I can be emailed at caterina -at- caterina -dot- net
{ Other Projects }
{ Links }
{ Miscellany }
{ RSS Feeds }
My Flickr photos.
Taken in Parc Guell, by Rija.
And while we're here, why not look at some more cool stuff, built by Flickr members, offsite.
Mosaic Maker (Hey! What's that E doing there?)
Cory, at the Reboot conference in Copenhagen, records the crafter's manifesto written by Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, a Finnish crafter that "reads like a blueprint for the Enlightenment crossed with an entrepreneur's prayer."
1. People get satisfaction for being able to create/craft things because they can see themselves in the objects they make. This is not possible in purchased products.
2. The things that people have made themselves have magic powers. They have hidden meanings that other people can’t see.
3. The things people make they usually want to keep and update. Crafting is not against consumption. It is against throwing things away.
4. People seek recognition for the things they have made. Primarily it comes from their friends and family. This manifests as an economy of gifts.
5. People who believe they are producing genuinely cool things seek broader exposure for their products. This creates opportunities for alternative publishing channels.
6. Work inspires work. Seeing what other people have made generates new ideas and designs.
I see the rise of crafting, DIY (and their mouthpieces in magazines such as Readymade and Make) -- and, in the digital realm, people publishing their photos and blogs, as the expression of a powerful, almost demiurgic need to create one's own world. The need for uniqueness and singularity becomes really pressing in a world of endless reproduction, sameness, mediocrity and crap.
As I was saying to Andy the other day, the marketplace used to be a human place, where people exchanged the goods they'd grown or made, and each exchange was an exchange between people. Now there are supermarkets and Walmart, and I had a conversation with a clerk at Borders who said that they were going to replace him with a system whereby your goods were tallied by an RFID reader as you walked out the door. There's something different about knowing the people who make your clothes and grow your food, and I think that this will be an enormous force going forward. Distribution mechanisms have become that much easier with online payments and online marketplaces, and I'm excited to start expanding the list of places I shop for things from "real people" -- from just my little local boutiques, Elsewares and Threadless.
One of Pittsburgh's own! Someone went and scanned in this fabulous book from the 70s from Rosie Grier, one of the Steelers that won that record number of Superbowls.
*coff* Don't ask me about football. *coff* Rob writes me to correct me:
Rosie Grier was an all-pro for the LA Rams, and never played for the Steelers. He's best known for cradling RFK's head after the assassination in Los Angeles, just after tackling Sirhan Sirhan. Rosie is also famous for the song "It's alright to cry."
Good facts! Thanks, Rob. And more stuff from Leo:
Thanks fellows. I'm an ignoramus of the pigskin. Now back to the rest of the post about Grier's embroidery.
As the poster of the photos, Extreme Craft, notes, at 6'5" and 300 lbs., Grier didn't really worry about people who thought he was a wuss. Check out the whole photoset and the rest of his photostream for more manly crafts, and some crafts by Charles Manson.
I am gaining an uncomfortable familiarity with numbers on the clock I had hitherto been unacquainted with. Numbers like 6.
I had thought that I could become a morning person by sheer force of will, but I find that I am really stupid until around noon, no matter how many smart drinks I drink or oxygen bars I visit.
The clock is the enemy.
I said, 'What thing is that?'
She said, 'Its some kynd of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you dont take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up suddn in the middl of the nite. 1 minim your a sleap and the nex your on your feet with a spear in your han. Wel it went you put that spear in your han it were that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it dont even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.'
I said, 'If its in every 1 of us theres moren 1 of it theres got to be a manying theres got to be a millying and mor.'
Lorna said, 'Wel there is a millying and mor.'
I said 'Wel if theres such a manying of it why it lorn then whys it loan?'
She said, 'Becaws the manying and the millying its all I thing it dont have nothing to gether with. You look at lykens on a stoan its all them tiny manyings of it and may be each part of it myt think its sepert only we can see its all 1 thing. Thats how it is with what we are its all 1 girt big thing and divvyt up amongst the many. Its all 1 girt thing bigger nor the worl and lorn and loan and oansome. Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us on like we put on our cloes. Some times we dont fit. Some times it cant fynd the arm hoals and it tears us a part. I dont think I took all that much noatis of it when I ben yung. Now Im old I noatis it mor. It dont realy like to put me on no mor. Every morning I can feal how its tiret of me and readying to throw me a way. Iwl tel you some thing Riddley and keap this in memberment. What ever it is we dont come naturel to it.'
-- Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban
We went to see Benoit Jacquot's homage to New Wave, A Tout de Suite last night; I adored it. It had an awkward rhythm -- the scenes seemed to go on a beat or two too long, the silences too -- and it was impossible to tell what was going to happen next. It was a very unadorned life as lived kind of telling, as the title a tout de suite (right now) would imply, and a kind of documentary style. The photography was a gorgeous black and white.
19-year-old Lili, played by the luminous and unconventionally lovely Isild de Beco, is a bourgeois art student who falls in love and runs away with Bada, a soulful Moroccan bank robber, condemned to death for his part in a bank heist that ended up with his partner and a teller dead. Lili's relationship with Bada leads to no good end, one might think, except that she is young, and free, and loves him, and only those moments lived without regard to consequences are true.
Best thrift store find ever? Here's the whole thing. And also, helcat's Jackson Verdict Watch photoset.
Thanks Lia!
On an impulse, I bought a copy of Freakonomics by Steven J. Levitt and Stephen Dubner yesterday. Full of factoids and interesting conclusions, and an unusual way of looking at economics. The thing I liked best about it was that Levitt's conclusions could be depended upon to be politically incorrect. He drew whatever conclusions the data indicated, regardless of how those results would be perceived morally, the biggest example of that being his research that proved that the precipitous decline of crime that started in the early 90s was a direct result of Roe vs. Wade in 1973.
The book was ultimately unsatisfying, not enough meat on the bones. It could have been written as a lengthy article in the NY Times Magazine or the New Yorker; in fact an article on Levitt that appeared in the former is quoted extensively throughout.
Notebook:
From Adam Smith's first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments:
-- Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis
G.K. Chesterton: When there aren't enough hats to go around, the problem isn't solved by chopping off heads.
The per-hour death rate of driving vs. flying is about equal.
Jason's going to be on TV, and I said he oughta wear a subversive t-shirt, a la Goatse. He suggested Maggie's new t-shirt, and my immediate response to the shirt was, Wow, that is so not construction-crew safe, an idea introduced to me by Heather who discovered that her [this is good] t-shirt was decidedly not. Also note that open comment systems can often replicate the construction crew experience.
Another wow: t-shirts are expensive. I saw a Duran Duran Seven and the Ragged Tiger Tour t-shirt for sale in a thrift store in Canada for $90!! Insane. Besides, that album was no good.
My pal Jen Bekman has started a new blog over at Personism, the name inspired by Frank O'Hara's declaration of a new (tongue-in-cheek) movement:
If you have to ask, you'll never know. Metaphors and the brain are discussed in this Scientific American article:
An interesting find. But I think, if pressed to explain "all that glitters is not gold", I'd probably come up with a similar explanation. As poetry is what is lost in translation, metaphor is itself lost in explanation. It's like explaining jokes or jazz. The thing that makes a great metaphor is that flash of understanding & the cognitive leap taken to make the connection. As with music. As with art.
- I never thought I'd say this, but the express Caltrain ride down to Sunnyvale isn't long enough. You just get started on your email, or your reading, and you're already there. But then, the non-express trains don't have shuttles going back and forth from the Yahoo campus.
- Notes from yesterday's meeting: "Montessori school meets speed dating." Don't ask.
- Dos Pesos is insane. Truly he is. I think he needs another dog to teach him how to be a better dog.
- Celebrities playing table tennis, from Estee
- Last night Derek told me about these videos of people that are caught on film stealing bait cars, but I can't find it on the internet. Anyone? Most of them are from Vancouver. UPDATE: Bait Car Videos. Thanks Matt!
OK, I'll take the bait, Mr. Chess. A book meme for book nuts.
