------------------------------\n-------------------
I went to Zaca\'s deathbed last night and gave him a rose.\n I told him that I brought the rose petals for him, because he ate them for me\n when I spread them over my cake plate, a reminiscence of the scene in Like Wat\ner for Chocolate.
The girl is in love with her lover, who married her sister\njust to be near her. He gives her roses, but her mother forces her to throw th\nem out. Instead she makes quail in rose petal sauce, and he looks at her at the\n table and eats the petals, because he is eating her soul.
I met Zaca and Mer\ncedes when they were my neighbors in Queens. When they came over to my house, I\n had flowers in my salad. He couldn\'t get over that. He loved it. Then, I serv\ned chocolate cake on a white plate filled with red rose petals, and Zaca took o\nne of the petals and looked at me and ate it, because he was an artist and he\nknew I had let him see the artist in me.
He was a ballet dancer, and he was B\nrazillian. The way he draped a coat scarf over his neck was regal. My father wa\ns a ballet conductor, and I spent my childhood watching 19th century ballet. W\ne took our life\'s lessons from the same story source. He was my ballet prince.\n
So I went to his deathbed tonight. As soon as he heard my name, he called o\nut Barbara. I brought him a rose, and he smelled it. He was under heavy sedatio\nn, and when he opened his eyes they rolled to the top of his head but he tried\nto open them to see me. In Spanish I told him how he was a beautiful gentleman,\n and how glad I was he was talking to me. And I told him I brought him rose pe\ntals like Como Agua para Chocolate and that I loved him. He held out a shaky ha\nnd, and I held it and said, \"Te amo, Zaca.\" Then he smiled serenely, because\nI understood that he was trying to tell me he loved me too.
Mercedes asked m\ne if I wanted to eat a petal while he looked at me, whatever he could see, and\nI said, \"No, Mercedes, you do that for me. I want you to do that for me.\" She\n has not cried yet, because she says this time is for him. But she will have th\nis moment with him. I gave her this moment.
Zaca had AIDS. I never knew. The\ny found out he had AIDS soon after they were married. An old girlfriend is all\nthey could think of. They don\'t know where she is. This is the first time AIDS\n has touched my life. For me it has been cancer. The end is similar. It is the\n beginning of AIDS that is so horrifying. Cancer is caused by a myriad of thing\ns, including genetic predisposition. AIDS is caused by a mistake.
I will wea\nr a red ribbon for Zaca. His impending death has pierced my heart, and the ribb\non is my blood. I loved him. He was my ballet prince in a world of pop culture\nand Microsoft. He was graceful and beautiful and faithful to his wife and to Go\nd. I know exactly what kind of a love Mercedes is losing. She is a lioness, so\n powerfully strong. He wanted an apartment with more light, so she is moving Sa\nturday, even if he doesn\'t make it to see it, it will be what he would have wa\nnted. He wanted light. I told her the light was el luz del Dios, the light of G\nod.
Zaca is the sun now. ',19990309003510,1,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (2,'Outside Lorraine\'s Window','When I go to Dublin, one of my favorite things is visiting my friend Lorraine\'s fashionable architectural-statement apartment, with 5 Georgian windows overlooking the Liffey. Her dining room even has more windows, richly curtained with golden brocade.
She is the essence of style, doing magical things with vegetables and olive oil, puff pastries, and lamb. I love looking out her windows at the night sky over the Liffey as kitchen smells waft throughout the apartment.
This summer, driving through County Mayo, past the famine memorials, through vastly beautiful, rugged land that could almost speak to you about the bitterness buried beneath it, I came upon a bookshop. In it, I found a book about the Irish Civil War. And there, on page 56, I saw a picture of a mine exploded by retreating Republicans, which destroyed the Public Record Office and the rear of the Four Courts, and hung a cloud of smoke over the Liffey.
It was the view outside Lorraine\'s window in May 1922.
The fight was over the Treaty for an Irish Free State that Michael Collins had negotiated with the British. Michael Collins from Skibbereen, Co. Cork, had invented guerilla warfare and brought the British to their knees. Eamon de Valera wanted independence. The treaty Collins negotiated gave the North of Ireland to the British. This dispute split the Irish Republican Army and led to an Irish Civil War, which is still being fought today.
Looking outside those windows today, the rage is hidden just like the bitter death of the famine victims is hidden in the Mayo mountains. The Liffey is calm. The district is now a growing residential and commerical area of Dublin. Economic development and hope covers the ghosts of the past.
But I thought to myself, there must be history outside many windows. And don\'t we all have the windows that we stared out of when we were growing up, or when we looked for the answer to a tragedy, or when we first fell in love.
Maybe someone has a story about a window that they would like to share. We all come from so many parts of the world. I am fascinated with what everyone saw outside their windows. ',19990309011102,2,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (3,'Wealth of a Different Kind','Mary\'s voice was soft. It lilted like the mountains. Her blue eyes sparkled peace. Too many people in Louisburgh, Co. Mayo. (Population 500) She moved up the mountain to where the St. Joseph\'s lillies grew free and Croagh Patrick, the church where St. Patrick first brought Christianity to Ireland, was two miles up.
When you see Croagh Patrick from the ground, you see this massive mountain and this tiny white church way at the top of dramatic desolation. But to Mary it is just an hour\'s hike up the back on a good day.
She had a sick little lamb who couldn\'t get up. It\'s feet were bent. So she fed him by hand. \"Oh, we don\'t name sheep here,\" she said, laughing. And then she had a field of year-old lambs. They just ran free on the mountain always coming back to the shed when it rained. The milkman left plenty of milk by the side of the road, and there was cheese, too.
She had us over for lunch, Cathleen, Lora, and me. A beautiful lunch of ham, cheese, and lettuce that was just picked. The kitchen floor was stone, and there was a hearth, where Skippy, the neighbor\'s dog rested by the fire. She also had two dogs of her own. Two iron pots, in which she baked bread, sat beside the hearth. \"It comes out very nice,\" she said. I could only imagine.
