Thursday, September 30, 2010

Gregg Fleishman's cut out lamps, furniture, and, oh yeah, a working car

After visiting the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which was fantastic but hilariously baby inappropriate no matter how friendly the staff were, Miriam and I wandered the lovely Culver City downtown area, stumbling into Gregg Fleishman's studio/gallery.

Having worked, and occasionally dumpster dived, at MIT for five years, I am pretty well attuned to computational design and like it an awful lot. Computational design is the art of applying computational techniques to design problems like designing a chair, or a street grid plan. There were folks in the building I worked in who were heavily into this stuff, using computer controlled routers, laser cutters, and waterjets to cut materials to assemble into sculptures, models, furniture, and a house built without nails or glue cut out of sheet of plywood with dovetailed joints. I could tell when they had a new project going up when the loading dock started to fill with the remains of 4x8 sheets of plywood after big irregular shapes were magically cut out of the center.

Gregg's stuff is very much in this vein, and he works at all of these scales. There's a do-it-yourself kit of flexible plastic tiles to make tetrahedrons and spiked buckyballs and whatever you want to make out of regular triangles, squares, pentagons, and hexagons. There are the surprisingly pliant plywood chairs of curved zigzags and interlocked pieces. And this weekend, he's displaying his two passenger plywood electric car at the Santa Monica Alt Car Expo. Much awesomeness. Miriam liked sitting on the chairs and hording the pentagons.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Things I can hear from where I sit and type

Rumble rumble
with a breath in and a breath out even though machines don't breath silly goes the dishwasher pushing forward and coming back and again
someone in a car that costs more than some houses gunning it up Santa Monica Blvd
footsteps of bare feet on hardwood floors pat pat pat
murmur murmur next door neighbor in a medium low male voice
now the dishwasher knocks, every couple pulses
pawsteps on hardwood floors pittat pittat pittat

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs and toast
lunch: leftover chickpeas and spinach
dinner: chili

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Storytime at the library

A few imprecise observations about storytime at the Santa Monica branch libraries gussied up in inappropriately accurate looking statistics:

The ratio of parents to nannies at the Montana Ave Branch (median house price in a half mile radius: $1.7M): 1:2
The ratio of dads to moms/nannies at the Fairview Branch (nearby business: Street Sports Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu): 4:19
Average age attending the Babies Time session at all libraries, advertised for 0-23 months: 17 months
Median MSRP for strollers seen at Montana Branch: $450
Downtown branch: $175
Most common brands: Bugaboo, City Jogger (note: strollers made by the City Jogger company are not intended for jogging on city streets or sidewalks), Graco, cheap no-name Chinese umbrella stroller sold at Babies R Us
Most common shoes: Robies
Median length of hair: for girls: 6 inches
For boys: 4.7 inches
Percentage of girls with hair shorter than 1 inch due to "hair-not-yet-grown-in": 17
Percentage of boys: 17
Most common snack: cheerios
Proportion of parent/nannies sitting on the floor to sitting in chairs: 1:7

Yesterday's run destination: 26th St

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: granola
lunch: leftover jonalicious pasta
dinner: Ezra's chickpeas and peppers dish

Monday, September 20, 2010

Science, science everywhere

I'm doing a bit of professional work this week and so have science outreach on the brain. Specifically, I'm helping to manage an online discussion about science festivals that has an A-list of science festival organizers from around the country and a smattering from around the world. Since there are only a dozen odd full size city-scale science festivals in the US, almost all started in the last five years and most in the last two years, the difference between the A-list and everyone else is not so much.

It's nice to use my professional brain and it has gotten me thinking not just about science festivals, those city-wide parties celebrating science with carnivals, lectures, discussions, fairs, and whathaveyou, but about the best science outreach I've been a part of or known of. I love museums. I love going to museums and working in museums and watching people marvel at a micrograph of a fly's eye or walk around a scale model of the solar system embedded in the pavement. I shudder sometimes at the limited reach of such things, the few hundred thousand people (at most) who are going to engage with a given exhibit and then only for a few minutes, once, in their lives. I have great faith in the power of the momentary transcendent experience, the wow factor, the fleeting sense of understanding the universe more than you did a second ago and seeing great vistas of understanding along the road ahead. I believe these moments come most frequently in the company of others, as science is best done in community, of your classmates or teachers or parents or friends. Meeting a hero, be they astronaut or grad student (some of my biggest heroes are grad students. Or they were at some point.), inspires.

