The Sparks That Fly When Work Becomes Play

October 19, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’m probably more driven than you imagine. Which is why it was so healthy for me to get down on the floor the other day and get lost in some play with a simpler version of myself.

I use cut outs with different colors and patterns to make larger canvasses by moving them around and swapping them out. Think of building a quilt with a big dose of randomness so that something unexpected might begin to emerge from the associations you’re making.

If you’ve got enough cut-outs and the right unusual ones, the exercise is totally immersive. You forget where you are in the dexterity of moving these puzzle pieces around. And sometimes you end up with something that almost looks like art.

So it was serendipitous this week to stumble on an interview with a cartoonist (an artist, really), teacher and writer who’s made a career out of this kind of playfulness. I’ll introduce her properly in a minute. In the interview, she was saying something about her grad students (“These are people at the top of their games [with] this laser focus on getting one thing done” in their areas of study) and how much they need little kids to show them how to relax their relentless quests enough for insight and creativity. She was talking about how 3- and 4-year olds approach problem-solving in tactile, immersive and playful ways and how she regularly invites them into the classroom to play with her big kids.

[M]y students had to be on the floor with them working together. They had to try to get into their mind-set. It’s hard to explain, but it changes you. After you spend about 90 minutes with them, you just find that something has loosened up. You get away from that laser-focused, worrisome way of being.
When you’re an adult watching a kid playing with a little toy, you just think that kid’s doing that and there’s nothing else to it. But from the kid’s perspective that toy is playing with them. It’s interactive.” (I added the emphasis here.)

When the value of this mutual encounter penetrates, at least some of her grad students have a second option. Their scholarship is no longer just about the push to shape their field of study, get their book published and find tenure someplace. All of a sudden, their chosen field can be equally involved in pulling them into it and shaping them back, like that child’s toy.

By breaking some of the earnestness down, there’s finally enough freedom for some magic to happen.

This ever-present chance to be taken out of my driven self is one of the great things about having Wally around. There is nothing—nothing—that he wants to do more than play. When I get down on the floor with him and grab a ball he knows what’s coming, because he’s up on his hind legs dancing with delight and purring with expectation. The sad part, I realized after reading this interview, is that I don’t get down on the floor with him enough.

But between the cut-outs the other day and this chance interview encounter, I’m realizing that it’s irresponsible for me NOT to open that space on a regular basis. As this wise woman said, it’s not for everyone (like the chronically under-wired) so this kind of play won’t have:

saving qualities for people who don’t need it. It’s like, some people can’t digest milk, you know? But a lot of people can.

I don’t post on Instagram anymore, but I visit regularly and have been captivated by the short videos posted by a former Philly guy (and current New Yorker) who identifies himself as @TheDogist He wanders around the city in his shorts with his camera and whenever he sees an owner with her dog stops, asks if he can take the dog’s picture, interacts with it for a bit, and starts snapping or filming (actually, an invisible assistant does the filming).

His encounters are often magical—like getting down on the ground with a 3- or 4-year old. He has a way with dogs, a dog-oriented gift for gab, and a pocketful of treats at the ready to move each dog’s full attention onto this total surprise of a stranger. I’ve found that @TheDogist’s dog portraits and filmed interactions often perfectly capture their mutual delight.

The pictures of dog’s noses here also capture that curious and playful spirit, I think, which brings me back to Lynda Barry. The interview with her (it’s all great, by the way) appeared a few weeks ago in The New York Times Magazine. She’s best known for a weekly comic strip called Ernie Pook’s Comeek, which I never recall seeing in any of my newspapers. (Interestingly, it was first published in a student newspaper, without her knowledge, by fellow cartoonist Matt Groening, whom you may know from his Simpsons fame in later years.) When Barry’s not drawing, she’s teaching “interdisciplinary creativity” at the University of Wisconsin. It was also telling that she’s living not very far from the place where she was born and clearly belongs.

Over the years, Barry has written (and drawn) several books, including the award-winning, 2008 graphic novel “What It Is,” a hat trick of sorts that is part memoir, part collage and part workbook counseling readers on how to make a space for their own creativity. One of my favorite things about Barry is that she won a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called genius grant) a couple of years ago, when she was already well into her sixties.

It would not be wrong to say that building playfulness into her life and work has given her access to a kind of fountain of youth.