There was a picture of a fiercely proud Irish woman in the parlor, taken in 1887. It had a beautiful frame. And pictures of this white Jesus. I have always wondered who that white man was because Jesus was a dark- skinned Middle Eastern Jew. But I suppose everyone needs a God in their image, and so there he was, face of white stained-glass, tending sheep in her house full of crosses.
It was not a place for questions. It was not a place for the power struggles of multicultural urban America. It was a place radiant with spiritual wealth in its simplicity, in its overpowering beauty, in its freedom. Remote from man--close to God. That was her luxury.
She didn\'t have to struggle. She could be kind.
I was shaking inside when I left for I knew I had seen a woman who had all the answers she needed. She felt God on the mountain. It was wealth of a different kind. ',19990309011149,2,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (4,'In Her Shoes','It was a night at the ballet, my favorite kind of night. The Met is so beautiful with it\'s magnificent Chagalls adorning the New York summer twilight sky. Inside, chandeliers, champagne, Nina Ananiashvili...
My friend Therese and I were milling about during intermission when she spotted toe shoes. American Ballet Theatre sells used toe shoes signed by the dancers. So she bought me a pair. They belonged to corps member Elizabeth Ferrell.
I have always heard the adage, well, what would it feel like to be in her shoes? I am in them now, feeling the history of her life through the shape of her feet. Strength in pink satin. They look so delicate, but I know the sweat that it took to make them look that way. The arches made after years of work. The shape of the toe. The heel depressed where her\'s must have fallen.
What a triumph it must have been when she danced the audition at American Ballet Theature and made it. She got a job. She could be an artist now. She could express her life dancing across a stage.
I put my toe on the floor to do an arabesque. My feet molded to her arch. I had to lean on the desk because it has been years since I have been on toe, but I saw my foot look like a ballet dancer\'s again.
My subconscious imagination tried to find her memories, but couldn\'t. The shoes will forever keep the secrets of her life from the world.
But they make me smile and remember my own life, my own worship of beauty and of graceful women, the artists I want to be, dancing with their souls attached to God, in their pink satin shoes ',19990309011251,3,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (5,'The Quiet Voice of Rage','The stench on urine in the elevator of the project on 115th Street in East Harlem was so strong I had to half breathe, but I couldn\'t make a face because this was the first time my boyfriend Robert had invited me to his home.
When we walked in, his mother was making pasteles, a Puerto Rican dish with an aroma that quickly made me forget the elevator. That night, I tried to learn how to dance salsa from Robert\'s uncle, Cha Chin, and saw Robert\'s mentally retarded twin brother Nelson for the first time.
His father cooked breakfast in a hotel kitchen for 30 years and supported a family that sent Robert to Oberlin and his sister to Harvard Law School. His family was more functional and warm than mine. I loved being there and eating, laughing and dancing the night away.
When we walked out, we felt that still cold that makes you hate walking because your movement creates a breeze that chills you more. Robert was walking me from 115th and Madison Avenue to Lexington Avenue where I could catch a bus home.
We came upon a fenced outdoor playground at around 11:00 at night, and rap music was blaring from a boom box. Six inches away, a 2-year-old girl sitting in a carrige with her hands in her ears. This was gang territory, and they were having a party. Beer everywhere. \"Robert,\" I asked, \"shouldn\'t that child be in bed?\"
He was silent. We walked further toward Lexington Avenue. Under a streetlight lighting a brick wall, with the music having faded out, he said to me softly, \"I hate the ghetto.\"
It was the quiet voice of rage. I will never forget how his whisper pierced the still coldness.
I had no words to comfort him. There was no family there, no warmth, no Uncle Cha Chin. There was just a young black-Puerto Rican man with his anger in tact.
Is this what racism does to the soul? Has anyone else ever heard the quiet voice of rage? ',19990309011427,3,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (6,'The Monuments of War','I spent yesterday with American monuments in Washington, DC.
The way the sun flicks off monuments, don\'t you think it makes them look like pretty statues in the distance?
You don\'t even see the Vietnam War Memorial when you come upon it from the hill above. It is etched into a mound on the side of the hill, starts with a small edge, and gets larger as the hill descends.
Its black stone walls embraced the grief of fathers never known or brothers lost, set against the majesty of the Lincoln Memorial, which proclaimed that soldiers in the Civil War did not die in vain. \"Government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth,\" said Lincoln. The American heroic myth. I would die for it, too.
But I thought that the Vietnam War was about trying to place this American myth on a country whose history was irrelevant to it. Maybe this humble wall, this powerful prayer against war, was the only way to make a statement that these soldiers did not die in vain.
People\'s shadows glistened against the stone, as visitors touched the names, crying. As I descended into this sculpture, I thought that the wall seemed to be an architectural expression of that phrase in Psalm 23:
I walk
into the valley
of the shadow
of death.
If the Vietnam War Memorial was the shadow of death, then the Holocaust Museum was death.
There was a dog crazed with anger being walked by a smirking Himmler. I touched an Auschwitz barracks bunker. I couldn\'t believe it. There I was touching something that only the chance of being born in a different time and place allowed me to escape.
I walked beneath a copy of the gate, Arbeit Macht Frei.
I stared at the faces of Jewish women from a town just outside Vilna, Poland, where my paternal grandfather was born. Looking just like those women, my face was a remnant of their disappeared history.
There was a table with a hole in the middle of it. This was the table where prisoners had to take the gold out of people\'s teeth. The hole in the middle was to drain blood.
I read stories of Jewish administrative heads of Polish ghettos trying to appease the Nazis and enforce their rules in the hopes of saving Jews from export, only then to be betrayed and killed themselves. And of a German maid of an SS officer who became his mistress against her will to save the 20 Jews she was hiding in her basement.
Then there were the piles of shoes.
On this journey through monuments, I wondered about the heroism of Lincoln, the impressionism of Vietnam, and the realism of the Holocaust Museum. Here were three searingly indelible ways to deal with war through architectural expression.
