PROJECTS IN SLOW MOTION

Tortoise Everything is faster these days. Faster than what? Faster than it was a moment ago. Project schedules of all types no longer abide by 40 hour work weeks. Design cycles barely give consumers enough time to even get comfortable with changes in product lines. Books come to market about major current events only weeks after they happen; follow-up films to Hollywood blockbusters come out like the changing of the seasons. Major retailers are starting to experiment with same-day delivery solutions.

That's why, when it really counts, when reputation and big money is on the line, I almost always turn to the file folder of ideas I've been gathering for years.

Sure, sure: when it's time to put ideas into action, I like to think we move like lightning. But as a general rule, faster isn't better in much the same way that lethargy won't ever get you where you're going either.

Do you ever eat a salad? Intellectually, you know that those vegetables took weeks if not months to grow. There's simply no way to grow them faster, even if you consume them in mere minutes. Were you ever a child who wondered about his or her grown-up life, years away? It took you years to become that grown-up. Sometimes the most meaningful projects happen in slow motion.

What I find interesting here is that slow motion does not have to mean boring. If you've ever watched the countdown for a rocket carrying astronauts, it takes place with deliberate, almost tedious precision. On the way to the big boom, the rocket masters even pause for built-in holds. The clock stops while lengthy checklists and evaluations take place all over the launch facility. No doubt the process could be expedited, but when human life is in jeopardy, the need for speed clearly pales. Perhaps it's not nearly as vital as that mortal component, but you might feel a similar feeling if vast sums of make-or-break capital are on the line, too. Go too fast, and you risk calamity. Failure is generally not an option.

My point is this: feel free to go quickly at whatever game you're playing. Go fast to compete; go fast to impress; go fast to get it done and out of the way. But go too fast at your own peril. Some things are supposed to take time. You can make a bottle of wine in just a few months, but most varieties benefit from appropriate aging.

--MS

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VIDEO IS DEAD. LONG LIVE VIDEO.

Video camera The teenager next door is doing it in his bedroom.

The grandparents up the street are doing it in the park.

The school guidance counselor is doing it in the auditorium.

They're shooting video, and sometimes even editing it.

But who cares? Video plays everywhere. It's ubiquitous. It's so omnipresent as to be ordinary. It's about as surprising as a text message, as novel as a horseless carriage.

This never used to be the case, but as with all things technological, the extraordinary becomes ordinary faster than milk sours at room temperature. Is anyone surprised that you can add electric light to your dark living room with just the barest finger pressure against a plastic switch? Perhaps not, but if you lived in the middle of the 19th century, you'd be totally amazed.

Video has mutated into new, strange forms of micro-modernism and also harkened back to older forms that have been transmogrified into contemporary dialect.

Let us not even speak of embedded YouTube links. There's no point in deconstructing the value propositions for different creative groups to choose Vimeo over Vevo, Dailymotion over The Daily Show. The issue is that as the new lingua franca, video will eat itself if it cannot remember its origins.

Remember writing? Photography? Music?

What's interesting is how much those disciplines and countless others continue to play essential roles in the modern video lexicon, even if their cultural pedigrees are often buried under push-wipes and snap-pans and other electronic filigree.

The lament is that video's ubiquity has dampened the power of the medium. Like the thrill of seeing electric light for the first time in a world's fair pavilion, lightbulbs have no thrill at all when you're stumbling for one in the middle of a twenty-first century night. Video has only become omnipresent in the past decade.  Insofar as it's a tool available to millions if not billions of people, I have to wonder if the trend going forward is not the evolution and development of newer, better videos, but irrelevance. The moment we are inured to the power of something -- lightbulbs, for example--the moment they lose their hold on our consciousness. Video isn't there yet, but it was only a few years ago when it was an extraordinary thing to click on and play a video link in your web browser. Now it's ordinary to gulp down entire seasons of episodic television on a wireless tablet sitting on your couch or a stiff airport lounge chair. Sometimes I even catch a glimpse of people doing this in traffic, stopped at a light. (Put that phone down, please.)

Clearly there will continue to be new stories and new storytellers who bring all sorts of invention and power to this rapidly changing medium. But the era of amazement and thrill stemming from the medium itself has long since past. What's left to separate signal from noise, as it's always been throughout the history of creative enterprise, is the value of the content. Content is always king. Now that the dawn of the video era is over, no one can foretell what the long day of video's ubiquity will bring.

