Last night’s show on Learning had a great full house which participated more than ever. Is it getting cliche that I keep writing first lines in these rundown’s full of exultation? If it’s not such a great night, I will definitely say so. My general inclination is to be inclusive and listen to everyone, but the show does need to watch for interruptions whether its from audience members or myself as one audience member kindly pointed out to me after the show. I’m not being ironic. She gave me some good feedback. One of the threads that had the most traction throughout the night was gender. Do we learn better in sex segregated environments as one audience member Don suggested? Does the reported increased sexual activity of gay people affect the kids they raise? That question prompted a heavy number of guest and audience comments.Early childhood education expert Tracy Burt said that the research neither supports that LGBT parents with kids have increased sexual behaviour or kids who turn out much different that any other, except that they’re slightly more sensitized to inequality. I commented that I don’t know any gay or queer people who are in out relationships that have had any children accidentally. An early childhood educator in the audience and guest Tracy said that the said that the elements that matter most for learning and growing as a child are: responsiveness, dependability, stability and a few more things that I can post after I hear all the tape :-) A woman of East Indian origin told a hilarious story about how she learned about sex when her mother was chastising her brother for making so much noise with his wife the night before: “Can’t you be a considerate like your father? He did his business and turned over and went right to sleep.”Our first guest, comedian Bill Santiago talked about his obsession with tango and what a difference it makes to be exposed to music early in life. He also said there are 3 year old kids who can tango. Exposure came up again many times as something that enables us to learn things. Bill told us the story of the first time he tangoed and was led by another man who was constantly disappointed in him. “He wasn’t gentle,” but Bill overcame the trauma to come back to the dance two years later. He also had a hard time learning learning swing because there was no syncopation. Tango has obsessed him because “the only men who are really pretty good at it are all over 70. So I got time.”Bill also spoke up about the importance of fun in learning. “I was home recently and looked through my old report cards. I thought I’d done well, but I had a paper with an F+. That’s really an insult…”we know you tried and you still failed.” He said that kids aren’t going to bother learning something unless it’s fun.Singer Michelle Citrin showed how easily we learn cues with her song Who I Am. Michelle spoke a lot about the need to survive as a driver of learning. If you need to know something you’ll learn it. For example, even though she grew up in a two-language household, her Hebrew got rapidly better when a recent trip to Israel forced her to speak the language in order to eat and navigate each day. She also spoke of the value of a means of self-expression in teenage years, like a guitar.The value of sensory-motor and musical techniques for teaching was discussed. Apparently music and dance are extremely valuable ways to teach kids who have difficulty in school. Unfortunately, if you want to making a living at them, as Bill pointed out, they’re less valued.Tracy Burt had an awful lot to teach us. There was so much chunky goodness, I’ll put most of it in the highlights below.

Highlights and Links

• Tango Video Project
• “We are always learning. Kids in school are always learning. The question is what is it they are learning?” Tracy Burt
• You need to have a nurturing, reponsive person in your life as a young child in order to lay the foundation to be able to learn almost anything the rest of your life. There’s another opportunity as an adolescent to get this, but then after 25 in because extremely difficult.”
• We remember 10% of what we hear, 20% of what we see and hear, 50% of what we see, hear and do and 80% of what we teach another person.
• There are 9 temperments that are set biologically
• Our brains are “plastic,” meaning they are able to change our entire lives. But the most important tendencies are set by 3.
• Audience member Samuel said that,as hard as he’s tried, he can’t seem to learn a foreign language. One of our regulars, Beverly, was sitting near Samual and also turns out to be a linguistic therapist. Evidently we learn language by chunking. To encourage both necessity and desire, Michelle, Bill and the audience suggested he find a French lover who does not speak English at all.
• We all learned the word rhythmicity, which describes an aspect of temperment. Do you like life to be steady or for the pace to vary?

My pal Rob Lord’s company. What a great name—Pioneers of the Inevitable. What a beautiful site and application and work process and core idea. With killer t-shirts to boot. The whole thing makes me want to bake cupcakes and dance around.

Phenomenal life lesson: whatever is happening (even if it’s as big as the web) you can always draw a bigger frame around it.