I think that momentary transcendent experience is a time when people change what they believe, how they think of themselves and their world, and can inspire entire careers in science. That is, when it is backed up by daily access to information and encouragement at school and at home (for kids) and in conversation at home and at work (for adults).

I am conflicted on it, as I am about most big questions I come across professionally. The informal science education world I've worked in for the past five years in many cases is mostly focused on reaching a lot of people for a short amount of time, a few dozen hours at most, and in many cases just a few minutes. You can't learn much in that amount of time. I haven't engaged the other side yet, the formal science education world in classrooms, the people who reach only a few people at a time but have enough contact to create in them something whole and huge. Yet.

Yesterday's run destination: CVS

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cereal
lunch: veggie fried rice
dinner: church potluck

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Let Miriam be Miriam

I like playing with legos. Always have. Loved my job at MIT in part because it gave me access to a huge collection of legos. I even got to buy legos, hundreds of dollars of kits at a time, with the Institute's money.

I like playing with Miriam's duplo legos. We've only had them a week but I've gotten down on the floor sorting, stacking, building, taking apart, putting together, every day sometimes twice a day. I "help" her play with them, pulling them apart or turning her wrist to match up studs to hollows. I say the names of the colors and count blocks and make piles and we have fun together.

Luckily, I'm also an absentminded father who likes to read his webcomics and the newspaper while I keep a sort of loose eye on the baby on the other side of the living room. For in her quiet play, she has on her own and with a few cries of frustration mastered the taking apart of two connected blocks and the turning of wrists to match stud to hollow. I didn't think she could. And sometimes she can't. These toys have caused more frustration than most anything else she plays with.

She sticks to the 2x2s and only to stacking them into tall thin towers. She will put down a block that doesn't fit right in her right hand on the floor and turn it until she can grab it in the way she knows has a chance of matching the stack in her left hand. But it works and the stack grows and she sits there quietly surprising me. Gooooo baby!

Yesterday's run destination: around the overlook on Mullholland Highway above the Stone Canyon Reservoir

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: Yom Kippur fast
lunch: Yom Kippur fast
dinner: rib eye, corn, greens salad, and kugel and it might not have been kosher but it was tasty

Thursday, September 16, 2010

When you stop wanting the marshmallow and enter nirvana

There is a classic psych experiment done by Walter Mischel starting in the late 1960s, that asked little kids, three and four years old, to sit in a room with a marshmallow and not eat it. If they could avoid eating it for the allotted time, on the order of 20 minutes, they would be given two, count 'em, two marshmallows. Some could, some couldn't. The kids in the original study have been tracked and those who could earn more, stay married longer, take fewer drugs, etc., all things you would associate with being able to delay gratification. For a while Mischel and subsequent researchers thought the delayed gratification trait was inherent, genetic, developmental, whatever, but eventually shifted to believe it can be taught. Those kids who, at this early age, whether in school, by their parents, or on their own, had learned coping mechanisms for delaying gratification, were able to pass the test, so to speak. Some hid from the marshmallow. Some ignored it. Some stared at it and talked to it. Different kids had different strategies.

On the walk from the driveway to the door of our apartment building, Miriam and I pass a gravel lawn, a large expanse for overflow parking surrounding the avocado tree. It is a litter box for neighborhood raccoons and cats and I don't like her to play in the rocks. She likes to walk more and more and I usually let her walk from the car to the house on her own, particularly if I am carrying something. As we passed today, she stopped at the edge of the gravel and looked at it, bent her knees a little bit and froze. After a moment she shook her head no and grunted, very slightly, as if she had heard me say "No Miriam, the rocks are not for touching," and she was nodding sympathetically, as she is apt to do when told No. Then she straightened up, kept walking, and didn't look back.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: totally plain omelet
lunch: pasta with bacon and chickpeas
dinner: roast chicken and pasta

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

MILK at the Zimmer

I sometimes struggle to make friends, preferring in a flowing social setting to sit on the sides and watch, with a buddy to kibbitz with if possible but more often without. I recognized and despised this in myself at middle school dances and would force myself to do something, anything, to get off the wall and out onto the dance floor. My best gambit with myself was playing hopscotch among the baubles of light bouncing off the school's disco ball. And occasionally it even turned into dancing with someone else.

