sweet nothing

We went and saw Away We Go last night. This song has been on my mind ever since.

It was a funny movie for me and Sean to watch. We are kind of at a similar point as the couple in the movie (although not goaded on by pregnancy or crazy parents): kind of looking for that place to go forward from. Cleveland isn't it. We've been here nine years - given it better than a college try, lived on the east and west sides, been involved, played league sports, joined clubs, gone to bars and restaurants and fundraisers and book readings, made friends, worked through various careers good and bad, looked at houses hand in hand and tried to see our future unspooling, and still can't quite make it feel right. We are locked in a holding pattern. It's not a knock against the city. It's a fine place, and many people love it whole-heartedly. It's kind of like one of those necessary divorces where despite the failure and frustration, you wish the other person nothing but good but have deep certain gut-based knowledge that in ten years you'll be a lot better for being apart.

Giving up is sad, but it's time. We need the next part to start. I'm hoping that even writing this can act like a goad and get us in motion.

The question is: where to go?

at rest in your own specific gravity

I soaked in the heavy nourishing air and this befriending atmosphere like rich life-cake, the kind that encourages love and brings on a mild pain of emotions. A state that lets you rest in your own specific gravity, and where you are not a subject matter but sit in your own nature, tasting original tastes as good as the first man, and are outside of the busy human tamper, left free even of your own habits. Which only lie on you illusory in the sunshine, in the usual relation of your feet or fingers or the knot of your shoestrings and are without power.

Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

each according to their nature

Caribou - Irene. Directed and photographed by Nic Brown and David James.

things will look better with my special glasses

I'm trying to wear the rose-colored ones as much as I can.

Image from here via here.

putting a number on it

Work is activity that earns money. Lucky people enjoy their work, but even they might not do it without pay. To the extent that pay motivates, people work for the sake of something else — so they can buy food, shelter, clothing, security, luxury or leisure — and against their inclinations. Now, to do anything against one’s inclinations is to put one’s dignity at risk. It is fascination with this cold truth that draws children to blend sludge out of refrigerated leftovers and then dare one another: “Would you drink it for a hundred dollars? For a thousand?” Everyone has a price in theory; a worker is someone who has agreed to a number.

Caleb Crain, 6/24/2009 NYT review of Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

(It's a good opening paragraph, but I preferred this review. I'm interested to read the book, because I have problems agreeing to a number. I like having money, but I hate getting paid.)

work clothes

Denim goods from Johnbull.

I visited my grandparents on Dayton last weekend. That part of Ohio was rectangular with growing corn (and gridded houses where corn used to grow). It made me wish for overalls and a richer piece of earth to plant things in.

sunday tune: the beach boys - let's go away for a while

sunday tune: the beach boys - i just wasn't made for these times

flying cloud

this weekend

Buy yourself a beautiful, hand-built bike. Or at least get your name on the list for one: Cicli Polito will be at MADE IN THE 216.

Danielle has curated a pretty amazing group of Cleveland artists, designers, and craftspeople to show their wares this weekend, and this time she has taken over some of the abandoned storefronts on Detroit, added local bands to the mix, created an EAT IN THE 216 section and is hosting afterparties at The Happy Dog. The woman is a one-person revitalizing force. Hopefully masses and masses of people turn out and show support - it takes a lot of work to bring a project like this together.

I'm going this afternoon, to get a snack and ogle the bikes. Afterwards, I'm headed to the southern part of the state to visit my grandparents, play Rook, ride my bike through flat places and feast on Made-Rites and bull shakes. I can't wait.

Otherwise:

• away we go
  
• the east wing is open for everyone
  
• pretty girls from Brooklyn
• tour de farms
  
• the modern lover
  
• John Huston's last film
  
• assorted activities on Waterloo
  
• MADE IN THE 216 (Go! Go! Go!)

Also, there are these to print out and put in strategic places.

Happy weekend.

Photos from Cicli Polito's Flickr.

goodbye

So much vulnerability and raw emotion, even as a little kid.

Not formed for this world.

time to place a call

Troubling news for Ohio:

At a news conference on Friday, June 19, the Governor proposed a cut to state funding for public libraries of $227.3 million in fiscal years 2010 and 2011 as part of his plan to fill the $3.2 billion gap in the budget that must be balanced by the Ohio General Assembly's Conference Committee by June 30.

