ocean waves

The Cherry Grove Art Walk got cancelled because of hurricanes coming up the East Coast. Hanna is sort of working her way in the neighborhood. The ocean waves are vigorous, it was raining a little bit ago but has stopped ... for the moment. They say it will rain hard during the night. As Kent Boese said on his Facebook page, I'm really lovin' Hanna. Of course it's only from the edge that one can say that. The center of the hurricane is not something to muck about with.

As I took the train to Sayville, there was a complicated transaction happening within earshot. Someone had left their cellphone somewhere and the two people who were in the train didn't know each other but the one would be at the Jamaica train station at 11 pm that night and could return the phone. The other said she was being a Good Samaritan. I decided to label this message "random acts of kindness." That's also a theme for my sister who took, when rather bored I guess, some extra quarters and put them in Ithaca parking meters that were expired. I don't imagine most of those blessed by the quarters knew it. But that's the random part, I guess.

I was reading the Times on the train and there was an article about Charles Rangel and his not paying taxes on his house in the Caribbean which is not anywhere near a full-time residence. How is it that our legislators and other politicians so forget that they are subject to the rules too?

I went for a walk on the beach a while ago and started toward "home" when the rain started to fall. The inclement weather seems to be making folks happy and friendly, facing the great unknown and all that. I guess that's just more random acts of kindness, like the happy birthday balloon that I picked up from the beach and put in a garbage can.

promise, tool, bargain

Chapter 11 of Shirky's Here comes everybody is entitled "Promise, tool, bargain." The premise is that "Every story in this book relies on a successful fusion of a plausable promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users" (p. 260). Boy, that really resonates. The problem with my office is that folks haven't bought into the bargain which does have some promise of helping the user and we've even got some decent tools that could evolve and become even more effective.

"Harvie Krumpet"

Thanks to Emerson Morgan for posting a charming film on his Facebook page -- "Harvie Krumpet" by Adam Elliott, narrated by Geoffrey Rush. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvie_Krumpet

series and accretions

There's been a big discussion on the PCCLIST about series authority records and it's morphing into BIBCO records and full/core records ... and now into Enhance. I keep thinking that what we really need is something more like accretion than enhance on master/other records. Someone puts a record into the common bibliographic universe, someone else adds another access point or two, someone else adds a contents note, now a book jacket or review. A combination of our traditional control with some of the jazzy new-generation stuff. Or perhaps an RLIN cluster with the accretions of the secondary cluster members more visible. I know we're getting there but big long reports on simplifying cataloging processes can be so dreary. Just go catalog. I think I will ... but, first, supper with Diana Mitrano.

everything is dangerous?

With having read David Weinberger's Everything is miscellaneous and now reading Clay Shirky's Here comes everybody, I was ready to read a lot into the news report on the 40th annual conference on "planetary emergencies" now finishing up in Erice, Sicily. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/world/europe/24sicily.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=erice%20global%20risks&st=cse&oref=slogin or search "erice global risks" at nytimes.com

It did resonate too because I'd been talking with Christie yesterday about our long-planned and -delayed trip to Sicily, with Erice on the map as I surveyed where we might camp out for a couple weeks as we roamed around Selinunte, Agrigento, Piazza Armerina, etc etc.

Back to the conference, this year's theme risks included cyberterrorism, climate change, nuclear weapons, and the energy supply. In one session, Hamadoun I. Touré of the International Center of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi spoke about pervasive computer use offering the prospect of a global knowledge society as well as making billions of individuals into potential superpowers. He is quoted as saying "Every single brain on earth is equal and can trigger an attack."

That report was in today's paper. Yesterday's op-ed page had a column by Bob Herbert on "Voters want more from Obama." A really interesting discussion of how Obama should let the folks in general know more about how when things are a mess, you need informed and reactive change. We're ready for some strong leadership that works FOR the people's needs other than jingoistic nationalism and America-first crap.

Weeksville & Alfred

Christie and I ventured out to Historic Weeksville in Bedford-Stuyvesant today. It is a small collection of historic houses, originating from the decades after the Civil War. http://www.weeksvillesociety.org/ The three extant houses are decorated to periods 1870s, circa 1900, and 1930s so there's an interesting variety of furnishings. The guide Anna was enthusiastic and informed. They are called the Hunterfly Road Houses because the road along there was called Hunterfly, a corruption of the Dutch name. The road was originally a Lenape Indian trail. Just like Broadway and many of the roads and streets in the U.S.

