sweet tea

Followed shortly thereafter by 1 waffle, 2 fried eggs over medium (stacked on the waffle, salted and smothered in syrup) and 1 side of grits. All at the Waffle House in Orlando.

And may I say they made me happy in ways that might even be illegal in Florida.

Posting by cameraphone from the road home.

waiting for barack

waiting for barack
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Big doings in Kissimmee, FL, where I stopped by to see the Monument to the 50 States at Apelad's suggestion -- Barack Obama's on his way in for a Town Hall Meeting. Folks are congregating en masse at the Civic Center -- or as en masse as things get around Kissimmee, I'm guessing (I found parking on the street, no problem).

He'll be here in an hour and a half. At which time I'll be at the Orlando International Airport, turning in my rental car and queuing up for my flight home.

Never thought I'd be this sorry to leave Florida.

summertime

Video: Ella Fitzgerald sings Summertime

Confession: When I have a client meeting, or when I have to present to a big crowd of folks, and I get all jittery and nervous, I sing.

Alone. To myself. In my hotel room. As I'm getting ready: ironing, showering, primping.

It's easier than worrying about how things will go. It focuses me better than walking through the pitch or the presentation does. And it warms up my voice so that it doesn't crack (too badly) when I first say "hello."

Summertime is the song I sing. Sometimes Blue Skies, but mostly Summertime, even if it's the dead of winter.

Because it's, well, just listen to that lyric. (And no: of course I don't sing it anywhere near like Ella. But isn't that something?)

third star from the right

third star from the right
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

As someone who's really into dirt & decay, I've discovered that Disney's really not for me.

But figured I needed to experience it for myself to be really really sure. So I snuck away for a *very* expensive lunch.

And now I'm sure.

(Imagine it would be entirely different if I were here with kids.)

Now: Back to work.

Posting by cameraphone from Epcot Center.

park it.

park it.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Gotta park all those happy people somewhere.

Posting by cameraphone from Epcot Center.

don't tread on me

[The Danes] appear to underestimate the importance of floor-coverings.

An Ikea spokesperson responding in the Times Online on the research findings of a Copenhagen academic who uncovered that:

Sweden's all-conquering furniture firm quite shamelessly names its fanciest futons, tables and chairs after Swedish, Finnish or Norwegian places, while reserving Danish place names for doormats, draught-excluders and cheap carpets.

Double-posting a comment response, given the sizable social significance of this finding.

Many thanks to @dianeburnett for passing it along.

T minus 5 & counting

T minus 5 & counting
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Long dark hallway leading to
Osceola Ballroom B where I'm
about to present.

Wish me luck.

Posting by cameraphone from
Orlando, FL

* waves *

* waves *
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Hertz Rent-a-Car
'Round Midnight

Posting by cameraphone from
Orlando, FL

you are.

Cancer Survivor's Garden
Chicago, IL

hotel florence

hotel florence
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Pullman's Company Town
Chicago, IL

Posting by cameraphone

lunch. on the wrong side of the racks.

lunch. on the wrong side of the racks.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Hinsdale, IL
Posting by cameraphone

dew

Early Morning.

what we see

Watch it and weep »

Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, talks at TED about Why we [Americans] know less than ever about the world.

Running time: 4.29 minutes

no such thing as normal

no such thing as normal
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Just outside Normal, IL
Posting by cameraphone

biometric daemons

Think how people bond with babies. You would do the same things with your daemon – cuddle it, stroke it, play verbal games.

Pamela Briggs, a psychologist and computer scientist at Northumbria University, commenting on biometric daemons -- the idea that we might carry our personally identifiable information with us, in the form of a small cuddly pets, in order to keep it secure -- in New Scientist.

In the presence of its owner, those nourishing signals make the daemon "happy" and able to verify the owner's identity, just like a PIN or password.

(I want mine to look like Miga, one of the new Vancouver Games mascots. So cute!)

The idea of an animal companion is what interests me in this piece of news. The New Scientist piece credits Phillip Pullman with the idea, but overlooks the many indigenous traditions that are more common than not. The Maya still hold that we're all born into this world with a companion, and have a responsibility to care for it through right behavior in society. Failing that the animal, your Nahwal, falls ill, dies, and so do you.

The idea is fairly prevalent and extends to the belief that we share the mannerisms of our Nahwals. Traveling in Guatemala with a guide we were to meet a second guide -- a boatman -- on the shores of Lake Atitlan. The driver had never met the boatman before and so I asked him: how will you know it's him? Because he's a fox, he said. We soon found him. And he was. Not in the North American way -- but his whole carriage was like the animal.

step outside your world

The real traveler travels off the clock. Schedules shift from the routine and expected to the new and surprising. The heart opens. Differences dissolve. Friendship and discovery are the most prized commodities on the traveler's road, and cost only the time it takes to listen, to explore, to step from one known, well worn trail to a fresh cut path through new terrain.

