Small Streams

We're All on the Same Side

The Pittsburgh Signs Project will be appearing at the Downtown Gallery Crawl this evening. The festivities start at 5:30. Food. Music. Art. Performances.

I could say there's lots of stuff there that's better than PSP or more deserving, or people at the Gallery Crawl that I envy, but I like to think of what Rufus Wainwright said on last night's World Cafe. "We're all on the same side."

Seems like Wainwright had been envious of singer Jeff Buckley (You know, the fellow who died to young but not before recording the best version of "Hallelujah" ever.) Wainwright envied Buckley's singing, his popularity, his hair . . . But once, when Wainwright was playing at a club, and having problems with the sound, Buckley came up and twiddled with the amplifier until it came out right. Wainwright then got to know Buckley better, and picked up on Buckley's spirit of generosity, and started to realize that we're all working to the same purpose. So I like to think that group photography, visual displays, community art, or whatever it is we're up to is not like football or business. You're not busy tackling other people or trying to be first on the market. I hope people come to the gallery crawl, walk away with a kernel of something, and act on it.

Think of the possibilities.^©.*

*"Think of the possibilities." is a trademark of Marvin Windows and Doors.

This Week in Sex

Oh sure, New York Times Week in Review used up a lot of space with the current administration's attempts to undo the New Deal.

Whatever.

More column inches, however, were spent dealing with sex and sexuality. In total, five articles covered the antics of Harvard President Lawrence Summers and SpongeBob Squarepants. No they weren't seen frolicking together. Although Summers could probably use a friend like SpongeBob right now.

Apparently Summers misspoke or spoke in what he thought was a private club room.

He suggested at an economics conference that the low representation of women scientists at universities might stem from, among other causes, innate differences between the sexes.

Charles Murray says that Summers' critics will have a chilling effect on scientific inquiry. To prepare for this, maybe we should have hired Jimmy the Greek to run an Ivy League School?

Olivia Judson's essay is a little more rounded and thoughtful.

More importantly we need to find out why SpongeBob, as the Council on Family's James Dobson says, is a threat to our children. John Leland has a short backgrounder on cartoon bad behavior, and Maureen Dowd tags our President with the name SpongeBush Square Pants (Dick Cheney is Mr. Krabs). I like Dowd's stuff, but I must say I'm glad I never met her in the schoolyard.

I've already written some about cartoons reflecting our psyches, and our internal struggles, but I think someone should parlay our need for a cartoon synthesis into a best-selling book. Dave Hickey's essay "Pontormo's Rainbow" in Air Guitar would be a good example of such an analysis.

Forty years ago crusaders set out to tame the world of animation. In this case, the puritans saw that the problem was not sex but violence in animated cartoons, and attempted to survey its effects. Hickey was one of the surveyed and describes his interlocutor from the point of view of a twelve-year-old:

. . . Did I like Donald Duck? Yes, I liked Donald Duck, I told her, although I withheld my opinion that the Duck was the only Disney character who had any soul, any edge, that he was sort of the Dizzy Gillespie of Disney characters. This was not the sort of insight one shared with June Cleaver.

Well then, she said, what did I think about Donald's relationship with his nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie? Did this frighten me? Did it, perhaps, remind me of . . . my mom or dad!? She looked at me solemnly, expectantly. I wanted to tell her that, first, Donald Duck was a cartoon. Second, he was an animal, a duck, and, finally, he was only about this tall. But I could tell from the penetration of her gaze that she wasn't really interested in ducks, and I felt my face getting hot. My inquisitor smiled faintly, triumphantly, taking this blush as a tell-tale sign of guilt, which it wasn't. I felt like a downed American pilot in the clutches of the Gestapo, determined to protect the secrets of his freedom.

'Twas ever thus. Big Brother has always watched us watching cartoons. Cartoons are subversive. They reveal a world of possibility. The great thing about cartoons is that if people start a witch hunt against them, the witch hunters will just be made to look silly. And by the way, it's witch hunter season.