The struggle and the gambits continue. I made myself business cards, just personal contact info, to hand out to parents met on the playground and at library storytime. I've even found a few dance partners.

One new friend invited Miriam and me to a meetup of M.I.L.K. LA at the Zimmer Children's Museum this week. She is too young for at least half of the exhibits of a typical children's museum but we found plenty to play with, if not always in the intended fashions. In the treehouse (just three low steps off the ground) there was a foot switch activated video embedded into the platform. She really liked the foot switch and never noticed the video. As did other kids of a variety of ages. The little metallic tinkle of the switch, its cover painted to blend with the planking, an unexpected movement underfoot captured just about everyone's attention.

And they had a magnetic wall (magnetic paint is AWESOME) mural and oversized animal and plant parts magnets to mix and match. And a strangely warm water table with some flow and boats and ducks and anchors and paddles and have I told you that one of the best parts of being a parent is getting to play with toys in the guise of "helping" and "facilitating learning and good play habits?" I'm not sure it is up there with giggly smile hug, but it is great. Also they had an airplane you could go in and turn the rudders and hit switches and levers and Miriam surprised me with her immediate understanding of the steering wheel.

Yet they only get 30-40,000 visitors a year. I don't quite understand why LA doesn't seem to visit children's museums, and as a result seems to have very few. There have been hints here and there of a marketplace of for-profit indoor gyms and playspaces, with and without classes, which might be where all those kids are going.

Yesterday's hike destination: Temescal Gateway Park canyon trail to the waterfall

Yestserday's menu:
breakfast:cereal?
lunch: Bay Cities Italian Deli salami sandwich with the works
snack: chocolate croissant and passionfruit smoothie
dinner: pasta leftovers

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Now I dream of driving..in LA

Driving south, south along the coast. The fog covers the ocean and only the waves at the shore are visible from the highway. We turn right and start winding up into the hills, past homes raised on concrete platforms jutting from the hillside. One has an observatory tower, another three levels of terraced deck, each with its own complete set of patio furniture. The empty concrete platform across the way reminds us of the precarious nature of our dwelling: fire more than earthquake. As we pull into the cul-de-sac, a chalk drawing on the driveway becomes visible: shana tova, happy new year. If the fog lifts soon, we will see the dolphins pass by. -guest post by supersecret very famous really guest blogger

Sunday, September 12, 2010

A theater for food; parenting be all; SoCal's back in business

A few items from radio and newspapers this weekend:

In the past few weeks LA has had a sort of out of town theater space for food: a restaurant in which a new team of chefs takes over every few nights, puts on their show, and gets some feedback in anticipation of maybe opening a new restaurant, in LA or elsewhere. It's called Test Kitchen, here's a radio piece about them.

The NYT Magazine front essay is about a reconfiguration of Maslow's hierarchy of needs that puts parenting and finding a mate at the top, based on what sounds like a very shallow understanding of evolutionary biology.

Among the macro things I have learned about Southern California is its recent history of economic decline following the end of the Cold War and the demobilization of a big chunk of military procurement spending. One area that's on the rebound post-9/11: unmanned airplanes. Spy planes and bombers, made right here in SoCal.

Yesterday's run destination: Centinela

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cinnamon honey toast
lunch: four quarters of dining hall goodness: shredded carrot, corn nibblets, rice, and chick peas
dinner: four quarters redux

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Who doesn't love legos?

I love lego. I love the feel of the bricks, their sharpness and precision. I love the colors, the sound and feel of snapping them together, lining two up then pushing them into place. I love games and patterns I made up when I was six and half remember coming back to me as I put a few pieces together. I love the lifelong connection to these blocks, so that picking up a lego piece can bring back layers of memory of the various people I have been at different ages.

