The Rut is a Path

“If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.”

― Martin Luther King, Jr.

It took a week to get the thethreesss urls (.com and .org) to point here. Technology is amazing, but what a time suck. I live to be in flow, but one thing I've learned on sabbatical is that we can learn as much if not more from being stuck, what George Leonard in Mastery calls "loving the plateau."

One of the great ideas I've had on sabbatical is called "The Visible Universe Project." It's kind of a Google Maps for time. I pitched the idea to a Google manager, who said he liked it and suggested that I develop it with a bunch of grad students, prove it has traction, and come back to him. That not what I wanted to hear. After putting everything I had into launching United Visual Arts, raising start-up capital while simultaneously quadrupling the revenue of the nonprofit I was also running (City Without Walls), and proving the concept behind my patent-pending defEYE® frame, including validation by the Museum of Modern Art no less, I felt like I already had way too much skin in the game. One of the many aspects of my stuckiness is needing to close UVA by year's end, despite having created something beautiful that has yet to see its day in the sun—other than a brief stint in MoMA's holiday catalog featuring a Marilyn by Warhol.

If you look closely at the image of the "Visible Universe" above, there's a pink curve that shoots off the top of the page in the center in a way that's different from all of the other data structures I plotted since the beginning of time. This is Moore's Law, or what Ray Kurzweil calls "the law of accelerating returns," predicting a singularity like the Big Bang that started it all billions of years ago or the Big Freeze that may end it billions of years hence (all also visible above). But this technological singularity could happen within a mere generation: a single, affordable, handheld device with computational powers many times greater than all the human brainpower on earth. This has been called a kind of "event horizon," beyond which predictions are impossible. Now THAT is a deep rut!

A friend of mine asked me to review chapters of a book he's writing about fundraising. From my years in the non-profit world, nothing seems more deadly than the work of development staff; they feel all the pressure and none of the rewards. My friend and his book, however, have allowed me to see otherwise: effective fundraising is the secret sauce behind all great social enterprise. With enough cash, you can accomplish almost anything; without it, mostly wishful thinking. One of his insights is that effective fundraising depends first and foremost on effective leadership. Now THAT helps me see beyond the rut.

My main feedback is that he needs to transform himself from a social-media curmudgeon into an apostle. Whatever the limitations of using these new media for fundraising today, it's all about relationships, and no matter how small or significant, every relationship in the future will be so mediated. As Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale (via Web 2.0 herald Tim O'Reilly) says, you've got to get in front of that parade. The most important "ask" in today's rapidly changing marketplace, as I learned today from Michael Schrage, is "who do you want your customers to become?" These changes will arise through storytelling, about which, even McKinsey & Co. recognizes, nonprofits (and screenwriters) can teach us a thing or two, and social media will be the primary vehicle for their transmission throughout society.

Hmmm. So let's put this all together: leadership, fundraising, and social media, with storytelling as the glue. A path appears from being present in the rut.

Columbus Day

An old friend who is a professor of political science read my last post and asked, why "no women" among the famous people I mentioned? He reminded me that in addition to Barry Commoner's death at 95, the great historian Eric Hobsbawm also died at 95 last week, though reported on page B19 instead of A1 of the same issue of the New York Times.

The two greatest lessons of history are "to the victor belong the spoils," and anicca, the Sanskrit word for "impermanence". How appropriate that the former was first uttered by a Nineteenth Century American in the early days of this country's long march to becoming the unrivaled superpower that it is today (New York Senator William Learned Marcy in 1832). The latter is one of the three marks of existence according to Buddhism, among the world's oldest teachings for how to overcome suffering; every victor is inevitably vanquished, though it can take years, generations or even millenia.

A friend sent me a press release last week, announcing his efforts to promote Italian-American culture. I was introduced to him by another friend who promotes Italian culture for a living—and with a much thicker Italian accent. She also introduced me to my first billionaire (yet another Italian American, but that's another story), and asked me once why I was surrounded by so many Italians rather than Jews like myself. Click on the map to my left to see the answer in terms of sheer statistical probability: Italians are the largest population by ancestry in the entire New York metro area.

In an article for London Review of Books on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's "discovery", Hobsbawm argues 1492 marked the first time in a thousand years that Europeans were engaged in conquering other lands rather than being conquered by Asians and Africans, a reversal that also included the expulsion from Spain of Jews and Muslim rulers. The Europeans expected to reshape the New World in their image, not the other way around. But the creative destruction that has transpired since then has been America's quintissential and hegemonic impact on the world.

