Category: Media

Peeve of the Day: Runner’s World

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I subscribed to Runner’s World magazine last year, just a few months after I started a walk-jog program detailed in their Runner’s World Complete Book of Women’s Running. I found both the Runner’s World site and magazine useful at the time, however, my interest waned and by the time they started sending me offers to renew, I decided it wasn’t worth it.

Then came the endless emails from other Rodale properties in my in-box. Figuring they were an upstanding company, I dutifully clicked unsubscribe on the emails.

But the mails kept coming, and each time, less relevant to me than the last.

And imagine my surprise when I received the latest issue of Runner’s World, with my subscription continued to 2010…and then the bill stating:

Dear Laura ****,

We’re puzzled.

We renewed your subscription to RUNNER’S WORLD as requested.

We’ve sent 4 previous reminders.

But as of 09/02/09 our records show that we still have not recieved your payment of $21.94.

Well, Rodale – I’m puzzled, too! You see, I ignored your previous mails because I had no interest in renewing. Yet you sent me new issues anyway, and now a bill for Runner’s World for $9.94 more than if I bought it on Amazon. This, plus the unending spam in my in-box has made me wary to purchase any other Rodale products.

I’ve sent an email to their customer service, and am rather skeptical that I’ll hear back. One Step Ahead has yet to respond to my unsubscribe request, so who knows where this will lead.

Magic(k)al Thinking

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Welcome to Monday, folks.

Last Thursday Jon and I went to see Erik Davis (author of Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV (33 1/3) and The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape) speak on Aleister Crowley. It was an interesting lecture which strung together some video clips showing the influence of Aleister Crowley on film, music, and spirituality. It was a compact lecture, and could have gone into greater detail – but what are you going to do with a late night, 2 hour lecture?

I try to be a fairly unsuperstitious person. All supernatural beliefs, in my mind, fall under magical thinking – though a quick Google search shows that others will quickly classify their chosen beliefs as being not magical, but all others being such. My interest in consistency makes me wave my hands, if only because to say that you don’t believe in ridiculous magical thing A but believe strongly in ridiculous magical thing B, for whatever reason, just seems silly.

I know of a few people who have taken Aleister Crowley very seriously, and Erik Davis shared with us some video of a Christian televangelist in the 1980’s warning that Led Zeppelin was more or less trying to invoke the devil in their live shows (not to mention the backwards masking, which we didn’t get into, but I’ve heard tons about over the years.) Years ago, I read The Magick of Thelema: A Handbook of the Rituals of Aleister Crowley, which, more than anything, I got the sense that good ol’ Aleister Crowley was having a laugh. The question seems to be, did he take himself seriously? Was he anything like the rumors of L. Ron Hubbard (who had less than 6 degrees of separation from A.C.)? Was he just doing it to see how much power he could exert over others? Was it the combination of heavy-duty hallucinogens, harsh climates and magical thinking that created the cosmology of Mr. Crowley?

The conclusion I came to, years ago, is that Aleister Crowley was Ha-Ha-Only-Serious. Even if you strip out all the concepts of “real” in the rituals and dismiss the belief that any supernatural creature can be invoked, the role of these ideas in the brain is a powerful one. Rituals and the supernatural have a place in society, and continue to exert power over the masses, regardless of what brand you subscribe to. Even atheists are vulnerable in that their non-belief gives a contrasting tension that gives the believers something to work from. Atheists cannot get away from the impact that magical thinking has on society. I see Aleister Crowley as a brilliant, warped, drug infused, megalomaniacal madman whose only power was granted to him by followers and those who feared him (and I guess, sometimes both.) His influence through the years is what keeps him interesting.

This Friday, Jon and I are scheduled to see Mike Daisey perform his monologue The Last Cargo Cult. Until Jon told me of this monologue, I hadn’t heard about the Cargo Cults. To put it short – when Americans used South Pacific islands as bases in the 20th century, they brought their wealth and technology with them – and when they left, they took it away. The islanders, to summon that wealth back, took to creating meticulously crafting radios, runways, planes, all non-functioning, made of local materials, and holding rituals. The description for Mike Daisey’s work states: “Their religion is explored alongside our own to form a sharp and searing examination of the international financial crisis. Daisey wrestles with the largest questions of what the collapse means, and what it says about our deepest values. Part adventure story and part memoir, he uses each culture to illuminate the other to find, between the seemingly primitive and the achingly modern, a human answer.”

Magical thinking is alive and well in our society today. Mike Daisey’s monologue should prove interesting.

“It’s like reality television, but for books!”

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Going to the gym is indulging in irony. Any gym you go to there will be thumping music, television and magazines. Unless you’re lucky enough to remember to bring your book or your iPod, you’re in a situation where you can spend an hour or more staring at other people or at the equipment, or pass your gaze over cable TV or a magazine, or sometimes switching between the two. The content of both cable television and the magazines is guaranteed to be interspersed with commercials and content that might as well be a commercial, all driving you to a vague sense of unease that can only be cured by purchasing or indulging in the flashing images and the ads in the sidebar. I get hungry for specific and unhealthy pseudofood while at the gym, while images of Ore-Ida frozen potatoes, Haagen-Dazs ice cream and Tyson frozen chicken nuggets tempt me.

Yesterday I picked my poison in the form of Real Simple magazine, which was nicely provided by my gym for my distraction. Flitting my gaze between Wolf Blitzer and faux simplification, I eventually found an article that seemed worth reading by A.J. Jacobs (author of The Year of Living Biblically. ) Of course, I didn’t realize he was also the author of The Year of Living Biblically, I only knew that he was the author of the upcoming book The Guinea Pig Diaries, whose title I discarded due to me not particularly caring until now.

The article was an abridged excerpt from his new book, focusing on the actual effort to simplify and organize life by unitasking. It turns out, in case you didn’t know, that any feelings of increased productivity by multitasking is a lie. We actually lose productivity when we try to multitask, and I would argue, lose some intimacy with our surroundings making multitasking at best a time sucker and at worst downright dangerous (eg. talking on a cellphone + doing anything else.) The excerpt read like an article in the Shambala Sun: unitasking as a conscious effort of mindfulness and full experience of a singular action. There were elements in the excerpt that included contemplations on patience and the hard work that is bringing your mind back from distraction. All good lessons, and a great reminder to me, as a chronic multitasker, that I should take this lesson to heart.

I found myself a little disappointed, though, when I found out just who the author of this piece was. This is based solely on the fact that A.J. Jacobs is a writer who basically logs a portion of his life, then packages it into a book. It’s what happens when you turn a blog into a book. It’s reality television, with the pretense of being unscripted, but packaged into a book giving a more virtuous veneer to a genre that I’m not sure deserves attention. I’m not saying that A.J. Jacobs is a bad writer – in fact, I enjoyed reading the excerpt and think that he made some valid points, however, this is just one book in a string of books where he sets off on a quest for the purpose of his own self-discovery and then writes about it.

Maybe I’m jealous. I’m a blogger (though, if not for Google Analytics, I would not believe anyone read this thing), and I’d love to be published some day – but not for the content of my blog. I do have to wonder, though – what makes these bloggers-turned-published authors more deserving of royalties than the next guy? A.J. Jacob’s schtick seems to be putting himself in awkward situations and writing about it. Julie Powell, author of Julie and Julia, turned her blog into a best selling book, and now a well-received Hollywood film starring Amy Adams and Meryl Streep. Why shouldn’t any person’s mundane life be profitable?

I aspire to high art. I can only believe that my art background before college, and the two years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago infected me with this idea that there is good art, and there is bad art (or non-art, if it’s really bad), and I know the difference. Maybe we, as a culture, have reached a state of media saturation, of too many choices, leading us to consume junk food for our brains as well as our bodies. It’s not that junk food is bad necessarily, it’s just in the quantities that we’re consuming it.

You know, necessitating us to buy our gym memberships to balance the chicken nuggets and fries we had for lunch.

“There’s some bad art over here.”

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I don’t remember who said it. It was later in the week at Burning Man in 2000, it was dark, and we were in the middle of the playa surrounded by the ring that is Black Rock City. My company for the evening was a motley bunch of individuals from Colorado. Some of the art on the playa was not well lit, and depending on the evening, you could count on tripping on something that wasn’t properly lit or marked. While we walked from one side of the city to the other, I heard a male voice say, “There’s some bad art over here!” There was a lot of giggling involved as we tried to make sure we avoided tripping over any art, and carefully avoided the even the spectre of art as we continued on. It didn’t take long before we all were muttering that there was bad art somewhere.

Bad art is everywhere, included in well-curated galleries and museums. Contemporary art movements of the 20th century was to art what Free Verse was to poetry: a few skilled people doing it well, and many more people doing it badly. It begs the age-old question, “what is art?” To me, art is largely contextual. Anything can be art, but not everything can be good art.

Last weekend I had the immeasurable treat to see the Seattle Art Museum’s exhibit, Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-1978. The show takes from some of the best works of that period that challenged the art world by using atypical media to paint and create. It included the art of some of my personal favorites, including Jim Dine and Jaspar Johns. There were even a few Yoko Ono pieces. It was a breath of fresh air and made my spirits light. Granted, whoever the new curator of SAM is, they’ve changed the museum for the better, making it a place I want to live, much like MoMA used to be, or the Art Institute of Chicago is.

Installations are a tricky piece of work. Not everyone can do it well. One of the best works I’ve seen all week was at a gallery last night, the Lawrimore Project where just a few days before a fire lit by a transient burned a piece that was parked behind the gallery titled “There Goes the Neighborhood.” Though it is no doubt a tragedy that the piece was set alight, charring the outside of the gallery building, whether on purpose or not – the unintentional creation was art in itself. Maybe I appreciate the cinders because they lack the irony that infuses so much art these days. Like the collection of found objects arranged in an arbitrary space, the remains of this little trailer house that was dropped off in neighborhood after neighborhood had been transformed into a charred shell that had the unmistakable smell of burnt wood and petrochemical furnishings, ready for our experience.

While mixing with some other gallery goers in the “bar area” by the cinders, the question came up as to whether the fire created a new, better work of art. It is, after all, infused with more emotion and drama that is easily palpable compared to some of the other works in the gallery, which are arguably more subtle in their meaning.

The best art on the playa at Burning Man in 2000 was the art that wasn’t there. You see, with my new friends from Colorado, we experienced together a piece of art that we were more than positive was there. I remember the structure well, and it was a massive piece of work. Later on, though, as we dared to get closer, we couldn’t actually find the art that we had been trying to avoid.