close my eyes to see.

All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.


- Alan C. Kay -

want to see.

Michael Reynolds, Garbage Warrior

renegade architecture and sustainable communities

created from trash

all i can say is...

...i love friends who come back to work
to pick up my bicycle-riding-stranded self
in the midst of a late-afternoon thunderstorm,
and who treat me to homemade
chickpea flour pizza before making sure
i'm delivered home safe and dry.

[i am truly a fortunate girl]

la sixième semaine - 13e chose. Del.icio.us. Folksonomies & Social Tagging.

Del.icio.us.

how do i love thee? i cannot count the ways.
but i can tag them and stumble into a mind-bending alterna-reality where others have tagged my same sites.

the possibilities are endless!

i had seen the little Del.icio.us icon ... in the sidebars next to various news stories online. i had noticed it had recently shown up as a share this function on sites like myspace blogs, but i had never really taken the time to figure out how to use it ... [yowsa!] ... i can't believe i've been missing out for so long! how nice to have something that functions kind of like a photobucket, but for information.

it's funny too, because after getting my laptop last january, i had sat up late into the night trying to recall those all-important bookmarks i have saved on my PC at work. [little did i know] i think it's brilliant to save your bookmarks to a remote, nebulous virtual realm where they can be accessed from any location...not just one specific computer. mobility is certainly the bullet train into the future, and i for one am glad to hop aboard the folksonomy caboose. true. it's informal. and idiosyncratic. but it piques my sociologist's heart with its interesting glimpse into the thoughts and wonders of others.

i must admit that this is the first time i've seen the great benefit of tagging. i like the hopscotch approach to discovery that it can present. this may have been my favorite exercise thus far.

la cinquième semaine - 12e chose. webfeat. [not the one about a duck]

okay. though i much adore cindy-lou, aka The Gluten Free Diva's assessment of webfeat = defeat, i really, really tried to give this one a fair shake. i really thought i'd like the service of webfeat and imagined it to function something like a dogpile of our library's various databases.

but...what should have made research faster quickly proved to be mired in functionality for me. at first, i thought it was merely my internet connection at home. but even here at work, it became clear that the search process can yield such a monolithic list of hits that i became more familiar with the loverly: internet explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close...love letter, than the actual merits of a one-stop shop search engine.

in theory i can see the benefits, but in order to use it for research, i think it works best if you think to parse your query not by what you are looking for, but for what you are not looking for.

for instance, when i was looking information on my hometown, i was not looking for:

"Laser-assisted anterior cervical corpectomy versus posterior laminoplasty for cervical myelopathic patients with multilevel ossification of the posteriorlongitudinal ligament."

i can quickly see the benefits of de-selecting certain databases in order to narrow down your search. i think i will have to experiment with this tool a bit more.

a maxim for piquant wallflowers everywhere.

"A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within."

- Eudoria Welty -

from "One Writer's Beginnings"

not webfeat exercise, but webbed-feet exercise. in other words: night sounds. and that one about a duck.

when i was a child, our family had a jet black duck named "Downy".
i'm not quite sure how, in a household with three small children, my single mother happened to acquiesce to a pet. i'm certain Downy was some kind of rescued stray, and also certain that the fact we could keep him required some kind of finagling from my older brother. but we had our duck and were determined to cherish our unique pet. thing is, i remember Downy as a small, li'l bit ... smacking his little duckling feet across the terrazzo kitchen like one of those old-timey wooden push toys we knew as toddlers. and toddle away he did. following first me, then my brother all. over. the house. i remember his rubbery beak, and the way he'd dip his whole face toward the water bowl just to throw his soft little head back for one tiny sip. but as all creatures are wont to do, Downy didn't stay soft or young forever and rather quickly grew into a troubled adolescent. considering his natural tendencies and realizing he had no duckling mother to show him the ropes, we each took turn out in the yard tossing little Downy into the air and watching him earn his wings on the way down ... there was a lot of down ... thus his nickname that stuck ... i don't even remember what he was called before he developed this humorous habit of pretending he didn't know how to fly. this business went on for nearly 2 full years as we would accompany our pet duck outside and he would appear wholly disinterested in the wide, blue world of sky that could easily belong to him in a way we could never know as earthbound humans. and then something happened. Downy fell in love. and as his charming lass of a suitor lingered around the yard, Downy answered the siren's call one day and flew away. now. of course we were worried. would he make it in a cruel, primitive world? how can you know your domestic duck has what it takes to mingle in the animal world? it's like being the late bloomer at a high school party. would he know what to say? what to do? how to act? could he fly just enough under the radar to survive? so we worried. and worried. and waited. for what? we were not sure. and sure enough, it came. one day, we went out to the back yard to hang laundry on the line, and there was Downy running along the line of the roof. feet smacking just like in his tiny bird days. smack, smack, smack, smack, quack, quack, smack. oh, he was a wild one, after all...and had blossomed into quite a strong little personality we soon discovered. this vocal chattiness would continue even when we'd go back inside...gone were the days when Downy would come in and join us...but he didn't want to leave us either. [a typical teenager, after all]. i suppose after all, we felt like home. he'd run back and forth all over the roof. a slightly more muffled clap, clap, clap, clap from the inside. all. night. long. all. season. long. and seasons came and went and Downy would be gone and return to pace the roof and fly down into the yard only to chase my mother and me around every. single. time we'd try to hang our sheets in the breeze. he'd be there...pecking at our feet [love pecks, no doubt]. then the year came when Downy did not come. i'd never thought i'd miss that sound...infernal clopping. all night long. but, i did. and we feared the worst for our fine, feathered friend. winter, and then spring...and Downy came home again...much to our relief...this cycle continued long enough for it to stick with me still...now, some 26 years later.

