I've got lots of little things to talk about today, so let's get right to it...

So it's official; I've now finally pulled off the first successful live literary event sponsored by my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (or CCLaP). Well, thank God for that! This has been a big part of CCLaP's plans since I first envisioned the center back in 2004, and is the way I plan on the center to eventually make a big chunk of its money, once I finally own a physical space for it somewhere in the city and can afford to do live events every night of the week; but based on the things I learned when studying small business in the early 2000s, it's also something I've been waiting awhile to actually start up for the first time, because of reading over and over in my book studies that the best thing a small business can do is wisely pick only a select amount of things to accomplish at first and do them very, very well, and to not even think about adding new projects until those existing ones are smoothly clicking along like clockwork. And so that's what I've been trying to do, starting with the book reviews in 2007 when the center first opened, then not getting serious about the podcast until the beginning of 2008, then not getting serious about the electronic publishing program until the beginning of 2009, and only just this summer starting to get serious about the live-events program.

And I have to say, such advice has really worked out well so far, and is something I recommend to others starting up small businesses; because just to cite this latest example, this first event of CCLaP's ended up getting four fairly major media mentions (Chicago Tribune, Time Out, Gapers Block, and even a full-length article at Chicagoist) with me having to do almost no work to make such a thing happen, and I'm convinced that the main reason for this was by the center building up a certain amount of trust and goodwill first by the other things it's done. As far as the show itself, then, I'm of course happy with how things went, although admittedly it wasn't the most earth-shattering event in the history of the Chicago arts -- it was simply a one-hour literary reading featuring a total of five writers, after all, all of them doing new pieces around a specific theme (urban decay and urban renewal for this show), the kind of set-up I preferred doing back in the '90s as well, when I was still part of the poetry community and was organizing and hosting a lot more shows, with this one garnering maybe 40 audience members total when all was said and done, perhaps 30 of them there specifically for the show and another dozen who were regulars of the actual venue. (If I haven't mentioned this yet, the show was held at this great "ad-hoc community center" down in Hyde Park called The Op Shop, founded and run by a friend of mine named Laura Shaeffer; she basically convinces the University of Chicago about twice a year to let her take over one of the unused retail spaces they own in the neighborhood, where for a month or two they'll run a full-time gallery, thrift store and performance/film center, eventually packing it all up and opening somewhere else in Hyde Park a few months later.)

The performers, however, all seemed to have a really good time (it worked out that they all got along together particularly well, which is always a great thing to see); and Laura seemed to have been really happy with how things went too; and we even had beer left over by the time the night ended, which is always a thing to celebrate, when you don't run out of alcohol halfway through and get grumblings from all the undergrads in attendance. And I'm grateful for all these things, because like I said I've been patiently waiting awhile now to hold CCLaP's first event, and so am glad that doing so generated all the goodwill and positive word-of-mouth that I was hoping it would; and of course I'm also grateful that the recording of the show came out decently as well (thanks again, Erik Cameron), which when run on the podcast and combined with all the Flickr photos and the upcoming electronic book version of the stories, gives the center actually four pieces of promotional product to come out of a single one-hour event. And this of course is a major component of CCLaP's operating strategy, as I've talked about numerous times here, to be like a Native American with a dead buffalo and to salvage as many different useful things out of that single kill as possible; as I've mentioned before, I see this as a key way for CCLaP to be able to provide an entire cultural center's worth of benefit for a fraction of the cost, and everything the organization does is in fact judged beforehand precisely by how many different tangible items it will eventually produce, in terms of either promoting the center or directly making money for it.

So anyway, hopefully another two artistic events like this will be coming before the end of 2010 -- one in September and one in November, the latter perhaps being a sit-down formal dinner and fundraiser for just a select amount of the center's readers, say twenty attendees at $50 a plate held in someone's home, with free entertainment and with me cooking (I used to be a personal chef long, long ago) -- so definitely let me know if you have any tips on venue/sponsor leads, or if you're an artist who'd like to be involved with a future event. And then hopefully over the next year, I'll be able to first put together a few hundred dollars so I can take some bookbinding classes at the Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, and then another $1,500 or so to actually put out CCLaP's very first paper book by this time next summer. And that will suddenly jump the center to a whole new level, because with its first paper book I'll finally have a chance to make up to a maximum of $10,000 on a single project (and in all realistic likelihood actually will make something like $5,000 or $6,000), which will make it the first time I'll be able to tell people that I run an arts center for a living without feeling the need to add an invisible air-quote asterisk to the end of such a sentence. So as always, I guess we'll see what the future holds; for now, all I'm concentrating on is getting an event pulled off in September that's at least as fun and as successful as June's was.

