Lifetimes

Photo on 2010-12-30 at 16.38

In a twist of fate, noth­ing really impor­tant. Dif­fer­ent life­times. Oakhurst. San Diego. Los Ange­les. Jet-setting. Whatever.

Melody and narrative

I have to dis­close a few facts to you before I can fully explain what I’m about to tell you. I’m a sucker for a book series. I have read Harry Pot­ter, the Space Odyssey Series, the Time Odyssey Series, the Rama Series (includ­ing Bright Mes­sen­gers and Dou­ble Full Moon Night), Lord of the Rings, and most recently Twi­light. There is some­thing about series like these that inter­est me. Even if the story isn’t par­tic­u­larly good, I can­not walk away until I have fin­ished everything.

Another fact I need to dis­close is the method which I con­sume music. Although I hon­estly try to change it up, I usu­ally enjoy lis­ten to one album or song at a time over and over. Most recently that has been the album Wichita Line­man by Glen Camp­bell, but in the past has been Black­black, The Broth­ers Bloom sound­track, or these songs.

Some­times these facts unex­pect­edly coex­ist. When a book series and an album inter­sect I can­not divorce the two. They are for­ever deeply con­nected in my mind. So much so that I feel like cry­ing when I hear a song. It reminds me so vividly of the story that has a per­ma­nent place in my heart. It is the long­ing for that moment. The happy mem­ory of your week­end on a Sun­day after­noon. Or the lull after the high of summer.

lee-perry

The first time this hap­pened to me was when I read the first four Harry Pot­ter books dur­ing high school at our apart­ment in Claire­mont, San Diego. I was really into dub at the time espe­cially Scratch Attack by Lee Perry. I lis­tened to that col­lec­tion on repeat for the entire dura­tion of the first four. When­ever I hear the song Scratch Walk­ing I think of Harry sav­ing Ginny in the Cham­ber of Secrets, of the despair of fight­ing against so much dark­ness, of hav­ing fam­ily in your close friends, of the mys­ter­ies of Hogwarts.

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I later felt com­pelled to turn Scratch Attack on while I was read­ing the rest because I could not sep­a­rate Harry Pot­ter from Lee Perry.

edward-bella-twilight

This recently hap­pened to me again. I saw the movie The Broth­ers Bloom and became obsessed with its sound­track. I started lis­ten­ing to it on repeat all day. I also was per­suaded to see the first Twi­light movie. I can’t explain why, but see­ing the movie gave me the want to read all of the Twi­light books. And now, for­ever con­nected to the Depart­ment of Safety, the North­west, the town of Forks, the beach at La Push, the Cul­lens’ House, miss­ing Edward, the Vol­turi… is Penelope’s Theme by Nathan John­son. A kind of “Bella’s Lul­laby” if you will.

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I had an Engish teacher in Jr. High who would play dif­fer­ent music for each book we were read­ing to help us to remem­ber it for the tests. Although that was more delib­er­ate, the con­clu­sion is sim­i­lar. I believe the con­nec­tion between the melody and the nar­ra­tive enables me to remem­ber the sto­ries so much more intensely. It is an inad­ver­tent psy­cho­log­i­cal exper­i­ment. Have you had any expe­ri­ence like this? Have you had an unbreak­able con­nec­tion between cer­tain melodies and narratives?

Drop City

DropCity-1

Drop City is a leg­endary micro­com­mu­nity, it is a model, and, ulti­mately, an aban­doned project. Drop City fas­ci­nates me and endear­ingly it reminds me of where I live. It started in a frenzy, it attracted famous artists and musi­cians, but after its height slowly fell into decay. After five years, it was aban­doned, but many of the orig­i­nal struc­tures remain today.

Fueled by thoughts of the Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis and the Viet­nam War, Drop City flour­ished. Domes were built for domes­tic pur­poses – a kitchen, liv­ing quar­ters, a the­ater – out of recy­cled prod­ucts (for which they won the Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Dymax­ion award). Ideas thrived – reuse and solar power, drone and early elec­tronic music, cre­ative com­mu­nity. Many “hap­pen­ings” happened.

good icosa.preview-1

Located in South­ern Col­orado, early in its his­tory this “inten­tional com­mu­nity” was a close rela­tion to utopia. Any­one and every­one was wel­come, for­ever free and open. It was naive, but worked for a time.

