Forgotten Lessons From the '60s

The other day as I was stopped at a traffic light, a tiny woman with long white hair wearing an old suede fringed jacket inched across the street in front of my car. It was so incongruous to see someone of her age wearing such an iconic '60s artifact. I found myself remembering the fall of '68 when I was turning 13 and had gotten my very own groovy, fringed jacket. Which I made sure to wear to the couple of anti-Vietnam War rallies I attended.

My fringed jacket practically vibrated with symbolic importance- I thought it showed my parents that I was liberated from their middle-class suburban mores and that it identified me with a group of people who I thought were going to make the world a better place.

As I daydreamed at the stoplight, I realized that I almost never had the feelings of hopefulness that I felt whenever I wore that fringe jacket 35 and almost 40 years ago. It got me thinking that it was worth revisiting the '60s (by which, of course, I mean the late '60s and early '70s) ethos. Here are a few thoughts:

Intoxicate Yourself And I don't mean take LSD. But I do think I could use some of the kind of joy that I used to feel wandering in my tie-dyed T-shirt through Volker Park in Kansas City - just hanging out and listening to music with nothing else to do but be there now.

All of us might feel more optimistic about the world if we grooved a bit more to life's sensual pleasures. Try this. Do nothing for the afternoon except rock in the hammock and listen to Bob Dylan. Walk barefoot through the grass. Don't wash your hair or make your bed. Seriously. Hang loose.

Let Your Hair Down Find more comfort in being yourself. It's OK to have wrinkles and bags under your eyes. God knows we had a lot of bags under our eyes in 1971. View all the signs of having lived a full life as markers to be worn proudly.

It used to be we changed our clothes and let our bodies be natural testaments to our values; now we radically alter our bodies and keep our clothes the same. Does anyone else see a problem with this approach?

Dream Bigger Dreams In the '60s we imagined a better future; now we tend to cling to a haloed past and our youths. What's up with that? We never wanted to represent the status quo and now, even though we are, perhaps we should occasionally surprise the world and ourselves.

Try to embrace the transformative spirit of the '60s - the meditation, the individual expression, the exuberance.    Maybe it's time to turn on and tune in.

Nothing Says Christmas Like A Flashmob Performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony

Ode to Joy!  A local Spanish bank honors its city with a spontaneous performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony.  Over 40 musicians from the Orquestra Simfònica del Vallès and a chorus of 60 singers from the Amics de l'Òpera de Sabadell, Coral Belles Arts and Cor Lieder Camera participated.

https://www.bancsabadell.com On the 130th anniversary of the founding of Banco Sabadell we wanted to pay homage to our city by means of the campaign "Som Sabadell" (We are Sabadell) . This is the flashmob that we arranged as a final culmination with the participation of 100 people from the Vallès Symphony Orchestra, the Lieder, Amics de l'Òpera and Coral Belles Arts choirs.

Reading Now

Articles:

"Diaries, A Healthy Choice" - The New York Times.  At the time of the year when many of us try to envision ways we can improve our physical and mental health, Matthew Lieberman, a psychology professor at U.C.L.A., the editor in chief of "Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience" and the author of the forthcoming "Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect" proposes something very old-school, yet extremely effective.  The notion is, keep a diary.  His research finds that something as simple as labeling our feelings and articulating our beliefs and insecurities is enough to reduce our distress and produce other mental and physical health benefits.

Books:  

On Writing Well, by William Zinsser. I've been making my living for a while as a writer but have never had any formal training.  A friend recently suggested that On Writing Well is a must-read for any nonfiction writer.  Here's how Zinsser describes his ambition as contrasted with E.B. White's, The Elements of Style. 

"The Elements of Style was essentially a book of pointers and admonitions: Do this, don’t do that. As principles they were invaluable, but they were only principles, existing without context or reality. What his book didn’t teach was how to apply those principles to the various forms that nonfiction writing can take, each with its

special requirements: travel writing, science writing, business writing, the interview, memoir, sports, criticism, humor. That’s what I taught in my course, and it’s what I would teach in my book. I wouldn’t compete with The Elements of Style; I would complement it.

That decision gave me my pedagogical structure. It also finally liberated me from E. B. White. I saw that I was long overdue to stop trying to write like E. B. White—and trying to be E. B. White, the sage essayist. He and I, after all, weren’t really much alike. He was a passive observer of events, withdrawn from the tumult, his world bounded by his office at The New Yorker and his house in rural Maine. I was a participant, a seeker of people and far places, change and risk. At Yale I had also become a teacher, my world enlarged by every new student who came along. The personal voice of the teacher, not the literary voice of the essayist, was the one I wanted narrating my book.

