indefatigablog

I met Bradley Bergey in Seattle where we worked together for two years at the Children’s Institute for Learning Differences on Mercer Island.

Around the same time, we each moved from Seattle to different parts of the world : I moved to Alaska and he moved to Mexico City. Over the next 4-5 years, we visited each other regular and I had the good fortune of watching him evolve from a naturally gifted painter into a focused and even more talented artist.

To boot, he’s an amazing educator, the kind of teacher I’m jealous his students get to have. World-traveled, intuitive, imaginative, playful and wise beyond his years - he’s a bona fide compliment to the practice.

Recently, Bergey was featured in Art and Letter, a monthly webzine focused on Architecture, Art and Design.

You can read the interview in its entirety here, if you likey.

He’s our pal and we’re very proud of him : )

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Have you ever wondered why they call it television “programming”?

Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that it INFLUENCES people how to behave would it?

Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that it TEACHES people to adopt an identity that isn’t their own would it?

Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that it CONVINCES people that they need to act a certain way to be COOL would it?

Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the WORLD would be a better place without it would it?

Fact : programming is programming you.

Yet Another Reason To Get Rid Of Your TV :

Is ANYONE here to make friends?

This “reality” makes me think there’s not much difference between television programming and how these people feel/think at work, at home and in society at large.

Are YOU here to make friends or are you just here to *win*?

You *winners* aren’t able to answer that honestly and that’s ok - you didn’t come here to make friends.

The rest of us didn’t come here to make friends with self-serving bullies.

Sadly, according to this study, the bullies aren’t going away any time soon.

It’s easy to get down about this but, fortunately, there ARE good people around who help balance them out : )

The only catch is, you won’t see or *meet* any of them on TV.

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My pal Steve turned me on to this essay, written in 1999 by Neil Stephenson.

Highly recommended.

Here’s an excerpt :

If I can risk a broad generalization, most of the people who go to Disney World have zero interest in absorbing new ideas from books. Which sounds snide, but listen: they have no qualms about being presented with ideas in other forms. Disney World is stuffed with environmental messages now, and the guides at Animal Kingdom can talk your ear off about biology.

If you followed those tourists home, you might find art, but it would be the sort of unsigned folk art that’s for sale in Disney World’s African- and Asian-themed stores. In general they only seem comfortable with media that have been ratified by great age, massive popular acceptance, or both.

In this world, artists are like the anonymous, illiterate stone carvers who built the great cathedrals of Europe and then faded away into unmarked graves in the churchyard. The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire culture.

Disney World works the same way. If you are an intellectual type, a reader or writer of books, the nicest thing you can say about this is that the execution is superb. But it’s easy to find the whole environment a little creepy, because something is missing: the translation of all its content into clear explicit written words, the attribution of the ideas to specific people. You can’t argue with it. It seems as if a hell of a lot might be being glossed over, as if Disney World might be putting one over on us, and possibly getting away with all kinds of buried assumptions and muddled thinking.

But this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from the command-line interface to the GUI.

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself–and more than just graphical. Let’s call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.

If you wish, you can download and read his essay in its entirety here.

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Until today, I was not perfectly clear on the words to the iconic tune by Men At Work, let alone the subversiveness of them :

Traveling in a fried-out combie
On a hippie trail, head full of zombie
I met a strange lady, she made me nervous
She took me in and gave me breakfast
And she said,

“Do you come from a land down under?
Where women glow and men plunder?
Can’t you hear, can’t you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover.”

Buying bread from a man in Brussels
He was six foot four and full of muscles
I said, “Do you speak-a my language?”
He just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich
And he said,

“I come from a land down under
Where beer does flow and men chunder
Can’t you hear, can’t you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover.”

Lying in a den in Bombay
With a slack jaw, and not much to say
I said to the man, “Are you trying to tempt me
Because I come from the land of plenty?”
And he said,

“Oh! Do you come from a land down under? (oh yeah yeah)
Where women glow and men plunder?
Can’t you hear, can’t you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover.”

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Surely, there are many people who strongly disagreed with his views. More conservative folks especially would rather he hadn’t reached the levels of success he did. He made a career out of stirring the pot and providing balance to the hard right and its overwhelming amount of political correctness and closed-mindedness about the world.

Known as the guy who took black humor to new heights, George Carlin also left a footprint on the media world, having ridiculed television for the seven dirty words you can’t hear.

In minutes, he could make us all question what we’ve just always been told.

That’s scary for a lot of folks.

For others, it’s just good exercise :

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