--MS

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THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY WAITS TO REVEAL ITSELF

Steinway It always happens. Days, weeks, sometimes even months of grinding work suddenly reach a crest in the shadowed road and then pass over the rise into exhilarating bright light. Intangibility turns solid. Ideas become real. Light floods the space and suddenly something exists in the world in a way that didn't exist a moment before.

That transformative jolt is not simply an epiphany suddenly making it's presence known. That jolt is akin to the lighting that reanimated Dr. Frankenstein's monster. Hard, incremental work prepared the space, with little emotional resonance. Hard work yesterday turns into hard work today, with the promise of more to come tomorrow. Intellectually we may understand the trajectory of an undertaking, but emotionally it's hard to believe that tiny steps taken day after day will actually amount to anything useful. But then the lifecycle of a project reaches a mid-point, and something must transform somehow, or at least make room for new components. When it's clicking some sort of new, élan vital enters the body, takes a breath and fires cells to life…

…and here's the crazy thing: those moments are hard to predict.

But sometimes you can get a hint that they're coming.

I'm writing this blog entry sitting in a recording studio in Athens, Ohio while our music master Andre (Hey! Check the rest of our website for a photo and bio!) is hunched over the piano working on a score for our new Science On a Sphere movie WATER FALLS. I think I speak for the whole team when I say that we all look forward to this phase of a big production, even as we're all starting to feel the strain of exertion and fleeting time. The work is serious and hard but simultaneously joyful. The process is a complete embrace of the best parts of life. It creates matter from void; it declares emotional resonance from nothing but memory and inspiration. For WATER FALLS, months of effort have led us here. We finally have a rough cut of the film capable of supporting serious dialogue between itself and musical ideas. No doubt that music will re-inform the visuals, and we'll be in a sudden pas-de-deux between the two, pictures influencing audio, audio influencing picture.

I've been doing this work for decades, and it still makes my heart rate pick up the pace. A moment ago, something that never existed before suddenly sprang into being, achieving enough mass and complexity to transform from a pile of matter into a gleaming structure, a temple, a town, a soul. There's music behind the pictures, and an a flooding list of notes running off the the pages in my notebook, and though the hour is late, I am wide awake and scribbling as fast as I can.

Moments of discovery are rare. The do not come easily. They are milestones along long, often forced marches, and they do not, by themselves, pay the rent. But placed against the endless labors of ordinary days, they are gleaming cracks in the often opaque facades of what we're all forced to endure in ordinary days. Moments of discovery shine light on what we all so desperately want to believe could be great, meaningful, shimmering substance of lives worth living.

--MS

--MS

Twitter @michaelstarobin Facebook facebook.com/1auglobalmedia

PS -- Yes, yes, here's where the good people of 1AU ask our dear readers to share what you've read with friends and colleagues. And here's the place where you think, "Oh, sure, one more imposition of my precious time." Well, we're asking. It's something we value above rubies, above gold: if you like an idea enough to give it a moment's thought, then consider giving it a measure of freedom. When you share an idea with another person, you release an idea to grow freely in the world.

Like what you see? Set it free.

 

FRAGMENTATION

Fragmentation  

When blog postings go up on the site I try to insure that there's some corresponding note on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and on Facebook. I mean, it won't mean a thing if no one knows it exists. Or as the great, late physicist Richard Feynman once put it, if you don't write it in your journal, it never happened.

Hang on one second, I just need to pick up this call…

"Hello? Yep. Yes, we'll be there. Three o'clock? Sure. With the documents? Sure. Okay, see you then."

So, yeah. The blog. It's tough sometimes when there's also a major project we're all working on. But it's especially tough between projects, when there are a million things in development, all sorts of ideas cooking, when we're taking meetings and running around to scout locations and working on technical and artistic tests. Sometimes then it's especially tough to focus. Sometimes in the middle of a crushing production schedule, it's strangely easier for the ideas to just come out. Blood pumping, with a focus that's laser beam tight, the clarity of ideas often shines bright.  Of course, sometimes there's the issue of just having the energy to get them out, but that's another story.

Just one second…got to respond to this quick Facebook tag.

"Blueberry pie, oh my."

