C+ :: A New Day's Risin'

Today's Thickwit is an entrepreneur, political organizer and style genius. He writes today about his burgeoning enterprise and social movement, C+. He likes more old school jams than he cares to admit and hob nobs with first graders and future first ladies alike. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you thank you, you're far too kind. A legend in his own time-- Christopher Mueller.

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I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how its going to begin.

The Matrix ::

What is this "matrix" we so often speak of? Ah yes, the system. That perpetual treadmill that is so difficult to step off of. No need to waste time defining it, since we seem to have this intuitive sense of what that system is, though a comprehensive definition is seemingly elusive, since the network that binds the matrix together is so shrouded in darkness. How, then, does the matrix maintain?

Culture ::

Our capitalist system survives by (among many things) the existence of a capitalist, consumer culture. This consumer culture acts as a design to living and is patterned for interpreting the world around you. In other words, it is constructed specifically to serve as a lens through which you come to interpret and understand your reality.

Brands ::

Brands develop pseudo spiritual meaning systems by appropriating human qualities, emotions, characteristics, and ideals, attaching compelling visual and sound elements, and associating their symbols with them. Ultimately, in a consumer society, this mediates our ability to construct authentic identities and communities. We are a nation of Saturn Families, Safeway Club Members, Nike Athletes, Toys R Us Kids and Starbucks Communities. We consume to belong, and as an outer-directed people, we come to reflect and project the images that exist most immediately in our visual landscape.

Imagemakers ::

Our ability to construct an attractive appearance is done with First World advancement, yet our inner world is impoverished like the Fourth, Fifth and Six. We are an outer-directed people, trapped so close to the surface that we have become exiled there. We cultivate a pedagogy of exteriority, but where does that leave us? Commodity rich and spiritually poor.

We Live to Work. We Work to Consume. We Consume until nothing is left. And it all goes back in the box. We are masters of the Monopoly Board, bored out of our minds, mind's eye wide Lasik surgeried shut.

So what is the answer?

(among many)

See Plus.

See More.

See Beyond Context.

Enhance our vision.

What we visualize is what we become.

"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled." - Jon Berger, Ways of Seeing

The thought process gives rise to actions. If it is behavior we hope to change, we've got to revisualize and reframe the images and ideas that govern that thought process.

Vision as an ancient metaphor for human spiritual insight, has a history so robust, that it doesn't need much explanation. I was blind but now I see. Seeing the light. Where there is no vision the people perish. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. These are just a few examples of how vision comes to signify transformation and enlightenment.

Even your favorite rappers spit it to you. Jay-Z says, "I wish you insight so you can see for yourself." Nas says, "As I grow yearly, I can see things more clearly, thats why they fear me." The metaphor is everywhere. Think about it. Look for it.

C+ = See Plus. C+ is hidden in the form of a letter and a symbol because we have a tendency to look no further than the surface, proving a mediocre sense of symbol literacy. What did you think C+ meant? Maybe a letter grade? Maybe that computer language?

In retaining the philosophical depth beneath the letter and symbol, C+, we hope to begin a habitual process to question all images and seek the meaning beneath all surfaces. It is our belief that seeing beyond the boundaries of difference, to see the commonality of "us," and the humanity we all share, will begin a process of social and cultural transformation, in a very positive direction.

Are you serious?? ::

We know its an ambitious idea. We also know its a bit contradictory to house such a progressive idea into such a regressive entity, a brand. But you have to experience the game in order to have any idea about how to improve it. If it were up to us, we'd have written a few books, but not enough young people read. We'd have developed a school curriculum but not everyone has the privilege to attend quality schools. And besides, we're so much better at cultivating ignorance.

Everyday we are bombarded with visual messages. Those messages piece together to form our perceptions of the world around us, ultimately governing our behavior. Again, improving the quality of the image, improves the thought process, which improves the actions that arise from that thought process. We thought to slip our ideas into the conversation, since the language of consumption seems to be the most proliferated.



So we began a project, called C+, based on the universal sensory experience of vision. We seek clarity in our sight. We seek a more worldly, humanitarian perspective. We seek to break old paradigms, and uplift new ones. We seek to re-frame our visual dialog. We seek sight beyond context. We seek circumspection. We seek to beautify our visual landscape, and to diminish the overwhelming clutter. We seek to construct new, positive imagery. We choose light over darkness.

We serve you, in hopes that you will seek forward progress with us.



The product is a conduit for an idea, and the enterprise of selling the product sustains our dialog with you. What were once the building blocks of our creative identity and imagination, now in a new context, become a metaphor for visual enhancement. Have a look.



A New Beginning ::

Improvement begins when we question the assumptions that form the foundation of our worldview, to deconstruct the perceptions we have, to challenge the limitations of our vantage point, to see beyond the surface of an image, to seek alternative perspectives beyond our own, to look past the boundaries of ideological divisions...to seek clarity in our vision.

Re-visualize your notion of what is truth, and bear witness to it, in all its neckidness.




I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world...without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries...a world...where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.

It all depends on how you see it.

C+



visit C+ Jewelry to participate in the effort to reframe our visual dialog, and for some fresh jewelry.

The night is dark before dawn. And day is coming.

Bear Witness.