Total number of books I've owned:
Well, if you've been reading this weblog for any length of time, you should have some idea. "Shitload" is probably a fairly accurate estimate. I think the problem began because I was such a nerdy girl I went to the library every day after school and hung out with the librarians there. We became chums. And they asked me to sort the books for the annual book sale, and said I could take home any books I wanted. Which probably halved the supply of books in the sale.
I'm going to guess around 3,000? My parents still have about 1,000 of mine which they keep threatening to sell off.
Last book I bought:
Does that mean "ordered" or "acquired"? I just ordered No Country for Old Men, the latest book by Cormac McCarthy, which isn't out yet, slated to appear in the July. And the latest book I acquired was swiped from Stewart, who was sent a review copy of The Art of Project Management by the author or O'Reilly or somebody. But the last book I actually paid cash money for in a real book store was a biography of Marcel Proust by Celeste Albaret, his maid, Monsieur Proust, which I got the day we left Canada at the world famous Little Sisters, which, in addition to carrying such titles as Jock Straps and Underwear also has a fine selection of literature, provided the author you're looking for is gay. It's also conveniently located next to Melriches, and so if you get disgusted with the abysmal writing in The Globe and Mail, as I do every time I pick it up, you can go get something else to read.
Last book I read:
A couple hours ago I finished the last book of the Marie Redonnet triptych, Rose Mellie Rose. The first two books were Hotel Splendid and Forever Valley. I heard about Marie Redonnet one day when I was wandering about the internet as I am wont to do. I came across a guy's page of books he'd recently enjoyed, and he'd read her entire oeuvre. When someone likes a writer enough to oeuvrify, I figure they're worth checking out. Redonnet's language is startling: barely any description, subject-verb-object sentences, stripped of all affect. Fantastic. Read the three books in the order they were written. I did, but not by design. It all makes sense in the essay at the end of Rose Mellie Rose.
Last book I finished:
See previous answer.
Five books that mean a lot to me:
This is hard. This is like asking your mother which one of her children is her favorite.
- The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens Means so much to me I memorized all of my favorite Stevens poems. The short ones anyway.
- Ballerina Bess. The first book I ever read all by myself. Holy smokes! It's back in print again, and with the same illustrations! (abandons blog post to go order a copy)
- The mind boggles. The problem with writing this kind of blog post is that it sounds kind of braggy and pretentious. Especially since I like famously braggy and pretentious books. And/or the predictable ones. So, I don't know, take your pick: Invisible Cities, Finnegans Wake, Gravitys Rainbow, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (joking!)... then there's a countervailing pressure to list obscure gems nobody's heard of -- I AM SO GLAD I finished reading that Marie Redonnet book just now!
So now I hand this off to my pals in the Lowlands, Paul, Jouke, and Rogerio, readers all, and on hiatus declared or otherwise! But here's hoping.
– Charles Mingus
And I was reading about things that are simple, yet difficult in a recent O'Reilly book, The Art of Project Management. A marathon is dead simple. You just run until you've gone about 26 and some miles. But no one would say it was easy.
I've had a fairly insane week, even by my already fairly insane standards. Last week I was up most mornings before 6, packing up the house, running errands, getting rid of crap. The days were filled with activities such as purging closets and making lots of trips to the Salvation Army with trunkloads of stuff. Then as soon as the movers left we jumped on a plane and headed down here, arriving late on Tuesday night. If you saw my meeting schedule from the last three days at work, you might be tempted to tear your hair out as much as I was. I haven't been home long enough to unpack, and haven't eaten a meal here yet, unless you count having a banana for breakfast, because there were several things to be celebrated: June 1, our first day at Yahoo, was also Stewart's and my third anniversary. And the next day we went out to celebrate with all our new friends and co-workers at Yahoo who had worked so hard to bring Flickr inside the company. Tomorrow we fly off to New York to celebrate our Webby award.
It's all a lot of eustress. So when I read this passage from a mailing list I'm on with a bunch of other overachievers, it really struck me. Because through all this activity, I've been sick with a cold and tired and knew I really should be in bed getting better. Instead I was dissipating all my energy and being, weirdly, lazy and irresponsible.
"There's a Buddhist teaching," one of our friends on the mailing list writes, "that the impulse to stay busy can be a particularly insidious form of laziness. As Sogyal Rinpoche put it: