Category Archives: Mono-blogues

Hidden Doorways in Gowanus

I took this photo in 2014 and this week, it was selected for re: place – snapshots of Gowanus in transition. Curated by Miska Draskoczy, it was the Arts Gowanus exhibit at the Affordable Art Fair in New York City. I just found out it sold (!). This was my first art opening. But I am hoping that it won’t be the last as I am determined to get a showing for the Mapping Gowanus project I started on this blog years ago.

The opening was a fun event, like a local party – attended by so many Gowanus neighbors and artists I have known and seen in the neighborhood for years – who also had photos in the show. Miska did a great job selecting images that reflect the changes that have taken place over the years; they were familiar and yet taken as a whole, captured the bittersweet feelings of change.

As for the Mapping Gowanus project – it is interesting to me that when I started it over a decade ago, people followed the rules of the assignment quite well for the most part. You are assigned a block, you are to walk the block, and create something within 3 days in response to it. The exercise was meant to create a deadline, and force an instinctive response. People wrote songs, took photos, wrote essays, made videos. No overthinking. At some point, people suddenly stopped taking the deadline part seriously. And though many blocks have been assigned, getting people to turn in their “homework” has been nearly impossible for the past several years. Why is that? Is it something that happened post-Covid? Our current political climate? Or is it the changing neighborhood itself? Whatever it is… I will try to pull some teeth and get those projects turned in. After re: place I am eager to put up this show.

If you are interested in a block assignment – please reach out!

I’m baaaack

How embarrassing. I haven’t been here since Covid lockdown, back when I thought I was being so cool to wear a bandana under my nose to prove I was paying attention to CDC guidelines.

A lot has changed since those days.

I don’t care to rehash the Covid stuff. But all of the changes that have occurred in Gowanus in these several years seem important to document. So I am rebooting the Mapping Gowanus project. Stay tuned for new block projects!

In the meantime, here are some recent pics from a Sunday stroll.

#showmeyourmask

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Since we are all staying home, sheltering in place, social distancing, quarantining or practicing PAUSE, I decided to start posting some thoughts on Deadline-Gowanus which has gone a bit fallow of late.

Here’s my thought for today.

I know the advice has been mixed on wearing masks and we are supposed to save n95 and surgical masks for health care workers but there are home-made options. (And yes I know my nose is not covered.) Took a walk in #gowanus today with my pink bandana mask and it wasn’t easy – felt very self-conscious in the epicenter of hip. But there are four good reasons to do this according to things I have read: 1)it does protect against some airborne particles 2) it signals to the world this is serious 3) it makes people distance from you because they think you might be infected or see you take it seriously (i can attest to this from my walk – people stepped aside!) 4) it stops you from touching your face while you are out running errands. So don’t be embarrassed. #showmeyourmask

Facebook’s End-of-Year Video: What If I Don’t Like It?

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If you’re on Facebook, you have no doubt been served up a year-end video that wraps 2016 up in a tidy little animated package, complete with soundtrack. I have to admit I’m a sucker for an animated slide show that I didn’t have to assemble myself. It’s like having Ken Burns as your personal scrapbooker and archivist. When FB made a slideshow of photos and videos I took of my husband handing out tissues at the marathon, I couldn’t stop watching it. It was a genius piece of ironic conceptual art that completely captured his wacky personality and made me and everyone who knows him want to laugh and cry at the same time. How was it so possible for an app to do this? AI has arrived.

But now Facebook’s end-of-year video is sending me into an existential crisis and threatening to un-do years of therapy. Because I *only* liked 1727 things this year.

This sounds like a lot, right? I mean, that means I liked an average of 4.73 things a day, every day for a year. And that’s in a year that, on average, had a lot of unlikeable things happen – at least in my opinion. So this should seem heartening. Maybe things aren’t so bad. Maybe Facebook is like a gratitude generator making us step outside ourselves and like things. (This is ignoring that a lot of the things I liked were probably posts complaining about current affairs.)

But the problem is, my friend Martha M. liked 37, 114 things.

Now, I am not at all surprised that Martha M. liked more things than I did. She is one of the most positive people I know, always quick with a compliment and a donation; an avid supporter of the arts and politically active. But are you seriously telling me she likes an average of 101.68 things per day? She is 20 times more positive than I am?

I was certain there was a clear mistake in the like-counter at Facebook.