A block of copy that I wrote for a client in, oh, maybe 1998? 1997? So at least ten years ago now.

A little schmaltzy maybe but I like it. It's one of my favorites among the commercial copywriting that I did once upon a time. They're still using it today.

It was for an adventure travel company and continues:

Take the time to travel with us on your next adventure. We'll introduce you to friends and fresh trails where the old rules of hospitality still apply. Where residents still receive visitors with open hearts and stories to share, and the earth gives generously to the gracious guest.

Step outside your world.

cakes

cakes
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Had a meeting in the Loop just about next door to Fox & Obel, Chicago's salivatorium of all things good to eat, so I stopped by because they carry 1) Quisp (remember Quisp?) and 2) my favorite black rice which I have a hard time finding anywhere else.

Not to mention that 3) I was in the mood for a Malbec.

So I picked up two.

Posting by cameraphone from Chicago.

proving a hypothesis

More evidence that broccoli is, in fact, the “most obscene” of all the vegetables, a firmly held conviction that Rahul shared with me -- with great passion, some volume and at length -- over our remarkable dinner at Convivum Osteria in Brooklyn last week.

I explained that broccoli as we know it is an unnatural hybrid conceived of rabe and cauliflower, engineered by the same Italian family who would later give birth to the original producer of the James Bond franchise, Albert R. Broccoli (may he rest in peace).

To which Rahul replied: “This is why you can’t do simple math.”

(An observation which, to my horror, was later proved true when I tried to add the tip to the tab.)

Broccoli poodle by Saxton Freymann, and featured in today’s New York Times Playing With Food feature.

old skool

“Original,” “expressive,” and “visionary.”

Architect Robert Venturi’s response to the question: “What three buzzwords do you never want to hear applied to your work?” in the June issue of Dwell.

The 1991 Pritzker Prize winner is also the author of Learning from Las Vegas and Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.

sweet pea pasta

The best and hardest thing about spending so much time on the road? Eating in so many restaurants.

The best and hardest thing about coming home again? Making my own meals.

Sometimes takes a few days of take out and quick fixes until I've settled in, the bags are unpacked, and routine has returned like a cat to its sill.

Then it's time to make a mess in the kitchen. Then it's time to come home.

fettuccine with peas, green onions, and mint (really)
serves 4

or, as we call it around here: sweet pea pasta

• small pinch of saffron threads or saffron powder


• 6 tablespoons of unsalted butter at room temp


• 6 green onions or several young red onions, sprouted like scallions trimmed and cut into rings


• salt to taste


• 1 1/2 pounds fresh peas, shelled, or 1 1/2 cups frozen peas (it was a school night: I opted for frozen)


• water


• 3 tablespoons chopped mint leaves


• 3/4 pound fettuccine Manischwitz egg noodles, since it’s just past Passover and they’re raffling them off for cheap at the grocery


• freshly ground black pepper


• freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Soak the saffron in a very small bowl with 2 tbsp hot water while you prepare the sauce.

Combine 4 tbsp of the butter, the green curious red onions, and salt to taste in a medium saute pan. Cook over low heat until the onions are tender. Add the peas and 1/2 cup water, and cook over low heat until the peas are tender, stirring gently from time to time. Stir in the mint and keep warm.

Combine the remaining butter and the saffron water in a warm pasta serving bowl.

Meanwhile cook the fettuccine egg noodles in abundant salted boiling water. Drain when just tender, leaving water dripping from the strands. Place the pasta in the serving dish, add the sauce, and gently toss. Serve sprinkled with pepper and Parmesan cheese.

From Viana La Place’s Verdura, of course.

Images from the bounty that is Flickr and created with Big Huge Labs Mosaic Maker tool:
1. Fatte in casa, 2. Fresh mint, 3. Peas, 4. Scallions in a Sieve

kappa maki

I made sushi.
Originally uploaded by Phil Dragash.

Dropped by the Field Museum's Mythic Creatures exhibit over the weekend, which was all good and a lot of fun except for the gal who was reading the placards to her children in a tinny not conducive to reading outloud voice (I can only imagine what bedtime is like around that house) (& a request: SUMMARIZE the key points for the kids. in your natural voice. we'll all appreciate it.).

The creature who won my heart was the Japanese Kappa, whose love for cucumbers is the reason we call cucumber rolls kappa maki.