“How do they sur­vive?”
“They just do. Go live there a while and see for your­self.”
“Any­body can just go live there?”
“Any­body. Drop City is Utopia.”
“Don’t believe it,” Frinki said.
“I don’t believe it. Nobody believes in Utopia any more. At least not in Col­orado.”
“Okay, it isn’t Utopia,” Kugo said. “Utopia’s got rules. Drop City doesn’t have any rules.”
“Up is down and down is up. Isn’t that right, Kugo? And the tooth fairy leaves Thai sticks under everybody’s pillow.”

Mem­o­ries of DROP CITY

Curl-dome.preview-1

But with noto­ri­ety comes prob­lems. The founders, the orig­i­nal artists, even­tu­ally got burned out and moved onto other projects. Peo­ple even­tu­ally began com­ing to Drop City not to con­tribute, but to take away, look­ing for ful­fill­ment. The land was sold, most of the domes dis­man­tled, but the model continues.

IMG00011 copy-filtered.preview-1

These struc­tures – com­mu­nity, open­ness, cul­tural can­ni­bal­ism – per­sist into our present. Can projects or ideas per­sist beyond its found­ing gen­er­a­tion? Should they?

It still feels incomplete

faceplateless

I think about it, more often than you would think. Not for revenge or with a sense of indig­nity, but with curios­ity and dis­con­tent­ment. Did they know or care? Would it still make a profit? Did they think they would be able to work it out somehow?

When I lived in San Diego with my par­ents I had a prob­lem hold­ing onto my car stereos. In fact, I had three stolen car stereos dur­ing a short time. It was rough. I looked into dif­fer­ent expen­sive prod­ucts includ­ing an alarm sys­tem for my car that would notify a key­chain don­gle if any­thing was amiss.

I started tak­ing the face­plate into my room at night. It seemed like this would be the proper deter­rent to fur­ther theft. I thought that if some­one were think­ing about tak­ing my car stereo, they would look inside and see the face­plate miss­ing and move on. Or they would still break in and look in the usual spots that they knew their vic­tims would put the face­plate – in the glove com­part­ment, under the seat, in the cen­ter con­sole – and not find­ing it they would leave the stereo and move on to the next car.

But this did not work. One night, despite my logic that a face­plate­less car stereo would be worth­less, some­one stole my car stereo. I think about this a lot. Did they go through all the effort of tak­ing the stereo out and then real­ize that the face­plate wasn’t even in the car? Were they pissed? But why did they take it still?

I feel bad about this. I’m not even upset about the stereo being stolen any­more. I’m upset that for­ever the face­plate and stereo will be sep­a­rated. It depresses me. I held onto the face­plate for a long time. It seemed too valu­able of an object to just throw away. I wanted to some­how con­nect them again. No ques­tions asked. It wasn’t even nec­es­sary for it to be returned to me.

Even­tu­ally, I think the face­plate was thrown out or was taken to a thrift store to sit and be use­less. I’m not even sure. But I hope that wher­ever the worth­less face­plate and the empty stereo went that they were destroyed and don’t con­tinue to exist.

KEYS

You’re wondering now

cranberry

This is how it looked

That day in the sky, but I don’t remem­ber see­ing them there. I didn’t know how to look yet. These stars are much older than the rest.

simi-valley

It was right after these. I’m told they were good for the city. Those stars are indica­tive of the eras pass­ing and forming.

84summerolympicslogo

It was before these stars came around, but it feels like they were present and helped.

early-simpsons-1987

I’m sure that there are more and that these are only the beginning.

The 21st cen­tury: mankind has col­o­nized the last unex­plored region on Earth; the ocean. As cap­tain of the seaQuest and its crew, we are its guardians. For beneath the sur­face lies the future.

jQuery: Not as hard as it sounds

For the new blogs page I wanted to put together an accordion-like fea­ture for view­ing the posts to make it feel some­what like a feed reader. I looked at dif­fer­ent javascript libraries for this and chose to go with jQuery, not that oth­ers wouldn’t work, but because I had some lim­ited expe­ri­ence with it.

