Martin Lukes Goes to Jail

My father is always criticizing me for not reading the Atlanta newspaper and keeping up with the local news. I blame it on the fact that I grew up here in the eighties. My memories of local news coverage run something along the lines of "Atlanta Zoo initiates program where local children can come and 'Watch TV with (local gorilla) Willie B'." Lately, my hometown and the surrounding 'burbs (OTP) have proven nationally newsworthy with such diverse personages and events as the Mansion Madam, the Runaway Bride and the Michael Vick dog-fighting charges.

Nevertheless, it never occurred to me that I would pick up the pages of the Financial Times, that daily broadsheet of the dismal science, and realize that I had missed out on the daily goings on of a juicy trial taking place in my own back yard. Today, I was introduced to "the great chief leader" of Atlanta-based multi-national a-b global, the iconic thought leader and world-class communicator, who re-defined management thinking with his foundational concepts: creovative(tm) and integethical(tm).

According to the FT, Mr. Lukes has just been sentenced to 2 years and three months in federal prison on three counts of insider trading, which he will likely serve in FCI Coleman, a correctional complex in central Florida.

The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

Say say my playmate,
Come out and play with me,
And bring your dollies three,
Climb up my apple tree,
Slide down my rainbow,
Into my cellar door,
And we'll be jolly friends,
Forever more
(children's nursery rhyme)

I once read a blog entry whose author waxed poetic on the fact that certain people (blogging or interacting on Internet forums) “just don’t get it,” it presumably being some unwritten rules for coolness on the Internet, understood by “those in the know"/the author’s particular clique of Internet acquaintances.

I had assumed that most of us were automatically uncool, by virtue of spending any significant amount of time on the Internet, in the first place. Weren’t all the cool people too busy caught up living the breathless whirl of their exciting lives to read or write? Then it dawned on me. Was it possible to be such a loser that even the other losers looked down on you? This possibility first occurred to me in Mr. M’s grammar class in Junior High.

I attended an old fashioned American prep school, also attended by my father, my aunts, my uncle, my sister and one of my cousins. It had a motto that went something along the lines of “And Jesus grew in understanding with the Lord” and an honor code. I learned to diagram sentences, scan poetry meter and exegete Bible verses, a tedious exercise that did wonders for my textual analysis skills but little for the faith it was aimed to reinforce. If God communicated by the written word and the written word was subject to multiple interpretations, how could we then be sure what God was saying? Maybe he speaks in Math. But I never was much good at Math. Most of all, I remember my chief preoccupation in those years was attempting to decipher the unwritten grammar of the arbitrary and constantly changing social behavioral code meted out by certain (seeming at the time) godlike peers.

In such a place, it was possible to achieve a solid academic education, along with an adequate introduction to, and, for the lucky, a lifetime immunization to institutionalized hypocrisy. Like so much in life, the lessons from what I'll call for lack of better name "The John Knox Institute" that really stayed with me were not the ones they consciously taught. Dispensing and deflecting sarcasm was one survival skill you might pick up there. The biggest triumph was to matriculate with some significant part of your dignity and individuality intact. I don’t know if I hated that place so much as I hated the person I was in that place. Funny how so many behavioral instincts go back to the schoolyard. It is one of our first frames of reference.

Back to Mr. M’s eighth grade grammar class. Some of my teachers at The John Knox Institute were truly inspiring individuals and some could have inspired Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” (We don’t need no education), M. was of the latter persuasion. As he handed back our tests, M. would cheerfully dispense his prognosis of the student’s collegiate aspirations accordingly—Duke, Vanderbilt, University of Georgia (considered a safety school for Atlanta prep schools in the eighties), Ole Miss (you really fucked up and couldn’t get into the University of Georgia), Bumfuck University in the middle of the sticks, trade school, enlisted in the military and very rarely, an Ivy League school.

It was another boring day learning about prepositional phrases in “Warriner’s Grammar and Composition” so I didn’t hear what Joe Dweeb said. Joe Dweeb had coke bottle glasses, wore Seventies style clothing (before Seventies clothing came back in style), supposedly had gotten a sixteen hundred on his SATs, had parents who were university professors and lived outside the Perimeter. None of these attributes, in and of itself, would have counted against him, if he wasn’t simply the type of kid who was doomed to be spurned by his more conventional peers anyway. He was unapologetically different. He also, apparently, had a sardonic sense of humor because that day he made a joke. I didn’t hear Joe Dweeb’s joke. If I had heard it, perhaps I wouldn’t have gotten it.

I did hear M’s response: “Joe, only you and I got that joke, and I didn’t think it was funny.” To this day, I think this is the cruelest put-down. I remember thinking how sad and isolating it would be if somewhere some person told a joke, a clever, complicated joke, with multiple levels of humor and frames of reference. And the impossibly improbable occurs: somewhere across the space-time continuum, some other sentient being claims to comprehend the joke, only the cruelest part of the joke is the one other person capable of comprehending it, doesn't think it's funny. This kind of makes me think about process of writing on the Internet and a C.S. Lewis quote where he says “we read to know that we are not alone.” Presumably we write for the same reason, but sometimes the very act or space in which it takes place leaves us feeling even more so.