These days, I treat my time on social media and streaming platforms like Netflix almost like a timed dessert. For example, I only look at Instagram when I’m close to falling asleep, and limit myself to the day’s postings from the few posters that I follow. I also try to take my “other screen diversions” in similarly pre-measured doses because I know they’re like sugar: something I crave but also know are less-than-deadly-for-me ONLY when consumed in small amounts.

YouTube, Twitter, IG. Screen diversions that are always waiting to take you away from reality are addictive: a kind of Mind Candy. These interfaces “know” you well enough to call to you and suck you in like play, but have little-to-none of play’s interactive and real-world upsides. Most of the time, all they are is an escape from reality, especially the reality of your own life and work.

Of course, Barry understands the difference between genuine play and the faux-playfulness of screen time as well as anyone, including in this parable of sorts, where she tells us:

I have I have a friend who’s a writer. No matter what we’re doing or whom he’s around, he’s on his phone. We were sitting out in a parking lot, and there was a guy who came out who was in this full orc costume with a shield. I thought, I’m not going to say anything. Let’s see if my friend looks up. The guy passed right by him and — it was outside a hotel — tried to get through a revolving door. There’s all this bump ba bump ba bump, and if my friend would have looked up, he would have seen an orc [fighting with the revolving door and then] go by! But he never looked up! Then later I told him, and he’s like, ‘That didn’t happen!’ [But] it totally did happen! So something that closes you off to the world that you’re in — I mean, I could be on TikTok all night long. I keep deleting that app because I love it so much. But something that takes you out of your environment, you pay a high price. You miss the orc.

As if she needs to, Barry drives home her point even further:

The main thing about the phone is that you’re no longer where you are. You’re no longer in the room. You’re no longer anywhere. The opportunities to have an interaction with the things [and the people] around you are taken away. I just see the world as richer without the phone.” (my emphases again)

Your alternative focus doesn’t have to be violence on the streets, Vladimir Putin, North Korea, girls cutting off their hair in Iran, babies starving in Pakistan, babies starving in the Horn of Africa, “disturbing images in this video,” rainforests being cut down, a politicized Supreme Court, mass shootings in our schools, smaller containers of coffee for the same price at the grocery store—because those things are only a small part of our daily realities and their din (because that’s what it is) can be escaped with equally small doses of social media time.

For the rest of our lives and our work, playful interaction with the world around us might be a whole lot healthier.

_{My favorite nose.}

The picture of the dog up top was taken by one of the ”teachers” at our favorite day care center @phillydogschoolfairmount The second one is care of @odzi.and.elza, also on IG, and the third from the Dog School folks again on a particularly “nosy” day. I took the last one myself, this morning.

This post was adapted from my October 9, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

What’s In a Face?

October 6, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I come from people who loved to search faces.

As a kid, my folks would visit a honky-tonk strip in a place called Savin Rock early on a Saturday night and, of course, they’d take me along. They’d park in a good spot on the main drag, open the windows and gaze out at the passing stream. Or we’d set out on foot, find a roost near the cotton candy stand or similar attraction, and go to work from there.

We had more than a little interest in what our passers-by were wearing (or in their gay abandon, not-wearing), how they were enjoying themselves (besotted in pairs and threesomes), but the main thing was their faces. They seemed to be masks as well as portals: about their workweeks, their illnesses or desires, about the boats their grandparents had come over on, the churches they’d attend tomorrow, or the suburbs they were aiming for. It was as if you looked hard enough, you might see it all there.

We were spectators who’d come for the faces.

The muttered comments from dad or mom were rich to a kid. I suppose that some were judgments of a sort. Marking distance while they gazed, maybe saying “We’re better than this. Look at how far we’ve come.” But I don’t remember the superiority in it. They genuinely seemed to want to make sense of it all, of this colorful slice of the world on parade and how they fit into it. We didn’t go so much to laugh or to pity but for the enjoyment of locating ourselves in the hot mess of it all as it seemed to teem by.

It’s a proximate experience that I’ve really missed during the past year and a half.

The crowds I’ve seen from afar while walking or driving have often seemed irresponsible or even dangerous. It’s literal masks I’m looking for now, or how few are wearing them. Since they’re outside like I am I know how foolish this is, but the crowds still draw me in less and make me more wary. They’re other people instead of the same people, less a pageant that I’m a part of too. I miss what seems like an old chronicle (although it’s only a short time ago) about who they are, where they’re going and seem to have been, or what I’m doing here in the middle of them.

