August 1, 2008
Great way to showcase a redesign
I love this animation Delicious designer Bernard Kerr made to introduce the user interface improvements incorporated in the design of Delicious 2.0:
[wake up!]July 15, 2008
Apps I've downloaded onto my iPhone so far
Twitterific would like to use your current location!
Shazam didn’t recognize John Cage last night.
Facebook is slick.
OmniFocus is my new Obama.
Google app is weak (brings up a tiny serp?) but at least it exists.
Pandora would be perfect if faster and also not crashy.
You had me at NYTimes.
Loopt does what now?
[wake up!]July 7, 2008
...and we're back
Holy Christ that was a giant pain in the ass.
On the bright side I may have gotten a whole chapter for my book on presence, all about what it’s like to have a longstanding web presence offline for six weeks or more. As far as the Internet is concerned you might as well be dead.
Maybe I’ll get some more blogging in now that I am alive again.
Did you hear me?
I… AM… ALIVE !!!!1!
[wake up!]May 6, 2008
Playing around with Utterz
Posted a thought via mobile that popped into my head driving to work this morning, part of an ongoing imaginary argument:
[wake up!]May 1, 2008
System going down in 10 minutes. Please finish up....
This blog, this domain, and all of my other Mediajunkie domains are going offline for about a week. We are retooling our server, migrating from RHL to Ubuntu, and generally tightening up security.
If I have a burning need to blog while this site is down, I’ll do it over at Vox.
See you in about a week or so.
[wake up!]April 24, 2008
I'm helping Sir Christopher Wren build this here cathedral
Or should I perhaps have found an anecdote with a bazaar in it for my title? I’ve been enjoying watching a lot of my fellow Y!OS cow-orkers “decloak” if you will and proudly announce to family and friends that yes, this Yahoo! Open strategy is what we’ve all been working on:
[wake up!]April 23, 2008
Ignite was fun
My Ignite talk, Grasping Social Patterns
Originally uploaded by duncandavidson.
Here are my slides.
Audio when it’s available (video too).
UPDATE: and here’s some YouTube video shot from the audience (the very beginning of my talk is cut off):
April 22, 2008
Three talks for the price of, well, none
At the IA Summit a week ago in Miami, I co-taught two full-day workshops (on patterns with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, and social design with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter), moderated a panel (on presence and other aspects of social web architecture with Gene Smith, Wodtke, Andrew Hinton, and Andrew Crow), and gave a presentation with Austin Govella from Comcast on designing with patterns. (Phew.)
I finally got my slides posted to slideshare today from the panel and the presentation. (Eventually, if and when audio becomes available, I’ll sync them up.) You’ll notice if you look at my recent talks that I am remixing a lot of the same points. I am trying to learn to be more shameless about this, since the material is usually fresh for each new audience until it’s fully distributed.
In that same vein, if you’re in SF you can find me at Ignite SF tonight doing a five minute talk (yes, covering some of the same ground as my BayCHI talk in this case) on the topic “Grasping Social Patterns.” I’m nervous as hell, not least because the lineup of other speakers is so incredible. So even if I bomb, you’ll get some pretty inspiration stuff from the likes of Kathy Sierra, Annalee Newitz, Lane Becker, and others.
For now, here are my summit talks:
and
April 17, 2008
Social design patterns slides from BayCHI last week
Here are my slides from my talk at Xerox Parc (the BayCHI monthly program meeting) on April 8th:
When I get the audio, I plan to put together a slidecast to synch the slides to the talk, which should be more valuable.
Oh, and consider viewing the slides in full-screen mode. They should be a lot more legible that way. I did my best to optimize the source files.
[wake up!]April 7, 2008
Talk back to presenters with Ted Nadeau's patented* Reaction Deck 1.0
At South by Southwest, Ted Nadeau and I led a “core conversation” on the topic of reputation, identity, and presence. Ted is great at questioning basic assumptions and had this idea of handing out placards an audience of participants could use to signal their reactions to what was being said to them.