How does writing compare? How do you deal with war? ',19990309011519,4,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (7,'Introduction to George','When I was a child, my father conducted ballet in Cuba. I watched Alicia Alonso dance 6 or 7 hours each day. Post-revolutionary Cuba gave me a magical and unreal childhood in the theatre, while others were taken to Castro\'s jails for incorrect thoughts. But I just remember the dancing, for I was 8 1/2 when I left.
At 40, I am taking apart the pieces of a life I was supposed to have had and putting them back together again on the Northern Coast of California. In the midst of a life surrounding internet radio, there is also a friend I made on the edge of the world -- a bird.
He is the greatest hang gliding pilot I have ever seen. They call him FlyGod because the speed at which he catches the edges of wind gusts is unbelievable. He dances in the air. He is my Alicia.
George. I love George for the beauty he brings to my life and for the iconoclastic, unruly, irrepressible person he is, and so I thought I would collect the stories I write about him in one place: my George Journal, and share them with those who live in more protected places than beyond the bounds of cliff edges 5000 feet up in the air. ',19990309014207,5,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (8,'Infamous Beach Pilot','There is a picture I am looking at. It is George flying over the water as the sunset blinks a star shape off his glider. The sky over the beach is getting dark, but not with colors, just blue sliding into darkness with the white light of the sun falling behind the horizon.
He straddles the line between insanity and art. His commitment to the wind is absolute, and he flies like no one I have ever seen. The other day, I saw the familiar colors of his glider, but something was wrong. The turns weren\'t smooth. The legs were stiff. The glider was just 4 inches in height it was so far away, but I knew it wasn\'t him.
George takes his hands off the glider bar when it turns and just tips it, this delicate instrument in his hands. It is a woman for him, I think, and he is a bird.
He has a pick-up truck that he sometimes lives in when he goes gliding in the mountains. He wears t-shirts until they have holes in them and customizes gliders for professional pilots during the day. \"Make the ground afraid of you. Ya gotta believe,\" he says.
I believe. ',19990309014344,5,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (9,'Alone in an Acid Dream','Alone, acid focuses a zoom lens on the senses.
And so it was, in a solitary moment, that George heard the ice crack on a frozen lake. It sounded like an echo of thumps as the crack got longer and further away. And, one day, he stared for an hour as water molecules settled and froze. His mind distorted, enabling him to see and hear such tiny changes that he perceived movement and sound in things the usual world perceives as still.
\"All you have to do is watch,\" he said.
Watch through the microscope of acid.
He made me think of the nature of the solitary being, the loner, the seeker of wild things. I have that person inside of me.
I have been taking video of the hang gliders at the beach. I found the shot I liked best was not of them turning near the clubhouse, as beautiful as those turns are, but using the zoom lens full blast and filming them on the dunes where they go to be alone.
I frame them with the beach, the dune, the sky, and get them expressing their thoughts as they play with the wind and do acrobatics in their gliders, or try to surprise naked people having sex on the beach, and then disappear into the fog leaving humanity behind. You meditate while flying, and suddenly you can wake up, find yourself somewhere, and wonder how you got there.
Solitude in the air seems to be its own acid dream. ',19990309014432,5,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (10,'Trying to Catch a Bird','Today, George was flying in 25-mile-an-hour winds from the North. There are not a lot of pilots who can handle those winds, but he was doing 360-degree turns low in the air.
And I thought, I am trying to catch a bird. I am trying to get him to type his stories into the web site I did for the hang gliding school, but I might never get them.
It seems like you search and search for the elusive muse, meanwhile trying to get everything done on time. Life is a flashing neon maze of obligations. But then in a cold, windy, isolated place, you\'ll find the inspiration -- the hawks, with George flying right beside them trying to stare them down.
I asked him if he ever got scared. \"Sure,\" he said. \"If you don\'t get scared, you aren\'t alive, and you aren\'t thinking. Then you can die. If you don\'t fear, things come up all of a sudden. And nothing ever happens all of a sudden. You weren\'t prepared.\"
I hadn\'t seen him in a few months. Hello again, George, I\'ve missed you. ',19990309014508,5,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (11,'Have You Ever Been Misunderstood Online?','I was asked to write this by trAce for The Next Five Minutes conference in Amsterdam, Holland, which started today, March 8, 1999.
-------------------------------------
Have I ever been misunderstood online? Yes. That was the question I was asked to write about for this conference.
Many times, online, an alter ego will emerge that you never knew existed until it was freed by online life. A demure woman can become sexual. Or, someone who looks like a cute little girl in real life can turn into a profound leader, strong and confident in her singular vision.
I found that people can express an inner power in email that goes beyond conversation--a force behind words, which leaves a soul imprint with the other person that is sealed in memory and heart.
And when two people who have inspired eachother in such
a way meet in real life, they could have fallen in love not with the human being, but with these soul imprints, which don\'t necessarily have anything to do with what the person is like day to day.
At least, this is what happened to me. It was not a misunderstanding of a statement\'s meaning, which is what one would expect to talk about when answering this question, but a misunderstanding of who I was as an essential human being, and it came from meeting souls first in an online community.
He wanted that strong, confident woman. However, in real life, I was still insecure, still dealing with many demons of self-worthlessness. He promised the world, but was changeable, and I didn\'t know that because it did not come across online. Online, he was strong,too.
It was a disaster. I would say we misunderstood eachother. I tried to call to work things out, but he started screening calls and keeping track of my movements with caller-id, and I didn\'t know it. Then he listed my phone calls, then I had a nervous breakdown.
I had fallen in love with his passion, which was so evident online. He was a technological genius on a level I had never encountered before. The way I thought about technology had changed.He gave me science.
And he saw that I had great ideas before I knew they were great. I had inspired him. He wanted to help me. He recognized my talent before I had any idea anything I was doing was worth a damn. But then he couldn\'t reconcile my need for support with my online personality.
It was a misunderstanding of the online soul\'s relationship to the real life human being. You can\'t have one without the other. They are not always the same person. Quite frequently, they are different and to someone who doesn\'t know you well, they could seem unrelated.
I recently saw the movie, \"You\'ve Got Mail.\" Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan fell in love with eachother over conversations written by Nora Ephron, in all her wit and verve.