Those triangles of eyes, noses and mouths that pull in our attention even as newborns are apparently embedded as essential markers of danger or promise in the most basic instincts of our brains. Is she friend or foe, is he caregiver, stranger or something different than either of those things, but still “of interest”?

When Wally looks up to read me, it’s not at my hands or how I’m sitting. What he’s after is a dog’s kind of facial recognition.

We look for that, and need that, too.

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With deadly germs around, it seems safer today to search a stranger’s face through the eyes of an artist, whether it’s a painter, a sculptor or a photographer.

Aside from pictures of family and one increasingly infamous ancestor, the only portrait I have at home is of The Queen. Although clearly a violation of protocol, I mean it no disrespect by keeping it over a commode so I always have it to look at when I’m standing in front of it. A sign of the times, it never looks back while I search those lines and folds of powdered skin for clues about her gravity, about who she really is. Because it’s a good portrait and perhaps because she’s sat for them so often, she’s known how “to do the portrait-thing” forever so it’s full of information that she wants us to have and little that she doesn’t. Even if This Queen doesn’t live forever, she’ll still be sharing her majesty with me in this theater of perceptions she was so clearly “in on” creating.

_{“Lightness of Being,” by Chris Levine (2004)}

When I go to a museum these days—at least when I did before the lockdowns—I’d go to see one or two things that I missed having a conversation with or simply wanted to learn more from. The regular aim was targeting my attention instead of bringing it “to all of European Art since 1850” or to everything that the curators had decided to hang up on a wall from the Orient or ancient times.

It turns out that being more selective about my attention has also carried over into what I’ve been doing in museums after I’ve covered my destination pieces and places.

For example, when I flew out to see Emily in LA a few years back and we went to The Getty for the first time, I knew “what I had to see” but quickly discovered that those who had staged the galleries I was seeking had played their own games with the objects of my affection. So, while I searched the face of Rembrandt’s “Old Man in Military Costume” for clues, I eventually noticed that I wasn’t the only occupant in the gallery who was doing so. A marble bust in the same room (Bernini’s “Pope Paul V”) was searching the Old Man’s face too—its sight lines arranged “just right” by the staff—so that the rest of my visit involved noticing the interplay between “must see” works and how there always seemed to be other Star Gazers who’d been strategically arranged to see them too.

_{Because of the distance, my camera couldn’t capture Bernini’s “Pope Paul V” (1621) gazing over at Rembrandt’s “An Old Man in Military Costume” (1630-31), and certainly not when I was eye to eye with the Old Man himself, but here are the two of them as they looked that day.}

The aim for Rembrandt and Bernini and maybe for their time was to capture the essence of their subjects by using all their artifice and painterly tricks to find the truth in their sitter’s faces. These days, of course, truth is a far more slippery agenda, approached, if at all, with irony and trepidation—more mask (in the pursuit of) than a sign promising what’s true over its portal.

Among many other things, “this way that we see things today” is what made John Vincler’s short essay this week (the latest of his “Brush Strokes” columns for The Paris Review) so illuminating.

Vincler was writing about the contemporary portrait painter Michael Borremans and his pilgrimage to see his first Borremans’ portrait “live” in one of New York City’s art galleries. The visit last December was a birthday present from his wife, his “out” after being cooped up for months during the pandemic. He’d wanted to go and search the painted face in “Study for a Bird” for what mere reproductions of it might have been less able to tell him.

_{Michael Borremans, “Study for a Bird” (2020)}

To look at this image of it, “Study for a Bird” is slightly unsettling, somehow ajar. What’s going on under her chin or at the back of her neck? What is she wearing, why is she wearing it, and how does this headpiece direct our attention around the hollows and elevations of her face? Surely these are some of the questions that lead Vincler to say:

[t]he people in [Borremans’s] portraits often seem as if they are playing a role in some mysterious production, adding a layered tension to an existential question they ask of both themselves and the viewer: What am I doing here?

The same, I think, could be said about earlier portraits of his, like “Columbine” (note the slip in her left eye) and “The Hood” (the smudge at her mouth, along with that vaguely animate thing that’s perched on her shoulder). How do we pass through these “cues,” these intentional masks or diversions, on our way to The Truth about these subjects? What does the visual pathway that Borremans lays down for us tell us about reality today and the roles we’re playing in it?

It’s like he doesn’t want us to know anything for sure, or as an art critic wrote about another of Borremans’s portraits:

‘The painting somehow manages simultaneously to speak clearly and to stutter.’