Native populations have been vanquished throughout most of the Americas, now comprising less than 1% of the population in the U.S. and much of South America, but the map to the left shows they also still comprise major proportions of the population in some countries, as well as majorities in many subregions such as northern Canada. Click on the map below to see how despite this mass extermination over centuries, the echoes of these First Nations continue to reverberate in almost every American neighborhood today.

I am an assimilated American Jew, for example, living in a place called Weehawken, a word evolved from Lenape, meaning "rocks that look like trees" or maybe "at the end" (both probably refering to the mighty Palisades), having grown up celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Passover, and surrounded by a motley intergenerational mix of immigrants from Italy, Ireland, Cuba, Columbia, Dominican Republic, etc. The local, one-party (so-called "nonpartisan") spoils system is so complete and corrupt here that even the many local escapees from Communist states don't notice. Our political bosses are such masters of patronage that despite the occasional jail term, they would make "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em" Plunkitt of Tammany Hall proud, a direct lineage not only of 1492 but of the entire evolution of our species—one of the single greatest insights of a European in the New World.

My political science friend, who knew Hobsbawm personally, says he "despised the notion of identity in all its guises and took a lot of abuse and was marginalized in public discourse, mainly due to the liberal intellectuals who run the show in academia." It may seem anachronistic not to have named a famous woman (or, he might have added, person of color) in my last post. Feminists launched identity politics in its now multiple forms so many years ago, but it is easy to forget that it is all so recent in the grand scheme of things. With the same kind of statistical probability of my being surrounded by Italians, I could not possibly remember seeing a famous woman on a plane or person of color on the Upper East Side with the same ease that I can recall sitting across from Spalding Gray while we sipped hot chocolate on the top of a ski slope, because the forces of history had simply not allowed enough of them to reach such fame or fortune until just about now.

I could write ten more posts on the subject of identity politics in American history, and maybe I will. I think one I will call "Octoroon."

Dreaming of Eigenvectors

I’ve been asleep for 2 days with the flu gratis my teenager who stayed out too late Saturday night.

My special screenplay “advisor” told me my dream sequences are unrealistic: no one dreams about history and math. My new Canadian “friend” told me she’d teach me how to dream.

Now, after the acupuncturist and podiatrist both took their best stabs at fixing my foot (literally), I can’t go back to sleep (I promise to write soon about my right foot).

I’ve decided that I won’t find the right job until I can bring humor and romance back into my life.  

My life seems like such a dream, unrealistic in almost every way. My mother just emailed me asking if I took her to hear Ornette Coleman at the Palace Theatre in London when I studied there in 1980. She stuffed kleenex in her ears; I can still feel the percussion in my bones. I just love that she remembers that, and hope it’s a memory of “Type 2” fun (i.e., in retrospect, rather than real-time), and not torture. I remember the seats were blue, but maybe it was just the music.

That whole year was like a dream. I visited Eastern Europe before the Wall fell, as well as Morocco and much of England and Western Europe, using a student Eurail pass to sleep on trains and wake in a different country and city eight hours away. Sometimes, I ended up sleeping in a train station or behind bushes in a park, curled up in the revolving door of a commercial high-rise or on the dirt-floor of a home in a slum outside of Casa Blanca. (Don’t tell Mom!) I wore a bright green blazer with gold buttons and carried a backpack full of books I never read. I’ll never forget the supernatural feeling of leaping around the fells in the Lake District barefoot and covered in mud. All like a dream. 

After a cold-water flat or two, I lived with the Secretary to the President of the Polish Government in Exile, and visited the Gdansk shipyards just as Solidarnosc began to change the course of history. For my undergraduate thesis, I wrote a comparative biography of Lech Walensa and Mikhail P. Tomsky. After graduating, I moved to NYC and for several years shared a sixth-floor walkup with a Polish peasant in the East Village. He spoke no English and wore long johns to bathe in the tub in our kitchen. His feet smelled so much like the raw garlic he would eat to ward off whatever ailed him that I had to time my meals long before or after he took a bath. We communicated via shots of vodka on Friday nights. Despite rubbing Epson Salts on his sore muscles every day, I heard Danek died as soon as he returned to the old country. I just looked up his Polish name; it's origin is Hebrew, Daniel, about whom I wrote last week, and means "God is my Judge."