Right. Anyway, the team is fully engaged in a gigantic new spherical production, and we have a list of other projects in the pipeline. Speaking engagements have been busier than ever this past year, and we continue to get offers from a wide variety of clients. As for the website…

Hang on one sec.

"We could shoot it sixteen-by-nine if we do it for ordinary HDTV playback, but we'd be pleased to show you some examples of ultra-wide playback options if you'd like. We think that could be terrific for your venue. Or if you really want to do something interesting, let us design a multi-faceted surface, with carefully timed sequences running among non-contiguous screens."

Okay, so yeah, the website is firing on all cylinders right now. With some of the matching social media efforts we've been putting out, plus the ancillary blog posts elsewhere (Tumblr, Wordpress, etc) people are talking and the phone keeps ringing. Can't complain about that! But the real issue is...

Sorry.

"Hello? Hey! Yes, great to hear from you. I'm sorry, but can I call you back? It's a bad time right now. Sure. Just in the middle of something."

Where was I? Oh, yes: the real issue is…

Sorry.

"Hello! Sorry, yes, this is a bad time. I'm just trying to do this one thing. One thing! I'll be right with you."

…as soon as I take the teapot off the stove…whistling like a….

So, anyway.  There we were. Cameras rolling, sound was clean, when this client comes charging across the soundstage, and says, "…

Listen. Why don't you come back next week. Next week the blog will be talking about the cultural ubiquity of video and the various ways that's affected our industry, as well as the public's ability to consume media of any sort. Trust me, it will be interesting.

I'm going to make a sandwich. And a cup of tea.

--MS

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ALONE

Pen and Notebook Modern electronic media and traditional art are not synonymous, although they both draw water from the same well. Creative media always seeks to establish a relationship with an audience, while art may be the product of other motivations. Both inevitably require substantial creative energies to come into being. Both may invest a great measure of personality from their creators. But above all, creative work of all types inevitably demands a sizable measure of time on the part of the creator focused in his or her own head, often alone.

The irony here should be obvious. Whether by force of a pen inscribing a few precious lines of poetry, or a stage director looking to send shivers all the way into the back row of the theater, most moments that convey meaning and emotional response stem from intense, focused, often private labor. We understand the poet immediately, quietly scratching out verse while leaning thoughtfully against the trunk of a tree. If you're wondering about the stage director, remember that long before he or she meets with actors and set designers and lighting techs, a director must do the work of refining a vision. There's reading and there's often writing, too. There's research and study, and like your parents always used to tell you about homework, no one can do it for them.

The same is true for those who produce soda commercials and magazine make-up advertisements. Even as more billable creative work tends to operate inside the forum of larger organizations, the day- to-day effort of writing scripts, drawing storyboards, or processing digital images from photographic memory cards comes down to one person leaning in to the work, often for many hours alone.

Of course, creative types often DO work with other people; most disciplines demand it. But I find those to whom I pay most attention are capable of motivating themselves outside the pressures of groups.

Make no mistake: I love working with teams. The energy and invention and even bonhomie camaraderie of creative teams has rare equal, even if it occasionally comes with intense interpersonal challenges. The pleasures of sharing ideas, of finding growth that always surpasses the limits of what any one person could singularly invent, imbues resonant satisfactions. People are interesting! The best experience from working in groups is the reflection of larger humanity's historical sweep of achievement, of culture. In a narrow microcosm, we recreate the best of our own shared triumphs as a species and celebrate it with re-enactment.

But like all performances, the lights ultimately dim. Even after standing ovations, audiences always go home. Players who live for the applause often don't survive. Applause is fleeting. But those who can take pleasure and satisfaction in the intense world of singularly creative mind return to quiet spaces and dream again. If they're good, applause may very well return. If they're perceptive, they may even be aware that applause is something they can court. But if they care about their craft, whatever it may be, that time alone is something they're not going to trade for anything in the world.

--MS

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TOAST

  Makin' toast!

The bread has edges, beyond which the peanut butter cannot go. But because the bread does have edges, toast made right will support peanut butter--or marmalade, or Nutella, or cream cheese--all the way out to those edges. The details matter, especially if you're preparing that toast for someone else.

What if you're making that toast for yourself? You can do it any way you like, of course. But consider the choice you have if you're making toast for yourself, all alone one morning, with nobody else around. I wonder if sometimes in the service of ourselves we think, "It's just for me. It really doesn't matter how it comes out, and it's just a piece of toast."

