Ummm... should we just throw this away?

Posted by Pinky.

We’ve been tidying up the Pinky Show website, which has given us a chance to go through all the old stuff that we had kind of forgotten about and look at it again. There’s some materials that we still use a lot when we go out and do workshops and stuff, but most of the stuff we haven’t looked at in years. And a lot of our reaction to our older work is like, “eww…”

Old diary entries too. Some of the entries are okay, but a fair amount of them are pretty embarrassing to read now. Has our taste changed? Have we improved as writers? Or maybe we’re gotten worse? What was I thinking??? Anyway, it’s hard to tell what all this really means, but one thing that’s clear is that we’re not happy with a lot of the old stuff.

Which brings up the same question over and over again: “Should we even keep this on our website? Or should we just throw it away?”

Well, we decided to keep everything as-is. Some of that stuff really does make us cringe, but like Drittens says, “I hope everybody understands that we are trying to keep growing.” I do like the idea of letting the website be a record of where we’ve been, wrong turns and all.

Still, I really wish I hadn’t written or said lots of those things.

~p.

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Posted by Kim: Don’t worry Pinky, I think it’s good to leave all that embarrassing stuff on the PS website. Even the mistakes and the things you regret saying. I think when people go back and edit out all the stuff they don’t like about their lives, it’s almost like making believe that you were always so smart, or always right.

New old material

Posted by Pinky.

My goodness. Going through the old Pinky Show hard drives, we are finding a lot of materials that for various reasons we never posted to our website. Interviews, lectures, dialogues, performances, notes - a lot of the files are very, very important for people’s learning and they really ought to be shared. Drittens has been preparing these materials for release, but realistically it’s going to take a while because there’s JUST SO MUCH STUFF. And it may take some time to obtain the proper permissions and such - some of the people we worked with have passed away, while for others it’s just been such a long time that we need to reestablish contact. But it will be worth the effort - the information radiates even more power now. ~p.

Making a plan; everybody has a role

Posted by Pinky.

I was expecting planning for Pinky Show v2.0 (2022) to be a lot more challenging than how it was the first time around back in 2005. I was thinking there would be lots of pressure to re-create or improve upon whatever things our viewers used to enjoy, or maybe it’d just be very difficult to adapt our old way of presenting information to new (and presumably unfamiliar) audiences, new trends, and so on.

Well, sitting down with Drittens and Kim and making plans for the next version of Pinky Show has made me remember a few things about how things went the last time (i.e., “the first time”). The main thing was this - Bunny and I weren’t modeling our project on anything that we’d seen before. We were just focused on how to address the problem: “What’s the best way for people to learn about the big problems we’re facing in the world today?” All kinds of violence. Selfishness. Lack of compassion. Disrespect. Injustice. Et cetera. We just wanted to make useful learning materials, based on our analyses of how the world works and who we’re teaching. We weren’t aiming to become popular or even to please anyone.

And now I find us falling into the same way of thinking and working, because, guess what - we still hold the same values, and we’re still focused on speaking directly to the same category of people as before: everyone who wants social, economic, and environmental justice AND happens to connect with our cat way of doing things. Once we accept the reality that there’s always going to be lots and lots of people who will never like us, there’s really no good reason to spend any time or energy feeling down about it.

I think if we just try our hardest to do our best work without being distracted by what anybody else says, everything will turn out okay.

Everything has been going pretty smoothly so far. I think it’ll take around 8-9 months to create a solid conceptual framework and complimentary production workflow, with new work scheduled for release in the last quarter of 2022.

Personally, I’m looking forward to just focusing on direction and writing and research. I’m also willing to contribute some art-stuff (drawing, photography) but this time around I think it’s okay to admit that I really do hate the production-work, the performing in front of a camera, website design and administration - all that stuff. Ghost Bunny and I pass all of that along to you, Drittens!

All teasing aside, I have a lot of confidence that Drittens will figure out the necessary new forms for our way forward. He knows how to think everything Bunny and I ever knew inside and out, but he’s also much stranger, which I think is going to prove to be very meaningful and important for everyone.

You know, I’ve been kind of thinking about this other thing a lot too. Kim often minimizes the importance of her contributions. But even when she doesn’t lift a pen, we really depend on her insight and feedback at morning critiques (a.k.a. breakfast) every single day. She helps set the right energy and direction. I’m so grateful to her.

Take care,
pinky

PINKY SHOW & the internet

Posted by Pinky.

Winter in the desert is my favorite. No matter where in the world I am, as autumn draws to a close I point myself towards Death Valley and start walking. Ever since Bunny and I decided to start the Pinky Show, our little gang has always spent the time around “New Year” together in the desert. I like the cold. Every winter, we try to slow things down, we cook for each other, reflect on the past year, and also dream together about the future.

After Bunny died, for a long time I didn’t want to do any computer stuff. I just wanted time to walk and think, so that’s what I gave myself. That quiet time was clarifying and really important for me, but from time to time I did find myself missing the daily grind of working on the Pinky Show. And of course I really REALLY missed just being around Kim, Mimi, and Drittens. After Mimi passed I started coming home more often. This lead to me and Drittens slowly starting to work on Pinky Show stuff again, although both of us kind of noticed at the same time that we were enjoying face-to-face, in-person interaction much more than the digital-heavy, internet-based project we had been doing from 2005 onward. This is why the past few years Drittens and I have been very content to do all of our teaching and project-work offline.

But, things have a funny way of coming around full circle. In 2005 we started the Pinky Show partly because we wanted to create exactly the kind of educational materials that we wanted to use ourselves in our teaching. Well, now it’s 2021 and the world has changed so much, and we want and need new, different materials to use with our students. We’ve been able to recycle the hell out of our old materials, but even though the fundamental nature of all of the big problems haven’t changed, culture has changed, technology & the internet has changed, and the way people think, feel, and act in the world are always changing too.

So, for these reasons and a few more, Drittens and I have decided that now is a good time to start making new Pinky Show materials again. And if we make them, we’ll make them available on this website for everyone else to use too.

Kim says she will help out, but her #1 priority will still be flying kites. I respect that.

2022 is not 2005, and everything is different now. Bunny’s gone, Mimi’s gone, I’m different, Kim’s different, and now the Pinky Show has Drittens, my favorite cat thinker in the whole world. So we don’t know exactly what the next version of the Pinky Show will be yet, but we already know that we’re not going to try to make it exactly like what it was before. We will just try our best to create what we need, based on our shared analysis of the moment. Which is what we were doing before.

~pinky

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Posted by Drittens: I think part of me is already starting to freak out.