Tag Archives: culture

Cody who?

People pleasing feels so good, until it doesn’t

I was very eager to please, not realizing what harm I might be doing to myself and others.

Photo and story by Stacey Warde

For much of my adult life, I’ve felt like the local pool boy, convenient to have around, but not of much use otherwise. I’ve worked grunt jobs, and also held roles in what others might consider the “professions.”

I’ve had experience as a pool cleaner, ranch hand, commercial blueberry grower, window washer, salesman, and flockster (raising chickens and selling farm-fresh eggs in the local market), as well as in landscape installation and maintenance, mostly laborer occupations. I’ve encountered invading squirrels, rats, bobcats, coyotes, rattle snakes, vicious dogs, and threatening bosses and angry paying customers, and received plenty of scoldings, cuts, and bruises, including a dog bite in the ass resulting in a trip to the doctor; all this in the dirty grunt business of producing food, and servicing people’s homes.

I’ve also worked as a writer, editor, and publisher, and got into spats with local government officials, readers who hated my guts and threatened to burn down the building where I worked, a bishop who fired me for writing an opinion piece about favorable interfaith dialog with pagans, and I took bites all over, resulting in sessions with a therapist.

I once even had one of the area’s best female dermatologists, an attractive associate of one leading dermatologist who taught classes for aspiring skin doctors at UCI hundreds of miles away, lift my ball sack, inspect every inch of my body, for signs of skin cancer and when she found something suspicious on my right lower leg, she snipped it out and sent it to the lab. I’d already had a Stage 2 melanoma removed from my back years earlier.

When the lab results came back positive for a second melanoma, she called me at work while I was in the midst of a pressing deadline, of putting the paper to bed, a critical moment in the publishing business where all the pieces must come together and go to press, as we would say. A late fee of $400 (in the early 2000s) would be imposed for every 15 minutes we missed our deadline for which, I’d been taught, there was no excuse.

“You need to come to my office right now,” the doctor said at 2 p.m.

“I can’t come right now!” I said, exasperated, looking at the clock, with a 4 p.m. deadline. “I can’t get out of here until at least 4:30.”

Okay, she said, “I’ll see you then!” And she hung up. Serious business, I thought.

“Four-thirty, fuck!” I said to myself and arranged to have a friend pick me up from the doctor’s office. Then, I went back to work.

When the doctor was done removing the cancer, I caught a glimpse of the specimen on the tray. It looked like a small slab of veal with hair on it. I gasped. She was so deft and careful, I had no idea what she had removed. My wound healed quickly and there was virtually no scar, not like the one left years earlier on my back by a surgeon who seemed nice but had a heavy hand while tugging on my back.

In all, I was very eager to please, not realizing what harm I might be doing to myself and others. I failed to embrace my own true colors while attempting to “help” others find theirs. My dermatologist did more than remove cancer from my leg; she helped me understand how important self-care can be, especially when the threat to life is real.

As one committed to my job and my boss, and failing to account for my own needs, I gave what I could to be a “good” guy, a team player willing to sacrifice everything, and perhaps more than I should have, just to wear the team jersey. But that’s what Americans do, that’s what we were taught to do. We all work hard and perhaps more than we ought, more than what is humanly healthy. In the end, we might hope for some kind of reward, as I have, only to find that some individuals have far more than they should while others have virtually nothing.

Thirty years ago, the bookkeeper where I was then working as a sales associate for an extreme video producer and distributor (featuring such filmmakers as ski buff Warren Miller and ice climber Austin Hearst, grandson of William Randolph Hearst) asked me to step outside after observing my interactions with the boss.

“Are you familiar with codependency?” she asked. Cody who? Melody Beattie had recently published “Codependent No More,” which was then all the rage.

I’d heard the term and, not being a fan of what’s trendy, I dismissed the bookkeeper’s suggestion that I could benefit from some insights into what has turned out to be one of my leading toxic behaviors, so eager to please, even those who could give two shits about me, setting aside what’s best for me in order to make others happy. What a waste of time and energy! I now realize. But, how to break the habit?

I still do it; this is a very hard habit to break. Where did it begin? Probably in light of the ideal that the best life is the sacrificial life, where we endeavor to give ourselves over to the well-being and happiness of others, even to the point where it hurts and is harmful. But, who knew? Who knew that this sort of sacrifice could be so toxic? What greater way to avoid personal responsibility than to assume responsibilities that are not mine?

