The Meaning of Art and Other Deep Questions

I don't know jack shasta about Art. I go to the museum, and I look at Art, and sometimes I like it, and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I don't even have an opinion about it; it's just there.

Because I have benefited from Mr. Peevie's liberal arts education, I adore Pieter Bruegel (the Elder, as distinguished from his replicator son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger), and I have a passing acquaintance with miniatures and armor thanks to the Art Institute of Chicago.

But that's it. I'm virtually completely unschooled in most forms of visual art, and yet here I am getting ready to comment on the "art" that "adorns" the walls at my place of work. And by "art," I mean random pictures, paintings and crafts that hang from a nail; and by "adorns" I mean "takes up space on, and when you walk past it, you think, "Hmmm. Weird."

I would like to know what went through the mind of the person who put this disturbing piece of alleged art--a grapevine wreath with Mexican dollies stuck to it--on the wall in the work room at my office. It is unfortunate to the point of being menacing.

Here's a close-up of one of dollies lashed to the dried grapevine wreath: She looks like something Stephen King invented. She looks like she'll come down off that wreath at night and pour cyanide into the coffee maker if you smile at her wrong. She makes me shiver, and not in a good way.

And then there's this Thai temple rubbing-esque piece that hangs on the wall by the emergency exit. The style looks like a buddhist temple rubbing--but the content is definitely Christian. What is up with that? I'm so confused. 

If you dare to walk through the rest of the office, you'll see "art" that is unambiguously Christian, like this one, which contains four New Testament story images in fabric splotches. I get this--we're a Methodist organization; but seriously. Is this the best the Methodists can do?

Then there's the obligatory anachronistic painting of two little black children kneeling by a bed, praying. Again--sort of predictable, but also un-original and slightly ironic at an organization that in many ways keeps its faith-based roots firmly in the past. 

And finally, there is a quilt. There is always a quilt. This one has the names of ladies' auxiliary members (or some such secondary volunteer group) hand-stitched on squares that have been sewn into a plain, blue-and-white quilt.

Why did they sew their names on the squares? Why was that important to them? Did they want to be remembered for their good works? Isn't that sort of antithetical to "be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men, to be seen by them?" 

I guess the purpose is so that when we walk past it, we can realize that even if we take the trouble to sew our names onto a piece of Art, there is still no chance that anyone will remember us, or care that we were a part of making history.

It's sort of a life lesson right there, hanging on the plain white walls right outside the three plastic-coated walls of my pathetic cubicle.

The art in my office is so random and disconnected that it makes me wonder: Who picked it out? Who decided what would hang on the walls, and why? 

Sometimes I just have too much time on my hands.

Anti-Logic

I just had a conversation with a government employee that made my brain bleed, and might possibly cause me to become a Libertarian.

I'm working on a government grant application, which all by itself is enough to cause spontaneous combustion. (Is that an oxymoron--"cause" and "spontaneous"?  Educate me.)  But today I had to call the Housing and Urban Development programmatic information help line--and I use the word "help" so loosely that it might fall right off the page.

My client had been told that a certain percentage should be allocated for salaries, and I wanted to confirm the percentage and clarify whether the salaries should be a certain percentage of the total grant request, or of the total budget?  Simple enough, right?

Except not when you're dealing with a civil servant.  Pardon my cynicism.

First, she referred me to a completely irrelevant section of the RFP, and was reading to me about conflicts of interest and partnerships. "This has nothing to do with my question," I pointed out, but she insisted that it did.  She patiently "explained" it to me, over and over again, as though repetition would make it more relevant.

I think that's "magical thinking," government employee-style.

Finally, something I said got through to her, and she realized that she had been looking at the wrong section of the guidelines.  Phew.  I thought my troubles were over, and that I'd soon have the information I sought.  "Hahaha," laughed God.

The actual relevant section of the guidelines stipulated that we must "indicate what percentage" of our award would be spent on salaries and benefits, and I said, "So what is the percentage you're looking for?"

"We can't give out that information," she bureaucratted.  "It's based on a scale that we don't give out."

"Wait, what?" I protested. "But we will lose points if we don't have the correct percentage!"

"That's right," she agreed.  "If we told people what our scales were, they would always pass the rating factor.  They'd adjust their budget to fit the scale."

I am not even lying.

"But isn't that the point," I argued fecklessly, "for us to complete the application in the most acceptable way possible?  How can we aim for the right percentage if you won't tell us what the percentage is?"

"You just put down what your plan is, and we'll tell you if you got it right," she said.