***

The Governor's proposed funding cuts come at a time when Ohio's public libraries are experiencing unprecedented increases in demands for services. In every community throughout the state, Ohioans are turning to their public library for free high speed Internet access and help with employment searches, children and teens are beginning summer reading programs, and people of all ages are turning to the library as a lifeline during these difficult economic times. Ohio's public libraries offer CRITICAL services to those looking for jobs and operating small businesses. Public libraries are an integral part of education, which Governor Strickland says is critical to the state's economic recovery. But it is unlikely that many of Ohio's public library systems, especially those without local levies, can remain open with these proposed cuts.

I think this is a pretty rotten plan, so I gave the governor a call:

Ohio Governor Ted Strickland: 614-466-3555 or 614-644-4357.

nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die

"I wish I knew why people think it's so important to be emotional," Teddy said. "My mother and father don't think a person's human unless he thinks a lot of things are very sad or very annoying or very - very unjust, sort of. My father gets very emotional even when he reads the newspaper. He thinks I'm inhuman."

Nicholson flicked his cigarette ash off to one side. "I take it you have no emotions?" he said.

Teddy reflected before answering. "If I do, I don't remember when I ever used them," he said. "I don't see what they're good for."

J.D. Salinger, 'Teddy'

Photo by Gil Blank (via White Noise of Everyday Life).

states of matter

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy is a liquid.

J.D. Salinger, 'De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period'

Tools for bottling joy: photo by Max Dupain, 1935.

pretty mouth and green my eyes

The girl stayed propped up on her forearm and watched him. Her eyes, more just open than alert or speculative, reflected chiefly on their own size and color.
...
I start thinking about this goddam poem I sent her when we first started goin' around together. 'Rose my color is and white, Pretty mouth and green my eyes.' Christ, it's embarrassing - it used to remind me of her. She doesn't even have green eyes - she has eyes like goddam sea shells ...

J.D. Salinger, 'Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes'

Photo from Square America.

wristwatch

Stowa Mark 1 B Uhr: designed for navigators.

The works:
Available here.

esmé

Esme was standing with crossed ankles again. "You're quite sure you won't forget to write that story for me?" she asked. "It doesn't have to be exclusively for me. It can - "

I said there was absolutely no chance that I'd forget. I told her that I'd never written a story for anybody, but that it seemed like exactly the right time to get down to it.

She nodded. "Make it extremely squalid and moving," she suggested. "Are you at all acquainted with squalor?"

I said not exactly but that I was getting better acquainted with it, in one form or another, all the time, and that I'd do my best to come up to her specifications. We shook hands.

"Isn't it a pity that we didn't meet under less extenuating circumstances?"

I said it was, I said it certainly was.

J.D. Salinger, 'For Esmé, With Love and Squalor'

Helene Schjerfbeck - Portrait of a Young Girl (1886).

imaginary outfit: boo boo and lionel

Boo Boo closed the screen door behind her.

She stood on the slight downgrade of her front lawn, with the low, glaring, late afternoon sun at her back. About two hundred yards ahead of her, her son Lionel was sitting in the stem seat of his father's dinghy. Tied, and stripped of its main and jib sails, the dinghy floated at a perfect right angle away from the far end of the pier. Fifty feet or so beyond it, a lost or abandoned water ski floated bottom up, but there were no pleasure boats to be seen on the lake; just a stern-end view of the county launch on its way over to Leech's Landing. Boo Boo found it queerly difficult to keep Lionel in steady focus. The sun, though not especially hot, was nonetheless so brilliant that it made any fairly distant image - a boy, a boat - seem almost as wavering and refractional as a stick in water. After a couple of minutes, Boo Boo let the image go. She peeled down her cigarette Army style, and then started toward the pier.

J.D. Salinger, 'Down at the Dinghy'

catcher's mitt

We took the field first. No business went out to center field the first inning. From my position on first base, I glanced behind me now and then. Each time I did, Mary Hudson waved gaily to me. She was wearing a catcher's mitt, her own adamant choice. It was a horrible sight.

Mary Hudson batted ninth on the Warriors' lineup. When I informed her of this arrangement, she made a little face and said, "Well, hurry up, then." And as a matter of fact we did seem to hurry up. She got to bat in the first inning. She took off her beaver coat - and her catcher's mitt - for the occasion and advanced to the plate in a dark-brown dress. When I gave her a bat, she asked me why it was so heavy. The Chief left his umpire's position behind the pitcher and came forward anxiously. He told Mary Hudson to rest the end of her bat on her right shouder. "I am," she said. He told her not to choke the bat too tightly. "I'm not," she said. He told her to keep her eye right on the ball. "I will," she said. "Get outa the way." She swung mightily at the first ball pitched to her and hit it over the left fielder's head. It was good for an ordinary double, but Mary Hudson got to third on it - standing up.