In today's trawl of garage sales I picked up a few buckets of Duplo, which are nominally for Miriam but really will be for all of us to play with. As Becca pointed out, what she really wants is to play with us, so toys that she enjoys but I don't care for come second to something we can both get behind. Same goes for books and, I suppose down the line, Pixar movies.

Yesterday's run destination: DK's donuts

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: donuts
lunch: tuna bean spread and donut
dinner: overcooked mahi mahi, ratatouille, boiled potatoes

Friday, September 10, 2010

Ups and downs of stay at home parenthood

A friend called and asked how I was doing as a stay at home dad. I told her it was up and down, like anything. When it is up, I have a joyful giggly ball of fire hugging me and I get to go to the beach and duck pond every day. When it is down, I apply for jobs.

Yesterday's run destination: around the block

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cake
lunch: PB&J
dinner: ratatouille and tuna bean spread

Thursday, September 9, 2010

OMG what a tasty dinner I made myself

Following the exploration of yet another farmers market, I set to making dinner with a big bag of summer veggies which screamed to me ratatouille. Following Mark Bittman's simplest ever recipe (chop and layer selected veggies from among eggplant, zucchini, onions of many colors, peppers, tomatoes, herbs, drizzle with olive oil and salt, bake for an hour) I had a full tray of food filling the house with heavy smells WHILE STILL WATCHING THE BABY.

Then we needed cheese for a planned cheesy garlic bread (re Yorkside), and something to do for an early evening activity to get us out of the house so off to the supermarket we went. Weekly circular in hand I overstuffed the compartment below the megastroller with canned goods on sale, including some tuna which inspired an improved dish over aforementioned planned cheesy garlic bread (at least in sophistication if not in overall tastiness, in that nothing comes before cheesy garlic bread from Yorkside) of a bean-tuna spread on toast. The final spread was an uncooked blend of chick peas, tuna, artichoke hearts, capers, and lemon, and would have been improved by some garlic and perhaps a little cumin and/or paprika but as is was exceedingly tasty on oiled broiled baguette.

Yesterday's run destination: up to Centinela

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cake!
lunch: potatoes and chicken leftovers
dinner: ramen. mmm ramen.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Through the chaparral to the stream below

With a college friend's family, we went on a hike for Labor Day. I like the idea of a restful, active, enjoyable  Labor Day in which activities are engaged yet no money changes hands, no labor is for me done on this day of rest for the working class (Go Samuel Gompers!). We drove up into the hills above Santa Monica and parked along a city street of hedges on one side and concrete piles holding a house 30 feet above the other, building into the slope. A birthday boy of 65, his two daughters, a son-in-law, a friend, and the Bijurs. Miriam went on my back in a framed backpack that looks old enough to have held my younger brother in his baby days.

Down the road and past a gate and up a road avoiding mountain bikers in their skin tight performance fabric patterned and logoed clothes. Cliff and slope to one side and around the curve the canyon to the left opens up and out and down and behind our left shoulders a glimpse then a view of the fogged in seashore a few miles away. Up the road then off it and down a trail that once was a road down to a private camp in the valley now long since abandoned and the chaparral, wild fennel and mint and dry dry sumac and manzanita and scrub oak that looks like no oak tree found on a street called Oak Street in a town in upstate New York or outside Ann Arbor. There are still bits of asphalt but mostly the trail was a stiff dirt path with bushes close enough on either side to scratch at our clothes. Down into the canyon and the scrub trees became larger and broader and we needed to duck beneath branches and around overgrowth. Going under a branch with 20 pounds of cheerful squirmyness on my back called for the use of muscles and balance more closely associate with yoga than hiking. It took a village to get us around some obstacles, lifting branches, holding out supports, spotting routes.

At the end of it, water, real flowing cold natural beautiful water in the midst of the hot dry hills of Southern California. A stream, not just a trickle, down the middle of the canyon and our destination, after the leaning aging deserted stables and other outbuildings of the former camp, a tall thin waterfall with a giant rock for sitting on and contemplating at the bottom and a fern lined pool at the top, deeply shaded and musical.