We imagine double-sided signs on sticks to hold up, sort of like the Roadrunner does, but we settled for handing out cut paper. We’re still working on the mechanics of this, *and the whole thing is Creative Commons licensed, derivs-allowed, attrib-required, I think (it’s in the fine print), but even now at version 1.0 of this Reaction Deck, I think Ted’s really onto something:
April 5, 2008
These are your most powerful and trusted friends
A leaderboard, viral, breaks email (one-way only), reputation game pattern from the Circle of Trust app on Facebook.
April 4, 2008
Great, now I have to keep up with Bucky
When I saw someone was using twitter to send out quotations from Buckminister Fuller I was all over that. Getting this email message was just kind of an unexpected side treat.
Now, if Bucky Fuller really was following me on twitter I might feel a little more pressure to be brilliant and cosmic. Like a dweeby Merlin Mann.
April 3, 2008
Social design patterns talk at BayCHI next week
Next Tuesday (April 8, 2008) I’ll be speaking at BayCHI on the topic of social patterns in a talk called Social Design and the Yahoo! Pattern Library:
Social networking sites are proliferating. New social media aggregrators appear every day. Venerable old sites are adding social features or trying to activate the social profiles of their users and members. A number of the interaction patterns that drive social relationships online are becoming clear (as well as a number of nasty “antipatterns”). Christian will talk about social patterns, previewing some that are in the works for the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library as well as others that he has noted “in the wild.” The newly redesigned Yahoo! Developer Network site is the host of Yahoo’s open design pattern library. Over the next few months, Yahoo! will be rolling out a series of open and social APIs and the pattern library will be gathering and sharing best practices for social web design.
I’m still trying to figure out what I can share and what I can’t, so I may focus on social design patterns observed “in the wild,” as well as my current favorite topics of presence, identity, and attention.
BayCHI talks typically have two speakers back to back, and I’m really looking forward to hearing Amy Jo Kim from Shufflebrain, who is speaking before me on the topic “Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software”:
Over the past few years, we’ve seen an explosion of interactive services that harness the collective efforts of users. On the web, services like MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook, Flickr, and Digg are providing hours of entertainment to millions of people. These game-like services are changing the face of networked entertainment, and rapidly displacing television as a leisure-time activity. They share three key elements: user-generated content, community infrastructure, and game mechanics. In this talk, Iâll review the psychology and system thinking behind game design, and explore how to use game mechanics to create interactive experiences that are fun, compelling and addictive.
I don’t want this blog to turn into just a litany of upcoming speaking appearances, but then again it would be foolish not to post these announcements, right?
[wake up!]Mediajunkie blogs to go offline for about a week
Hey, I wanted to notify everyone who blogs using the Mediajunkie service that our server is in need of some serious upgrading and maintenance to deal with security issues.
This isn't a trivial fix, and it will require taking all of our blogs offline for up to a week.
I apologize for this and wouldn't do it if it weren't necessary.
If you'd like to post a blog entry letting your readers know your blog is going offline for maintenance, please do so soon. Thanks!
-mgmt
[Above the Fold]March 17, 2008
Testing Anil Dash's text-embed idea
Anil Dash blogged recently about adapting the embedding method used for rich media on personal / blog / social sites (most common use case: embedding a YouTube video on a MySpace page) to simple text quoting. He has added an embed code to each of his entries and I’m going to paste it in, inside a blockquote tag pair, at the end of this post.
His commenters talk about how re-blogging hasn’t really taken off. This was one solid feature of Radio Userland, although I didn’t like the way it would quote directly, with no offset, which led to people naively presenting quoted content as if it were their own.
This may be technical overkill or a brilliant way to take advantage of existing folkways and habits. For now, I’m just participating in the experiment:
[wake up!]March 8, 2008
If I have to appear in Valleywag this is the way to go
Started off Saturday morning with Kick ‘08.
Namedropping: Talked to George Kelly, Erin Malone, Anil Dash, Jessamyn West (yay!), Simon Willison, Owen Thomas, Hugh Forrest, Micah Alpern (briefly, passing on the escalator), Janna Hicks DeVylder so far….
[wake up!]February 21, 2008
Talking patterns and social design at the IA Summit
If you’re interested in interaction design patterns or in the elements of social web design, then come on down to Miami in April for the IA Summit and either sign up for one of the two pre-conference workshops I’m helping teach or see my presentation or panel in the main program.
