The Weekly didn't print my letter or respond to my email, and I'm relieved. I spoke out of frustration and not out of the highest ground as far as really contributing useful energy goes. I brought out some of the other complaints and maybe that is good for a few seconds of commiseration but really, we have to keep working slowly and positively toward being in the world we are in downtown.
There won't be an end to frustration and disillusionment in the world as it gets more crowded and full of things we don't like or are afraid of...and I as an aging woman am just going to have to get tougher and more resilient or suffer more. I saw a post about people that tied long life to the ability to stand and sit crosslegged on the ground without assistance...tried it and was humbled. I couldn't get up without using my hands, and sadly don't think my foot will allow it. But I am determined to keep working on it to see just what power I do have over my damaged foot. Up that ante to keep working on seeing what power I have over all my damage...lots to do!
I have a giant pile of purple shirts to print today and that makes me smile. Wish all my Prince collection wasn't on cassettes I can't play now. Listening to the posted songs makes me feel like they appealed to me most in those times because it was then...my goals and interests were different and my energy was fueled by that funky beat. Some of them seem simple almost, compared to the electronic layers we are more accustomed to today. As everything around us becomes more complex, is it even possible for us to continue to try to simplify? Does that amount to putting our heads in the sand?
Full of questions to chew on, it's the perfect time for me to chain myself to my squeegee for the next five hours. I hope lots of people are filled with hope and purpose by Bernie Sanders' visit. Every step toward a better world is the step we need to make now. Keep walking in the right direction. I'll keep working.
Thursday, April 28, 2016
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
FSP but Deeper
I missed the mark with my post about the FSP, but it took a bike ride along the river (to the dentist, but whatever) to figure out what was wrong. I got all the defensive complaining out, which isn't very helpful, and didn't keep going to strike those other heart strings that get more to the reality of the world we are living in.Saturday Market is a throwback to the hippie days in many ways, and people like me want us to stay close to our roots for some good reasons. Like I said, we see ourselves over across the street: disillusioned with the dominant paradigm, determined to have a more authentic life, wanting to make it with our own efforts and not have to be under anyone's thumb. It was a hell of a lot easier in the 1970's to carry those feelings into right livelihood, a hell of a lot cheaper, and there were more of us with a clearer ethic to create the space for it.
Now we've taken up the space with decades of effort and we have made our compromises. We wanted to be close to the land so we bought when you could get property for cheap and we worked on it ourselves when the permit requirements and building codes were more forgiving. We worked on our cars because you could, and we embraced organic agriculture because it seemed like the obvious improvement. We were way more innocent than you get to be now, and indeed some of the political struggles now are exactly what we went through. It pains me greatly to know that my son's friends and other Bernie supporters are probably going to have to go through the same disbelief and cynical grief when the political machine makes its moves. We can hope, for change, but those who see deeply can see that improvements are glacial and hard won and the revolution gets co-opted so it can be televised and you still are left with making your own way in this world.
And now it's uglier and the peace and love generation is tired and mostly has bought into comfort. We think we haven't but there's a big difference between me in my 600-sq-ft house and someone in a tent by the river. I have safety and don't get harassed, and I have community that is sort of respected. People new to town might not realize that Saturday Market has had to fight hard for the respect and success we enjoy today and it isn't necessarily widespread. There are plans afoot that might drive us right off where we stand and we might not be able to do a thing about us. We hope not, and we're not without resources, so we stand a good chance of keeping what we have created, but there's never any guarantee.
So what I didn't get to is why someone like me, a radical cynical iconoclast, would be so loyal and defensive about my organization. It isn't just habit. For one thing, we are, a lot of us, people who would not fit into the establishment with a shoehorn, nor would we be willing to fit in. I don't speak for everyone, and my habit of saying "we" is probably grating to many ears in the community of artists. Some of us are not hippies and never were and find many of our pot references and silliness completely irritating. We draw from all of the area, people outside Eugene and people outside the counter-culture. We are now fairly solidly the culture. We buy all those things listed in the last post and we follow all of those rules because we decided we were going to include people who didn't necessarily share our politics and we certainly wanted to attract customers who were from all walks of life, from all over the world. We collectively despair and embrace our rainbows and our reputation and there is not a ton of agreement about anything, really, when it comes to the Market. Come to any of our meetings and see that we gather and do our best to create a balance that will sustain us, and it is certainly not perfect.
We are a community that is not competitive. It's hard to imagine, but when you set up next to someone who makes the same thing you do, you are going to talk shop and admire each other's work, most likely. You will meet some of the most incredible masters of their art and you will meet people who are just making their first crafts and have no idea what they want to do with their lives. We have a full range of artists from beginning to end. If more screenprinters join and we become the go-to place for t-shirts, that makes me happy. If we have so many jewelers that each one is challenged to make work like no one else is making, bravo! The way we all work together to raise the artistry level of the Market is constantly inspiring.
We don't jury. When you come in with your items for screening, the committee members want to know if you make them, if you make something that is safe and durable so the buyer will get good value, and if you take the raw materials and create something handmade. We don't care if it is ugly or won't sell or shows your lack of skill or your mastery...if you make it, it works for Standards. That is not to say that the guidelines haven't been refined over the years. Some of them might seem picky, but the members of the committee will be happy to explain the purposes of those things and give you tips on how you might be able to modify or add to your product to meet the guidelines. It is almost always a very supportive process. We all want to welcome new artists, especially young ones, and although it seems intimidating in concept, the process is quite welcoming. Sit through the orientation and you will find out so many things about the community and how you can be part of it...it is inclusive and open.
We prioritize member and customer services. The info booth will handle credit cards for you, will give your info to people when you are not there if you like, and will help people find your booth with even the most vague of descriptions. Our staff tries hard to get to know each vendor and what they need and desire, as far as that can go. If you have disabilities or money issues you can be accommodated. It is the least corporate business in town when it comes to how you will be treated as a member. Understanding the membership structure can take awhile and you might think it is complicated, but we work by consensus still, and make decisions by getting as many stakeholders as possible around the table and listening to them all until a good decision can be made. It isn't perfect, of course, and meetings sometimes run long and emotions run high. When it is working well, it's a very beautiful process and you could be an important part of it.
