Wednesday June 27th, 2007: Issue #816
Monday started out badly and got worse. Much worse.
Delia and I went up to London to visit an art exhibition and I left my glasses at home. Annoyance #1.
At the station I parked my car, paid for my train tickets and just as the train pulled in a voice came over the intercom: “If a Mr Avis is on the platform, please could he report to the ticket office.” I’d left my credit card in the machine. We missed our train, but at least I got my card back. Annoyance #2.
We arranged to meet a friend for lunch. He waited for half an hour for us, and we waited for half an hour for him. In the rain. Unfortunately, we were both waiting in completely different places and both of us had forgotten to bring the other’s cell phone number. Annoyance #3.
When we got back to the station at 5.30 we found that our car had been broken into. The door is badly damaged and the lock is broken. Nothing was stolen, but the insurance company excess charge is £100, so it’ll be an expensive day’s parking. Annoyance #4.
Then I noticed that Kickstart, which I got up extra early to write before we went out and sent at 8am had not arrived in my own inbox. Further investigation showed that my autoresponder company had a major database problem and was effectively offline. Also, although I have backed up the Kickstart list, I haven’t backed up the You Can Write Articles, the London List or the PLR Secrets one. All can be reconstructed if necessary, but at a cost of a lot of time and effort. Annoyance #5.
Anyway, the good news is that EmailAces appear to have sorted themselves out at last and so I can send you today’s Kickstart!
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Let’s talk about art shall we?
We visited the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London - an annual exhibition of about 1000 works of art chosen from over 10,000 entrants. Having your work accepted to be shown in the RA Summer Exhibition, which has been held every year since 1769, is a feather in the cap of modern artists.
I’m no artistic luddite who thinks that anything that isn’t photographically representative can’t be ‘art’ but I do sometimes wonder if the art establishment is engaging in some giant practical joke. Talk about the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’! Some of the crap that was selected for exhibition was simply staggering in its lack of substance.
Take one artist (term used very loosely) for example. He had four works selected (one would have been overkill) that were all basically minor variations on a pointless theme: a large rectangle of aluminum with a scrunched up black plastic trash bag glued on it.
Art? Not in my book.
Or one of the winners of a prestige ‘best in exhibition’ award: a six-inch high piece of wooden doweling carved to look like a burnt candle.
Art? Please, will someone explain it to me!
Or the large canvas that had a few random splodges of paint. There were lots of those.
Art? Wallcovering perhaps. Colorful, to be charitable. But art? Come on. Who are they trying to kid?
How about the bronze statue of a Hindu god that the ‘artist’ had bought from a shop and then attached a shiny brass banana and two brass eggs to in an obvious position.
Art? The statue was lovely, but that was someone else’s work. What was being presented was at best smutty schoolboy humor. It was attempting to offend, but frankly the only thing offensive was its silliness. Of course, it was entered into the RA Summer Exhibition by a famous ‘modern’ artist who is loved by the art establishment. That must have given it a head start!
Of course art has to push boundaries and try new things. Without experimental art we’d have never had impressionism, cubism or pop art. And I’ll defend anyone’s right to like things that I don’t like. But surely there has to be some kind of objective judgment as to whether something has merit or is just a cynical attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the self-opinionated glitterati of the art world?
Perhaps a degree of thought as to whether creating a piece shows any unique skill would be enough.
If anyone could go home and reproduce it, then the piece is at best a craft item, not, in my book, a work of art,
Art, surely, must encompass artistic skill.
Or perhaps the joke is really on me and I just can’t see it.
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition isn’t all bad though. The real crap does serve a purpose - it makes the good stuff stand out and shine.
We bought a small linocut print that will look great on our wall and will be enjoyed for years to come. I bought my first real artwork from a Royal Academy Summer Exhibition nearly 30 years ago and we have enjoyed it on the wall of our living room every day since.
That kind of lasting appreciation is one measure of artistic quality. One that works for me.
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I mentioned Squidoo last week and how I’ve built my first lens - at http://www.squidoo.com/easy_time_management/
Squidoo is fun to use and very easy. If you are new to websites, it is a great place to start, and of course, it costs nothing! Even better!
What makes even more sense is to build several lenses (the name Squidoo uses for the one-page sites you build) and link them all together. That’s a strategy I plan to start using because it can help you get great search engine love for both your network of Squidoo lenses and your other sites.
My friend Dr Mani has just released a very good report on advanced strategies for Squidoo. In it he explains exactly how you can easily build small networks of lenses and shows you the very best ways to do so. He also explains what you should include in your lenses and a lot more besides.