The Kappa lives in water, which gives him his power, and when he emerges from the water in search of the small children whom he loves to eat as much as cucumbers he carries his power with him -- in a small depression on the top of his head.

This curious circumstance means that a small child under threat need only bow to him and he will bow in return, spilling the water, and his power, subsequently losing his strength.

Disarmed by politeness.

freeze play

It's sort of depressing. He's usually drowning.

Undergrad John Spradling commenting on the polar bear who has become the icon for energy use in the Dartmouth dormitories, as reported in the Union Leader.

"The animated creature displayed on a hallway monitor is part of a pilot project to measure the real-time energy usage on four floors of Dartmouth's newest dormitory cluster."

The animation responds to power draws in real time -- as power usage escalates throughout the day, the ice cracks and, if usage isn't reined in, the polar bear perishes.

keeping it real

SO...

A little while back I posted something crazy.

And then I pulled it down.

And then I got my nerve back and put it back up.

And then I pulled it down again.

And then a friend called me out on it -- told me he 1) saw it before I pulled it down 2) he received a copy of it via email when he signed up to get email updates of detritus (you can do that? cool.) and 3) mentioned something about "leverage" which I think was a thinly veiled allusion to blackmail.

So I'm putting it back up. Leaving it midstream because the datestamp matters, so if you want to read it you'll have to go digging.

It concerns statistical analysis and Plaster of Paris casts of male rock star genitalia.

Really.


So now you ALL will have leverage.

blue silo, blue sky

blue silo, blue sky
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

One more from the trail.

Posting by cameraphone.

brand new day

brand new day
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Craggy old tree sprouting
luminous leaves.

Posting by cameraphone.
Trailside. Sunshine.
Fat tires under me.
(Happy.)

step into the sun

Prairie poppy. Yesterday afternoon.

the important thing is going on

Edward Hopper: New York Movie

What I wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house.
— Edward Hopper

I knew too little of Edward Hopper to know that there was more to him than Nighthawks; more than New York Restaurant, which I love for its perfect ability to conjure that transitory happening dependent on time and place known as “lunch” against a larger stage. More than New York in the 1920s. More than that: Hopper was a traveler. And that I didn’t know.

Caught the the Art Institute’s Edward Hopper / Winslow Homer show in its last few days over the weekend, trapped in the shuffling overflow crowd of zombie art fans plugged into those cursed taped audio tours (what I hate about how art galleries have been transformed by those god awful things? it’s like being surrounded by a crowd on their cellphones. they move in large lumps from frame to frame, as though each was a television set or a department store window decorated for Christmas, and assume that all comers will behave by the same automaton rules. there’s a constant electrical buzzing of ambient voiceovers and the occasional shouter who forgets she has her headphones on and gestures wildly to her companion about fugitive pigments and forgotten color washes. they forget to bend and move; they forget to say “excuse me” and forget to effect the physical courtesy required when thrown into public spaces populated by strangers.)

The Hopper show opens with the note about sunlight on the side of the house, progresses through his architectures and sparsely peopled spaces -- canvases “unspoilt by the impertinent presence of people” as his friend Guy Pene du Bois pointed out.

My viewing of the show, startling the folks in headphones as I dipped into and out of their streaming mass, was disrupted by a coiled stone snake that I had seen earlier that day in the Field Museum on a brief visit with my classmates from a course on the Mayan Collapse.

The Aztec snake, carved for the earth goddess, is exhibited on a raised platform under which has been placed a mirror -- so that the viewer can see that the underside was also immaculately finished with the scales and details of the coiled snake. Why? I asked our teacher. For the earth goddess, I was told. Because she can see the underside.



That information shook up my ideas of representational art -- used to, as I am, the stage with its proscenium arch and its audience beyond. To imagine that the folks who made this snake, compelled to create as we are still today, were perhaps compelled to create for a different audience entirely. Or perhaps more exclusively.

People as viewers are secondary to the primary audience: the Gods.

We make art to be seen -- the object is our intercessor.

Passing through the Hopper show, through the desolate loneliness of his urban spaces, I was acutely aware of how he was telling me this story. How his images reach through the loneliness that he portrays so well and attempt connection.[1] The canvas is his stage, I am his audience, he paints for me false fronts and stage sets and I agree to search out the truth of what he has to tell me.

Or at the very least to try.

In the last room of the Hopper show we see Hopper’s later works, when he’s taken to the road after the disappointing period that followed the success of his Nighthawks. He and his wife travel West, and his Western Motel of 1957 is so perfectly transiently American -- this brief, tidy place of habitation against a western landscape; yurt-like in its purpose, the traveler knows it for only a night before they move on. The terrain occupies as much space as the room itself.

