Living in More Than One World

In my previous installment of posts about the new book Drucker: A Life in Pictures, I remarked on the tremendous variety of people who are represented in documents depicted from the Drucker Archives, including Cesar Chavez, Rick Warren and Frances Hesselbein. As the chapter “The Social-Sector Advisor” makes clear, Peter Drucker was a citizen of the highest order. Besides some of the organizations mentioned in my earlier posts, this also illustrates his involvement with CARE International (CARE Foundation International Humanitarian Award; May 24, 1995), the Salvation Army (Evangeline Booth Award, 2001) and Mutual of America (Distinguished Citizens Service Award; April 4, 1991).

I was particularly struck by the photo of the typewritten document “Peter F. Drucker (Partial) List of Community Service Responsibilities 1950-1988.” He separates the list into two categories: (1) Doing, (2) Advisor and Consultant. The first includes (all as Drucker typed it): Trustee-some time Vice-Chairman, Montclair State College, Montclair, NJ, 1960-71;[Drucker lived in Montclair when he taught at New York University]; Board of Directors, American Management Association, 1952-1960; 1972-1976; Commissioner, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 1986; Member, Asian Art Council, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1986; Member, Advisory Council, Peace Corps, 1968-1973; President, Society for the History of  Technology.

In category two (again, not repeating organizations from my earlier posts, and as he typed it), the list includes the American Heart Association, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford Graduate Business School, Navajo Indian Tribal Council, International Rescue Committee, Japan House NYC, American Symphony Orchestra League and the Western Association of Hospitals. Those are only some of the organizations on both lists. And all of these responsibilities were on top of his other consulting work, as well as his teaching and writing. Peter Drucker as role model is on full display in this chapter, and in the entire book.

Last week I wrote about my experiences in Claremont, California at Drucker Day, on November 10th. However, I also had the pleasure of spending November 8th and 9th, and part of November 7th, on the campuses of The Claremont Colleges and The Claremont Graduate University. In between meetings with friends at the Drucker School and the Drucker Institute, I also managed to take advantage of a few on-campus activities.
After arriving in town mid-day Wednesday, I attended a fascinating talk by John Bachmann, senior partner (and retired managing partner) of Edward Jones, and chairman of the Board of Visitors of the Drucker School and trustee of Claremont Graduate University. He was interviewed by Rick Wartzman, the Executive Director of the Drucker Institute, on “How I Became a CEO.” Bachmann is also a Distinguished Visiting Assistant Professor at the Drucker School, and was a longtime friend and consulting partner of Peter Drucker. He is a perfect example of the many high-profile, highly accomplished leaders who were followers of Drucker.
A trait that Bachmann shares with Drucker, and so many of Drucker’s followers, is intense intellectual and cultural curiosity. This played out for Drucker in his interest in and collecting of Japanese art. During the Drucker Centennial in 2009, I attended the opening of an exhibit, “Zen! Japanese Paintings From the Sanso Collection,” of this collection on campus, at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, at Scripps College. I returned there during this visit for another Japanese-themed exhibit, “Genji’s World in Japanese Woodblock Prints.” Maybe it was because it was late Friday, but I had the gallery all to myself.
I always enjoy going to the Honnold/Mudd library on campus, including the Honnold/Mudd Café. On Thursday I attended the library’s Claremont Discourse Lecture, “How American Bandstand Created the American Teenager,” by Scripps College professor Matt Delmont. It was based on his new book The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia. As a pre-teen during that decade in Scranton, Pa., I religiously watched the show when it was a weekday, after-school offering. Matt’s lecture was highly interesting and intriguing, the same qualities I’m finding so far in the book. It provides new perspectives on Bandstand’s host, the late Dick Clark; and on rock music’s central role in the growing power of teenagers in the early baby-boom years. And gaining new perspectives is a perfect reason to spend a few days on a college campus.