I wish I’d been less skeptical and paid closer attention to the bookkeeper’s concern. I might have avoided the heartache of giving in to people who pretend friendship and seek little more than to be appeased, praised, or flattered, who haven’t any real personal interest in me beyond what I can do for them, with little to no commitment to mutuality on their part.

This, I’ve learned, is a type of trauma bond, of which I’m quite familiar, having tried to establish relationships with people who were perhaps not as interested in me as I was in them. And, as so often happens when laser focusing on someone else, we hurt more than help one another. My goal now is to avoid these unhealthy bonds as much as possible, and to associate with others who aren’t afraid of intimacy and conversation, and to expend as much good energy upon myself as I try to give to others.

Giving until it hurts felt so right, until it didn’t.

Stacey Warde lives mostly in solitude, which suits him well, yet he still loves a good conversation. This essay appeared originally on Medium.

Music in the Schools

I pleaded with my parents to please let me learn how to play the piano. My mother was aghast; she hated piano lessons as a little girl.

By Stacey Warde

Part I

My dad traded his used lawnmower for my first piano. I was in sixth grade.

We lived in the condos, Tustin Village, a tight mix of family units separated only by paper-thin walls through which, as children, we could listen to our neighbors’ pillow talk.

We had no need for a lawnmower.

All that grew in front of our condo, along the concrete slab for a walkway to our front door, was ugly green ivy, a great place for rodents to thrive. The few lawns that could be mowed were kept by the homeowners association in the finely manicured commons, “the putting greens,” we called them — located between two community swimming pools — where at night some of the Village kids would gather to smoke marijuana and pair up for sex for the first time.

Sometimes, we’d spend the day indoors, unsupervised, listening to early versions of Santana or Neil Young on a hi-fi stereo system that belonged to a friend’s parents.

In addition to hanging out in the putting greens and the swimming pools, we gravitated to the playground with its half-court basketball space, swings and tether ball court.

When we got bored with these activities, we’d gather in the greens to play, throw rocks and clods at the beehives hanging from a smattering of olive trees around the commons. Once, a beehive came crashing down on Lane as he rode his bicycle beneath the hive when a rock dislodged it from its place in the tree. He tore off on his bicycle toward home, screaming, covered with bees. His parents rushed him to the hospital. No one that I knew at the time had a love for playing a musical instrument.

The only public music on site occurred occasionally when someone in the Village hosted a cocktail party in the clubhouse, where kids weren’t allowed to loiter.

Prior to moving to the condos, we lived in a small rental house with a tiny lawn that needed frequent quick mowing. Since moving to the Village, however, the mower sat unused in a shed in the square concrete slab of our condo “backyard,” no larger than a prison cell with high fencing, a place that felt mostly like a developer’s afterthought, an accident or a trap, no place where kids or parents would want to spend their time, unless they were hiding, in deep depression, seeking outdoor isolation, or cooking on the barbecue.

The only person in the condos who played a musical instrument in that festering pool of latchkey children, mostly pre-teens, looking for things to do, was an older, stout, and not very popular girl whose father worked for an electronic typewriter business. He, of course, was proud to inform us that his daughter could play the accordion quite well and would love to give us a concert. Kids in the neighborhood turned down the offer several times until finally we gave in and sat for a session in which the stout girl played her accordion with verve and acumen, while her proud, beaming father accompanied her on his own accordion. I don’t exactly remember the music, only the pleasure her face showed while she played. We let her play for us only that one time.

Not long after the home mini-concert, a few of us decided to pick up guitars, it didn’t matter what kind, plastic, wood, whatever, we were gonna play. Forget the accordion! We burned ourselves out the first day and our band aspirations died just as suddenly.

As a sixth-grader, I was discovering that girls had superpowers as we hung out on bored afternoons, listening to records, watching TV, feeling the itch of pubic hairs starting to grow, and sometimes curious hands rummaging through our pants. I needed and wanted more focus, something creative, something to fill in the hours when I wasn’t at the ballpark, or throwing oranges at cars from inside the surrounding orange groves, or lounging on a Saturday afternoon at a friend’s house while his sister tried to wrestle me off the couch.