Edward Hopper: Western Motel

To me the important thing is going on. You know how beautiful things are when you're traveling. — Hopper

The last canvas selected for the show is one of the last that Hopper painted before he passed away: a bare room, the walls washed in sunlight. Sun in an Empty Room from 1963 was an intentionally curated counterpoint, I suspect -- the journey from painting sunlight on the side of the house to painting sunlight within.

Illuminating the interior.

The placard on the wall details Hopper’s response when he he was asked what he was trying to get at with his art:

"I'm after ME", he replied.

To which I added my own quiet postscript: And you want us to know.


Edward Hopper: Sun in an Empty Room


[1] I’d argue that Flickr is more than just a place where folks seek self-expression -- it’s a place where folks seek connection through that self-expression. Its true appeal lies in the connectedness that the architecture enables -- the comments where folks thread back and forth; the groups where like minded souls post like minded content.

mem'ing

Memes usually make me cringe a little
This one seemed different.
Courtesy of Sidereal.

The concept:
a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.

b. Using only the first page, pick an image. (Editor's Note: I read this too fast -- and forced myself to use the first image within each search result.)

c. Copy and paste the html into your blog or Flickr stream. (Ed. At dogfaceboy's suggestion I used BigHugeLabs Mosaic tool. worked like a charm to get those images that folks didn't want to share as thumbs.)

The Questions:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up.
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you?

1. Green Tea, 2. Prosciutto Mint Wrapped Figs With Goat Cheese Dipping Sauce, 3. Sunrise, 4. buttercup, bug and ochre, 5. Untitled, 6. 6 gingerale & pomegranites, 7. So long, 8. Hello cake, 9. Swaggy the swagman (self proclaimed), 10. these hands can tell a story........, 11. breathless12. Not available

Created with fd's Flickr Toys.

where the buffalo roam

I’m sure I’ll regret this.

The workshop that I took in Taos with Natalie Goldberg a couple weekends back was all about approaching writing as a practice. We deployed something called timed writings where you just write -- always moving your pen not allowing yourself to stop not editing as you go -- for ten solid minutes. Pros go longer than that.

It was hard. And I wrote a lot of crap. The best thing about it was how it plumbs the depths -- “frees the wild mind” as Goldberg kept saying -- and makes you color outside the lines because you run out of normal things to say.
I’m gonna post just one “shitty first draft.” Maybe I’ll post more from the workshop, but I’ll edit them first. This one I won’t.

We were given a phrase -- “I remember” -- and then told to GO. This was the first one of the day.

The night before I had a dream about a buffalo.

I remember the thick wooly fur of the buffalo come to me in my dream how I expected it dusty and dirty and flecked with sticks and how it wasn’t. How it reminded me of the long silk of Bodega’s fur, big large grey mane coon of a cat grown great from a kitten who would curl beside me to nap; hot September afternoons in South Pasadena along Huntington Drive when the soot from the steady passage of traffic would gather as black dust on the windowsills.

Hot, napping, he’d curl beside me sweet just grown cat still barely a kitten my top off because there was no swamp cooler no A/C and my tank was drenched. How he woke me from napping his silky fur against my belly a heat I didn’t mind somehow how he woke me from napping his scratchy tongue against my skin and then his try to suckle: sharp cat teeth on my tit. NO, boy. But still we napped; me laughing, him learned.

And how this memory spills into a memory not mine a memory shared by a girlfriend napping somewhere in Hollywood stolen moments while her little boy slept, him waking while she still dreamt and her to find him, having rummaged through her closets having rummaged through her drawers to be pacing the floor in her heels her dildo to his head fielding make believe telephone calls for her while she slept.

Hot summer napping comes in a flood of memories, some wished for some had; something about the sun in mid-day fighting through the shades; something about waking from dreaming to find a warm form beside you -- the best naps happen naked the best naps go somewhere more still dreamy still bordering this world and that the best naps spill into tangled limbs and wetness and kisses found and some kind of strong finish.

And then we awake. Naps being the hardest thing to wake from of course but they can’t continue because then they wouldn’t be naps. They must emerge into the rest of whatever the day must be whatever must be done.

And there’s the tragedy of waking: moving from the doing nothing; moving from receiving to being; moving from dreaming to doing; moving from petting buffaloes to knowing that buffaloes don’t ask for belly rubs.

fold it good

Long-term, I'm hoping that we can get a significant fraction of the world's population engaged in solving critical problems in world health, and doing it collaboratively and successfully through the game.