A number of books and articles that I collected over a period of years became important background material for the Peter Drucker-related visit I made to Japan, as I wrote in the previous of (now six) posts about my week in Tokyo.
As helpful as all of that reading material was, I also read a lot of Drucker’s work about Japan, in books and articles, before and especially during my time there. One was Drucker on Asia: A Dialogue Between Peter Drucker and Isao Nakauchi, which I read in the English translation published in 1997. But within that book it notes that the original was published in Japanese in 1995, titled Chosen no toki, as two volumes, by Diamond, Inc., Drucker’s publisher in Japan (and I’m happy to say, mine as well).
The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition; a 466 page collection of essays with new Drucker introductions, originally published in 1993, was also really valuable. Part Seven is called “Japan as Society and Civilization,” and contains five chapters plus the introduction.
It contains some of his most personal and wide-ranging writing on many aspects of Japanese life, including a 17 page essay, “A View of Japan Through Japanese Art,” which originally appeared in the catalog for a 1979 art exhibit. I particularly enjoyed a Wall Street Journal piece from 1980: “How Westernized Are the Japanese?” It includes a wonderful section about a “twenty-year-old daughter of old friends – we have known her since she was a toddler,” who indignantly tells him that in her philosophy seminar about Plato, the readings were not translated into Japanese. They were in the original Greek. She was also reading Kant and Schopenhauer, in German; along with “Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein and Symbolic Logic, in English, of course.” What, Drucker asks her, are you doing for fun? Her reply: “This is fun.” The young student would be 52 now. One wonders what became of her, and the other people in this short, enlightening article in a big, helpful book.

If you are anywhere near Arlington, Virginia from now until the end of May, check out the recently extended “D.C. Punk” exhibit at the Arlington County Public Library (where I did an author event in 2009). The combination of flyers for gigs and album cover posters vividly illuminate the music scene of the early punk era. In 2009, I wrote about part of my connection, including being neighbors in the same Arlington apartment building as Henry Rollins before he moved to California to join Black Flag.  Even before that, I first met Henry and his longtime friend Ian MacKaye, who started the phenomenally popular Dischord Records more than 30 years ago, while launching his own band, Minor Threat. Ian became even more popular with his subsequent band, Fugazi. As part of the exhibit, on April 18th the library screened “Instrument – Ten Years with the Band Fugazi :  A Film by Jem Cohen and the Washington D.C. Band Fugazi.” Individuals and companies can learn a lot about branding from studying the history of Ian and Dischord. Another related event takes place on April 26th, when Jennifer Egan will speak about her 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, a selection of Arlington Reads 2012.
Many other D.C. area bands of the punk era are featured in the exhibit. Whether you go or not, be sure to have a look at the extensive Flickr pages from DSI Archives. Some of the graphics are terrific, and the DIY, entrepreneurial spirit is strong. Another admirable aspect these graphics demonstrate is the commitment to social justice that some of these bands represented.
It’s only fitting that this exhibit takes place in a library, as evidenced by this column in LAWeekly last September: Henry Rollins: The Column! Henry Speaks On His Consciousness-Expanding Trip to the Library of Congress With Ian MacKaye, about a visit to LOC and the National Archives that Henry called “a day of nonstop awe and inspiration.”  Even if you don’t like listening to the music, you can have your consciousness expanded by your in-person or virtual visit to “D.C. Punk” at the Arlington County Public Library.

300 Words With is a new, semi-regular feature on my blog, in which I interview people I admire, especially those who exemplify the spirit of living in more than one world. Their responses are (in the range of) 300 words. Today’s interviewee is the artist/writer/musician/NPR radio commentator David Greenberger, who also has done innovative work with the elderly. I knew David back in my music writing/selling days in the late seventies and early eighties, and then lost touch with him until becoming reconnected earlier this year on Facebook.

1. Can you briefly describe your life’s professional journey so far, including Duplex Planet and your art?

Duplex Planet is my art, or one aspect of it. I won’t take up the limited word space here to describe it, but will say that I started out as a painter – art school, showings, the whole thing – and after I created the earliest issues of the periodical in 1979, I purposefully set aside painting a year or so later so that I could truly allow this other medium to become my voice. That said, for the past half decade, I’ve returned to visual art as well (though there are also visual components in The Duplex Planet) and it picks up around where I left off thirty years ago. For the past 15 years I’ve been most interested in the creation of monologues with music, further abstracting the underlying source material to make for a more universal, less documentary-specific focus.