When my astonishment had worn off, and then my awe, and then my delight, I looked over at the Chief. He didn't so much seem to be standing behind the pitcher as floating over him. He was a completely happy man. Over on third base, Mary Hudson waved to me. I waved back. I couldn't have stopped myself, even if I'd wanted to. Her stickwork aside, she happened to be a girl who knew how to wave to somebody from third base.

The rest of the game, she got on base every time she came to bat. For some reason, she seemed to hate first base; there was no holding her there. At least three times, she stole second.

Her fielding couldn't have been worse, but we were piling up too many runs to take serious notice of it. I think it would have improved if she'd gone after flies with almost anything except a catcher's mitt. She wouldn't take it off, though. She said it was cute.

J.D. Salinger, 'The Laughing Man'

Patented 1925 catcher's mitt.

bag and shoes

Cole Haan Dylan tennis bag (made out of natural recycled fabric with vegetable tanned and chrome-free leather trim).

Tretorn Nylite Mid.
(I have been waiting for that bag to go on sale forever, but the problem with getting a throwback bag is that then I would want one of these or one of these to go in it.)

balls

FIVE STRAIGHT SATURDAY MORNINGS, Ginnie Mannox had played tennis at the East Side Courts with Selena Graff, a classmate at Miss Basehoar's. Ginnie openly considered Selena the biggest drip at Miss Basehoar's - a school ostensibly abounding with fair-sized drips - but at the same time she had never known anyone like Selena for bringing fresh cans of tennis balls. Selena's father made them or something. (At dinner one night, for the edification of the entire Mannox family, Ginnie had conjured up a vision of dinner over at the Graffs'; it involved a perfect servant coming around to everyone's left with, instead of a glass of tomato juice, a can of tennis balls.)

J.D. Salinger, 'Just Before the War with the Eskimos'

Photos by Esther Bubley, via the Library of Congress.

highballs

My favorite version (a bastardization of the great one you can find at this joint):

Fill tall glass with ice cubes.
Add spicy gingerale to about the 2/3 mark (I like Maine Root).
Top with Maker's Mark.
Stir.
Taste. Make adjustments.
Drink.
Repeat.

Vintage French glasses from Etsy.

a nice girl

"Listen to me, career girl. If you ever get married again, don't tell your husband anything. Do you hear me?"

"Why?" said Mary Jane.

"Because I say so, that's why," said Eloise. "They wanna think you spent your whole life vomiting every time a boy came near you. I'm not kidding, either. Oh, you can tell them stuff. But never honestly. I mean never honestly. If you tell 'em you once knew a handsome boy, you gotta say in the same breath he was too handsome. And if you tell 'em you knew a witty boy, you gotta tell 'em he was kind of a smart aleck, though, or a wise guy. If you don't, they hit you over the head with the poor boy every time they get a chance." Eloise paused to drink from her glass and to think. "Oh," she said, "they'll listen very maturely and all that. They'll even look intelligent as hell. But don't let it fool you. Believe me. You'll go through hell if you ever give 'em any credit for intelligence. Take my word."

J.D. Salinger, 'Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut'

Photo: Cindy Sherman, Untitled #96, 1981.

a rubber float

1960s Vintage inflatable canvas raft. Made in Japan. Available here.

see more glass

"Are you going in the water?" Sybil said.

"I'm seriously considering it. I'm giving it plenty of thought, Sybil, you'll be glad to know."

Sybil prodded the rubber float that the young man sometimes used as a head-rest. "It needs air," she said.

"You're right. It needs more air than I'm willing to admit." He took away his fists and let his chin rest on the sand. "Sybil," he said, "you're looking fine. It's good to see you. Tell me about yourself." He reached in front of him and took both of Sybil's ankles in his hands. "I'm Capricorn," he said. "What are you?"

"Sharon Lipschutz said you let her sit on the piano seat with you," Sybil said.

"Sharon Lipschutz said that?"

Sybil nodded vigorously.

He let go of her ankles, drew in his hands, and laid the side of his face on his right forearm. "Well," he said, "you know how those things happen, Sybil. I was sitting there, playing. And you were nowhere in sight. And Sharon Lipschutz came over and sat down next to me. I couldn't push her off, could I?"

"Yes."

"Oh, no. No. I couldn't do that," said the young man. "I'll tell you what I did do, though."

"What?"

"I pretended she was you."

Sybil immediately stooped and began to dig in the sand. "Let's go in the water," she said.

"All right," said the young man. "I think I can work it in."