C+

Why It's Okay to Write About Deceased Peoples from the 1960s: Jimi & Me

Dalia Rubiano Yedidia is a mixed(up) kid who likes matching, organizing--not of the Excel spreadsheet variety, and has an unhealthy yet loving relationship with fried foods of all kinds. She has made a habit of (un)inhabiting multiple places that she desperately uses as remedy for her perpetual feeling of lack. Having moved 8 times in the last 2 years, she currently finds herself in Chicago, writing for the first time in a while and loving sticky summer. She is painfully insightful and an uncanny judge of character. Dalia is the epitome of thick wit. Curvy and no holds barred, we're honored to have her featured.
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Some artists control my inspiration thresh-hold, altering every book and movie and song and image I ingest thereafter, like the first time I witnessed the witching hour and watched the sun wash out the stars, or excruciatingly realizing that my mom, like the rest of us, surrenders to pain and mortality sincerely, quietly . After the 7th grade or so, these geniuses, with crippling thoughts that they manage to generously share and poignantly impose, have rarely been musicians. However, using up my one-time only 'free pass' to write about a dead rocker from the 60s, here's my ode to Jimi Hendrix and his supernatural power over me. Go ahead: add it to the list. Diverging from one of our favorite pastimes as writers, which is one of the most common motivators for us to actually get down to business and write for once, I am not trying to 'stroke the ego' combining my nimble fingers and fast internet connection. This is not Dalia trying to subtly scream the "oh-my-god-let-me-tell-you-all-the-reasons-why-I-love-him-more-than-you-
and-am-more-familiar-with-his-discography-than-you-ever-could-be-and-am-
far-superior-to-any-other-fan-because-I-know--that-he-hated-trimming-his-
toenails-and-was-allergic-to-night-shade-vegetables [eggplant, tomato, mandrake, and the like]" type of intellectual masturbation. Nope, my relationship with Jimi, though it does include a number of rotations around the sun since the first time I heard Voodoo Child, has nothing to do with a hardcore authentic pure fanatic blood-spilled-willingly history. I've only owned one album of his my entire life, and, inflaming my already infamous rosy cheeks, it's a compilation.

Yet, something within my tangled hair and archetypical teen desire to belong is wrenched raw with each measure of precariously balanced guitar and drums that clasp their lyrics steadily, soothing my longing and confusion unlike any piece of writing, carton of McDonalds' fries, or execution of my frequent impulse to flee to a new city. My first exposure when I was five years old was not a random and beautifully romantic personal choice that we sometimes stumble across in our childhoods, and now share with pride on first dates or Facebook. Nope, it was actually an involuntary listening to Electric Lady Land via my older brother's tape player. How's that for a big bro watching out for his hermanita?

Since this un-noteworthy (and clearly undeserving of a piece of writing) primary encounter and subsequent purchase of the Jimi Hendrix Experience during my record-buying middle school days, Jimi has entered and exited my life quietly, and yet noticeably, many times. Growing up in San Francisco, my next door neighbor's ex-husband invented the Light Show, the ingenious visual orgy that mixes colors and fluid formations with music and pulsating body movements; an 'art experience' whose soundtrack easily included a Hendrix song or two. Naturally, Hendrix was on frequent rotation next door, in addition to the few tepid hits (comparatively to his full library) like Foxy Lady and Purple Haze on the local old white rocker radio station. And yet, as I non-challantly dismiss his popular anthems, I can't help but allow the little hairs that dot my forearms begin to raise just thinking about the guitar intro to the latter and its impending epic explosion of poetry and riff and mayhem.


He also became a facet of my daily listening and tonal memory to the Freedom Summer of 2007, where a good-friend-turned-more-turned-tragedy put, in my humble (literally, as you now know) opinion, one of his most powerfully written and gorgeously vibrated ditties, Bold as Love, on a mixtape dubbed the soundtrack of that Summer. While this majestic musical magnum opus of a mere 4 minutes is now quite obviously and painfully connected to a loss deep and familiar like July Chicago heat or the wrinkles around my Abuelita's eyeballs, I refuse to believe that this is the only reason Jimi affects me so.

Listening to him is an urgency wound into words too tight and fragile to mention. It is a change in mood, breeze, a captivating hurt that won't let go of the wrists and ankles; it is not easy-listening. Even as I lay here, attempting to write about music -- which we all know is like 'dancing about architecture" -- I cannot play him unassumingly in the background, fading in and out of my Sunday night thoughts that include calculating how long I'll actually have to stay at work tomorrow, or what the "..." really meant in that ambiguous text message from someone whose face I can't quite pull together from my Friday night excursions (?). No, Jimi demands complete attention of my body, my ears, my sensory memory and my willingness to surrender control. Digesting his vibrations is like watching the sunset fracture the Pacific Ocean from Taraval and 48th Avenue with Nano and his dad, a frantic, wired professor who trails off chaotically about how sunsets are one of those rare collection of moments that only get prettier as time stretches forth. He claims that only the older generation, bruised by nostalgia and dripping with the desire to impart knowledge, can truly discern them. The clouds fade into a limitless foam and the sky folds deep into its own routine of detaching and allowing night to cloak us with possibility.

I've recently found myself wishing life into a more linear course, only becoming more beautiful with each inch of time she reluctantly reveals to us. But somehow, while Jimi is just like the sunset and my unsatisfied youth, which currently lies within my unanswered--and typically selfish and implausible--prayer for a manageable life path, he is also the epitome of that capricious pattern of longing, knowing, mourning, melding, falling, and shaping that all of us are too familiar with before we even wake up each day, before we remember we are breathing. He holds me down in a way that is incomplete, vast; each bar is filled with waiting and fragmented disbelief, making it both unsettling and wholly transformative. No one will ever have me quite like he does, but then again, despite my certainty of his now familiar grasp, each chord beckons the nameless, spirals of seconds determined to unfurl. Until that twisted and bitter root called love finds its way into this half-step shuffle to complete that paradox, I'll have to keep giving myself to a rainbow like you.

Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival

Brave New Voices hits D.C. this Tuesday. Featuring 400+ young poets from all over the planet. They'll be joined by talented folks such Ishle Yi Park, Beau Sia, Rafael Casal, George Watsky, Sonia Sanchez, Idriss Elba, and two Bay Area Slam teams. Buck. Buck. Lickle Shot. Blau. More info.