Then back up, a quicker route and more sure with the terrain and down the road and up the road and a few minutes in the car and we were back in the grid of Santa Monica and ready for a drink and a meal and a scrub to get poison oak oils off the ankles of those of us foolish enough to wear shorts.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Branch Library

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs
lunch: pasta leftovers
dinner: provencal-y chicken and boiled potatoes

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Contemporary art is fun, fun, fun, scary, fun

At LACMA today I reintroduced Miriam to Richard Serra's Sequence, which we had seen when we were in LA in May. As before, the enormous room in which this enormous sculpture resides was entirely empty, so I parked the umbrella stroller and diaper bag on the side and tried to get her to scamper through among the curves. I had the idea that contemporary art, at least installation art, could be fun, and that massive, architectural-scale sculptures could be fun even for babies. We could run around and through it and play with the echoes and lie down on the floor next to it and see the world from another angle entirely.

She didn't like it. So much so that as we approached she grabbed on to me and hid her head in my leg and whimpered until I picked her up. Still, we walked through, into the two circle rooms and through the S passage and as before I loved it and wanted to touch it and take that texture home with me and wondered why all the architectural spaces of my life are rectilinear and even the Gehry or Saarinen buildings haven't swooped and taken my breath away the way this double curve of angled rusted steel has and does and hopefully will forever more. I'll keep trying it on Miriam as she grows.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Branch Library

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: terrible pancakes
lunch: Jim's birthday supper, pork chops and mashed potatoes
dinner: lentil soup

Monday, September 6, 2010

What's that house really worth?

One day, I thought I would buy a house. It would be a nice house, in a nice neighborhood in a city with a mix of rich and poor places with some cultural attractions nearby. I would get a "deal" after learning about which neighborhoods and even specific blocks I wanted to live on, then leaping at the right property, the one that came on the market in just the right way, perhaps after someone had died and the heirs needed to sell quickly. I dreamed of saving for fixing the roof and putting in fruit trees and having an annual barbecue with the next door neighbors. I was waiting for the right moment in the real estate market and perhaps in my life, its stability and the assurance of a long steady next phase.

I wandered into open houses. I went to estate sales and looked at the bones of the houses they were held in. I learned about Zillow, then Trulia and Redfin and the Multiple Listing Service and looked at prices again and again. I watched the housing market explode, then implode, and started thinking about foreclosure sales, or showing up at an auction with a $400,000 bank check in hand. I went to an open house of an 1880s two family mansion on a hill above Union Square, Somerville, that hadn't had any work done to it in at least the last fifty years with peeling lead paint and broken windows and 10 tenants stuffed into tiny apartments being offered for half of  what the building could be worth in good shape and sat down and saw a vision of my life for the next 30 years swallowed up into this beautiful, terrible, importantly historic building, repairing it one room at a time, living without electricity when the new system went in, freezing in the winter, ripping out the work I did in the first couple years, going deeper into debt to remediate and repaint, learning about woodworking and electrical and plumbing and loving working with my hands, ripping up the asphalt of the too big driveway and putting in shrubs then watching them grow and as I left I needed to sit down outside looking out at the street facing down the hill and just breath for a minute and try to get that beautiful, terrible future out of my head, to make sure that it wasn't going to be my own.

I look up rent vs. own calculations, the complicated ones that include taxes and repairs and the opportunity cost of not putting a down payment into the stock market for 30 years. I think about closing costs. I scoff at friends and friends of friends who are underwater on their houses. I work hard, and seek out and find a wide array of supportive literature, in believing that I don't need to own a home to be a true blue Amurrican.

I covet my friends' and friends' of friends houses, with their space and their yards and their strongly signaled dedication to particular place and community. I look up how much their houses are worth as soon as I get home from wine and cheese and wonder if I could swing the payments. I dream about buying our four unit building and living in one unit and hoping the rent covers the mortgage and maybe it's not a triple decker but it could be something a little more familiar to my Boston trained eyes than giant property management companies on the one hand and million dollar starter homes on the other. It's cheap to dream.

