Hasta La Gadget!

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — The Palestinian-American teenager who relatives allege was beaten by Israeli authorities returned home to Florida late Wednesday, saying he will never think of freedom in the same way again.

Tariq Abu Khdeir, 15, and his mother flew back to Tampa on a flight arriving from New York and were greeted by about 50 cheering supporters waving American and Palestinian flags. The Khdeirs had flown out of Israel earlier in the day. “I am only 15 but I will never think of freedom the same as I did two months ago,” Tariq said upon arrival at Tampa International Airport. “No child, Palestinian or Israeli, deserves to be killed.”

The teenager, who spoke only a few minutes, said prayers had helped him through his ordeal. He also said he can’t wait to see his friends and go fishing.

Hassan Shibly, the teen’s attorney and the executive director of the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, had said Tariq suffered head trauma and had to receive stitches on his face when beaten two weeks ago as he was arrested during a protest. Supporters say Tariq’s beating was videotaped. The Israeli justice ministry has said an investigation has been opened into the footage.

There were no immediately apparent signs of injuries to Khdeir on his arrival.

Israeli authorities released Tariq shortly after his arrest and sentenced him to nine days of house arrest while they investigated what they say was his participation in violent protests over the death of Tariq’s cousin, 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir. His family denied that he participated in the protests. Palestinians suspect Mohammed Abu Khdeir was killed by Israeli extremists exacting revenge for the abduction and killings of three Israeli teens in the West Bank last month. 

His mother, Suha Khdeir, said Wednesday in Tampa that the last two weeks had been a “nightmare.” She wiped tears from her eyes as she spoke.

Friends and family have said Tariq went on a vacation to visit relatives he hadn’t seen in about 10 years — not to be part of a conflict. They have described him as a good student who likes basketball, soccer and video games.

Tariq’s arrest happened shortly before Israel attacked Gaza to stop Hamas members from launching rockets into its territory. Earlier Wednesday, Israel and Hamas agreed to a five-hour U.N. brokered “humanitarian” pause to their 9-day-long battle, offering the most encouraging sign yet that the fierce fighting could come to an end. Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has killed more than 200 Palestinians, including four boys struck on a beach Wednesday by shells fired from a navy ship.

It’s the slowest sports night of the year and that means two things: Sports fans get back to their real lives for a few fleeting hours and many of the world’s best athletes get all dressed up for the ESPY awards.

As has become tradition, ESPN holds its annual sports award show on the night after Major League Baseball’s All-Star game. With no MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL games being played on that night, ESPN needs the programming and plenty of sports stars don’t have any other pressing plans. They trade in their uniforms for suits and gowns and their cleats for dress shoes and high heels.

The 22nd annual ESPY Awards were held at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on Wednesday night with Drake presiding as the host. In attendance were some of the biggest names and most dynamic performers from the wide world of sports. There were football stars from the NFL and World Cup heroes who play the world’s football mingling with Olympians, NBA stars, college athletes and just about anyone who might ever find themselves on “SportsCenter.”

When I take my dog for a walk, he may be the one on the leash, but he’s definitely the one who walks me. He decides where we go, how fast we get there and when it’s time to go home.

Marketing professionals are used to this. While it may seem like we have the power because we hold the leash — we have the ability to dictate our brand’s content, strategy and channels — it’s really the customers who are in control, and it’s our job (with the help of sales and customer service representatives) to nurture our relationships with them.

Like being a dog owner, managing relationships with your customers is a huge responsibility. It takes a whole lot of time and effort. But transfer these four pillars of pet ownership to your relationships with your customers, and you can retain customers who will be very loyal to your brand. Dog might be man’s best friend, but the customer is brand’s best friend.

1. Give them attention.
If you’ve ever come home from an eight-hour workday to a big slobbery dog kiss, you’re probably aware of how much attention you need to give your four-legged friends. Engaging your customers also requires being attentive. That means when they have an issue, you listen to their concerns, care about their dissatisfaction and do everything in your power to reach a solution. Has a customer let you know that he/she is dissatisfied with your product or service? Figure out where that dissatisfaction stems from and take the necessary steps to correct it.