We're not all about the money. We are so not all about the money. Our nonprofit status means we try to end up even at the end of the year...we pay federal taxes. We have savings, though not enough to survive a super wet and cold year, or a real disaster. We try to pay a decent wage. Our recent fee increase was to comply with the federal and state guidelines for the minimum wage and overtime reform. You can believe that raising the fees was one of the hardest processes we went through in years. That $10 plus 10% was practically sacred, but we want our employees to like working with us, to feel valued, and to be able to get what they need. We pay for health insurance. We even have a crisis-relief fund, the Kareng Fund, started and maintained by members to help other artists. It recently broadened its scope to include all self-employed, low-income artists in Oregon (suffering a career-threatening crisis.) We really care about people, our people, the people who come to us, and the people in our town. We actually care a lot about the people across the street.
I didn't make that point at all, and I apologize. I stopped short of saying that when I see people trying to express themselves over there, I want them to know what I know and have what I have: the opportunity to thrive. I have found that opportunity in the Saturday Market. It has totally worked for me, and I plan to keep it working for me for the rest of my life. This is a profound gift that sometimes I think I do not deserve, something of inestimable value. My Mom even said it: "I'm just glad you found Eugene." Subtext being that I would not be me the way I am in any other place, and that is because of my counter-culture, because of the Saturday Market. I want that for everyone who wants it.
So my defensive response was sadly lacking and although I said some things that might have needed to be said, I did not extend the warm invitation to those who don't know about us as we really are to come across the street and join us. We deliver the customers and we support you while you find your niche. We are open to you and that is one of our most important ethics. We get it that we are not for everyone, but if you are able to try us out, we want you to do it. We're not the bad guys. We are trying to make it just like you are.
Let's do it together. Those drums beat for everyone.
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Narrative Nonfiction
Reading Ariel Gore (The End of Eve) makes me want to shout some truth. Reading her and Mary Karr (The Art of Memoir) at the same time makes me want to tell everything. All of it, right down to the smallest details, no matter what the consequences. Of course, I'm not them. My most interesting drama at the moment is mostly not about me, really, so it isn't my stories to tell. So telling the truth about it is not something I can do. I would at best be telling other people what I think about them, and at worst, be completely denying my part in what surrounds my life but is not what I generally think of as my life.
It's fascinating to me (and I guess what I mean by divine tension) that emotions can be so complexly contradictory and layered, so much so that trying to get to "the bottom" of them is a mire of trying and most likely not having a "there" to get to. At my writing group we were talking about mystery, and how you are advised to leave some in your writing, not to tease but mostly to give the reader something of their own to chew on, to not wrap the package up all enticingly and then go ahead and open it yourself. I'm thinking a lot about expectations, how deep they run, and how we can almost not avoid them, or avoid suffering from them. They're not realistic, but some of us (and by that I mean me) have developed a practice of avoiding even having them, not being willing to endure the disappointment. It's got euphemisms: going with the flow, making the observation "it is what it is," and for me it has grown to be a set of behaviors with which I just don't set myself up for disappointment. I enjoy what I do get, and try not to see it as a meager portion of all that life has to offer.
I settle, I suppose, and fail to risk enough to get what a lot of people cling tightly to, mostly other people. That's what Ariel and Mary write about, their abusive and outrageous parents, the damage that set them to becoming, the challenges to which they rose, their failures, their choices. They reveal their porous boundaries, but also their fearlessness, their counter-intuitive capacity for vulnerability, what made them cry, what cried in silence inside their heads when they didn't apologize or deferred from taking all the space they deserve. They wrote down most of what they thought and said and did, and made it a good story with spaces and mysteries and the right amount of satisfaction for the reader, for me. But they published the written account of it, the filtered story that came through their damage to our eyes. They put it there for us, but probably they wrote it for themselves, mostly. Because it was fun, and it felt good to use skills, and the stories, or the messages in them, were worth telling.
I stopped just before the end of Ariel's tale of her dying mother. I have to save it for a little while, after being able to do little else but read the book in the last 24 hours. It's far too short, for a book this important, this fulfilling. It is also a good idea for me to step away when I get this excited about relationships and people, particularly damaged people. I start to resonate loudly, start to get all about me, start to, I guess, (sigh,) get triggered by my own damage into my own drama. I invariably feel compelled to write. My advice to myself is to keep it in my journal, but it feels braver to put it here, where 30 or 220 (that's my alltime high so far) people read it, and where it had better not be a lie, and it had better not be too real. This isn't my journal, it isn't my Book of Secrets where I used to write really awful thoughts, ones I really never wanted anyone to know I was thinking, but just couldn't stop having until I wrote them down. If I put it on Facebook it's public even, like a zine I drop off at the library with my heart's address right on it.
I suppose that is what draws me so powerfully to these writers. They put out all this damaging evidence for me, of what crushes people to bits and ruins their lives, and they wave a flag over it, a kind of bravery flag. They make that intentional connection to the universal, and they make it clearly, and then they walk away and you are left thinking to yourself, well, there go all my excuses. There really is nothing but this present moment when I decide what my life is about. I decide what I feel, what I have, what I have just gotten or lost, and how much that matters.
That can feel harsh, confronting all of that wasted time and knowing that I will continue to waste time. Life's getting shorter and shorter. My life isn't really exactly what I want it to be. I could do more, say more, write more, think more clearly, try harder, and I know I won't really do better. I've already decided on the low-stress path. Maybe I've made the right choice, maybe there is no right choice. Maybe it is always a mire, and if you don't lose your boots or fall over, that's the best you can expect. I'm finishing this a week or two after I did finish the Ariel Gore and the Mary Karr books, and am on to other reading, somewhat less passionate. More choices, more excuses. No answers. We all just keep going, because it might be really cool what happens around the bend. We might find an even better book and get even more inspired. We might even put up three posts in three hours. Life is for sure, surprising.
Because to everyone else, what matters so much to me, doesn't matter. They have their own essentials, their damage and their moments. They get up every morning and drink coffee or don't, check email or not, write in their journal or not, and go out and do their work, the work they have decided to make the substance of their lives. It doesn't make them happy or unhappy; they do that. At every turn, we each decide if it is a most beautiful of days or if all that sunshine makes us a little stressed that we aren't out in it doing something remarkable.