Mani has been a Squidoo fan since its very early days and has built up a lot of knowledge about how to get the best out of this excellent site.
If you are not Squidooing already you should be. The place is growing at such a fast rate that you really need to establish your presence there - even if you have nothing to sell yet. There have been 17,000 new lenses built in the last week alone: the total is now 177,500 and rising rapidly.
With Mani’s report, ‘Advanced Squidoo Profit Secrets’ you will be starting out on the right footing. Your lenses will never get lost in the mass!
To paraphrase a cliché, don’t Squidoo without it!
http://www.urlnex.us/advancedsquidoo/
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As my emails to you haven’t been getting through it seems unfair to stick to my original plan of offering fast-acting affiliates a higher commission for the the first week or so of my new ebook’s launch period.
Right now the affiliate commission (through ClickBank) for ‘Total Time Control in 14 Days’ is set at 70%, but I planned on reducing it to 60% at the end of this week.
Instead, I’m keeping it at 70% now for three weeks from today.
That will give all early-bird affiliates the chance to tell their lists about this great new book (I would say that wouldn’t I) and get about $23 per sale for themselves!
Your affiliate URL will be http://xxxxx.mravis.hop.clickbank.net (replacing the xxxxx with your ClickBank affiliate id).
If you have any questions or problems about promoting ‘Total Time Control in 14 Days’ let me know and I’ll help out in any way I can.
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What extraordinary weather the UK has been suffering. Rainfall in some parts of the country has been awful with widespread flooding resulting.
Thankfully we have been spared the really bad weather where I live, but my thoughts are with the families of those poor people who have lost their lives and the many thousands who have no idea what state their homes will be in when they are finally allowed to return to them.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/6240038.stm
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An Inspirational Thought
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What are you going to do today?
People who study these things say that every single one of us will have over 30,000 thoughts today. That sounds amazing doesn’t it?
30,000 thoughts!
The only problem is that 99.9% of them will be the same thoughts that we had yesterday. And the day before.
They will be mundane, habitual thoughts like ‘I fancy a cup of coffee’ or ‘What can I eat tonight’ or ‘Where did I leave my keys?’
These habitual thoughts are programmed into our minds. We can’t stop ourselves from thinking them any more than we can stop breathing.
Don’t beat yourself up over them. Just accept.
But in accepting the mundane, why not make a positive attempt to raise the stakes?
If only 0.1% of your thoughts each day are likely to sparkle, why not light up the sky with them?
After all, 0.1% of 30,000 is still 30 fresh thoughts. 30 wonderfully new ideas for you to capture, mull over and dazzle yourself with!
The question I asked was ‘What are you going to do today?’
Are you going to do the same as yesterday and wonder why you keep getting the same results? Or, just for once, are you going to pay attention to your own brilliance and make today incandescent?
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Who do you know who would love Kickstart Today?
Don’t keep it to yourself - send them to
http://www.kickstartdaily.com today!
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The Quote of the Day
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Lou Holtz said,
“Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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Brian Tracy said,
“Your biggest opportunity probably lies under your own feet in your current job, industry, education, experience or interests.”
Let’s look a bit closer at that quote from Brian Tracy.
How many of us have the strange belief that to be successful, we have to be doing something different?
We seem to feel that a complete change is the only way that we can make things go well for us.
What is that all about?
If we can’t make a success of what we are doing now, why do we think that doing something completely different will make us change our behavior?
The key is in the two words ‘different’ and ‘differently’.
Doing something different doesn’t imply that we will change our way of working. Just that we will apply the same old behaviors to a new project.
Doing something differently, however, implies that we take a fresh look at our own interactions with our tasks.
When Brian Tracy says, “Your biggest opportunity probably lies under your own feet in your current job, industry, education, experience or interests,” he is putting his finger right on the button.
The things that you feel you are failing at right now, are things that you probably know a great deal about. Too much, perhaps, if you have stopped seeing them with fresh eyes.
Your experience is getting in the way of your success.
Rather than going off looking for greener grass, which will still need cutting and watering, take a moment to think WHY the grass you are standing on right now is turning brown.
Think about what you are doing, the way you are doing it, why you are doing it, how you are doing it - even where you’re doing it and with whom. Look at ALL the influences and see what you can change to do it differently.
They say that a change is a good as a rest, but even more powerfully, a change is often the spark that can explode completely unexpected success.
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Fascinating Facts
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Katherine Hepburn and Barbara Streisand are the only two actresses to ever tie for the best actress Oscar.