Those are not the kind of conversations people have when they venture into the soul of another online. They go deeper. They go to dangerous places. The results are complex and unpredictable.
And the misunderstandings can destroy someone to their very core. I will never trust anyone after this experience as I had before I met this man. He has taken that away from me. He stole my innocence--because of a misunderstanding, because he fell in love with the leader and found the child.
Yes, I have been misunderstood online. I should have been more careful. Online life rarely writes itself like a script in a Nora Ephron movie. ',19990309012802,6,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (12,'Man and Machine','James Burke says that with each tool we invent, we get further away from a direct relationship with our environment, thereby incrementally destroying it. He defines our challenge as using technology to reverse this process and save the planet.
But do tools also transport us out of our own bodies? Is technology fading the idea that we own ourselves, that our consciousness lies within the boundaries of our own bodies?
I remember reading a Socratic discussion about the invention of writing. In it, a king disfavored stone writing tablets because they would eliminate people\'s need to remember things. Knowledge would die because people would just reference wisdom.
Some think the computer is an evolutionary breakthrough in external memory storage, that our symbiotic relationship with machines has altered our consciousness to the point where virtual reality tells us where our bodies begin and end, and the social interactions in digital space control our sense of who we are.
Have human beings merged with machines to become something other than human? ',19990310103745,7,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (13,'Indian Red Crayolas','I am glad Crayola is changing the name of the color. Racism is learned through subtle images, the effects of which are so minuscule when each image is taken individually, that you can\'t really see what it portends. You can\'t see the meaning by just looking at one situation. You have to look at an overall picture of old Westerns, the way many things are named, the ignorance of Indian history that most people have, the thousands of stereotypical images that go into a child\'s head, so 100,000 images later, when they are 16 years old, you see the result: racism. The quiet kind. It is a language of silence even though racism gets transmitted through mistakes in language.
Crayola just took one image out of the loop. There is no way you can measure its effects, but they will know that they are not contributing to the flood, and that is great.
Native Americans do not have the power to control their image in the media, and therefore their culture is still seen through a white filter. They cannot counter the 100,000 stereotypical images with their truth as they tell it. When I read The Last of the Mohicans, I was amazed at the diversity of cultures among the Native Americans. It was foreign policy within the United States. The contrast between that and the emptiness now is astonishing. Perhaps Native Americans will not get the power they need to control their image because there are not enough of them left.
They say history is written by the winners. I will never forget my trip to the Holocaust Museum. There, you might say, history was written by the losers. But Jews got enough political power to win later, so we had the money to build this, to take control of our history. I cannot imagine how many millions of dollars it took to build that museum. I cannot imagine how much it takes to maintain it.
The Indians will never have money like that. They have to fight to keep the memory of their genocide alive with small victories, like getting Crayola crayons to remove \"Indian Red\" as a color name. ',19990311185300,7,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (14,'Changing Lives','White flakes pour down from a white sky as a lone seagull glides outside my window. This might be the last time I see a snowstorm in twilight for a while. The flakes are so big and heavy they are falling more slowly than usual. My eye can follow one flake from the sky all the way to the ground.
I always thought that if I looked up in the sky and saw a seagull, everything would be OK. There are a lot of seagulls near the East River in New York City where I live. Maybe that gull is my favorite hang-gliding pilot George in one of his many incarnations. He could have left a bird marker in my neighborhood, a remnant of his truck episode, which took place on the FDR Drive.
Night has come, white sky turned to black. My pet bird is bopping to some peppy music on the TV. The cars rush along the FDR Drive, and my NY world, which seemed so permanent, is going to disappear in about a month when I pack up and move to Monterey, California.
Change is scary. But I suppose quiet desperation is worse.
Has anyone ever changed lives? What was it like? How did it affect your writing? ',19990316123915,7,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (15,'How do we forgive our fathers?','I wrote this after having seen the movie, \"Smoke Signals.\" -------------------
Victor looks in his mother\'s eyes and gives her a tin urn with his father\'s ashes. He has carried them all the way from Phoenix, where his father died after having run away from home. The journey to get them back was an awakening for this son of an Indian reservation.
\"The cowboys always win,\" says his friend Thomas, a grandmother\'s boy, who always seems to tell the same story 100,000 times. Victor\'s father took him to Denny\'s once. He also accidentally set a fire that killed Thomas\'s parents. It ate at him.
Far away, where his father ran, he made a friend, a beautiful woman named Sally Song. From New York. She was a hospital administrator living in a trailer in the middle of the desert nowhere, and one night she tells Victor that his father ran back into that burning house for him, and saved both infants. \"He ran in there for you,\" she said.
What is a lie? What is truth? Thomas doesn\'t seem to care. He is interested in both. Victor has rage against lies. When Thomas finally arrives home, his grandmother asks, \"what happened, and what will happen?\" And Thomas closes his eyes, and answers, \"How do we forgive our fathers? for their rage or lack of rage, for what they did to our mothers, for leaving us too early and never coming back?
As he recites these questions, we see his vision of Victor taking his father\'s ashes and throwing them over the Spokane river with a war cry, letting go of rage, of the connection he formerly had with his father, and he sinks to the ground and cries.
I still have my father\'s ashes. I cannot let them go. I wonder if I will ever let them go. I wonder if I will ever forgive my father for leaving me too early.
How do we forgive our fathers?
',19990402234214,7,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (16,'The Moderator\'s Promise','\"It\'s on me,\" said Morry as we sat down in an Italian cafe on an ordinary Tuesday night. Sipping hot chocolate, he told me about this magazine he was starting at ITP and asked me to write something. \"Explain what you\'re doing,\" he said. \"OK,\" I said tentavively, pondering.
My first reaction, when I tried to organize an answer, was an open mouth with no sound coming out. Catatonic shock. On one level, I have no idea what I am doing. I just follow my heart and listen to what the people tell me, and the answers usually come from the ground. I have learned to recognize what direction an online community should take by understanding the experiences members have in them.