We're trying to use the brain power of people all around the world to advance biomedical research.

David Baker, a UW professor of biochemistry, commenting in the University of Washington News on the beta release of FoldIt -- which puts gamers to work folding proteins.

According to the UW News FoldIt is “a new game [that] turns protein folding into a competitive sport. Introductory levels teach the rules, which are the same laws of physics by which protein strands curl and twist into three-dimensional shapes -- key for biological mysteries ranging from Alzheimer's to vaccines.”

Or more to the point, from fold.it:

What big problems is this game tackling?
Knowing the structure of a protein is key to understanding how it works and to targeting it with drugs. A small proteins can consist of 100 amino acids, while some human proteins can be huge (1000 amino acids). The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom.

Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.

(+ I love that fold.it registered an Italian domain so that they could get the .it extension...)

Game on »

delayed. & waiting.

delayed. & waiting.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Posting by cameraphone from Laguardia
International where CNN is speculating
about Jenna Bush's bridesmaid dresses.

(Um: isn't there a war going on somewhere
that we oughta be reporting on?)

rainmaker

rainmaker
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Cabdrivers in Manhattan must welcome the Spring rain with the same joy that farmers feel when it falls on their crops. Rain means nobody's walking; rain means everyone flags a checker cab from the curb to stay out of the mess, to try to stay dry; rain is how the money is made.

And rain means I'm having one heck of a time getting out of here.

Posting from the limo (not a single cab available) that I flagged down on 5th Avenue after my car service called to say they'd be another half hour late, on top of the one hour late they had already promised me.

It took awhile. I'm soaked.

Had hopes of catching an earlier flight home to arrive in time for at least *half* of the Devotchka show in Chicago tonight -- the show that I bought tickets for about, oh, three ago months now.

Looks like I'll be listening to stories about how great it was instead.

Posting by cameraphone enroute to Laguardia.
Pouting a little.

slam BAM thank you ma'am

slam BAM thank you ma'am
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Met up with Rahul last night for some Beckett at BAM -- his first, which is all kinds of risky for me, because Beckett productions skew to the very very good or the very very bad with very very little middle ground.

Mitigating my risk was knowing that John Turturro and Elaine Stritch were in the Endgame cast, and we were soon to learn of two others (whose names I'm having trouble ferreting out from the BAMbill) who nearly outshone the two knowns.

Just nearly. The performances were pitch perfect across the board (nearly: Elaine disappointed just a smidge, playing the part a little too hard, but I think maybe my expectations are too high for my favorite dame.) and R generously guffawed where expected, giggled on cue, and had periodic extended laughing fits, all good signs that I hadn't led him too far astray with the suggestion.

But it was a safe bet really: R and I met in a hostile office environment where we quickly and almost subversively discovered that we found the same crazy absurd realities funny.

And that we were the only ones laughing.

Followed the performance with an astonishingly comforting Italian/Spanish/Portuguese meal in a Brooklyn basement that felt like a Spanish cava (is that a wine cellar? maybe it's a wine... anyway: we were in a wine cellar.) sharing astonishing, comforting stories about misadventures with one-eyed grandmothers and other excavated memories.

And then the subterranean ride home in which R demonstrated his unnerving knowledge of the NY public transit system's coming and goings, listening like a Pawnee guide to the incoming rail cars from a central spot and dashing to the appropriate platform when the train came rushing in, to take us back across the river to my swank corporate crib, already chasing into the next early morning hours but still, done too soon.

brooklyn academy

BAM
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Waiting on a friend. Two tickets to Beckett's Endgame at BAM's Harvey Theater in my pocket. Sipping tea. A little bit tired after a long day of meetings with one more on the horizon before I head home tomorrow night.

Reminding myself that I can sleep when I'm dead.

Posting by cameraphone from Brooklyn, NY

the scottish play

the scottish play
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

A few brief thoughts about the Scottish Play headlined by Patrick Stewart (oh hell: Macbeth. We saw Macbeth. This isn't a theatre. I can say it.) which I caught last night at the Lyceum with @karigee, because there isn't time enough to write up something thorough and thoughtful -– it was too big, and any approach I might make is heavily saddled with former English Major baggage, and I have to be at a meeting in half an hour.

So here it is:

• The sitcom Friends gets a lot of credit for introducing brief episodic scenes into the dramatic narrative. Shakespeare did it first.



• I thought this was a play about ambition. The director Rupert Goold wants me to know that it's about tyranny and tyrants and, maybe?, George W. Bush. And he's right. And I'm ready to rally against it.



• The thing of a play is: it must be inhabited. The life that is brought to this play through the blocking, through the body language, through the acting -– always and again I'm astonished by how powerful dramatic action can be. When it's well done.