For further reading, here are some links from BoingBoing:

• An article covering the original flap.


• The transgressor himself


• What's up with this?


• Keith Olbermann weighs in.

Welcome to the Wonderful World of Tags

You'll notice on the left side of my page I have Flickr and Delicious listed. I'm just starting to figure them out and use them. I can't say I'm figuring them out before I'm using them. But I did notice that Technorati has no entries for pittsburgh signs. This should remedy that. People should know now to go to Pittsburgh Signs. Damn, I feel ignorant. But I also have the feeling that this is the direction the web is going.

Not One Damn Dime Day, Again

I think we should try spending not one damn dime again. The temperature is below 20 degrees, the snow is accumulating, the roads are a mess, the wind speed is increasing, and everything is closed or closing anyway. Just wake me up for tomorrow's kick off.

Early Yeast Is Like Money

Liz came back from San Francisco bearing three loaves of sourdough bread. Terrific stuff that made me wonder, "Why can't we make our own." I mean not just the two of us, but the whole city. Pittsburgh may not be able to rival Silicon Valley in computer engineering, but we certainly should be able to outbake them.

San Franciscans must create millions of dollars worth of fungi just so people can take it all over the world and let it die. My guess is that the Bay Area's artisanal yeast and bread industry must generate 50 to 60 million per year, and that Pittsburgh could double its artisanal yeast and bread economy in a few years.

You could say, "Well, that's San Francisco, Pittsburgh doesn't have the market." I would have to counter that twenty years ago, Pittsburgh didn't have much of a market in premium coffee either.

Based on the concept of import replacement espoused by Jane Jacobs in The Economy of Cities, Pittsburghers should start making yeast strains and home made breads to become a pre-eminent source of yeast research and production. In addition to bread production, there are various offshoots of the industry that would help our economy grow. We could have biologists and bakers and programmers and nanotechnologists throughout the city working on the project.

Pittsburgh already has a yeast community, people who study S. cerevisia and at least at one time met in Pittsburgh every Friday.

For those who think that the yeast business is insignificant, remember it was yeast money that helped start The New Yorker.

More Links:

Pittsburgh Bakeries

An article on biology research which illustrates the benefits of an

open source approach

Sourdough Recipe

Sourdough FAQ

Yeast Research

How to Make Sourdough Starter

Off My Desktop on to the Web

Rebecca Blood writes about citizen science efforts, people working outside the conventional institutional framework. You could also check this out for the great posies.

If you're an intelligent designer you might want some of these stickers for your textbooks.

Wired Magazine provides a great introduction on BitTorrent a peer-to-peer-like method for transporting very large files.

BitTorrent transforms the Internet into the world's largest TiVo.

The People in Our Neighborhoods

Fred Rogers Lives!

Check out this site and join the fun.

Congratulations Cynthia

I just found out that fellow Pitt Writers' Workshop student Cynthia Kadohata won the Newberry Award. I'm not surprised, she's a terrific writer.

What I remember most about Cynthia is that along with pen and pad, she always wrote with a box of Kleenex nearby, just like the Kathleen Turner character in the first scene of Romancing the Stone. Her writing showed that she was that intense. Now I'm going to go out and buy the book. I'll have to remember to keep a hanky handy.

More Mysteries of Pittsburgh

From Stewart O'Nan, author with Stephen King of Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the 2004 Season, an alphabet of Pittsburgh goodies (some of them fairly obscure).

Extremer Finger Counting

In Extreme Finger Counting, I demonstrated how to count to 1,023 on two hands. I have since found out that counting to 1,023 is for wusses. Interconnected.org has an entry which discusses counting to 3,124 and 65,535. It even has a link to a site on an ancient Chinese counting method for counting up to 100,000.

The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes

And the 20th century's pre-eminent organizer never joined organizations. Or so he said in a Playboy interview.

I've never joined any organization -- not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what judge Learned Hand described as "that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right." If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide. The great atomic physicist Niels Bohr summed it up pretty well when he said, "Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question." Nobody owns the truth, and dogma, whatever form it takes, is the ultimate enemy of human freedom.