On another level, as the loner girl dreaming in her room, I know exactly what I am doing. I want to reach that state of emotional exchange where people give their trust, reveal what is in their souls, and are changed by the experience. That is what I want. That is what inspires me, and I call it \"souls touching across wires.\"
And so I thought I\'d write to you, my fellow dreamer-partners in crime, about the moderator\'s promise. It is an oath you make with your life to the people who give their souls to your vision. When that bond is made, the group recreates the original vision in their own image. You can never predict how it will come out because each group creation is unique. But the oath is, \"I will be here, giving of myself to you, my fellow community members, for the rest of my life.\"
You can do it in words alone, you can do it in multimedia, or you can do it over a party line on the telephone.
The technology is not really important, for technology is only a distribution channel for emotion, and emotion is what people react to. However, after you have made decisions about emotional design, it is interesting to play with technology and create an online community environment that combines different channels to form a multimedia experience.
That is what I am doing with Radio Free Monterey. It is a web cast radio station/virtual community where chatters in a chat room see and hear a DJ in live audio/video and then both sides talk to eachother. We have a wireless pinhole camera in a box kite ready to fly on Del Monte Beach in Monterey, when the winds permit.
We tested the camera by having it send back pictures to a receiver, whose signal was then pumped into the computer encoding the live feed. The chatters saw the DJ moving about the house, heard rock music playing from the stereo, and chatted about how shockingly disgusting the bathroom looked at night when viewed through the pinhole. A lot of fun was had with this. Chatters never knew where the DJ was going to go next with that camera.
However, the reason a community is forming around this radio station is not because our environment is in multimedia. It is forming because a guy found a stage in broadcasting that offered an outlet for creative expression, which changed his life. The community stage offered him the opportunity to be understood and make a difference, where society did not. Now, he is giving that stage away to others. He made the moderator\'s promise. \"Radio Free Monterey will give voice to the disenfranchised, and running this station is what I want to do for the rest of my life.\"
He and various other DJs are on 7 hours a day, five days a week, from 5:00 pm to 1:00 am PST. People can connect to the live feed and have a person to talk to. We now even have a phone that allows telephone interviews to go over the live feed, so you can call the station and hear your voice over the computer, while chatting, to yourself? :-) It is a comfortable, zany place. Regular guests include a militia guy and a paranoid schizophrenic.
We had an 18-year-old girl who hadn\'t drawn in a long time. She just graduated high school and is working as a waitress. On a lark, she sent us this pen-and-ink doodle along with some CDs. I put it up on the site and made a big deal out of it. Where her art teachers at school dismissed her doodles, we celebrated them. It touched her. Her brother sent us a private note thanking us for getting his sister to believe enough in herself to start drawing again.
This is the reward you get for the moderator\'s promise. It\'s not a big job in a glamorous new media company. It is not getting your start-up bought out for $10 million. In fact, a lot of the nuts and bolts work of running an online community could be classified as secretarial. You have to respond to people when they want something. You have to want to talk to them and care about them. I spend hours on email. I will probably never make a dime off it because I don\'t care. The driving force for me is to use internet technologies to create social structures that touch people, and there are no \"if onlys\" in my life. That is what I do.
Thank you very much for reading. Comments welcome, as always. ',19990402234022,6,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (20,'Security: Who is responsible?','On Fri, 3 Sep 1999, Nancy White wrote: Yikes, this is terrific, Barbara. I\'d like to probe your ideas on guidelines (trying to get to some sense of \"how\")
Thanks. I will try. I moderated a mailing list 4 - 7 hours a day for four years, so my tone might be a bit strident at this point. I welcome questions, probes, or any comments at all to anything I write.
I wrote: I have been thinking about the term \"email citizenship\" for a while. What is a good email citizen like?
Some things are coming to my mind:
* the ability to take responsibility for their own security
Nancy wrote: What does this mean? Taking care with public persona online? Understanding the vulnerabilities of the technical systems (ie, write each email as if it were to be published in the NY Times....) It would be nice if we could define this a bit, especially for folks new to the net.
I think all of those things. Control within -- regarding your revelation-privacy balance, learning software that might give you more choices than a mailing list. I have seen some excellent posts about community software here. What software you use, how subtle it is, can really shape your mind.
Perhaps it would be helpful to start with three questions:
Should people be able to see the member list of their community?
Would seeing the email list provide a greater sense of security because people would know to whom they are writing?
Is it good for a member to use the email list to determine their revelation-privacy balance when posting?
My answers would be as follows: 1. If you are starting a new community, it doesn\'t really matter which way you go in terms of security. 2. No. 3. No.
Example 1: You subscribe to a list using your POP, or domain name address. barbara@barbarasbusiness.com. There is a majordomo aliases file on the server that links that address to your real email, bs25@earthlink.net, let\'s say. However, you can link a POP address to more than one email address. So barbara@barbarasbusiness.com = bs25@earthlink.net, greg354@aol.com, terry897@compuserve.com
If barbara@barbarasbusiness.com subscribes to a list and everyone sees that address, they might think, well, that is an address that reveals who barbara is. Not necessarily. Others could be getting the mail as what I call \"ghosts,\" and there is no way anyone would ever be able to find out about it.
There are many many other ways to hide identity on an email list with free email addresses, but it would be shutting out a lot of voices if communities were to ban free email addresses, POP addresses and the like. There are some great people using those services.
Example 2: You get to know someone via private email. They reach out to you. You make friends with them. You invite them onto your community mailing list. You know they are there, you invited them. They turn out to have lied to you about who they were. Now they have all this information about you.
People lying to eachother is a big security problem online and is completely irrelevant to whether or not members get to see a list of email addresses.
What should you do? This is only my answer, but it is take control within yourself. Figure out what your comfort zone is and stick to it. It would be safer to write as if you were going to be published in the NY Times because the NY Times asks permission to publish writers material. I think you have to write as if whatever you say will be forwarded to unknown people without your permission.
More and more, people are courteous. They write and ask if they can forward an email, but not enough times to be secure. For me, the answer is just to be able to say, this is who I am. This is what I\'ve done. These are the mistakes I\'ve made. These are my sorrows. These are my joys, and I don\'t care who knows it. When you get to that point, then you can write conversational email to a community as an art form. When a group does this, then the bond begins to form. Community, the bond that you feel.