The 1930s Williams House was especially poignant because both Christie and I are thinking about retirement. I am contemplating living in Alfred in the family house which was built in the 1870s by my great-grandfather and his father-in-law. Some of the stuff in the kitchen was evocative of the house I still think of as my grandmother's though she probably thought of it as HER grandmother's. You can see a couple pictures of the house at http://people.alfred.edu/~fmuller/VillageProject/164011/1016/index.html

Living there would mean that I'm the fifth generation of my family in the house. When I was a child, my grandmother and her second husband lived downstairs and my great aunt and her second husband lived upstairs. My folks lived upstairs after my great aunt's health weakened and she moved downstairs with my grandmother. After my great aunt and grandmother had died, my folks moved downstairs and my brother and his wife moved in upstairs until they built their house on the hill outside the village of Alfred. So, actually, I wouldn't be the first fifth-generation person to live there.

encounters with ...

Elizabeth Lilker had highly recommended seeing Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, for the images. And it is a beautiful film. As I was watching it at the Quad (I'm now eligible for senior rate; yea!), the scenes of McMurdo air base on Antarctica looked familiar, like the photos of An-My Lê. Indeed, her photos are also of McMurdo, a bleak but serene landscape. And then on Friday, I'd been to Murray Guy and the wonderful Flemish frieze of saints masquerading as soldiers had been on the office wall. It's such an incredible photo: a frieze of soldiers in various stances looking like a scene of standing saints.

After Murray Guy, I went up to P.P.O.W. to see the Wojnarowicz show. The image just inside the door really confronts you aesthetically and thematically. The rest of the show was pretty interesting too. A lovely photo by Wolfgang Tillmans of feet and lower legs: "in the night."

On to Long Island City. I got there early enough to visit P.S. 1 before the ARLIS/NY tour of the Richard Meier Model Museum. The P.S. 1 courtyard show this summer is Public Farm One, part of the Young Architects Program. Lots of interesting info and fun to look at too, particularly so soon after standing in my brother's garden as he thinned the beets. I wasn't doing any gardening myself but I did take the weeds as Doug pulled them and tossed them on the mulch pile.

The Richard Meier models are great. There are several whole-site ones of the Getty as the design evolved as well as the huge final model. There are also some wonderful detail models such as staircases and light wells. After we visited the museum, about a dozen of us went on to Lounge 47 for a snack, drink and chat. A lovely afternoon. If you do get over to Long Island City, don't miss the show of women earth artists at the Sculpture Center. There's a great staircase/amphitheater by Alice Aycock, a great Jackie Ferrara in the courtyard, and a number of other really interesting works. Oops, just checked: the show closed in late July.

"Boy A"

"Boy A" is playing at Film Forum. It's quite a devastating story. The neglected geeky kid falls in with the truly bad kid who, of course, has a story and maybe an excuse to be a misfit. Not that that justifies crime. Boy A is being protected by a guy who, in turn, has neglected his son who had lived with his mother after she left the guy. Pretty tangled. My folks were deeply involved with folks in the church and other charitable endeavors they were involved with. I didn't feel neglected as I was growing up and I don't know if my older sisters did. My youngest sister and my brother (the two youngest kids in the family) do feel that the folks sometimes ignored our deep concerns while dealing with others. I guess I was so deeply sublimating my sexuality that I didn't really want the attention. Anyway the movie really resonated.

memorial moments

Randy Pausch, professor and author of The last lecture: He did, however, mention that he experienced a near-deathbed conversion: he switched and bought a Macintosh computer. (N.Y. Times, 26 July 2008)

Katherine Kinkade, founder of utopian commune: ... more pioneer than hippie ... "She was not fond of group hugs, had no interest in alternative medicine, nature-centered activities or tofu lasagna." (N.Y. Times, 27 July 2008)

everything is also possible

On the last day that I was in southern California for ALA, John Maier and I walked over to the Crystal Cathedral. I'd seen pictures of Philip Johnson's glass church for Robert Schuller in a Global architecture decades ago. I'm not sure I knew that Richard Meier had designed the Welcoming Center and I am absolutely sure that I didn't know that the first church was designed by Richard Neutra. Quite a nice complex of modernist architecture. Schuller's message is very positive and American dream -- the engraved slogan was along the lines of everything being possible.

The sculpture on the grounds is mostly pretty kitschy with several works by John Seward Johnson. The "Prodigal Son" is quite amazing. As we passed the "Rest on the Flight into Egypt," a fellow was praying and crossing himself. Seemed kind of Catholic for such a Protestant place.

The Welcoming Center is a museum of Schulleriana with some speakers from the drive-in church era and a tar patch. You probably have to see it to believe it. From the third floor, you can see the hills of La Habra Heights from which Sharon Chickanzeff hails. The store is quite full of wonderful tchotchkes.

We were a bit hungry as we left and stopped at Winchell's Donuts for a snack. The slogan on the bag was "with a donut in each hand, anything is possible." They had to know they are just a block or two from the possibilities church!