J.D. Salinger, 'A Perfect Day For Bananafish'

Photo from Square America.

one hand clapping

She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.

With her little lacquer brush, while the phone was ringing, she went over the nail of her little finger, accentuating the line of the moon. She then replaced the cap on the bottle of lacquer and, standing up, passed her left - the wet - hand back and forth through the air ...

J.D. Salinger, 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish'

Photo: Woman sitting in a chair painting her nails, c 1940s. © NMeM / Photographic Advertising / Science & Society.

summer reading

It's possible, with most contemporary novels, for astute readers, if they are wont, to break it down into its parts, to take it apart as one would a car or an Ikea shelving unit. That is, let's say a reader is a sort of mechanic. And let's say this particular reader-mechanic has worked on lots of books, and after a few hundred contemporary novels, the mechanic feels like he can take apart just about any book and put it back together again. That is, the mechanic recognizes the components of modern fiction and can say, for example, I've seen this part before, so I know why it's there and what it does. And this one, too - I recognize it. This part connects to this and performs this function. This one usually goes here, and does that. All of this is familiar enough. That's no knock on the contemporary fiction that is recognizable and breakdownable. This includes 98 percent of the fiction we know and love.

But this is not possible with Infinite Jest. This book is like a spaceship with no recognizable components, no rivets or bolts, no entry points, no way to take it apart. It is very shiny, and it has no discernible flaws. If you could somehow smash it into smaller pieces, there would certainly be no way to put it back together again. It simply is.

From Dave Eggers' introduction to DFW's Infinite Jest.

(Infinite Summer started yesterday. If you are in the Cleve or thereabouts and are participating, let me know. I am thinking of having a dinner party at the end of the summer as a sort of completion celebration.)

kodachrome

First I find out the youngsters are hating on Holden Caulfield, now I hear Kodak is yanking Kodachrome.

I don't think I like this world we are creating for ourselves. I guess I need to go sit in a corner by my codgery lonesome.

kids today

Get a Life, Holden Caulfield:

Some critics say that if Holden is less popular these days, the fault lies with our own impatience with the idea of a lifelong quest for identity and meaning that Holden represents.

Barbara Feinberg, an expert on children’s literature who has observed numerous class discussions of “Catcher,” pointed to a story about a Holden-loving loser in the Onion headlined “Search for Self Called Off After 38 Years.”

“Holden is somewhat a victim of the current trend in applying ever more mechanistic approaches to understanding human behavior,” Ms. Feinberg wrote in an e-mail message. “Compared to the early 1950s, there is not as much room for the adolescent search, for intuition, for empathy, for the mystery of the unconscious and the deliverance made possible through talking to another person.”

Ms. Feinberg recalled one 15-year-old boy from Long Island who told her: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ ”

(Good grief.)

Illustrations found here, a site I wish I could read more fluently.

monday morning conversation

rachel.madewell: it's a beautiful day.

me: it is.

rachel.madewell: don't let it get away.

Sent at 9:45 AM on Monday

me: how should i catch it?

Sent at 9:46 AM on Monday

rachel.madewell: i don't know.

prob with bubbles.

me: hm. i will give it some thought.

(Talking with my sister is one of my favorite things.)

sunday tune: horace silver - senor blues

Another song that I love thanks to my dad.

sunday tune: ry cooder and david lindley - fdr in trinidad/maria elena (osaka 1979)

A song for my dad.

sorry i'm late

Delightful. Via The Post Family.

this weekend

Make your own road.

Also:

• selvation (one night only)
  
• the new wing of the CMA is opening and Dan Deacon will be there
  
• James Franco, erased
• works in progress
• porchfest
• a day for dads

Happy weekend. Photo by Erik Johansson.

passport to trespass

In case you need an escape this morning.

the fifth best movie ever

Screening this evening courtesy of 1/3 Movie Night.

The schedule is cleared, and I am going. Can't wait.

a sleepy kisser, a pretty war

Jeff Tweedy at La Riviera, Madrid. 1-12-2006.

contained and uncontained

Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing: I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God ... I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

***

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens

jars

Tomas Kral's Upgrades: traditional crystal cutting techniques applied to mass produced glass jars and bottles.

Originally found here.

how i'd wear it

I have a guest post up at Camp Comfort (thanks, Roberta Jane!) today featuring an outfit I would wear to a Saturday flea market ... you can check it out here.

my childhood

Jennifer Zwick.

a head for books

Work by art director Takayuki Nakazawa and photographer Hiroshi Manaka. More here.

a place to read and write

Scrittarello writing desk by Castiglioni.

gradient

Christelle Bonnet: Niveaux de ciel (above) and Niveau de gris (below).

chains and chains

Arielle de Pinto's gradient web jewelry.