And another first in the last two weeks to report -- I'm back on my bicycle again! Well, how about that! Yeah, I know, I too consider it a miracle of sorts, that I should be back to daily urban bicycling literally less than a year after shattering my hip in a bad accident; but I've written about the wonders of modern medicine in earlier journal entries, so won't go into it again today. In fact, here's been the real surprise, that nine months now of daily physical therapy actually has me in better shape now than even before the accident; or at least, between my real bike and the stationary one at the gym, it's not much of a challenge to put in at least ten miles every single day and sometimes fifteen, a pace which I most definitely could not keep up with before the accident, and I also find myself able now to go five and sometimes six miles at a stretch without having to take a single break at all, not even a 30-second one to catch my breath and take a sip of water, when before the accident my absolute maximum for such a thing was four miles.

Surprisingly (and gratefully), being back on the bike hasn't been nearly as psychologically difficult as I feared it was going to be -- after all, I was freaking out so badly after first crashing, for a month I actually had to go on anti-anxiety medication for the first time in my life. But then, I'll also admit this, that so far I have been sticking almost exclusively to either the lakefront bike path or the extra-wide streets in my neighborhood with dedicated bike lanes; plus I haven't biked even once yet at dusk/night or in/after bad weather; plus when forced for short periods on narrow side streets in my neighborhood, I tend to constantly check my rear-view mirror so that I can ride out in the middle of the street most of the time, in that I am still awfully skittish about riding anywhere even near parked cars along street edges (which of course is what caused my accident last summer, someone in a parked car flinging their door open a split-second in front of me). But still, in general I'm surprised by how easily I've been able to take up bicycling again; and this makes me very happy, in that before my accident, biking was one of the most effective ways I had for relieving stress from my life (like many, I often enter a state of trance-like calm when I'm exercising), so I'm grateful to be able to add such a calming influence to my life again, after a year now of perhaps the most stressful existence I've ever faced as an adult.

As I mentioned here last time, I'm trying not to have unrealistically fast goals, and in general am preferring to simply be grateful to be back on the bike in the first place; but that said, I think I will almost undoubtedly be attempting my first 20-mile day within the next week or two, an important milestone for me in that this was the maximum I had ever put on my bike in a single day before the accident, so doing so again would effectively prove that I'm finally back to "100 percent" healthiness (or, not really, but you see what I'm getting at). My whole goal last summer was to be able to put in a 30-mile day by the time Labor Day rolled around, which I was going to prove by biking from my place all the way up to the Chicago Botanical Garden in the far north suburbs (which believe it or not you can do via a 30-mile nature trail), then taking the Metra train back to the city afterwards, which only costs five bucks on weekends; I'm not saying necessarily that I'll actually be able to pull off a similar goal this summer, but certainly I see nothing wrong with shooting towards this goal. As always, I'll let you know the latest here in future updates.

So how am I dealing with the ruckus these days about Facebook's lack of privacy over personal updates? Easy -- I simply don't say anything there that I wouldn't want to be public knowledge, the simple solution for pretty much any grown-up with even a modicum of willpower. And yes, I know, this is an awfully glib joke (I know, I know), and is also the lazy justification used by supporters of censorship and government spying ("If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about"); and in fact, the entire reason I bring it up is actually to make an entirely different point altogether, which is this -- thank fucking God the web didn't exist when I was nineteen years old, when I was young and naive enough to go around blabbing about any ol' bullshit to just about anyone who would listen, which of course is exactly what a nineteen-year-old should do. It's a whole issue that the current generation of youth are going to have to deal with, that even my generation never did, of having each and every stupid little fucking thing you ever say in your life dragging behind you in a virtual paper trail no matter how old you get, to pop up for out-of-context misinterpretation exactly at the moments in your future where they'll precisely do the most damage. I mean, even the founder of Facebook himself has been a victim of this, when an old transcript popped up last week of a random drunken chat he once had with a friend when he himself was nineteen, unwisely boasting of the stupidity of his original Facebook customer base and professing amazement that they were so willing to hand out private information to a complete stranger in the first place. I shudder to think of some of the stupid shit I did and said at nineteen suddenly becoming front-page news in my forties, or being brought up during a job interview or whatever; it's going to be one of the major cultural issues facing society another twenty years from now, mark my words, as this current generation of pot-smoking, boob-shooting college students become middle-aged parents and community leaders themselves.

So can I talk about something sensitive here for a moment without being called a Jew hater? Because I'm not a Jew hater, just to make it as obvious as I can, which I've learned the hard way over the years is something I simply need to state in a basic way here sometimes when talking about sensitive issues...