However, not everyone can do this. Then, they join and just read. They might have family health problems that do not give them the time to participate. There are so many reasons why people just read. I have always passionately believed that people have a right to do this. That the privacy balance of silence is something that should be respected. That a community should embrace all members, silent and voiced. I put the responsibility on those who post to take care of themselves, and this can be controversial.
There is danger.
What if people have gotten to know eachother well and get addicted to revealing information past their comfort zone? Is there any way a community can really take responsibility for them now? Maybe I am hard, but I think the answer to that is still no. The technology of subscribing offers too many possibilities. So does lying. What if people cannot accept this? What if they just cannot take responsibility for themselves anymore? Then the answer might be that you, as moderator, are in trouble.
Checkmate in the mental game.
Maybe someone has an answer to this security issue that I have not thought of. I would be very interested to hear the opinions of list members.
But that is why I am writng this email citizenship guide. After 4 - 7 hours a day of doing this, I still got into trouble. Maybe you cannot really say you are an experienced moderator until you have been there and learned from such an experience.
I would be interested to hear if any other community moderators have gotten in trouble over an issue. What I am interested in is
Did your trouble change you as a human being? Did you lose passion, innocence? Did you become less of an artist, less of a moderator?
I was thinking last night that if a disagreement matters to you too much, you have already lost because you have lost control.
Anyway, I have written enough for today. :-) I\'ll probably take your questions, Nancy, in parts. I sometimes feel my tone might be a bit strident. I hope that if anyone disagrees with me or has questions that they would feel free to ask away. I don\'t have all the answers by any means. I ask questions and wonder every day.
Barbara ',19990906180331,8,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (19,'Email Citizenship Guide','Lorraine wrote: I have come to believe that an important duty of citizenship is educating oneself about the very issues hinted at by the debate specifically about online security and privacy. This education has to take place both online and in the wider social and political environment. It can\'t be divorced from theory and made into a question only of practical considerations. Nor can the latter subvert the former.
I have been thinking about the term \"email citizenship\" for a while. What is a good email citizen like?
Some things are coming to my mind:
* the ability to take responsibility for their own security
* the ability to leave an argument when they percieve it is getting too personal for the other person
* the ability to place faith in themselves as opposed to projecting faith onto the community as a whole or on any one member
* the ability to find balance between the real and online worlds so that the community doesn\'t become 100% of their lives
* the confidence to be honest so that when you write something you feel is appropriate for your community, it doesn\'t matter who knows it. This is who you are, and you trust others to respond to you as a human being, with respect.
My combination answer to the security issue is to provide as much security as humanly possible on the back-end network, but even with all that, to give members the philosophical and social responsibility to provide security for their words. This way, I figure, that the issue would be covered on the back end and on the front end, everyone can make their own decisions, and I would be covered if that million-to-one beyond-my-imagination internet Thing happened.
But it seems to me that with all this blinding technology, the definition of a good email citizen has a lot to do with inner emotional control at some very deep levels.
Nancy wrote: This is, in some ways, like making everyone a facilitator. I like that. It is like the Open Space Facilitation technique\'s one law -- the law of two > feet. It creates the expectation that you come informed and if you don\'t like it, you leave. (my poor paraphrase) But it is much more than that. It is about assuming responsibility for your participation in a group in an active, aware manner. Is that what you are suggesting?
I remember telling someone once how to stop a flame. I said instead of getting into the argument, you have to tell a story that makes people say \"stop\" to themselves. Then you have to have the control to keep quiet and go on. The control to silence is what seperates the leaders from the followers. If all the members of an online community can find that control, in addition to the trust, then it would be like everyone being an online facilitator, do you think Nancy? I like the idea, too.
Wondering what everyone thinks.
Barbara ',19990906175942,8,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (21,'A Goodbye Poem','George might leave Marina. Kameron at Northwing moved up to Oregon, and George is out of a job. I have his picture on my desktop. I took it of him above the dunes.
That familiar curved flying form, he is a metaphor for the dream that flew away. You know he will never get close enough to anyone to stay with them. He will never love anyone over the wind. He will never put down ties to a place even though everywhere he goes, people love him.
So I took some pictures of him and took some video of a parachute clinic he did so I would always have the memory. He is having anxiety attacks because suddenly he is not in hang gliding anymore. He would have to get another job to stay in the area.
I know that the wind won\'t let him.
Yesterday, I almost took the image of George off my desktop. Too emotional. Every time I look at him I see \"the dream that flew away,\" something which brings out the attachment disorder in me. But maybe it is good for me to see a metaphor for the bond that needs to fly. Maybe familiarity will lessen the terror in time.
He might become a competition hang gliding pilot. They get paid to take inhuman risks like fly through thunderstorms. I told him that if he dies, I hope no one will ever tell me. He\'ll just become the ghost of Marina Beach, because on those cold, dark, twilight blue days we\'ll be able to look up and see him there -- alone with his truth in the wind. ',19990912224818,5,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (22,'A Question of Faith','A Question of Faith
It is so easy to be inspired by art and think this project that I found is going to be the next big thing. It is so easy to think that an art project can fill the deep philosophical gaps in your life. It can\'t. It\'s run by human beings, and after enough time how many of us are not deeply flawed?
And so it happened that Jokerman loved us. He came from a family of actors. \"I\'ll bring my brothers to you. If James can just get some experience with more professional people, then the entertainment can get even better,\" I am paraphrasing. His brothers cancelled out on us twice, hours before they were supposed to arrive.
I had all these ideas about interactive narrative between the chat room and the broadcast. Give the chat room the power to move the plot. A submarine where the chatters provide the measurements. A treasure hunt where the chatters could provide the notes.
Joker\'s brothers wanted to be gay theatre promoters from Texas. I didn\'t know how it would work, but I was hoping I could do something for a thesis presentation in October.
But they cancelled twice. Then Joker was going to bring his father. But no call all week.
