Sometimes complaining works

I wrote this letter to the Goergia O’Keeffe Museum fully expecting that it would end up in some spam folder and would never be read. And I’d fully intended to mail it, but just got sidetracked. Moving on. Then, I saw the following email in my inbox this morning:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 7, 2009

For more information please contact:

Jackie Hall

Director of External Affairs

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

505.946.1020

jhall@okeeffemuseum.org

Georgia O’Keeffe Elementary School and Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to Work Together

Santa Fe, New Mexico—On July 31, 2009, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s Interim Director, Carl Brown and its Director of Education and Public Programs, Jackie M, met with Lucinda Sanchez, Principal of Georgia O’Keeffe  Elementary School.  Mr. Brown conveyed  to Principal Sanchez the Museum’s regret over the misinterpretation of issues surrounding  correspondence between the Museum and the elementary school.

Mr. Brown stated, “The Museum does not object to the elementary school’s use of Georgia O’Keeffe’s name, nor do we object to the selling of t-shirts that feature the school’s name for fundraising purposes.   We are pleased and proud that the elementary school is named after Georgia O’Keeffe. The school has been in existence for 20 years and the Museum has never had an issue with its name.”

The Museum and school officials spent most of the meeting discussing cooperative efforts in the area of education for students, faculty, and family members.

“I’m so appreciative for the opportunity to work collaboratively with the O’Keeffe Museum in coming to a win-win solution for all.  We are so grateful to continue honoring the brilliant legend of Georgia O’Keeffe through the use of her name,” said Principal Sanchez.

Ms. M added, “ We look forward to working with the school, one with such a noteworthy academic record and a long history of outstanding accomplishments.”
# # #

It’s nice to know that public shaming was enough to get the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to back down and stop looking like such greedy jerks. I think the reaction to their attempt to strongarm a school showed them that people will step in when such overt wrongdoing is happening. Right now, I feel like people who care can actually make a difference. On that note, I will get on with my day and enjoy the loveliness of Newport Beach!

Later, gators!

D’oh! I forgot to mention that I’m off to California for the next week, and I’m not sure whether I’ll be posting much, if at all. Peace out, East Coast!

Stupid hackers!

The Gawker Media blogs are back up. Word on the street – and by on the street, I mean Gawker – is that hackers trying to block access to Consumerist (which isn’t even a Gawker Media blog anymore, but is still hosted on the company’s servers) effectively prevented people from accessing anything. Although I missed checking these sites while I was at work yesterday, I feel even worse for the many Gawker Media bloggers, who I believe still get paid on a page view model. This cannot be good for them. Bummer all around.

Sounds like some shady company is trying to prevent people from learning of their suckitude.

So…Mohegan Sun

First, let me start by saying that I generally like casinos. I don’t gamble much; $20 is usually the most I’ll spend in a casino, and I try to stop if I’m up even a little. But I think that casinos make for fun people-watching, and try really hard to make you not want to leave. This was not the experience that I had at Mohegan Sun. The arena was awesome, although I am still mystified that I ended up in the second-to-last row, since I got my ticket in a presale. It was non-smoking, which was great, and a huge difference from the rest of the casino. That place was nasty! Ugh. It smelled terrible, and even though there were supposed to be designated smoking areas, people lit up everywhere except for the food court and the non-smoking gaming area. Even at the food court, you could not completely escape the stench of other people’s cigarettes. Aside from the four hours that I spent in the arena, I was only at Mohegan Sun for another hour, yet when I left, I smelled like an ashtray. It was gross. I had to air out my clothes overnight.

I find the Atlantic City casinos to be vastly superior in their regulation of where people can smoke. I don’t feel as nasty when I leave the casinos there. I can’t remember enough about Vegas casinos to say whether they were smoky, but I don’t remember feeling nauseated by them.

My feelings about Mohegan Sun were definitely tied into the fact that I’m a non-smoker with little to no interest in gambling. I think that if I smoked, or if I were more used to being around cigarette smoke, I would have noticed or minded less how bad I ended up smelling. Or, if I was used to gambling, I’d probably be more accustomed to smelling smoke.