_{Michael Borremans, “Columbine” (2008) and “The Hood” (2007)}

It’s often interesting how artists talk about their work, and that’s certainly true about Borremans, who lives and works today in Ghent, a Belgian city that’s been associated with great artists for centuries. Here he is, explaining “how he first came to work in this structurally abstruse way,” in a 2015 interview and commentary.

It’s really a philosophical question about what truth can be. And truth is just as much in the lie as in something straightforward or honest. All of this came very organically for me from the way I perceived the world since I was a child: that there’s a variety of interpretations of something called ‘truth’. And I was always cautious about it. As an adolescent, that’s where my fascination for cinema came in. They build decors; they fake everything to make it seem real. And if they do it with that,’ he continues, warming to his mistrust, ‘they do it with everything. To have it is to use it. Landing on the moon, wars – you never know. So therefore in my work I want to give information in a way that’s clearly incorrect, not fitting, out of place. I think that’s more honest.’

This variability of truths seems well-suited for today, when we can’t even agree on whether the virus that’s roaming this land like a reaper is real, or that it’s actually killing us.

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Looking into the faces of Borremans’s subjects—staged as they are—isn’t the same as watching a parade of faces in a place like Savin Rock, or even the expressions of the confinement-rejecting walkers who stream past my front porch all day, every day. But there are similarities in the exchange. We look into these faces and they look back, telling us something about where we are–“doesn’t anyone else see this too?”–and how those fleeting recognitions make us feel less like strangers, if not quite companions of one another on this strange trip we’re all on?

In Vincler’s essay, after viewing Borremans’s portrait and starting to write about it, he tells us (with obvious nostalgia) how he remembers the similar joys of searching the commuters’ faces on a subway that he’d taken regularly to work not so long ago.

Taking the subway means daily having at least one person’s face across the aisle and many faces in your line of sight. You can’t help but study the concentrated face of a reader, the elsewhereness of a daydreamer, the sadness here, the exhaustion there, the twitchy concentration of a game player, the open face of the tourist, and even the practiced but not quite impervious shell of the city dweller, lightly armored in sunglasses or headphones. In staring at the face in Borremans’s portrait. . . I was . . . reminded of the experience of moving through a city, the mix of intimacy and alienation that comes from incessant, packed proximity with strangers. It was okay to stare there in the gallery, to contemplate the dignity and complexity of this subject, with the strange costume, the visage part mask and part portal, suggesting something as awesome and truly unknowable as an individual person. Isn’t this a paradox, to be made to remember the faces of strangers?

And how great it would be to stare into and search our ways through them again, just like we used to, face to face.

In the meantime, Michael Borremans’s portraits provide us with some suggestions about what we might see when we can finally do so again, whenever that is. Ambivalence, containment, resignation, foreboding and, at times, even some humor in the face of it all. (His picture up top is called “Man Wearing a Bonnet” after all, from 2005.)

There’s something true, if not exactly truthful, about each one of them. And even that sense of recognition feels good.

This post was adapted from my August 1, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

We’re All Acting Like Dogs Today

July 29, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Saul Steinberg in the *New Yorker,* January 12, 1976

I recently read that dogs—through the imperatives of evolution—have developed expressions that invite positive interactions from their humans like “What a good boy” or a scratch behind the ears whenever, say, Wally looks me in the eye with a kind of urgency. There’s urgency all right, because he’s after something more than just my words or my touch.

The reward that he really wants comes after this hoped-for interaction. It’s a little squirt of oxytocin, a hormone and neuropeptide that strengthens bonding by making me, and then both of us together, feel good about our connection.

As you might expect, Wally looks at me a lot when I’m working and I almost always respond. How could anyone refuse that face? Besides, it gives whatever workspace I’m in a positive charge that can linger all day.

Social media has also learned that “likes”—or almost any kind of interaction by other people (or machines) with our pictures and posts—produces similar oxytocin squirts in those who are doing the posting. We’re not just putting something out there; we’re after something that’s both measureable and satisfying in return.

Of course, the caution light flashes when social media users begin to crave bursts of chemical approval like Wally does, or “to feel rejected” when the “likes” aren’t coming fast enough. It’s a feedback loop “of craving to approval” that keeps us coming back for more. Will they like us at least as much, and maybe more than they did the last time I was here? It’s the draw that always makes us stay on these social media platforms for longer than we want to and always keeps us coming back for more.

