The Jules Siegel Story

I am a self-referential artist. I realized a long time ago that I really didn’t know much for sure. Everything I thought I knew was subject to interpretation. I became interested in phenomenology and spent much time reading Joel Fort, who is perhaps known as an anecdotalist of the absurd and strange, but was really asking What do we really know?

I saw that the only truths that I knew were the ones that I had seen with my own eyes and felt with my own heart. I began writing about that to the exclusion of almost all other themes. Eventually, it boiled down to me, and my story, and my thoughts.

To write well, you want to do things the easy way, to use the simplest words and style to express the most complex thoughts. Some writers attain that by constant polishing. I aim at the spontaneity and clarity of intelligent conversation. I don’t really work at writing all that much. The language is called forth by the need to communicate my thoughts exactly as if I were speaking out loud. A lot of work and many, many awkward false starts went into the development of that technique, but now it’s like riding a bicycle. I don’t construct sentences. I use the keyboard like a saxophone. I don’t write a story. I blow it, man.

I know a little about programming because I do quite a bit of Web design. I hate this. It is like washing endless dishes that never get clean while they bite and snap at your fingers like angry clams. I have to really work hard at being lazy and stupid. That is all the more reason (Read the link to understand this.) to be as lazy and stupid as possible. How else could the work ever get done?

My programming skills are so limited that I have to keep everything really simple. I never even dominated the infuriating clunkiness of html. Faced with CSS, I now just use WordPress and spend a lot of time looking through themes and trying them out and adapting them with my bare knowledge of CSS.

I have some WordPress sites running now, of which the latest is

Idealities, Serving your inner idealist, is the front end for a kitchen-table sustainable theme park start-up. It began as some notes and sketches for a post 9/11 theme park by John R. Drury, former Disney Imagineering design director, whose credits include Tokyo Disneyworld. If you have been to any Disney theme park, you’ve seen his signage, among the many other visual elements and concepts that he created in his twenty-five years with them. John is a one-man idea factory, a brilliant illustrator with the ability to make the most improbable construct look not only perfectly feasible but utterly enticing.

I started as a hired hand and have been taken in as a partner. I am the only one who draws money. The basic concept began with world conquest through amusement park rides. The other guys involved will start screaming at me for saying this, but it’s a valid concept. How would you really design a completely sustainable and environmentally ethical theme park? Idealism quickly emerged as as the dominant consideration. You’d have to be a totally committed idealist. I’m sure you will especially appreciate our business plan:

Illustration by John R. Drury

Newsroom-l, News and issues for journalists and other gifted imbeciles, grew out of my frustrations with the limitations of ASCII email listserv medium. I tend to neglect this site, but I have been paying more attention to it lately. My son, Jesse, has been pushing me to do more with it.

He was very happy when I published The origins of gaming and operations research in the ‘I Ching’ a few weeks ago. I plan to obey my son’s wishes and write more in my “characteristic style,” as he put it.

Finally, there are Cancun Today and Anita Brown Photography which are self-explanatory.

Photograph by Anita Brown.

Anita’s site, especially, needs to be refined, but just as it is, it has given her a place to express her really formidable photographic creativity. She was way too self-critical at first, but I encouraged her to relax and do some photojournalism without waiting to capture the special affectionate light that is her greatest gift. Some days, you get pictures that aren’t exactly Pete Turner masterpieces, but contain interesting and valuable information and cultural insights.

All in all, I consider my sites working prototypes at varying states of development. At some point, the real financing will arrive, and I will be able to hire professionals to execute my design policies, which will free me up to create content. Then I can fully indulge myself in being lazy and stupid. Meanwhile, I will be very interested in your comments.