Here are the basic facts about the two workshops (more details in the title links):
Design patterns: from interaction to design to build is a full-day workshop I’m teaching with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, colleagues of mine from the user experience design team of the Yahoo! Developer Network. Erin founded the pattern library and has captained it throughout its entire existence (going on four years) with the help of three curators, me being the third. Lucas is the lead designer on the YDN redesign project and works directly with the Yahoo! User Interface library team, so he’s intimately familiar with the development challenges and issues involved with implementing design patterns in the real world.
Design and architecture of social web experiences is a full-day workshop I’m teaching with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter. Christina is a director of product management at LinkedIn, a co-founder of the IA Institute, founder of Boxes and Arrows (the leading online user experience design magazine), and founder of Cucina Media, the makers of PublicSquare, the publishing/community software B+A now runs on. Joshua Porter is a former associate of Jared Spool’s UIE and writes the popular Bokardo blog on social web design.
And here are the basic details about the presentation and the panel:
Designing with Patterns in the Real World is a presentation I am giving with Austin Govella, a senior information architect at Comcast Media. We both have plenty of hands-on experience with the trials, tribulations, and occasional triumphs that stem from applying design patterns to real world interaction, information, and interface design problems and we plan to let it all hang out.
Presence, Identity, and Attention in Social Web Architecture is a panel I’m moderating featuring a “murderer’s row” of some of the leading thinkers in user experience and social web design: Christina Wodtke of LinkedIn, Andrew Hinton of Vanguard, Gene Smith of nForm, and Brian Oberkirch of Small Good Thing. I’ve been talking to all of these folks for some time about my latest hobbyhorse (presence) and the rest of the “human OS” stack that social web applications are built on. I plan to run a tight ship and am expecting a great multi-perspective dialogue to ensue.
I’ll devote a whole blog post to each of these items as the Summit gets closer, but wanted to mention it now while there’s still time to sign up for the conference at early-bird prices.
See you in Miami?
[wake up!]February 14, 2008
I'm speaking on presence and reputation with Ted Nadeau at SxSW
If you’re interested in social web design, how to model identity, presence, and reputation, and how to create and align incentives with the behaviors you wish to encourage in your online community, then join Ted Nadeau and me for a Core Conversation on the topic of “Online Identity: And I do give a damn about my bad reputation” at South by Southwest interactive this March, in Austin, Texas (of course).
UPDATE: Alex Lee in the comments asked me when my talk is scheduled for. It’s on Tuesday, and I think it’s in the morning but not sure about. Will update with exact info when I have it.
UPDATE II: It seems that we will be doing our core conversation in a late slot (5pm) on the last day (Tuesday, March 11) of the interactive portion of the conference. I say if the conversation is good, let’s continue it into the evening over food and libations. Maybe we’ll even launch a startup over beer and barbecue.
[wake up!]February 1, 2008
insert Microsoft overlords joke here
Now I know how the Sabine women felt.
[wake up!]January 29, 2008
Notchup invites a cock-up?
I’m having second thoughts about Notchup. The other day I checked my mail in the morning, as is my wont, and found an invitation to Notchup from a friend who left Yahoo a while back to work with venture capitalists. I wondered if this was something he had had a hand in, but I didn’t ask. I went and signed up because it sounded interesting.
A few years ago I had some interviews at LinkedIn for a position that didn’t work out (didn’t work out for me, at least) and they asked me at the time for suggestions and ideas about additional businesses or products they could build on top of their existing platform. I was gung ho at the time about the idea of a reverse-auction style site for hiring. Just as Priceline reversed the polarity on hotel and plane bookings by having customers bid what they are willing to pay and having vendors match that, I figured that job searches could also work in reverse.
Instead of applying for a job, you could advertise the sort of work you are willing and qualified to take on and prospective employers could apply to you and try to make the case that you should “hire” them to be your new boss. The LinkedIn guys suggested that that’s what they were already doing but I thought there was still something missing from that model.
So Notchup seems to be somewhat in that same ballpark, which was why I thought I’d check it out.