All the time, I think maybe I'm doing it wrong, life. I am so happy to be unhooked from the world of desire to have a partner, to be loved in an intimate relationship, to have a lot of family demands on me. I have probably substituted my organizations and my work for those things...the Jell-O Show was my birthday party, and the weekly Market is my church service or maybe my family dinner. Country Fair is my ecstatic trip to an exotic land where I pretend that I don't work my ass off for a solid week and try to catch a sweet life moment as the dusk gathers or in the morning when that thrush sings.
As long as those sublimations and substitutions are in place, I feel fine. It can't be all that wrong. Anyway, there's no judge. Just the mire and the nice sheen on it that makes it look so pretty in the morning.
It's fascinating to me (and I guess what I mean by divine tension) that emotions can be so complexly contradictory and layered, so much so that trying to get to "the bottom" of them is a mire of trying and most likely not having a "there" to get to. At my writing group we were talking about mystery, and how you are advised to leave some in your writing, not to tease but mostly to give the reader something of their own to chew on, to not wrap the package up all enticingly and then go ahead and open it yourself. I'm thinking a lot about expectations, how deep they run, and how we can almost not avoid them, or avoid suffering from them. They're not realistic, but some of us (and by that I mean me) have developed a practice of avoiding even having them, not being willing to endure the disappointment. It's got euphemisms: going with the flow, making the observation "it is what it is," and for me it has grown to be a set of behaviors with which I just don't set myself up for disappointment. I enjoy what I do get, and try not to see it as a meager portion of all that life has to offer.
I settle, I suppose, and fail to risk enough to get what a lot of people cling tightly to, mostly other people. That's what Ariel and Mary write about, their abusive and outrageous parents, the damage that set them to becoming, the challenges to which they rose, their failures, their choices. They reveal their porous boundaries, but also their fearlessness, their counter-intuitive capacity for vulnerability, what made them cry, what cried in silence inside their heads when they didn't apologize or deferred from taking all the space they deserve. They wrote down most of what they thought and said and did, and made it a good story with spaces and mysteries and the right amount of satisfaction for the reader, for me. But they published the written account of it, the filtered story that came through their damage to our eyes. They put it there for us, but probably they wrote it for themselves, mostly. Because it was fun, and it felt good to use skills, and the stories, or the messages in them, were worth telling.
I stopped just before the end of Ariel's tale of her dying mother. I have to save it for a little while, after being able to do little else but read the book in the last 24 hours. It's far too short, for a book this important, this fulfilling. It is also a good idea for me to step away when I get this excited about relationships and people, particularly damaged people. I start to resonate loudly, start to get all about me, start to, I guess, (sigh,) get triggered by my own damage into my own drama. I invariably feel compelled to write. My advice to myself is to keep it in my journal, but it feels braver to put it here, where 30 or 220 (that's my alltime high so far) people read it, and where it had better not be a lie, and it had better not be too real. This isn't my journal, it isn't my Book of Secrets where I used to write really awful thoughts, ones I really never wanted anyone to know I was thinking, but just couldn't stop having until I wrote them down. If I put it on Facebook it's public even, like a zine I drop off at the library with my heart's address right on it.
I suppose that is what draws me so powerfully to these writers. They put out all this damaging evidence for me, of what crushes people to bits and ruins their lives, and they wave a flag over it, a kind of bravery flag. They make that intentional connection to the universal, and they make it clearly, and then they walk away and you are left thinking to yourself, well, there go all my excuses. There really is nothing but this present moment when I decide what my life is about. I decide what I feel, what I have, what I have just gotten or lost, and how much that matters.
That can feel harsh, confronting all of that wasted time and knowing that I will continue to waste time. Life's getting shorter and shorter. My life isn't really exactly what I want it to be. I could do more, say more, write more, think more clearly, try harder, and I know I won't really do better. I've already decided on the low-stress path. Maybe I've made the right choice, maybe there is no right choice. Maybe it is always a mire, and if you don't lose your boots or fall over, that's the best you can expect. I'm finishing this a week or two after I did finish the Ariel Gore and the Mary Karr books, and am on to other reading, somewhat less passionate. More choices, more excuses. No answers. We all just keep going, because it might be really cool what happens around the bend. We might find an even better book and get even more inspired. We might even put up three posts in three hours. Life is for sure, surprising.
Because to everyone else, what matters so much to me, doesn't matter. They have their own essentials, their damage and their moments. They get up every morning and drink coffee or don't, check email or not, write in their journal or not, and go out and do their work, the work they have decided to make the substance of their lives. It doesn't make them happy or unhappy; they do that. At every turn, we each decide if it is a most beautiful of days or if all that sunshine makes us a little stressed that we aren't out in it doing something remarkable.
All the time, I think maybe I'm doing it wrong, life. I am so happy to be unhooked from the world of desire to have a partner, to be loved in an intimate relationship, to have a lot of family demands on me. I have probably substituted my organizations and my work for those things...the Jell-O Show was my birthday party, and the weekly Market is my church service or maybe my family dinner. Country Fair is my ecstatic trip to an exotic land where I pretend that I don't work my ass off for a solid week and try to catch a sweet life moment as the dusk gathers or in the morning when that thrush sings.
As long as those sublimations and substitutions are in place, I feel fine. It can't be all that wrong. Anyway, there's no judge. Just the mire and the nice sheen on it that makes it look so pretty in the morning.
Crafts are my Culture
Edit: This is a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago and couldn't finish for some reason. Maybe it was just too soon to bring up cultural appropriation again, even in a new light.
My Saturday Market season was launched a week late, and after so many decades, I know what to expect: completely surprising details in a fairly routine pattern. Much had changed over the winter, so there were missing craftspeople, and new ones, recognizable customers and ones from out of town, laughs and hugs and bad jokes and the constant drumbeat interspersed with refrains from the buskers on the corners and wherever they thought they had a space.