The Space In Between

The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.
Friedrich Nietzsche

In that awkward space, somewhere in between
What you’ve done, what you failed to do;
Who you were, the person you failed to become;
The vision you attempted to create,
The reality that took its place,
In a broken culture you couldn't change.

People get lost
Somewhere in between
Where you let them down, and they let you down.

You wonder what you could have done differently?

Who knew? Did They?
They were laughing all along.

You see a good movie the other night.
You know what it means to communicate in codes.

What does that accomplish,
When it’s not that people don’t know the truth;
It's that they don’t care.

Are there others who understand?
Does it matter?

It was a wave. You hopped on. You had your ride.
Did you get there too early?
Or was it always already too late?
Or just too late for you?

You were the pilgrim,
At Vanity Fair waylaid.

The Yell School of Drama

"In my sex fantasy, nobody loves me for my brain"
--Nora Ephron.

My writing collaborator and I have discovered that the most common path to production for first-time playwrights is to enter sponsored drama competitions. Unfortunately, many of them like The Alliance Theater in Atlanta's Kendeda Competition require that entrants be enrolled in a graduate playwriting program.

This is not an option for us. We have seven children between us, not to mention a stack of superfluous diplomas. My colleague has an MBA, CPA, cooking school diploma and divemaster certification. Ironically, the latter two degrees have proven the most useful in our writing adventures. As for me, no more diplomas, thank-you-very-much. Graduating from Wellesley College Phi Beta Kappa, with an Honors degree in English literature couldn't even get me an $18,000 a year publishing job in New York back in 1994. My Universite de Paris DEA (Masters) in Comparative Literature was worse than having no graduate degree at all. This testimony of impracticality was guaranteed to send would-be employers packing.

I suppose none of this would matter if I were a clever, resourceful sort of girl.... In my most recent employment experience as the Director of Communications for JBoss, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to convince journalists to write about us and paying talented full time PR to do just this. It never occurred to me that I could skip that superfluous step by simply pretending to be a journalist. Not only would I have saved money, I would have done away with the inconvenience of relying on two credible sources for my stories. In a crazy mixed up world where legitimate journalists pretend to be anonymous bloggers, I missed the boat on corporate PR pretending to be disinterested journalists.

Ironically, it was my old Wellesley tee-shirt that initiated a conversation about journalism with another mother, while we were waiting to pick up our kids at school. She, herself, had attended Barnard, and then Columbia School of Journalism. She mentioned that the loans for two years at the latter totalled more than her four years at Barnard. My wiser pseudo-journalist self certainly would have skipped that step. I could get more mileage out of a fake pair of tits. I came to this conclusion observing first-hand the successful interview tactics of a journalist from a respected business publication. Her plunging decollete exerted a Kaa-like effect on her interviewees--"Don't think about the questions, boys; just focus on these." No doubt she had figured out the corresponding plunge in the heterosexual male IQ, transforming the heppest and smartest Web 2.0-types into this.

Thankfully, my certificate of enrollment in a Masters program in the Fine Arts is being mailed to me, forewith. Not the Yale School of Drama, but the Yell! (in the South, this is pronounced 'yay-ul') School of Drama, my distinguished soon-to-be alma-mater, a place that understands that the implication that I am anything less than talented flies squarely in face of the incipient dramatist I was born to be. And that for the $200 I am paying for my diploma, I am far too busy and important a person to be bothered with studying the techniques of playwriting or reading anybody that has mastered them.

Lambchop in La La Land

Investigating what it might take to succeed as a scenariste, I came across the following analysis of the role of the artist and the producer in David Mamet's Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie business

"The artist is, in effect, a sort of gangster. He hitches up his trousers and goes into the guarded bank of the unconscious in an attempt to steal the gold of inspiration. The producer is like the getaway driver who sells the getaway car and waits outside the bank grinning about the deal he's made."

Artists, craftspeople and directors

CV: Experience as a ne'er do well

Medical history: Preferably Asperger's Syndrome. Surprisingly, Mamet fails to mention the inherent potential of manic depressive, obsessive compulsive and insomniac diagnoses

Motivation: Pleasure in creating something, doing the job well. Like a terrier gnawing on a bone, it's fundamentally what you do, an expression of who you are; you wouldn't be happy doing anything else.

Mythological archetype: The Trickster -- "characters who express or intuit the propensity to upset and so reorder the world on a different level of abstraction"

Paid your dues: "i.e.been seduced and abandoned sufficiently to tire of it"

Producers

Education: "The American educational system prepares those with second-rate intellects to thrive in a bureaucratic environment...the bureaucratic rigors of the studio system probe the neophyte's threshold for boredom, repetition, sychophancy and nonsense."

Origin/Family Values: "So let us assume someone's brother-in-law showed up in the palmy presound days of Hollywood, and his brother-in-law, a power on the lot or on the set, hoping to avoid a "touch," said "People, this is Bob and he is a producer." Bob was then, entitled, under the family flag, to all the sex, drugs and fun he could wrangle and to whatever he could hypothecate. Time went by and Bob stayed on. He, or another of his ilk, caught, stole, or otherwise achieved power in some niche of the industry and, having learned a good trick, one day appointed footmen of his own."