The radio station has another friend, Tony. His father was an official under Marcos but disowned him. Tony is a gardener who is constantly in trouble with the law. But he also goes in the street with a tape recorder and interviews homeless guys, whose voices we proudly put on the air. When people are calling the internet elitist, I can say we reach the homeless becasue of Tony.
But he had been trying to escape jail on a parole violation by staying at my house for four days. He also barbecued this fish that he caught and it smelled like hell. James had to kick him out. I was at my wits end. James realized that I needed major care. So he took me out Friday night because there was no call from Joker.
At 8:00 pm, Joker called. At 9:00 pm he and his father arrived. James and I weren\'t there. When we came home and Roger told us what happened, I almost threw up.
Broken faith. I spoke to Joker about this. He still loves us. But I keep running into this again and again.
People see an art project. They fall in love with it. They invest their expectations in it. It isn\'t enough that it gives a spiritual lift. It has to be big. Where are the numbers? How can it make money? This is the next big thing. Wow. I\'m in on the ground floor.
I want to scream. I am only an artist. Don\'t have faith in me. Place faith in yourself!
Come to me and the worlds I create as a self-sufficient human being and feel the spirit. Enjoy yourself. Give what you want. Take what you want. But then go home and leave me and everyone else with their flaws alone.
It is a broken expectation that makes a human flaw harmful. If your expectations are controlled, the flaws are neutral.
And this skill -- to carry your faith with you -- I think, is essential to being a healthy member of an online community.
Joker\'s father read Longfellow and \"Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening,\" my favorite Robert Frost poem. I clipped it and will put it up on our website. I would have loved to have met him, to talk to him about my father, to ask him about the Hollywood blacklist and WWII.
Promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep. To balance flaws and dreams, that is what I wonder about today as I end my journal, 9/11/99 ',19990912233319,9,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (23,'Tony','Tony
His father was a high official under Ferdinand Marcos but disowned his son after a childless marriage went bad. He has stories of palaces and limousines, but tells them in gardener\'s overalls now. Half hearing, he keeps talking and nervously laughing for fear that you will figure out he has no way of understanding you.
One day he came over with a fish, a rock fish that lives 3000 miles underneath Monterey Bay. There is a reason these fish live 3000 miles underneath Monterey Bay. They were not meant for the surface.
This big, ugly, orange fish with bulging eyes was then put on my barbecue grill. I was working on the computer so I didn\'t quite know what was going on. When I smelled the air outside my door and saw the fire on the grill, I lost my temper, and the fish was this half- cooked big, ugly orange monster with one eye coldly looking up at me. \"I will never let you forget. If you bring me to your hell from the bottom of the Bay, you will have to remember me,\" the fish said.
The grill was thrown out. I was very angry. But then I listened to Tony\'s interviews. He takes a tape recorder and talks to the homeless on Cannery Row. Then we make digital sound files out of them and put them in our playlist database.
On the street, Joel told Tony about the fight he had between Thor and Odin. \"Oh really?\" Tony asked. \"You fought Thor and Odin on the corner of Hone and Prescott?\" And so it went. Out of Steinbeck, out of Beckett or O\'Neill. The voices come to our station.
James made Tony RFM\'s Public Relations Manager with a business card and everything. Tony had never had a business card. He blew it up at Kinko\'s and laminated it for us. Identity. Self-respect for this rock-fish killer who is always one step away from a parole violation.
And so it goes as I end my journal... 9/18/99 ',19990918205208,9,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (24,'The Norman Letter',' The light shined delicately on the back of his shirt as he marked his score sitting at the piano. The old photograph has the look of Vermeer, as light gives peace to study. Your mind can wander. What was he thinking? How was the music shaping up in his head to bring to the stage?
My father was a conductor and a dreamer. He gave his life to a vision of an integrated orchestra, the Symphony of the New World, he called it. It was a world where people from all cultures played music on the same stage. It died in a fight. It died when he contracted pancreatic cancer in 1974. I think tobacco killed my father. I stand here without a family because of cancer. I am one of the children survivors.
“I’m home early for a change and my thoughts turn to mental images of stucco homes of California sunshine, of you, Pearl and myself, and many other things. Somehow it just doesn’t seem possible to coordinate them all in any one picture. I think it is quite hopeless for me to even think of California. If I had more, it might be possible, but even then, it would just mean a gamble at best.
“And yet, it is very important that we three should live our lives in the closest possible proximity to eachother. For we are truly fortunate, you and I; -- we have a friend! I don’t think it possible that I shall ever have another besides yourself. And to our dual friendship we have added Pearl! In so vast a population, we three people are, to be sure, a mere drop in an ocean; but when I think that of all the people I have ever known in my life, not one, ever had been blessed with even one friend, according to my own profound concept of the word. I realize more fully how infinitely great is our luck merely to know eachother.”
Written January 30, 1939. Benjamin Steinberg to Norman King, his best friend. The first time I saw that letter was in January 1999 when I found it hidden among old papers. He wrote like me. I stood on his shoulders as a writer and I didn’t even know it until that moment.
At 40, I made the move to California myself to pursue my own dreams. I bask in the sunshine 60 years later still listening for the words of my father, the dreamer who understood friendship, and my mother, the woman who saved the money to enable me to have a chance at life.
Lung cancer took her, too. I remember going to NYU hospital with her. We went through a painfully slow bone scan, a cat scan, a battery of other tests, and when I finally got home, I got a phone call. She had broken her leg and we went to the emergency room at midnight. Lung cancer had eaten through the bone. She died two months after.
What do we owe our parents when we have watched them die like that? Is it, possibly, to reach out and hold the hands of the other children and say we are a family of man? We will stand with eachother and live good lives and share so you can be proud of us because we know you are watching. We know you will never let us go, as we will never forget you.
In this community of storytellers, I wanted to reach out to the children -- those who are watching their parents die now, those whose families are a memory. It doesn’t matter what your age is. We are all the same. We are slowly losing our best friends.
My father wrote before computers that he realized how infinitely great is our luck merely to know eachother. That is what online community is, a place where we can all be lucky merely to know eachother.
