened

To my artist brain?

This is what I want to know.

I’m convinced we all start out with the ability to be hugely creative—and then, something happens.

I don’t know what.

Maybe an art teacher laughs at a drawing. Maybe we make too early comparisons between our own lopsided clay pots and the Ming vases we see in museums. Maybe we just get too caught up in linear thinking to make the leaps and connections required for innovation.

Something happens, though.

Usually, I think of myself as moderately creative. I have had some success with writing. I did recently discover a heretofore underestimated aptitude for drawing.

But then I see something like this:

And I wonder.

Putting the end of the ham

on your car’s wheels.

Apparently, we’re all doing it.

It’s a billion dollar business.

(Well, that might be an exaggeration. The truth is I don’t know the actual figures for the profit in the hubcap industry, but I’m betting—given the number of cars on the road and the fact that most of them have at least four tires—that it is a significant sector of the economy.)

You may remember, a few weeks ago, a post wherein I was wishing for the Star Trek computer to record a moment by moment account of my life so that I could find the source of used hubcaps we bought some years ago.

Well, along the way to getting that replacement hubcap, I began to wonder why we have hubcaps at all.

I now refer you to Car Talk wherein a valiant attempt is made to justify the existence of hubcaps, but it turns out to be mostly like that old story about the end of the ham.

There are plenty of versions of it floating around. In essence, it goes something like this:

A new husband asked his bride why she was cutting the end off the ham prior to cooking it.

She replied that she didn’t know. Her mother had always done it that way, so she assumed it was the right thing to do.

Mom, when asked, replied the same. Her mother had always done it, so she had carried on discarding a portion of the ham prior to cooking.

Grandma was approached.

Yes, she confirmed. She had always cut off the end of the ham.

Why?

Because, otherwise, it didn’t fit in her pan.

This, of course, is a cautionary tale about doing things just because they’ve always been done that way.

And, it turns out, that the raison d’être of the hubcap is similar.

Hand-tightened wheel nuts might, if they fell off, clang around in a metal hubcap and alert you to a problem before you lost the actual wheel. (Many hubcaps today are plastic, so good luck with that. Plus, most wheel nuts are machine-tightened these days. Good luck with changing that flat yourself, too.)

Hubcaps might help prevent the nuts from rusting to a point where they are too difficult to remove (assuming you’re going to be able to loosen those machine-tightened things anyway). The Car Talk boys point out, however, that wheel rotation and brake inspection generally take care of that in a well-maintained vehicle.

That leaves them with the slippery slope argument. The ‘for want of a nail’ sort of thing. Missing hubcaps are the first step on a downward spiral where you don’t get the brakes inspected or change the oil.

Generally, however, it sounds like the end of the ham to me.

I wonder on what other things we are spending time and money for some ancient and now irrelevant tradition. I believe I’ll try to be re-thinking things as I go along. Sort of wondering on more than Wednesdays, so to speak.

What in the world?!

Or, to be less politically correct…

WTF?!

There are people who just have too much time on their hands.

Which is fine.

Most of us do, really, now that we have achieved the 40 hour work week and vacuum cleaners.

I guess I’m just wondering today about what some people choose to do with it.

I’m not sure whether to call this wild originality (it is), or total ridiculousness (also true).

But, seriously. Which is stranger? That somebody actually came up with these two ideas for web pages, or that I found them, or that I am spending time writing about them, and…let’s be honest…you are spending time looking at them.

I do apologize. But it’s like a train wreck. You can’t help but look.

I am a Turtle

and

Postbox or Cheese?

If you have any explanation, any, that doesn’t involve the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), feel free to attempt to explain it.

In the meantime:

Saya kura-kura.*

Or, I wish I were, anyway. Then I would get some use out of that website.

*”I am a turtle” in Indonesian.

What happened…

…to my city feet?

I was wondering this for about a week, and now I’m not wondering anymore. I think I know.

This is a cautionary tale.

When I lived in NYC, I walked all the time. I walked to work. I walked to the theatre. I walked to museums and restaurants and friends’ apartments. To classes, to stores.

I did take subways for long distances, but I walked to and from the subway station on either end.

There was an occasional taxi cab or automobile excursion, but, mostly, I walked.

One learns very quickly in NYC that comfortable shoes are important.

I had comfortable shoes.