• There's such a huge and clear difference between a mediocre Shakespearean actor and an accomplished Shakespearean actor. When a player can deliver that language with all the naturalism of breathing -- like Stewart did last night -- there's nothing better. It's potable poetry.



• Devastated by the scene where Macduff learns of his family's fate. Reminds me of the Henry production in Chicago -- the scene with Hotspur and his wife. How often did Shakespeare do this with the antagonist -– infuse them with a humanity that brings the big themes into startling focus? Making it all manageable. Evoking such compassion.



• Lady Macbeth: I wasn't your fan in the first Act, but now that you're washing out those spots I'm all yours. Such pure, believable madness.



• And, right: How old is Patrick Stewart again? Damn he's hot in those boots.

Posting by cameraphone from Union Square in NYC.

laguardia's tower

laguardia's tower
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

I've gotta get better about shooting air
control towers with a decent camera --
so many of them seem to have been born
in the age of Googie architecture. (I imagine
there's gotta be a Flickr group for these.)

Touching down at Laguardia. With quesadilla
grease on my pants.

Posting by cameraphone.

first we take manhattan

Headed to NYC this afternoon, but not staying in Midtown, where this holga was taken, and where I’ve spent so much time over the last couple of years that it’s starting to feel like home. It’s close to Bryant Park and my favorite office away from the office, plus I know where all the drugstores are.

Instead I’ll be staying near Union Park, on the edge of the East Village, near Teddy’s birthplace, close to the only Louis Sullivan in New York and alongside the pub where O’Henry wrote the Gift of the Magi. And just around the corner from where the statue of John Wilkes Booth’s brother Edmund playing Hamlet adorns Gramercy Park.

(And yes: I’ve been reading the guide book. ;)

Working of course, but may be able to squeeze in a walk or two. Stay tuned.


holga.

dateline delray beach

After being denied access to the Kingspoint clubhouse Ryan decides to leave his own special cannonball in the adult pool.

We’re stretched thin between holidays, which generally bring with them a seasonal greeting card from my sister, so I thought I’d recycle an old one. This is from the inside flap of a thank you card from a Christmas a long time ago. Her son Ryan has since cleared 5 (I think. Maybe only 4? I’m such a bad aunt.), so he’s quite a big bigger than he is pictured here. It’s been hanging from a pushpin over my desk all that time.

This was snapped in Florida, at D’s in-laws, near Kingspoint, the retirement community in which my grandparents lived (technically, my step-grandparents -- if you’re trying to keep all of this straight -- but we never called them that or thought of them that way) in Delray Beach.

There are four of us kids in our family, two older girls and two younger boys, and it wasn’t uncommon for us to get chunked according to gender and shipped off to relatives in the summertime for a couple weeks at a stretch.

One summer Grandma and Grandpa S made the long drive up to Denver from Florida in their full-size American made sedan and took me and my sister back with them. That road trip, in the summer of my fourth grade year, is a thing of romance in my memory (although I’m pretty sure we drove my grandparents crazy) -- I had my first jumbo sized prawn, learned the Swedish word smorgasbord, and my grandfather’s glasses steamed up suddenly like magic when we stepped out of the air conditioned interior of the car into a muggy Louisiana summer day.

D has a movie musical running in her veins and was forever orchestrating all four of us in a full on symphony routine. The ride to Florida required some re-scoring, of course, because she had fewer resources to work with. Our repertoire included endless repetitions of Dream by I don’t know who (which was her favorite love ballad until Samantha Sang usurped that position with Emotion, backed by the Bee Gees, some years later), along with Yankee Doodle Dandy and You’re a Grand Old Flag, probably only because we had saved the paper American flags that were stuck in our sandwiches on toothpicks at Sambo’s somewhere in the South, and then animated them like Barbies across the terrain of the back seat.

Our cast also included two molded plastic pirates that we picked up at a rest stop who inspired a unique composition from D, the refrain of which included: “Yo ho ho and a bottle of orange juice / Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.”

Truthfully: The piece was all refrain.

There was also the tune that we called “Monomanop”, which I’m sure has a real and very different name, which we lifted from a Sesame Street skit and in which I got the boy’s part, which meant I got to sing skat. (For a refresher, see Flickrite Sidereal’s take on the theme »)

But to my point. Our destination was Kingspoint, which was populated then as now (I’m sure) by New York Jewish expats, who treated children like incoming insurgents.

I exaggerate. There were some kind ones in the bunch. But there were so many rules.

