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olderthannetfic · 6 years

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I just realized it’s Fandom First Friday and the topic is meta!

For months, I’ve been slowly working my way through How To Be Gay by David Halperin, which talks about drag queens and how certain aspects of gay male culture appropriate from women to empower gay men. (Halperin uses the word ‘appropriate’ extensively, not necessarily in a negative context.) He brought up some points I thought were highly relevant for thinking about slash.

Last February, I went to Escapade and chatted with a bunch of acafans. To my total lack of surprise, they too love Halperin’s book and had the same reaction I did. I thought when I finish the book, I’ll write up some meta. But I got busy, and it’s a long, dense book. So then in August, I went to the final Vividcon. There, I ran into Francesca Coppa and mentioned this idea. Her response? “Oh, I just wrote a journal article about that.”

…

AHAHAHAHA! Oh god, we are the same person.

(NB: We are not actually the same person.We just have similar first names, similar fandoms, and similar flists back on LJ, have done similar fandom history oral history projects, go to the same cons, and have both been on the OTW board. Laura Hale once went so far as to “out” me as her. And now we like the same academic books too. Heh.)

So, obviously, now I have to write meta about this, and Fandom First Friday is the perfect time to take a stab at it. I have so much more to say and I want to go back through How to be Gay and pull out many more amazing quotes, but better to write something than wait for perfection.

What I found the most interesting about Halperin’s analysis was that he points out that women may find these funhouse mirror versions of femaleness upsetting, and those feelings are completely understandable and valid, but they don’t make drag any less empowering or significant for gay men. He neither thinks that we need to get rid of drag nor that women should stop having those reactions.

He also talks about how subtext is often more appealing than text: when he first started teaching his college course ‘How to be Gay’, on which the book is based, he assumed that students would connect more with literal representation of their identities. That’s the narrative we push: now that we have literal X on TV or in a Broadway show, we don’t need subtextual old Y anymore! Instead, many of his students loved things like The Golden Girls and failed to connect with current gay representation.

It’s a long book, but what many of his ideas boil down to is that a Broadway show that is massively subtextually queer allows the viewer to identify with any of the characters or with all of them simultaneously or with the situation in general. It’s highly fluid. Gay representation often means a couple of specific gay characters with a rigid identity. Emotionally, that can be harder to connect to.

Sometimes, allegory gets closer to one’s own internal experiences than literal depiction does.

Coppa’s article (book chapter?) is about exactly that. It’s titled: Slash/Drag: Appropriation and Visibility in the Age of Hamilton. She uses Halperin’s book but extends the idea further. I particularly liked her example of how female fans use Bucky to tell stories that are essentially (and often literally) about rape. His story is about a loss of bodily autonomy and about having one’s boundaries violated in a way that is familiar to female fans, but he’s a male action hero, so those stories don’t have the same visceral ick factor as writing about literal rape of literal women.

Partly, that’s due to how society treats men vs. women, but it’s also about which fans are writing these stories and which fans are the target audience of them. Just as a cis gay man appropriating Joan Crawford to talk about his experience of gayness isn’t really for or about women, most slash fanfic about Bucky being victimized isn’t really for or about cis gay men.

It was on the dancefloor at Vividcon that I realized that, as a woman, I have this unconscious feeling like I am appropriating gay men’s culture when I’m into Joan Crawford and other over-the-top female performers. It’s ridiculous! How can I be appropriating a female celebrity from gay men? But it’s an experience I share with lots of other women. Telling women we have no right to things is the bedrock of our culture.

That feature film Slash, which featured a bunch of cis male slash writers was inspired partly by the male director going on Reddit and finding a bunch of gay guys saying that slash squicks them. He felt that he was being progressive by erasing women.

On Tumblr, the fujocourse gets reblogged not just by toxic pits of misogynist, delusional bullshit like thewoesofyaoi, but also by seemingly reasonable fans. Hell, I’m pretty sure I used to suffer from this problem myself: I remember a time when I felt like I, as a bisexual woman, liked slash better, differently, and more correctly than straight women did.

I no longer feel this way.

There are lots of reasons for caring about slash, some of which are just about the pretty, some of which are more about gender, and some of which are more about sexual orientation, but after seeing decades of arguments about who is allowed to like slash, I have come to the conclusion that none of them are valid. All of them are “Not like the other girls!” and hating on femaleness. Some of the fans who do this are female and some are not, but it all boils down to not feeling like women have a right to a voice.

And then there’s Halperin calmly asserting gay men’s right to self-expression!

It struck me like a bolt of lightning because it was so self-assured. He never doubts that there’s something valid and important about giving gay men space to explore their own emotional landscapes. Literal representation is important, sure, but so is the ability to make art that speaks to your insides, not just your outside, and that sometimes means allegorical, subtextual art played out in bodies unlike your own.

“Fetishization” a la Tumblr often means writing stories with explicit sex or liking ships because they’re hot. Sometimes, it means writing kinks that are seen as dark or unusual. Frankly, this sort of fujocourse boils down to thinking that sex and desire are dirty and that m/m sex is the dirtiest of all. I do write some ~dark~ kinks in my fic because, for one thing, I’m a kinky person in real life, and for another, I often use fic to explore the experience of having dark thoughts and wondering what that says about me.

A lot of slash writers are exploring feelings of victimization. Another big chunk of us explore things like rape fantasies from the bottom: maybe we have and maybe we haven’t experienced assault in real life, but for all of us, having that kind of rape fantasy brings up questions of whether we’re asking for it, whether it’s okay to be into that kind of thing, whether it means something. Another chunk of us are exploring a different kind of “bad” thoughts: feelings of aggression, violence, dominance. In my own work, I’m interested in sadists and how they come to terms with their desires, but I think slash is also often a way to explore any sort of violent, dark feeling, not just rape fantasies from the top. Society tells us women aren’t allowed to have dark thoughts–hell, that we’re not capable of impulses that dark. Sometimes, it’s easier to write even a relatively banal action story about a male action hero because he, in canon, is allowed to have the feelings and impulses that interest the writer.

The fujocourse is all about saying that women aren’t allowed to have dark impulses ever. That we’re not allowed to be horny. That we’re not allowed to enjoy art for the sake of an orgasm. When we depict people not precisely like ourselves, we’re overstepping. When we make art for our own pleasure instead of devoting our lives to service, we are toxic and bad. Any time. Every time.

It’s just another round of saying that women’s pleasure is not valid and women’s personal space should not be respected. No hobbies for you: only motherhood.

And yet that’s not actually what most slash fans think. I was heartened to read Lucy Neville’s Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Women and Gay Male Pornography and Erotica. A friend read it recently and was trying to guess which quotes were from me. I have to admit, I was playing that game too! I honestly couldn’t tell, until I looked at demographic info, that some could not have been mine. They sounded so familiar. On Tumblr, I tend to wade into meta discussions, so I see a lot of loud, divisive views. I especially see a lot of views that, over time, make me start to wonder if I’m a crazy outlier. Intellectually, I know that this is all down to bad curation of my dash and a love of browsing the meta tags. I didn’t realize how much it had crept up on me unconsciously–how much I had started to feel like I had to justify and explain the most basic and common experiences of being a slash fan.

What was interesting about Neville’s book is how alike many of the women sounded. Now, no one book represents everybody, and she makes no claims to have figured out the exact size or demographic breakdown of fandom. Her focus is on women who like m/m material, whether slash or porno movies or anything else. At the same time, though, she surveyed heaps of women, and the responses were amazingly similar. Nearly every quote in that book strikes a chord with me. Nearly all of them, with a few minor variations, could be something I’ve written. Gay, straight, bi, asexual: we all had many of the same things to say about slash and what it means to us.

So, some brief, and more digestible thoughts:

Slash is “overrepresented” in meta and scholarly literature because people still ask us to justify ourselves constantly.

People ask us to justify ourselves because they assume that “good representation” is literal representation.

There are key emotional, psychological aspects of our experiences that are often better expressed allegorically, whether we’re gay men doing drag or women writing slash or any other sort of artist.

Here are some choice quotes from Coppa. (I will restrain myself and not just try to quote the entire thing. Heh.)

“There are endless transmedia adaptations of characters like Sherlock Holmes or Batman, so it is clearly not appropriation that’s the issue: it is the appropriation by the other—by women, in this case.

One could argue then that it is our awareness of this appropriative doubleness—of the familiar characters acting in an unfamiliar script, of the female storyteller animating the male characters— that boots slash out of “literature,” with its illusions of psychological coherence (see Edwards’s Chapter 3 in this volume), and puts it instead into the category of performance, itself so often associated with the fake, the female, the forged, the queer. My argument in this chapter is that it might be useful to compare slash to other forms of appropriative performance; drag comes powerfully to mind and, more recently, the musical Hamilton. These are forms where it’s important to see the bothness, the overlaid and blurred realities: male body/Liza Minnelli; person of color/George Washington.”

“In his book How to Be Gay, David Halperin (2012) discusses the ongoing centrality of certain female characters to the gay male cultural experience and takes as his project an explanation of why gay men choose those particular avatars and what they make of them. Halperin argues that gay men use these female characters to articulate a gay male subjectivity which precedes and may in important ways be separate from a gay male sexual identity (or to put it another way, a boy may love show tunes before he loves men, or without ever loving men). The gay male appropriation of and perfor- mance of femininity effectively mirror—in the sense both of “reflect” and “reverse”—slash fiction’s preoccupations with and appropriations of certain (often hyper‐performatively) male characters in service of a female sensibility; in both cases, appropriation becomes a way of saying something that could not otherwise easily be said.”

“A character like Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne speaks, obviously, to boys who are getting mixed messages about what successful manhood looks like in the twenty‐first century—it was hard enough in the old days to be Charles Atlas, but today you have to be Charles Atlas and Steve Jobs at the same time, which is a problem of time commitment just for a start. But these characters speak to women, too: differently. The doubled nature of the paired male characters taken up by slash fandom—these aliens, these costumed heroes, these men wearing man suits, men in male drag—make them appealing sites of identification for women, or proxy identities, to use Halperin’s (2012) term; that is, they provide “a metaphor, an image, a role” (185). They are sites of complex feeling.

But what these characters are metaphors for, what they make us feel, is not simple, singular, or easily reducible. Halperin takes hundreds of pages even to begin to excavate the complicated web of meanings around Joan Crawford; I am not going to be able to unpack any of these iconic male characters in a few paragraphs, and it is also the nature of fandom to build multiple and contradictory meanings around fan favorites (and to get into heated arguments over them).”

[In Halperin’s class] “Works that allowed gay men to be invisible were preferred to those where they were explicitly represented. “Non‐gay cultural forms offer gay men a way of escaping from their particular, personal queerness into total, global queerness,” Halperin (2012) writes. “In the place of an identity, they promise a world” (112). I would argue that slash offers something similar—that queer female space, as well as the ability to escape the outline of the identity that you are forced to carry every day—and that for gay men and slash fans both, the suggestion that you would restrict your identification to those characters with whom you share an identity feels limiting.”

“Visibility is a trap,” Phelan (2003) concludes, referencing Lacan (1978) (93): “it summons surveillance and the law, it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonialist/imperial appetite for possession”—and fans on the ground know this and talk about it in very nearly this language. Again, this is not to say that fans—or gay men, for that matter—do not want or deserve good representations: female fandom, slash fandom included, championed Mad Max: Fury Road, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, and the new, gender‐swapped Ghostbusters, all of which have multiple and complex female characters. Rather, I am arguing that representation does not substitute for the pleasure or power of invisibility; for, as even the most famously visible actors say, “But what I really want is to direct.”

#fandom meta #fandom first friday #fujocourse

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craigrcannon · 3 years

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Employee #1: Yahoo

Employee #1 is a series of interviews focused on sharing the often untold stories of early employees at tech companies.

Tim was the first employee at Yahoo, its Chief Product Officer for eight years, and is now a partner at YC, so we thought it would be fitting to kick things off with him.

Discussed: Meeting the Founders, Writing Yahoo’s Business Plan, Leaving Harvard Business School Early, Creating the Banner Ad, Yahoo’s First Ad Sales, Being an Early Employee After a Management Change, and Founder vs. Early Employee Differences.

Craig : What did you do before Yahoo?

Tim : Before Yahoo, I learned that I preferred working at small companies. I really didn’t think of it as entrepreneurship at that point. My first work experience out of school was at Motorola – a big company. And at the time, in the early ’90s, Motorola was held up as a model of a well-run company. Every business magazine at the time portrayed Motorola up as the ideal.

I went there with a positive attitude. The work was interesting. It was rewarding and intellectually challenging. But after a few months, I remember looking at my boss and my boss’ boss, and my boss’ boss’ boss, and saying to myself, “You know what? I don’t want any of their jobs.” I saw how they spent their time and didn’t find it interesting or very rewarding. They spent their time managing meetings and office politics.

This wasn’t my vision of what work was. To me, work was doing and making things and being able to see the fruits of that labor. At the end of the day or at least after a short period of time, I need to point to something and say to myself ‘that’s what I’ve been building.’

My experience in this big company was very different from that idea. If I rose up the managerial ranks in this big company, I could easy see myself going home and asking myself, “What did I do today?” and not having a very satisfying answer.

Craig : You couldn’t point at stuff.

Tim : That’s right. It‘s not that these managers weren’t doing things, but everything was so time inefficient. In big companies, time scales are longer. And the bullshit factor of office politics is high. For me, maintaining passion for your work when the feedback mechanism is that slow is difficult.

Once I internalized that big companies weren’t my cup of tea, I decided to go to business school in order to make a change.

Craig : But you ended up leaving Harvard Business School for Yahoo, right?

Tim : That’s right. I left in the middle of my second year. The whole point of going to business school was to figure out what I wanted to do and get exposed to a lot. The case study method was great for that.

I soon concluded that small companies were where I would thrive. I also thought that it would be great to work with friends. What could be more rewarding that working hard and doing something important with friends? And so here I was in business school thinking this when my friend Jerry Yang calls and says, “Hey, I want you to come out and join me and my co-founder start a company.”

Craig : That was the opportunity.

Tim : Exactly.

Craig : Just to rewind for a second, how did you guys meet?

Tim : Undergrad. Jerry and I were both double E’s [electrical engineers]. We spent 4 years studying together.

Craig : Cool. So Jerry calls and you’re thinking, “Oh, this might be it.” Did you know that Yahoo would be a thing, or did you just feel like this is a good first step?

Tim : The latter. I didn’t know it would be a big thing. Jerry came to visit me at the beginning of my second year at HBS. At the time he was a PhD student in EE at Stanford. He knew I was looking for a new job, and I told him, “I want something small.”

He called me a couple of months later and said, “Hey, a buddy of mine, my research partner and I started this thing. You should check it out,” and he showed me the world wide web for the first time. There was almost nothing online at that point, but I clearly remember a website company called Satchel.com, which published live sports scores.

I’m a sports junkie. So before I found this website, I used to sit and watch ESPN just for the score ticker that runs across the bottom of the screen. At the time, it only came on twice an hour. I was pathetic. I literally would just sit there and wait 30 minutes for the damn ticker to get the live score for Detroit Piston games. There was no other way.

Craig : Hahaha.

Tim : So Jerry showed me this site and I asked, “You mean I can just hit refresh and I get the live score instantly?” Okay, I got it.

Craig : That’s how you got the internet?

Tim : That’s how I got the internet.

Craig : That’s the best example I’ve ever heard.

Tim : After that, I was hooked. Jerry and his cofounder, David, had built a directory of the world wide web, which was finite at that point. Given where the internet is today, it’s hard to imagine. It was largely just double Es and technical folks posting their dissertations and sharing their papers. Only gradually did they make sites about their hobbies and quirky things, because they realized, “Hey, it doesn’t have to be just dissertations.” So Jerry and Dave started collecting these things and organizing them for everyone.

And so when Jerry called me at school, he said, “Hey, I have no idea if this is going to be big, but I know you’re looking for a job. So how about if you join David and me? Come out to Silicon Valley and get a regular 9 to 5 at a place like at SGI [Silicon Graphics], and then you can moonlight with us. And we’ll see where it goes.” I’m like, “Sounds good.”

Craig : And so where does this fall? Is this the summer before your second year?

Tim : No, this is November of my second year. And I’m thinking, “Sounds good. I’ll ramp up my job search in Silicon Valley, at SGI or Intel or wherever.”

Craig : Yeah, there are plenty of places like that.

Tim : Yes, plenty of places. But that’s also the time when internet usage started to take off.

A couple weeks later Jerry calls me and says, “Hey, we’re going to go raise some money. We need a business plan. Can you help us write a business plan?”

So I flew out to Stanford for Christmas break. I spent two weeks with them, wrote the business plan, then went back to school. They took the business plan, which they probably really didn’t need, it was mostly just a formality at that point, and they raised money from Sequoia Capital.

But in those two weeks I learned a ton from them about the opportunity and put it into a business plan format.

Again, that was about the same time that internet usage started to take off. So a couple weeks after I returned to school, Jerry called and said, “Ah, you know what? This thing is taking off. It might not be a moonlighting job by the time you graduate. It might be a full-time gig.” I’m like, “Fine by me.”

Craig : That just saved me time.

Tim : Exactly, I wouldn’t have to look for another job.

So a few weeks later Jerry calls and says, “Sequoia is going to give us money and we’re going to go for it.” I’m thinking,

“That’s awesome. I’m in. I will see you in June right after graduation.”

Two weeks later, Mike Moritz, a partner at Sequoia, calls me, “Tim, we have a problem.” “I’ll be out after my graduation on June 8th. What’s the problem?”

“We don’t need you in June.”

“Huh? Jerry said I’m in. What’s changed?”

“Well, this ship is sailing. You either need to get on now or don’t bother coming.”

“What’s that mean?”

“We need you in February, not June. Your position will be filled by June.”

So I’m like, “I’m in.”

Craig : Wow. So you just ditched business school?

Tim : It was a little more involved than that. It included a very uncomfortable phone call with my parents, who paid for business school. Luckily, I did end up graduating.

Craig : Nice. So what was your day-to-day when you moved out?

Tim : It was whatever needed to be done. I was an EE, but the other three were all more technical than me. They hired me as the business person so I had to do all the operations and business stuff – including figuring out if there was even an ad market. No one had ever sold advertising on the Internet.

Craig : So advertising was the clear strategy from the very beginning for you. That was in the business plan.

Tim : That was in the business plan. I shouldn’t say that nobody had sold ads online before though. Other people had sold advertising on the Internet, but not at scale and not as their primary business.

I think it was Wired Magazine that was the first one to sell an ad online. So there were the beginnings of something, but Wired was an offline magazine company. It wasn’t their primary business. There wasn’t much else being sold online.

So we came up with the traditional banner ad size that still exists today and tried to figure out how to sell it. At the time, the only people that used the Internet were traditionalists. And what I mean by that is the internet was used exclusively for the non-commercial sharing of information at the time. The idea of commercializing the internet wasn’t accepted by the very people using the internet. Of course, the number of people and the demographics of those people were rapidly changing.

Craig : So your job was to shift how that community was thinking or bring other people online or both?

Tim : Both.

Craig : And so you are cold calling people to sell ads? What were you doing?

Tim : Jerry and I tried to figure out the business side of things and we quickly realized that we were not the best people to sell ads. So we hired an outside agency in L.A. and convinced them to try to sell ads on the internet.

We decided we’ll sell every page on our site, except the home page, to five advertisers for a million bucks a pop. That made us $5,000,000, but they were the same 5 ads on the site for an entire month. Our users hated it.

Craig : What was the traffic at that point?

Tim : I can’t remember the exact number, but it was a double digit percentage of the traffic on the web. It was a big number.

Once we got advertising going, I was thinking, “Oh my god, we’re in the ad business. I’m an engineer, not an ad sales guy. As much as I’d love to pull an ad sales guy out of me, I’m not that guy.”

Jerry realized he wasn’t an ad sales guy either so we hired a CEO, a guy by the name of Tim Koogle. He came on in August of 1995 and helped us build an ad-supported media company. But that was a full seven months after I got there. Traffic on the site was growing at an amazing rate, but we were really struggling to build an organization that could keep up with the growth.

We knew we were on to something potentially really, really big and we knew we didn’t have enough experience to execute it alone.

Craig : So what interests me is throughout this phase it sounds like because you’re buddies with the founders and you’re sort of treated as this co-founder-type guy. How did that dynamic work?

Tim : Jerry and David were the founders and when a big decision needed to be made, like who to raise money from, they would lock themselves in a room and come back with a decision. That said, the day-to-day operational decisions were all made by consensus at the time. There were four of us, and in that sense, I certainly felt like a co-founder.

Craig : After you closed those first ad sales were you all still freaking out over if this would be viable to not?

Tim : It was probably a full year of discomforting uncertainty. Even after we brought Tim Koogle in, it wasn’t a sure thing. The Internet was a sure thing but Yahoo wasn’t a sure thing. It probably took until the end of ’95 to guarantee that.

Craig : Interesting. Did how you feel about the company change as you scaled?

Tim : Nope. I was all in the whole time.

Craig : How long did you stick around?

Tim : I was there until 2003.

Craig : How was it to ride that wave, especially when the bottom fell out in 2000?

Tim : When things are going well and you’re in a growth industry, you don’t have to deal with many difficult issues. It’s the old cliche, winning solves everything.

Craig : For sure.

Tim : It’s really true. It solves everything… or maybe better said, it masks all your mistakes. A lot of the mistakes you make get masked because you receive almost no negative feedback.

But then the bottom fell out and the board let Tim Koogle go. The upper ranks of management emptied out pretty quick, except for me and the CTO who stuck around. We got a new CEO and set of peers in upper management. Let me just say, I learned a whole lot more about business on the way down than I did on the way up.

Craig : When you think back on your time at Yahoo, how do you feel about it?

Tim : Well, I definitely made some of my closest friends there. I compare them to childhood friends. I can pick up the phone and call any of 50 people and talk to them as if no time had passed. It’s a pretty cool feeling.

Craig : That’s really neat.

Tim : It was formative in so many different ways. Granted it was early in my career, but then again most of the entrepreneurs at YC are early in their careers, too. It’s this intense experience where for the first time in your life where you’re defining your own test and seeing if you measure up. You find out a lot about yourself in that environment.

Craig : I imagine it really builds confidence.

Tim : It does.

It was certainly career defining. The financial success was nice, but it was way more than that. The entire process helps define who you are, what you’re good at, what you want to do, and what you think is important.

Craig : When it does work out for someone in your shoes, I feel like it really helps solidify your belief in how you understand people and markets.

I’ve been wondering if through these interviews we’ll find a strong correlation between early employees and people who are good investors. The way I see it, someone like you, you’re like, “Ok, good people, good product, and I can add value. I’m in.” Founders might be much more singularly focused. You know what I mean?

Tim : I do.

I guess Imagine K12 is the exception because that was my idea with Geoff, but Yahoo wasn’t my idea and QuestBridge wasn’t my idea. It was me recognizing a good idea and then being able to contribute to it, and I did that twice in a row. Even with Imagine K12, you could say, “Well, PG is really the one that kind of defined how to help companies… I just applied it in a different realm.”

Craig : Yeah, exactly.

Tim : But I guess you could say that about almost any idea.

I’ve never felt like an idea had to be mine in order for me to be passionate about it or want to contribute. I hope that helps me be a better advisor and investor.

Craig : I think whatever that quality is, that is the exact differentiator between the person who needs to start something and the person who’s comfortable accepting risk but will work on someone else’s idea.

Tim : You think so?

Craig : I think it can be easier to do your own thing, even if it’s a bad idea, because it feels cooler.

Tim : I think there’s social cache to starting your own company now. Back in the 90s, it wasn’t like that. There was no social backdrop to it. You didn’t go to bars and talk about it.

On one hand, I guess it could be seen as a lack of confidence to not do your own thing. But on the other hand, it could be seen as not letting your ego get in the way of recognizing a good idea. I can see both sides and honestly, I don’t know where the truth lies.

For me, my sweet spot is when I can say, “That’s a great idea. It’s just getting started. Count me in.”

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fan-enby-anonymous · 6 years

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Tagged

Ahhh, what, I was tagged in a post?! @hapless-fma-otaku my friend I love you! So I’ve been asked eleven questions yay!

1: What would you want your Animagus to be?

A Capybara! They’re the world’s largest rodent and they are just the cutest things! They’re pretty big compared to humans, like, the size of a very large dog, and they have very strong teeth. I love them because when a zoo takes in a bunch of orphaned animals they’ll give the poor little critters to the Capybaras to raise because Capybaras are the sweetest little beans and will mother any animal at the drop of a hat. So when you see pics of Capybaras just chilling in a group of other animals it’s probably because the Capybara’s their mama. I’d love to be a Capybara.

2: Favorite sweet treat?

My grandma’s chocolate cake. She uses the best recipe, there’s nothing like it.

3: Favorite space movie?

Yeah, I really like the new Star Wars movies. Sue me, the plot is interesting and the characterization is good and paired with great actors. I don’t see where all this hate is coming from.

4: What skill would you like to learn?

I’d love to learn to play an instrument, maybe guitar or piano. But since I have neither...puts me in an awkward position I’d say.

5: Dream House?

I’d love to live in a two bedroom apartment with hardwood flooring, purple, white, and black furniture and decorating, an ultramodern design, and a big kitchen. There’d have to be a glassed off balcony with a turf and a pet door so I could keep a small dog. Preferably somewhere with a nice view. (But that was probably more detail than was necessary.)

6: Favorite animal?

I think you already know it’s a Capybara, followed very closely by dogs tho.

7: Do you like dinosaur chicken nuggets?

I’m sorry honey, I know you love these but I’ve got to say no. They just don’t taste like real meat. I’m hanging my head in shame I promise.

8: Favorite ice creams flavor?

Man, it teeters between cookie dough and gold ribbon chocolate from Baskin Robin, but I have to go with the latter.

9: What day of the week is significant to you especially?

Sunday is really important to me because it’s my sabbath, so it’s a day where I have a very strict schedule and I have a loooong chance to reflect on my spirituality. It’s just always felt like a very important day.

10: What song do you absolutely loathe hearing?

My sister loves to put on songs that are otherwise good but are covered by singers with literally zero talent and horrible sound quality on their mics. Man it grates on my nerves.

11: Any books that have a special significance to you?

Ok, this is going to be a very long answer so feel free to skip if you’d like, otherwise, buckle up. My favorite book series in existence is Artemis Fowl. It’s special to me for two main reasons, so, here we go.

One, these books saved my from suicide. I was just starting middle school when my grandma introduced me to these books, which is not a good time for anyone. I was just starting to feel those body image issues everyone develops around that time, I was stressed trying to figure out what the hell I wanted to do with my life, I felt responsible for my parents and younger siblings and I was afraid of the bigger work load from multiple classes and how that might effect how much I could help around the house anymore, I had just switched from the first public school I’d ever been to, to a year of online school, to this new high-standards charter school and I had no clue what to expect, I was...drowning, and I needed a constant. I’d always loved reading and the word Artemis Fowl provided to me became that constant in my life, no matter what changed, I could go back to those stories and find something that would stay the same, something reliable. And I really related to Artemis. He was taking care of his parents the way I felt I had to, he was questioning his skills in a new environment way out of his depth like I was at my new school, and he was beginning to realize the world wasn’t exactly the way he thought it was, and that he might be making the world worse, I’ll get to how that applies to me in a minute. It got to the point that Artemis became my new best friend and guide, I’d imagine him with me, like the older brother I never had, to support me when things got rough, be it a joke about how little my teachers must really understand this subject during a class I just wasn’t getting or emotional support when I felt like I was failing my family. Even if he wasn’t really there or even real at all, I felt like he was someone I could go to with my problems, someone who understood. And, when I started experiencing suicidal thoughts for the first time, I’d think about Artemis. He had been through so much more than I could ever possibly comprehend, he’d known the struggles I was going through and then some, and he’d managed to save the world at least five times. So, if Artemis could go through all that, could survive all that, there was no reason I couldn’t fight my battles. I survived middle school, and when my dad moved us half way across the country, from Idaho to Texas, the Artemis Fowl books continued to be that constant. Everything around me was changing, but I was always guaranteed my one friend, because Artemis was always with me.

And, two, Artemis Fowl taught me about racism. Remember when I mentioned feeling like I made the world a worse place, yeah well I’ll just put it out on the table for you, I’m white. And, while my generation was going to elementary school, schools were just barely starting to teach the truth in history classes. I loved going to school and absorbed as much information as I could, but a lot of what I learned reflected badly on people like me. The trail of tears, slavery and segregation, manifest destiny, Christopher Columbus, all the horrific things you learn about in history class that are entirely because a group of white people decided they were better than everyone else, I was glad I was trusted enough to learn the truth about these things, but I also started to see myself differently because of what I was learning. I was ashamed of myself and I started to hate myself because I was one of those people who had ruined the lives of millions of innocent people. My ancestors were nothing but a force of destruction. And it hurt, it scared me that all these terrible things had happened and there was nothing I could do about it. But, when I got older and I started reading the Artemis Fowl books, what I saw changed something. Artemis, who I saw as so similar to myself, was the antagonist of Holly’s story in the first book. Holly was a woman of color, a force for good throughout the story, the most compassionate person in the narrative, and in my opinion at that time, the best character in the book. That fit with my views of the world, a white man was objectively the bad guy and he was making life unnecessarily difficult for people of color around him who were objectively the good guys and treated others much better than he did. But as the book series went on, Artemis and Holly became friends, very good friends, and that changed things. Because no one would ever deny that Artemis hurt Holly, his actions had been terrible and we weren’t supposed to think any differently. But after a long time of healing, and working to make things better, and a lot of personal growth on Artemis’s part, he was able to be forgiven and form positive relationships with the people he had once hurt. And that taught me that I didn’t have to be the bad guy in someone else’s story, I could be a positive force as well. Moving to Texas helped quite a bit as well. When in Idaho you’d have maybe five students of color in three grades and an all white teaching staff, in Texas schools there is a much more balanced demographic and I’ve been able to make friends with a lot of people I just wouldn’t have had the chance to meet in Idaho. (And realize that they don’t automatically hate me, especially if I’ve never been an ass to them. They don’t care what great great great grandpa did at one point or another, people don’t hold that against you.) And I was able to have a much more positive outlook on myself and on my potential relationships with others.

Artemis Fowl saved my life and it’s had a much greater impact on me than I think any other form of media ever has. So yeah, that’s some special significance if I’ve ever heard of it.

#racism m/#suicide m/#artemis fowl #thanks friend

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myblogwithothermediainserted · 4 years

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Wednesday, March 25, 2020 3:58am

This is a facebook post from Dr. Gabriela Magda, Rae Votta’s friend in New York. I would just post the link like I usually would, but I don’t want to risk losing this one.

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I asked my mother for permission to share this #COVID19 dispatch and she said, “I have no problem with that. I want others to be safe to do whatever is in their power to be safe and to protect others from getting sick.”

Last week I videochatted with my mother and noticed she was congested and ill appearing. She told me she had new backaches and a cough that over the course of the day had turned productive, but that she did not have a fever. Because my mother takes medications for a chronic condition that make her immunocompromised, the temperature she reported to me, 99+, though mildly elevated, was concerning to me and as the day progressed and her temperatures rose to 100.4, I became fearful and contacted her doctors to inform them of what was going on and request an outpatient COVID test which I knew would be available where she receives her care. They replied to me immediately and though initially they were more concerned about influenza, they acquiesced to my request and the next day she drove to the testing site. Though her fevers, aches, and cough persisted, she felt a little bit better than the day before and we were hopeful this would turn out to be no big deal.

The next day, hours into my first day working on one of our hospitals’ COVID teams, my mother’s doctor called me to inform me that my mother had tested positive for COVID19, and because they knew I am a pulmonary/critical care physician we came up with a treatment plan together. I had just spent the morning listening to case presentations of COVID patients as varied as those who could be discharged home to continue their recovery there, to people close in age to me who were fighting for their lives in the ICU. The news of my mother’s diagnosis stunned and scared me, and I went into fight or flight mode coordinating her care, remotely assessing my father, a cancer survivor who lives with COPD, for symptoms, and instructing my parents on how to quarantine from each other on different floors of their house for the foreseeable future.

We do not know where she acquired COVID. It could have been at her job in a New York City public school because despite the urgently expressed insistence of teachers, parents, and students across our city, our elected officials delayed the (difficult) decision to close the schools. It could have been at the grocery store. We will never know, and what matters is not quite where, but rather under what conditions this virus was able to be transmitted. When my mother learned of her diagnosis she called me crying and pleaded, “Why me? What did I do wrong?” My heart broke. You did nothing wrong.

This past week I have been working in the COVID ICU at Bellevue, the oldest public hospital in our country, which occupied a mythical place in my mind while growing up in NYC and at which I now have the amazing opportunity to practice medicine alongside colleagues who are as passionate as I am about providing the best possible care to EVERY person who comes through our doors. Every night when I come home I hear phantom ventilator alarms. The other night I thought I heard one near my bed and almost turned around to see what the problem was before I realized I was home and not in the ICU and that there are no ventilators in my tiny studio apartment. In my brief career, I have never seen anything like what I am seeing in our ICU, nor have my more experienced colleagues. Our census grows daily with patients who develop respiratory failure after a few days of smoldering fever and cough. A pattern of middle-aged patients representing all walks of life who have certain co-morbidities seemed to develop, but we are seeing even younger patients with the illness. It is not socially responsible to say that this disease afflicts only the elderly. We are no longer allowing routine visitation by family members so as to prevent further spread of the infection to themselves and to other people. This is just one of the difficult decisions that we are tasked with making on a daily basis.

As predicted by anyone with a keen eye on social justice and labor rights, those affected include workers who could not afford to take a day off from their jobs lest they lose even a day of much needed income. When I look at these patients, I am reminded of my parents, working class immigrants who diligently went to their difficult jobs every day to put food on the table for me so that I could grow up comfortably and fulfill my dreams in this country that sometimes doesn’t seem to care as much about people like them as it does about the ultrarich and ultraprivileged. My father was a New York City taxi driver for my entire life until 2 weeks before I went to medical school in New Orleans, when he retired and within the same week was diagnosed with cancer. If it weren’t for being married to my mother, whose employer provided them both health insurance, he would not have received the chemo, radiation, surgery, and follow-up care that saved his life. He worked 12+ hours per day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year during his tenure as a cabbie. I wonder to myself, if he had still been driving his cab during this pandemic, would he be one of the patients whose ventilator I now adjust on a daily basis?

This is not the first time I have grieved for my city. I remember exactly who I sat behind during Spanish class when I heard the first plane fly into the World Trade Center. I watched the towers burn from my homeroom window. I walked 70 blocks and 6 avenues that day and along the way found a woman who I recognized from my morning commute and asked her if I could go with her to wherever she was going just so I had someone to walk with. I remember the devastated faces I passed on the street. When I was finally able to get to a working telephone to call my mom, I remember the sound of relief in her voice because she thought I had died. My childhood street has since been named after a first responder who lived on it until that day. I remember the acrid smell that persisted in the air when we were finally allowed to return to school, and I feel lucky that unlike some of my classmates from that time, the only ailments I suffer from are chronic sinusitis and the occasional unpleasant memory.

This is an entirely different crisis because it does not have a sense of finitude (although in many ways, neither has that day), and the thing we are contending with is invisible except for its horrific consequences we are seeing play out in our hospitals everyday. It is an affront to my parents, my patients, and my colleagues who are literally sacrificing their own well-being to take care of our city, when I observe or hear of people still publicly congregating in dense groups despite repeated warnings from leadership, physicians, and scientists to stay home. It enrages me when I hear out of touch politicians irresponsibly prattle on about people going back to work in a couple of weeks when we are struggling to manage the current onslaught in our hospitals and my colleagues and I fear we are nowhere near the peak of this problem.

I do feel like everything in my life has prepared me for this moment and that I am meant to be right here, right now, working in whatever ways I am able to with my colleagues to take care of the people who need us the most. I am the first physician in my family; the life I have lived is so radically different from the ones my parents lived in Ceausescu’s Romania. I chose to go to New Orleans for medical school because I was haunted by images of Hurricane Katrina and I wanted to learn from people who kept that city afloat (literally and figuratively) while the agencies who were supposed to help them failed them. I ranked my residency in Washington, DC, because I wanted the opportunity to rotate at the National Institute of Health, where Dr. Fauci and his colleagues were my attendings and taught us about the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. The day after the election in 2016, I cried with my patients about the results and will never forget the words of one woman who held my hands as she expressed her regret that she could not vote due to her hospitalization and said, “This is going to be bad for me.” I was so thrilled when I matched in New York at my current fellowship program because I knew I would be joining the ranks of an amazingly dedicated, compassionate, innovative group of people who show unwavering and undeterred care for every single New Yorker. I am so proud of my family of colleagues here and across the world who are selflessly and tirelessly working in whatever capacity in order to care for patients.

I am once again urging you to heed the calls for social distancing. I have been reading your posts and am painfully aware that some of you are deeply struggling to pay your rent and your bills because of this turn of events. I am so sorry. I am encouraging you to elect politicians whose interests are to create a social safety net for all people in this country, and not just to provide tax cuts and benefits to people who they perceive to palatably satisfy certain demographic criteria. I am imploring you to hold your elected officials accountable and demand they provide healthcare workers with the resources we need to take care of you, and the resources you need to be able to stay home nourished and properly sheltered so that our healthcare system can accommodate everyone who desperately needs it right now.

My mom is doing okay for now. I am remotely monitoring my parents daily. We are scared that any day the other shoe could drop, but we are trying to remain hopeful and grateful. In the meantime, the magnolia tree behind my building continues to bloom magnificently, the birds continue to chirp obliviously, the sun continues to set and rise again…

https://www.facebook.com/806222/posts/10109579688763729/?d=n

https://twitter.com/gabmagda/status/1242618464826785792

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alexisfkemp-blog · 5 years

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PRINT STILL EXISTS! Media Switch Up Two - 1.24.19

Growing up, I loved print media; I loved to read newspaper articles and look through magazines. When I would read the newspaper with my grandma, I would love to read about the latest game wins, movie reviews, funny comics and of course what was going on in the world, both negative and positive, no matter how it made me feel. When it came to magazines, I always looked up the latest trends in fashion/beauty and even what my celebrity crushes looked like at the time; I even had a collage of both fashion and my celebrity crushes in my back room (which was once the play room for my toys). One day, as I ran through the pages of one of my Seventeen magazines, I heard “Breaking News,” on the television; I became sad. Visually seeing a news report about someone being killed or missing was so heartbreaking. As a child, you never expect to visually see these stories after you read them; but I did. Literally the same story I just read an hour prior was on the television screen. My spirits soon uplifted when I heard about another story that I was reading on a cancer walk. From that day on, I realized digital media was emerging. Televisions, radios and even the internet captured everything I was reading in a newspaper article. However, the more I began watching the news the more I noticed the difference - the stories were more graphic and in depth on tv and the radio than it was a newspaper, well to me anyway.

The older I got and the first iPhone I received resulted in watching news casts less and less however I always held on to a newspaper and my social media outlets/the internet to gather my news. While the world has changed and digital media has taken over, print media still exists. In fact, my family and I still got the newspaper every week until Jan. 1, 2019.

In a 2017 article, Print vs. digital subscribers: Demographic differences and paths to subscription, studies show that 58% of subscribers prefer print media while 28% prefer digital. Print media is more popular for newspaper subscribers as well.

From further research, I learned that baby boomers and the greatest generation use more print media than any other generation. My grandparents, especially my grandfather reads the newspaper everyday; he has tons of them in his “man cave.” Before my grandma died, she also read the newspaper a lot however she did a combination of print and digital media to gather her news. My parents also use a combination of both to capture their news.

While its no secret older adults prefer print, some millennials also enjoy print media, like myself. Those millennials are more likely college students or already have a college degree. Print media also has a huge impact on brands/businesses as well.

In a article,10 REASONS PRINT MEDIA IS ALIVE AND WELL, they provide insight proving that print media still matters to brands. In fact, 56% of consumers say, “print marketing is the most trustworthy form of marketing.” Another fact suggests that print media helps establish a brand.

Brands today even still use print media. Brand such as Apple, Ford, Dove and even Ciroc all utilize print media alongside the digital media ads that they offer.

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garbagebabygirl · 7 years

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Under the cut: reflections on andrea zuckerman, wealth inequality, and being lower middle class at liberal arts college.

Call it Marxist-idealism, but here's to hoping that the next 90210 reboot is radically different not only for Andrea, but for all of us.

Beverly Hills, 90210's Andrea Zuckerman, the plucky, headstrong editor-in-chief of the West Beverly Blaze, represents a unique socioeconomic demographic in need of further reflection. She is the archetypal "poor kid," the girl-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks. Though she lives out of district, she is able to use her grandmother's address to attend the lucrative West Beverly Hills High and access the same educational spoils as some of the wealthiest youths in the country. Andrea finds her niche in the school paper as well as with her group of friends (the show's main characters: Brenda, Brandon, Kelly, Dylan, Steve, Donna, and David). Her main narrative on the show is that she is less wealthy than her peers, facing unique challenges, like the long bus ride she takes to school, in order to maintain the appearance of West Beverly wealth. Andrea's positionality both as a character and as a person in society are representative of cultural conceptions of wealth, even today. Her interactions with other characters portray wealth inequality as individual rather than systemic. Her position as an "outsider with access to the inside" in a closed community is also comparable to the position of lower middle class students at expensive liberal arts colleges, a relationship to be explored later.

A common portrayal of Andrea's socioeconomic status on the show is that it's a trait that she has, rather than a system she is subjected to. This tendency towards archetypes is, of course, not uncommon for Young Adult melodramas. All of the Classic archetypes are present still in 90210: the troubled bad boy (Dylan), the shallow popular girl (Kelly), the hard-working All-American (Brandon). However, making wealth a personal attribute in the same that being a musician (David) is a personal attribute is problematic. One step further, on 90210 each character has both their personality traits and their cross-to-bear traits, and each character has an "equal" mix of each. For instance, Kelly is beautiful and popular, but her mom is addicted to cocaine. Andrea is really smart, but she's poor. In this way, the struggles of each character are depicted as comparable: it's rough all over. Everybody has their cross to bear. In fact a common event on the show is the down-to-earth Walsh family (we'll unpack them later) reflecting on these "equitable inequalities." They say things like: "sure, Dylan may have money but he has no relationship with his father. And I wouldn't trade our family for anything in the world." Framing wealth this way is risky. Portraying wealth inequality as a personal cross-to-bear fails to account for its systematic roots. There is no room for conversation on the wealth inequality in Beverly Hills (not to MENTION the intersection of wealth inequality and racial inequality in the region, a topic well-covered by 90210 critics). Andrea's personal cross to bear of being poor is solely her own. Her wealthy friends are therefore not accountable in the same way that they are not accountable for Donna's dyslexia. It's rough all over, right? Nothing we can do about it. In this way, the more affluent members of the group never need to reflect on their own socioeconomic statuses: Andrea is the only one. And so once again she is the outsider.

Although Andrea is internally the Other, on the surface she is an insider. She goes to the same elite school as her friends, hangs out at the Peach Pit with all of her friends, goes to the same parties as her friends. She's financially struggling but her friends don't see her that way, since she appears to have access to the same spoils as they do. What they don't realize is the tremendous amount of physical and emotional labor that go into maintaining this appearance of wealth. She mentions in an episode that she must wake up at five a.m. in order to get to school on time via city bus. She throws herself into the Blaze, into volunteering and planning dances in order to earn her Yale scholarship. To her wealthy friends, there is this threshold of wealth that, once crossed, entitles one to the full advantages of the upper class. To Andrea, this threshold is West Beverly: it's assumed that once she's enrolled in the school she has all of the same privileges as her peers. Her friends are frequently surprised when she's unable to accompany them on their trips to Rodeo Drive. "You're one of us, right? Then why can't you do xyz with us?" Her peers fail to recognize the nuance within their situations, imposing additional expectations onto Andrea. She is the outsider on the inside, and even though her friends know she's "poor," they fail/are unwilling to recognize what this actually means. Chalk it up to rich-kid-cluelessness, to the nature of wealth inequality, to selfishness or liberal guilt. Either way, the result is the same: increased pressure and emotional burden for Andrea.

Part of maintaining this identity includes not burdening her wealthy friends with her financial problems for fear of being cast out. However, I would argue that Andrea doesn't want to assimilate completely, so she establishes her difference from her peers through her activism and her un-California dressing style. It may be more comfortable to differentiate herself in this way, by her own choice, rather than by her uncontrollable socioeconomic status. When she does occasionally express frustration/worry about wealth inequality, such as when the school board became suspicious of her residency, her friends are clueless at best and patronizing at worst. One would think that Steve or Dylan, the group's wealthiest members, would be the most out of touch with her situation, but I would argue that in reality it's Brandon. Brandon Walsh, hard-working All-American fellow journalist, is one of Andrea's closest friends/near-love interest. A common 90210 narrative is that the Walsh family isn't As-Wealthy-As their West Beverly peers... but with their corporate accountant father and driveway full of cars, they're doing more than okay. However, Brandon and Brenda love to tout how much they struggle to financially fit in when the reality is that they are able to keep up just fine. They struggle financially until it gets inconvenient, at which point their father steps in and bails them out. They have the privilege of a struggle that builds character with no real consequences, whereas Andrea's struggle is her unchanging reality. Brandon in particular often mistakes his possessions and success to be the direct result of his hard work. He often is self-righteous in discussing his own wealth, making statements like "I'm broke too and you don't see me complaining. I work for a living." This pseudo-working-class approach is very ingrained into Brandon and, because of their relationship, also ingrained into Andrea. I would argue that Brandon's personal narrative is more detrimental to Andrea than someone like Dylan, who makes no attempt to downplay his personal wealth. As we reflect on Andrea's positionality compared to that of the lower middle class students of expensive liberal arts colleges, the burden of the Brandon Walsh Mindset will become more apparent.

Before we do so, it's important to distinguish that Andrea is not living below the poverty line. She's not on welfare; she never goes hungry. This isn't an argument that the challenges of Andrea/lower middle class individuals are As-Bad-As those living in poverty. Instead, this argument calls to recognize the unique challenges and emotional burdens experienced by Andrea/lower middle class individuals when they have prolonged access to wealthy spaces. When they are expected to maintain the appearance of a higher socioeconomic status in order to retain access to resources. When they are the outsider on the inside. In this way, Andrea's positionality at West Beverly is comparable to the positionality of lower middle class students at expensive liberal arts colleges. Both West Beverly and these liberal arts colleges are closed communities of education and social events dominated by wealthy individuals. Lower middle class students in these spaces internalize similar expectations to maintain the appearance of wealth. Enrollment in these colleges is the same "threshold" as enrollment in West Beverly: once they're in, they're expected to have access to the entire array of lifestyle spoils as their more affluent peers. Their peers cannot understand why they "refuse" to opt for the same amenities that they do, failing to recognize that they are literally unable to. "Why won't you go to dinner with us? Why won't you fill your car with gas? Why aren't you willing to raise your rent budget so you can live with us? We can!" Additionally, in these spaces there's an overwhelming presence of the cross-to-bear narrative (except in this case, I would argue that liberal guilt plays more of a role than it does in the universe of 90210). Wealthy peers are uncomfortable recognizing wealth inequality within their own community (despite the fact that this is the focus of many of their studies), so they downplay its significance and compare their own struggles. "I don't understand that your parents can't pay their mortgage, but my parents are divorced so I know how you feel." Again, this is not to garner sympathy for the lower middle class (who have their own privileges in comparison to impoverished communities) or downplay the personal/family problems of affluent students. But it's crucial to distinguish how the characterization of wealth inequality as a personal attribute comparable to a personal challenge and NOT as a systematic problem is harmful to both individuals in these spaces and larger conceptualizations of wealth inequality.

A unique aspect of the liberal arts environment is the disproportionate presence of the Brandon Walsh Mindset. Whereas Andrea only knows one Brandon Walsh, I would argue that liberal arts colleges are filled with literally hundreds of Brandon Walshes-- students that tout the "struggling college student" identity until it's inconvenient, at which point they phone in cash from their parents. Because of the 'threshold' nature of these communities, it is assumed that the lower middle class students have this same luxury. When these students express discontent with their socioeconomic status, they are patronized with "I know, I'm broke too." Knowing that this statement has different implications, the student, once again, is confronted with their own difference. The outsider on this inside.

So what is the solution for the Andreas of the world? Should they stay out of these spaces, sticking to their own socioeconomic circles for social comfort? Should they not try for a West Beverly education, even though their grandmother lives in-district? Should they not study in liberal arts colleges, even though they received scholarships that make it possible? I guess the first step is reflection, changing narratives, changing dialogue. We need to become less uncomfortable discussing wealthy inequality--especially within groups where everyone is perceived to be of the same socioeconomic status, Those who are more affluent should reflect on their wealth so the burden of need not fall entirely on the outsiders. And, ultimately, these discussions need to be expanded outside the borders of their elite, closed communities. The Andreas of the world are not the greatest victims of wealth inequality: they are only a microcosm within one institution. Change needs to come with larger, sweeping changes for the more extreme ends of the wealth equality spectrum. Call it Marxist-idealism, but here's to hoping that the next 90210 reboot is radically different not only for Andrea, but for all of us. And maybe some non-white main characters.

#in case you needed BH 90210 discourse lmao i am queen of Useless Discourse #9021oh man

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loansguide01-blog · 5 years

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I Have 2 Master's Degrees & Make $53K As A Math Specialist In Education

New Post has been published on https://loansguideto.com/%20/awesome/i-have-2-masters-degrees-make-53k-as-a-math-specialist-in-education/

I Have 2 Master's Degrees & Make $53K As A Math Specialist In Education

In our series Salary Stories, women with long-term career experience open up about the most intimate details of their jobs: compensation. It’s an honest look at how real people navigate the complicated world of negotiating, raises, promotions, and job loss, with the hope it will give young women more insight into how to advocate for themselves — and perhaps take a few hazards along the way.

Been in the workforce for at least eight years and interested in contributing your salary story? Submit your datum here.

Previously, we talked to a financial controller in Pittsburgh, PA, a head of content in Los Angeles, and a senior product expert on Long Island, NY.

Age: 33 Current Locating: Detroit, MichiganCurrent Industry& Title: K-1 2 Education, Math SpecialistStarting Salary: $28,000 in 2007 Current Salary: $53,500 Number Of Years Employed: 10 Biggest Salary Jump: $9,565 in 2016( from $37,467 to $47,032) Biggest Salary Drop: $14,000 in 2008( from $28,000 to $14,000)

Biggest Salary Negotiation Regret: “With teaching salaries, you can’t genuinely negotiate for a different salary but can negotiate for’ steps, ’ or years of service. I wish I had pushed back on the pay freeze, because people were get hired for what I’m currently inducing now who had fewer years of experience. Appearing back, this was a big unhappines, because I realized that I should always be negotiating when it is necessary to salary. When and if I switch postures again, I will make sure that I advocate for my years of service and fight for what I’m worth.”

Best Salary-Related Advice: “Even though it’s teach, you are able to negotiate. There are ways to get your worth for your position. For instance, in Michigan, you can Google any district and get it entire pay scale. Sometimes one district will have a very different pay level, so it’s good to come in with that information and have already done your research.”

“There was a task carnival at my Midwestern university, and representatives from this North Carolina school district were there. We lined up and waited at a table and did a pre-interview. I was contacted by four different schools within a couple of weeks, so I went down to Charlotte and interviewed with all four over the course of a weekend. I get offers at all four schools, and they were all in most varied areas, so I made my decision based on where I knew other people were going to be living and the commute time from those neighborhoods to the schools.

“One school had a similar demographic to where I had done my student teaching, and I would be teaching a similar grade level, so that helped me induce my decision. The offer was for $28,000 for ten months’ work. I did not negotiate; I was fresh out of college and didn’t even know negotiating existed.”

“My father passed away instead unexpectedly shortly before I graduated from college. In hindsight, I was not in a place to move across the country — but I didn’t realise it at the time. The school where I was running had hired too many educators, so they aimed up literally putting all of the new hires’ names into a suitcase and depicting names of people who had to transfer schools. I was one of the names chosen and ended up get transferred to a school that was a 40 -minute commute from where I lived. I didn’t want to take this task and I was still mourning, so I decided to just go back home to Michigan.

“At this time there were very few teaching employment opportunities in Michigan, so I objective up having to replace teach. I was very fortunate to have a lot of friends whose parents were teachers, so the issue is nice about allowing me to substitute. There is an agency that contracts out replace teachers, so I would sit on the website and refresh the page and get undertakings that style, as well.

“I was able to build relationships with schools, and I ended up replacing almost every day, at the least 20 days a month and sometimes closer to 25. I worked in five districts mainly, but that offered me a lot of job opportunities. Towards the end of the year, I had more regular replace schedule and would pick up random undertakings as well as they came up.”

“I taught swim lessons all through high school and college, so when I moved back to Michigan, I picked up a chore where I taught swimming a couple of times a week for extra money. I would usually teach two evenings a week and Saturday mornings. It was a very hodge-podge side thing but it was really the only route to have enough income to pay student loans.”

“I was subbing one day and considered an ad looking for teachers abroad. Because I’m lacking in foreign speech skills, I was excited to find an ad for England. They had a teaching shortage in certain neighborhoods in London, so I applied, did a phone interview, and they offered me a position.

“I was hired as a teacher who covered other teachers’ prep day( this job doesn’t exist in the U.S .). I would teach several subjects, including math, religion, art, and P.E. It was like a floating educator chore. The second year that I was at the school, I taught one grade level, which was the U.S. equivalent of third grade, and taught all subjects.

“In the UK, they had a cool thing where they have a special housing project — essentially a dorm — just for teachers. So I lived with other educators from all over the U.K ., U.S ., and other British Commonwealth countries. We all had our own rooms but shared a kitchen and bathrooms. Our rent was ridiculously inexpensive, which left us with lots of money leftover. It was easy to gratifies other people, and it worked out really nicely.

“Overall, this was an amazing possibility because I was able to work in the U.K. for two years without dual taxation and made a very livable wage, and I was able to travel cheaply across Europe on school breaks.”

“Due to changing visa restrictions, I had to return to the United States. Before I left London, I started applying for other work, but couldn’t find anything. So I went back to substitute teaching when I got back, and thankfully I was able to find a long-term replace job.

“In this case, the art educator at the school had discontinued proportion route through the year, but the school didn’t have enough fund to hire a new person. So I got to stay on as a substitute art teacher posture for the rest of the year.

“I was paid the standard subbing day rate, and there was no opportunity to negotiate, once again. At this point, I was unsure if I wanted to keep teaching and was interested in educational policy so I was applying for grad school and thinking of looking at other options, though I planned to finish out the year.”

“I decided to pursue a Master’s degree in policy and administration within education. As a educator in Michigan, you can get a pay increase after procuring a master’s, so I thought this was a good way to raise my salary. Additionally, I knew administrative tasks paid more than classroom teach, and I wanted the option to become a principal in the future.

“Since I was already subbing, and full-time teaching jobs were scarce, I took a risk with going back to school. But I figured at this point taking time to go to grad school was a worthwhile investment, plus I hoped that maybe in a year or so the job climate would change, and I’d have better luck finding a job.

“During my program, I had work-study jobs in research and student tutoring, as well as a field instructor stance with the university where I ran and observed teachers who were in the Teach for America program in Detroit. I also had an internship as a principal, this helped me realize that I like working with teachers and talking about their practice. Getting to go to different colleges and work with teachers allowed me to ensure a lot and learn a great deal about teaching. I realized that I really liked is speaking to teaching math with educators, so that led me for the purposes of wanting to pursue something with math and education at the elementary level.”

“When I interviewed for this position, “there werent” published salary scale. They initially offered me $30,500. I told them that I needed more, especially because I had my administration credential, 5 years of experience, and a math endorsement that is pretty hard to come by. I pushed back and told them I supposed I deserved $45,000, and they said no.

“We went back and forth for a while and finally settled on $37,500. This whole process felt weird because educators aren’t typically trained to even think about negotiating for their wages since everything is already laid out in publicly available salary scales. Also, it’s a woman-dominated industry and generally females are paid fewer and aren’t encouraged to negotiate. I didn’t have a ton of preparation but I did realize that I could push back and argue for what I felt I was worth.

“This position allowed me to get more experience within administration. I learned a lot, especially about Title 1 Laws and the paperwork elements of running a school, but I didn’t do a ton of work with kids. I mostly did administrative run which wasn’t my interest. On top of that, the charter management company was for-profit, which I didn’t like at all.

“In Michigan, they allow for-profit companies to manage charter schools, which means these companies can make a profit off of public funds. Whereas in public school the money goes directly back to the kids, here the CEO of the charter school could give themselves a nice hefty salary and there’s not a lot of oversight. Since it was a for-profit school, “there werent” room for negotiation and they weren’t interested in stimulating assured that educators were paid well or had good health benefits. We also had no retirement options. There are other states that merely permit nonprofits to manage charter schools, but Michigan is one of a handful that allows for-profit manufacturers to do this.

“Staff turnover at this school was huge. Within my year at the school, two-thirds of the teachers left for other schools or quit teaching wholly. It was a challenging place to remain positive. It’s really hard to have a school that functions well when employees are constantly leaving and there’s such low morale.”

“Although this was a lateral pay move, I actually ended up with take-home pay due to insurance premiums and public employee retirement contributions.

“Due to financial issues, the district was not allowing anyone to transfer years of experience, so when I was hired I was told I would start at the very bottom of the master’s pay scale. Still, I wanted to get into the public school system, and I liked the school district. It was a very diverse school and had a lot of English-language learners which I really liked.

“What was additionally frustrating was that my pay was frozen for my first three years, which entailed none of us received pay increases. I didn’t realize that I was not only starting at the bottom of the pay scale, but that I would not be able to increase my salary. I should have done more research. While the principal was upfront about the fact that pay wasn’t great when she offered me the job, I didn’t think to ask about the pay scale and trajectory of the position. It was disillusioning, but what the school being provided in other ways made it worthwhile. I enjoyed this chore much more than the previous position as I was now working with students more and doing less paperwork.”

“I got a grant to go for another master’s degree for free. The program was related to teaching English language learners, and I took class in the evenings part-time. The course run was focused on reading and writing, and since I had largely taught math I thought it would be better to make a switch to a room where I would actually be teaching reading and writing.

“I took a risk and devoted it a try at another school. The district finally came out of fiscal oversight, which was what had legislated the hiring freeze and tightened its own budget — and everyone got a significant pay bump. But it also meant that people who were new hires were attaining more than I had attained in my first three years. It was a very frustrating time for a lot of educators because we had worked for so little money for so long, and then suddenly these restrictions were eliminated.”

“When I had one more semester left of my grad program, I applied for an assistant principal posture in the same district. I didn’t get it, but they mentioned they were going to open up the math expert posture and encouraged me to apply for that again.

“I was offered the job, and I tried to negotiate my salary, but I was told that they couldn’t move me on the salary scale because I had already been in the position before. They basically gave me the runaround. With union contracts, there are lots of positives, but sometimes it’s hard to negotiate without causing issues. But I loved math and decided to take the job and felt okay with government decisions. Even so, I received our annual step increase that came with per year of service. With each step, there is a coinciding increased number of salary, so I didn’t have to start off right where I left off previously.

“I was a little nervous at first as I guessed I was ready to jump into an administrative role, but I had a lot of strong relationships with the kids at the school, and I love teaching math. I was excited to go back to just teaching. With the funding changes, I no longer had to work with small groups of kids who were struggling in math, I could actually co-teach with other teachers and come into their classrooms, which I really enjoyed.”

“Along with the rest of the educators in the district, I received our annual step increase, which came with another salary bump. I also completed my second Master’s which allowed for an additional $500 per year more than the step increase.

“Right now I’m feeling fairly content with where I am. I’m building enough money to feel comfy, given the relatively inexpensive cost of living in Michigan. I still have student loan indebtednes, so it will still be a while until I out-earn the debt I took on to get my degrees. This said, I have no regrets because my education brought me to where I am now and gave me some unique experiences, allowing me to transition to a non-classroom role.

“I do like the position that I am currently in, and if I make a move career-wise I think it will most likely be to a principal or assistant undertaking, which would come with a significant pay bump. I now know that, while I may not be able to negotiate a unique salary, I can use my experience to negotiate more steps. So if I’m ever to change districts, there’s no way I would consider going down to the bottom of the pay scale ever again.”

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zipgrowth · 5 years

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Can Online Education Lower Costs and Improve Quality?

Inspired by the breakout podcast Serial, four years ago two digital learning leaders at the University of Central Florida created their own podcast—focused on online learning instead of true crime.

It’s called the Teaching Online Podcast, or TOPcast, and co-host Thomas Cavanagh says he is driven by his quest to figure out one of the grand challenges of higher education: how to use technology to raise the quality of instruction while lowering costs. Not everyone thinks that’s possible, of course, and even Cavanagh, vice provost for digital learning at the University of Central Florida, admits that edtech can spark plenty of new ethical challenges along the way.

Each month, he and co-host Kelvin Thompson executive director of the Center for Distributed Learning at UCF, give their analysis of trends in online learning over a cup of fancy coffee—and these days their fans often send them beans to brew and fuel the show.

EdSurge connected with Cavanagh (online of course) to talk about what he has learned from all those podcast chats, and about how his sidegig as a detective novelist shapes his work in campus innovation.

Listen to the discussion on this week’s EdSurge On Air podcast. You can follow the podcast on the Apple Podcast app, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play Music or wherever you listen. Or read a portion of the interview below, lightly edited for clarity.

EdSurge: So what’s the mission of your podcast?

Cavanagh: The format is just a couple of colleagues sitting around talking about stuff that we do—which is online learning—over a cup of coffee, which has become kind of a recurring meme. But the idea is that if you are in this space, you could put on your headphones and grab a cup of coffee and sit down for 25 minutes or so and be part of a conversation with some colleagues. Occasionally, we do bring in interviews.

Your most recent episode was about learning analytics, and listening to it reminded me that the focus of edtech folks these days is less about the tools being used and more about finding ways to improve student retention and learning. Do you see that as a broader trend as well?

This week's podcast sponsor is AWS Educate: With a mission to provide students and educators with tools needed to accelerate cloud learning, AWS Educate will soon announce its newest offering for educators. Join us to take a look at AWS Educate's evolution and hear about what is next.

I do, and I think as the tools improve, they will become more ubiquitous and more effective. But I am sort of all-in on analytics as a concept. I'm not sure if we've quite realized the vision yet, but let's leverage technology to help.

There are things that technology can do that humans can't. That was kind of the way in to the episode you referenced. We could probably do multiple episodes on learning analytics, maybe there's a whole podcast about it out there somewhere. But our way in was to kind of talk about the human side of it.

That means seeing analytics as a [supplement] to the human connection. That’s necessary when you're actually talking to students about their performance or their risk level or what they're predicted to do—whether or not they'll be retained in a major or at the university or succeed in a course. Those are really delicate conversations that probably should not be wholesale handed over to technology. But technology can play a part in it, and can provide information to the humans who are having those conversations. That was mostly what we talked about.

"If you're teaching 12 students, then you kind of don't need the big data ... But we've got 68,000 students here."

Thomas Cavanagh, vice provost for digital learning at the University of Central Florida

You're talking about enhancing human conversations with software robots. How does that work?