"You are fucking kidding me!" I almost said, "that is the most ass-backward thing I have ever heard!"

Pardon my French.  But seriously, isn't it just about enough to make you want to vote for Ron Paul?

Bad Clients

I love being a freelance writer, and if God and Mr. Peevie allow it, I will never go back to a regular full-time job, ever.

That said, there are some things that suck about being a freelancer. One of them, as I have noted, is that there is no guarantee of a regular paycheck.

Another is that sometimes clients are slow-to-pay, or don't pay at all. Why is that? I currently have two clients that I produced work for who are not paying my bill. One is a former colleague; we used to have lunch together periodically; we are friends. She signed off on my quote in February, and I delivered the first draft of a resume to her about a week later, along with an invoice.

We went back and forth with emails for a few weeks: first she wanted to do a conference call, then she didn't, then she asked for a different resume format. By this time it was late March, and she still had not paid my invoice, nor did she pay the up-front half that my contract required; but I still delivered the second draft on April 3. Five days later she asked me for another re-write, and this time I insisted that I talk to her mom--the actual subject of the resume--to make sure that I understand from her exactly what she wants.

Now it's a month later--three months after we made the contract--and my former colleague has not put me in touch with her mom, nor has she paid my invoice. I had asked her after the second draft was rejected if I could just call her mom directly, but she wanted to set it up herself. She is now ignoring my emails.

Grrr. Bad client.

The second non-paying client is a huge IT consulting company in Florida. They probably do millions of dollars of business every year--but they are stalling, or reneging, on paying my lousy $150 invoice for consulting on and re-writing a marketing brochure. WTF?

This client I got through E-Lance, a website that allows people or companies to post freelance projects online, and subscribers pay a monthly fee to have access to the job listings and bid on the projects. Since it's a virtual international marketplace, I'm bidding against writers in countries where the dollar is worth a lot more than it is here; and without exception, all of the jobs I've bid on have had minimum bids of $50. In other words, someone in India or Bulgaria is willing to write 50 articles for a grand total of $5, which, bully for them. I'm not.

So this IT company, which will remain un-named unless it turns out that I really am not going to collect any money from them, asked me to turn around a first draft of this brochure copy in 24-36 hours, which I did. I did some research on the company, researched their competition, made some recommendations for how to improve the piece they were producing, and wrote a concise, peppy first draft.

They hated it.

It's fine for them to hate it, though, because that's what a first draft is for. Anne Lamott calls them "shitty first drafts." This company is apparently unclear on the concept of a first draft, because, as it turns out, when they didn't like what I produced, they gave the project to another writer to finish up for them. They were planning on just dropping the project and not paying me, because, as the client said to me the other day on the phone, "I didn't get what I wanted."

But let me backtrack. At first, I didn't get any feedback from the client himself, but his representative told me the client was unhappy with what I had done for him and that there were grammatical errors in what I had written. Now, I might not be Noam Chomsky, but I do know my way around a p-ante, if you know what I mean. Which you probably don't, but stay with me here.

(Oh, and just as an aside, I did wear Noam Chomsky's name on my back during one of those meet and greet games in college where you have to go around the room asking people questions to figure out what name has been scotch-taped to your shirt. Every time I asked a question--am I a male? Am I alive? Am I in sports?--people would look at me with a blank expression and say, "I have no idea." This was Mr. Peevie's hilarious idea, and yet I still married him.)

So back to my point. When I pressed my client to point out the alleged grammatical errors in my writing, he admitted that they weren't so much "grammatical" problems as they were concerns about word choice. Effing word choice. That's like telling an engineer she made structural mistakes in designing a bridge, when in fact she painted it a color that you're not quite comfortable with.

He also said that what I wrote wasn't long enough. So for word choice and length, he figured it was just fine and dandy for him to breach his contract with me. In fact, I believe he considered that by not delivering a perfectly acceptable first draft, I was the one who had breached.

I told him, look, Mr. IT Guy, you're a billion dollar company. I'm a sole proprietor operating out of my home office. Are you really going to cheat me out of $150 dollars? He replied, without any irony, "We're not a billion dollar company," which missed the point by approximately 26.2 miles.

At one point he said, well maybe we can still pay you to produce another piece for us. Of course I'd love to get more business from you, Mr. IT Guy, but I'd like to get paid for the first job FIRST, I told him. (I can be very direct when I need to. Some people call it combative.)

In the end, we agreed that he would send me his comments on my original first draft, and I would revise it so that they could use the material for another purpose. This is what should have happened in the first place. That conversation occurred two days ago. I'm still waiting for his edits.

Bad client.