Mind Fields – Current Phrases and Memes

Posted: August 20, 2021 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Commentary, Humor, Mind Fields | Tags: Arthur Rosch, language, Mind Fields, Slang, Writing to be Read | 2 Comments

Current Expressions and Memes of The Day

July 5, 2021

1. “It is what it is”.

This expressions carries a load of disappointment. It means that a situation or relationship can’t be changed into a desirable outcome. “It is what it is” means that one must accept the reality as it exists. No effort will alter the trajectory of this drama.

2. “Double Down”

Nothing we’ve done has succeeded, so it’s time to increase the effort applied. Doubling down is just what it sounds like. Time to double the work and hope that it doesn’t turn into an “It Is what it is” situation.

3. “My Bad”

This has been around a while, and it has a child-like cuteness that conceals its real impact. Saying “My Bad” is a way of apologizing without saying “I’m sorry.” In essence it trivializes someone’s mistake or bad judgment. “My Bad” is an admission of guilt shorn of its moral force.

4. “You know what I’m saying?”

If you listen to the speech of young people, you will hear this interjection so frequently that it becomes nearly inaudible. I hope that I’m not being explicitly racist. This is an expression spoken by millions of black men. It’s a very sad locution. Its repetition reaches to the core of powerlessness felt by poor black youth. The feeling is so deep and pervasive that it has become a verbal tic. The speaker does not feel heard or seen. He is invisible, un-witnessed, not validated. “You know what I’m saying?” testifies to the sense that we may know exactly what he’s saying, but still he does not believe it. The speaker is perennially crushed by self doubt.

5.“You didn’t hear this from me, but…. “

It means you heard it from her but no responsibility will be taken should it loop around as an accusation of bad faith and banal betrayal.

6. “Gaslighting”

Isn’t that cute? Gaslighting is listed as an abusive tactic. I want my readers to know that up to this point I haven’t looked up any of these words or phrases. I looked up “gaslighting”. I find it interesting that this term is listed in all modern dictionaries as a description of throwing doubt or obscuring the truth. Why “gaslighting”? It seems to refer to a past time when gas light was the primary means of lighting, in public and private. Things weren’t brightly lit in the era of gaslight. It was easier to get away with street crimes. Things were brighter near the light and they faded away between the lights. All the crappy stuff happens in the space between the lights. On the other hand, “gaslighting” may simply refer to farting as an adequate response to cultural stimulation.

7. “Woke”

This term means “enlightened” or “in a higher and more responsible consciousness” but it’s so loose in its specificity that I foresee that “woke” will split into sub-categories, i.e. un-woke, woke-ish, wokeless, , wokefucked woke-tastic, woklastic and wocastic.

8. “Word”

This means truth. “Word up” means “pay attention to me right now because I’m telling the truth.”

9. “Aight?”

It comes as a question. “Are you all right?” Acts as both greeting and farewell, like “shalom” does.

10: “Going South”

Poor “south”. It gets no respect. Going south means things are getting fucked up. Since losing the civil war, the South has struggled to regain its credibility. Speaking of credibility: there is the term “cred” but I don’t need to go into it. Nothing confers cred like suffering. The American South is doing just fine.

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Arthur Rosch is a novelist, musician, photographer and poet. His works are funny, memorable and often compelling. One reviewer said “He’s wicked and feisty, but when he gets you by the guts, he never lets go.” Listeners to his music have compared him to Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Randy Newman or Mose Allison. These comparisons are flattering but deceptive. Rosch is a stylist, a complete original. His material ranges from sly wit to gripping political commentary.

Arthur was born in the heart of Illinois and grew up in the western suburbs of St. Louis. In his teens he discovered his creative potential while hoping to please a girl. Though she left the scene, Arthur’s creativity stayed behind. In his early twenties he moved to San Francisco and took part in the thriving arts scene. His first literary sale was to Playboy Magazine. The piece went on to receive Playboy’s “Best Story of the Year” award. Arthur also has writing credits in Exquisite Corpse, Shutterbug, eDigital, and Cat Fancy Magazine. He has written five novels, a memoir and a large collection of poetry. His autobiographical novel, Confessions Of An Honest Man won the Honorable Mention award from Writer’s Digest in 2016.

More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com

Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos

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Want to be sure not to miss any of Arthur’s “Mind Fields” segments? Subscribe to Writing to be Read for e-mail notifications whenever new content is posted or follow WtbR on WordPress. If you find it interesting or just entertaining, please share.

Mind Fields – Marketing to Obsessive Compulsives: Is It Fair?