there are times, like this one, late at night...when alone in my loft on this city block far, far away from that childhood home that i hear that same clap, clapping on my roof. it's caused me to open wide my great moon-saucers of eyes staring deep into the black of night as if i could see through the beams of my ceiling to...what?? what kind of creature i've never seen? here in this place of old historic neighborhoods and alleyways far away from the more rural landscape of my youth, it's probably some behemoth possum running back and forth on my roof. but, late nights, like this one, i like to think past the probable...and imagine that, it's my little soft duck friend having found his way home.

open wider. your heart.

"Opening to all aspects of our experience is what is asked of us if we want our hearts to grow, if we want a difference. This means looking at the world with honesty, unflinchingly and directly, and then looking at ourselves and seeing that this sorrow is not just out there, but also within ourselves. It is our own fear and prejudice and hatred and desire and wanting and neurosis and anxiety. Our own sorrow. We have to look at it and not run away from it. In opening to suffering, we discover that we can connect with and listen to our own hearts."

- Jack Kornfield -

from "Ordinary Magic: Everyday Life as Spiritual Path"

edited by John Welwood

helvetica

...or the geekiest movie you'd never thought you wanted to see. [but you should - and won't be disappointed]

...of course, [geeky?] i thoroughly enjoyed it.

this documentary celebrates the 50th year of the face font of post WWII, post-modernism by interviewing nominal figures of design - Erik Spiekermann, Matthew Carter**, Massimo Vignelli, Wim Crouwel, Hermann Zapf, Neville Brody, Stefan Sagmeister, Michael Bierut, David Carson, Paula Scher, Jonathan Hoefler - and others.

this homage to graphic art and print draws the uninitiated into a world to which none of us are immune, but probably few of us are attuned...we wander the aisles of grocer's adverts...interstates...and public buildings daily without even considering - perhaps - the vehicle of information dissemination...or contemplating the impact of visual culture.

i liked especially the venture through thought considering the universal appeal - or hatred - of helvetica - a very uniform [read: comforting/predictable] spacing of characters - is championed by the luminary designers of the sixties. an incredible contrast between print prior to its advent and afterward is what is most remarkable...remember vintage kitchy clip art adverts of the fifties? it is argued that helvetica brought about the practice of 're-branding' organizations for broader commercial appeal.

later in the film it's posited that that association is what lead to a backlash and departure from its use ... having been adopted as the face of corporations and government institutions - a wholly unsavory connection in the era of the Vietnam War - made way for the advent of 'grunge' design throughout the seventies and eighties [an interesting parallel artistically...think...sonically, that era brought us punk and that whole anarchist aesthetic]. and, sure enough, the film considers that the departure from helvetica certainly seemed to the old school of design at the time that "the barbarians were storming the gate."

the film traces its reputation full circle to today's designers incorporating and championing the classic helvetica again. in all, the film is an interesting foray into something that has become utterly ubiquitous - a younger designer even traced his fondness for the font to a recognition that it literally was the face of culture from his youth - illustrating the wider truth that something so seemingly static as a printed word has broader associations considering marketing, psychology, anthropology and perhaps, to some extent, our understanding of global, urban identity. as another designer referred to it: "helvetica is the perfume of the city."

an awareness, i think, that will linger with me for some time.

**nerdy cool: Matthew Cooper developed the Verdana typeface [the official font for all of our library's documents] for Microsoft in the late nineties.