I still have those same shoes, and they still fit my feet in the same way.

But, suddenly, they’ve started to hurt my feet!

It began on the treadmill and continued during a trip to the zoo and the county fair.

All I can think is I have lost my city feet.

Because this here is not a land of public transportation.

If you’re going to walk, you are going to walk a loooooooonnnnnng way. And you’re not going to want to do that in 95° weather with 97% humidity. Well, okay. You may want to but, outside of incapacitating mental illness, you learn better.

So, I almost never walk anywhere. Add to that the fact that I almost never go anywhere, and I like to go barefoot—or, at most, slippered around the house—and I find I am now a person who gets blisters on trips I would’ve barely noticed previously.

This is not a good development.

Clearly, I am going to have to get off my—ahem—and back on the treadmill on a daily basis. Several times a day, in fact. Probably, multiple short walks will be better than long blistering treks.

It’s a plan.

In the meantime, I wonder how long it will be before I get my city feet back. And I’m wondering what else I’ve lost?

The latest in a series

And maybe the weirdest one yet.

I’m talking about the long tradition of my mind baffling me.

This morning, I woke up—at least, I thought I was awake—and in those first few minutes when I knew I had to get up and before I actually did get up, I thought about what I have to do today.

One of the things I have to do today—and practically every day—is work on this blog.

So, there I was, lazily reviewing a mental image of the spreadsheet I have with possible topics laid out day by day, and trying to decide which one I might like to select.

I settled upon “Pickle Pie.”

I composed a headline and a subhead.

I began to consider content.

And, I got up.

As I was walking down the stairs, I began to wonder if “Pickle Pie” was a real entry in my spreadsheet. By the time I got into my office, I was fairly convinced that it was not. By the time I got the computer booted up, I had decided—if it was not, this was the post I would write instead. By the time I dealt with tech support on my website and solved the problem of why I was receiving email but suddenly could not send it, I had completely forgotten the original headline and subhead ideas.

Turns out the original headline ideas don’t matter, because I was right the second time.

There was no entry for “Pickle Pie” in my topic spreadsheet.

I have never heard of a pickle pie. I don’t want to make a pickle pie. I certainly don’t want to eat a pickle pie. It sounds awful, frankly.

Before I started down this path, I had no idea if a person could actually make a pickle pie.

You can.

I mean, you can. I’m not going to try it.

I did wonder, on that trip down the stairs, if it was anything like fried green tomatoes, which are connected in my mind somehow with fried pickles. Which I have also never seen, eaten or made. I wondered if you would use sweet pickles and a regular pie crust or if there would be something more savory added to the crust to go with a dill pickle.

Now, I’m just wondering about my sanity.

And, if you make the pickle pie from this recipe, I am wondering what it tastes like.

Perhaps you will let me know?

The next Star Trek gadget

When can I have it?

We got the sliding doors early. And we’re so used to them now that we tend to walk right into doors marked “Pull.”

We’ve already almost got tricorders. In case you hadn’t noticed, they’ve merged with communicators. That cell phone in your pocket? That’s pretty much it—minus the scanning capability, and there are apps that come close to that.

So, I wonder what’s next? And, if it’s what I hope it is, I’m wondering when can I have it?

See, what I want is the computer’s minute-by-minute log.

I want to be able to say, “Computer. Replay Stardate gobbledygook-of-numbers, time stamp 0700.”

It’s not that I really want to give up the privacy and open the legal can of worms that recordings of every second of our lives would bring. It’s just that I really don’t want to almost be remembering things.

We lost a hubcap a few weeks ago. The MotH,* of course, wanted to replace it.

It’s not the first time we lost a hubcap. I once had four go missing all at once when I was in rehearsal on Staten Island. (You just know they didn’t all fall off on the Verrazano Bridge. And, I’d like to point out that this was Staten Island. Not Harlem or the South Bronx. So, there’s that myth disproved, too.)

Anyway, the last time we needed hubcaps, we went to a used auto parts yard somewhere out in Brooklyn, near the water, and got one. For something like $15 bucks.

The MotH figured we ought to be able to do the same here. Maybe we could. But after much calling around, none of the used auto part yards seem to have hubcaps. Hard to believe, but there it is.

Since he’s planning a trip to NY in the near future, the MotH came hopefully around to ask me if I could find the name of the place in NY that had previously solved this problem.