Posted: August 6, 2021 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Commentary, marketing, Mind Fields, Opinion | Tags: Arthur Rosch, marketing, Mind Fields, OCD, Writing to be Read | 2 Comments

Marketing To Obsessive Compulsives: Is It Fair?

May 16, 2021

That’s not supposed to be a funny title, but it is certainly ironic. Aren’t we all slightly OCD? Isn’t the condition of compulsiveness generic to our culture? Isn’t it nurtured, encouraged, normal, to be obsessive when we’re bombarded with messages to buy stuff that we don’t really need? I’m compulsive. Is there a difference between being compulsive and being an addict? There is, but it’s a question of degree. An addict is compulsive beyond reason, dominated by compulsions that create a self-harming syndrome. A “normal” obsessive compulsive is just another citizen of modern times.

This subject began to entice me when I went hunting for a new camera. I don’t really need a new camera, but my current camera is from 2013. That is ancient in terms of digital cameras and their markets. It’s like having a thirty year old dog. The compulsion to upgrade is generated by massive commercial influences. It’s Canon and Nikon, Pentax and Fujinon. Asian conglomerates pour a lot of money into creating an itch, for the latest gear. The two big companies, Canon and Nikon, continue to manufacture upgrades and new iterations of the same basic camera features. Mostly what the newest cameras do is focus faster and weigh less. A lot faster. A lot less. And they cycle frame rates at 20 shots each second. This enlivens the “lucky shot” school of photography, meaning everyone who shoots with a camera. I bought my first digital camera eighteen years ago. It was an Olympus that featured a 2.1 megapixel sensor. The resolution of camera sensors has taken wings and there are now consumer cameras with 50 megapixels. I own a 20 megapixel camera and it takes beautifully sharp and accurate images. As did my 12 megapixel camera, and my 3.3 megapixel camera.

Do I yearn for the new 32 megapixel camera from Canon? Yes. I can’t help myself. I can’t help wondering what would 32 megapixels look like? One problem is that this kind of gear is really good. The makers of cameras have conquered an array of technical problems that go with acquiring digital images. They are brilliant! How good can these cameras get before CanIkonAx (choose yr company) lunges into our brains and starts taking out the visual cortex to implant image sensors in our heads?

BUT: people like gear. People enjoy gear, so the in-the-brain-controlled- by -your -thoughts paradigm may have trouble acquiring lift. It may never get off the ground because what’s the fun of doing cool jobs when there’s no gear to play with but a chip of silicon within our bodies?? That may take a few hundred years, when we’ve learned that our very hardware bodies are also gear and there comes with this gear some interesting software.

I’ve digressed from my original question. Is it fair to market to obsessive compulsives? Who else is there to market to? If you find a person free of neuroses it won’t be a person easily conned by ads and glitz.

To answer the question: NO! It’s not fair. It’s a way of rigging the society to feed the voracious maws of Business. I’ve written elsewhere on the idea that “contempt sells”. We’re treated with contempt every day. It is assumed by highly placed marketers that we’re stupid. We ARE kinda stupid. A lot of our behaviors are stupid and against our own interests. Electing charlatans to high office is stupid, but it happens all the time. Buying TV sets the size of walls is a bit stupid. It’s kind of cool but still, how big does your TV need to be? Do you need a hoist and crane to install it in your house?

Being OCD is the modern equivalent of being religious. In the middle ages one HAD to be religious or the authorities would hunt you down and kill you. Heretic! In our own times it’s consumerism that drives our religion. There are so many ways to drain our bank accounts, so many temptations that leap from our social media and TV to entice us as if with a sexual appetite.

UHOH! This is the new SEX! No wonder it’s so powerful! People will climb over one another to experience five minutes of pleasure. People do the same thing at a store sale. Climb over each other to save a dollar. Now I get it.

It’s not fair to market to obsessive compulsives, but there is no one else to whom the companies can market. This OCD, which I will now dub Exogenous OCD, or EOCD, has been created by the forces of modern civilization.

It is said by some Buddhists that Emptiness is the true nature of reality. Deep inside ourselves we are aware, and terrified, of this condition. We will do a lot to escape from Emptiness. There is a giant misunderstanding about this term, Emptiness. It isn’t Nothingness. It’s Everythingness pouring into Nothingness. Always and now.

The market will be aimed at obsessive compulsives no matter what else happens. There is nothing we can do about it. We are the obsessive compulsives we hope to protect.

The Many Faces of Poetry – So Many Poets

Posted: July 23, 2021 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Poetry, The Many Faces of Poetry | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Poetry, The Many Faces of Poetry, Writing to be Read | 2 Comments

So Many Poets

By Arthur Rosch

Only I understand my own poetry.