Social scientists have been telling us for years that craving approval for our contributions (along with not wanting to miss out) causes social media as well as cell-phone addiction in young people under 25. They are particularly susceptible to its lures because the pre-frontal cortex in their brains, the so-called seat of good judgment, is still developing. Of course, the ability to determine what’s good and bad for you is also underdeveloped in many older people too—I just never thought that included me.

So how I felt when I stopped my daily posting on Instagram three weeks ago came as a definite comeuppance. Until then I thought I had too much “good sense” to allow myself to be manipulated in these ways.

For the past 6 years, I’ve posted a photo on Instagram (or IG) almost every day. I told myself that regular picture-taking would make me look at the world more closely while, at the same time, making me better at capturing what I saw. It would give me a cache of visual memories about where I’d been and what I’d been doing, and posting on IG gave me a chance to share them with others.

In recent years, I’d regularly get around 50 “likes” for each photo along with upbeat comments from strangers in Yemen, Moscow and Beruit as well as from people I actually know. The volume and reach of approval wasn’t great by Rhianna standards, but as much as half of it would always come in the first few minutes after posting every day. I’d generally upload my images before getting out of bed in the morning, so for years now I’ve been starting my days with a series of “feel good” oxytocin bursts.

Of course, you know what happened next. My “cold turkey” from Instagram produced symptoms that felt exactly like withdrawal. It recalled the aftermath of cutting back on carbs a few years back or, after I was in the Coast Guard, nicotine. Noticeable. Physical. In the days that followed, I’d find myself repeatedly gazing over at my phone screen for notifications of likes or comments that were no longer coming. Or even worse, I’d explore identical-looking notifications for me to check other people’s pictures and stories, lures that felt like reminders of the boosts I was no longer getting. I felt “cut off” from something that had seemed both alive and necessary.

It’s one thing to read about social media or cell-phone addiction and accept it’s downsides as a mental exercise, quite another to feel withdrawal symptoms after quitting one of them.

Unlike the Food & Drug Administration, I did’t need anything more than my own clinical trial to tell me about the forces that were at play here, because at the same time that IG owner Mark Zuckerberg is engineering what feels like my addiction to his platform, he is also targeting me with ads for things (that I’m sorry to say) I realized I was wanting much more frequently. That’s because Instagram was learning all along what I was interested in whenever I hovered over one of its ads or followed an enticing link.

In other words, I’d been addicted to soften me up for buying stuff that IG had learned I’m likely to want in a retail exchange that effectively made both IG and Mark Zuckerberg the middleman in every sale. IG’s oxcytocin machine had turned me into a captive audience who’d been intentionally rendered susceptible to buying whatever IG was hawking.

That seems both manipulative and underhanded to me.

It’s one thing to write about “loss of autonomy” to the on-line tech giants, it is another to have felt a measure of that loss.

So where does this leave me, or any of us?

How do lawmakers and regulators limit (or prevent) subtle but nonetheless real chemical dependency when it’s induced by a tech platform?

Is breaking the ad-based business models that turn so many of us into captive buyers even possible in a market system that has used advertising to stoke sales for more than 200 years? Can our consumer-oriented economy turn its back on what may be the most effective sales model ever invented?

To think that we are grappling with either of these questions today would be an illusion.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has just fined Facebook (which is IG’s owner) for failing to implement and enforce narrow privacy policies that it had promised to implement and enforce years ago. The FTC also mandated oversight of Zuckerberg personally. Unlike the CEOs of other public companies, because he has effective ownership control of Facebook, his board of directors can’t really hold his feet to the fire. But neither the fine nor this new oversight mechanism challenge the company’s underlying business model, which is to (1) induce an oxytocin dependency in its users; (2) gather their personal data while they are feeling good by satisfying their cravings; (3) sell their personal data to advertisers; and (4) profit from the ads that are aimed at users who either don’t know or don’t care that they are being seduced in this way.

Recently announced antitrust investigations are also aimed at different problems. The Justice Department, FTC and Congress will be questioning the size of companies like Facebook and their dominance among competitors. One remedy might break Facebook into smaller pieces (like undoing it’s 2012 purchase of Instagram). However, these investigations are not about challenging a business model that induces dependency in its users, eavesdrops on their personal behavior both on-site and off of it, and then turns them into consumers of the products on its shelves. The best that can be hoped for is that some of these dominant platforms may be cut down to size and have some of their anti-competitive practices curtailed.