Deep Ecology

I've been reading A Life in Hand: Creating the Illuminated Journal by Hannah Hinchman, a book about drawing what's around you; therefore, it's about looking at life around you.

If you are not in the habit of wondering about such things, or if you don't know the answers about your own home range, introduce bioregional thinking in your way of looking at the world. In the winter of 1981, CoEvolutionary Quarterly published a self-scoring test on basic ecological perception of place. Here are some of the questions as they were adapted in the book Deep Ecology by Bill Devall and George Sessions.

1. Trace the water you drink from precipitation to tap.

2. How many days till the moon is full? (Plus or minus a couple of days.)

3. Describe the soil around your home

4. From what direction do winter storms generally come in your region?

5. Where does your garbage go?

6. How long is the growing season where you live?

7. Name five resident birds and any migratory birds in your area.

8. What primary geological event process influenced the land form where you live?

9. From where you are reading this, point north.

10. Were the stars out last night?

Most of the questions, except for the last one (It's Pittsburgh, for goodness sake! Of course, the stars weren't out.), were difficult for me. They were also deeply humbling and at the same time stimulating. I preferred it to most on-line quizzes, which usually conclude by telling you which Lord of the Rings character you most resemble.

More Resources:
Deep Ecology Quotes
An interview with Michael Zimmerman
A Yahoo Directory on Deep Ecology

Where's My Infinitron?

I imagined a machine that could remove the worries of the day. Some would suggest meditation, exercise, or religion, or some Apple product, but I propose creating a machine that would dissipate one's worries and negative energy into infinity. I would call it the infinitron.

The machine would cost as much you could afford so that every time you look at it you think, "I must have no worries because I had enough money to buy an infinitron." It can be made of wood or plexiglass, and shaped like an old-time radio, or a blob, and can have nobs and gears and sliders that you can fiddle with, but technically it really won't work; so it can never break down. You can clean it, or take it apart, or add parts as desired, or just leave it to collect dust. It can be as simple or complicated as you want. The infinitron's only function would be to make you imagine your place in the universe.

In fact, you could build your own, but I think Ralph Waldo Emerson had the better solution, which he wrote about it in "Nature":

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches. . . .

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred expression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never becomes a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflect the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.

Emerson's infinitron even comes with a disclaimer.

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population

The infinitron's uses are only limited by your imagination. Try it out for free. Order by midnight tonight.

If It's Not Food, Don't Eat It

Marilyn McDevitt Rubin has an interesting article in Sunday's Post-Gazette about American eating habits and how to make some radical changes. Rubin interviews Will Clower who advocates removing faux food from our diets.

To begin your diet the Clower way, remember this rule: "If it's not food, don't eat it." Meaning: "If it's processed, don't eat it."

I'm pretty much with him until you get further down in the article and Rubin describes Clower slowly eating his food, putting his fork down between bites even. I'm all for slow food. But I can't eat fifty-five.

Banana Republicans

According to the New York Times, federal government revenues are down, but spending is up:

In 2004, federal revenues were 5.6 percent lower than in 2001. But federal spending was 23 percent higher, and total debt held by the public - the amount borrowed to pay for past deficits - was 29 percent higher.

Perhaps we should applaud Judd Gregg's (R-NH) attempts to rein in Medicare spending. The Medicare changes were supposed to cost us $400 billion over ten years, are now projected to cost 50 percent more. What's more, the beneficiaries of the changes aren't indigent retirees but insurance and drug companies. Unlike his Republican colleagues, Gregg voted against the medicare bill. Republicans are a party driven by ideology and cronyism more than fiscal conservatism. While the corporate giveaways continue, the Bush administration and Congress continue to make cuts in health, education, and technology. Anyone who thinks differently should take Deep Throat's advice and, "follow the money."