Yesterday's run destination: Metro Calvary Church

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: currant scones
lunch: quesadillas
dinner: ziti with capers, cherry tomatoes, and parmesan

Sunday, September 5, 2010

There shall be no bad restaurants in the Age of Information

My first introduction to Yelp was in person, meeting a much too shiny recent hire of the company tasked to build up the Boston area Yelp community. I understood it to be some sort of social networking site and she to be a superconnector, a party person and a party organizer, and a somewhat pushy person who was going to try get whatever she could get whenever she could get it. From me she got a free rental of the MIT Museum and held a party with an intensity well outside our comfort zone. It was the first year of a Student Life grant that gave me a good deal of latitude for setting up evening events. Having a whole network of online reviewers come into the museum for a party seemed like a good idea. Nothing broke or was damaged, their bouncers kept the numbers to the limits I set to them, and a good, if drunken, time was had by all. And as hoped for, we got a burst of positive reviews on Yelp and the attention bumped us up in the listings when potential visitors searched for "museum in Boston" on the site.

Over the past few years since then I've used Yelp more and more, though not quite yet to the point of writing reviews. Yelp is a classic Web 2.0 company, in which a community of thousands of unvetted unpaid contributors write their opinions of local businesses and attractions, like restaurants, museums, dry cleaners, parks, etc. Mostly restaurants. They rate the business, and these ratings, plus selected keywords form the reviews, which are autogenerated into a metareview by which all the say, donut shops, in a given area can be rated and easily ranked. Yelpers, as contributing members of the community are called, chat on message boards and comment on one anotherr's reviews through quick check boxes "Is this review interesting/useful/funny?" Yelp encourages Yelpers to stay involved, rewarding frequent contributors, and some people write hundreds of reviews, with gold stars, invitations to special events, and other status symbols. Following the typical Web 2.0 1:10:100 model, for every reviewer there are around 10 commenters and 100 viewers, so the user generated content goes a long way and the system stays relatively fresh and relevant.

To me, one of the 100, what this mostly means is that everything around me gets a review. In the newspaper era, a restaurant may be reviewed once every few years, and then only a tiny subsection, usually the high price end of the market, got reviewed at all. Now I can walk down a block of Wilshire Blvd. and find for every restaurant, the white linen nouveau french places but also the taqueria, the bagel store, the deli, this neighborhood's Carl's Jr, not one but dozens of reviews and ratings of which to go to and which to avoid. At least, that's how the system is supposed to work. In reality, the community isn't quite large enough, particularly for non-restaurant reviews, and even among frequently reviewed places the ratings can be highly idiosyncratic. But it helps me to avoid dud restaurants. Ideally.

When (if?) this sort of this becomes truly ubiquitous, all the bad restaurants should close, right? There would be no reason to go to a bad restaurant, at least in a city large enough to have alternatives in a given market segment. Before heading out or making plans, a quick check with the ratings would direct me to something good, or at least something that hasn't turned other people off, and the dirty, overpriced, poorly managed establishments will lose business and either improve or close up shop. That is one dream of the Age of Information, of the great leveling of marketplaces following on the heels of the great leveling of access to information, in this case information on the quality of restaurants. And following an era of the growth of the franchise, which is its own solution to the information problem inherent in variability of independent restaurants, anything to improve quality is welcome.

So I have happily hummed to myself, particularly in the past month of heavy Yelp usage as I learn about my new metropolis. But I also wonder if the Age of Information is a not a difference of type but only of intensity. Information about restaurants is nothing new. People have always shared recommendations with one another. There are plenty of reasons pre-Yelp that I haven't sought out reviews from friends and neighbors before going to a restaurant, and there have been times that I have. In the past month I haven't sought out all that many recommendations in person, easy though it would be easy to chat up my neighbors in the building or on the block, some of whose names I even know. For city dwellers, or most people with a car, there is and has been for decades enormous choice around which businesses to patronize and which to shun, but we seem to have overpriced, mediocre, poorly run institutions all over the place. Yelp probably isn't going to change that. But I'll be happy if I can find lovely places like Zelda's Corner Deli, which without a look at the reviews I  would never have wandered in to.