If you don’t give your dissatisfied customers the attention they need, they’ll get that attention elsewhere — likely by bashing your brand to anyone else who will listen. (I suppose it’s better than peeing on your carpet.) Also, keep in mind that preventive maintenance is just as important (if not more important) than solving problems after they occur, so make sure to check in with all your customers — not just the unhappy ones.

2. Train them.
You don’t need to carry a bag of treats around for every time your customers do something right. (We’ll assume they’re already housebroken.) However, you can train your customers, in a way, by rewarding positive behavior that could result in brand loyalty. If you sell a product, thank them for making a purchase by offering discounts or other rewards to encourage them to keep buying or provide them with a value not offered by your competitors.

It’s also important to remember that, much like training a pet, reacting negatively in any situation can damage any strides made in strengthening a relationship between your brand and your brand’s ambassadors. Yelling at or becoming frustrated with your dog is not going to make him more loyal — just more scared. Likewise, treating your customers poorly when they have a complaint is the quickest way to make them run the other direction.

3. Approach change slowly.
You can’t teach old customers new tricks. Isn’t that how the saying goes? Basically, humans (like dogs) are creatures of habit, and they aren’t always the most receptive to change. On the bright side, this means if you can form a strong relationship with your customers, they will be more likely to stick with your brand habitually. On the not-so-bright side, it means your customers may be turned off by the changes you make as your brand evolves.

Think about the ever-changing look of Facebook and the backlash you hear each time a redesign occurs. Innovation is essential to keeping your brand current, but you also have to make sure you aren’t leaving your customers behind in the process. Make changes gradually, or allow your customers to opt in or out of the changes so they can evolve with you.

4. Read their behaviors.
When your dog whines next to his food dish or scratches at the screen door, you can make fairly sound assumptions about what those behaviors mean, despite the lack of direct communication spelling it out for you. Similarly, your customers might not always write you a heated email or leave you a nasty voicemail venting about why they’re dissatisfied. Much like our dogs, we can often learn more from customer behaviors than we can from their direct communication with us.

Customer surveys and social media/web analytics are great ways to monitor these behaviors. Surveys allow you to ask your customers direct questions about their behaviors, while analytics let you monitor consumer behaviors firsthand. No matter what method you use to find the information, understanding your customers’ behaviors is critical to knowing how to best interact with them to keep them interested in your brand.

For many years I have been thinking more and more that everything must be, should be, and can be queered, or gayified, or lavenderized, or bent. At conferences, or in classes, or during conversations, I consistently say that I am only interested in queering things, which usually refers to queering literature. But I also mean that I am only interested in queering ideas. Of course, I am not saying that I refuse to read straight literature. That would be stupid. But I am saying that I want to read as much gay literature as straight. And I truly only want to write gay literature. If I offend people, or make them feel uncomfortable, when I say that I am only interested in queering things, then that’s good, and I truly don’t care; it means that I am shaking their comfortable status quo.

I wish to share an excerpt from an essay I wrote. It was published in the second issue of the fourth volume of The Blue Notebook: The Journal for Artists’ Books (April 2010). The title is “Queering Artists’ Books: A Queer Critical Analysis of Artists’ Books,” and I did exactly that: I queered the genre of artists’ books. I wrote it for a class on the history of artists’ books that I took for my degree in library and information science. And the kind editors at The Blue Notebook happily chose to publish it.

Queering Artists’ Books: A Queer Critical Analysis of Artists’ Books

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
–Immanuel Kant

The purpose of this essay is to queer the art form of artists’ books, by examining the relationship between artists’ books and the queer sensibility and the community of queer writers and artists who create them, and also the members of the queer community who read and collect them. This essay will also show the similarity between artists’ books and the queer community with regards to the marginalisation of both. By queer, I mean members of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersexed, Questioning, and Queer — or GLBTIQ — community. I propose to investigate the intersection and correlation of the following entities: artists’ books, zines, the book arts, book artists, queer book artists, queer artists’ books, queer zines, queer literature, queer readers, queer theory, queer studies, queer culture, the queer sensibility, and the queer community.

I am not proposing to define or re-define artists’ books, nor to analyse a collection of artists’ books with queer themes, nor those created by queer book artists. Instead, with a queer critical lens, I want to apply a queer analysis, perspective, sensibility, and voice to the artform of artists’ books. I wish to create a queer discourse that will add to the examination of artists’ books, bringing more approaches to how we discuss and analyse the field and artform of artists’ books.

From the Beginning

Twelve years ago, in 1998, I attended a workshop at the Center for Book Arts in New York City. I was teaching high school English at the time, so I chose to attend a workshop on incorporating artists’ books into English classes. That day, I learned much about artists’ books and made my own, not a complete book, but the front and back covers, with blank sheets of paper in between.

I observed something that I considered to be fascinating: I observed that I was not the only gay man present, or for that matter the only queer person or member of the GLBT community in the room. It was an interesting observation, but not something that I wished to pursue further at that time.

However, it was the beginning of an idea (or theory), that there is something queer about artists’ books and that there is a relationship between artists’ books and the queer community. I thought (and still think) that, both artists’ books and the queer community are marginalised. In addition, I noted that artists’ books and the queer community both have roots and histories in the 1960s, New York City, San Francisco, and the Feminist Movement (or Women’s Movement). Also, artists’ books and the queer community use new, different, unconventional, nontraditional, odd, and/or “queer” ways to integrate their existence and to have their voices heard, within the larger communities, societies, or worlds in which they belong.

Now, twelve years later, remembering that day and thinking about my queer observation during the workshop, I feel this idea deserves further thought, analysis, and attention.

What Does It Mean to Be Queer?

As a gay man, I have my own definition of the word “queer.” For me, a person who wishes to identify as queer is one who wishes not to conform to the status quo; is one who sees himself/herself/itself as different with regards to the mainstream society; is one who does not fit in with the norms of society, which is most likely the sexual and gender norms of the society. However, I do not think that one has to be homosexual in order to identify as queer; heterosexual individuals can also identify as queer. Being queer is being different. In her book, Queer Theory: An Introduction, Annamarie Jagose explains the meaning of the word “queer”: Once the term ‘queer’ was, at best, slang for homosexual, at worst a term of homophobic abuse. In recent years ‘queer’ has come to be used differently, sometimes as an umbrella term for a coalition of culturally marginal sexual self-identifications and at other times to describe a nascent theoretical model, which has developed out of more traditional lesbian and gay studies.

However, in her essay, “A Man Who Wants to Be a Woman” Queerness as/and Healing Practices in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven”, Nada Elia explains that “queers will name but not ‘define’ themselves, because no definition can encompass the multiplicity of queer experiences and practices”.

Queer Literature: A Queer Aesthetic

If artists’ books are to be considered as artistic and literary, then queer artists’ books can be a part of the history and tradition of queer literature. On the queer aesthetic in/of queer literature, the New York Public Library’s Gay and Lesbian Collections and AIDS/HIV Collections’ Gay and Lesbian Studies Research Guide states: “Throughout the centuries, homosexual literature has remained hidden in plain sight, never far from view but elusive to all except those who created and read it. Thus ghettoised, gay literature was the furtive province of imagined moral guilt and perceived deviant sexuality, inhabited by doomed homosexuals and social outcasts.” Thus, both artists’ books (as literature) and queer literature are similar in that they are not popular literatures within mainstream society — they have been “hidden” from the general public. This is another aspect that they share. This also adds to their relationship.

The Relationship Between Artists’ Books and the Queer Community

I have been researching and writing about marginalised groups, such as Italian Americans and members of the GLBTQ community, especially as writers, in literature, and within the literary community. I wrote my thesis for my Master of Arts degree in English on the marginalisation of Italian American writers and Italian American literature. As I was conducting the research for my thesis, I discovered another topic that interested me even more: the marginalisation of Queer Italian American writers and their literature, and the rejection of Gay Italian Americans in society. I noticed the lack of Queer Italian American writers, and the lack of reference to them. I noticed that their stories were not told, their voices not heard, their existence ignored. In my thesis, I devoted a section to GLBTQ Italian American writers. I have always been fascinated by marginalities and the varied levels of discrimination in any society. I am particularly interested in how marginalised people live, survive, and thrive, creating their own fulfilled lives, creating their own art, and adding value to their communities and societies, while overcoming adversity. Always feeling like an outcast myself, I am captivated by the perseverance of the “other” and the non-conformist in any society. As a Gay Italian-American male, I never saw my life depicted in the books that I read, especially the books that I was assigned to read in school. This is debilitating for the growth of one’s own identity.