It looked like there might be big changes at the Courthouse Plaza as the sellers over there were finally hearing that there is a difference between commerce and free speech, but it looks like nothing will indeed change. Apparently those doing commerce were going to be required to pay for the appropriate permits and insurance requirements that Saturday Market has been paying for for almost five decades, but the prospect of litigation or violence reared up and the pressure went down. It's hard to be against free speech. No one wants to be in that position, certainly not Saturday Market or the City of Eugene.
It's odd to observe them and be taken back to my own early days when I was making anything I could think of that might sell, so that I could live from my own craft. I don't think I was looking for something for nothing but in those days you could sell at Saturday Market for $3.50 a day, so those zero days weren't quite so expensive. But using that structure to grow within was certainly beneficial for me and I don't see how resistance to it makes that much sense, even with our new fee structure and the process it takes to get a really great space. It does make it hard if you aren't handcrafting what you want to sell. We aren't a flea market.
Now that the discussion of cultural appropriation is deepening and people are looking more carefully at how words and images matter and what needs protecting, I'm bringing up the discussion of handcrafting again. (Not that I've dropped it.) If you've been listening to the larger culture you now know that everything from commercial beer to fast-food tacos to kayaking is being described as a craft or hand-crafted. If a person's hands were involved, that designation is being applied. It obscures what I consider the artisanal practices that have been carried from the most ancient times, of some person taking a raw material and making it into something useful and beautiful from the work of their own imagination and skillful application of simple hand tools and techniques.
This definition doesn't include stuffing a taco or patting a burger into a round shape. Those are cooking skills and that's not what handcrafting is. There can be artisanal foods, of course, but unless one person is putting their own creativity into it, those foods aren't qualified for this distinction. For instance, Dana mixes up his cake with his own recipe, takes it out of the oven at the right time and frosts it. I'm sure he makes it look easy and can make a lot of them but he still does it himself, with his hands and because he wants to. So that is a hand-crafted food. If he bought the cake and just frosted it, the significant contribution of his frosting would have to outweigh the commercial material of the cake. Food isn't the best example of this, but it makes the point that we draw some lines that divide the products we sell at Saturday Market from the products for sale everywhere else.
It's easier to see with a product like a wool hat, for instance. The artist selects the wool, creates the pattern of color and design, knits the hat, blocks it, finishes it, displays it and sells it. She stands there and can easily say "I made this," without a shred of ambiguity. Most of our crafts are like this, dishes made from raw clay, paintings made from a blank canvas, prints made from a silkscreen process with the artist holding the squeegee. Not that there aren't some gray areas.
T-shirts and other screenprinted items have always presented a dilemma because they are commonly commercially made items. Saturday Market has dealt with this by calling the t-shirt a blank canvas, and requiring that any commercially made items be simple and generic so that the artistic contribution has outweighed the item. You couldn't sell a white t-shirt without an image, but if you applied the image with a craft technique, you could. You could also dye it, but you couldn't send it out to someone else to be dyed, even in a color you chose, because the requirement is that you have your hands and heart involved right on the piece you are selling. The Maker and the Seller are the same person. It's a narrow definition and many people currently selling things under the mantle of hand-crafted are in zones that are even more gray than the t-shirt one. I do my own screenprinting, but some artists don't, and some send their art to a business that provides them with a digitally printed image made with a printing machine (a fancy copier/computer) that is a step removed from their watercolor painting or original image. This has been allowed, but it pushes over the line and those in the world of Standards and jurying have worked over these lines with questions that are hard to answer. Now that we have 3-D imaging, where does the line get drawn with reproductions? It's a constant discussion in meetings. It's very hard to dial things back.
At Saturday Market, because we sell every week and have meetings every month, a lot of the fine lines get redrawn and adjusted over time, but we can still have an artist who cuts a coin with a little saw selling next to one who cuts a similar image with a computer-controlled laser. It's not ideal, and the technologies keep coming. Invariably the use of technology provides the opportunity to have multiple images or objects made at a lower cost per piece, with less artist labor involved, and thus less of a hand-crafted component. I know over time I stopped being accepted into craft fairs with my screenprinted shirts. They began to require a handcrafted garment as well as a hand-done application technique. We've been slow to make this change at the Saturday Market, because we are also a business incubator and we like to give a person a chance to get started as an artist. If they need someone to print for them until they can get set up to be a screenprinter as well as an artist, we've allowed that, letting them know that we hope that they will work up to being their own screenprinter as well. Sometimes they do, but other times they go in the direction of getting their images reproduced in even less hand-crafted ways, such as the digital prints. We haven't really been able to satisfactorily address the use of technologies within the limits of our non-juried, open entry marketplace. We'll never run out of subjects to discuss. Sometimes things tighten up, and sometimes they loosen.
We considered requiring those people selling digitally reproduced paintings (called giclee prints) to stretch their own prints on the wooden frames, but it was viewed as harsh to ask painters to be woodworkers, even though everyone is not completely comfortable with products that you can just order, unbox and sell. Your artistic contribution stopped at the original painting. We recognized that you had to make a living, and selling the prints and cards of your images allowed you to have a reasonably priced product. But that border needs constant patrolling.
So to cut to the chase, I challenge OCF people to start thinking carefully about what is sold at our Fair/festival. I doubt many festival-goers even remember that we are a top-quality hand-crafted Art Fair. Erosion of this ethic has come from lots of directions and in lots of subtle ways. Many, many things are sold during the Fair and the weeks around it that are not by any definition hand-crafted. Does this matter? Do we care, as a community, that the hand-crafting artisans are becoming a sideline, a misunderstood and rolled-over part of our landscape? Many of us have done this our whole lives, and founded and nurtured the Market and the Fair to protect a place where we could thrive, out of the commercial mainstream. Do factory-made products threaten us? I say they do. Someone asked me yesterday where they could get one of those cool pleated-fabric sets of wings they saw at Fair. I had to say I am pretty sure those are a commercial product you can find online, not a product of a Fair crafter.I hope I'm wrong about that.
I hope I'm wrong that the craft world is being eroded. I think it does still matter to people that things are handmade by artists you can talk to. I think the success of our two events is testimony to that. But I also think that the culture we participate in is in danger of being rolled over by fast food commercials and co-opting. So just listen carefully when you hear the word craft, and do your part to keep it meaning something different. Craft beer should find a new name. I suppose it is a compliment, right?