The pool and the shuffleboard court were off limits during what seemed like most of the afternoon, so while we waited D put us to work publishing our first newspaper, which we typeset using rubber stamps and populated with interviews extracted from the bathing beauties around the pool (where bathing caps studded with oversize flowers were in fashion -- I wore one myself -- and most of the women’s bathing suits had skirts). The issue that I remember best featured the return of Howdy Doody to daytime TV (we got some GREAT “I remember when” interviews).

That was the summer of my first remarkably warm Atlantic ocean swim, of cream cheese and jelly sandwiches, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and my first exposure to the Lawrence Welk show. It was the summer of my embarrassment when, in my excitement, at the home of my grandparents’ friends, I shattered the glass-topped coffee table when our contestant won the Miss America Pageant, and the grownups who were playing mahjong in the next room came rushing in. (So yeah: It's an old habit.)

They laughed it off and I remember thinking I got off easy.

That summer is the reason I know the Fox Trot and the Box Step and the Tango, because our grandfather taught us in the living room darkened by heavy drapes against the fierce Florida sun, illuminated by the little lights that lit up each of the oil paintings that he brought home from Europe on his travels in the garment trade. Taught us to trace the patterns and measure out the steps as he lifted the needle and found the track on the vinyl again, looping Fernando’s Hideaway until we got the cadence right, got the the harmony of moving across the floor as one.

I danced the boy’s part, my sister danced the girl’s. And it’s the reason to this day that, when the occasion calls for ballroom dancing, I find it nearly impossible not to lead.

on composition

The power is within — the question is how to reach it and use it.

Increase of power always comes with exercise. If one uses a little of his appreciative faculty in simple ways, proceeding on gradually to the more difficult problems, he is in the line of natural growth.

Arthur Dow in Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers. Originally published in 1920.

I picked up Arthur Dow's book a couple weeks back at the Georgia O'Keefe Museum in Santa Fe. I heard about it a few days before that in Las Vegas where the Bellagio was running a sweet, small and prohibitively expensive exhibit (Vegas, Baby) featuring American Modern Masters, including O'Keefe.

In the short video that ran in a room alongside the exhibit I learned that O'Keefe almost gave up painting because her education at the Chicago Art Institute focused on rote repetition, and she grew tired of copying naturalistic masterworks.

Then she read Dow's teaching on Line, Notan, Color and Composition and everything changed. Abstraction was hers.

I'm fascinated by stories like this. Something similar, I'm told, happened to Jack London after he read Herbert Spencer's Philosophy of Style. Both artists found something they needed that was vital for their practice, vital for their motivation, vital for driving them to get it done -- in the pages of a book.

Maybe it was as simple as this: They found their teacher. And it was time.

fallout

Each cell is a time capsule of sorts.

Neurobiologist Kirsty L. Spalding of the Karolinsky Institute in Sweden commenting on the way the C14 carbon isotope left its timestamp on human DNA cells as the result of nuclear bomb testing, in this morning's New York Times.

By way of explanation the piece goes on:

The method for dating human cells takes advantage of an effect caused by above-ground nuclear bomb testing that took place from 1955 to 1963.

When the bombs were tested, their radioactivity created a spike in the amount of a carbon isotope, C14, in the atmosphere. The C14 made its way into plants and animals that ate the plants.

When people ate those plants and meat from the animals, the C14 was incorporated into their human DNA. After the nuclear test ban, C14 levels started to drop. The result is that every cell has a C14 level that reflects the level in the atmosphere at the time the cell was born.

rockin' 'em, sockin' 'em

Backyard battle. Red Rocker won.

belated haymaking

Video: Jonathon Coulton sings First of May First of May / Outdoor F*ing Starts Today
A bit belated, but since I failed to get my super serious Haymarket post together in time, I thought I’d throw in my little bit late homage to May Day -- courtesy of Mr. Jonathon Coulton.

Not really safe for work, but what do you care? It’s Sunday.

And it's Spring.

&p.s. if you prefer earnest here's 2006's May Day recycled »

if Sarah weren't so full she might have been more concerned with questions of being & nothingness

hannah jumps the hymen

Photo: Annie Leibowitz for Vanity Fair
Moving through McCarran International in Las Vegas the week last I spotted a full-size blow up of Mylie Cyrus, aka Hannah Montana, and thought “uh oh. she’s getting close.” To clearing puberty that is.

I resisted the impulse to tweet “when will Hannah Montana jump the hymen?” because I thought it was too crass. I didn't want to talk about my little niece's idol that way.

I think too I avoided it because I was still trying to process disturbing news received earlier in the week that an old co-worker had received sentencing (a hefty one) for raping a girl under 14. So questions of emergent and divergent sexuality were unsettling me entirely too much.