The art form of artists’ books is marginalised within the larger, prevailing artistic community of other more popular artforms. The queer community is marginalised within the larger, dominant heterosexual community. Both exist on the fringes of larger communities. Both exist in the periphery of predominant cultures and communities, and I am interested in investigating whether or not a relationship exists between these two marginalised entities.

Joanna Drucker, in her essay, Critical Issues/Exemplary Works, writes: “For years, artists’ books have remained one of the last zones of artistic production that doesn’t have an organized culture of gate-keeping…. Because the field of artists’ books suffers from being under-theorized, under-historicized, under-studied, and under-discussed, it isn’t taken very seriously”.

Zines, the Zine Movement, and the Queer Community

In her essay, Artists, Books, Zines, Janet Zweig explains the zine movement: “While book artists were either abandoning or fetishising the form in the ’80s, there was a burgeoning underground zine movement that fulfilled many of the promises made for the artist’s book a decade before…. Zines have succeeded with those ambitions connected to audience and communication where most artists’ books have failed”.

In Queer Zines, Chris Wilde explains the importance of queer zines: Queer zines have helped [to] liberate and transform several generations, from the political newsletters of our lesbian sisters and gay brothers in the 1970s and 1980s, to the queer manifestos and transgender resource guides of today. They documented and demonstrated the life, love, politics, camp, gender-bending, writhing, and spurting of a queer revolution. Queer zine preservationists help [to] propagate the cultures of rebellion that have formed on the fringes of sexual, gender, racial, cultural, and class minorities by insuring those voices are preserved and heard. We defend the place of queer zines in the context of history and use them as a counterbalance to mainstream gay and lesbian assimilationist thought.

Final Queer Thoughts on Artists’ Books

I feel that there is definitely something queer about artists’ books. In writing this essay and creating my own artist’s book, I once again discovered my own queer voice, which proves that artists’ books can help someone, whether queer or not, to find his/her own voice, self-worth, and place in the world.

William Faulkner wrote: “Some things you must always be unable to bear — injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame — just refuse to bear them.” I can no longer bear being rejected, marginalised, ignored, silenced, and invisible. No one should have to. And as a gay man, I do not want to. I hope that this essay — and my work in the future — will prove meaningful; informing and enhancing society, and effect some positive change for the lives of those who are members of sexual minority groups, bringing them from the margins to the centre.

We all know what it’s like to chug along on fumes: not much fun. The added problem is that our clients, customers and colleagues also know when we’re exhausted, stressed and hungry. Our diminished condition almost certainly detracts from the work we do.

I want to talk for a moment about taking care of ourselves. I’m going to tear through some of the more obvious ways to do that: get enough sleep, exercise, eat right, don’t smoke, drink a lot of water and not much alcohol. We can’t cheat on these rules for very long without consequences.

I want to suggest another rule, though, that is not so obvious, specifically for us as salon professionals, but anyone devoted to service and the quality of their work could fall prey. It is an ironic hazard of any such profession, I think, that when we spend so much time and attention making our clients beautiful, on making them feel great, that we sometimes neglect ourselves.

We’re certainly not oblivious to our own appearance and happiness but these are probably not our focus. Our clients and our work matter so much that we sometimes overlook our own needs. We see their smiles and that is a terrific source of personal satisfaction. Our own appearance may not seem near so important as the service or product we provide but it certainly sets a tone that translates into value and reputation. That appearance not only affects the experience of our clients but also how we feel about ourselves.

I am not suggesting that we ‘get all dolled up’ for work every day, like we’re headed for the red carpet. I do know, though, that we feel better if we look great and our clients certainly notice.

Try this: Take the time to do something more or different with your appearance some day this week. Step up your clothes or change your makeup. Buy a new pair of really comfortable yet fashionable work shoes that will make standing a lot easier on your body. Some of us already provide our clients with a hand massage while their color is processing. Do that for yourself after work. Run a soothing hot bath and pamper yourself with these same products you so diligently pamper your clients with. Set aside 10 minutes a day to meditate. This is about elevating ourselves at work and at home which results in being happier and healthier overall.

We should regularly make the effort to look great for our clients and for ourselves, but a one-day experiment will highlight the effect. Monitor the outcome. Take note of how other people act toward you. More importantly, reflect on how you feel.

As always, be open to change.