My Saturday Market season was launched a week late, and after so many decades, I know what to expect: completely surprising details in a fairly routine pattern. Much had changed over the winter, so there were missing craftspeople, and new ones, recognizable customers and ones from out of town, laughs and hugs and bad jokes and the constant drumbeat interspersed with refrains from the buskers on the corners and wherever they thought they had a space.
It looked like there might be big changes at the Courthouse Plaza as the sellers over there were finally hearing that there is a difference between commerce and free speech, but it looks like nothing will indeed change. Apparently those doing commerce were going to be required to pay for the appropriate permits and insurance requirements that Saturday Market has been paying for for almost five decades, but the prospect of litigation or violence reared up and the pressure went down. It's hard to be against free speech. No one wants to be in that position, certainly not Saturday Market or the City of Eugene.
It's odd to observe them and be taken back to my own early days when I was making anything I could think of that might sell, so that I could live from my own craft. I don't think I was looking for something for nothing but in those days you could sell at Saturday Market for $3.50 a day, so those zero days weren't quite so expensive. But using that structure to grow within was certainly beneficial for me and I don't see how resistance to it makes that much sense, even with our new fee structure and the process it takes to get a really great space. It does make it hard if you aren't handcrafting what you want to sell. We aren't a flea market.
Now that the discussion of cultural appropriation is deepening and people are looking more carefully at how words and images matter and what needs protecting, I'm bringing up the discussion of handcrafting again. (Not that I've dropped it.) If you've been listening to the larger culture you now know that everything from commercial beer to fast-food tacos to kayaking is being described as a craft or hand-crafted. If a person's hands were involved, that designation is being applied. It obscures what I consider the artisanal practices that have been carried from the most ancient times, of some person taking a raw material and making it into something useful and beautiful from the work of their own imagination and skillful application of simple hand tools and techniques.
This definition doesn't include stuffing a taco or patting a burger into a round shape. Those are cooking skills and that's not what handcrafting is. There can be artisanal foods, of course, but unless one person is putting their own creativity into it, those foods aren't qualified for this distinction. For instance, Dana mixes up his cake with his own recipe, takes it out of the oven at the right time and frosts it. I'm sure he makes it look easy and can make a lot of them but he still does it himself, with his hands and because he wants to. So that is a hand-crafted food. If he bought the cake and just frosted it, the significant contribution of his frosting would have to outweigh the commercial material of the cake. Food isn't the best example of this, but it makes the point that we draw some lines that divide the products we sell at Saturday Market from the products for sale everywhere else.
It's easier to see with a product like a wool hat, for instance. The artist selects the wool, creates the pattern of color and design, knits the hat, blocks it, finishes it, displays it and sells it. She stands there and can easily say "I made this," without a shred of ambiguity. Most of our crafts are like this, dishes made from raw clay, paintings made from a blank canvas, prints made from a silkscreen process with the artist holding the squeegee. Not that there aren't some gray areas.
T-shirts and other screenprinted items have always presented a dilemma because they are commonly commercially made items. Saturday Market has dealt with this by calling the t-shirt a blank canvas, and requiring that any commercially made items be simple and generic so that the artistic contribution has outweighed the item. You couldn't sell a white t-shirt without an image, but if you applied the image with a craft technique, you could. You could also dye it, but you couldn't send it out to someone else to be dyed, even in a color you chose, because the requirement is that you have your hands and heart involved right on the piece you are selling. The Maker and the Seller are the same person. It's a narrow definition and many people currently selling things under the mantle of hand-crafted are in zones that are even more gray than the t-shirt one. I do my own screenprinting, but some artists don't, and some send their art to a business that provides them with a digitally printed image made with a printing machine (a fancy copier/computer) that is a step removed from their watercolor painting or original image. This has been allowed, but it pushes over the line and those in the world of Standards and jurying have worked over these lines with questions that are hard to answer. Now that we have 3-D imaging, where does the line get drawn with reproductions? It's a constant discussion in meetings. It's very hard to dial things back.
At Saturday Market, because we sell every week and have meetings every month, a lot of the fine lines get redrawn and adjusted over time, but we can still have an artist who cuts a coin with a little saw selling next to one who cuts a similar image with a computer-controlled laser. It's not ideal, and the technologies keep coming. Invariably the use of technology provides the opportunity to have multiple images or objects made at a lower cost per piece, with less artist labor involved, and thus less of a hand-crafted component. I know over time I stopped being accepted into craft fairs with my screenprinted shirts. They began to require a handcrafted garment as well as a hand-done application technique. We've been slow to make this change at the Saturday Market, because we are also a business incubator and we like to give a person a chance to get started as an artist. If they need someone to print for them until they can get set up to be a screenprinter as well as an artist, we've allowed that, letting them know that we hope that they will work up to being their own screenprinter as well. Sometimes they do, but other times they go in the direction of getting their images reproduced in even less hand-crafted ways, such as the digital prints. We haven't really been able to satisfactorily address the use of technologies within the limits of our non-juried, open entry marketplace. We'll never run out of subjects to discuss. Sometimes things tighten up, and sometimes they loosen.
We considered requiring those people selling digitally reproduced paintings (called giclee prints) to stretch their own prints on the wooden frames, but it was viewed as harsh to ask painters to be woodworkers, even though everyone is not completely comfortable with products that you can just order, unbox and sell. Your artistic contribution stopped at the original painting. We recognized that you had to make a living, and selling the prints and cards of your images allowed you to have a reasonably priced product. But that border needs constant patrolling.
So to cut to the chase, I challenge OCF people to start thinking carefully about what is sold at our Fair/festival. I doubt many festival-goers even remember that we are a top-quality hand-crafted Art Fair. Erosion of this ethic has come from lots of directions and in lots of subtle ways. Many, many things are sold during the Fair and the weeks around it that are not by any definition hand-crafted. Does this matter? Do we care, as a community, that the hand-crafting artisans are becoming a sideline, a misunderstood and rolled-over part of our landscape? Many of us have done this our whole lives, and founded and nurtured the Market and the Fair to protect a place where we could thrive, out of the commercial mainstream. Do factory-made products threaten us? I say they do. Someone asked me yesterday where they could get one of those cool pleated-fabric sets of wings they saw at Fair. I had to say I am pretty sure those are a commercial product you can find online, not a product of a Fair crafter.I hope I'm wrong about that.