2. Has music been a running thread through your personal and professional life, and if so, in what ways?

Music has been a constant since I was ten or eleven years old. I’ve always been nourished by hearing something new, as well as finding new in the familiar. I played bass guitar in bands in my hometown of Erie, PA, through high school and into college. I returned to performing when I lived in Boston and formed a band called Men & Volts. We did five albums and numerous other releases over the course of the eighties. Putting together an issue of The Duplex Planet has always been like assembling an album: the rhythmic flow, the juxtapositions, the slow reveal. My recordings and performances now – monologues with music – I liken to a band with a guy (me) talking.

3. What non-work activities do you find particularly meaningful in your life?

As an artist, I find very little divide between my daily endeavors and the notion of work. They are the same; they are who I am and what I do. That said, stepping away from the various processes is necessary for the growth and integrity of the art. So there are friends, the aesthetic pleasures of food, film, literature and every other medium, to baffle, amuse, delight and enrich.

Seemingly random discoveries are part of the pleasure of reading the work of Jorge Luis Borges, and of reading about him. The latest is my discovery of a feature in today’s independent.co.uk, Jonathan Romney’s On cloud nine: Turner Prize-winner Keith Tyson reveals the surprising ideas behind Turner’s mind-bending work. I had never heard of Tyson, a celebrated British artist, before this article. What drew me to it was the notion that Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel” was an influence on Tyson’s wide-ranging art. Tyson was awarded the coveted Turner Prize in 2002. Perusing his website shows him to be a visual artist of startling originality and variety, much like Borges was with the written word.  The interview reveals Tyson’s varied and colorful life history, which indeed sounds like it could be fictional; if not written by Borges at least by a particularly imaginative author. Turner’s assertion that “My whole approach to life and everything comes from a series of existential traumas I experienced when I was about six” certainly makes you want to read on. Apparently the road to art fame — as well as his life now as a family man — was also paved with nervous breakdowns, a gambling addiction and working as a shipyard apprentice on nuclear submarines. He has an upcoming exhibition beginning September 16 at Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art London, Keith Tyson: Cloud Choreography and Other Emergent Systems. (Further searching for today’s post led me to an Alberto Manguel September 24, 2008 piece in The New York Sun, A Universe of Books: Borges’s ‘Library of Babel.’ Manguel is a wonderful writer who has written eloquently on Borges in the past. I have a feeling that Borges — were he still alive — Manguel and Tyson would all take pleasure in the nature of that discovery.)

Economist.com has been running a web-only series of columns this summer spotlighting “hidden-gem museums” around the world. The pieces are beautifully written, and do an excellent job of placing the houses of art in historical context. The first was July18, about the National Museum of the Renaissance at the Chateau d’Ecouen. The column points out that although attendance rose to 85,000 visitors last year, that’s not particularly good, especially considering its location in Paris. July 25 spotlights the Museum of Handbags and Purses in Amsterdam.  On August 1 is the dryly-headlined Arles together now, about Museon Arlaten in Arles, France. Lack of marketing, promotion and amenities visitors have come to expect, such as a café and a catalogue, kept down visitor totals to 55,000 last year. Yet the back story is fascinating; blending its creator, the poet Frederic Mistral, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1904, and Vincent Van Gogh. The column points out that the latter admired Mistral, yet probably never met him. The loan of a Van Gogh would complete the picture: “Now that fate has reversed the reputations of the two men, the presence of a Van Gogh in the Museon Arlaten would send visitor numbers shooting up.” The three most recent museums covered are The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York; designed by and filled with the art of the sculptor Isamu Noguchi (August 9); The Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C., on August 15 (not far from where I live, and the only one of these spaces I’ve visited) and The Wallace Collection, in London on August 22.  The latter is due for a sudden boost in visitors beginning in October, when it begins an exhibition of 25 new paintings by Damien Hirst. The hidden-gems column has been a pleasant summer diversion. Let’s hope it gets extended for another season.