Even the data-privacy initiatives that some are proposing are unlikely to change this business model. Their most likely result is that users who want to restrict access to, and use of, their personal information will have to pay for the privilege of utilizing Facebook or Google or migrate to new privacy-protecting platforms that will be coming on-line. I profiled one of them, called Solid, on this page a few weeks back.

Since it looks like we’ll be stuck in this brave new world for awhile, why does it matter that we’re being misused in this way?

Personal behavior has always been influenced by whatever “the Jones” were buying or doing next door (if you were desperate enough to keep up with them). In high school you changed what you were wearing or who you were hanging out with if you wanted to be seen as one of the cool kids. Realizing that your hero, James Bond, is wearing an Omega watch might make you want to buy one too. But the influence to buy or to imitate that I’m describing here with Instagram feels new, different and more invasive, like we’ve entered the realm of science fiction.

Social media companies like Facebook and Instagram are using psychological power, that we’ve more or less given them, to remove some of the freedom in our choices so that they, in turn, can make Midas kingdoms of money off of us. And perhaps their best trick of all is that you only feel the ache of dependency that kept you in their rabbit holes—and how they conditioned you to respond once you were in them—after you decide to leave.

Saul Steinberg in the *New Yorker,* November 16, 1968

Maybe the scariest part of this was my knowing better, but acquiescing anyway, for all of those years.

It’s particularly alarming given my belief that autonomy (along with generosity) are the most important qualities that I have.

I guess I had to feel what had happened to me in order to understand the subtlety of my addiction, the loss of freedom that my cravings for connection had induced, and my susceptibility to being used, against my will, by strangers for their own, very different purposes.

By delivering “warm and fuzzies” every day and getting me to stay for their commercials, Instagram became my small experience of mind control and Big Brother.

Over the past few weeks, I see people looking for something in their phones and think differently about what they’re doing. That’s because I still feel some of the need for what they may be looking for too.

It gives a whole new meaning to “the dog days” this summer.

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I’d love to hear from you if you’ve had a similar experience with a social network like Facebook or Instagram. If we don’t end up talking before then, I’ll see you next week.

This post was adapted from my July 28, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Kicking Off the New Year with the Mummers

January 6, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Does Philadelphia’s wildly improbable Mummers Parade even happen each year if we don’t have the pictures to prove it?

Interestingly, all of us taking pictures to prove that the unbelievable is happening for the 119^thtime (and that we’re all a living part of it) is just a recent addition to this highly interactive event.

I’ve gone since the first New Years Day after my move to Philly. That first year, I asked several locals (who, looking back, were probably suburbanites) about going to the Parade, and to a one they described a bestial rite that you’d only attend if you were interested in having someone vomit on your shoes. Watch it on TV “if you have to,” they said, “and turn it off “when you’ve had enough.” Happily, I didn’t take their advice, never got enough, and never once went home with dirty shoes.

In fact, I always ended up feeling more like I was wearing the same golden slippers (Ok, gilded sneakers) that the strutters with their dainty parasols had been wearing as they made their way down Broad Street—Oh dem golden slippers. The Mummers always portrayed a huge cross-section of the City that rarely gets its day at its friendliest and most colorful. It is our Mardi Gras.

After I’d been here for several years, I took a job at the local gas utility to try and leverage its strategic locations and infrastructure for a global energy market. There were maybe 300 of us “in management,” but the other 1500 workers were the rank and file representatives of the City’s sprawling neighborhoods like Nicetown, Tioga, Point Breeze, Frankfort, Port Richmond, and Bella Vista. As I learned, a large number of them transformed themselves into Mummers at their local clubs for every New Years Parade. Sometimes when I went to one of the plants to rally them to one cause or another, I imagined these men and women in their end-of-the-year finery as they huddled around me and knew them all the better for it.

The following pictures prove that I was there with them again this year along with Wally, some old friends and thousands of new ones. I think that the grey skies and the mild weather on Tuesday set off our local dazzle particularly well. Every New Year needs to begin with revelry, optimism and local connection that looks something like this.

From the Wenches Division, a trio of lovelies

Kid-size golden slippers, a next generation Mummer taking a load off

From Broad Street’s median strip, the Americans are coming

Remembering the Day of the Dead for some reason

A Fancy Division captain works the rails

I hope you enjoyed a quick view of this year’s Mummers Parade. The last time this page contained a photo essay was after I visited New Orleans and saw a similarly local connection–this time to those who had died–in the City’s potters field. Here’s a link to it if you missed those heart-felt memorials the first time around.