A few years later, while the Filipino filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik stayed with me, we watched (he filmed) from my window as thieves stripped his cousin's parked car like ants leaving only the apple’s core, after it had been hit in a drive by. The front-page photo of the military tank during the East Village squatter riots took place on the same spot, right in front of my building. I learned from Tompkins Park that a “revolution” can occur without anyone hearing just blocks away, and remembered from a college professor that poverty is the best preserver of history. The squatters are long gone and that block is now full of high-end cafés and tourists; I've made and lost my first million, and we continue to forget and to dream.

The most heroic act of the protagonist in my screenplay is to sell solar power to the nuclear industry to stave off disaster in 2027. I’m going to apply for a job to direct the solar strategy of the biggest nuclear power company in New Jersey. I’d be great at that job, but will never get it. Barry Commoner’s obituary was on the front page of New York Times this week, just before I fell asleep. He was one of the founders of the environmental movement in the U.S., ran for president and was on the cover of Time Magazine in 1970. The day before he died, while visiting studios in DUMBO, a friend of mine and I talked about our work with him years ago on a Brooklyn advisory panel. In the early 90s, Commoner asked me to be his successor, but withdrew the offer when I asked him when he planned to retire.

I am the most amazing job interviewer. More on that too in future blogs.

I received a letter from Al Gore praising one of my books that was reviewed side-by-side his in USA Today. I lost the letter. At least I got the VP to sign his book for me. And, somewhere, he has a signed copy of mine! Did I tell you about when Andy Warhol tried to pick me up on Second Avenue, and I brushed him off, mop head and all? Or when Allen Ginsburg corrected my English when I told him I lived on the top of the Palisade, just months before he died and while he was signing every scrap of paper in sight, like printing currency for his family?

There was a programmer who worked with me in the early 80s, who I joked once, “couldn’t figure out which disk drive to stick it in.” He finally found a girlfriend, and then was murdered on a NY subway before Bernie Goetz took revenge. A friend-of-a-friend became front-page news when he disappeared after leaving the late-night party on Canal Street where I had been hanging with him. Or how about the time that my grandmother insulted Tony Randall for smoking while we were eating at Sardi’s, or when Joe Moakley told me he worked for Congress after he asked me what I was did for a living. I watched Mike Wallace rip out newspaper articles while barking at an assistant, and John Kenneth Galbraith buried thick in a book as if he were on the plane all alone.

I got a full scholarship to study with Nobel Laureate Wassily Leontief even though I could never understand what an eigenvalue is. I still wake up thinking my degrees are just a dream, and that I only really know what I learned today.

And just like a dream, that ain't the half of it....

Calculating the Flip Side of Love

The most important calculation I ever made was simple subtraction: 

People of Color = Total Population – Non-Hispanic Whites 

I am the first person to define statistically what is a “person of color.” This of course may sound like an outrageous claim. But I know for certain that Public Data Access, Inc., a company I co-founded, was the first to file a Freedom of Information Act request for the 1980 ZIP-code Census, and to analyze these datasets for social science research in the early 80s after the phrase "colored people" had become taboo and was retired for the now-ubiquitous term "people of color."

That calculation, which came to me in my sleep in 1986, was used in a landmark study I coauthored that led to a Presidential executive order (No. 12898), public policy at all levels of government in the United States, and a new field of academic study called “environmental justice.” No one had bothered to aggregate all of these different population groups before; even our own study still used the term "minority percentage of the population." Some people knew I did this at the time, and it led to my being able to say on my resume that I was “an advisor to the Clinton Administration,” with several federal appointments and contracts to my name, as well as a string of influential publications. But mostly, it barely even registers as an historical footnote.

As a polymath provocateur, once I move onto my next challenge, others move in to stake claim for whatever ground I’ve laid. Most recently, for example, even before I left town, others tried to grab credit for initiating the City Murals program that I created from whole cloth, which can now boast more than two-dozen permanent, large-scale public murals throughout the City of Newark, created by contemporary artists working with inner-city kids, all of whom face incredible hardships and some even severe physical disabilities. When the program won New Jersey's top award for cultural access, because of a mural created with children in wheelchairs, I wasn't even invited to the ceremony.

Like Seth Godin’s professional lynchpins, when I “affirm that I am most fulfilled by championing others,” I must learn to separate passion from attachment. That’s an even more difficult challenge than loving without possessiveness.

It is Thich Nhat Hanh’s three-breath hug: 

1. I am going to die.

2. You are going to die.

3. We have just these precious moments together.

So profoundly ephemeral, so temporary, it may be life’s hardest lesson:

Loss is the flip side of love.