A great example of a person living a multidimensional life in more than one world is Edward Tufte, profiled recently by Adam Aston in BusinessWeek, Tufte’s Invisible Yet Ubiquitous Influence. Tufte is perhaps best known for his large, elaborate and beautifully-produced books (from his own company, Graphics Press) on the best ways to present and interpret data and information, such as The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. But he is also a consultant to large corporations and master teacher (Professor Emeritus at Yale) who now spends considerable time on the road each year delivering a one day course, Presenting Data and Information, to big audiences at auditoriums nationwide. I went to one several years ago in Arlington, Virginia, and found it to be stimulating and highly informative. The cost is relatively steep, but copies of his books are included in the admission. Even so, back-of-the-room sales of his books were brisk as people bought extra copies as gifts or for their office. I also discovered that day that he is a serious rock music listener (the background music played during the breaks and during the book signing afterwards came from his collection) and an artist of large-scale sculptures and outdoor installations. The Cheshire Herald in Connecticut (Tufte’s home state) has a story, Tufte Continues To Dazzle With Larger Than Life Works, about a new exhibit of these installations, Edward Tufte: Seeing Around, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Ridgefield, Ct. It runs until January 17, 2010. For more on these works, and Tufte’s philosophy of art, see the interview from Modern Painters and more on Tufte’s website. The site as a whole has a considerable amount of information (including writing by and about Tufte) and stunning visual imagery.

The science of creativity in The Globe and Mail provided a reminder to me about Jacob Bronowski, the scientist/author who achieved a degree of fame in the early 1970s with his BBC documentary The Ascent of Man. It also introduced me to the writer of this compelling essay, the Canadian poet/essayist/short story writer Robyn Sarah. In the space of her short piece, she weaves together background on Bronowski, whom she describes as “mathematician, physicist, biologist, humanist, lover of the arts, incomparable teacher, passionate believer in progress;” a brief anecdote about her daughter’s reaction to a Leonardo da Vinci painting in a picture book and a thoughtful review of Bronowski’s collection of essays Science and Human Values. Originally delivered as lectures at M.I.T. in 1953, they explore, among other things, the nature of, and similarity between, creativity in science and the arts. Sarah describes Bronowski’s work in Science and Human Values as “dense with thought and information, but lucid in style and beautifully written.” The same might be said about her own essay. The science of creativity is part of the “Buried Treasures” series in The Globe and Mail’s excellent book section. Among other reviews, essays, lists and special features in this section is a new one, Summer is short…, in which a short story appears every week until Labor Day weekend. It’s being done in partnership with HarperCollins, and intersperses contemporary and classic writers. The most recent story is from Joyce Carol Oates, and next week’s will be by Herman Melville. A nice bonus in the book section from June 27 is the cleverly-titled Alain de Botton is packing your suitcase, as the ubiquitous de Botton lets us in on his summer travel reading.

I’ve been fascinated by Top 10, Top 40, Top 100 etc. lists since childhood, going back to local rock radio stations and their Top 40 lists, and the singles and album charts of Billboard and the late Cashbox.  The Guardian has a great series of Top 10 lists – all of which are on its website – in which various authors contribute annotated lists usually, but not exclusively, about books. Particularly good is Ian MacKenzie’s top 10 artworks in novels, the June 2 entry by novelist MacKenzie, author of City of Strangers. It makes for a concise, informative and insight-packed read. Despite the title, in his intro MacKenzie declares that he is presenting “10 of the most memorable” books in which fiction and art combine. In these books, from such varied authors as Geoff Dyer, V.S. Naipul, Tatyana Tolstaya, Henry James and John Updike; art is integral in some way, either artwork itself, its creator or even in the place in which it is displayed. In the latter instance, see particularly the entry on Updike, and the quote of the latter’s somewhat creepy description of the spiraling Guggenheim Museum in New York. Mackenzie writes eloquently and even passionately; as he drawing us, in a short space of time and attention, into two intertwined worlds. In this case, the art was created independently of the literature, and yet the latter can shine new meaning and significance on the artworks that their creators might not have considered. You may think and read differently next time you encounter the world of art in fiction, and may also consider things differently the next time you are in an art museum. Some may come to think of these spaces, as he does, “as a kind of secret writer’s retreat.”