That's true to a degree. No one will know if you under-browned the bread or missed a corner with the raspberry jam. But standards begin with an internal adjudication, and the moment we begin equivocating about whether quality matters in private is the moment we begin eroding quality in public.

Sounds obsessive, doesn't it? Sounds a little nuts.

It doesn't have to become a boat anchor around the neck of your life. The point is that small gestures add up. In aggregate they begin to describe how we approach our days, how we think about thinking, how we regard an endeavor undertaken and a mission completed. Making toast should not become a complicated process. But next time you're about to coat a good piece of pumpernickel with butter and jam, notice the fine details around the perimeter. If it's for you, there's a moment's pleasure in knowing it's just the way you like it, however that may be. If it's for someone else, enjoy the fact that he or she will ever-so-slightly appreciate the care you took to do it right.

--MS

PS -- Yes, yes, here's where the good people of 1AU ask our dear readers to share what you've read with friends and colleagues. And here's the place where you think, "Oh, sure, one more imposition of my precious time." Well, we're asking. It's something we value above rubies, above gold: if you like an idea enough to give it a moment's thought, then consider giving it a measure of freedom. When you share an idea with another person, you release an idea to grow freely in the world.

Like what you see? Set it free.

 

POLITICS

Handshake Are our political leaders supposed to do the right thing because they'll lose the next election or because it's the right thing?

Does it matter?

I think it does matter, but clearly the first option should not  be dismissed out of hand. In politics the art of the possible sometimes has nothing to do with the underlying values powering the pursuit. By means of an example, consider the particular way President Lincoln pursued the Emancipation Proclamation. (Need a refresher? See the brilliant historical encapsulation in Stephen Spielberg's masterful "LINCOLN".) The abolition of slavery on moral grounds alone would have been too onerous for his political foes to support. Instead, an ever-so-slightly weaker position allowed fence-sitters to save face and side with him, thus insuring his victory without the emotionally more satisfying results of complete and total victory.

But you ask, "Why should we care about this in creative enterprise? Why is this in the 1AU blog?"

Creative people don't simply punch a clock. Whether working on a film as an assistant camera person, or playing second viola in the symphony orchestra, artists invest their work with themselves. They have to. Without self, creativity generally rings hollow.  But the moment creative enterprise expands beyond the realm of a singular painter holding a singular brush, politics inevitably accrue. It's inevitable because it's unlikely that the designated leader of an enterprise is the only person with a good idea. Even with a clearly defined hierarchy--a chain of command established from the outset--good leaders understand that they have to deal with people. Good leaders also know that even with a singular vision, they're fools if they don't seriously consider the good ideas of those around them. Likewise, members of the corps de ballet, so to speak, need to be able to express themselves to a director without foolishly expecting public adulation or artificial praise.

That's where politics asserts itself most loudly.

Some people simply have trouble working in groups. They struggle to back down or they cannot speak up. Sometimes they get their timing confused. Sometimes they forget that ideas and technical capabilities are not separate from the emotional containers that convey those ideas. More practically, political simplicity gets you nowhere in terms of funding or fans. A more nuanced political listener will learn from an audience without capitulating his or her vision. A savvy producer will understand how to reach a funding source while maintaining his or her own integrity. I'm not calling any of this easy, I'm just calling it essential. Creative teams need to figure out diplomatic ways to move through challenging dilemmas without losing sight of an even more challenging goal. It's true that some creative groups break a lot of china as they move through the world, but for myself I find this a rather distasteful way to operate. Even if an enterprise is a complete success, the cost of disharmony in the world rarely seems like a reasonable trade.

That said, nobody likes endless campfire songs, full of conviviality and warmth but yielding nothing substantial in the morning. Once in a while: sure. But forever and always? Creative groups of all types need to respect that politics as a means of manipulation is disingenuous, but as a means to bring sensitive perception to disparate, oxygen-starved ideas, it matters. Politics is the art of the possible.  Funny, but that sounds an awful lot to me like making creative projects in a group.

--MS

PS -- Yes, yes, here's where the good people of 1AU ask our dear readers to share what you've read with friends and colleagues. And here's the place where you think, "Oh, sure, one more imposition of my precious time." Well, we're asking. It's something we value above rubies, above gold: if you like an idea enough to give it a moment's thought, then consider giving it a measure of freedom. When you share an idea with another person, you release an idea to grow freely in the world.