For that I would need a new model—a writer I would emulate not for his subject but for his turn of mind, his enjoyment of what he was teaching. That book wouldn’t come from a professor of English, squeezing the language dry with rules of rhetoric. It would have to come from an entirely different field, and it did. My model for On Writing Well was American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950, by the composer Alec Wilder."  As someone who came to writing from an entirely different field, I cannot wait to dig into Zinsser's On Writing Well more deeply.

More Dads Buying Toys for Their Daughters: A Win-Win

In a recent piece, the retail reporter for the New York Times reported that Mattel was introducing a Barbie construction set.  Stop the presses!  Twenty years ago, when I ran the Consumer Products division of Nickelodeon, we launched our first licensing partnership with Mattel to produce a line of gender-neutral activity toys that were designed to not only entertain girls and boys but to challenge them creatively as well.  Long before the "green" movement became a mainstream marketing pitch, we created an open-ended construction set made from processed potatoes that allowed kids to design, cut, saw and lick together inventions.  Unlike Erector Sets, where there were finite ways to combine the various parts, the potential constructions with Zog Logs were limitless, and unlike Lego, no plastics were involved.  

What could go wrong with creating fun toys designed to appeal to both girls' and boys' imaginations?  The industry and its unchanged gender approaches.   Because part of Nickelodeon's mission was to create gender-neutral TV programming, all of our businesses reflected the same informing values -- which forced Mattel to break out of their rigid girl-toy/boy-toy organization to launch a new Activity-toy unit, designed to compete with Play-doh. Two problems emerged.  The extant Mattel culture mounted defenses against the Nickelodeon foreign body, and retailers and distributors like Toys 'R Us -- who racked kids product in dedicated girls' and boys' aisles, had no idea where to sell our toys.  The division and the initiative failed.

What has changed since then, according to the Times piece, is the underlying parental sociology.   "Consumer surveys show that men are increasingly making the buying decisions for families, reflecting the growth in two-income households and those in which the women work and the men stay home. One-fifth of fathers with preschool-age children and working wives said they were the primary caretaker in 2010, according to the latest Census Bureau data. And 37.6 percent of working wives earned more than their husbands in 2011, up from 30.7 percent 10 years earlier."  This means that manufacturers and merchandisers have had to re-tool their approaches to appeal to male consumers.  In toy terms, this means that about 20% of new construction toys are targeting girls.

It's been obvious for a long time, as the Times piece notes, that "Research has shown that playing with blocks, puzzles and construction toys helps children with spatial development, said Dr. Susan C. Levine, chairwoman of the psychology department at the University of Chicago….Even controlling for other skills such as verbal and numerical skills, she said, children with better spatial thinking are more likely to eventually go into mathematics, engineering, science and technology."

Tapping into the need for more women in the sciences, I recently came across a terrific Kickstarter concept initiated by Debbie, a Stanford engineer, who has launched a company called GoldieBlox, an activity toy and series designed to encourage girls to become engineers.

I think it's wonderful – and more than a bit ironic -- that 20 years after we at Nickelodeon tried to create toys that challenged girls' and boys' creativity equally, and with a minimum of stereotyping assumptions, that it's men becoming primary caregivers that has been the demographic catalyst for breaking down the toy-equality barriers.

Reading Now

Articles:

Two recent pieces push our understanding of evolution.

"Can Jellyfish Unlock The Secret Of Mortality?" - The New York Times.  What we might learn from the "immortal jellyfish," a small, aquatic invertebrate that can transform itself back into a polyp and begin life anew. Or as  Friedrich Nietzsche conceived “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: “Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again. . . .”

"Human Evolution Enters An Exciting New Phase" - Wired Science.  "If you could escape the human time scale for a moment, and regard evolution from the perspective of deep time, in which the last 10,000 years are a short chapter in a long saga, you’d say: Things are pretty wild right now.

In the most massive study of genetic variation yet, researchers estimated the age of more than one million variants, or changes to our DNA code, found across human populations. The vast majority proved to be quite young. The chronologies tell a story of evolutionary dynamics in recent human history, a period characterized by both narrow reproductive bottlenecks and sudden, enormous population growth.