But then other people started posting their like-numbers. Marian liked 18,078 things. An average 49.52 likes a day. And she’s pretty snarky. In fact a good portion of my sparing likes are probably bestowed on her posts about Sutton Foster’s outfits on ‘Younger.’

Could it be that I am a withholding like-r? And if so, what does it mean? Has Facebook stumbled upon a way to determine a positivity quotient? And mine is LOW? Could this be the reason for everything wrong in my life? How do I fix this? Maybe if I like more things on Facebook, I’ll finally sell that TV pilot or land that dream gig. Should I be giving the old thumbs up more generously to everything I read? I mean, I THOUGHT I pretty much clicked a thumbs up for most of my friends’ posts. Maybe I wasn’t on Facebook enough. Maybe I needed to devote more time to scrolling through my feed to like stuff. How many things could I like in a minute if I tried? I’d have to be careful about carpel tunnel, but I bet with minimal effort, I could add a zero to my like #. I mean, if rats in a cage can hit a lever….

And then it hit me. Mark Zuckerberg has built a giant Skinner box and we are all in it. Facebook is a giant behavioral economics experiment and we are being conditioned to like things. I am not the first to figure out that social media uses Skinnerian marketing to engage users. But seeing these numbers and the competitiveness it brought out really brought it home for me.

What is Facebook doing to us with this end of year tally? On the one hand, it points out how much time we must be spending in this Skinner box, and makes us vow to put “quit Facebook” on our 2017 resolution list. On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with liking things.

Is there?

 

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I Think Women Are Filled with Self-Doubt and Should Pretend We Aren’t

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Now that I’ve got your attention, let me explain.

I’ve been writing a lot about women and entertainment lately and quite frankly it starts to get a little depressing to see our culture – and my social media feed – as a constant source of stories about gender bias. Even when I focus on stories about “powerful” women, there’s something about viewing the world through gender as limiting.

Which, of course, is the problem.

People talk a lot about unconscious bias when they talk about overcoming gender discrimination. Most of us who consider ourselves feminists assume we are immune.

Imagine my surprise when I came face to face with my own “unconscious” bias.

I was reading an interview with two TV showrunners in Variety, Matthew Weiner (Mad Men) and Alex Gansa (Homeland). I had stumbled on the article online and didn’t read the opening and didn’t know what Gansa looked like. In reading the Q & A, I assumed “Alex” was a woman. You might think this was very evolved of me, given that Homeland is a heavily plotted show about the CIA. But the reason I thought Gansa was female was that in the profile “Alex” talked a lot about how stressful the job was:

“On the third, fourth episode of the first season, I was in the middle of a major nervous breakdown. I didn’t know how I was possibly going to do all the stuff I had to do. There’s a hill I walk up behind my house every morning and I just was clearly in bad shape. Jason Katims, who lives down the street from me, happened to be walking his dog. I just grabbed him, and said, “Jason, how am I going to do this job? I honestly don’t think I can do it.”

As I read this, I thought – I can’t believe the woman showrunner is talking so much about self-doubt! I started to get angry and debated whether to blame Gansa for not pretending to be more confident, or the writer for portraying a woman showrunner in this way.

Then I saw the photo and realized Gansa was male.

I was immediately impressed with his honesty.

So I had to confront several things:

  • I assume someone who expresses self-doubt is female.
  • I expect women in powerful positions to go out of their way not to express self-doubt, so as not to feed into this stereotype.
  • When I hear men express self-doubt, I think – wow, he must be confident to be able to express his vulnerability like that.

What a sexist hypocrite I am.

Another powerful showrunner, Jill Soloway (Transparent) got a lot of attention for comments recently about there being an “all-out attack” on the female voice. In it she admitted:

“I just want to make sure you know I’m always plagued by insecurities. The insecurities are always going to be there. Notice them when you’re there writing, when you’re trying to get your thing out there, when you’re setting up your night where you’re showing your films.”

This is really no different from Gansa’s admission. The difference is in how I (and I assume some others) hear it: Men who voice insecurities are self-deprecating and brave; women who voice it are in danger of being viewed as weak or incapable. This is likely some combo of my own sexism, my own insecurity and self-doubt, and overcompensation for how I fear (know) women are judged compared to men.

Change will come from recognizing our own unconscious biases and starting to question them.