Each piece is hand crocheted from sterling silver and/or vermeil metal. The color variations are achieved with experimental oxidation techniques.

on the wing

All those pigeon feathers reminded me of Roe Ethridge (I saw this one in person last summer).

The beauty in common things is my favorite kind.

sluice

Sluice (2009): a site specific installation by Kate MccGwire made of pigeon feathers, felt, glue and polystyrene.

Seen a couple of places, and it knocks me out every time.

light as a feather

Thinking today about Joanna Bean's mobiles. I recently came into a collection of beautiful feathers and need to display them.

Available here and discovered here.

how i am feeling this morning

You?

Rad from Chad Kouri's Ebonics Motovational Poster Series. Photo from OMG Posters!

sunday tune: my brightest diamond - hymne à l'amour

sunday tune: bill callahan - diamond dancer

let's make a treat

Juice popsicles!

this weekend

Have fun.

• parade the circle
• this is Cleveland (all the stuff I see)
  
• handmade nation

Photo by Mark Kauffman - Children playing with a water hose, 1956. Happy weekend.

imaginary outfit: weekend homemakers

I've been thinking a lot this week about the idea of homemakers. It's an underrated profession. Occasionally, when someone asks me what I do (a question I find perpetually difficult), I tell them I am a professional homemaker. Usually, an almost instantaneous veil of pity descends around them, especially once they know I don't have kids. It amuses me, and it makes me aggravated, because really, we are all homemakers. It's a sort of default position. Many people aren't particularly great at it, and live lives of discomfort in barren spaces filled with soulless objects, but in the act of living in a space, we are making it a home, either successfully or not, and people who have the transformational power of making a space a comfortable home are special.

My mother is a terrific homemaker. As long as I can remember, any place that she has been in has been a place of refuge to nearly everyone who crosses the threshold. She has a magical ability to make everything in her house cohere into a diffused atmosphere of comfort and welcome. Having access to that is a gift I have always valued - by creating that place she has allowed me, and my dad, and my brother and sister to go off and fight good fights, knowing there is a place of restoration not far away.

Because of that, one of the few concrete goals of my adult life has always been to make sure that wherever I live is a home. It's not an easy thing to define or create. It involves a combination of a projection of personality (it's not enough to buy interesting things and comfortable chairs to fill the corners, there has to be some governing mind, some sort of emotional glue binding everything together) and love, which sounds hokey, but is completely, irrefutably true. Loving life and the people around you is an absolute requirement for building a home.

So this weekend, Sean and I will sit on our little stoop together. We'll read the paper and weed the marigolds and maybe have some friends over for a beer. The dog will be overenthusiastic about everything. And all of us, in our small ways, will be doing some of the maintenance work required to keep this little rented space we live in a home. It's the best job to have.

for afternoons in the yard

Need Supply Co.

one day, working

after Ted Kooser
for Beth

Last Saturday, we spent the afternoon
tending to the garden we’d left too long
on its own. While the children played half-naked
in the yard shooting the hose pipe at anything
that moved, I fought the lawless hedges,
and you pulled blackberry vines. I am certain
there were green snakes coiled in the branches
near your fingers, or hornet’s nests throbbing
from all our work, that would have scattered us
back to a day of bills or cleaning inside.
But on this day, the boys ran in the water,
the dog rolled in the grass, and you
stood there glowing in the June sun,
all floral and sweet as a breath to be taken.

Jack Bedell (from The Rumpus.)

Photo by Cecilia Afonso Esteves via all the mountains.

handcrafted

Cupboard over case of drawers, pine and bass wood in original finish, dated in red stain under the top right drawer "1843", attributed to Brother Amos Stewart (1802-1884), Mt. Lebanon, NY.

I would find a place in my house for this.

why you can't quit your day job to make quilts

Etsy as a seller of false fantasies:

... What Etsy is really peddling isn’t only handicrafts, but also the feminist promise that you can have a family and create hip arts and crafts from home during flexible, reasonable hours while still having a respectable, fulfilling, and remunerative career. The problem is that on Etsy, as in much of life, the promise is a fantasy.

Sara Mosle @ DoubleX

It's a pretty thought-provoking post.

for folded linens

Tortoise General Store rattan basket. Via Remodelista.

small tasks

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.