If I read another poet

and get to the end of the poem

without being bored,

that makes her

a good poet. People tell me that William Butler Yeats

was a great poet but I’ll be damned if I understand him.

There are poets who play games with words

in such a way that the poetry bends the wind so that it ties knots in itself.

Listeners are embarrassed at their lack of comprehension.

So they applaud, to hide their gullibility, and the poet goes on to become a great

poet with audiences at colleges and books on shelves at stores.

Another kind of poet writes in plain English

but his narcissism makes him seem

as if he’s holding back a fart.

For god’s sake write in plain English. Or French. Or Serbo-Croatian.

Let’s start again.

I love MY poems. I love Pablo Neruda’s poems, just because I do.

e.e. cummings? Hey, come on. What a goofball. And Bukowsky; that’s as close to

real as poetry ever gets.

There are too many leaves and geese in Mary Oliver’s stuff. She’s obviously wise;

I hate poets who are wise. They fill me with envy. I’d like to be wise.

I don’t like poetry very much. There’s such a to-do over it, but hardly anybody

gives a poet money. Rich poets are always terrible. It isn’t about the poetry. It’s about the poet. We need poets,

badly, desperately. But we don’t need poetry at all. So I guess the best thing

is to be a poet who doesn’t write.

Just don’t tell anyone about me.

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Arthur also has writing credits in Exquisite Corpse, Shutterbug, eDigital, and Cat Fancy Magazine. He has written five novels, a memoir and a large collection of poetry. His autobiographical novel, Confessions Of An Honest Man won the Honorable Mention award from Writer’s Digest in 2016. His other works include his memoir, The Road Has Eyes, and his science fantasy novel, The Gods of Gift. Arthur’s lates release is a poetry and photography collection Feral Tenderness.

More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com

Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos

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Want to be sure not to miss any of Arthur’s “The Many Faces of Poetry” segments? Subscribe to Writing to be Read for e-mail notifications whenever new content is posted or follow WtbR on WordPress. If you find it interesting or just entertaining, please share.

Mind Fields: I’m Confused

Posted: July 16, 2021 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Commentary, Mind Fields | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Commentary, Internet, Mind Fields, Photography, Writing to be Read | 4 Comments

Listen. A month ago I saw one of my bank statements and I saw that Adobe had been paid $119 in February. They’ve been getting the same $119 for five years. Uh? For what? Apparently I had signed on to an app for a one-time signing of a PDF contract. That was how Adobe got me. I’ve been paying 119 a year for that one-time signing. I should have seen it. I didn’t.

Software did it to me. Adobe. Photoshop and its minions, Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. Adobe has such a tight grip on the photo image market, it’s like an octopus with twenty four tentacles. I’ve been on fair terms with the awesome app for a long time. I’ve been using Photoshop CS5, which is about fifteen years old.

I figured that as long as I’ve paid Adobe through the years, I may as well install all the photo apps to which I am entitled. The latest Photoshop. The latest Lightroom, the latest Lightroom Classic.

Here’s where the confusion starts. There’s a guy on Youtube who looks like a Hindu version of Peter Lorre. His face is motionless, frozen into an amused smirk. He’s so good with Photoshop he just riffs with heavy duty stuff like “eliminating the background”. And he does it with a few clicks and brushes. Isn’t that fundamental with a thousand images you’ve taken? Wouldn’t it be great to have a tool that automatically erases the background?

That’s what’s happening now in Photoshop. It can do that! The Revolution has come! Not for me, not yet: I’m following Frozenface’s instructions and it’s not happening. That’s one aspect of Photoshop. There are hundreds of ways of doing the same thing. I follow FlatFace’s steps and I’m not erasing any background. I’m erasing the foreground. I WILL figure it out.

So I’m running two versions of Photoshop, I also have Lighroom, Lightroom Classic and Canon’s Digital Photo Pro. And all the Windows photo apps, all the Microsoft photo appos, all these image apps jumping in my face and saying “Use me! Use ME!” All these programs are supposed to run harmoniously together and shepherd my precious images towards their apotheosis.

I’m not comfortable with this stuff. I’m especially confused by the shift in terminology and the way “Save As” has become “Exports As” and now there are Collections instead of Folders. Folders had to give up their guts and ride the Adobe Train.

I’m lost and confused. I don’t know where my photos are any more. I don’t know how much duplication has happened and how much drive space these previews and previews of previews and preview previews for comparison photos, before and after, showing how many iterations of the same image exist.. Over and over again. Where they are. They’re on my computer. I can click and make an image appear. In fifteen different programs. Everyone loves photography. The internet is all about photography. And video, don’t forget video.

I think it must be okay. The people at Adobe are experts. They must have deep insight into the process of editing and transforming images or they wouldn’t be able to anticipate what photographers and graphic artists will need in the future. Even with the latest mega Terabyte solid state drives, space will always be a major consideration.

Hell yes I need a tool that can erase a background from an impromptu portrait snapshot. Hell yes. I just have to figure out the procedure. Right now I’m erasing the faces that I’m hoping to preserve. Maybe I need a better Youtube teacher than Mister SmirkFace.

It’s okay to be confused. Don’t let it alarm you. Ever since Walt Disney took control of this culture’s imagination things haven’t looked right. You never know when a set of whiskers will appear on the side of a woman’s face. Or dogs are fitted out as astronauts and interstellar explorers. Dogs, pigs, mice. Disney was a major zoophile. Things haven’t looked right for the last sixty years.

Where do archetypes end and stereotypes begin? Ask Walt Disney. Ask his ghost, I don’t care. He has a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.

I’m still confused. I expect to be less confused as I get familiar with this new software. OR…I’ll toss this shit and go back to Canon DP Pro, because it’s just easier.

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In his early twenties he moved to San Francisco and took part in the thriving arts scene. His first literary sale was to Playboy Magazine. The piece went on to receive Playboy’s “Best Story of the Year” award.

More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com

Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos

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The Many Faces of Poetry- “Crazy”: A Reading by Arthur Rosch

Posted: July 9, 2021 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Poetry, The Many Faces of Poetry | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Crazy, Feral Tenderness, The Many Faces of Poetry, Writing to be Read | Leave a comment

“Crazy” by Arthur Rosch

You can find this poem and many others in Feral Tenderness – A Poetry and Photography Collection by Arthur Rosch.

Buy Link: https://www.amazon.com/Feral-Tenderness-Arthur-Rosch-ebook/dp/B08VQGKKPZ/

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More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com

Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos

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Mind Fields – The Windows Deluge

Posted: July 2, 2021 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Commentary, Mind Fields | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Internet, Mind Fields, Progress, Writing to be Read | 7 Comments

May 11, 2021

I have eighty two websites open on my computer. Right now. It’s a lot of info, and I barely know where to go next. All of it is Image. The text is merely relish on the photos and digital constructions. Every day that I sit at my computer or use my phone I am assailed by an overwhelming deluge of images. Who can discriminate within a field of overlapping network pages? There are so many things to look at!

Let me go from left to right at the top of my computer’s browser. I’ll read them off to you:

Lisa Witt’s Piano Lessons/Fredmiranda photography forum/dpReview camera review/.goodreads, literary opinion/Photoshop lessons/Ebay Tamron portrait lens for sale/two more Ebay pages/Youtube, archeology video/Smashwords, my book sales site/I have two pages of Inbox in the email pages that I use/ four windows open on Artsy, a wonderful auction site for artists/the Wiki page of photographer Diane Arbus. If you don’t know who she was, check her out, immediately!/National Geographic, always urging me to subscribe…I’ll stop there. You get the idea. You probably have your own plethora of open websites in front of you. What are your plans for today? It’s Sunday. My plans involve a lot of sitting in front of my computer looking at these open websites. At intervals I will swing my chair a hundred eighty degrees and practice piano scales. I usually check my email first but I haven’t done that today. I’m more curious about the reviews of a Canon camera that I want to buy. I sold my old camera using Facebook.

If I click on the little arrow at the top of my browser bar, I see yet another forty or fifty open pages. It’s insane! Everything is so interesting! Much of it isn’t worth the pixel density it’s projected upon. It may be interesting but it’s still Junk. That’s not my problem. I know how to avoid junk. I don’t use my phone for internet. I’m not a phone person. I’m a Desktop person. I like the size and resolution of my computer monitors. One of the monitors sits behind my digital piano where I can read music from its display.

It has occurred to me that much of what I do from day to day is incredibly cool and none of it existed ten years ago. That’s how fast the pace of change happens beneath our feet. It’s like living in a constant earthquake. The mental agility required to navigate the current epoch is intense. Do we have mental health issues? I wonder why. Every human being must now be a juggler, a dancer and respond to life as if riding a surf board. And you wonder why you’re so crazy.

You’ve heard the Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” It’s a riff on the historical knowledge that “interesting times” are times of trouble and turbulence. I view our own times as interesting beyond credulity. These are INCREDIBLE times and it’s a privilege, albeit a demanding privilege, to be alive in this cauldron of possibilities. China just landed its own Mars Rover on the red planet. Holy shit! What’s next? Where is the dividing line between science fiction and science fact? It keeps moving. I guess that’s my point in this rambling essay: living requires several kinds of agility. If you don’t move with skill you’ll be lost in the undertow of this great wave of information that keeps rushing onto the shores of our consciousness like a digital tsunami. It will take agility to survive. It has always been this way. It’s likely to be this way for the indefinite future.