This was five or six years back! If not more!

And the MotH said, “But you save all that stuff.”

Uh-huh.

I don’t generally save it if you paid cash and didn’t give me a receipt. Even then, it’s buried in all the backup material I am storing in case of an audit. I might have had it noted in my financial software, but since a) I never got a receipt and b) the name did not include the word “hubcap,” that is an avenue of research that yielded no results.

But…just think…if I were stationed on the Starship Enterprise, I could have announced to the air, “Computer, stardate gobbledygook-of-numbers to stardate gobbledygook-of-numbers-part-2, replay.”

And I could have watched and listened to us discussing hubcaps and coming and going with hubcaps until I found—ta da!—the source of the hubcaps.

As it is, I had to Google.

For a new source online and a higher price.

When can I have that computer log?

Sure it’s kind of Big Brother-y. But it could save me so much aggravation!

* MotH = Man of the House

What shall I write?

Something simmering.

Ever since I wrote my play and it had its first reading, people have been asking me what else I have, telling me I should be working on something new, and wondering if I am a one-trick pony.

I have wondered that myself.

The thing is, there was a lot of work to do to get the play to a production. Every playwright is his or her own first producer, and if you’ve got a play in which you have faith, you owe it to the play to try to be a good one.

In my case, that meant a steep learning curve since I had never approached the theatre from that angle. In addition, I had some early luck with casting that seemed to make it imperative that I do the very best I could to insure the play got every opportunity possible.

It took longer than anyone could have possibly imagined. Anyone, that is, except another playwright.

And I don’t know that I did everything, or even anything, right.

But the play is going to have a production—(Yay!)—and I am saved from being the Emily Dickinson of playwrights. Whatever happens now, I will not end up with a drawer full of unproduced plays. I might end up with a drawer full of unproduced plays and one that made it onto a stage, but it seems like whatever was paralyzing my impulse to write may have lifted.

In the last couple of days, I have been wondering what’s next.

And, at the moment, I am wondering if I could write a farce.

There’s a part of me that highly doubts it.

Farce is the form most violently dependent upon plot. Plot is not something at which I excel. It always seems to me that I am interested in character. Dialogue flows somewhat rapidly from my pen (or keyboard), but, often, I am casting about for a believable situation imbued with enough conflict to get these characters I have conjured through a play or a story or, heaven forfend, a novel!

I went to see a production of Moon Over Buffalo recently, however. And I remember, with great fondness, seeing Noises Off on Broadway in the weeks following 9/11. At a time when we thought we could never laugh again, more than a thousand people a night were rolling in the aisles.

That production was profoundly important—a gift of incalculable value to a grieving city—and cured me forever from any tendency I might have had to look down on farce.

So, what I’m wondering now is—could I write a farce?

Maybe we’ll see.

Where am I?

I wonder.

No, I have not lost my mind.

Most likely, at the moment you are reading this, I know exactly where I am.

The difficulty comes because I am not writing it at the moment you are reading it. In fact, in this instance, I am writing it a couple of weeks early.

The reason for this extraordinary lack of procrastination is that my niece is visiting this week. (Yes, this week—the week you are reading this post.)

The decks have had to be cleared for fun and frolic.

The thing is, I don’t know whether we will be going to the beach, to St. Augustine, to Fernandina or where? I don’t know if her uncle will have convinced her to zipline over the ‘gators at the Alligator Farm. (I hope not, but there’s no telling.)

Will we have gone hiking?

Will we be at the Kingsley Plantation?

Will we be trying on clothes at the outlet stores?

Will we be out on the boat spying on manatees and egrets, ospreys and eagles?

Or will we be lounging on the dock discussing the meaning of life and what she wants to be when she grows up?

I have no earthly idea.

I do know, whatever it is, it will be fun.

She’s a pretty cool kid.

Past visits have included Cape Canaveral, flea markets and horseback riding. Stuffed piglets and straws.

She’ll be staying with my mom, but there’s a good chance we get her for a night or two.

So, at this point, now in the past, I don’t really know where I am today, in the present. (This post is getting as complicated as one of those Star Trek episodes where they run into a rupture in the time-space continuum.)

So, I’m wondering.

Maybe I’ll tell you when I find out. Maybe I won’t.

You get to wonder, too!

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

Tag Archives: Wondering Wednesdays