I hope I'm wrong that the craft world is being eroded. I think it does still matter to people that things are handmade by artists you can talk to. I think the success of our two events is testimony to that. But I also think that the culture we participate in is in danger of being rolled over by fast food commercials and co-opting. So just listen carefully when you hear the word craft, and do your part to keep it meaning something different. Craft beer should find a new name. I suppose it is a compliment, right?
Free Speech Plaza
Edit: I feel bad, because three times as many people have read this rant as my better-thought-out one that followed shortly. Complaining helps the complainer but solutions would help more. http://divinetension.blogspot.com/2016/04/fsp-but-deeper.html
I've been having trouble writing this blog lately, but yesterday I read an article about the heart connection to the brain and it struck me that when I'm sitting here in this particular space, that connection for me is very open. That's one reason it's hard to write: I want to get the words right, to say what my heart is asking me to say, and not just for me, but for the people who read it. I think that is what they come looking for, and although that's often an oppressive responsibility, it's also compelling. If I can do this, I ought to keep practicing it.
There was a letter in the Weekly asking "what's going on with the people who set up their booths across the street from the Saturday Market in the Wayne Morse Free Speech Plaza?" I know what I think about it. I've been watching it grow for over a decade. First it was our information booth on the southwest corner, a space we rented from the County so that we could use the Park Blocks spaces for our members. The drum circle settled there after it grew too large and loud for the East Park Block. It's a great space for that, and most of us have some love for the drum circle. We are a community gathering place, after all. It's convenient that there are seats built there, as if it were the intention that people would gather. And no one opposes free speech. We're proud to be neighbors of a space reserved for that.
Saturday Market is a nonprofit, a membership organization. You don't find many of those anymore, as they can be hard to run "like a business" with hundreds of owners trying to make good decisions together. Saturday Market has for almost fifty years learned to run like an extremely well-managed business. We sign contracts, we get permits, we pay for utilities and insurance and we have employees, health insurance for them, and we perform together all of the duties of a modern business, plus we do it all with our only income coming from our member fees. This is a rather astounding accomplishment that many take for granted as we make it look so fun and easy. Let me repeat, we members pay for it all with our fees. From our sales, that we depend on our customers for. That's why we try to hard to be family friendly, safe, and attractive. And fun!
As an officer and someone who has been a member for a very long time (since 1975) I've seen times that were much worse and this time is a really good time. We have had some problems. One that has been particularly troublesome is the county property across the street. When our booth was there, we were required to buy $4 million dollars worth of liability insurance for our 10'x10' space. That and the rent we paid to the county bought us approximately nothing, as when a stabbing happened right in front of our info booth, traumatizing our staff, the only solution we could come up with to stop the violence to us was to move our booth to city property on a different corner.
This was after years and years of proposing solutions and promoting discussions with the county and the police and the city and the community leaders on what kind of support we could get for the lawless scene happening under the guise of free speech. We bought $2000 gates that we had to put up and take down every week to keep the upper areas off limits after we had documented prostitution, drug dealing. and many types of abuse and violence in those areas. We kept logs of just how many illegal actions and purchases were made over there every week, using volunteers from our organization to document what the county didn't want to see. We paid our site staff to clean the space every week, even though we didn't rent it, to be good neighbors. We absorbed the costs, spread them over our population of micro-businesses, some of the smallest businesses you can find anywhere. We still have members who drive 30-year-old cars and can't afford computers or health care, but we pitched in to be good citizens in our downtown.
We asked and asked for help from the County. We spoke with countless concerned officials and citizens and no one seemed to care that all of the expense, the bad reputation, the needed services, and the problem-solving fell on our little nonprofit. Even the Farmers Market didn't want to help us. (A quick edit: Actually, we have gotten good support from EPD to help with the law-breaking, and I thank them.) We tried putting our own booths on the block, but none of our members wanted to sell over there. We tried making it clear that it was not part of the Saturday Market, but a brand name like ours means nothing when everyone feels free to use it. It's a day of the week...it's a market. Put a word in the middle and you seem to have something new...or just lump us all together. What's the difference?
The Weekly letter-writer seems to think it is little old ladies selling over there, all innocent. It's true that not everyone can afford a canopy or the fees we pay. You can get a 4x4 space at Saturday Market for $8 plus ten percent, or $13 if you want an 8x8, or you can stroll for $5. You have to pay a membership fee of $50 but you can sell a time or two while you get the money together. You have to get your items screened to see if they are hand crafted. We're not a flea market. You can't sell used things or things you buy at Goodwill and that might seem a little restrictive. And you have to pay your fees so we can rent the 9 or 10 porta potties, pay for the street permits so people are safe, pay for the fire marshal to come and inspect you, pay for the health inspectors to come inspect you, pay the city rent for the space, pay the people to sort the garbage so you can keep tons of waste out of the landfill, buy more forks for the ones that go missing, pay the staff to come at 5:00 in the morning to get the site ready, pay the managers to hire the staff and the security to protect us from thieves, pay for all the paper to register everyone and inform them, pay the musicians, pay for the advertising to attract the customers, and pay for everything that we as members have decided to pay for to make ourselves attractive enough to make our livings doing our art. We govern ourselves (lots of meetings.) We put our money together to make it all happen for all of us. It works very well!
But then, it seems, we have to pitch in more to pay for the people who don't want to pay. They want, for all of their various reasons, to set up over there, bypass laws and ordinances that society requires businesses to follow, but to get all the benefits of membership that we offer, for free. It's a bit hard to watch, I'll admit. It has taken me years of working on my patience to take a charitable view of it all. I see myself when I was just starting out, when it only cost me $3.50 to sell, and I remember having a zero-sales day and trying to get out of my fee. Howard wouldn't let me. I can't believe I thought I should have gotten that day for nothing, when I look at what my $3.50s have built. I've lived from my art for my whole working life now, over forty years. I would not have been able to do it at all without Saturday Market. My membership has given me my life, the wherewithal to buy my home, to pay for my health insurance, and to move somewhat gracefully into what is going to be my semi-retirement, because without the Market I can't really retire. I'm going to have to keep doing it or lose it all. It's a bit odd to be seen as the establishment now, to be seen as the ones trying to force out the innocent people just trying to make it, over there, where they are using what we have built as if it were owed to them.