A Photopost

Computer acting strange. Posting an item in my journal from Hannah Hinchman's A Life in Hand

Against Institutionalization

Mary Thomas of the the Post-Gazette gave the Pittsburgh Signs Project a mention as one of the top ten art exhibits in Pittsburgh! I couldn't help but be tickled by the mention. We were mentioned along with a lot of big, big, big shows, staged by the likes of the Carnegie, the Warhol, Wood Street Galleries, etc. Then I think of all the great Pittsburgh stuff that didn't get a mention. Tim Kaulen's and some other people's stuff comes to mind.

I think that the PSP is a mere bagatelle in bringing the discussion of public perceptions, public art, public production and public consumption to the table. The PSP is a bit of a goof, a chance for people to document the visual jokes, the excess, the commercial come-ons, the occasional splendors, etc. Not to say it's not worth the time. It's just that I'm looking forward to many more similar efforts that can use the same sensibilities and technologies.

Thomas uses the word "egalitarian" in her short description of the project. That may have been the best part of the article. You see, I just finished reading Dave Hickey's Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, and am a little wary of art institutions, and high on the place of democracy in art. Here are some quotes to give you an idea of what Hickey says:

I told them I missed "standing alone" -- the whole idea that "standing alone" was an okay thing to do in a democracy.

When I was a kid, books and paintings and music were all around me, all the time, but never in the guise of culture.

In the Twentieth Century that's all there is: jazz and rock and roll. The rest is term papers and advertising.

If we had thought about it from the perspective of old car freaks, however, we would have known and surely could have predicted that the General Motors of the art world -- the museums and universities -- would ultimately seek to alleviate their post-market status and control the means of production.

and a quote from his theater teacher, an actor during Germany's Weimar Republic and a Nazi refugee:

So all you Aryan muscle-boys down there at the end of the table. Don't be Aryan muscle-boys! I have seen enough official culture.

Hickey clarifies a sentiment for me and then has given me something to guide my path: Sometimes I think there is a crowd apart, dressed in a way that makes me feel hopeless, and saying things that I can't quite hear, or perhaps couldn't understand if I could hear. I might be right, or perhaps overly sensitive, to think that I can't join such a conversation. But even if I try and can't, I can still start my own.

Mother Nature and the Red Headed Stepchildren

The New York Times' David Brooks has made a career of taunting the new age, urban, left — what he calls bourgeouis bohemians (using the term "bobos," which I guess never caught on). He's illuminated their foibles, and dissected their sometimes tawdry belief systems. In his meditiation on the December 26 tsunami,A Time to Mourn, he once again sets up an opposition between the nature lovers and those who believe in that old time religion. In his column, he writes that old flood tales with a wrathful God had an advantage over our present day naturalist theology. At least that old time religion put humans at the center of history.

The nature we saw this week is different from the nature we tell ourselves about in the natural history museum, at the organic grocery store and on a weekend outing to the national park. This week nature seems amoral and viciously cruel.

What raised a red flag for me is when he goes to the trouble of quoting Thoreau, setting him up as a straw man to take the fall for naturalists.

Nature doesn't seem much like a nurse or friend this week, and when Thoreau goes on to celebrate the savage wildness of nature, he sounds, this week, like a boy who has seen a war movie and thinks he has experienced the glory of combat.

He's right that there are no simple bromides to take away from the event, and that we shouldn't try to make political hay out of the misfortune and misery of hundreds of thousands (even though an attempt to do so is embedded in his essay). We might, as Brooks writes, have no explanations. But he's wrong if he thinks that Thoreau wasn't asking the right questions.

In "Ktaadn" Thoreau writes about climbing the inhospitable highest peak of Maine, and hiking through its burnt lands. Nature, he demonstrated, has the power to make us question the places we live in, even the bodies we inhabit.

What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

I have to wonder, who is the boy watching war movies?

Took a Hike

We celebrated the New Year by walking along Allegheny riverfront trail. We started out at 43rd Street. The half-mile path is about twenty or thirty to feet above the river. There's a pleasing park right under the 40th Street Bridge.

Here's my attempt of a panorama of the trailhead. A little junky, but still scenic: