P'unk Avenue Window

Philly does not have a special tax on bloggers. All the outrage about this is silly and overblown. So why am I still ticked off at the city? Because Philly has a tax code that punishes new businesses, period.

Many news outlets are carrying the story of the “Philly blog tax.” This staff opinion piece in the Washington Examiner is typical. Bloggers are waking up to discover that the city demands they pay $300! Sarah Palin was right— the First Amendment is dead!

Except that’s not what happened at all.

1. These bloggers were deriving a (very small) amount of income from ads. They signed up for that, provided bank account numbers so Google or whoever could pay them, the whole bit. They were very much aware they were trying to make money, successfully or not.

2.They reported that income to the IRS.

3. The IRS made that information available to the city and state authorities, and the city did what it did with everyone who operates a business in the city: they required the business owner to pay their one-time, lifetime $300 business license fee.

The city is not gunning for bloggers or even looking for blogs at all. They are just reading the information the IRS gives them.

Bloggers who are not trying to make money- bloggers who are not running ads for a cut of the profit- are not being required to pay $300. There is no free speech issue here.

You can certainly argue that the city shouldn’t require a business license for entities that have not earned at least $100 in a given year. I would agree with you— $100 would be twice the city’s alternative $50 annual fee for those who don’t want to shell out $300 up front in the belief that their business will one day be viable. A $100 cutoff seems fair and sane.

You can also argue that local taxes are unnecessarily complicated, requiring small business owners to pay as much to accountants as they do to the local government because their tax software refuses to even consider handling every little municipality’s crazy unique tax code. I would agree with you there too. State and local taxes on personal and business earnings should be percentages of your adjusted gross income, or the corporate equivalent. Nothing more complicated than that. (Property tax is another story entirely.)

But the city is not specifically going after bloggers. They are doing what they have always done to collect taxes on all business activities in Philly.

Two recent Inky stories got the facts right, but it’s worth emphasizing the most important point: the city is responding to information from the IRS about people who reported business income to the feds but not to the city. That’s it, and that’s all. They have no idea which businesses are blogs. The underlying problem is that Philly punishes new businesses in general.

Non-fiction writers love to incorporate snippets of French in their prose. These petits fours provide emphasis, adding cachet to otherwise dry sentences. They are often italicized to avoid confusion and help the reader with pronunciation. After all, their purpose is to create an inclusive fraternité between author and audience, not alienate and embarrass.

Editorial writing offers opinion supported by facts. It contains a certain bourgeois entitlement, a privilege not afforded to provençal journalism, technical writing, and other blasé publication. It is that haute entitlement that elevates writing to an international level. The French language accoutrements of which I’m speaking can be employed to conjure lavish images the Belle Époch or tempestuous ones from the subsequent Fin de siécle.

With the newspaper industry’s raison d’etre waning, perhaps editors are taking a more laissez-faire approach to pretension. Widening the aperture of journalistic creativity might be the saving grace of our Quatrième État. We must grant impunity to our newspapermen from stylistic judgement. We only stand to benefit from expanded proverbial exercise in the print oeuvre.

Latin might be the eternal language of scholarship, but French is the language of culture… c’est la vie.

The present is experienced through the senses, mostly realtime, with some delay/buffering. The past and the future are experienced nonlinearly in the mind, via memory and extension/projection. The computer doesn’t do much for the present. It, and our interaction with it, allows us to store memory—photos, diaries, videos, lectures, history texts—and make plans for the future—talk to friends, buy tickets, research vacations, find a new job. The present happens when we close the laptop.

As intelligence increased we (westerners) became more and more literate. That literacy extended humanity and translated to an increased proficiency in experiencing the nonlinear. To transport ourselves to far away places, to become abstract, to escape ourselves and the captivity of the present. It seems we have accomplished that goal and then some. Memory is being outsourced by the petabyte. Every scientist’s goal is to predict the future so that he or she can alter it.

I’m guilty of treating the present as a passthrough that occurs between here and there. It’s that blurry part of our peripheral vision to the left and right of the thing we’re pursuing. I eat too fast. I ride my bike breathlessly. Technology is not to blame, we have developed it in order to extend ourselves. There isn’t really even any need for blame. I’m just curious, with all of this extension and breadth, what emphasis have I placed on my depth? I’m jealous of professional athletes, not for the lifestyle, but their precognitive ability. To catch a pass you have to be so in the present you’re really in the future.

Live in the now!

I talked with Isaac Schell after his recent opening about the motivation and inspiration for his pictures. At first he frame photography as a compulsion. A way to get an image out of his head. He later conceded that Garry Winogrand got it right by saying, “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.”