Next, I saw that they had a way to import your personal info (effectively, your resume) from your LinkedIn account, if you have one. That sounded a lot better than entering all the data myself, again, so even though I had qualms about this violating LinkedIn’s terms of service, and even though it’s generally not a good idea to give your login credentials for one site to another site (even if “all it’s going to do” is scrape some data from the screeen), I went ahead and did that.
So then Notchup offered to enable me to invite my LinkedIn connections into their beta, saving those people the trouble of applying. I started that sequence and went through my list of contacts, which is long so this was tedious, unchecking the folks I figured are either definitely not looking for a job, or whom I don’t actually know that well, or whom I believed would have no interest in the latest social network thingamabob.
I assumed I would have the chance to write a personal note, something along the lines of
Hi! I’m checking out this new site called Notchup. I don’t know much about it and I don’t necessarily endorse it, but I thought you might be interest in checking it out too.
Unfortunately, before I was given an opportunity to write a note or even review the boilerplate they were going to sign my name to, I was notified that the invitations had been sent. This is not as bad as what Tagged.com and some other sites have done, tricking people into virally inviting their entire address books, but it still rubbed me the wrong way.
All that morning and the next day I got email notifications of friends joining Notchup, and a few personal notes from people asking me if this was for real - because we’ve all gotten spammy invitations in the past. When people asked I told them the gist of what I would have written in the invitation, but many people just joined, apparently trusting me. By now I wasn’t sure what the person who had invited me was thinking.
Then, the other day I saw a message from Russell Unger on the IA Institute members mailing list establishing that he had done more (that is, some) due diligence and actually read Notchup’s terms of service, and that he had uncovered some troubling clauses in the user agreement:
9. NotchUp reserves the right to offer third party services and products to You based on the preferences that You identify in your registration and at any time thereafter; such offers may be made by NotchUp or by third parties.
10. Without limiting any of the other disclaimers of warranty set forth in these Terms, NotchUp does not provide or make any representation as to the quality or nature of any of the third party products or services purchased through NotchUp.com or any other NotchUp Site, or any other representation, warranty or guaranty. Any such undertaking, representation, warranty or guaranty would be furnished solely by the provider of such third party products or services, under the terms agreed to by the provider.
As Russell pointed out, this sounds a lot like signing up for Notchup means agreeing to receive spam.
He also pointed out another pair of clauses:
18. You understand and acknowledge that you have no ownership rights in your NotchUp account (âNotchUp Accountâ), and that if you cancel your NotchUp Account, all your account information from NotchUp, including resumes, profiles, cover letters, network contacts, saved jobs, questionnaires and email mailing lists, will be marked as deleted in NotchUp’s databases and will be removed from any public area of the NotchUp Sites. Information may continue to be available for some period of time because of delays in propagating such deletion through NotchUpâs web servers. In addition, third parties may retain cached copies of your Information.
19. Your email and other data that you submit as part of the resume will be made available to our recruiters and employers. NotchUp.com doesn’t have any control over how that data would be used. If you don’t want any such data to be displayed your only remedy is not to post any resume.
So now I’m really concerned, particularly about seeming to vouch for a site and luring a bunch of best contacts into it. I’ll keep an eye on Notchup but so far I don’t like what I’m seeing, and to those I invited in before researching the subject further, I apologize.
[wake up!]January 14, 2008
Etymology of monk dimin'?
First of all, let me just say that I completely love Achewood. The comic is funny, clever, well written, hip, profane, and sometimes astonishing.
In a recent strip, Beef commiserates with Ray because Ray is going bald (or is it mange?), and he uses an expression to describe going bald: monk dimin’.
I did a little searching around and found several other references to the term, all meaning that same thing, but nothing in the urban dictionary and I’m coming up short trying to figure out where it comes from.
I assume it’s a reference to the monk’s tonsure, ok, but what’s diming? I’m tempted to think it’s actually from “diminishing” or something like that but it doesn’t add up.
Anyone care to hep me?
[wake up!]January 9, 2008
Help me write my book about presence
I’m going to write my book, Presence of Mind (working title), on a wiki with as much input from others as possible. I’m also starting a mailing list to discuss online presence and related topics (extending from closely related matters such as identity, reputation, attention, privacy and so on, out to the full array of social web design patterns).