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More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com

Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos

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Mind Fields: Scammed Like An Idiot By Hackers

Posted: June 18, 2021 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Commentary, Mind Fields, Opinion | Tags: Arthur Rosch, computer glitches, hackers, Mind Fields, ransomware, tech support, Writing to be Read | 5 Comments

Scammed Like An Idiot By Internet Hackers Vol 3a

“This is completely crazy!” I shouted at my smartphone. I was on the verge of a panic attack. The man at the other end, in his classic Mumbai accent, replied, “No no sir, it is not crazy. Your computer is badly infected. Do you see all these people who are using your private information?”

He pronounced Private with a “W”. Priwot.

My mouse pointer moved while my hands rested in my lap. The Command Window opened and showed an ominous list of white notations scrolling down the black background. Mumbai Man had control of my computer. I could see repeated iterations of the word “Trojan”

“See there,” he said. “See, see? See how many!” I had been fighting him for at least an hour and he was losing his composure. I was stubbornly refusing to capitulate. Is this what’s called Ransomware? So it seems. I couldn’t get rid of the guy. I couldn’t regain control of my computer until I paid five hundred dollars. Needless to say, I was upset. And I brought it upon myself by doing a stupid thing.

I had already been softened up. A week ago a demanding white pop-up window informed me that my computer had contracted a virus. In order to fix it I must call Microsoft at an 800 phone number. Riiight! And there are elephants on the moon. The pop up wouldn’t go away. No restart, no Task Manager, nothing. I shut down my computer by pulling the plug. When I rebooted I got on a treadmill of Windows fix-it bubbles that went nowhere.

After a couple hours of futzing with various remedies, including a non-functioning backup program, I realized that I had to reformat my computer. That was three days of work. Such work included ransacking all of my closets and bins looking for software. Labor intensive!

Everything was fine after the reformat, my computer worked for a week. Then that same white pop up window appeared and I knew I was in trouble. I didn’t want to reformat again! Like an idiot I called the phone number. Thus an ordeal began that went on for hours. Mumbai Man insisted that he represented Microsoft. He gave me an I.D. number. He gave me a phone number for…uh..Microsoft. I got another phone and punched that number. At the first ring a man with a Mumbai accent answered. “Microsoft Customer Service” he cheerfully announced.

The voice of Mumbai Man #1 created a bizarre feedback loop because as he spoke to me on MY phone, his voice sounded one desk removed on the phone that I had used to call…er…Microsoft.. I went through the motions, juggling two cell phones. I was assured by Mumbai Man #2 that Mumbai Man #1 was a legitimate Microsoft employee. His name was…uh… Sam Taylor. I wasn’t buying it but I was losing my grip on reality. These guys were slick! They had an answer for everything. They talked and talked and their reasoning was insane. Slowly they dragged me into the upside-down world of internet thieves. They could demonstrate to me how badly messed up was my computer. They told me that even if I bought a new computer the same thing would happen because hackers lurked in my network. They told me that every computer I ever bought from this day forward would be infected if I didn’t pay five hundred dollars.

“Sir, why are you having a broblem with this?” asked..uh.. Sam Taylor, as if this were a perfectly reasonable situation.

“A broblem?” I shrieked. “A broblem? Five hundred dollars and my computer held hostage is a broblem!. I can buy a new computer for five hundred dollars!”

“Oh, but sir, the new computer will also have the same broblem if you do not take care of this right away.”

Listen, I love the accent of Indians, be they from Mumbai, Kalikot or Kerala. I love the way they sound like they have three marbles just inside their lower lip. I have adored Indian culture my entire life. However these fellows conformed to a stereotype, this was happening in the real world and in the real world most Americans expect their tech support to speak with that lilting accent. Weirdly, it added a gloss of credibility to what was blatantly incredible.

“I’m sixty two years old,” I told the thief. “Does your mother know what you do for a living? That you rob old people on Social Security?”

“Oh, sir, you are a senior citizen? Let me talk to my supervisor and see what I can do about getting a discount.”

Hmmm hmmm count to five. “Oh yes sir, my supervisor tells me that we can make the rebairs for three hundred forty nine dollars and ninety five cents.”

I gave in. I let them install their shit on my computer. Their spyware, malware, ransomware buggy shit on my computer. I gave them my credit card number. I still don’t believe I did that. Sam Taylor had turned me over to Steve Smith who worked in Billing, and Steve Smith had then given control of my computer to Richie Logan. I watched my screen as program after program was installed, operated, then uninstalled. It was spooky! I was afraid to pull the plug on the modem and shut them out. By this time I didn’t know what to believe and I had the futile hope that these guys were actually fixing my computer.

My lovely spouse had a terrible virus experience once and contacted a reputable repair company who charged her a hundred dollars to remotely fix her computer. I phoned them while my computer chattered away, rolling files across the monitor screen.

“Unplug your modem right now!” This was the order from Jeffrey Everard in Austin, Texas. He works for OneSupport. They handle situations such as the mess I found myself in. I trust them. I think.

Jeffrey worked for an hour on my computer and charged me a hundred bucks.

Barclay Bank shut down my credit card and promised to mail me a new one with a new account number. Mumbai Men had yet to run the charge and they were not going to get my money. I called all my credit card vendors. I called the bank.

This was a horrible experience. Be careful. These crooks are skillful and incredibly persistent. They are glib, slick and ruthless. They are from India, Ukraine, Thailand, Poland, Belorus and the USA. They find your knowledge level with regard to computers and they know how to convince you that they’re not lying. They twisted my head so badly that I couldn’t locate reality after spending a couple of hours in their company. Did a little alarm go off at Microsoft Headquarters notifying them that my computer was infected? I posed this vision sarcastically and they said, “Yes that’s exactly what happened!”

I am now afraid to do any browsing on my computer. I’m afraid that any program I purchase to fight malware might be the vehicle bringing malware to my computer.

I made a mistake, a dumb mistake and it could have cost me much more. It will be a while before I can relax and use my computer normally. If ever.

My hands are still shaking.

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More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com

Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos

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Want to be sure not to miss any of Art’s “Mind Fields” segments? Subscribe to Writing to be Read for e-mail notifications whenever new content is posted or follow WtbR on WordPress. If you find it interesting or just entertaining, please share.

Mind Fields: The Apocalypse Of YouTube

Posted: June 4, 2021 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Mind Fields, Visual Media, Vlogging | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Mind Fields, Visual Media, Vlogging, Writing to be Read, YouTube | 2 Comments

April 19, 2021

I Love YouTube

April 19, 2021

The Apocalyptic Age Of YouTube

YouTube blows my mind. It’s GOD, it’s SHIVA, it’s…ummm..you know. Effing SUPERB! So much for the capital letters. I love YouTube. I love all the video platforms, from Godtube to Vimeo. We are living in an extraordinary time. The tools for creativity have multiplied so that billions of people have access to recording devices. Phones, vidcams, DSLRs, we now have quality gear to produce clean videos. It’s Content Heaven, and the content is whatever you want to make of it. I like discovering and studying things, like music, archaeology, astronomy. I go to school every day and it’s on the internet.

I think I’ve learned more in the last year than in all my previous life. YouTube has taught me more than many years of school taught me. I hated school…so there you go. I wasn’t about to learn anything from a place I hated. On YouTube, I’ve acquired skills from the most patient and benevolent teachers. Many providers of content do so out of their own generosity. They don’t make money, they don’t advertise.

The advent of the Vlog, or video blog, is a major development. I found the travel vlog Baldandbankrupt.com by accident. An adventurous Brit travels the world. We only know his name, Benjamin. He doesn’t tell us much else. As a guide he’s superb. He’s simple but entertaining, and his erudition is inconspicuous. He’s just one of us, “one of the guys”. He has a knack for languages. He does passably well in Russian and Hindi. What else does he speak? Who knows?

On the southern perimeter of the ex-Soviet Union there are a dozen nations, all of whom speak Russian. Consider that a gift of the Soviet past. It endowed all of Asia right up to the borders of China with a common language. As we can see through Ben’s travels, the cultures and heritages of the erstwhile Russian Empire are relatively intact. Whether it’s in Ukraine or Kalmykia, those peoples remember their legacies from The Silk Road and the steppes. In essence Bald Ben follows The Great Game, that competition between the British and the Russians that took up so much of the 19^th Century. They competed in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Turkestan. They confronted one another across vast swathes of central Asia. They were full of Imperial ambition. The geography is immense. If Ben wants to be in the middle of nowhere, there are plenty of nowhere places to go. Especially in the once proud Soviet Union.