Check out more of designer J Koshi’s stuff.

Coming out is not just about the gender of the people you desire. It’s about being your whole self, in public. It’s about honesty. It’s about transparency. It’s about difference and togetherness. It’s about self-acceptance, not waiting for the acceptance of others. It’s about integration. It’s about the whole cookie. I wish it, in all aspects of life, for you.

This is an excerpt from my book-in-progress An Honest Living which tracks my search for meaning through work. This Google/Youtube deal reminds me of a moment in the heat of the coke frenzy of the dot com boom. I am sure that the deal is inspiring startup CEOs everyone to create a Powerpoint slide of delusional correlations like the one I discuss below. There are 250 Video start-ups revising their pitches as I write this based on this logic. “They do video..we do video. They’re worth 1.6 BN, We’re worth at least 390 MN!” Perhaps attention-needy blondes everywhere should be revising their own pitches too: “Paris does slutty…I do slutty. My valuation just went up over 1000%!” Tip of the mental hat to AAN.

My girlfriend is a tech reporter. That’s the other group where there are lots of women. These guys love to talk about themselves and it seems like they didn’t have any contact with women till they were adults. Put a reasonably attractive, intelligent woman in front of them and they’ll tell them anything. I spend my time at the conference with the writers. I enjoy them more than everyone else. They get to say what they really think. I have to be excited! about! ! whenever! I ! talk! to! anyone! to convince! them! that! they! should! know! us!

CEO! wants me to just call up the studio where I used to work and do a deal with them. He wants me to do this with everyone I’ve ever had a relationship with. I don’t want to do this unless we have something real to offer in exchange: a real deal. I learned this first year law school: the difference between a gift and a contract. Of course you only need a peppercorn worth of value to make it a legally binding contract, but I’m having a hard time coming up with a peppercorn for potential partners. I don’t want to suck people in and then have them resent the hell out of the deal. I understand why I’m the 4th business development person in a couple of years. I resist the scorched earth policy on my Rolodex. I’ve been at enough companies to know this won’t be my last job and I don’t want to ruin my reputation on it.

But promise of value is a peppercorn. I just don’t understand that yet. Business is changing right before my eyes. I meet S, one of my girlfriend’s friends who has a new start-up. He’s convinced 8 friends to work on it for next to nothing. They Believe in it. He used to date her before I did and so it feels a little tense. I ask him about his business as a way to bond. He is an engineer and he’s building tools to create online communities. Boy that sounds vague to me.

“How are you planning to market it?” I challenge him.

“We’re counting on a lot of word of mouth.”

I am dumbfounded. I think he’s naive as hell. No marketing plan? Community as a business? We’ve all been doing that online in the web scene but how is that a business? Where ‘s the business model? S later sells his business to Excite for millions.

At work the next day, CEO! shows a few of us the presentation he is taking to potential investors. He lists public Internet companies and the number of page views they are receiving (that’s the number of times people are viewing a web page at their sites). He also lists the number of their “members” and besides each, their valuation. As if a company is worth some dollar amount based on the number of times someone looks at their site! Below these other companies he lists ! and it’s number of page views and then its valuation. It is a crazy number. It is a crazy slide. I cannot believe my eyeballs.

That’s what he’s basing all this on: the number of “eyeballs’ that looked at something made at ! even though we have no ad salesperson, zero ads and can’t even account for the number of page views we do have to our partners (something I’m supposed to deliver). He thinks we’re worth that arbitrary amount of money. What happened to making money? I miss the days when I stacked shelves with real things to buy that people really want. I imagine a conversation with my Uncle Jack about all of this. We have nothing on the shelves. We are slipping everything to the back of the stack. There is no chocolate bar in front. Nothing to buy or hold in your hand. Market share. Eyeballs.

This year, in the Net fashion of the year, SXSW is having panels selected by you and me: the public. I’ve got a few suggestions in the mix. I’m planning on defintely attending the conference and bringing/podcasting The Heather Gold Show there. If you’ve got great Austin venue or guest suggestions, let me know.

Like a fresh peach, pick these ideas here. What do you think about these ideas? Do you RSVP to events? Please comment. I’m listening.

You’ve Got Your Chocolate in my Peanut Butter

Creating shows for the Net and television together. Why neither one will kill off the other. The interweave between social community and creative content isn’t new, but is now the basic building block of a growing show in the brand new era in which this is possible. Hear from people approaching this connection from traditional media networks, online media networks and successful independent creators.

Context: The Next Layer of the Net

The Net has brought us more information. More text, more images, more audio and now video. And the future only promises to bring us more access to more of it in more places. How do we find things when we don’t know specifically what we want? After “web 2.0” enables the average user to create even more stuff, the next layer of the Net needs to help it all make sense. This session combines experts on technologies and individual curators and communities that are already creating context and not just more stuff.

A New Commons: Beyond Affinity Groups

The political realm stopped being a realistic commons some time ago. America is now described as “red” and “blue” or “black” and “white.” The web has accelerated the growth of affinity groups and “tagged” identities. How is a commons possible, in which those who are different or in disagreement or self-contradictory to meet and engage with one another? The trick is to create space in which people can be their whole selves (all their affinities and more) together.

RIP RSVP

Our sense of social obligation is shifting as we live busier and more transient lives. Replies are no longer held up by action. Upcoming.org identifies some social options as being “watched” and not even attended. Dodgeball assumes that planning isn’t part of our connecting. Are technologies helping create our changing communication around commitments or are they helping us have more connection in a culture that wants to avoid social commitment? What does a a real friendship mean in an era of Myspace friends and can the net help these friendships and commitments be ongoing and reliable in the RL (real world :-) How are our views of personal relationships affecting the evolution of business as service and relationship management and vice versa?

60 Minutes has been my Sunday evening pleasure for a long time.
Who’s next on the show? Pat O’Brien? Aw hell, why not Brittany Murphy?

L to R: Rob Delamater, Anthony Marshall, Heather, Jill Slater

The shows just seem to be getting better and better. September’s show explored how we can value the past in the present with three grerat remixers. Rob started things off by showing several paintings and objects that were meaningful to him. First was this self-portrait by artist Peter Witwer who was murdered not long after he made the painting.

Rob kept this painting for himself after he and his partner at Lost Art bought the entire collection of Witwer’s paintings from a descendant. He loves the aesthetics of the painting but the story just as much, and said he felt it was his job to share these stories with the people who buy the work at his Salon. It’s that story that he finds holds the power in a piece of art or an object. “its a way of ensuring it will be valued. If I can craft a true story about an object or an image, then there’s a better chance it will survive.”

Rob also shared a story about his dad’s fascination with creating animatronic figures. He would take the family mannequin shopping to have parts for these puppets and Rob would sleep with mannequins in his room as a child. Jill spoke about leading a hora of over a thousand people at Burning Man (apparently there is now a Black Rock JCC) and edified the audience on the specifics of what a hora is and what it means. At the wedding of a Russian-Jewish couple’s last child, they are lifted up in the hora as well, with wreaths on their head. Where Jews in Russia got wreaths is beyond me, but that’s the deal and it’s called the mezzinka. It was hard for Jill to focus on one topic only as she said “my whole life is about connecting with the past.”

Anthony talked about hip hop culture and generally the lack of Inheritance and known history of many Black Americans. “I do not have much to look back on.” “The youth today do not have a lot surrounding them in terms of history.”He commented that the greatest inheritance you can get from someone is their point of view or perspective. His mother, a Rastafarian, raised him as a vegetarian and after she passed, he found himself taking on her advice-giving role about everyone’s diet. “We’re all just a slice of the pie. We’re all just perspectives.”