Modus Operandi: "This power exists, and can exist, only in potential--for should the committee ever come to conclusions, its task and so its operation as a bureaucratic fiefdom, would cease."

Growing Savvy: learning that success comes not from pleasing the audience, but from placating one's superiors, until such time as it is expedient to betray them.

Pinnacle of Success: getting rid of the artists and craftspeople; achieving the "art of producing nothing at all."

Nostalgia..."It is not that the fox has taken over the henhouse but, if I may, that the doorman has taken over the bordello. In the golden days of the madam (Harry Cohn et al.), the lives of the girls may not have been better, but the lives of the customers were. Why? Because the owner-proprietor knew that her job was simply and finally to please the customer. "

Behold! The Crepe Maker Cometh.

As part of the health section of my third grade daughter's IB unit of inquiry, her teacher sent out a request to parents to help with a French-themed breakfast. It seemed a simple enough request. Bring in crepe batter. Come into class and make them.

How could I go wrong? I had fond memories of gorging myself on sugar-filled crepes that my French-raised grandmother would make for Mardi Gras. My mother was a chef. I remember her riding the subway to work, her army-issue carrying case filled with cooking knives jauntily swinging from her shoulder. Surely such can-do spirit might have rubbed off on me.

One reason for doing this was the extra brownie points needed to redeem myself from the "What do people do for a living?" unit. I had signed up for the "Creative" section, on the heels of so-and-so's gastroenterologist mother who came into class to talk about how the digestive systems works. In contrast, my presentation would be something along the lines of

"Hello, boys and girls. My name is Nathalie Mason-Fleury and I make things up for a living. That's actually a figure of speech because, so far, nobody pays me to do this. Today my colleague and I researched how to fake your own death. I don't have any medical, forensic or criminology degrees, but it only took me a few minutes to look this up on the Internet. Why would I bother with professional references when I read the National Inquirer? Look at how long it took Lacy Peterson's body to come floating back up. And they knew exactly where to look.

Things started to go wrong from the very beginning:

1) I doubled the batter proportions. However this caused the batter to overflow in the Cuisinart as the liquid level went higher than the middle blade attachment.

2) I then decided to guesstimate how much of the milk and water to replace, but probably didn't add enough flour, which made the batter a little runny.

3) Worse, we had to cook on these horrible plug in electric eye units that were underpowered and didn't heat enough. A Bunsen burner would have been better, as at least I'd have gotten some heat. It took an average of five minutes per side for each crepe to cook and I know that's not normal.

This confirmed what I had always suspected, that I would rather stand for eight hours at a software trade show with cheap carpeting in three inch heels, than deal with a class of cynical nine year olds.

"You're not very good at this are you?" "I'm a picky eater, I don't want the broken ones" "My dad is a great crepe maker," "how come they keep falling apart" "When is this going to be ready?" and proceeded to literally go down the toilet, as two of them starting singing: "Bob Marley, Jim Dandy, R. Poopy..."

The veteran teacher gave me some advice and consolation: "Next time, make them all ahead of time and bring some token batter. Send them off on some distracting activity. Then, 15 minutes later: Voila! 30 perfectly formed TurboCrepes. But don't worry, it's the weekend. That way if they get sick it will be at home with their parents and we won't have to deal with it."

I appreciated his wisdom and told him that if, one day, the teaching thing didn't pan out, he really should consider putting on software demos.

It’s Alive! Start-ups and Old Monster Movies

In the movie Frankenstein, based on Mary Shelley’s novel, Dr. Frankenstein attempts to create human life by sewing together disparate body parts. Only, none of it works until there is an electric storm, whose lightning bolt gives off the spark of life. Parallels can be found in the quest to build a successful startup, and in the relation between the surgical systems approach and what I’ll call, for a lack of better terminology, “the spark.”

A systems person wants neither drama, nor surprises. Skilled professionals in the start-up business optimize, customize (and improvise) a foundation of systems that worked well for them in the past--whether in sales structure, HR, finance, executive recruitment tactics, R&D, marketing etc. To make those systems work they look for teams with proven track records in the field. And, with a bit of luck, all this may be imbued with the spark—that rare zeitgeisty combination of the right idea, the right people, the right time.

A company could be a perfect system if it wasn’t for the messy, but necessary, “Human Element”—comprising the entrepreneurs, the artists, the “emmerdeurs,” the friends, the enemies, the relatives, the apparatchiks, the mercenaries, the visionaries, the small-minded, the amateurs, the pros, the traitors, the lovers, the people with the big goals, the people with the little goals, the advisers, the investors, and, oh yes, the customer. In short, what the French call “The Human Comedy” or “La Comedie Humaine.”

The spark without the system dissipates; meanwhile systems without the spark are empty vessels.

Whether the spark is a bolt of lightning striking some random unsuspecting dumbass, who wakes up to find himself plonked on a pot of gold, or the collective will of sentient beings, with objectives of their own, sparks do happen.

As for what happens from there, nothing is certain once the Creature shambles down the hill towards the unsuspecting and soon-to-be terrorized villagers.