A picture I took, New York City

Photography is the invention of an impatient world. Insofar as It is a way to render a scene timeless, it varies little from the early functions of painting. However, the quickness with which photography can snapshot such a scene is where it has set itself apart. Photography is an enabler of faster-paced living. We augment and extend our memories by time shifting scenes. We can mediate a vacation through the lens, flatten an overwhelmingly deep scene, vignette a busy one, and most significantly grant ourselves a continuance to process and reprocess the witnessed event at later times. We mostly ignore the present, storing the past on SD cards, and fantasize about photographs we’d like to take in the future.

Beyond the documentary function of photography there are a number of post-structural functions, those that rely on the interpretation of the viewer. They fit nicely into three categories of design outlined by Donald Norman in his not so recent TED talk—the visceral, the behavioral, and the reflective.

The visceral function speaks to the content of a photograph. A pretty girl, a sunset, a landmark, violence, action, and so forth. These are the pictures in our albums and shoeboxes, gathering dust and yellowing as they attempt to preserve spent time.

The behavioral layer of a photograph contains its composition, the juxtaposition of objects, counterpoint, light and shadow, the mechanics of the scene. It is informed by and understood through the a knowledge of the operation of the camera/lens/film. These are the clever pictures we took in our first black and white photography class.

Lastly, the reflective function is that post-modern one, entirely reliant on the social context of a picture, entirely ignoring the visceral and behavioral. These pictures concern the backstory rather than the scene. They are new topographic photos of small town storefronts, street snapshots, Stephen Shore’s steak dinner, the mundane, photographs of nothing. They don’t have inherent meaning. The burden understanding their relevance falls entirely on the viewer, one with some knowledge of the history of photography and of the culture reflected by the mirror of these photographs.

When I take (I can’t bring myself to say “make a picture,” I’m just not that good at it) a picture I fixate on those functions of photography. I flex my eyes and brain too hard, it always seems to look like I tripped right before releasing the shutter. I end up a little too close, let some rogue element in the corner of the frame, or find perfectly dull flat light. By thinking about too many things, I accomplish very little in my picture-taking.

I get overly excited when I see that someone has unconsciously arranged their overflow recycling to look like a still-life—how quaint and lofty all at once, and Yes! it’s six PM with light hitting it at a wonderfully oblique angle. If I crouch just so, and take a step back, and stop down, and Click. Somehow I have managed to take nothing more and nothing less than a picture of garbage. It’s that other function of photography, the elusive and unteachable one, that contains a photograph’s aura.

I’ve been having an ongoing dialog/freakout with myself regarding authorship and creating content.

My degree is in folding metaphorical envelopes and I’m tired of licking them. I want to be a letter writer, but I have nothing to say.

But maybe that’s the point. For the sake of argument, there have only been a dozen or so original (archetypal) films ever made. Following those have been scores—six hundred or so a year—of genre films. Many of which are formulaic, the smarter of which do that reflexive meta Charlie Kaufman thing, where they acknowledge the formula. Fifty or so years of French films have used the modes of production over plot as vehicles for morality.

Maybe this is ok. Our brains are relational. We make connections and use them to process new things based on our previous experience. In the animal kingdom this probably helps animals decide what to do when they encounter an unfamiliar predator. In graphic design, museum art, music, film, and literature this is called vernacular. With culture ever reproducing, remixing, co-opting, we need these similes and metaphors.

When reviewing a movie for a friend I say, “it was sort of like Alien, but with that drug-stupor Spike Lee steadycam thing.” Or a band, “they’re kind of like Black Dice, but fun like Black Eyes, with the train wreck theatrics of Black Lips.”

At some point the snake might finish swallowing itself and we’ll be released from this cycle. For the time being I’m just going to have to keep making better envelopes with totally rad security patterns.

Katie Murken is a friend of P’unk Avenue. Geoff and Alex worked with her on the Debtor’s Inheritance project two years ago. She is currently the head of 2D Foundations at Tyler School of Art, leading classes in digital tools and printmaking.

Alex and I met her for some breakfast-for-lunch and continued a conversation about art and criticism begun while ice skating two Fridays ago. I took some rushed short-hand notes, so much of the following is paraphrased and polished to make us sound eloquent.

…

KM: I just got back from the Millay Colony [Hudson River Valley artist residency program] juries and enjoyed hearing Chris Stackhouse speak. His writing is really good. He expressed an interest in Philly.

RB: Yeah, I’d like to get in touch with William Pym and do a gallery tour or something.

[segue into talking about curation as creation]

RB+AG: But Does It Float is really great, pulling together beautiful editorials of contemporary and historically relevant art and design. Sometimes they are posting photos of the signage and wall cards from an installation, or the work of a seminal architect with his or her photo. Jason Kottke is about to give a lecture at SVA on curating the web. That should be really good.