Like what you see? Set it free.

The Consciousness of Money

Thinking money

With cyberspace populated by semi-autonomous “bots”, and smart phones sending wireless messages onto the web to look for last minute plane tickets, and software agents in refrigerators circuits ordering more orange juice from a wired supermarket before we even notice we're out, one begins to wonder if we're giving up our freedoms one convenience at a time. But incremental developments aside, one human invention that’s been around for centuries remains in such demand as to be perhaps the first artificial consciousness.

Money.

A cursory glance simply casts an eye of desire on it. But it is really the cash that’s got a hold of us. Consider:

It’s really worth nothing, but it convinces us of its value; it talks us into protecting it. It has value because we collectively believe it has value. A bottle of water can quench a thirst. A fertile field can produce sustenance for years. A whole box of money can do nothing, but it’s desire to exist, to grow, to spread, whispers Faustian bargains in our ears and we listen. We take it in, protect it under our mattresses, pay others to project it in steel rooms at banks, obfuscate to friends and relatives about how much we may or may not have. Consider this:

If you squint while stopped at a red light, the cars all around look like blood cells rushing through veins and arteries. Traffic lights act like heart valves, buildings and businesses act like organs, apartment complexes and housing developments act like bone marrow.

Money rushes around the human organism.

Just like in nature, if there’s a niche to be filled, life rushes in and adapts to fill that niche. If an organ needs assistance, blood and nutrients rush to fix it. If money discovers a need--it's own need, mind you-- it pulls people and energy—lives—towards it like a biological magnet. Cars leave their parking spaces at the crack of dawn, their drivers pulled inexorably to office jobs and fork lift operation and days in front of a fourth grade class. We tell ourselves these are our jobs, but the compulsion to these labors are often just the relentless tectonic pressures of money.

Further evidence of money's consciousness is the endless creative energy among financial entities to forge connections where superficial horse-sense seems to fail. Take the French automobile company Renault and the Japanese car company Nissan. Separated by more than 10,000 miles, the two behemoths share an unusual alliance, and the two together market a wide range of cars in the United States, a foreign country to each of the partners. The soul of the alliance is an effort to broaden the power of manufacturing scale without demanding that each partner bow beneath the sword of the other. This union of competitors is predicated on money talking; corporate cultures in France and Japan could not be more different, but there they are, locked together at the brain stem. To the thousands of workers at each company actually assembling the cars, clicking keyboards, and ordering parts, theirs is not even the illusion of autonomy. Their lives are directly governed by the wages parceled out like pollen among worker bees. They can no more go their own financial ways than they can decide to build a new type of engine on their own. The money in the system is the deciding factor. It is money which reached across culture and space to create a partnership of expedience, and it is money which unifies the executive ganglia making rudimentary decisions regarding aesthetics and strategy. But lest any observer of the system, internally or externally, consider that the executive class has significantly more say than the employees on the factory floors, consider: significant corporate missteps might only end the current incarnation of the financial arrangement built by the Renault/Nissan partnership. Just as the wooly mammoth shed its coat for the summer of the post ice age, so to will the money be transmogrified should those companies pass into the historical record.

Supply side economists will rush to say that corporate bankruptcy is proof that money is not conscious, that it's in the realm of humans and the decisions they make. Rising stocks are based on good decisions and a smidgen of good timing, and by the way, also add money to the economic ocean.

But money is not a population issue. More currency does not equal a bigger, biologically more successful population. Money is more akin to biological potential. It's the promise that it's capable of enormous growth if the conditions are right, and the guarantee that it will endure in a slower, even dormant state when conditions are bad. It is the sleeping code of the global genetic germ, activated like an allele, and deactivated by a drug.

Money can never be inherently creative, but the shadows it casts onto the world around it warp and bend like our own mortal umbras as we walk in the world. The challenge for creative people of widely divergent stripe is to recognize that money is not fundamentally what's important, even as the pursuit of money may be a necessity. Moreover, a creative class (potentially everyone alive, by the way) must get smart about what's going on. Money is an android with a mind of it's own. We created it; it required humanity to get up and walk. But once it set out into the world, it began to pursue it's own routes, pushing and pulling and influencing the world in ways that sometimes cause people of great intellect and purported integrity to disagree vehemently. If we're smart-- if we're paying attention and don't want money's limited, artificial intelligence to push us around-- we have a fighting chance to build a culture that values the subjective rather than the objective. I am moved much more deeply before the motley altar of beauty than at the sparkling altar of money. One radiates energy out into the universe, the other sits and gathers mass.