Back to YouTube, the Guru, The Miracle Baba. It gives tirelessly. It’s our creation, ours. I wanted to learn piano and I didn’t feel that I could afford a teacher. YouTube’s piano teachers are legion, and I’ve fastened on a few piano mentors to help me master the instrument. After nine months of practice I can run scales, play and recognize most of my chords, and perform a few songs. When was this possible, before the internet? When I took trumpet lessons as a kid the dreaded Mister Haspiel came to our house weekly to instill in me the love of the instrument. It turned out that I was a drummer, and trumpet wasn’t so much a mistake as it was my mother’s design to thwart me as a drummer. I hated the trumpet! My mother hated it too, she hated my creativity. She once threw my trumpet down the basement steps. My dad had to buy me another. I got an upgrade: a shiny Selmer to replace that funky old Buescher. Thanks, Dad! And thanks again, departed father, for tolerating my drums after I had pestered you so much that you had to buy me drums to shut me up! I became a pretty good drummer. I can still paradiddle and double paradiddle with the best of them.

Mother’s long gone and YouTube offers free piano lessons, or cheap piano lessons, whatever…I can buy a course for a hundred bucks. If I can tell you anything, it is this: learning is fun. I’m an old man and I’m still learning. I’m still perfecting skills. How cool is that? Don’t get bored. Don’t be boring. Feed your spirit, especially with music.

Additional Notes:

YouTube is so freewheeling a form that it is possible for you to meet yourself online. Get into someone’s video or make your own. When Ben “Bald” wanders the Ukraine he runs into people who are watching his travel vlog. Now they’re IN his vlog. The loopy nature of this appeals to me. The skills for video making are evolving, but the toolkit is replete with every kind of Fade, Swipe, Roll, Caption, Insert, Delete. The skill with the camera involves knowing exactly when to turn on a subject, how to walk, narrate, greet people in foreign tongues, deter thieves and touts, and when to shut up and be quiet. One does these things simultaneously. It’s a flow, a rhythm and it’s impossible to fake. Vloggers are like musicians learning their chops as they record. A good vlog narration is a consummate filmic device. Not all vloggers are equal. And not all vloggers are as independent as Benjamin Rich on baldandbankrupt dot com.

The YouTube/video post phenomenon has spawned whole new industries. There are video “factories” where buildings are divided not into offices but studios for the recording of videos of all stripes from science to porn. The miniaturization of gear and the lowered cost of production have moved videos into the mainstream.

This is the Golden Age of Content. More people are doing more things with video than has ever been possible.

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More of his work can be found at www.artrosh.com

Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos

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Mind Fields: My Bank Account Has Termites

Posted: May 21, 2021 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Commentary, Opinion | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Commentary, Mind Fields, Writing to be Read | 1 Comment

My bank account has termites. Look at this statement! I’m paying $2.99 a month for National Geographic Online. I pay $4.99 for Bookbug, $3.99 for InfoTune. I’m still using the free version of Spotify. I can’t keep up! I did an audit of my books last night and my monthly internet charges are out of control. The total crept up on me like an infestation. One day it wasn’t there and the next day it was in my life like bugs in the basement. I can’t wonder: How did this happen? because I know how it happened. In the course of acquiring a normal amount of services and entertainment I accrued a creeping army of little debits. Look at this one: Chordbuddy.com. It’s a site that helps me practice piano. It gives me access to every musical chord ever devised. Many thousands of chords! It’s $5.99 a month and I use it every day. What chord is that? OK let’s look it up on Chordbuddy.com. Aha! Cminor 13. What a bizarre chord.

This tool is a miracle! Beethoven didn’t have the internet. He figured out his own shit without help from the digital universe. NOW… we have the digital universe and I’m teaching myself how to play and write with the aid of these tools.

I’m so grateful. I take nothing for granted. The world is always fluid and plastic. It melts and flows. Y’gotta be like a surfer.. Ride the waves as they come, big ones and small ones. My bank account gets nibbled at by a horde of seafloor crustaceans in digital form. Here’s my charge for keeping my Viewbug photo website up and running. It’s 10.99. I have to keep my amazing photos visible to the world because that pays part of my rent. Then… there’s $2.99 a month to Google for enough online storage to hold all these images and videos. Holy shit. I started writing this, kind of larking it but now it’s turned serious. I better audit my account again, for real this time. I need to know this essay has not been an exaggeration.

There are these fleas too. You get one behind your ear and for the next week even though the flea is long dead you still itch there, still scratch it now and then.

I keep a Sticky Note on my desktop. It has all my credit cards and internet debits listed by the company and last four digits. If I’m going to get hacked I’ll get hacked. One time I had my computer held hostage by a bunch of guys named Rah-jer. It cost me five hundred dollars and a lot of work to recover the contents of that computer. It wasn’t the machine that was hostage, it was the contents. Of course I had back ups. I always have backups and backups to the backups. Still, it was worth 500 dollars to ransom my computer.