Jason Mraz at Mohegan Sun, July 31, 2009

As I said earlier, I really enjoyed Jason Mraz’s concert on Friday at Mohegan Sun. He really seemed to enjoy himself, and performed for nearly two hours. He did sets on both a large main stage, and then a more intimate acoustic stage. I thought I’d died and gone to aural heaven. It was pretty awesome. I don’t have the set list yet, but I’ll update this post when it’s available. I’m guessing that at least one person in the packed arena taped the concert, so I’m providing a link to Mraz’s 2009 concerts download page. If you’re not familiar with his taping policy, Jason Mraz allows tapers to record and upload every show that he does (provided the venue doesn’t prohibit it), so there are hundreds of his shows available from archive.org.

Mraz 2009 shows // Mraz concerts by year

His energy was amazing. He sang his heart out, and he sounded great. I’ve definitely heard him sound a little worn out or hoarse, and that was not the case this concert. He did a great reggae-influenced version of “The Remedy,” and then did this energetic cover of Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long.” He also performed my new favorite song, “Never Too Late (The Only Life You Can Save).” This version was different from the one he did in England and Ireland, and honestly, I prefer the way I initially heard it. He left out my favorite line, “Be glad to be along for the ride.” I want to say “burn” every time I hear that, and think it would be a shame if it didn’t make the final cut. On the train on the way up, I listened to one of his concerts from 2001, and heard early versions of “The Dreamlife of Rand McNally” and “Better,” and definitely felt that I enjoyed what they became more than what they started out as.

I could not stop smiling and dancing during this concert, and am so glad that I decided to go to it. I’m sorry that I’ll be in California during the rest of his New York and New Jersey concerts, and that I can’t go to the Boston concert I expected to see, but this was such a great concert that I really can’t have too many regrets.

Also: you’ll notice that I finally broke down and made a Jason Mraz category. I figure that if I’m going to talk about him this often, I should just make it clear that ~80% of my music posts are going to somehow involve him.

A day without Gawker

I visit various Gawker Media blogs multiple times during the day on weekdays, and usually at least once every weekend. This morning, upon starting my workday, I fired up my personal and work email accounts, the interlibrary loans window, Metafilter, Jezebel, and Gawker.  Those last two didn’t work. I gave it ten minutes, and tried again. Same deal. I googled Jezebel.com and saw the beginning of a post  from yesterday that mentioned technical difficulties. So I waited a couple of hours, and checked again. Still not working. I remember that this once happened before and I was able to find a backdoor link to Gawker, but that’s been years and now I don’t remember how I found that link (possibly Jossip, but since that site is now dead, that’s no help to me).

It’s kind of sad how much I missed these blogs. It’s not just the gossip or the ridiculous content; I actually like the people who post on threads and appreciate learning about things I would otherwise not know.

Right now it is 3 pm EDT, and these web sites, as well as Lifehacker and Gizmodo, are still not working. I never realized how much time I spent checking these blogs until I couldn’t look at them.

Bummer.

Some pics

Yesterday’s concert at Mohegan Sun was awesome. Amazing, even. It was definitely in my top 5 Mraz concerts ever. Considering that I’ve been to six of his concerts in less than a year, that’s really saying something. Right now I’m exhausted, so I’m taking myself off to bed soon, but I’ll share a couple of pics.

I’ll go into more detail about the concert in general and Mohegan Sun in the near future.

Whee!

I’m on the train from New York up to Mohegan Sun. I’m excited partly because I get to see Jason Mraz again for the first time since April, but also because I’ve never been to Mohegan Sun before. I haven’t been to a casino lately, so I’m itching to be parted with my standard $20.

I still have five hours before the concert, so it’s too early to start listening to Mraz. Thankfully, my good friend Ingrid Michaelson is here to keep me company.
I’m bringing my camera, but the concert has assigned seating, so I don’t know how well any pictures will come out. If they’re not terrible, I’ll post them tomorrow.