Far away from our family piano, from the light that shined in my living room window, I await the words of others. ',19991005191040,6,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (25,'Online Identity','> My sense is that we seek the same things online that we seek in rl - > we\'re still humans... My personal experience with identity > experimentation was limited to highschool - I put myself on a path > where I define my Self as a plastic and changing thing, although the > longer I walk my path, the more I find myself to be the same person > I\'ve always been :)
I have never played identity games online, but I did find that writing conversational email released the leader, the artist, and the adventurer in a girl who had led an otherwise sheltered life. These parts of me, then released, invaded my real persona, and at 40, I moved from NYC to California to be close to Radio Free Monterey, my partner James, and see where life took me.
I also read the story and was glued to the screen.
My core vision of online communities is \"souls touching across wires.\" It isn\'t about conversation. It is when someone releases their inner power online and thereby changes the way you look at the world. I did this one- on-one with a man I met online in July 1994. It was from that relationship that I started asking questions. This is one-to-one. Can it be done many-to-many?
He was born in a shack in Appalachia. Abandoned by his father. Called bastard. On the GI Bill, he went to a community college in Michigan and got a job in a steel plant. There, he figured out a computer system to track manufacturing and 10 years later, ended up a vice president at a high-tech firm. He was making a half million dollars a year travelling around the world selling oil commodities trading systems, but he was dreadfully unhappy. Unhappy marriage. I had fallen in love with him, but then suddenly he left me. His wife took in a child from their adopted daughter\'s bad marriage and he put himself further into the box of duty.
One day, in a hotel in Houston, he asked the bell boy where he could get some marijuana. The bell boy led him to a crack house. He tried it. Last year, I visited him in a rehab center. This year, he lapsed for the second time and is in jail. He said he left me because, no matter how much I understood, my sheltered life would not have permitted me to understand what kind of a risk taker he was. He had ruined other people\'s lives with broken promises. He didn\'t want to ruin mine.
Online identity. There are things I understand about this man that no one else understands. The soul of the Appalachian Kentucky boy and what it wanted. I understand that with all his risk taking, he never had the courage to feed his soul. But I didn\'t understand the practical implications of the kind of man he was. I didn\'t understand the harm his broken promises had done, and he knew that, so this ultimate salesman left me because he loved me too much to make the sale.
Online identity. I wonder if you can ever know anyone but yourself. ',19991129142048,6,1); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (26,'Pain in the Ass','You break everything you touch, man what you have to learn. FlyGirl is a morbid person who finds fancy in destroying computer equipment... But when all is said and done, she\'s not have bad...
Randy',20000327204250,1,3); INSERT INTO Story VALUES (27,'Michael McDermott','I know people who look like Michael McDermott. I know them online and in real life. I learned today that he was active on bulletin boards that talked about explosives, but his tone was mischevious, always intelligent. I learned today that he said hello to his neighbors, but no one really knew him. What made him snap? We will never know.
There was no place he felt comfortable talking, and that is our problem as a society. The social walls of conformity make people fear to reveal, both online and off, and the box of silence becomes ever tighter.
I am used to postal workers going nuts with a gun. I expected to see a high-school student from a place I have never been commit a heinous crime, not the reflection of someone I see every day. This guy had a .460 magnum in the locker at his office. Does anyone here have a gun in a locker at their office?
What is the difference between our inner and outer lives? Should we be working to make our lives less a game of masks, social graces be damned? Perhaps if we revealed more, both online and off, we would be in less danger of becoming Michael McDermott. I say \"we,\" because the emotional violence of madness has hit our community.
Michael McDermott was one of us.
People are talking about the dot com crash, assessing our industry. There were a lot of lies, a lot of greed. Now there are fewer lies, and people want to see business plans detailing a financial structure toward profitability -- finally.
But I think there is another serious issue we might not be facing. I think there is a lot of mental illness in our industry, too -- people who have jobs in internet companies walking around with mental illnesses, who don\'t tell anyone because of society\'s prejudice. (Of course, this is true everywhere, but it may be especially pronounced with us.)
Creative ideas are very much the territory of people with mental illness because many times they think differently, and our industry has been built on a shift in the way people think. My life partner and true love has bipolar disorder. I will love him forever, I don\'t care who knows it, and neither does he. We live honest, rich, and rewarding lives because, to our friends and my co- workers, there is nothing unknown.
He designed the installation on which I have made my career.
Maybe I am not the only one who developed a product with a mad tinkerer in manic states of dementia. But maybe I am one of the few who is not afraid to admit it. I am proud of it, in fact, because changing attitudes is very much part of the courage and original work that made our industry.
I think we have to start talking about mental illness, so people can start to admit the role people who win their struggles with these illnesses have played in our industry -- as well as the wonderful contributions they have made to online communities. We should celebrate their creativity and support their battles, for we have all benefitted.
Then maybe they won\'t be afraid to come out in real life, or maybe we can learn to recognize warning signs better so another one of us does not become a Michael McDermott. One of the people he killed was a new mother who just came back from maternity leave. She deserved to live. We have to look in the mirror. ',20010114184820,6,1); # # Table structure for table 'Story_Category' # CREATE TABLE Story_Category ( sc_id mediumint(8) NOT NULL auto_increment, sc_name char(60) DEFAULT '' NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (sc_id) ); # # Dumping data for table 'Story_Category' # INSERT INTO Story_Category VALUES (1,'The First Piece'); INSERT INTO Story_Category VALUES (2,'Ireland Opus'); INSERT INTO Story_Category VALUES (3,'New York Stories'); INSERT INTO Story_Category VALUES (4,'Washington, D.C.'); INSERT INTO Story_Category VALUES (5,'Marina Beach, CA'); INSERT INTO Story_Category VALUES (6,'Inside the Soul'); INSERT INTO Story_Category VALUES (7,'Discussion Starters'); INSERT INTO Story_Category VALUES (9,'Running RFM: A Journal'); INSERT INTO Story_Category VALUES (8,'Articles on Moderating');