KM: That sounds interesting. I just walked through one of the “Notations” shows at the PMA that Carlos Basvaldos curated. This idea of criticism AND creation through curating the permanent collection has become really relevant.

RB: Like the Vic Muniz show at MoMA [appropriately titled Rebus].

[Rick gets caught up in the theory of theory]

AG: I think you need to get away from the theory of theory.

KM: Yeah, I think slideshows and imagery are going to be necessary at this Junto to give context to the stuff you want to critique.

RB: I agree, definitely. I guess I am fixated on critiquing criticism. It’s just that the latest Art Forum has something like forty pages of writing and more than a hundred pages of ads. [It's become the Vogue of art criticism]

KM: Have you guys seen any of the Art 21 programming on PBS? [Sadly, no] What about the Biennials? Are they doing anything interesting for you?

RB: I liked the Whitney last year, I hated the 2006 one. I just feel like two hundred years ago the critics had artists wrangled, and it made the work narrow. Now the work is very broad and the critics are at the artists’ mercy. We need a Baudelaire to balance things out.

KM: So you’re into this Clement Greenberg thing? It seems like there’s a lack of critical expertise to discuss work that can’t be framed within Modernism.

RB: Critics haven’t updated their vocabulary. There’s almost no frame for this stuff. Going to a New York gallery can be an Emperor’s New Clothes experience. We went to art school, but feel stupid there. The wall cards are written by the artists. That feels really inappropriate. Critics need help us synthesize the work into something we can relate. Create an inclusive public vocabulary. A wide audience is going to these Superstar Retrospective shows, but missing out on all the more difficult work.

KM: I think there is a difficulty in translating something visual to something literate. The interview can be a really good critical tool. Asking questions of the artist can be an opportunity for straight talk.

RB: Yeah, I’m really interested in replacing the audio tour with the sound experience of replaying a gallery walk with Curator, Artist, Critic. Experiencing the work as you hear their dialog about it.

KM: When reviewing a show, nowadays, there is the curation and presentation of the show. That adds a layer of opacity over the work, it can make critique more difficult.

AG: Is there anything I said in there [gesturing to my notebook]? Damn, no AG’s.

Last night, in considering possible post topics for today, I emailed myself the following:

Creating space to experience art, Bresson walking slowly backwards out of the room so as you want to follow him, Eno wanting to leave things out, while players want to hear themselves play. Making a cool medium from a hot one. Film with the lights off. White websites. A new function of modernism, subjective, interactive. John cage, lettng the audience hear itself, it’s contribution to the music. Trying to squint your ears to eaves drop after thinking you heard your name. Drawing in the audiences attention. Having them come to you, never demanding it.

Private, personal, contemplative aesthetics, subjective, conversational.

This morning I forwarded that to Alex, asking him to run a litmus test on the idea:

Just pick something that isn’t an argument built on top of your deep
vocabulary. If it can’t be said with simple words, fuck it.

What I mean is this: we eat carefully presented meals slower than we inhale reheated chili. When my mashed potatoes have a leafy garnish stuck in them I feel the need to meet the chef halfway. It makes me eat with as much care as went into the preparation of the food.

When a doctor whispers instructions in that hush way that gives us goose bumps we listen intently to every word. When our parents used to scold us we shut off and let the scolding wash over, perhaps some of it was absorbed as vibration through our skin.

In art this idea is leveraged through the use of negative space. We fill in the parts that are empty. In music we use the negative space to anticipate the next note. It creates drama. When something appears deliberately sparse or still we engage it to find out why it is so.

To expand on the examples I listed last night: I love Robert Bresson’s films because he makes us do work. He used non-professional actors, calling them models. They deliver their lines flatly, they move stiffly, the camera moves very little. He creates a very deliberate mystery with all of this negative space and we get sucked in to equalize the pressure.

In an interview for Tokion magazine a few years ago, Brian Eno mentioned an essay by Warren McCulloch called What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain. The premise is: our eyes constantly fight off habituation. If we stop scanning a room the rods and cones stop transmitting new information. A frog’s eyes habituate on purpose. It’s what makes the fly buzzing about the main object of the frog’s interest. This idea has been put to use in Eno’s minimalist music for quite a while. He creates a ground for our ears to absorb, then plays with themes and accents that float above that ground.

That bit of positive space surrounded by negative is our fly. When it’s left room to breathe, we gobble it up.

This morning my barista asked me if I enjoyed my cappuccino. I responded in the affirmative, and then I asked him if anyone ever told him that they didn’t like their cappuccino. He said that people rarely say anything unless he specifically asks. He went on to explain that when he asks, people might say, “Well it could have been a little dryer” or something like that. He said he likes to know because he is very willing to make another and to get to know how people like their drink.