Helen Keller

Photo: Lark About.

tonight

MOCA is hosting their first Summer Neighborhood Mixer. See you there.

call for artists

Summer deadlines of note:

Bike Station Public Art: Due June 26, 2009
Cleveland Public Art (CPA) in partnership with the City of Cleveland calls for a permanent public art project that will call attention to and raise the visibility of a new commuter bike facility being constructed in downtown Cleveland. Open to submissions from Ohio residents only. Full description here.

SPACES General Exhibitions 2010-11: due July 3, 2009.
Open to all established or emerging artists, curators and cultural producers who are 21 years old or older. Full description here.

SPACELab 2010-11: due Aug 14, 2009.
SPACELab is a laboratory created to help artists push and pull a concept until it materializes. By providing resources and instruction SPACELab not only acts as a venue for the display of process and projects but plays an active role in the conceptualization of art. Open to artists living in specified NEO counties. Full description here.

See Also: Due 5:00pm on Friday, August 14, 2009
See Also is an annual program of the Cleveland Public Library in partnership with CPA that invites creative professionals to create temporary public art projects in the Eastman Reading Garden. View description here. This is open to submissions from both established and emerging artists from the Great Lakes Region (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ontario).

Downtown Photo Challenge: due by 11:59pm on August 16, 2009
The Downtown Cleveland Alliance is launching this 2nd annual amateur photo competition. The project calls for images that reflect the distinctiveness of Downtown Cleveland. View details and submit photos here.

garden

William Edmonds' disassembled landscapes.

house

Situ Studio's model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Herbert Jacobs House #1, currently on display at the Guggenheim Museum.

Erica sent me to the link to this. I think she's going to get to see it in person (lucky duck).

built by hand

Rural Studio has time lapse films of some of their projects on YouTube. This particular project, the Pattern Book house, was part of their $20K House project and ended up looking like this.

Pretty neat.

reincarnated mcmansion

Reincarnated McMansion:

Through a media campaign, McMansion owners will be petitioned to engage the Reincarnated McMansion project. A single McMansion will be selected, audited, dismantled and rebuilt; Reincarnating an unsustainable McMansion into 2 best practice, zero emissions green homes using existing McMansion building materials.

Interesting idea. This is also thought-provoking. One can only wonder how all of the land we have merrily subdivided will have to be adapted to suit the future we are facing.

the domestic package

What McMansions are made of:

The standard construction materials are essentially: timber of the same grade used for temporary hoardings (structure); expensive garbage bags (DPMs); bubble pack grade plastic (siding, soffits, sills); staples; Tyvec envelopes and fly paper (weather proofing) ... This same building form spans an entire sub-continent with a climate that ranges from tundra to tropical and culture that varies from Appalachian to Amerindian. It is constructed using materials that are of lower quality that the packaging in most consumer goods.

David Galbraith

ready to build

Jens Risom Prefab House. Seen here.

home

To the moderately poor the home is the only place of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot on the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. Everywhere else he goes he must accept the strict rules of the shop, inn, club, or museum that he happens to enter. He can eat his meals on the floor in his own house if he likes. I often do it myself; it gives a curious, childish, poetic, picnic feeling. There would be considerable trouble if I tried to do it in an A.B.C. tea-shop. A man can wear a dressing gown and slippers in his house; while I am sure that this would not be permitted at the Savoy, though I never actually tested the point. If you go to a restaurant you must drink some of the wines on the wine list, all of them if you insist, but certainly some of them. But if you have a house and garden you can try to make hollyhock tea or convolvulus wine if you like. For a plain, hard-working man the home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks. The home is the one place where he can put the carpet on the ceiling or the slates on the floor if he wants to.

G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World

Photo from here.

sunday tune: weezer - the good life

sunday tune: that dog - hey old timer

I saw That Dog open for Weezer at Nautica Stage in the Flats in the summer of 1995 (I think ... may have been '94). At the time, I wasn't that big of a Weezer fan (it took Pinkerton to win me) but I loved That Dog. Still do.

mark rothko post-it

This riff on Rothko by Mark Johns made me smile. Via Ffffound.

color on color

"Streaming Gradient" by Jen Stark on Vimeo via Scout Holiday.

Watching this makes me happy.

new tunes

The Kickdrums (Cleveland's own beat savants) have a new album out ... download available here.

Fun summer listening.

this weekend

Hopefully the wind will blow you somewhere good. Such as:

• there goes the neighborhood
• private Warhol
• a great night on Waterloo (and the return of Alley Cat Fridays)
  
• drawn and quartered
• a countdown to awesome
  
• leave her to heaven
  
• thirty-something celebration
• antiquing in Geauga County

And if you are in the western part of the state, woodcuts. Happy weekend.