Dad traded his mower for a beautiful clunky old upright piano that barely fit into our tiny three-bedroom condo. It took up nearly half the dining area downstairs but it fit snugly where it stood against the paper-thin wall. He traded it with my beloved great-aunt Doris, an avid gardener with a big beautiful home garden in Laguna Beach where she and her sister, my grandmother, grew up. She needed the lawnmower more than we did, and she would put it to good use. I loved visiting her home and her garden, which always felt like welcome spaces to me, mostly on account of her warmth and easy Southern California demeanor and the lovely roses in her garden.

I pleaded with my parents to please let me learn how to play the piano. My mother was aghast; she hated piano lessons as a little girl.

Mrs. Boger, a classical pianist, had come to our school, the brand new Heideman Elementary School. She came to play music as part of a trio, and I was mesmerized. We sang songs in school with one of the teachers who enjoyed singing but we had never seen a live performance by real pros. I felt drawn to the mix of sound from stringed instruments harmonizing with Mrs. Boger’s piano playing.

The mini-concert was my first real awakening to live music. I don’t know whose idea it was to bring music into the school but I’m glad that it happened; it’s been a lifelong journey and enjoyment in the more than 50 years since. Music, as I understood it until Mrs. Boger came along, had mostly been sing-alongs at school or took place in the background, usually while listening to my Uncle Ron’s vinyl selection of soul, which I still love. But music wasn’t something I’d ever experienced up close, not in a personal or intimate way, not where you could actually see and hear the musicians playing, working together to create harmony.

My great-grandmother, Marie Harding Thurston, apparently could be quite dramatic; she loved the theater and she loved to sing. From “Laguna Beach of Early Days,” by J.S. Thurston, published by History Press.

No one in my family, as far as I knew, had ever played a musical instrument. Only much later did I learn that my grandma played the piano when she sat down one evening and started playing from some old sheet music we had in the house. Her mother, a pioneer educator, Marie Harding Thurston, apparently could be quite dramatic; she loved the theater and she loved to sing, sometimes embarrassing mom and her siblings in a Laguna Beach church because she sang louder than everyone else.

None of that came down to me until dad traded his lawnmower.

I marveled at this music in the flesh, Mrs. Boger and her trio, sound produced by perfectly imperfect humans keeping time and blending themselves in a mix of harmony that I found more compelling than lumbering through a bunch of reading cards, or trying to avoid falling asleep at my desk during “self-directed” exercises such as reading and math. I hated penmanship too, especially when the teacher would try in vain to force my left-handed writing style to look more like a right-hander’s by twisting my hand back instead of letting it curl awkwardly around my pen as felt natural to me.

I couldn’t take my eyes off Mrs. Boger’s hands, though, left and right, as they moved effortlessly across the keyboard, producing the most amazing, articulate sound, in a language or vocabulary that felt both familiar and foreign, in time and in sync with these other musicians. When the performance was over I ran up to the piano. How long does it take to learn how to play like that? What was she reading? Sheet music? What’s that? I couldn’t make sense of any of it. She asked me if I would like to learn how to play the piano.

Yes! I told her. She reached into her purse and gave me her business card. “Give this to your parents,” she said. “Tell them you want to take piano lessons.”

Stacey Warde writes and practices the piano daily from his home in Mendocino County. This article first appeared on Medium.

Supporting the arts

Why do conservatives want to eliminate government funding?

Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe

by 

Recent reports indicate that Trump administration officials have circulated plans to defund the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), putting this agency on the chopping block – again.

Conservatives have sought to eliminate the NEA since the Reagan administration. In the past, arguments were limited to the content of specific state-sponsored works that were deemed offensive or immoral – an offshoot of the culture wars.

Now the cuts are largely driven by an ideology to shrink the federal government and decentralize power. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, argues that government should not use its “coercive power of taxation” to fund arts and humanities programs that are neither “necessary nor prudent.” The federal government, in other words, has no business supporting culture. Period.

But there are two major flaws in conservatives’ latest attack on the NEA: The aim to decentralize the government could end up dealing local communities a major blow, and it ignores the economic contribution of this tiny line item expense.

The relationship between government and the arts

Historically, the relationship between the state and culture is as fundamental as the idea of the state itself. The West, in particular, has witnessed an evolution from royal and religious patronage of the arts to a diverse range of arts funding that includes sales, private donors, foundations, corporations, endowments and the government.

Prior to the formation of the NEA in 1965, the federal government strategically funded cultural projects of national interest. For example, the Commerce Department subsidized the film industry in the 1920s and helped Walt Disney skirt bankruptcy during World War II. The same could be said for the broad range of New Deal economic relief programs, like the Public Works of Art Project and the Works Progress Administration, which employed artists and cultural workers. The CIA even joined in, funding Abstract Expressionist artists as a cultural counterweight to Soviet Realism during the Cold War.