This post was adapted from my January 6, 2019 newsletter.

How Stepping Back and Really Noticing Can Change Everything

October 14, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Pieter Bruegel’s The Battle Between Carnival and Lent

I’m frequently reminded about how oblivious I am, but I had a particularly strong reminder recently. I was in a room with around 30 other people watching a documentary that we’d be discussing when it was over. Because we’d all have a chance to share our strongest impressions and it was a group I cared about, I paid particularly close attention. I even jotted down notes from time to time as something hit me. After the highly emotional end, I led off with my four strongest reactions and then listened for the next half hour while the others described what excited or troubled them. Most startling was how many of their observations I’d missed altogether.

Some of the differences were understandable, why single “eye witness accounts” are often unreliable and we want at least 8 or 12 people on a jury to be sharing their observations during deliberations. No one catches everything, even when you’re watching closely and trying to be insightful later on. Still, I thought I was better at this.

Missing key details and reaching the wrong (or woefully incomplete) conclusions affects much of our work and many of our relationships outside of it. Emotion blinds us. Fear inhibits us from looking long and hard enough. Bias makes us see what we want to see instead of what’s truly there. To get better at noticing involves acknowledging each of these tendencies and making the effort to override them. In other words, it involves putting as little interference as possible between us and what’s staring us in the face.

As luck would have it, a couple of interactive challenges involving our perceptive abilities crossed my transom this week. Given how much I missed in the documentary, I decided to play with both of them to see if looking without prior agendas or other distractions actually improved my ability to notice what’s in front of me. It was also a nice way to take a break from our 24-7 free-for-all in politics. As I sat down to write to you, I thought you might enjoy a brief escape into “how much you’re noticing” too.

The Pieter Bruegel painting above–called “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent”–is currently part of the largest-ever exhibition of the artist’s work at Vienna’s Kunsthistoriches Museum. Bruegel is a giant among Northern Renaissance painters but most of his canvases are in Europe so too few of us have actually seen one, and when we have, they’ve been in books where it’s all but impossible to see what’s actually going on in them. As it turns out, we’ve been missing quite a lot.

Conveniently, the current survey of the artist’s work includes a website that’s devoted to “taking a closer look,” including how Bruegel viewed one of the great moral divides of his time: between the anything goes spirit of Carnival (the traditional festival for ending the winter and welcoming the spring) and the tie-everything-down season of Lent (the interval of Christian fasting and penance before Good Friday and Easter). “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent” is a feast for noticing, and we’ll savor some of the highlights on its menu below.

First though, before this week I’d never heard about people who are known as “super recognizers.” They’re a very small group of men and women who can see a face (or the photo of one) and, even years later, pick that face out of a crowd with startling speed and accuracy. It’s not extraordinary memory but an entirely different way of reading and later recognizing a stranger’s face.

I heard one of these super recognizers being interviewed this week about his time tracking down suspects and missing persons for Scotland Yard. His pride at bringing a remarkable skill to a valuable use was palpable–the pure joy of finding needles in a succession of haystacks. His interviewer also talked about a link to an on-line exercise for listeners to discover whether they too might be super recognizers. In other words, you can find out how good you are “with faces” and how well you stack up with your peers at recognizing them later on by testing your noticing skills here. Please let me know whether I’ve helped you to find a new and, from all indications, highly rewarding career. (The test’s administrators will be following up with you if you make the grade.)

Now back to Bruegel.

You can locate this central scene in “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent” in the lower middle range of the painting. Zooming in on it also reveals Bruegel’s greatest innovation as a painter. He gives us a birds-eye view of the full pageant of life that embraces his theme. It’s not the entire picture of “what it was like” in a Flemish town 500 years ago, but viewers had never before been able to get this close to “that much of it” before.

It’s also a canvas populated by peasants and merchants as opposed to saints and nobles. They are alone or in small groups, engaged in their own distinct activities while seemingly ignoring everyone else. In the profusion of life, it’s as if we dropped into the center of any city during lunch hour to eavesdrop.