So when she says that they've never caused a problem, I have to disagree. People who don't want to pay their own way in the world cause thousands of problems. The deeper question, to me, is who should pay for it if they won't? I think Saturday Market has paid and paid, and that is what is wrong with what's happening over there. Free speech isn't free. Selling isn't free. How does it make sense that no one over there has to pay for what they use? If they can't pay, then let's solve that problem. Instead of me handing out ten dollar bills every week, maybe the people who love it so much could pony up some cash. Maybe the people selling there could pay someone to clean it and chip in for a porta potty. Maybe the County could take on the expense of managing what is happening on their property, in front of their courthouse. Or maybe we could go back to having real free speech, and not commerce. The way it is now, you can't really go over there and express yourself, schedule a rally or bring in a speaker. It's dominated by people who are taking advantage of a lot of other people without consent. I call that a problem.
Saturday Market has mostly been trying to be charitable about it, to keep doing what we are doing so well, and to not publicly embarrass Lane County for their lack of concern for our well being as their neighbors. We are now having to endure the criticism of those who see us as opposing free speech and pushing around those less fortunate. There is something really wrong with that picture, and it isn't Saturday Market. We're still working together to create and maintain the best community event, the most accessible business incubator, the greatest gathering of cooks, musicians and artists in the region, and we're doing it with style. What's happening on the Free Speech Plaza is not free speech, and it's not our problem. You fix it.
I've been having trouble writing this blog lately, but yesterday I read an article about the heart connection to the brain and it struck me that when I'm sitting here in this particular space, that connection for me is very open. That's one reason it's hard to write: I want to get the words right, to say what my heart is asking me to say, and not just for me, but for the people who read it. I think that is what they come looking for, and although that's often an oppressive responsibility, it's also compelling. If I can do this, I ought to keep practicing it.
There was a letter in the Weekly asking "what's going on with the people who set up their booths across the street from the Saturday Market in the Wayne Morse Free Speech Plaza?" I know what I think about it. I've been watching it grow for over a decade. First it was our information booth on the southwest corner, a space we rented from the County so that we could use the Park Blocks spaces for our members. The drum circle settled there after it grew too large and loud for the East Park Block. It's a great space for that, and most of us have some love for the drum circle. We are a community gathering place, after all. It's convenient that there are seats built there, as if it were the intention that people would gather. And no one opposes free speech. We're proud to be neighbors of a space reserved for that.
Saturday Market is a nonprofit, a membership organization. You don't find many of those anymore, as they can be hard to run "like a business" with hundreds of owners trying to make good decisions together. Saturday Market has for almost fifty years learned to run like an extremely well-managed business. We sign contracts, we get permits, we pay for utilities and insurance and we have employees, health insurance for them, and we perform together all of the duties of a modern business, plus we do it all with our only income coming from our member fees. This is a rather astounding accomplishment that many take for granted as we make it look so fun and easy. Let me repeat, we members pay for it all with our fees. From our sales, that we depend on our customers for. That's why we try to hard to be family friendly, safe, and attractive. And fun!
As an officer and someone who has been a member for a very long time (since 1975) I've seen times that were much worse and this time is a really good time. We have had some problems. One that has been particularly troublesome is the county property across the street. When our booth was there, we were required to buy $4 million dollars worth of liability insurance for our 10'x10' space. That and the rent we paid to the county bought us approximately nothing, as when a stabbing happened right in front of our info booth, traumatizing our staff, the only solution we could come up with to stop the violence to us was to move our booth to city property on a different corner.
This was after years and years of proposing solutions and promoting discussions with the county and the police and the city and the community leaders on what kind of support we could get for the lawless scene happening under the guise of free speech. We bought $2000 gates that we had to put up and take down every week to keep the upper areas off limits after we had documented prostitution, drug dealing. and many types of abuse and violence in those areas. We kept logs of just how many illegal actions and purchases were made over there every week, using volunteers from our organization to document what the county didn't want to see. We paid our site staff to clean the space every week, even though we didn't rent it, to be good neighbors. We absorbed the costs, spread them over our population of micro-businesses, some of the smallest businesses you can find anywhere. We still have members who drive 30-year-old cars and can't afford computers or health care, but we pitched in to be good citizens in our downtown.
We asked and asked for help from the County. We spoke with countless concerned officials and citizens and no one seemed to care that all of the expense, the bad reputation, the needed services, and the problem-solving fell on our little nonprofit. Even the Farmers Market didn't want to help us. (A quick edit: Actually, we have gotten good support from EPD to help with the law-breaking, and I thank them.) We tried putting our own booths on the block, but none of our members wanted to sell over there. We tried making it clear that it was not part of the Saturday Market, but a brand name like ours means nothing when everyone feels free to use it. It's a day of the week...it's a market. Put a word in the middle and you seem to have something new...or just lump us all together. What's the difference?
The Weekly letter-writer seems to think it is little old ladies selling over there, all innocent. It's true that not everyone can afford a canopy or the fees we pay. You can get a 4x4 space at Saturday Market for $8 plus ten percent, or $13 if you want an 8x8, or you can stroll for $5. You have to pay a membership fee of $50 but you can sell a time or two while you get the money together. You have to get your items screened to see if they are hand crafted. We're not a flea market. You can't sell used things or things you buy at Goodwill and that might seem a little restrictive. And you have to pay your fees so we can rent the 9 or 10 porta potties, pay for the street permits so people are safe, pay for the fire marshal to come and inspect you, pay for the health inspectors to come inspect you, pay the city rent for the space, pay the people to sort the garbage so you can keep tons of waste out of the landfill, buy more forks for the ones that go missing, pay the staff to come at 5:00 in the morning to get the site ready, pay the managers to hire the staff and the security to protect us from thieves, pay for all the paper to register everyone and inform them, pay the musicians, pay for the advertising to attract the customers, and pay for everything that we as members have decided to pay for to make ourselves attractive enough to make our livings doing our art. We govern ourselves (lots of meetings.) We put our money together to make it all happen for all of us. It works very well!