If you’re interested in joining this conversation, let me know and I’ll invite you when the list is set up.
[wake up!]January 4, 2008
Question about OpenID data policies
Just when I was really starting to enjoy not blogging, I find myself compelled to ramp up the post-o-matic for the new year.
I was just writing a comment on a recent blog entry from Chris Messina and decided to use my OpenID identity attached to this blog (although actually brokered by MyOpenID.com, which presented me with a choice of profiles to share with Chris’s site, telling me
A site identifying itself as http://factoryjoe.com/blog/ has asked us for confirmation that http://xian.myopenid.com/ is your identity URL.
The site also asked for additional information. It did not provide a link to the policy on data it collects….
So I figure I ought to notify Chris that his site is not providing such a link to his policy, presuming he has one, and to ask in a general lazyweb sort of way, what the standards are for the inclusion and formatting of such a statement of policy.
[wake up!]December 20, 2007
The twelve-month review
Levi Asher tagged me with a meme, according to which I am to list the first sentence of the first post of each month for the past year. I’m game:
- January: “The talented Lisa Williams has launched Placeblogger” (Local blogging gets a site)
- February: “Grab your preferred username at Useless Account before someone else does!” (Signing up for the sake of signing up)
- March: “This story (Open Call From the Patent Office) suggest that a breath of fresh air may be entering the patent-review process” (Open sourcing the patent process)
- April: “What knowledge would be lost to the company if I were to leave tomorrow? What do I know that I have done a thousand times that I think everyone already knows?” (Pattern Mining)
- May: “Hmm, those options have an excluded middle.” (Answering danah’s twitter questions)
- June: “Over on the Well, in the public Inkwell topic, Iâm interviewing my pal Nick Meriwether about his new book, All Graceful Instruments: The Contexts of the Grateful Dead, a scholarly work looking at the Dead phenomenon from a variety of perspectives.” (I’m interviewing Nicholas Meriwether)
- July: “If you missed Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Privacy, and Reputation last March at South By hereâs your chance to hear me, Ted Nadeau, Kaliya Hamlin, Mary Hodder, and George Kelly take on these topics, very early one Sunday morning after an untimely daylight savings change and, for many people, a night of carousing and drinking free drinks sponsored by startups and web behemoths.” (Podcast of my sxsw panel is now live)
- August: “Three jobs I have held: vendor at Yankee stadium, freelance legal summarizer, assistant sexton” (Three things about me you may not have known)
- September: “23. Write lots of numbered lists.” (35 ways to draw more readers to your blog - a series)
- October: “Since I started at Yahoo my workaday routine involves riding a shuttle from Oakland to Sunnyvale with a big laptop computer crammed on my lap so I can work, browse the net, or as Iâve been doing lately, blog.” (Can I blog from my iPhone?)
- November: “Iâm feeling a bit under the weather, fighting off some kind of bug.” (Stumbling out of the gate)
- December: “Get salad greens and heirloom tomatoes at the farmerâs market at Splash Pad park” (Things to done)
I’ll pass this meme contagion along by infecting So-called Bill, Cecil, Leisa, Woody, and Christina.
[wake up!]December 18, 2007
Calendar made of people
The big version of the human calendar is amazing!
The portable version is kind of cool too.
From Craig Griffen, who also brought you the human clock.
[wake up!]December 16, 2007
I am not Spock
I trust Jon Lebkowsky. I think I even spelled his name right. I met him on the Well, knew him by reputation as a blogger, sxsw presence, and fringeware review alumnus. He and I cohost blog, formerly blog.ind, a featured conference on the Well.
I trust Aldon Hynes. We met as tech-savvy volunteers for the Dean campaign. I interviewed Aldon for the Power of Many book. We were both credentialed bloggers at the 2004 Democratic Convention, which may be the only time we’ve met face to face. A picture David Weinberger took of Aldon and myself in Boston that was posted to Flickr is perennially one of the few image results for searches of me on Google.
I don’t see what Spock.com has to do with any of this.
[wake up!]December 13, 2007
Community site responds to homicide epidemic in Oakland
I just heard today about Not Just A Number, a community journalism project coproduced by the Oakland Tribune and InsideBayArea.com.