I’m going to put the cover on my digital piano now and go to sleep. In the morning I may discover that I’ve signed up for a live Zoom conference with therapists at the South Pole. I don’t know what’s going to happen next:. The pace of change is positively sweaty! Close your eyes and turn around three times. Zipp! The world has changed. If you don’t change with it… well… you haven’t changed with it. That’s okay. If you want to be stuck in the past, pitch your tent with spikes made from old AOL discs.

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More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com

Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos

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Mind Fields: Fish In Or Out Of Water

Posted: May 7, 2021 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Commentary, Humor, Opinion | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Commentary, Mind Fields, Writing to be Read | Leave a comment

We’re just like the fish; we don’t know what water is. But the element in which we swim, the element that is impossible for us to recognize, is stress.

You may think you know you’re stressed. This isn’t the kind of stress I’m talking about. We have become denizens of a culture that is actually a Torture Machine. It drives us insane by presenting demands so complex as to be impossible to achieve. Every day, it issues orders to our nervous systems. Turn on your left blinker. Pay your insurance premium. Pick up your kids’ school uniforms. Don’t forget the doctor’s appointment. Where’d you put the McFarland file? Where are the paper clips? Why is this milk sour? Screw it; not worth my time, flush it down the sink. Are the dogs’ vaccinations up to date?

Do I have the receipts for my tax audit?

Why am I always left with the feeling that I’ve forgotten to do a homework assignment? Who is this screaming at me, right next to my ear so that it hurts?

The Antifa people are scurvy hippies. Our government is letting people steal on a massive scale. My bank account only exists long enough for the auto-payments to hit, and it’s gone and I’ve got nothing left to spend.

I think I’m going crazy. I don’t have any sexual desire at all. The last time I felt truly alive was… when? Have I ever felt truly alive? I truly don’t think so.

There’s nothing to look forward to. My old age will merely be a time when insurance machines squeeze the remaining dollars from my estate, leaving my kids with nothing. Zero. The globe is warming up. It’s true. The waters are creeping on shore, slowly. The future is a tsunami.

OUR SOCIETY IS A TORTURE MACHINE, so complex that it takes a genius to maneuver its daily routine. It tortures by its relentless pressure. We don’t need Stalin or Hitler. We have modern life in Amerika. See that guy with the cardboard sign sitting at the parking lot exit? “Will work for food.” He isn’t a pathetic loser. He’s you or me or someone we know who just cracked under the pressure and opted to sit in the TIME OUT box in front of everyone. He couldn’t take the complexity any more. Now he’s doing better. He has a shoe box where his money piles up. He’s doing better than I am! Could I take sitting in the TIME OUT box in front of everyone? I don’t think so. I’m not tough enough.

Life has always been complex, but not like this… Hunting, gathering, fighting off raiders, that was easy stuff compared to this. The modern Torture Machine can’t be dodged. Your assignment is late! Punishment will be swift and merciless! Your interest will rise, your credit will be cut.

The injustice of it! I’m choking on injustice. I can’t breathe! Give me a cigarette. Where are all these voices coming from? Let me turn off the radio.

The off switch doesn’t work. The voices are coming from my pocket. It’s my Z-Phone. It doesn’t have an OFF switch. The argument continues, shouting everywhere, lies compound in blatant and shameless huckstering. Everything is a trick. Even the tricks we know to be tricks conceal more subtle tricks. Those Antif types are going to burn down Manhattan in a giant riot. Quick, we’d better launch a pre-emptive pogrom, mow them down before they find out where we’ve stashed the money.

The fish don’t recognize the sea. The people don’t recognize the element that dominates our lives. I will coin a term for it: Phobagonovia. Phobe-ago-NOVE-ee-yah. It causes us to curl up inside our homes with the giant TV playing football games and scripted “reality” shows where people are abused by their in-laws. Phobagonovia. We are afraid of new experiences. The Torture Machine has implanted this condition in our nervous systems. We are afraid of relating to one another openly, of crying in front of strangers, of expressing feelings easily, of hugging or kissing spontaneously, lest we be inappropriate, our strait jacket is “Appropriate”, we haven’t a clue how to dance in a circle while deeply in love with members of a clan, to sing ancient songs, to sit around a fire feeling wonderful under the stars. That doesn’t mean we want to go backwards. We want to invent new communities. We are dying of Phobagonovia. Our neck ties are cutting off our breath. Our high heels are warping our skeletons. The future is over. Donald Trump will be reborn as a talking pig that can only sputter nonsense. The people of his remote village will laugh at him holding their sides with mirth. They will postpone the time to eat him. He’s so strange that people come from villages far away to throw him pieces of rubbish. His time will come, at last.

When the chief takes the first bite, he will spit it out.

“We laughed too long,” he will say. “This fat talking pig tastes like shit.”

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