Good on so many levels

I love helping people. And cupcakes. So I’m really stoked that there’s a new business in Teaneck that specializes in both! The bakery, Zoe’s Cupcake Cafe,  opened in June, with a mission to help teenage mothers get work experience. All proceeds from the shop benefit Zoe’s Place, a non-profit organization that helps pregnant teens and teenage moms and their babies. NJ Monthly magazine has a lovely article on the cupcake cafe.

Doing it for the children

I find it highly cathartic to write an angry letter every now and then. This is one I emailed to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, which is trying to prevent the Georgia O’Keeffe Elementary School from going by the initials GOK, which might diminish or tarnish the artist’s legacy…somehow. Anyway, I like this letter so much that I’m going to print it out, put it in an envelope, sacrifice one of my pretty pretty Jackie Robinson stamps, and allow a mail carrier to deliver it.

************************************************

To those who make the decisions [I considered, and decided against, Dear Wankers]:

I just read this article about your museum, and to tell you the truth, it made me a little sick. You’re a well-respected art museum that apparently has all the grace and compassion of a school-yard bully. It has been said that there’s no such thing as bad press, but I’m pretty sure you know that this is simply not true. We live in the age of the Internet now, and I am always begrudgingly impressed when highly visible entities like the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum display such an appalling lack of awareness of how quickly information spreads via this medium.

I read just a few minutes ago on Metafilter (consistently listed as one of Time Magazine’s Top 25 and PC Magazine’s Top 100 Classic web sites) that your museum is trying to get the Georgia O’Keeffe Elementary School of Albuquerque, NM not to go by its initials, as if having people pronounce “gawk” for GOK would somehow diminish this amazing artist’s legacy. There’s quite a lively discussion going on over at Metafilter about the way that your museum is doing a fine job on its own of tarnishing the legacy of Georgia O’Keeffe. There’s a lot of sympathy in that thread, but none of it lies with you. And I don’t think that Metafilter is somehow unique in its interpretation of this situation. I sincerely doubt that anybody is going to say, “Well, I used to respect Georgia O’Keeffe, but ever since that one elementary school in Santa Fe started going by GOK, I realized how vastly overrated she was as an artist and have since allowed my membership to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to lapse.”

More than anything, I wonder what you could be thinking by even allowing your ridiculousness to continue through several rounds of emails, letters, and now the serious threat of legal action. I’m curious to know whether you are somehow unfamiliar with the plight of public schools in this nation in general, and Albuquerque in particular. It’s not as though schools are raking in the dough hand over fist, so why would you think it prudent to threaten the school over its use of Ms. O’Keeffe’s initials? You do realize that she was a former schoolteacher, right? I can’t imagine, if she were still living, that her sympathies would lie with you, either. And let’s not forget the very real fact that the school had this name before your museum even owned the rights to Ms. O’Keeffe’s trademark.

In the olden days (say, the late 1980s), awareness of this story might not have reached very far. Locals might have tsked, and if it was a particularly slow news day, you might have made it onto one of the nightly news programs. Dan Rather would have used some indecipherable phrase to illustrate how dastardly he found your behavior (because “like stealing candy from a baby”) would have been to easy, and Peter Jennings would have said something amazingly erudite that would have made you look like graceless money-grubbers.

But now we’ve got blogs, 24-hour news cycles (it’s always a slow news day somewhere), incessant social networking, and online communities with near-global reach. And just like I’m posting this on my web site, Facebook page, and twitter feed, somebody I know is going to see this and pass it along, too. I’ve got friends all over the world, and being that I am a librarian, several of them work in museums, archives, and libraries. We’re used to feeling like the good guys, and this will be passed along just as a sheer oddity. I mean, shouldn’t an entity dedicated to the preservation of an artist’s works, spirit, and legacy be on the side of education? Who are you saving this legacy for, if not the people who will grow up in a world where knowledge of Georgia O’Keeffe recedes further and further into the past? And what about the students affected by your misguided attempt to prevent the disrespect of Ms. O’Keeffe’s legacy? Let me tell you: you’re doing a heckuva job at disrespecting your raison d’etre all by yourselves. At this point, all that the kids at that school are going to remember is that they were named after a woman whose memory was left in the hands of seriously misguided, greedy people.

I am utterly disgusted by your behavior.

************************************************

So there.