I guess it depends on the use case that you're talking about. For example, if you look at the Jill Watson experiment at Georgia Tech, where they created a virtual teaching assistant, the students in the class didn't know that they were talking to a bot. That is, actually, not a bad application of outsourcing a traditional human function to a robot because the service that it provided was worthwhile and helpful, and it did no harm. But if you're talking to a student, saying, “Hey, Jeff, it looks like you're not gonna be the aerospace engineer you think you are because of your performance in these classes,” then I don't think that's something we want to outsource to a bot. That's something that a human being needs to have a conversation with you about. But the human being would be informed by the data from some of these big-data systems, or AI or analytics.

Some critics of learning analytics worry that algorithms could end up reinforcing stereotypes and actually having a negative impact for some students. How do we avoid some of the pitfalls of getting algorithms into the classroom?

Yeah, it's a great question, and I'm not sure as an industry we've completely gotten our arms around it yet. But I would say maybe a place to start is: Don't prejudge any student; judge them on their actual behavior. We recently did some analysis, out of my department, where a faculty member who’s a world-class data scientist spent half a year analyzing some of our student information system data and our LMS data. Really what he came back with… is that incoming GPA on day one in the class is really the only thing that predicted success without any other data. It had nothing to do with race, ethnicity, age or gender. It was really just GPA, which was interesting.

So he claims an 85 percent accuracy of his prediction model before a student's done even one thing in the course. Now we need to validate that. But then once you start layering in LMS data, his predictive model goes up to a 90 percent accuracy, just based on a student's actual performance in the course. And again, none of the demographic data made a difference. The number of logins [to the learning system] didn't make a difference. Really what mattered where things that were graded, like quizzes and tests and assignments.

So, if you look at those two data points, GPA and actual performance in the course, and build your predictive models around those, you can avoid the bias of pre-judging a student based on any other kinds of factors.

Aren’t things like performance on tests and quizzes something that professors already know? Are you finding enough insights from learning analytics to make it worth the cost and trouble of setting up this huge infrastructure?

I think it's a question of scale. If you're teaching 12 students, then you kind of don't need the big data because you can have those kinds of deep interactions with your students and know what they're doing. But we've got 68,000 students here, and it's hard to treat each one of them individually on that level. I think technology could help us with that.

If we can leverage the AI or bots or data analysis to raise to the surface those students who are struggling and we could intervene quickly, I think technology could do it in a way that humans can't at the scale that we're talking about. And then even just beyond our institution, I think across the country, combining some of these data sets, learning about what's effective. I think that that's the promise—it's a promise of scale. If you and I were the only two people in the course, it would be easy.

What are some of the lessons you’ve learned from the interviews and conversations you’ve had on your podcast over the last few years?

I've learned how many people like coffee. Because, God bless them, they keep sending it to us to drink on our show, which is kind of cool. So we've got a long backlog of coffee to drink from generous listeners.

That's a pretty good perk.

If there's one thing we've learned, it's that people are interested. I think it's a reflection of the growing ubiquity and strategic importance of online and digital learning in various places across the country. It's hard to hire instructional designers now because they're in demand. All of that's a reflection of the kinds of things that I hear.

You're probably one of the only people we’ve talked to on the podcast who also writes murder mysteries. Is there anything that your kind of work in that space has taught you or made you think differently about your work in digital learning?

I don't know. Murder mysteries and online learning. I probably should firewall those if I haven't already [laughing].

I love doing both. I think, honestly, the creative outlet of fiction writing makes me better at work. I think it exercises certain kinds of critical thinking muscles that can be applied to everyday work, even if it's looking at a spreadsheet. It probably doesn't hurt to be thinking in different ways, solving problems.

I guess it's not like you're going to literally make a choose your own adventure online course, but it does strike me as something that is a pretty interesting parallel life you're leading.

Yeah. Honestly, I think if you get in the habit of writing, it also helps you with the scholarly writing that I occasionally do. I know that blank page can be intimidating, but if you just sort of get in the habit of writing all the time, whether it's fiction or whatever, [you can say to yourself,] “OK, I'm just gonna write this thing now today instead of that thing.”

Any other takeaways from all those coffee-fueled podcast conversations?

Well, there is a recurring theme that we keep coming back to in the podcast that I don't think is going away anytime soon. The idea relates to the “iron triangle” and how online digital learning is a potential disruptor for breaking it. The iron triangle is access, cost and quality. Each of them is a bar on the triangle, and the thinking is that you can't positively impact all three at the same time. So if you wanna increase quality, you're going to negatively increase cost, for example. Or you're going to reduce access.

The notion of disrupting that through online learning is that you can positively impact all of them by using different models and new ways of doing things. It has been our premise here. We're doing everything we can to try to positively impact cost, access and quality through digital technologies. It's why I go to work every day.

Can you give an example of what that looks like in practice?

For example, you can increase access and reduce cost through a transfer program. We're the largest transfer-receiving institution in the country, mostly through our direct connect to UCF program. This is kind of separate from online learning.

We've got a consortial agreement with six [community colleges] in our region where a student can declare their intent to come to UCF when they graduate with their associate’s degree. If they're part of this consortium, they're guaranteed admission to UCF. So the first two years are completed at a much lower cost, and we're able to open access for those students on a guaranteed basis. So it positively increases access, reduces cost and then I would say our quality is at least as good, or at least not compromised by doing that.

We do similar things online. Like using adaptive learning, for example, to personalize the experience for students at scale.

Online learning allows you to reduce cost if you're doing it through some economy scale. I argue that you can increase quality if you do it well. It requires effort and investment. You're opening [college] up to people who previously could not come.

I use the example of my mom, who was a nurse. She worked the overnight shift in the ICU, at a hospital. If she had wanted to go back to school. she couldn't go to class Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 10 o'clock in the morning. But if she had wanted to go back and get the next level of her education, online learning would've been a solution for her. We have an awful lot of students like that here, so that’s definitely access.

Can Online Education Lower Costs and Improve Quality? published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

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language576-blog · 5 years

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Using Free Resources For Language Learning « Language Learning Tricks

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Using Free Resources For Language Learning « Language Learning Tricks

Should you pay for your language learning? Even to this day, both students and second-language speakers are divided on the answer. Some say you are better off paying for structured, pre-planned lessons, while others swear there’s enough free material out there for anyone who’s genuinely motivated. As with many questions that have competing valid arguments, the correct answer probably lies somewhere in the middle.

Free Language Learning

I can understand the argument for using free materials. The web really is filled with tons of useful resources that any language learner, whether you’re studying Chinese, French, or Spanish, can put to use right this minute to help achieve their language acquisition goals.

If you’re willing to take the time to find the right information and separate the wheat from the chaff, you can come up with enough quality material to last you from beginner to advanced stages. And all of it without having to pay a single cent for the actual information.

Right now, there are tons of websites dedicated to curating freely-available language resources. From free books to free videos to free lessons to free flashcards, there are literally places in the web where you can get them in bulk. Plus, there are tons of blogs by language learners that discuss strategies and approaches for successful language acquisition.

There are also a lot of forums where language learners congregate, sharing materials, ideas and experiences. Find a few forums whose general demographic you can relate with, join them and participate — more than the information, you can meet some online friends that can help you in your language learning efforts.

Even websites that aren’t strictly language-focused can be helpful. YouTube, for instance, is filled with videos aimed at language students, as well as foreign language videos with subtitles that you can use as secondary learning sources.

Problems With Free Language Learning

Basically, if you’re willing to spend the time digging through the vastness of the web, you’re going to turn up some very useful language resources. Of course, organizing them into a structure that you can actually use on a day-to-day basis is a whole other story.

And those things above are my main concerns. One, you’re going to have to go through a lot of crap to find the gold. Not everyone has the time, nor the patience, for that. Two, you have to be fully self-reliant in that you can figure out how to use all that material properly without having it overwhelm you completely. If you’ve ever tried collecting free research sources for study for any skill, you know just how hellish that whole process could be.

The Value Of Time

Both of these problems can end up costing you time — a lot of it. The money you spend today can be made back tomorrow. The time you lose, on the other hand, is gone forever. Are you really willing to waste hours, days and weeks just to save a couple hundred dollars?

Before you decide to go the free route, map out a plan. Try to get a rough estimate of how much time you’ll need to spend digging through information, identifying what’s usable, scanning through each material and creating lesson plans to give your lessons a little structure. Once you come to a realistic estimate of the time it will take, you’ll often realize just how much more work going free will require.

On Your Own

Using free language learning resources, you’re left to your own devices. If you enjoy the solitude (a lot of people do), that could be a positive. However, it also means you will lack valuable feedback, unless you manage getting that, too.

If you thought using a language software was solitary, doing things for free is even more so. Most language products come with private forums for customers, where both students and representatives of the company can interact to help learners who use the product make the most of it. While free products can have that, too, they’re rarely organized, if at all useful.

More Skills To Master

Doing things the free route usually means more than just brushing up on language skills. Instead, it requires a working level in a few more:

1. You’ll need to flex your research muscles to find good material. 2. You’ll need to study different approaches to language learning that you can pattern your own lessons from. 3. You need to go into teacher mode, designing your own learning plans and lesson structure. 4. You need to define your own measuring sticks as to your proficiency. 5. You need to create and manage a feedback system, whether this be people you talk with in real life or people you interact with over the internet.

Paid Language Resources

When you enroll in a language classroom, book time with a tutor or use a language software, the problems of doing things on your own go away. You don’t waste time scouring the internet for material and making sense of how to correctly organize it. Instead, you just follow the lesson plan and work hard through it — no time lost.

I’m not saying paid language lessons are the best route for everyone. There are, probably, people out there for whom using free resources will work better. However, I doubt they’re that common. I like using college courses as an analogy. Say, you want to learn discrete mathematics before the end of the year and you want to make sure that it really happens. Would you do it by enrolling in a class, get a textbook or going to Google? All three are valid, but only the first two can guarantee that you have the right resources to learn things.

Should You Or Should You Not?

Ultimately, the decision is up to you. If you value the couple of hundred dollars you’ll save, then use the free resources available to you. If you value the time you won’t waste dealing with the non-language stuff, then pay for lessons. Both are equally valid routes.

If you do go with the free route, always remember that paid lessons will always be available, in case that doesn’t work out. Usually, you’ll have an inkling early on anyway on whether things are working out. If it’s not, don’t force things. Cut your losses and invest in an affordable language software.

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Using Free Resources For Language Learning

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elizabethleslie7654 · 6 years

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Why 3rd World “Immigration” Is Actually Colonization Against Us

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When people ask me what is the #1 problem the West is facing, I always have a simple answer to give. They may be a little surprised to hear it at first, but after I explain it to them, they instinctually know at a gut level that my answer is 100% correct.

What is the simple but hard hitting answer?

“Immigration” Is A Nice Word That Conceals The Truth

What do you think of when you hear the words immigration and immigrant?

I’ll tell you I used to think; false ideas based on an agenda put into my head via public school indoctrination, the Corporate Media, and Hollywood.

What used to pop into my head was: A person who comes to America for a ‘better life’; who wants to work hard, loves freedom and democracy, and who wants to become an American. Someone that once they touch our ‘magic soil’ is just as American as someone whose family has been here generations and can trace their ancestry back to the first English settlers.

Unsurprisingly, I don’t think such silly things anymore.

Yes, it is true that people with similar backgrounds can accomplish that American Dream scenario above, such as Europeans immigrating to the United States.

Just your typical Dutch traditional outfit

But that’s not how this all works.

How is actually goes is more like this:

More and more non-European foreigners start coming into your nation. They start creating little enclaves (also known as colonies) in your cities. The vast majority of them are on some form of public aid. They can’t speak your language, nor are very interested in your culture at all.

Although none of them have paid into the school systems (your ancestors have been paying into the public funds for generations), they get to send their 4+ children to schools that you paid for at no cost to themselves. Not only that, but taxes must go up in order to hire more teachers to accommodate these students, who generally can’t speak your language well/at all and can’t keep up academically.

What exactly do you and your people get out of these foreigners from the 3rd world entering and occupying your territory and nation?

-Loss of space: you can’t enter certain areas because they are literal 3rd world colonies

-Higher crime: “Poverty causes crime” is a myth. Certain people, cultures, and IQ levels are the ones that cause the vast majority of crime.

-Less say in your own nation: These imported 3rd world people vote against your interests at every chance they get. They will vote for a bigger government (raise your taxes), open borders (more of their cohorts coming in), and restrictions on free speech (silence you)

We Must Call It What It Actually Is

By not calling things by what they actually are, we are actually helping those that wish to harm us.

Purposefully flooding our nation with 3rd world people is not “immigration,” and those 3rd world people coming here are not “immigrants.”

We must speak the truth of what is going on in order for people to actually realize what the dangers and consequences of what is happening really are.

To put it bluntly, mass 3rd world migration is really an invasion, colonization, and conquest of our nations.

Those that come here are colonizers who wish to take from us our wealth, our culture, and ultimately our nation.

The mass flow of foreign people into our nations is nothing short of a form of warfare against us, our families, and our people.

Those that scoff at, dismiss, or refuse to see it for what it really is are either benefiting from the colonization of our nations or cannot put together simple data on demographic trends and changes happening to us.

Let’s look at an example of how this colonial warfare actually plays out in Britain.

Muslim growth world wide is exploding, while at the same time the White European population is quickly shrinking.

Britain has a large (and growing) Pakistani population, with somewhere around 3% of the population of Britain now made up of Pakistanis.

Assuming the rest of the population is actually British (it’s not), the British people now control 97% of their own nation, while Pakistanis control not only 3% of Britain but still 100% of Pakistan.

Why must we die off and be replaced, while non-Europeans must be allowed to keep expanding their population and territory?

If nothing changes in the next 50 years, the British are expected to be less than 50% of the population of Britain. What this means is that the British people only control 49% or less of Britain, while the Nigerians, Pakistanis, Indians, Afghanis, and others control 51%+ of Britain, but while also still retaining 100% control of Nigeria, Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan.

What does this mean?

It means Britain becomes less and less British, while also becoming more and more Pakistani, Indian, Nigerian, and Afghani. Essentially, these nations and people are expanding their territory and influence, while the British people keep losing more and more territory and influence.

Ask yourself: How is demographic replacement via third world migration any different than any other take-over by foreigners?

Let’s look at another example to see this even more clearly.

Note: This is from 2012. It has only gone up in the past 6 years.

First off, what do you think of when you see such a map such as this one?

I’ll tell you what I think of.

Territory of the First Mexican Empire

The colonization and demographic warfare by Mexico of sending its people into our nation to re-take its supposed ‘lost land’ is so blatantly obvious that all you need is 2 maps to know its true.

There is no ‘magic dirt’ that transforms Mexicans into Americans just by crossing a line on a map and entering into American territory.

In the future if nothing is done to stop this demographic replacement, the states that are majority Mexican can simply vote to leave the U.S. and join Mexico, as they will de facto be Mexican territory anyways.

As stated above, what is happening is that the American people lose land and influence to Mexican colonists, while Mexico and its people gain land and influence in its new territories.

To sum up how this works: We LOSE and gain NOTHING from millions of foreigners colonizing our lands, while they WIN and take OUR nation from us.

What is conquest?

– a territory that has been gained by the use of subjugation and military force.

What is subjugation?

– the action of bringing someone or something under domination or control.

What is domination?

– the exercise of control or influence over someone or something, or the state of being so controlled.

What is having foreigners numerically outnumber you and your people, losing your homeland, and becoming a hated minority in your now conquered nation?

– Istanbul Pogrom

At least the Greeks who were attacked, discriminated against, and kicked out had a homeland to go to.

If this happens in the United States, Britain, France, and other European states, we will have no where to go.

It Is Not Too Late to Fix This

I don’t see what is happening to our nations as the inevitable destruction of our way of life. Rather, I see it as a test by nature and by God; to make our people struggle, so that we will come out the other side stronger than we have ever been before.

This whole ‘let’s flood every White European nation with 3rd world non-Europeans’ is not something our people and our society have ever faced. This is a new threat and challenge that we are facing.

We just happened to be the ones born into this mess.

I don’t really like too many modern day movies, but my favorite movie as a child was the Lord of the Rings movies, especially the second one, The Two Towers.

Who else didn’t imagine themselves at Helms Deep; on the walls with all of your brothers, looking down at the vast hordes who were hell bent on wiping you and your people off the face of the Earth?

We are at that point in time now.

We are the ones on the wall. We are the ones standing between total annihilation of our people, our culture, and everything we hold dear, and saving everything we cherish and love on this planet.

This task was given to us; and we will either rise to the challenge and save ourselves, or our people and culture will forever be a footnote in the book of human history.

We only live once; we might as well be known as the heroes that saved our people and saved the West. Let’s go.

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jeremyfrechette · 6 years

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The "Californication" of America

If you have any doubts to the depraved depths progressives what to submerge America, look no further than the once Golden Republic of California. Inundated with 1.3 trillion in debt despite possessing the highest sales tax and marginal income tax rates in the U.S., California is now attempting to borrow from itself to pay outstanding retirement pensions. Why? When counties and cities continuously offer exorbitant employee benefit packages - the over 20,000 residents currently collecting 6 figure pensions - while the taxable revenues/incomes of private businesses and corporations are fleeing suffocating regulations in record numbers, somebody’s trying to eat Prime Rib on a McRib budget. Not to pour salt into insolvency or double dip those $15 minimum wage fries waving in the Western horizon, but Illegal aliens and their dependents cost Californians $25.3 billion per year according to FAIR's 2017 report: The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on California Taxpayers. The state's 3 million illegal immigrants and their 1.1 million US–born children cost the average California household — headed by a U.S. citizen — $2,370 annually. And what special allowances have been granted to those struggling, natural born families who pay must foot the bill of the Democratic Party’s foreign voter adoption and affirmative action estate? Mind your white privilege; even if you’re not white, live paycheck-to-paycheck and still can’t afford to rent a cupboard in San Francisco's Pacific Heights.

Enough about redistribution and devaluing a sentient being’s “worth”. Let’s talk about how California residents can now knowingly infect another person with HIV without informing their partner of their status, but state workers (including teachers and social workers) can be fined or even jailed for using the incorrect “gender” pronouns. In some educational institutions where gender-queer conditioning of elementary kids has becoming mandatory conditioning masked as sensitivity cognition, grade school students themselves can be reprimanded for not indulging their peers’ non-binary, role playing fantasies. In other words, ignore your genitals and reject your biological birth, liberate hate by wearing a dress, because little is more abnormal than just letting kids be kids without the inherited baggage of "sex" obsessed malcontents. But never fear, calling for the assassination of the President, beating peaceful pedestrians expressing political dissent or slandering any patriotic Republican as a Nazi bigot, is both commonplace, if not admirable, on enlightened college campuses and now in the “non-discriminatory” workplace.

Not to invoke the irony of future mugged constituents, California lawmakers recently passed Proposition 57 mandating early release for all “non-violent” criminals”. And what exactly constitutes a non-violent crime worthy of such leniency? Oh, just the rape of an unconscious person, human trafficking involving sex acts with minors, and assault with a deadly weapon. And here I thought legalizing child prostitution was but another attempt to normalize pedophilia among Hollywood benefactors lecturing Middle America about equality and tolerance. Once you breech and discredit one ethical boundary - those societal foundations of gender, family, faith and love of country - people will literally defend the most senseless, soulless acts for their existence is defined by limitless pleasure, perceived entitlement and a glaring inability to think for themselves. "Progress" isn't derived by forcing people to handicap their success, bake a sacrilegious cake to the extortion of financial ruin or purposely exposing innocent children to perverse Gay Pride parades and profane feminist rallies. Progress is realizing living the lifestyle of your choice, the literal sanctity between right and wrong, should never require confiscating the rights and dignity of others solely to validate/advertise one's bombastic beliefs.

With such inane reasoning masquerading as good government, it is of little surprise Governor Jerry Brown declared our immigration laws moot by further investing in sanctuary cities and attempting to obstruct ICE officials from apprehending known fugitives. When you’re more distraught over than the safety and so-called rights of non-citizens than the death of a 32 year-old woman murdered by a man deported 5 times, prudence and justice are antithetical anomalies. Not only are California illegals now eligible for driver’s licenses, they can legally vote in an election if they are officially registered to vote. And what does it take to register to vote in the great state of California? A driver’s license and a personal guarantee you’re a citizen. Yes, you heard me correctly, the legitimacy of our elections, the survival of our 241 year-old republic, is now based entirely on the honor system; or if you prefer perspective over subjective bliss, foreign invaders who consciously broke our laws without a hint of regret, only to be congratulated with a complimentary door prize, the honorary American oppressed immigrant mindset, of leftist socio-economic contempt.

I take umbrage with any self-respecting American, God forbid elected civil servant, who is completely indifferent to the estimated 3 million unlawful votes cast in 2016 simply because they believe small town America values and the electoral college should acquiesce to the moral degradation and militant activism of urban epicenters like San Francisco, Los Angeles or Chicago. Considering California alone accounted for over 10% of Hillary Clinton's final vote total, a 3.4 million difference that exceeded her 2.86 million final popular vote lead, I'm confused as to how those Donald Trump supporters representing over 90% of American territory - or precisely 3,084 counties of all 3,141 U.S. counties - should take a knee with Colin Kaepernick to empower a regressive state that dismisses the rule of law, mocks rural America and remains visibly contentious towards any concept of electoral sovereignty.

There’s also another term for those politicians who willingly subvert the immigration process and disregard our voting statutes to their personal and civic benefit? It’s called sedition, dereliction of duty, treason. If I may, when did defiant trespassers become “Dreamers” and doorbells a humanitarian crisis? Have millions of aspiring Americans from across the globe, for well over a century, not honored the afforded requirements for securing the privilege of becoming a U.S. citizen? Conspiring to invalidate prescribed protocols ratified to ensure legal and orderly naturalization – those measures explicitly enacted to protect America’s citizens and welfare - makes about as much sense as giving convicted felons the right to vote because of “felon disenfranchisement”; i.e., the admitted hearsay of political opportunists salivating over the fact 60% of released California convicts are minorities who deserve the opportunity to vote Democrat.

The same bureaucratic terrorists who forced 53 dairy farmers to go bankrupt and/or relocate to saner pastures due to absurd regulations on cow farts are somehow entirely satisfied with the unsubstantiated word of an undocumented, unvetted immigrant. Surprised? Not unless logic and liberalism share a nonflammable unitard. And while peace activists remain adamant U.S. citizens must undergo extensive background checks to exercise their constitutionally affirmed right to bear arms – naturally excluding those potential militants illegally entering a sovereign country in a post 9/11 world – their unflinching “non-partisan concern” for human life magically ceases at the recognized borders of radical agents like Iran and North Korea; inhumane, totalitarian regimes that globalists duplicitously believe possess an inalienable right to develop nuclear weapons despite vowing daily to destroy Western Civilization. So what’s the common denominator? Rampant, unabridged, unapologetic anti-Americanism.

When voting is no longer our most sacred duty and the integrity of our elections becomes a racist endeavor, as denoted by California’s refusal to investigate massive vote fraud uncovered in November, America becomes a second class citizen unable to defend itself in its own home due to fear of “offending” the same guests who would outlaw our flag, silence free speech and ban the national anthem if given only a fleeting chance. In essence, any policy that strengthens or reaffirms America’s independence, influence and economic vitality is an affront to the liberal narrative America must surrender its identity and founding Constitutional charter for being an evil empire built upon greed and White supremacy. Or in historically accurate terms, a superior culture displacing an ethnocentric population which supplanted other nomadic societies via the auspices of war, commerce, adaptability and/or technological superiority. Whereas California and New York are hopelessly lost to the left’s orchestrated demographic coup d’etat and ideological conditioning of their respective populaces, states like Virginia, Colorado, and Michigan are not far behind.

Regardless of one’s political persuasion, you don’t have to be a historian or even watch the History channel to understand America was erected as a free republic for a moral, self-sufficient people acutely aware of the triggers of tyranny, poverty and religious persecution. Individual liberty, limited government, transparency and accountability were never optional amenities on an academic drug trip to worship the Lenin Statue in Marxist Seattle. These autonomous attributes represented conceptual necessities whose only negotiable features were the exact method and expected integrity of implementation.

Unfortunately for the idyllic state of California, squatting on the world’s sixth largest economy and boasting vast untapped natural resources, its propensity for dysfunction and waste is only superseded by its systemic rejection of America itself. Whenever West Coast socialists are not charging working families and commercial transportation the highest fuel taxes in the nation, environmental terrorists who cannot differentiate between ecology and political alarmism are manufacturing water shortages and sparking unnatural disasters with pseudo-scientific regularity. Fixing the error of your naive ways is near impossible when rogue political fantasy displaces sound judgement and the Constitutional authority of your native country. How else can controlled thinning of excessive forestation designed to reduce the risk of uncontrollable wildfires, similar to the recent devastation which devoured 9,000 homes/buildings and 250,000 acres of habitat, be equated to "clear cutting" or raping the land?

It is also of little surprise California elitists, aka doomsday legislators seeking another excuse to tax common sense, believe Global Warming is not a natural, cyclical occurrence predominantly caused by solar fluctuations and the temperature of the Earth's core. Never mind Antarctic ice levels are far greater than 30 years ago and New York is not submerged beneath Al Gore's "unnatural science" grade point average, if you believe a .03 reduction goal in global temperatures in a century's time at an eventual loss of 2.5 trillion in annual GDP is a winning strategy, than counting cow farts and banning combustible engine cars by 2040 is your golden ticket to getting assaulted on Bay Area Rapid Transit for reading 1984 without a permit. But never fret, Sacramento City Council approved a motion to pay gang members for the conscious decision not to kill one another; or in layman's terms, obey the law and stay in school. And to think millions of decent, hard working Americans are ineligible because of their offensive civilized "privilege".

Although it's mathematically impossible to pinpoint exactly what alternative universe California Democrats reside, our Forefathers would have called for a second armed revolution long ago. No, Really! Whether or not progressives approve of President Trump is a moot point if their own policies and authoritative abuse do not adhere to the prescribed constitutional checks of adopted statehood. Likewise, embodying the fight for state sovereignty by no means justifies endeavoring to become like those impoverished, inept nations your exploding illegal immigrant population is instinctively fleeing. It's hard to fathom how the once "Go West" mantra of American pioneers that catapulted California into an unprecedented wave of prosperity, proud nationalism and a vibrant centrifuge for diversity, has dissolved into an immoral state of cultural Marxism that believes government is god, gender is a fluid state of mind, exploitation a form of education, and patriotism an unjust form of racial oppression.

It is obviously no secret the once predominantly “Red” stomping grounds of Ronald Wilson Reagan has been turned bright blue by an unprecedented wave of immigration and indoctrinated anti-Americanism. That was and always has been the goal of the radical statist quo. Where this nation was forged as a beacon of hope and opportunity for millions of law-abiding aspiring citizens seeking a better life, California has descended into counter-intuitive cesspool that preaches victimization over accountability, reverse discrimination over equality, intolerance over intellectual diversity. No matter how pure your intentions or how strong your faith in the nature of human volition, you cannot coexist with partisans so obsessed with maintaining political supremacy they would gladly surrender their own country to those who tirelessly seek our demise or break any rule to control our lives out of some misplaced sense of social justice that gives no such credence to their own failures and hypocrisy; most, notably, those corrupt, foreign governments globalists so foolishly favor to the liquidation of civility and the downfall of mankind.

While no American wants to witness the secession of California, or more profoundly the dissection of America's legacy and the abandonment of our fellow right-minded countrymen who represent the powerless minority, how long can you spare a cancerous appendage before it spreads, poisons your soul and ultimately takes your life? Will apathy reclaim our revisionist classrooms or assuage the sponsored anarchist war on police and freedom of speech? Once again, the left’s goal is not to coexist under the ideological umbrella that was and is America. Their unrelenting mission is to whitewash history, ensure conformity and redefine America by eradicating all borders, natural human distinctions – symbiotic gender roles and the family paradigm - so the concepts of liberty, individual achievement and morality quickly become outdated manifestations that can no longer threaten the secular supremacy of a progressive state. The systemic decay of California is as much a symbol of our failure as a society, as it is a dire warning to every governor and undaunted patriot that still believes God is the liberty of salvation, character does not fear consequence, and raising respectful, responsible children is by far our greatest contribution to humanity; that indomitable virtue of a free nation born from the bounty of a Judeo-Christian seed but distinctly American creed. If this transcendent republic has any chance to coalesce and preserve the timeless wisdom of a handful of visionaries marked for death by the tyranny of a crown's crest, I believe hope resides in the heartland of an industrious people - a summoned Convention of States faithful to independence and the merits of intelligent debate - still rightfully proud of their heritage and ever cognizant of the evil contempt and complacency breeds.

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ramialkarmi · 7 years

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How Tim Armstrong, a hotshot Boston sales guy, wowed Google's founders, built its multi-billion-dollar ad business from scratch, then became AOL's CEO

Tim Armstrong is the CEO of AOL, and he will be the CEO of the combined AOL-Yahoo company under Verizon once that merger is completed.

Before joining AOL, Armstrong was an executive at Google who helped build its advertising business from $700,000 a year to billions every quarter. He was also an expert advertising salesman and entrepreneur, and the first person to sell a $1 million digital-advertising deal, back when all the money was flowing to print and TV companies.

Armstrong visited Business Insider and spoke with Business Insider's US editor in chief, Alyson Shontell, for "Success! How I Did It."

In the interview, Armstrong discussed how he built a high-powered career. During the wide-ranging conversation, he talked about:

How he started a newspaper out of college, where actor Casey Affleck worked for him.

How he became a great digital-ad salesman and sold the first $1 million ad deal online.

What it’s like to be interviewed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

How he helped Google pivot from a licensing business to an advertising business, and launch products like AdSense, which would eventually generate billions in revenue.

How you know it's time to leave a safe, cushy job (Google) for one that's high-risk (AOL).

The advice his dad gave him the night before he started at AOL.

How he spent his first 100 days as CEO.

How he makes gnarly decisions and comes to peace with them.

How he inspires his teams when morale is low.

How talks with Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam heated up and led to AOL's $4.4 billion acquisition.

How you can be an effective leader who is also well liked and respected.

The advice Tim gives to his children, and to anyone who wants to build a high-power career.

Here's the full interview, which you can listen to below.

Or, if you'd rather read it, here's a transcript, which has been edited for clarity and length.

A strawberry farm, volunteering to be fired, and employing Casey Affleck

Alyson Shontell: Tim Armstrong is the CEO of AOL, and he'll be the head of the combined AOL-Yahoo company when the merger closes. Before AOL, Tim built Google's ad products and is basically responsible for the brainchild of AdSense. And he built the ad team from scratch. We're really happy to have you, Tim.

Tim Armstrong: Alyson, good to see you. Thanks for having me on a rainy New York day.

Shontell: I want to go all the way back, to the beginning of your career. It sounds as if you were always entrepreneurial. I remember the story about your making a strawberry farm successful during college?

Armstrong: When I was growing up, I always had the entrepreneurial bug. There were multiple things I did when I was younger, in my middle-school and high-school ages. But one of them was with a friend from college. There was a strawberry farm that the bank owned. I don't know if the farmer had lost it to the bank, but there was a strawberry farm, and we went to the bank and they weren't using the farm, so we said, "Could we take over the farm for the summer and do a pick-your-own strawberries? It'd be a lot less work for us, and probably a lot more profitable."

And so we did a you-pick strawberry farm, from a farm we didn't own, and cut a deal with the bank to do it. We had hundreds of customers drive up and go pick their own strawberries, and it ended up being a very successful venture and a lot of fun.

Shontell: So then you graduate and you have a short stint in finance?

Armstrong: Right when I graduated from college, I actually taught a program called the Explorer Program at Wellesley College. That was for the summer. Then I went to an investment bank in Boston, and I was there for about three or four months, and I realized that banking was not something for me. So I went to my boss and said, "You know, I think you should let me go."

Shontell: You volunteered to be fired?

Armstrong: Yeah, I just said, "I don't think this is the career for me, and I should do something else." And they said, "No, why don't you stay? It seems like you could do a good job here over time." And I said, "I want to go do something else." So I left and ended up starting a newspaper in Boston, out of that experience. And that's really what got me — if you look back to the seminal moment for me — what got me sitting here today — it was really that decision.

Shontell: It's no wonder you're the head of essentially a media company now. So BIB, was the “Beginnings in Boston” newspaper that you started. And the way you got into that, I guess you had been cold-calling executives, just hoping they would talk to you? And you discovered that nobody would talk to you unless you were a reporter?

Armstrong: I was calling people in Boston. I was really trying to just figure out what I wanted to do, and learn about different careers. I again had thought that banking would be something I would be really interested in, but when I realized it wasn't, I thought, "I should go do research and find out, really, what I want to do." And so I would call different executives in Boston, CEOs of companies, and see if they would meet with me, and not many of them would. I called one of a very large financial institution in Boston, and the woman was very nice on the phone, the CEO’s assistant. She said, "You know, the only people who really cold-call here, or who get through to the CEO, are journalists."

Later that night, I was talking to my roommate and I said, "You know what we should do? We have all our friends in their 20s, everyone's finding jobs or figuring out what they want to do — why don't we start a publication to get advice from all of these people, and give it to them? Boston's filled with young people graduating."

So we decided to launch the magazine. It was targeted at exactly my demographic back then, and I didn't know anything about publishing newspapers or magazines, but we basically launched from scratch.

We sold everything we owned — cars, bikes, surfboards, the whole thing. We bought an Apple Quadra 650 computer. And we basically learned how to publish from scratch, and print from scratch, distribute from scratch.

In that journey, I learned probably the most I've ever learned, just about what a business is from start to finish. And it was a wonderful experience. It was really hard. We did an OK job at it, not great. And we ended up buying a second newspaper, which was a better idea. That was in Cambridge and Harvard Square. So that was the launch of my phone calls to newspaper ownership, in a very short time period.

Shontell: It sounds like you never had a problem cold-calling people, which is Sales 101. So it's not really surprising that you ended up having a career in that. But you were telling me a funny story before this podcast, about how actor Casey Affleck used to work with you?

Armstrong: So we bought the second newspaper, The Square Deal, and if you went to Harvard back in those days, you used it. It had coupons in the back; it told you what was happening around town, in Cambridge Square. And we hired people, kids from Harvard, to hand them out to other Harvard students.

I was at a dinner a couple of years ago, when Casey Affleck said to me, "Hey do you remember me? Do I look familiar?"

And I said, "Yeah, of course you're familiar — you strike me as very familiar."

He said, "You don't remember, but I used to work at The Square Deal and hand out the newspapers for you." Obviously he's done really well, and he's not handing out newspapers anymore, for sure. I think he's even won an Academy Award, so that was a fun story, and a good memory back to the old days.

Shontell: So you soon became interested in the internet. You visited MIT and saw a presentation about it, and you switched gears. What happened there?

Armstrong: Another friend of mine, Peter Dunn, owned a store in Boston called Cool Beans, which was a Grateful Dead store. And he was very networked in the Cambridge and MIT communities. He said, "Hey, there are some people coming. They have this new thing called an "internet browser." We're going to meet down at MIT, and you can see it."

I went down, and literally within one minute of them turning it on and showing what the browser did, I looked at my friend and said, "I'm selling my newspaper as soon as I got back to the office. I'm going to go do this thing. This is 100 times easier, faster, and more scalable than what we're doing in the newspaper business."

And so I literally went back, called my parents on the way home from that meeting, and I said, "I'm selling the newspaper. I'm going to try to move to an internet environment."

We started actually trying to put our newspapers online. This is 1994, I think. And then, long story short, I moved pretty quickly. We sold our share in the newspaper back to another publisher in Boston, and then I went off to start doing internet things, which was a lot of fun.

Shontell: So you rise as this great salesperson, with the first internet magazine, I believe. And the company you end up later working for gets acquired by Disney?

Armstrong: Yes. After the newspaper, the only thing I found right away — because not many people were doing internet things — was IDG, the big tech publisher, was launching the first internet magazine, which was a magazine about the coming internet.

I went to work there. In those travels — it's an incredibly long story — but I went to an event with the founders of NASCAR, the France family. And the Frances got up and gave a presentation about where they thought this internet thing was going. I talked to the NASCAR family, and they basically said, "Look, there's this company. Paul Allen's starting a company on the West Coast called 'Star Wave.'"

Shontell: Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, right?

Armstrong: Yes. And they were the first real content company on the internet. So when I got back to Boston from that trip, I had a voicemail on my phone from Star Wave. And they said, "Hey, we heard you're in Boston. We hear you're doing internet things, and you're trying to do advertising and content on the internet. We have a company in Seattle. Would you like to come out and visit us?" So I flew out to Seattle. I did a day's worth of interviews and got offered the job at the end of the day. I went back, moved from Boston with a bag of clothes — I didn't own anything else at the time —and moved to Seattle. And I had an awesome experience out of Star Wave.

We launched ESPN.com, NFL.com, ABCnews.com, and worked with a whole crew of people from all over the US who had moved there to really get into internet content. And that was an amazing experience. Then Disney bought us. I ended up moving back to New York, to work for Disney, helping them get their internet things off the ground, including ESPN and ABC.

Shontell: From what I understand, you were pretty young when you went out to Seattle. You were in your mid-20s maybe, and you were working across platforms, which was a really early concept of TV-plus-digital, plus all these things. And you're also working with the legacy-TV sales guys, who are the old guys who've worked their way up to the top. How did they let you in? Why were you such a good salesman?

Armstrong: Well, one is, when I was at Star Wave in Seattle originally, I had done, at the time, the largest deal on the internet ever done. So I did a $1 million deal back in probably 1996 or 1997. And this was when most of the deals were $10,000 deals. I got on Paul Allen's radar screen. I ended up flying down to a Portland Trailblazers game with Paul Allen and some friends from Star Wave. And then when Disney bought the company and I moved to New York, people knew about this deal.

The deal I had done was with Rick Scott, who's now the governor of Florida. He was the CEO of Columbia/HCA, and he did the first really, truly large ad deal at Star Wave and for ESPN. When I got to New York, I sort of had a reputation of somebody who was energetic, creative, and doing deals.

I showed up in New York, and I was really one of only a couple internet people there. It was a little bit more like we were outside-the-box people who didn't fit into the normal way that everything was happening in New York and media. So they kind of took us everywhere. It was sort of like a dog-and-pony show, and we were the dog.

I learned a lot from working at ESPN, which was an amazing company with amazing people. I got to spend a lot of time with people who were super knowledgeable about advertising and super knowledgeable about content. I became, like, their internet buddy.

What it's like to be interviewed by Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Shontell: That served you well, because then Google came calling. Google at the time was this tiny startup. It was barely generating any revenue. Omid Kordestani, who's now the executive chairman of Twitter, calls you up.

Armstrong: Right.

Shontell: And he's at Google at the time. What does he say and what's that meeting like?

Armstrong: Omid had called, through another woman I worked with at Star Wave. And he said, "Can you meet me in New York City?" I met him at the Carlisle Hotel in New York on a rainy Friday. And we hit it off right away. If you know Omid, he's one of the best humans on the planet, and one of the most engaging.

At that time, Google was into licensing software. That was the main business model at that point. And they were thinking about getting more into advertising, so Omid asked me a whole bunch of questions about what I thought, and I ended up going out to meet and have breakfast with Sergey Brin in Palo Alto.

I had had another job offer at the time from a large gaming company, an unbelievable job. Which would have, at my age, been super enticing. But after meeting Omid and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and some other people from Google, you could tell there was going to be magic there. And it wasn't exactly clear what it was going to be, but I decided to join Google, and that was a great decision. A lot of fun, and just an unbelievable experience. And again, super-talented people. It was a highlight for me.

Shontell: Do you remember what that first meeting with Larry and Sergey was like? What is it like meeting the Google founders back then, as they're growing it?

Armstrong: I don't think I've ever told this story. But when I had my first discussion with them, they basically said at the beginning of the meeting, after a few questions, "We're not really sure what to ask you. Ask yourself the questions. Like, what questions would you ask yourself, if you were us?"

So I said, "Look, I'm very direct person, very honest. Here's what I would ask, the following questions." And I thought that was interesting. I realized later, after working with them, that that was not an anomaly, that was one of their tactics.

But they were driven. I think to this day, Larry and Sergey are obviously very smart, and very creative. They're very competitive also, in a good way. I'd say they care a lot. At their size now and what they're doing, I'm sure there's a lot of feedback on them, how people feel about them. But they're, at their heart, very good people. Both of them.

Creating AdSense for Google, from scratch

Shontell: When you get to Google, it's generating about $700,000 a year in ad revenue. And now it's generating about $25 billion a quarter. So you got in and helped them figure out what ad products were going to work. And one was AdSense, right? How did you help develop that? It's now a multibillion-dollar-a-quarter business for them.

Armstrong: First of all, Salar Kamangar used to be the head of YouTube and was really the brainchild behind AdWords, and a few other people we worked with. Really, it all kind of came together in a very mad-scientist way, of how AdWords got off the ground, and the ad business. But there were a whole bunch of us working on it, and it had a good outcome on the AdWords side.

And then one day a guy named John Firm, who worked in our ad-sales group, came and said, "Hey, we have a whole bunch of customers who don't have budgets spent on search. They basically load all their budgets in. There's lot of room for other places they could run it, but we can't spend all their money."

And by the way, one of our publishers, About.com, said, "Is there any way for you guys to help us figure out how to make more money?" And so we literally took a PowerPoint page, mocked up a content page, and put AdWord boxes on it that were laid into the content. We took it into the Google meeting, to the executive-team meeting, and said, "Hey, why don't we syndicate all of our ads onto content properties?"

Which today doesn't sound like brain surgery, but it was a moment in the company's history when there were a whole bunch of people who didn't want to do it. They were like, "We're a search company. Let's stay focused on search. This doesn't make any sense. Display ads don't really work."

There was a big argument, back and forth, but at the end of the day we got a group of engineers. We hired Kurt Abrahamson, who was the president of Jupiter, to come and run it. We spend about a year in my group developing it and growing it, and then we turned it over to Susan Wojcicki, who's running YouTube now. She took it over and ran it.

Then Applied Semantics was a company that was bought by the product and engineering team, so that was another product that had a lot of founders to it, I guess, and a lot of success because a lot of energy got put into it.

One untold story about Google I should have gone back to is, one of the reasons Google is successful in ads is because the search-licensing business went away. Yahoo bought Inktomi, and so one of Google's major revenue lines kind of went away, because search licensing went to a free model from a paid model. That allowed a lot of the engineering talent at Google to go focus on ads. I think without that type of transition, we never would have had the horsepower in terms of the intellectual capital on engineering a product.

Sometimes in business you get lucky, and what looked like a bad situation with the licensing business turned out to be an unbelievably big opportunity. And that's really what led to AdWords. And with the DoubleClick acquisition, there was lots of stuff like that that came out of it. What looked like a tough situation originally turned out to be a boon for the entire company.

Shontell: So this works. You become this god within Google, managing this massive department.

Armstrong: I was not a god within Google. There were a lot of gods within Google. So there was a massively talented team there. Unbelievable talent, yeah.

A call from Jeff Bewkes

Shontell: Well, that may be true, but still. The head of Time Warner gives you a call, Jeff Bewkes. He notices what you've built and what you've done. This is 2009. What made you intrigued to take a meeting with him, and to talk about the idea of joining AOL?

Armstrong: You know, a few things I would go back to. The reason I ended up going to Google was that it looked like there was a huge opportunity in the information business, and putting information connected with where commerce happens, was a big opportunity. Earlier in the 2000s I had cofounded and funded a company with my college roommate, Luke Beatty, called Associated Content, which was more of a content company that eventually got sold to Yahoo.

But my time at Google, I'd say after I was there for almost 10 years, I have a personal career philosophy, which is, I think you should continue to do something as long as you're learning quantum number of things in general. And I think the quantum learning is probably the most important attribute to people's careers, to continue to grow.

At Google I just wasn't learning anymore, but my interest level over time had started to get really focused in on the content space, and where media was going, and working on Associated Content a little bit. I was on the board for a while. It got me interested in where content was going.

And then when Jeff Bewkes called, it seemed like a unique opportunity. I could go into my investing philosophy, but I'm also somebody who likes to invest. I think a lot of opportunities are opportunities because everyone can't see them. And if you can read something in the newspaper, it's probably not an opportunity anymore. And AOL was the exact opposite. It was something that everyone had given up on, but they had a lot of resources, a lot of users, and they had a lot of talent. So it seemed like an opportunity.

If I was going to do something disruptive, that'll also be a big runway to do something disruptive because people frankly were counting it out. I think that you have a choice to go to a startup to start something, or you have a choice to do something at bigger scale. I wanted to do something at bigger scale.

And it was just an interesting asset. It was probably going to be a windy path, because it was inside of Time Warner. If we wanted to spin it out, we'd have to go through the whole process of spinning it out, and then we'd have to make all these changes to the company, and it was a challenging experience, and that's what I wanted at the time.

How to weigh a big, risky career move and leave your safe, cushy job

Shontell: So at the time when you're having this conversation, you're thinking about taking the job. But there was a graveyard of AOL CEOs. There were five, I think, within that decade. How did you measure the risk, and how did you decide to jump? How did you make sure you weren't the sixth CEO in that graveyard?

Armstrong: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I didn't want to take the job if I didn't think I could do it. And I definitely had a lot of reflection time on that, because a lot of these companies that have these situations have a lot of CEOs, and they're all smart people. They are good at their careers. I was carefully thinking about it, but on the other hand I thought: What if this totally fails and it's the world's biggest failure? Really — who cares? I'll probably learn more doing it.

A lot of people said to me, "Why would you ever leave Google? Why would you leave Google and your reputation at Google to go do something like AOL?" But I thought about it the opposite way, which was, if you wanted to have the most intense learning experience, and apply a lot of the skills I had learned in the 10 or 15 years prior, AOL seemed like a great opportunity to do that. My personality is more entrepreneurial, and it just seemed like an opportunity that, although it had tons of risk, it also had tons of opportunity. And you've got to be willing.

My dad said to me the night before I started at AOL, "This is a burn-the-bridge moment. If you fail at this, you can't walk backward. So you should figure out how to always look forward."

My dad said to me the night before I started at AOL, 'This is a burn-the-bridge moment. If you fail at this, you can't walk backward. So you should figure out how to always look forward.'

And I think that was a great piece of advice, because that's essentially what we had to do, over and over and over again.

Shontell: How do you make a burn-the-bridge decision? How do you know you're making the right choice? Especially as the leader of a huge company?

Armstrong: One thing is, when I took the AOL job, I traveled around and went on a little mini leadership roadshow before I actually started.

I got to announce that I was going to start, and then I had some time before I started and I spent a lot of time with a lot of different leaders, who I respected, who are big leaders across corporate America and some entrepreneurs.

Essentially, I think in a CEO job, you have to be OK with risk and you have to be OK with failure. I have a saying which is, "You have to fail toward a goal."

As long as you're failing, if you know what the goal is, it's OK to fail in that direction. And that's the advice I got from people. On that roadshow, I had a lot of people challenge me. The best mentors I had are also the most challenging people. And on that roadshow, they asked me a lot of the questions I ended up facing further on. I wasn't prepared for all of them but I kind of knew what the role was, and what the job was going to be. And fortunately, or unfortunately, for AOL, a lot of that I learned on the job overall. So it was challenging.

Shontell: And when you come into a new job like that, do you need to bring your own team with you? Because that's something you did. You cleared out the executives, brought in some people from Google. Was that essential?