I'm fascinated with the idea that the fracas going on this week with Israel opening fire on a flotilla of Palestinian aid workers might turn out to be a tipping-point catalyst of sorts, for it finally being socially acceptable here in the US to be publicly critical of things done by the Israeli government. I've been thinking about these subjects a lot this year, because of doing a lot more reading over at CCLaP recently about the beginnings of the Postmodernist artistic movement; and as I read more and more of these great older books from the '60s and '70s by people like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, I'm coming to realize just what a thorough plan was put into place in the US after World War Two to make it socially unacceptable to say anything bad about either Jews or Israel at any time or for any reason, a big reason why it's generally perceived that the US has a much friendlier relationship with Jews than with Muslims. (In fact, it's very common now for American Christians to fondly view their religion as the sort of younger brother of Judaism that ended up doing well for itself, while if you had suggested this to most Christians pre-Holocaust, they would've looked at you in horror.) But see, this came at the cost of simplifying the Jewish race in Christian eyes into a profoundly reductionist, almost cartoonish kind of caricature; this is what Roth and Bellow (and Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce and Mel Brooks and all the other great Jewish artists of Postmodernism) were complaining about back then, and in many ways you can see the entire countercultural period for them as being the struggle to bring a more complex, more realistic view of Judaism to their mainstream American audiences.

Far from being a sign of anti-Semitism, I think this recent wave of Israeli criticism here in the US is the best thing that could've ever happened to Jews; it means that Judaism has become legitimate enough and permanent enough in the eyes of the world to deserve a complicated viewpoint, to acknowledge that there are actually both conservative and liberal Jews, that they actually don't get along most of the time, that the radical fringes of both groups often actually do things that a lot of others find morally reprehensible. It's a hell of a lot better attitude to have than what you saw in the US in, say, the 1950s, when Jews were generally thought of in Anne-Frank-saintly, permanent-victim terms, and when it was considered in bad taste to even mention Judaism in polite conversation in any context at all. Like I said, this is exactly what the daring, envelope-pushing Jewish artists of Postmodernism were fighting against (with surprisingly the most important one of all perhaps being goofy ol' Jerry Seinfeld, who when you really look at it, did more to normalize the complex ins-and-outs of daily Jewish life to mainstream America than maybe any other Jewish artist in human history); and it's a real testament to these artists, I think, that in 2010 you can have a growing amount of Americans feel comfortable with calling out the radically conservative current leaders of Israel for their radically conservative actions, without fear of being branded a general Jew-hater by society at large. My two cents, anyway.

And finally, a recent observation I made about the tech world (yes, I still have them, "Great Fucking Start-Up Disaster of 2006" notwithstanding)...

Whenever I finish a new blog entry over at CCLaP, I almost always take the time to add a robust amount of helpful terms in that entry's "tag" field; and that's because I'm one of those people who have been updating websites since literally the mid-'90s, so have become inured to the idea of adding as many useful tags as possible, to make those entries much more popular at the various search engines out there. But I confess, on the days that I don't have the time or energy to add such tags, I no longer worry that much about it; because Google by this point has become so sophisticated, it hardly matters anymore whether you add useful keywords or not, in terms of it understanding what that blog entry was about and how it should be ranked during specific searches there. And that got me thinking about how Google in fact has pretty much ruined several sub-industries within the tech world that first got their start in the dot-com '90s, and if not for Google would now be multi-billion-dollar sub-industries just on their own; take for example the entire subject of "search engine optimization" (or SEO), which even a decade ago was a big enough issue to support thousands of people in this country getting paid millions of dollars, all in the name of trying to get their clients' websites to show up higher on result pages at the various search engines out there, which at the time mostly amounted to these quasi-legal scams involving complex backend coding, expert manipulation of these very tag fields just mentioned, and the hiring of thousands of flunkies to literally sit there hour after hour at their home computers, conducting thousands of searches for these client websites at Yahoo and MSN. Google eventually made the entire process so sophisticated yet so plain, that it's now patently obvious to just about anyone as to how to get your website listed high in search results -- simply talk in an informed, entertaining way about the subject at hand, and make sure that your customers are liking it and linking to you. That's it -- no complicated keyword schemes needed anymore, no paid Yahoo trolls, no six-figure SEO scam artists.

This is the thing that so many people in the tech world still seemingly don't get, and is one of the many things that makes me thank God that I'm no longer trying to establish a career in that industry -- that Google didn't become the juggernaut it now is by being the best at what all its competitors also do, but by literally changing the very rules by which the entire game is played, rightly deciding for example that if you spend 95 percent of your budget making a product that simply works amazingly, and almost none of your budget on fancy marketing and advertising (pretty much the opposite of the rut most tech companies found themselves in by the late '90s), people will just naturally flock to your product on their own, without you needing to pathetically beg them to through false promises and flashy distractions. Every time I see Bing announce another twenty-million-dollar ad campaign, or Yahoo announce another tie-in with some sad Hollywood actioner that no one wanted to see in the first place, I laugh and laugh at all the fucking losers in that industry who still can't see what is plainly staring them in the face, and marvel at the mass stupidity of most humanity that still somehow lets us function as a society at the rate we do. Sheesh, I can't tell you how glad I am sometimes to be an arts administrator now.