Illustration by Souther Salazar via Neu Black.

my uncle terwilliger on the art of eating popovers

My uncle ordered popovers
from the restaurant's bill of fare.
And, when they were served,
he regarded them
with a penetrating stare
Then he spoke great Words of Wisdom
as he sat there on that chair:
"To eat these things,"
said my uncle,
"you must exercise great care.
You may swallow down what's solid
BUT
you must spit out the air!"

And
as you partake of the world's bill of fare,
that's darned good advice to follow.
Do a lot of spitting out the hot air.
And be careful what you swallow.

Ted Geisel (better known as Dr. Seuss), Lake Forest College, Illinois, June 4, 1977

Sidenote: The college president and trustees were unsure if Ted Geisel would give any speech at all, so his reading of this poem was a complete surprise to everyone. As to the photo: if I had an Uncle Terwilliger, I like to think he might look like this, permanently mortar-boarded and dispensing pithy rhyming wisdom.

you are brilliant, and the earth is hiring

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn't bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. The earth couldn't afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here's the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

Paul Hawken, University of Portland, May 3, 2009.

Full text here.

isolation and efficiency

The world shifts under our feet. The rules change. Not the Bill of Rights, or the rules of tenting, but the big unspoken truths of a generation. Exhaled by culture, taken in like oxygen, we hold these truths to be self-evident: You get what you pay for. Success is everything. Work is what you do for money, and that’s what counts. How could it be otherwise? And the converse of that last rule, of course, is that if you’re not paid to do a thing, it can’t be important. If a child writes a poem and proudly reads it, adults may wink and ask, “Think there’s a lot of money in that?” You may also hear this when you declare a major in English. Being a good neighbor, raising children: the road to success is not paved with the likes of these. Some workplaces actually quantify your likelihood of being distracted by family or volunteerism. It’s called your coefficient of Drag. The ideal number is zero. This is the Rule of Perfect Efficiency.

Now, the rule of “Success” has traditionally meant having boatloads of money. But we are not really supposed to put it in a boat. A house would the customary thing. Ideally it should be large, with a lot of bathrooms and so forth, but no more than four people. If two friends come over during approved visiting hours, the two children have to leave. The bathroom-to-resident ratio should at all times remain greater than one. I’m not making this up, I’m just observing, it’s more or less my profession. As Yogi Berra told us, you can observe a lot just by watching. I see our dream-houses standing alone, the idealized life taking place in a kind of bubble. So you need another bubble, with rubber tires, to convey yourself to places you must visit, such as an office. If you’re successful, it will be a large, empty-ish office you don’t have to share. If you need anything, you can get it delivered. Play your cards right and you may never have to come face to face with another person. This is the Rule of Escalating Isolation.

And so we find ourselves in the chapter of history I would entitle: Isolation and Efficiency, and How They Came Around to Bite Us in the Backside.

Barbara Kingsolver, May 11, 2008, Duke University. Full text here.

(Thanks, Kelly.)

imaginary outfit: june 1997

I graduated from high school in June, 1997, and spent the following summer dividing my time between a landscaping job and work at a small, short-lived theater company.

I had a pretty defined uniform at the time: jeans (one of two pairs: a pair I had traded my friend Jenny for - she had cut the waistband off, and they were held up by a safety pin - or a pair of ancient Levis from a thrift store in Lincoln, Nebraska, found the summer before); men's Hanes v-neck t-shirts (3 for $4.99); a pair of moccasins (then and always); and an old canvas barn coat of my father's. It was from Banana Republic, back in the day when they used to carry adventure-wear instead of yuppie-wear and its cuffs were frayed from years of use (I kept it and the jeans until they fell apart into gentle piles of string). I toted all my belongings around in a red Jansport I had covered in patches ( I would upgrade to a chartreuse Lowe Alpine rucksack in the fall) - said belongings included mix tapes, Mead spiral-bound notebooks (college rule, only), Bic blue ballpoint pens (I had a fetish for these), and whatever I was reading at the time, along with copies of The Great Gatsby and The Little Prince (personal lucky totems). I wore safety pins in my ears (to my mother's mild dismay), an assortment of cheap silver rings, and a trusty Swiss-Army watch I had gotten for my birthday - senior year, my life had been a swirl of part-time jobs, classes, tennis matches and drama practice, so timing was everything. I also was never without sunglasses - I generally searched out anything resembling Wayfarers or big round Jackie-O shades.