Yesterday's run destination: Stan's Donuts, Westwood Village

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: overrich peanut butter filled donut
lunch: cheeseburger at the Village Grill in Pomona
dinner: black bean quesadillas

Friday, September 3, 2010

Two views of reading history

Laura Amy Schlitz, winner of a Newbery Medal, describes her childhood view of history as having two strands. There was the history of textbooks, with dead white men doing heroic and villainous things and whole sweeps of generations wrapped up in a sentence or two. There was the history of novels, following a few people in a certain time and place and their imagined lives of loves and losses. She preferred the latter, as I often do myself.

The two types, the academic and the fiction, feed on each other. I know a few historians, and while they seem to certainly love reading broad strokes of mass movements and key ideas I think of them as in love with the particular of a past moment. I'm not sure if they, like I, use the visions and immediacy of historical fiction as a vehicle for attempting to understand what it was like to live and be and think in a given era. Sometimes it sounds more like symbol manipulation, the tracking of what document is linked to which thinker, and who was reading who rather than people who drink and dream and  occasionally write something of their thoughts and observations.

Good historic fiction needs to be based in good history, for the world is too weird for an author's imagination to fill in the details believably. And believability is at the core of historic fiction's ability to take me to another time, for my own imagination, poor substitute though it is for lived experience, to fill in the details of smells and sights, worldviews and interpretations. The past is strange, which is why it fascinates. That otherness can be evoked, by a good author, in a passing phrase or even word choice, but only if it holds together with the world and time being recreated, which I think is easiest to do with accurate detail. Bringing us back to the historian, the archeologist, the folklorist.

Yesterday's run destination: Sadly yesterday I did not run.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs
lunch: cheesy mashed potatoes
dinner: tofu fried rice.

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Subway maps, my favorite

Jacob sent me a link to a page of fantastic Japanese subway posters. I took a look expecting subway maps, which I have had an abiding interest in ever since shortly after I read the Visual Display of Quantitative Information and started thinking about information design. The posters were not really information design, but quite entertaining nonetheless.

Thinking about subway maps brings me back to the heady days of 2003 and a business plan for the Museum of Information Design, written out on a stack of Post-Its. To discovering Ben Fry's website, and then learning that we had a bunch of friends in common. To seeing Manhattan take a little tour around the country. To a plan to collect digital camera manuals and write a paper on the evolution of digital camera interfaces through the 1990s as Canon and Kodak and Nikon (lots of 'k' sounds in among the camera manufacturers, almost as if they are trying to evoke a certain clicking noise...) figure out how a digital camera is not like a film camera. Yay information design.

Yesterday's run destination: Centinela

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: granola
lunch: chicken and potatoes
dinner: chorizo tacos

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Temescal Gateway Park cools at dusk

Bring a sweater. In the deep broad shadows of the valley of Temescal Canyon, when the sun goes down so does the temperature, and quickly. Even without a sea breeze coming up the too broad road from the PCH to Sunset Boulevard it gets chilly.

It is a lovely place. Quiet, rural seeming, with a dirt parking lot and picnic tables, mature trees and a trickle of a creek even in August. I made what turned out to be an extraordinarily tasty chicken dinner last weekend, packed it up, and 30 minutes later we were eating at one of those tables, with their too thick beams telling their own version of the story of cheap lumber. Miriam was happier on the lawn so we all shifted down. No one else was about, just a few hikers, bikers, and joggers coming down the canyon from the trails, two by two. Dusk in a place of big trees, eucalyptus and valley oak, sycamore and redwood, with all the shadows merged into one and a sparkle of sunlight on the tops of the hill, with a hummingbird above and the faint trickle of the creek below, grass underfoot and the brush trimmed back, wind cool and wet and clear.

Temescal Gateway Park is no longer part of the California State Park system, which seems only to matter to those with CSP annual parking passes.

Yesterday's run destination: San Vincente

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: granola
lunch: leftover chicken and potatoes
dinner: chana masala