Insights + highlights

• all three guests had lost parents (in Rob’s case, his grandfather had been orphaned) and the interest in connecting presently to what came before was a spiritual and/or familial anchoring.
• the life in an object comes from its story, from the human life and caring which gives it its character and energy.
• “America is a country that doesn’t repect culture.” —Anthony Marshall
• “Maybe we’re cultural rebels in that we’re all into preserving whatever little corenr of culture we’re into.” Rob
• “In NY people pay to have everything done. So why not beginning the hora?” —Jill Slater
  “Are they paying for the hora or to be relieved of their anxiety worrying about it?” —Heather
• “I thought that if I moved to NY (from SF) I’d be surrounded by my family and the people looking down on me..that would ground me and then I’d able to focus on future as well as the present. So far it’s not working so well.” —Jill Slater
• Jill’s valuable gratis hora tip “Put the short people at the back, when you life up the chairs.” (so the honored guests don’t fall and break a limb on their happiest daykaynaynahoreh) Jill also gave a great explanation of kaynaynahoreh that’s worth listening to the podcast to hear. I love that Jews “created” monotheism but the most powerful stuff in the day-to-day lives of many Jews like Jill is fears of the evil eye and of the positive happy statements that supposedly attract it.
• It’s the 250th anniversary of the first public market in NY. Jill is working to bring it back.
• “Back in the day” is now 5 minutes ago”—Anthony

Well, at least women from the second wave. They are our “greatest generation.”

A tip of the juice cup to Ann Richards who just died at 73. I already miss her. Katherine Mieszkowski sums it up really well.

I’m posting a piece I wrote earlier this year. For the love of Life women, let’s aim beyond chicklit and SnackWells for greatness: at least once a month.

February 12/ 2006

The passing of great women

In just one week, the world lost three amazing women: Wendy Wasserstein, Betty Friedan and Coretta Scott King. I’m sure there were many more amazing women who died that week as well, who did not have the fame each of these three had, but their lives were probably bettered in some way by at least one of these three. It made me think about the kind of backbone the leaders of civil rights movements have had. We now live in a time in which the corruption of governments, corporations and militaries, “authority” in general seems so disconnected from the needs of people. It’s almost hard to believe that these systems depend on people—on human lives to operate.

Each of these women inspired me. They each had incredible strength of character to do things the way that seemed right to them, even when the environment they came from told them they were foolish or irrelevant. They did not write or organize for ego alone. They were willing to speak and live their truth for its own sake, which is probably what makes life meaningful.

I recently read Ghandi’s autobiography and I am reminded by this work and these women (especially Coretta Scott King), that the ability to change our world and our seemingly-deaf corporations and government is there, but that it begins first and foremost with ourselves. It is more helpful and meaningful to change our behaviours out of a commitment to our own integrity rather than hating what we wish were different outside of us. We do not have to co-operate with what causes us harm.

I am particularly saddened by Wendy Wasserstein’s premature death. First Gilda Radner, then Madeleine Kahn, now Wendy Wasserstein. I am about to make my first Off-Broadway appearance with my first play, and I am very conscious of the fact that women playwrights owe her a great debt. As involved as I was in feminist organizing in college and law school, I still often question whether or not the details of a uniquely female life will really be interesting and “important” enough to include in my work. Reading Wasserstein’s work helps remind me that a woman’s life even feminist hopes are worth writing. It is the lives we don’t often hear about, even the mocked beliefs that are the most worth sharing—if they are part of an honest life, honest truth and, for me, heartfelt humor.

Dr. Okounkov’s work has found use in describing the changing surfaces of melting crystals. The boundary between melted and non-melted is created randomly, but the random process inevitably produces a border in the shape of a heart.

—from today’s NYT article about a mathmetician (not Okounkov) who has won and refused the highest honour in mathematics.

I’m generally a fan of Oprah’s show, but saw a few minutes yesterday that I found sad and disheartening.

The child I saw must be about 5 or 6 at the oldest. He has glasses, red hair, an exuberant personality and an encylopaedic knowledge of dinosaurs. Oprah was talking to him an a condescending manner, asking him to do tricks like a pet dog.  It was worse than a strip club. At least the strippers get paid.

I thought he had his father with him, and then realized that it was Jay Leno. What the hell is that about? Where are the parents and why are they being replaced by Jay Leno? All young children need attention, but they don’t need to be talked down to, especially not intellectually precocious kids. They, like everyone, want to be seen and appreciated and stimulated, not watched for entertainment.
It’s easy to confuse those two when you’re young and you can end up confusing your intelligence or attractiveness or whatever it is that’s getting adult attention with regard for your Self.
I recommend the film Magnolia does a great job of showing the layers of childhood precociousness and the effects on identity and self-worth.