Looking back, what's funny to me now is how the bones of this still show through what I wear today. I had a brief, post-collegiate hiatus where I tried to dress according to the amoebic tenets of office casual, but that's gradually fallen away with time, and I am back to my old janky self these days. I still miss those jeans.

a multitude of universes

From Keri Smith's How To Be An Explorer of the World.

freedom

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

David Foster Wallace, Commencement address at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, May 21, 2005.

Full text here. Of all the speeches I've posted this week, this one is my favorite.

whatever you do

Son of Tam for For Office Use Only via today and tomorrow.

a variety of forms

The good life comes in a variety of forms. This variety has become difficult to see; our field of aspiration has narrowed into certain channels. But the current perplexity in the economy seems to be softening our gaze. Our peripheral vision is perhaps recovering, allowing us to consider the full range of lives worth choosing. For anyone who feels ill suited by disposition to spend his days sitting in an office, the question of what a good job looks like is now wide open.

From The Case For Working With Your Hands, Matthew B. Crawford, NYT 5/21/2009

(This article is easily the best thing I have read in the NYT in recent memory. I'm prejudiced, though, being that I am one of those people not made to sit still in an office. Photo from Square America.)

find what you love

A motion graphic class at UCLA used Steve Job's 2005 Stanford commencement speech as a jumping off point for this bit of dynamic typography.

june

Anthropologie + Hatch Show Print.

(I got to visit the Hatch workshop once and it was a religious experience for me. In another life, I'd move to Nashville and offer to sweep the floors or something just to have a reason to be there a lot.)

the fringe benefits of failure

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

...

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

J.K. Rowling, Harvard University, June 5, 2008. Full text here. (Sidenote: she studied Greek and Latin.)

Copyright of J.K. Rowling.

greek and latin

"Greek! Latin!" she spat. "What good it will do you, Greek and Latin? They are dead, the Greeks, the Romans — all dead, for a thousand years they are dead! A thousand years! I have been to Greece, been to Athens! And I can tell you — they are dead! What good did it do them, their literature, their art?! Plato? What good will he do for you? I have been to the grave of Plato, and I can tell you: he has been dead for a thousand years! Trust me, find something else to study, you'll make a living at least, you'll be happier!"

She took a deep breath and wearily ended with a sentence that—as she could not possibly guess, that May afternoon thirty years ago—would give me the title of a book I would write one day, a book about her vanished world, and how it vanished. "Plato, the Greeks," she muttered. "In a thousand years, it will all be lost."

From Daniel Mendelsohn's commencement address to the UC-Berkeley Classics department, May 15, 2009, describing his step-grandmother's reaction to his decision to major in Classics.

Full fantastic text here.

© Daniel Mendelsohn. Via Readerville.

Photo is of the Dying Gaul at the Capitoline Museum during WWI, carefully protected by a pyramid of sandbags.

the gift of tongues

It is very certain that it is the effect of conversation with the beauty of the soul, to beget a desire and need to impart to others the same knowledge and love. If utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man. Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told: somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas; sometimes with chisel on stone; sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music; but clearest and most permanent, in words.

The man enamored of this excellency, becomes its priest or poet. The office is coeval with the world. But observe the condition, the spiritual limitation of the office. The spirit only can teach. Not any profane man, not any sensual, not any liar, not any slave can teach, but only he can give, who has; he only can create, who is. The man on whom the soul descends, through whom the soul speaks, alone can teach. Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can teach; and every man can open his door to these angels, and they shall bring him the gift of tongues.

From Ralph Waldo Emerson's address delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday evening, July 15, 1838.

do what you can

...Hope isn't a choice, it's a moral obligation, a human obligation, an obligation to the cells in your body. Hope is a function of those cells, it's a bodily function the same as breathing and eating and sleeping. Hope is not naïve, hope grapples endlessly with despair. Real, vivid, powerful, thunderclap hope, like the soul, is at home in darkness, is divided; but lose your hope and you lose your soul, and you don't want to do that, trust me, even if you haven't got a soul, and who knows, you shouldn't be careless about it. Will the world end if you act? Who can say? Will you lose your soul, your democratic-citizen soul, if you don't act, if you don't organize? I guarantee it. And you will feel really embarrassed at your ten-year class reunion. People will point, I promise you; people always know when a person has lost his soul. And no one likes a zombie, even if, from time to time, people will date them.

The great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz has a poem titled "On Angels"--you can imagine why I was drawn to it--and it concludes by articulating the best possible answer to What am I doing here and Why me. The poet is haunted by a voice:

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draws near
another one
do what you can.

From Tony Kushner's commencement speech at Vassar College, May 26, 2002.