The evolutionary dynamics of these features resulted in a flood of new genetic variation, accumulating so fast that natural selection hasn’t caught up yet. As a species, we are freshly bursting with the raw material of evolution."  One finding?  "These variations, known to scientists as “cryptic,” might actually be evolution’s hidden fuel: mutations that on their own have no significance can combine to produce unexpected, powerful effects."  Maybe X-Men comics weren't so far-fetched after all.

Books:

The Legend of Broken, by Caleb Carr. Carr's new genre-bending saga of fortress city.

Don't Underestimate The Power Of Cute

Feeling distracted and incapable of focusing on any detail?  Maybe the best thing you can do for yourself is to look at photograph of a cute animal. Researchers at the Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences at Hiroshima University discovered that looking at images of puppies and kittens over adult animals caused subjects to focus and increase their ability to concentrate.   The researchers reported their findings in this academic-speak, "This is interpreted as the result of a narrowed attentional focus induced by the

cuteness-triggered positive emotion that is associated with approach motivation and the tendency toward systematic processing. For future applications, cute objects may be used as an emotion elicitor to induce careful behavioral tendencies in specific situations, such as driving and office work."

But as I like to think, I'm not wasting my time on cutestpaw.com.  I'm enabling myself to get down to business.

One Question for Lawrence O'Donnell

Lawrence O'Donnell, Jr. is a political analyst, journalist, actor, producer, writer and host of The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, a weeknight MSNBC opinion and news program.  He was an Emmy Award-winning producer and writer for the NBC series The West Wingand creator and executive producer of the NBC series, Mister Sterling.  He's also an occasional actor, appearing as a recurring supporting character of the HBO series Big Love, portraying a lawyer.  He began his career as an aide to U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and was Staff Director for the Senate Finance Committee.

Q: What’s the most significant risk you’ve taken professionally?

Lawrence:  Not going to law school.

Reading Now

Articles:

"The Snake in the Garden" - The New York Times. Pico Iyer's meditation on anxiety.  Here's an excerpt:  "Besides, many kinds of anxiety are natural, almost healthy, especially if they’re concerned with others; a parent who didn’t worry about her child might seem almost inhuman. Yet still it’s uncanny how often we let ourselves out of the Garden by worrying about something that, if it did happen, would quicken us into a response much more practical than worry. All the real challenges of my, or any, life — the forest fire that did indeed destroy my home and everything in it; the car crash that suddenly robbed dozens of us of a cherished friend; my 13-year-old daughter’s diagnosis of cancer in its third stage — came out of the blue; they’re just what I had never thought to worry about (even as I was anguishing over whether they’d serve spinach when my friend visited the retreat house). And every time some kind of calamity has come into my life, I and everyone around me have responded with activity, unexpected strength, even an all but unnatural calm."

"Neuroscience Under Attack" - The New York Times.   Alissa Quart on the fallacies of over-popularizing scientific research.  "A gaggle of energetic and amusing, mostly anonymous, neuroscience bloggers — including Neurocritic, Neuroskeptic, Neurobonkers and Mind Hacks — now regularly point out the lapses and folly contained in mainstream neuroscientific discourse."

Books:

Behind The Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo. National Book Award winner, Boo's landmark work of narrative nonfiction tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities, Mumbai.

What A Wonderful World

Sir David Attenborough, the great English natural history filmmaker, is perhaps best known for his Life collection, a series of nine nature documentaries aired on the BBC between 1979 and 2008.  To promote the broadcast of his latest production, Frozen Planet, ad agency RKCR/Y&R produced a video with Attenborough reading lines from Louis Armstrong's classic, "What a Wonderful World."  It's a perfect way to get into the holiday spirit.

1967 Jim Henson Paperwork Explosion Film for IBM

In 1967, Jim Henson was contracted by IBM to make a film extolling the virtues of their new technology, the MT/ST, a primitive word processor. The film would explore how the MT/ST would help control the massive amount of documents generated by a typical business office. Paperwork Explosion, produced in October 1967, is a quick-cut montage of images and words illustrating the intensity and pace of modern business. Henson collaborated with Raymond Scott on the electronic sound track.  The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling-like  narrator's mantra of letting the IBM machines do the work so we "humans" can think seems particularly quaint given the ways in which we are all now tethered 24/7 to our machines.  But imagine a world where Jim Henson and Raymond Scott continued to collaborate on corporate messaging.  How great would that be?