The painting’s details show a figure representing Carnival on the left. He’s fat, riding a beer barrel and wearing a meat pie as a headdress. Clearly a butcher—from the profession that enabled much of the festival’s feasting—he holds a long spit with a roasted pig as his weapon for the battle to come. Lent, on the other hand, is a grim and gaunt male figure dressed like a nun, sitting on a cart drawn by a monk and real nun. The wagon holds traditional Lenten foods like pretzels, waffles and mussels, and Lent’s weapon of choice is an oven paddle holding a couple of fish, an apparent allusion to the parable of Jesus multiplying the loaves and the fishes for a hungry crowd. On one level then, the fight is over what we should eat at this time of year.

As the eye wanders beyond the comic joust, Carnival’s vicinity includes a tavern filled with revelers, on-lookers watching a popular farce called “The Dirty Bride” (that’s surely worth a closer look!) and a procession of lepers led by a bagpiper. On the other hand, Lent’s immediate orbit shows townsfolk drawing water from the well, giving alms to the poor and going to church (their airs of generosity equally worthy of closer attention).

Not unlike our divided society today, Bruegel painted while the battle for souls during the Reformation was on-going, but instead of taking sides, this painting seems to take an equal opportunity to mock hypocrisy, greed and gluttony wherever he found it, making this and others of his paintings among the first images of social protest since Romans scrawled graffiti on public walls 1200 years before. While earlier paintings by other artists carefully disguised any humor, Bruegel wants you to laugh with him at this spectacle of human folly.

It’s been argued that Bruegel also brings a more serious purpose to his light heartedness, criticizing the common folk by personifying them as a married couple guided by a fool with a burning torch—an image that can be found in almost in the exact center of the painting. The way they are being led suggests that they follow their distractions and baser instincts instead of reason and good judgment. Reinforcing the message is a rutting pig immediately below them (you can find more of him later), symbolizing the destruction that oblivious distraction can leave in its wake.

Everywhere else Bruegel invites his viewers to draw their own conclusions. You can follow this link and notice for yourself the remarkable details of this painting along with others by the artist. Navigate the way that you would on a Google Map, by clicking the magnifying glass (+) or (-) to zoom in and out, while dragging your cursor to move around the canvas. Be sure to let me know whether you happen upon any of the following during your exploration (the circle dance, the strangely-clad gamblers with their edible game board, the man emptying a bucket on the head of a drunk) and whether you think Carnival or Lent seems to have won the battle.

Before wishing you a good week, I have a final recommendation that brings what we notice (say in a work of art) back to what we notice or fail to notice about one another every day.

The movie Museum Hours is about the relationship that develops between an older man and woman shortly after they meet. Johann used to be a road manager for a hard-rock band but now is a security guard at the same museum in Vienna that houses the Bruegel paintings. Anne has traveled from Canada to visit a cousin who’s been hospitalized and meets Johann as she traverses a strange city. During her visit, he becomes her interpreter, advocate for her cousin’s medical care, and eventually her tour guide. But just as he finds “the spectacle of spectatorship” at the museum “endlessly interesting” as he takes it in everyday, they both find the observations that they make about one another in the city’s coffee shops and bistros surprising and comforting.

Museum Hours is a movie about the rich details that are often overlooked in our exchanges with one another and that a super observer like Bruegel brings to his examination of everyday life. One of the film’s many reveals takes place in a scene between a tour guide at the museum (who is full of her own insights) and a group of visitors with their unvarnished interpretations in front of “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent” and other Bruegel paintings. You can view that film clip here, and ask yourself whether the guide is helping the visitors to see what is in front of them or diverting their attention away from it.

As we shuttle between two adults in deepening conversation and very different kinds of exchanges across Vienna, Museum Hours asks several questions, including what any of us hopes to gain from looking at famous paintings on the walls of a museum. As one of the movie’s reviewers wondered:

“Is it to look at fancy paintings and feel cultured, or is it to experience something more direct: to dare to unsheathe oneself of one’s expectations and inhibitions, and truly embrace what a work of art can offer? And then, how could one carry that open mindset to embrace all of life itself? With patient attention and quiet devotion, these are challenges that this film dares to tackle.”

That much open-mindedness is a heady prescription, and probably impossible to manage. But sometimes it’s good to be reminded about how much we’re missing, to remove at least some of our blinders, and to discover what we can still manage to notice when we try.

Note: this post was adapted from my October 14, 2018 Newsletter.

What’s In a Face?

Kicking Off the New Year with the Mummers

How Stepping Back and Really Noticing Can Change Everything

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