The NEA came about during the Cold War. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy asserted the political and ideological importance of artists as critical thinkers, provocateurs and powerful contributors to the strength of a democratic society. His attitude was part of a broader bipartisan movement to form a national entity to promote American arts and culture at home and abroad. By 1965, President Johnson took up Kennedy’s legacy, signing the National Arts and Cultural Development Act of 1964 – which established the National Council on the Arts – and the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965, which established the NEA.

Since its inception, the NEA has weathered criticism from the left and right. The right generally argues state funding for culture shouldn’t be the government’s business, while some on the left have expressed concern about how the funding might come with constraints on creative freedoms. Despite complaints from both sides, the United States has never had a fully articulated, coherent national policy on culture, unless – as historian Michael Kammen suggests – deciding not to have one is, in fact, policy.

Flare-ups in the culture wars

Targeting of the NEA has had more to do with the kind of art the government funded than any discernible impact to the budget. The amount in question – roughly US$148 million – is a drop in the morass of a $3.9 trillion federal budget.

Instead, the arts were a focus of the culture wars that erupted in the 1980s, which often invoked legislative grandstanding for elimination of the NEA. Hot-button NEA-funded pieces included Andre Serrano’s “Immersion (Piss Christ)” (1987), Robert Mapplethorpe’s photo exhibit “The Perfect Moment” (1989) and the case of the “NEA Four,” which involved the rejection of NEA grant applicants by performance artists Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck and Holly Hughes.

In each case, conservative legislators isolated an artist’s work – connected to NEA funding – that was objectionable due to its sexual or controversial content, such as Serrano’s use of Christian iconography. These artists’ works, then, were used to stoke a public debate about normative values. Artists were the targets, but often museum staff and curators bore the brunt of these assaults. The NEA four were significant because the artists had grants unlawfully rejected based upon standards of decency that were eventually deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1998.

Demonstrators protest congressional opposition to an NEA-funded exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs in 1990. David Kohl/AP Photo

 As recently as 2011, former Congressmen John Boehner and Eric Cantor targeted the inclusion of David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly, A Work in Progress” (1986-87) in a Smithsonian exhibition to renew calls to eliminate the NEA.

In all these cases, the NEA had funded artists who either brought attention to the AIDS crisis (Wojnarowicz), invoked religious freedoms (Serrano) or explored feminist and LGBTQ issues (Mapplethorpe and the four performance artists). Controversial artists push the boundaries of what art does, not just what art is; in these cases, the artists were able to powerfully communicate social and political issues that elicited the particular ire of conservatives.

A local impact

But today, it’s not about the art itself. It’s about limiting the scope and size of the federal government. And that ideological push presents real threats to our economy and our communities.

Organizations like the Heritage Foundation fail to take into account that eliminating the NEA actually causes the collapse of a vast network of regionally controlled, state-level arts agencies and local councils. In other words, they won’t simply be defunding a centralized bureaucracy that dictates elite culture from the sequestered halls of Washington, D.C. The NEA is required by law to distribute 40 percent of its budget to arts agencies in all 50 states and six U.S. jurisdictions.

Many communities – such as Princeton, New Jersey, which could lose funding to local cultural institutions like the McCarter Theatre – are anxious about how threats to the NEA will affect their community.

Therein lies the misguided logic of the argument for defunding: It targets the NEA but in effect threatens funding for programs like the Creede Repertory Theatre – which serves rural and underserved communities in states like Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Oklahoma and Arizona – and Appalshop, a community radio station and media center that creates public art installations and multimedia tours in Jenkins, Kentucky to celebrate Appalachian cultural identity.

While the present administration and the conservative movement claim they’re simply trying to save taxpayer dollars, they also ignore the significant economic impacts of the arts. The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that the arts and culture industry generated $704.8 billion of economic activity in 2013 and employed nearly five million people. For every dollar of NEA funding, there are seven dollars of funding from other private and public funds. Elimination of the agency endangers this economic vitality.

Ultimately, the Trump administration needs to decide whether artistic and cultural work is important to a thriving economy and democracy. §

 is Assistant Professor of Art Education, Pennsylvania State University. Knochel receives funding from the National Science Foundation. This article is reprinted by permission of The Conversation.