I would rather light up the night.

--MS

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Money's Value is a Matter of Perception

One Dollar, USWhat does it cost?

The question practically exists outside of time, outside the world. It's built into almost every transaction, and cost is not always a matter of money.

The old saying goes that you can have only two of the following: faster, better, or cheaper. Notice that the arrangement doesn't even require you to determine what kind of goods or service you're asking for.

Money is a measurement of condensed time. Money makes up for what sweat might possibly yield, or for what sweat simply cannot produce alone. A toaster is cheap, but no amount of independent labor from even a smart, motivated person will yield one.

But money is unlike most other human inventions. More than most other things, you want it. Don't pretend otherwise. Sure, you love your family and your freedom, but what do you spend literally two thousand hours a year pursuing doggedly? Like the slogan from the early days of MTV, "Too much is never enough." Pursuit of money sends us all to grinding labor, to endless stress, to acrimony and sacrifice, often with limited promise of lasting rewards. The madness is that it usually takes money to make money, or to make money in any substantive amount that tips the balance of future in a measurable way. That's why most of us are beholden to others who control deeper reservoirs of the stuff than we have.

But does it genuinely, authentically, deeply matter?

If you were to ask most people if they'd willingly abide the great works of art being cast onto a bonfire in return for ten bucks, I'd like to believe that most would say no, even if they knew nothing about art. But ask the same thing for ten million dollars, and I fear for our cultural legacy.

Money matters because it's a proxy for time, and time is the ultimate measure of value. Time means life. Money means you can buy the services that free you from labor, and the goods that facilitate--or promise, at least--comfort, pleasure, or confidence, and all of that means you have more time for life.

The problem is that money has become a misdirected proxy for meaning. We conflate the purchase power of money as a means to an end, as the reason to be alive. But see: we're artists here at 1AU. We already have reasons to live. There are photographs to make, poems to write, movies to produce, dances to choreograph. There are books to read and soups to taste and hands to hold. The size of bank accounts do not make those soups any more savory, those hands any warmer, those books any more compelling. As Pete Seeger said, "How can I keep from singing?"

The money isn't important.

Okay, I see it: you're cringing. Your face is tight, you've already glanced away, thinking you may not finish this naive prayer, this tale of misplaced, juvenile innocence. Just read a few more lines.

I'm fully aware of money's great power, just as I rightfully fear the power of the gun wielded by the undisciplined guerrilla fighter. Only fools pretend there's no potential for profound influence. The fantasy is always that we can James Bond that gun out of the fighter's hand, or, more on topic, suddenly find ourselves flush with cash. Do we want the gun? Nope. Neither do we want the cash. We want the freedom that each affords us. We want the autonomy, the security, the clarity about how to manage our next few precious minutes of this fleeting life. But consider that gun: what would you possibly do with it? Grabbing it gives you nothing but instantaneous sovereignty over circumstance. It neither feeds you, nor shelters your allies, nor brings you love.

Therefore my thesis solidifies. The pursuit of money may be a necessity of the modern world, just as more visceral pursuits are the immediate necessities of pre-industrialized cultures. But as a means to an end, it's worthless. It is it's own end: money pursues more of itself. The moment it gets any greater cultural value beyond being simply a tool, it becomes a false god.

Ironic, isn't it? As a media production team, we're in a very expensive industry, always scrabbling in a relentless pursuit for resources to achieve artistic visions. Artistic visions do not feed you nor shelter your allies either. But they are REAL. They are actual moments of meaning created out of chaos. They are subjective, and thus debatable, whereas money is always objective and outside the realm of debate. Without the ability to discuss or debate something's merits, value's proof evaporates like morning's bold promise yielding to daytime. We need money to do what we do, but it's not the money that matters in the end.

* * *

Next week we continue the bling-thing, with thoughts about money's easily misunderstood consciousness. It's true: it walks, it talks; we listen closely and have a few things to say...next week right here on the 1AU Blog "Faster than Light".

--MS

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