Armstrong: When I first started I brought a couple people like Maureen Sullivan, who's the president who runs Rent the Runway now. She was the first person who came over from Google with me. And what I told the AOL team was, "Look, this is the team. Everyone's going to have their shot. We have to change what we're doing. Some of the changes, if you want to roll with them and stick with them, great. If this is not what you want to do, raise your hand, because we're going to go in a different direction." And I think over time I did end up bringing a bunch of people in from Google, and other people as well.

I would say looking back on it, overall, you had a very challenged company. Out of the gates, we were trying to spin a company out of a public company and take it public alone, which is a massive challenge. Forget about one that's in a downturn, overall. I think there was a whole group of us who were somewhat experienced, but not fully experienced in doing all the things that we were doing. So we were figuring it out on the fly.

I bet if you went back and talked to a lot of those people, it was probably one of the best — and hardest — but best learning experience. If I went back to it now, at my experience level, I would probably take a step back and take a better account of my own skills of what I was really good at, and what I was not good at. And I probably would have augmented the team slightly. Not that I wouldn't have brought the people in from Google, but I would have had a couple other people around me who had more experience, and I think that was a lesson, and something I'm frankly taking into the Yahoo deal we're working on now.

How to inspire a team when morale is low

Shontell: You also had a really tough challenge of, this was an uninspired company. It had gone through a couple of rough years, maybe people didn't even remember what a good year felt like. And you had to come in and get people to buy into your vision and get people excited again. So how do you go in and breathe inspiration into a company that feels deflated?

Armstrong: We did a 100-day process, and I traveled around the whole globe. There were about 10,000 AOL employees at the time, I saw about 9,000 of them in person, and I had three processes I was running: feedback from the entire company and team, feedback from the management team, and then a list I was keeping of things that I thought we should be doing.

After the 100 days, we held a meeting at the Time Warner Center and I put up three whiteboards. On one white board I wrote back the results from the entire global team of what they thought we should invest in. I put up a white board of what the management team thought, and I put up a whiteboard of what I thought. I flipped them all around at the same time. Each one had five things on them. All of the white boards were identical, except for one area on the white board that I had flipped around on my personal side.

So the whole company was already in alignment and I think that got people excited. They weren't told what the strategy was. They got input, and everyone was on the same path in believing in it.

A meeting with Verizon's CEO that led to a $4.4 billion deal

Shontell: Down the road, Lowell McAdam, the CEO of Verizon, and you have a conversation. Verizon ends up buying AOL for $4.4 billion. How did that conversation start, and how do you decide, as the head of a huge company, that this was the right move?

Armstrong: There were two things. Lowell is an incredible CEO at Verizon, and somebody who really helped grow it from a wire line to wireless — and Verizon to become one of the most successful companies on the planet in doing so.

When I sat down with Lowell, it was one-on-one. It was at the Allen and Co. conference at what they call the "duck pond," where people kind of have meetings after the conference is over. And essentially I had a blank sheet of paper and Lowell asked me a number of questions. Things like, where the industry is going, what the structure would be, and what I thought was happening. I drew him a diagram of what I thought was happening. We talked for an hour or two about it, and then I didn't see him for months afterward, and then he called.

We had talked about [how] maybe there are operational things to do together between the companies, and then he called and came back in the fall. I met with him, and we had more and more conversations. So over the course of time, there was a very natural progression of where things were going. On the AOL front, what was happening was everything was going mobile and everything was going data-driven. I used to carry around a five-column chart from our board-of-directors meetings that I started every meeting with, that had the strategic priorities for the company.

Mobile, video, and data were the first three things on that chart, and I knew we needed to solve that issue. And Verizon, at the time, wanted to solve their challenge of, how do they grow services? So what naturally grew out of that conversation was a combination of what Verizon needed to solve and what we needed to solve.

It didn't start out as an M&A deal. It started as a big operational deal, then it went to a joint venture, then it went to a full company sale. But that's how it started. And at the same time, there were other companies kicking the tires on AOL, and we were meeting with people, but the reality was Verizon, if you think the future is mobile, then it's going to be about video and data.

If you think the future is mobile, then it's going to be about video and data.

It's hard to argue Verizon wasn't a great outcome for us as a business. I've been there for two years now; it's been a great experience.

Shontell: One thing that's happening in the broader media landscape in digital is this term "duopoly." A lot of media executives keep talking about it — it's the idea that Google and Facebook. the duo, are taking a ginormous share of all digital-ad dollars. There was recent a study from IAB that showed 89% of the digital money was going to those two, and 11% was going to everybody else, like AOL or Business Insider. How do you look at this landscape and what AOL's role can be? Where is everything going, in your opinion?

Armstrong: I think you have got to add Amazon to that list.

Shontell: A "triopoly."

The digital triopoly of Google, Facebook, and Amazon — and how everyone else can survive

Armstrong: People are saying duopoly, but they are missing one of the legs of the stool. Amazon's a real competitor in the space. I'm probably a contrarian thinker on this. I like the fact that Google and Facebook are getting more successful, and getting bigger at what they're doing. Frankly for us, we have a different strategy. So the stronger they get at what they're doing, the harder it will be for them to adjust out of that big scale to some of the things that we're thinking about doing.

We're a big publisher; we're one of the largest publishers on the web with our content, and we're one of the larger ad players. So it's challenging, but you have a choice. I'll give you the choice.

You have a choice of being in an industry that's growing at 15, 20, 30% globally. The internet is going to double in the next five years in terms of people who are connecting to it, through mobile. Only 15% of commerce by 2020 is going to be on the internet. There's huge opportunity in front of us.

You have a choice as a leader and as a company. You can go compete in linear spaces or offline spaces that are really challenged, or you can go into a space that's growing and you compete against gold-medal Olympic athletes. It's tough to say Google and Facebook aren't executing at the top of their game. Same thing with Amazon. But that sets an awesome bar for us as a company to compete at that level. And it challenges us creatively to try to get in that game.

From where we sit right now, I'd choose the tailwind industry that's growing, and I would choose to have Olympic-gold-medal competitors, because it's only going to raise our game.

I would choose to have Olympic-gold-medal competitors, because it's only going to raise our game.

With the industry, I have a whole viewpoint on industry consolidation, but where the world's going, we're heading to a place where there's going to be giant scale we've never seen before globally. There's going to be a set of companies that have the abilities to do that. And those companies are going to really, really have the chances to build companies the size that the world hasn't seen before.

Shontell: A final question: You've had to make a lot of hard decisions as a leader of many companies at this point. But you're also personable and a likable guy. How do you strike that balance between gaining respect from your employees and making the hard choices, and being liked and respected at a manager?

The advice Tim gives to his children, and to anyone building a career

Armstrong: There's advice I got when I was growing up — and I give it to my own kids — which is: To thine own self be true. What you see is what you get. If you interact with me, this is who I am, love me or hate me. And I think being authentic is important.

The second thing is, the mentor crew I have. I have a bunch of advice I always give to younger people, but one of them is to build your personal entourage or board of directors.

I have five or eight people outside the company I rely on. I have one person, David Bell, who used to be the CEO of IPG. He's in our office almost every day. I meet with him every Friday. And every Friday he starts by telling me everything I'm doing wrong. For me, it's the most helpful meeting of the week because it always resets me back to, "OK, what am I supposed to be doing as a leader? What's my job? What are those things? If you're yourself, and you're authentic, and you're honest and direct.

The other thing I've learned from David and people like [former Starbucks CEO] Howard Schultz and [American Express CEO] Ken Chenault and other people like that who have mentored me over time is, just be direct with people.

I did an all-company meeting with AOL and Yahoo yesterday. I got asked if there are going to be impacts from doing the deal. I said, "Yes, there are. That's what happens when two companies come together."

I'm not going to beat around the bush. We're going to try to do the least amount we possibly can, but the bottom line is, that's part of what's happening with the deal and I want to be direct about it. So that directness, I think, helps a lot, and being honest with yourself.

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: Channeling Lygia Pape’s Radical Relationship to Space

Performance of Lygia Pape’s “Divisor” (“Divider”) (1968) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in March 2017 (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)

On Saturday morning, I was jittery over the idea of walking down Madison Avenue under a giant white sheet. Together with some 225 people, I was going to reenact Lygia Pape‘s 1968 performance “Divisor” (“Divider,” 1968). Pape, a Brazilian artist who was born in 1927 in Rio de Janeiro, where she also died in 2004, performed this piece during the military dictatorship, first with children from favelas and later in the gardens surrounding Rio’s Museum of Modern Art. The 50-by-50 foot sheet is cut with slits for participants to fit their heads through, so that everyone moves through a single piece of fabric. The Met Breuer, which is currently holding a beautiful retrospective on the artist titled A Multitude of Forms, organized the performance from Madison and 75th Street to the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at 81st and Fifth Avenue. The idea seemed nothing less than surreal, to momentarily interrupt the flow of the city with a white square punctured and shuffled along by people.

Performance of Lygia Pape’s “Divisor” (“Divider”) along Madison Avenue (photo by Travis Magee)

But this is not, exactly, what happened. We were sadly given only one lane of traffic, which meant that the sheet was not entirely unfolded, accommodating only 60 people. The rectangle of fabric sagged between us, rather than appearing taut and expansive as I’d seen in archival footage. Police and Met staff were on either end of us, making sure we kept within our limits, watching out for the cars and curb. This, to me, defeated the point of the whole thing. We were supposed to take over the street, not be dictated by its laws.

When participants first slipped under the sheet, they laughed and talked with their neighbors, and took many selfies (we were told that once we got moving, we weren’t allowed to snap photos, but that rule went quickly out the window). We were given instructions about our route via a megaphone, and Met staff members led the performance with plaques written “Divisor” across them, as though we were a pack of tourists.

Given all these formalities, which I realize may have been legally necessary, we might as well have had some discussion on the actual performance. Because once we got going, participants went relatively quiet, walking at a steady pace, when “Divisor” is designed for people to move animatedly within it, and play with the fabric that connects them. The curator of the Lygia Pape exhibition, Iria Candela, tried to encourage participants to jump and cheer, but any wave of excitement quickly subsided.

Despite all this, it did feel like we were one organism, adapting to one another’s tugs and pulls, at once hyperaware of our individual impact and drawn by the collective current. Though it wasn’t until we stationed ourselves in the plaza in front of the Metropolitan Museum that we gained a glimpse of what the performance was meant to be like. There, we had the space to unravel the sheet, and onlookers were invited to fill in the remaining slits. It was is if a weight had been lifted, the white of the sheet joyously reflecting the light that enveloped our floating heads. Someone from the Met gave us instructions (via his megaphone): “Jump!” “Turn clockwise!” The effects were gratifying, even if the process felt somewhat stilted.

Lygia Pape’s “Divisor” (“Divider”) (1968) in Rio de Janeiro

Recent reenactments, in Hong Kong and Lisbon for instance (staged by the nonprofit space Para Site and Galeria Graça Brandão, respectively), have appeared to be more successful in that they were at least able to spread open the sheet. In Lisbon, it was taken to a public square, where passerby had to activate the fabric. In New York, it would’ve been more interesting to open up the demographic beyond art worlders and Met members (who tend to fill up the museum’s events quickly, since they are kept apprised and can register early), considering the piece offers a good deal of potential to create connections, and expose differences, between strangers.

Pape did, at first, envision the performance in a gallery setting, with the added element of hot air being blown from below the sheet. But she ultimately decided to take the project to the streets. Staged during the military dictatorship, “Divisor” gave people agency to move through public space en masse during a time when protests were suppressed and the streets surveilled.

Both in the US and in Brazil, people (myself included) have taken to occupying the streets with greater fervor and urgency. Both countries are being run by unpopular leaders: In Brazil, Michel Temer became president after Dilma Rousseff was impeached and his all-male cabinet readily implemented longstanding austerity measures; and in the US, we have, well, Donald Trump. The wealth of grievances against the Trump administration have brought people of various backgrounds to protest on major avenues in cities like New York. This context only exacerbated my disappointment with the “Divisor” reenactment. While it did not need to be an act of dissent — I would not expect that from the Metropolitan — to participate in a public art performance that essentially shoves you to the curb is needless to say frustrating during a time when many of us are eager to make our presence felt.

Lygia Pape, “Book of Paths” (1963–76)

As the Met exhibition makes clear, Pape’s art is precisely about heightening our senses and engendering awareness of how we situate ourselves in space. In the 1970s, she taught architecture at the Universidade Santa Úrsula in Rio de Janeiro, where she made a point of having students study favelas and improvised architecture. Together with her friend, the artist Hélio Oiticica, she explored the margins of the city, developing a particular fascination for street vendors. In a similar vein, she took to studying Brazil’s neglected indigenous cultures, inspired by their devotion to crafts. This turn toward popular culture and indigenous roots in Brazilian art in part sprung from a sense of disillusionment: the dictatorship had crushed the modern, utopian promises of the previous decade. It was difficult to imagine that a dictatorship would follow four years after the new capital, Brasília, was constructed under Oscar Niemeyer‘s design.

Lygia Pape, “Tecelar” (1957) and “Tecelar” (1957)

Pape started out as a Concrete artist in the ’50s, making primarily wood reliefs and engravings of oscillating and dislodged geometric shapes. In a 1997 interview, she cited her artistic “passions,” among them Piet Mondrian, Alfredo Volpi, and Kazimir Malevich, whose visions echo in her patterns, which are enlarged in the giant canvas that is “Divisor.” One of her 1957 engravings (all of them titled “Tecelar”), on view here, uncannily prefigures the buildings of Niemeyer’s Brasília with their half-moon shapes.

In 1959, she joined the Neoconcrete movement with her friends Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, making work that was more sensual, enveloping, and musical. In her childhood home, Pape grew up surrounded by singing birds, among them 30 toucans and 50 macaws — an anecdote I love, as it feels apt in these galleries inhabited by colorful and dynamic objects that often lift in places like wings and are arranged in multiples, like small colonies. Her famous work “Book of Time” (1961–63), here installed on one large wall, seems to present a whole new species, with 365 wooden reliefs abstractly representing each day of the year.

Lygia Pape, “Book of Time” (1961–63) (detail)

Often, when looking at Pape’s work from this period, I think about how I would like to shrink and walk among her constructions, like “The Book of Architecture” (1959–60), one of many of her works that allude to reading and books. In it, a series of paper sculptures that look a bit like pop-ups illustrate the hallmarks of architecture, from the Egyptian pyramids to the Roman arch.

Lygia Pape, “Book of Architecture” (1959–60) (detail)

In a performance on a beach, “The Egg” (1967), Pape inhabits her own work, placing herself inside a fragile white box and tearing through it, reborn. The work was made shortly after she started experimenting with film, when she joined the Cinema Novo movement and began making more politically charged art. One of her strongest videos is “Carnival in Rio” (1974), which zooms in and out of dancers and dressed-up characters taking over the streets, until reaching Avenida Presidente Vargas, where the police arrive and the samba beats are silenced. In line with the art of her time, Pape’s works are at once joyous, optimistic, and humorous, even as they subtly allude to the heavy context of Brazil’s repression. In 1973, she was imprisoned for three months, held in solitary confinement, and tortured for having aided people who had been persecuted.

Lygia Pape, “Ttéia 1, C” (1976–2004) (detail)

The last room of the exhibition is occupied by the magnificent “Ttéia” (1976–2004), where clusters of copper wires extend in diagonals from floor to ceiling like beams of sunlight. The room is pitch black, with only spotlights on the harp-like strings. They appear to move in very slow motion, shifting slightly as we progress around the strands that alternately glow and disappear in the dark. As with many of her works, this one is a reflection on time, how stories take shape, and how we help shape them. I think of the sheet blanketing our bodies in “Divisor,” and how it literally highlighted our movements — illuminating the connections, divisions, and stories we make every day by just walking on the streets. This mapping of our relationships to our surroundings could be transposed almost anywhere; in every space we inhabit, there is the potential to become more self-aware, to make our presence felt. This is what Pape’s work reminds us of and, when fully experienced, enables.

Lygia Pape, “Ttéia 1, C” (1976–2004) (detail)

Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms continues at the Met Breuer (945 Madison Ave, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through July 23.

The post Channeling Lygia Pape’s Radical Relationship to Space appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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