Returning home to the paper on Monday morning I found that Cyrus had already made that perilous leap from girl to woman: posing for Annie Leibowitz in satin sheets and tousled hair in a Vanity Fair spread that seemed to greatly upset all the parents on my trajectory to Ann Arbor later that same day. They were all talking about it. Unhappy about it. (Notably: Vanity Fair has chosen to publish the shots of Mylie with her dad, Billy Ray. The video of the shoot does nothing to change my mind about the territory she’s currently moving through.)

The leap that Cyrus is navigating, like so many girl stars before her, is perilous because it’s wholly public, and created by someone else, just as her persona as Hannah has been controlled by her handlers for her adoring public. And that’s what struck me the most, thinking about Hannah and the girls who have gone before her (think Britney, who doesn’t understand why we don’t all love her anymore): we don’t have an easy way to graduate child stars into adulthood.

This is chiefly, I think, because we insist on black and white projections: you’re either a pair of sexless cheeks we want to pinch or a fine piece of ass (note the cheek allusion) we want to, well, I’m not thinking pinch.

Jodie Foster pulled off the transition from girl star to grown up actress well -- perhaps in part because she made her transition at Yale and came back to us all grown up. Maybe too because Foster is gay, and perhaps for that reason was more cautious about feeding her identity into the male-shaped fantasy of what we want our girls and women to be.

Mylie Cyrus did nothing that she wasn’t used to doing every working day: She trusted her handlers and submitted to the image making. It’s just the timing that’s all wrong: Mylie’s a young woman now, and, like a father who feels awkward and strange expressing his affection the same old way for his adolescent daughter who’s just sprouted breasts, none of us know how to make the transition easy without feeling entirely creeped out by how it makes us feel.

flickr progeny

Arrived home this evening to a package from Encino (who do I know in Encino...) which I opened to find contained the somewhat jingoistically titled Aurora: A City Second to None, featuring a shot that I took of the Sherer Building on page ix.

Nice.

It’s the kind of book that city boosters give out to promote the marvelousness of their metropolis. It would be interesting to know how much of the photography in this photographically rich book was supplied by the good people of Flickr.

Notably absent is mention of the fact that Aurora, Illinois is home to Wayne’s World, a dubious honor that elefanterosado was kind enough to remind me of not too long ago.

Another Aurora resident who is missed on these pages is Baby Goff, who showed up on this good earth only yesterday. BG is also a product of Flickr -- it took the photosharing site to bring his folks together, even though (if I’m remembering this right) they both have deep family roots in the same small town in Texas.

Welcome little one -- and big hugs and congratulations to p2wy and *April*.

Happy 'Day.

how much I suck

Embiggen »

My carbon footprint per Dopplr.com -- as of September 2007 when I started using Dopplr.

So yeah: I pretty much suck.

What I do to try to reduce my impact when I travel:

• Try to eat no meat (see: Diet for a Small Planet for the rational behind that), although I've been known to make an exception for Roscoe's House of Chicken & Waffles.


• Decline drinks & peanuts off the airplane snack cart -- goodies I don't need in packaging I don't need to waste.


• Rent a Hybrid whenever I can. I guess if I were really on the stick I'd start taking public transportation from the airport rather than cabs.


• Eat in restaurants rather than ordering take out with all that additional packaging.

Gonna get better about bringing my own coffee mug along -- so I'm not using up all those paper cups. Will probably start bringing my SIGG along too for a water bottle -- I average two plastic water bottles per trip because I have to dump it before I go through security.

But yeah: I still suck. Quite a bit.

She was hoping only for a sandwich,
and for someone to share it with.

the digging-est wolverine

Photo: Katie Moriarty

Oh my goodness! That is so exciting. So when are the grizzlies coming back? And the wolves?

Truckee High School Chemistry and Physics Teacher Susan Lowder, commenting on the return of the Wolverines to the Sierra Nevada Range as reported by the Sacramento Bee back in March.

Sue's also my aunt, and one of my favorite ones at that, so that + gushing about rarely sighted species + longing nostalgically for others that have gone before gets her a plug here at detritus.

Kin for sure.

distress beacon tweet

Arrested.

Berkeley student James Karl Buck's tweet from Mahalla, Egypt on 10 April shortly after he was arrested for covering an anti-government protest, as reported by CNN in Student Twitters his Way Out of Jail.

Buck was released after friends, family and followers got busy upon receiving his tweet. After some time he was able to tweet: "Free".

Buck's translator, Mohammed Maree, is believed to still be in prison.

red's

Espanola, NM