But then, it seems, we have to pitch in more to pay for the people who don't want to pay. They want, for all of their various reasons, to set up over there, bypass laws and ordinances that society requires businesses to follow, but to get all the benefits of membership that we offer, for free. It's a bit hard to watch, I'll admit. It has taken me years of working on my patience to take a charitable view of it all. I see myself when I was just starting out, when it only cost me $3.50 to sell, and I remember having a zero-sales day and trying to get out of my fee. Howard wouldn't let me. I can't believe I thought I should have gotten that day for nothing, when I look at what my $3.50s have built. I've lived from my art for my whole working life now, over forty years. I would not have been able to do it at all without Saturday Market. My membership has given me my life, the wherewithal to buy my home, to pay for my health insurance, and to move somewhat gracefully into what is going to be my semi-retirement, because without the Market I can't really retire. I'm going to have to keep doing it or lose it all. It's a bit odd to be seen as the establishment now, to be seen as the ones trying to force out the innocent people just trying to make it, over there, where they are using what we have built as if it were owed to them.
So when she says that they've never caused a problem, I have to disagree. People who don't want to pay their own way in the world cause thousands of problems. The deeper question, to me, is who should pay for it if they won't? I think Saturday Market has paid and paid, and that is what is wrong with what's happening over there. Free speech isn't free. Selling isn't free. How does it make sense that no one over there has to pay for what they use? If they can't pay, then let's solve that problem. Instead of me handing out ten dollar bills every week, maybe the people who love it so much could pony up some cash. Maybe the people selling there could pay someone to clean it and chip in for a porta potty. Maybe the County could take on the expense of managing what is happening on their property, in front of their courthouse. Or maybe we could go back to having real free speech, and not commerce. The way it is now, you can't really go over there and express yourself, schedule a rally or bring in a speaker. It's dominated by people who are taking advantage of a lot of other people without consent. I call that a problem.
Saturday Market has mostly been trying to be charitable about it, to keep doing what we are doing so well, and to not publicly embarrass Lane County for their lack of concern for our well being as their neighbors. We are now having to endure the criticism of those who see us as opposing free speech and pushing around those less fortunate. There is something really wrong with that picture, and it isn't Saturday Market. We're still working together to create and maintain the best community event, the most accessible business incubator, the greatest gathering of cooks, musicians and artists in the region, and we're doing it with style. What's happening on the Free Speech Plaza is not free speech, and it's not our problem. You fix it.
Sunday, April 3, 2016
The Day After The Show
 | |
| Stark light of day, the aftermath |
A couple of the Angels did report in after their own days at the Market, but that made me feel worse. If only it had been possible to have twice the energy, twice the moments in each hour. Mentally I was feeling myself running back and forth, knowing the pull of my space at the Market, and my party at Maude Kerns. I'm the Queen, so I had to be there, but then again, I'm some important glue in my Market neighborhood. Oh well, it's all in the past now, and next week I will get my chance to haul stuff downtown and stand next to it all day. The second week could well be fully as exciting as the first, and I really wouldn't have missed the Jell-O Waves for anything.
 |
| Before anyone got there |
 |
| Looking out, ready to Queen |
Standing next to Markalo Parkalo, Your Queen and Mine, was equally transformative. There we were, arguably the two most important people in Eugene for those brief moments. He gave a little talk, sang a little song, and I stood awkwardly with my scepter wishing I had prepared to sing with him...we forgot to even talk about which song he was singing. Darn. A missed opportunity. Yet a few minutes and one costume change later, I was singing my heart out with the rest of the Angels and we had launched our performance. It went well, very well, with only one part where we miscommunicated and I didn't cue the musicians at the right time. The audience helped us as we stumbled through some time-filling silliness and it all resumed, thanks to Larry across the stage telling me "Say regular surfers, say regular surfers." I said it.The music started and the tube queens emerged. It was over too fast. My best line "Jell-O Wave Comin'!" a la the B-52s line "Tin roof, rusted", got stepped on in the enthusiasm to get to the last fantabulous song.
The music was memorable and so well done. We heard from our friends that possibly our equipment was not transmitting our wonderfulness quite as well as we were imagining it, but no matter. I can't wait to see the video. It was impossible to see all the costumes and silly acting people were doing behind me, and I can't wait to see the whole picture. When it feels that good it has to transmit, and everyone did seem to be enjoying it. It was hard to let go.
For me the very most magical time was the cast party, though, not to make you jealous, but just to share that after all that work together, with so many rehearsals for so long, the love in the room when it got to be a small and intimate group, was massive. The rightness of the feelings and the glorious singing we did with everyone singing a different part, a dozen parts, and the way we went from song to song merging the music with other tunes from our past and our practices, was brilliant and way beyond inspiring. That's what I want to hold onto the most, the depth of friendship and love that we shared by doing that together, throwing it out there, giving it away. Those moments made up for missing out on standing on the Park Blocks, feeling the same connectedness, the same vitality of the work, essential nature and endless love, as I feel every Saturday when a wave of appreciation washes over me. It's as good as it gets. It's better than I ever imagined, the peak moments that come so infrequently, but that are so rich they make up for any drudgery or complicated drama that came before.
One funny story, just to get it recorded: I had just changed into my official Queen costume with my crown and all, and was waiting impatiently for the bathroom. I said loudly, "Do you think I should say it's the Queen waiting?" The door then opened to someone I knew, lamenting the fact that the toilet was clogged and filled to the brim. I remember that helpless feeling when the water is rising, about to flood, and you desperately don't want your hostess to have to clean up your mess, when all you did was try to flush in the normal way but unexpected things happened. I brushed past her in my taffeta, said, "Well, isn't there a plunger?" and proceeded to plunge the toilet. In my gown and crown, in my full makeup. It must have been quite the sight.
Taking care of business, that's what the Queens do. Whether it is out-trumping Trump, which is what the Slug Queen got to challenge people to do on Friday, or working on the plumbing, we can bring the tools and apply them to the world with our perspective and personality making all the difference. What a great life. Amplify your joy and remember to appreciate it when you have the chance.
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