It endeavors to tell the real human stories of Oakland homicide victims, rather than letting them become merely statistics.
The site speaks for itself, and I feel like I might be cheapening it by talking about how it works technically (there are maps that show murder sites that lead to multimedia testimonials about the victims, and so on, but how it works isn’t really the point).
It just seems like the right sort of response (among many) to one of the worst crises in my adopted home town. It’s not like it solves the problem, of course, but it feels like a way to keep the humanity in the picture. I wonder if a similar approach could be applied to other, possibly more positive, community needs?
[wake up!]December 11, 2007
Voice over iPod?
Remember when I said that an iPod touch with wifi and Skype (or similar) would obviate the need for an iPhone?
Well, according to the unofficial Apple weblog, that day may be closer than ever:
[wake up!][iPod] touch hacker eok has ported Samuel’s SvSIP to the iPod. SvSIP uses the SIP protocol to connect to other participants and to allow you to talk over WiFi…. eok has been able to both send and receive calls and promises screen shots as soon as possible.
December 10, 2007
Nevelson revisited
![[crumlish siblings in front of nevelson sculpture (link to larger image)]](http://xianlandia.com/pix/nevelson70s-thumb.jpg)
After I posted about that Louise Nevelson exhibit at the de Young museum and seeing the model for the sculpture near my parents’ apartment at 92nd and Park Ave in New York, my sister scanned and emailed me a photo of the four of us siblings posing in front of the sculpture, circa 1974.
(The image above links to a much larger version, not quite as cropped.)
From left to right, handlewise, that’s xifer, moo, xourmas, and xian. I’m making a muscle and entertaining xourmas. moo is, I believe, pretending to smoke a cigarette and not making a vulgar British gesture. xifer is looking stylish in her coat.
Yes, we really dressed that mod back then.
[wake up!]December 7, 2007
As promised, my pattern library talk
As the third curator of Yahoo!’s Design Pattern Library I often receive a lot of thanks and praise from website designers and developers for the way we at Yahoo! have offered this resource to the world. I usually try to explain that much of the goodness happened before I came on board and that I can’t really take credit for it, but when my ego needs a boost I just smile and nod.
When Erin Malone and Matt Leacock and others first launched the internal pattern library, they presented a talk at the IA Summit, called Implementing a Pattern Library in the Real World: A Case Study (and subsequently the linked article on the same topic at Boxes and Arrows). Then Erin and Bill Scott took the library to the public on the Yahoo! Developer Network website and Bill enriched the library with tons of Ajax-y goodness, closely tied to the YUI Library.
Since that time, I came on board and I’ve worked on reorganizing the library, updating the patterns, and shepherding a new generation of patterns through our internal refinement and review process, with an eye toward identifying useful social and openness patterns that we can share with the whole Web. So when people come up to me at conferences or find me on mailing lists for information architects and interaction designers frequently the are curious about how the library has evolved in the years since it was founded, what our internal process looks like these days for writing, reviewing, approving, and rating patterns, and how we decide which ones to publish in the open library.
Recently, I gave a talk at Yahoo! as part of our UED Brown bag series, called The Pattern Library Wants YOU!, intended to update oldtimers on changes and improvements to our process and infrastructure and to orient new designers about the library, and of course to encourage people to get involved. Ricky Montalvo, our ace videographer for YUI Theater and YDN Theater, recorded my talk and edited it together with my slides, and we just spent a week or so removing any too-sensitive information and getting our friendly legal folks to sign off on releasing the talk to the public.
So, without further ado, here is the public version of my talk, which should answer a lot of those questions I’m hearing these days.
(This post was adapted from the YUI blog by sticking it on a block of wood and banging a nail into it.)
[wake up!]December 6, 2007
Finding my bliss
A week or so ago I posted a semi-whimsical question on Facebook:
Has anybody seen my bliss? I was following it but I think I fell too far behind.
(Hat tip to Joseph Campbell, pictured here, who seems to have coined the phrase “follow your bliss.”)