I had been thinking about the issue of feedback in relation to the medical field over the weekend, so I said, “It is great that you can get that instant feedback and respond to it. It is not like the medical field where doctors and nurses often do not get follow-up information based on their treatment.”

I know that is quite a jump, but thinking about how people get feedback is core to improving pretty much anything we do as humans. In a field like medicine, it seems like we have created institutions that make it difficult for the people on the ground (doctors and nurses) to get feedback on how their treatment plans are working except in the more critical situations. However, my barista has the ability to get direct feedback, learn my preferences and build an on-going relationship.

Consider the situation where you call your child’s doctor when they are ill. They will give advice based on what you tell them and then hang up. Sometimes the advice works. Other times you end up in the emergency room. And for the most part, your doctor doesn’t hear about the end result. Most importantly, they don’t ask for feedback on their advice. They don’t say, “Drop me an email to let me know how things work out” or “Here is how to call me back directly.” You are free to call into the emergency line and talk to whoever is on duty at the moment, but you are not given a direct way to contact them. If it turns out to be serious and you go to the emergency room, they might get a letter from the physician in the hospital (if you request it to be sent) or they might hear about it months later at your next appointment. If their advice is useful and helps heal you, they will likely never hear about it.

But, why?

We all learn from experience. Experience means that you get feedback on what you do, process it and it has an impact on what you do in the future. Let’s hope that most of the time a doctor’s medical advice is confirmed by the feedback they get, but why should we assume that is always going to be the case? As an advocate for life-long learning, I fear that medical institutions are denying our medical professionals the opportunity for on-going learning and direct feedback.

However, our cafe system is pretty healthy. Even in chains like Starbucks, it is really easy to get to know your barista and for your barista to get to know how you like your coffee. I don’t mean to diminish the value of that experience because I believe that a good barista can probably contribute to your health and keep you out of the medical system, but…

I think the biggest take-away for me is to ask people for feedback. My barista this morning is close to the people he serves. He asks, he learns, and he improves his product.

So, the tricky people that defined the word semantics thought they could keep things simple by limiting its definition to the study of the literal meaning of words, leaving the interpretation of figurative meaning up to the folks in pragmatics.

But who studies the contextual meaning of words? The hermenauts look at the whole text and more recently even concern themselves with multimedia, but they aren’t looking through the text. Linguists look at language in social context, but what about aesthetic context? We’ve all been told that the form is central to content and meaning, but what exactly is its effect?

There is a way to break down the aesthetic context of messages and to determine the stylistic etymology of various forms. Currently this is done in art criticism, but doesn’t share across the hallway to the language department.

As modern art purged formal content and started eating its own plasticity, new discourse emerged to contextualize the new functions of art. Painting about painting, the Hip-hop remix, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, all that stuff.

My point is this: since the terms “graphic design,” “graphic arts,” “visual communication” came into existence people rarely read/view/absorb undesigned texts. They are increasingly aware that they are viewing designed texts, they’ve seen the Helvetica documentary, they like this logo and hate this one.

How do we begin, then, to parse the meaning of the aesthetic context of all of this designed information? If I make a word red or bold or blurry it changes its interpretation and thus its meaning. Why red? Why bold? Why blurry?

Ironically, pictorial imagery and symbolism developed before language, maybe we just forgot to pay attention to red and bold and blurry while we absorbed everything via romantic longhand set in Caslon.

Today I looked out our window and saw someone delivering Grid, a new magazine about sustainablity in Philadelphia. It spurred me to write about some ideas that I care about.

If you know me, you know I am pretty passionate about solving urban problems, and that I am constantly cooking up schemes to this end.

One of these is to create neighborhood compost spots. I hypothesize that people can join the neighborhood compost co-op, get a key and drop off rotting vegetables in a centrally located, locked compost bin. Co-op members would take turns aerating the compost. Possible locations could include a small area in a city park or community garden. Locked. Community-run. Feel-good fun.

Needless to say, I have not gotten around to this initiative. Fortunately, it looks like the Pedal Co-op in Philadelphia is taking on the problem of urban composting. For $2.50, they will pick up a 3 gallon bag and delivery it to compost bins in a community garden. Currently they give the compost away to community gardens.

As an urban pedestrian, bike rider, and mostly mass-transit user, I have often dreamed of a car-less city. When people say I am crazy, I have always said, “If you remove the cars, other businesses and solutions will spring up to replace what the car does.” The Pedal Co-op is an example of the type of business that I mean. Human-powered delivery and transport would certainly flourish. Subways and trolleys would benefit. Cities would become more livable, and asthma rates would drop.

What else?