Jay Greathouse Teaches

“No matter how cynical I get, it’s just never enough to keep up.” Lily Tomlin

Once a promising science student, I dropped out of the career game in revulsion at the purposes science served. At the time the wrongness of United States aggression upon Vietnam seemed obvious.

The arts temporarily became my refuge. This came to an end with the oil shortages and other events in the mid 1970s.

The truckers’ strike and the coal strike saw shooting deaths near where I lived in the Ohio River Valley. Unusual winter snow fall halted the delivery of food and the area experienced severe food shortages.

The democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile fell to a United States supported coup d’etat by General Pinochet who then established a military dictatorship which lasted for 17 years.

President Nixon supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War by circumventing congress and initiating an air lift of United States arms. The subsequent defeat of the Arab coalition led to their oil embargo.

Gas went from 30 something cents per gallon to 70 something cents per gallon nearly overnight. While the 6 month Arab oil embargo seemed to be the cause of the so called Mideast Oil Crisis many more factors contributed to the crisis. Not the least of these stemmed from United States energy policy, domestic political and social circumstances.

Nixon created Project Independence with the stated goal of freeing the United States completely from foreign oil dependence by 1980. This resulted in the federal approval of the ecologically controversial Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment. The abuses of power, arrogance and hubris of the only person to be elected twice to the presidency and twice to the vice presidency indicated deep flaws in our system of government.

Ford assumed the presidency and pardoned Nixon for any federal crimes he may have committed while in office. The United States withdrew from Vietnam in failure and many atrocities committed by United States forces became known.

Convinced of the imminent collapse of the United States and modern civilization I moved to the West coast in search of answers and alternatives. My real education began at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD).

At UCSD I took a double major in the Visual Arts and the social science of Communication. In this training ground for the next generation of the social elite in the heart of the largest military base in the world I came to understand the forces forming the human world.

I learned to find the fallacies in supposed logical arguments. I came to an understanding of the scope and workings of human history. I understood the power and limitations of public media and the role of mediation in human activity. I earned very high grades, learned how to use computers for email and computer aided typesetting and typography.

I was awarded the California Board of Regents Scholarship, the highest honor achievable by undergraduates in the University of California system. Then came the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship which funded my graduate work.

At Humboldt State University I first learned how to work collaboratively. Then I learned how to support other people in expressing themselves through theatre and film.

This education in becoming a theatre and film director forms the basis of my teaching style. Teaching, like directing, requires the sucessful transfer of both authority and responsibility.

The same year I arrived in Humboldt County, Greg King created the first Headwaters slide show with his own photos. Then Pacific Lumber took out full page ads denouncing Greg King and the Headwaters Forest proposal.

The Environmental Information Protection Center (EPIC), founded 11 years earlier over herbicide issues, filed lawsuits with the Sierra Club. Folksinger Judi Bari joined in and brought timber worker outreach principles and practices.

During my third year in Humboldt County the Spotted Owl became listed as threatened and Redwood Summer heated up. The FBI became implicated in an attempt to kill Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney with a car-bomb.

After earning my MFA in Directing for Theatre and Film I bought a first generation PowerMac and began digitizing video. I seemed to be the only person between San Francisco and Portland who was digitizing video at the time.

UCSD recruited me to bring their digital media equipment online and support the Visual Arts Department faculty and graduate students. I left Humboldt County the same year Judi Bari announced she had terminal cancer. Woody Harrelson scaled the Golden Gate Bridge to hang a banner bringing attention to the Redwood Headwaters issues.

Then I moved to Maui working at the community college as a software trainer. I started teaching classes how to use Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator and Macromedia’s Dreamweaver based upon my experience with them.

Then I started teaching classes students asked for related to building websites, which I had been doing on the side since 1996, and running an online business. As the Internet evolved I stayed on the edge of the emerging technologies.