My friend Aldon Hynes wrote an interesting post, Following Our Bliss, inspired by this, saying, in part:
Christian has a good job. Heâs published a book. Heâs newly married. I would have expected him, of all people, to be keeping up with his bliss. Perhaps it is endemic of how hard it is to follow your bliss these days. Perhaps some of it is that people arenât even sure what their bliss looks like anymore.
He then goes on to talk about his own various ups and downs recently and closes by saying
So, Iâm not sure where Christianâs bliss has gone. Perhaps it is walking down the street, talking with my bliss, stopping to befriend a homeless man, spending a little time helping a teenager find her voice, and doing a little social networking to help other people find bliss that is more meaningful than talking about fashion, horoscopes and the desire to find Mr. Right in an Internet chat room.
Believe me, I am well aware of my blessings and how fortunate I am in my life, my love, my work, and so on, but I still wrestle - as probably many people do - with wondering whether I am engaged in the best possible uses of my short time here on earth. No doubt there is a grass is greener component of this, and not everyone is sucked into a higher calling. Some of just muddle through, trying to follow our bliss and sometimes losing sight of it around a corner just up ahead, but I think it’s probably that urge to thrive and grow that really matters.
[wake up!]December 5, 2007
A message to you, Rudy
Since Rudy Giuliani is running for president of 9/11, WFMU is running a remix contest encouraging people to put together tracks using his incessant invocation of that day (when his command center proved to be so ill-placed):
Here’s over two minutes of wall to wall September Eleventh’s, courtesy of America’s mayor. Your mission: turn some or all of them into music, to be reposted here.
There are already a bunch of submissions up on the blog.
One of my favorites is Gary Lambert’s Revolution #9/11.
[wake up!]December 3, 2007
Discovering Louise Nevelson
So yesterday B and I went into SF in the afternoon to visit our friends D and P and get some cultcha. We went to the deYoung museum in Golden Gate Park and took in the Louise Nevelson exhibit.
For some reason I did not know who Nevelson was. I read her bio on the large placard and started looking at her mostly wood sculptures, but she was unfamiliar to me. A gap in my art education. I liked her work a lot, her way of using found scrap wood and then painting it all matte black (later white and still later gold) and then assembling it into towering cubes of surfaces, patterns, shadow and depth. I liked her obvious cubism influences and her prints and drawings.
When looking at a wooden piece (shown above) called Model for Night Presence IV, I suddenly did a double take. I knew this work, or at least the work it was a study for. Night Presence IV is in fact a huge metal sculpture situated on Park Avenue (in the middle of the boulevard) at 92nd street, the intersection nearest to my parents’ apartment.
I never really liked that sculpture much. It’s a muddy brown color and the scale is kind of oppressive. Also, we were young when we moved up there (it had only been dedicated, it turns out, a year earlier), and it’s not quite the right size for climbing on, especially when compared to Hans Christian Andersen or the Mad Hatter in Central Park.
The shapes were incomprehensible to me as well, but looking at the small wooden sculpture I liked it very much. I could see that the cut round pieces of wood were from balustrades or carpentry. The wavy columns looked sensuous and inviting. The shape harmonious overall. Was it simply a matter of scale? Looking at a photo of the large sculpture (and consulting the memory imprinted in my mind) the proportions seem different, but is that simply a matter of foreshortening and perspective or did she truly alter the design when going from the wooden model to the metal final version?
Also, will I now appreciate and even like the sculpture next time I’m visiting at home, now that I know who made it and how it was made? Only time will tell.
December 1, 2007
Things to done
Saturday
- Get salad greens and heirloom tomatoes at the farmer’s market at Splash Pad park
- Work out with B at the gym
- Drop off shirts at the cleaner
- Start laundry
- Make pizza and salad
- Fix problem with misdirected payments to writer client
- See Michael Clayton
- Have a nightcap of Balvenie
- Move remaining to-do’s to Sunday or Not This Weekend
Sunday
- Make coffee, squeeze juice, scramble eggs, toast bagels, serve lox
- Skim the tv listings for TiVo
- Try (and fail) to get a haircut
- Coordinate move of East Bay for Democracy website
- Catch up on food diary
- Finish laundry
- Go into SF, deYoung museum, dinner at D & P’s