I started toy­ing around with the slideTog­gle() func­tion, but after a cou­ple hours I had to look around the inter­net for some help. I couldn’t have done it with­out Steve Krueger’s tuto­r­ial. Although I didn’t fol­low it exactly, it helped be over a few hurtles.

Here is the code I ended up with.

jQuery(document).ready(function($){
	$('.story').hide();
	$('.title').click(function(){
	if($(this).is('.active')) {
		$(this).toggleClass('active');
  		$(this).next('.story').slideToggle('fast');
  		return false;
  	} else {
  		$('.story:visible').slideUp('fast');
		$('.title.active').removeClass('active');
		$(this).toggleClass('active');
  		$(this).next('.story').slideToggle();
  		return false;
		}
	});
});

Also, as I was delv­ing deeper into this project, I spent a lot of time around the Word­Press Codex. I found this great func­tion called wp_enqueue_script for load­ing javascript libraries. This is for use in Word­Press plu­g­ins and themes so there is no con­flicts or super­flu­ous code. Pretty neat.

Update — June 29
I edited the page so when open­ing an item it will scroll to the top of your win­dow. So much bet­ter. Some help from Learn­ing jQuery and Marc Gra­ban­ski. I am using the jQuery.ScrollTo plugin.

Here is the updated code:

jQuery(document).ready(function($){
	var scrollTop = jQuery(window).scrollTop();
	$('#content > div.story').hide();
	$('#content > h2.title').click(function() {
		$('#content > h2.title').removeClass('active');
		$(this).addClass('active');
		var $nextDiv = $(this).next();
		var $visibleSiblings = $nextDiv.siblings('div.story:visible');
		if ($visibleSiblings.length ) {
			$visibleSiblings.slideUp('fast', function() {
				$nextDiv.slideToggle('fast');
				jQuery('#content > h2').each(function(i, h2){
				h2top = jQuery(h2).offset().top;
				if (scrollTop  h2').each(function(i, h2){
				h2top = jQuery(h2).offset().top;
				if (scrollTop < h2top) {
					jQuery.scrollTo('.active', 300 );
					return false;
				}
			});
		}
	});
});

Word of the Day: Merde

As in, “Don’t be ner­vous! You’ll do great! Merde!”

I was just informed by a friend who works for a bal­let, that it is cus­tom­ary to say “Merde!” to bal­let dancers before they go on in lieu of “Good Luck!” or “Break a leg!”

(imag­ine your­self back­stage…)
“Hey, merde.“
”…thanks”

An ongoing investigation: Browsing the www

I’ve had a very ter­ri­ble cou­ple of years com­ing up on the Inter­net. When it began, it was easy. I had my gate­way lap­top, I used IE until 2004 when I heard about Fire­fox. It was a sim­ple choice. Fire­fox had tabs, it was faster, it had the lus­ter of being open source. (In fact, it inspired my fanati­cism for all things open source). But in 2005 I got a tiny power­book and Safari was so cute and new. I was dis­ap­pointed with Fire­fox on my power­book. The wid­gets were ugly and pix­e­lated, noth­ing like aqua at all. At this point I was ded­i­cated to Safari, only using Fire­fox for sites that rejected Safari for what­ever reason.

But I wasn’t sat­is­fied. I started flirt­ing with other web browsers: Shi­ira, Opera, Omni­Web, Camino, Opti­mized Fire­fox builds… It was a con­fus­ing time. I exper­i­mented heav­ily. Even­tu­ally I began to fall in love with Camino. It had the ten­der­ness of real mac app, but also the cer­tain flare of being open source and dan­ger­ous like Firefox.

When I upgraded to Leop­ard, it was back to square one. I went with Safari for a while because Camino was strug­gling with 10.5. Then Fire­fox 3 came around with its hype and fancy Smart Loca­tion Bar. I fell back into my old ways. I was using a PC at work, Fire­fox felt right, cut­ting edge, cus­tomiz­able, fun.

Since then I’ve not set­tled. I can’t decide. I’m switch­ing weekly. Nobody has exactly every­thing I want. Here is where I stand now:

Safari 3

  • I love to use cmd-1, cmd-2, etc for links on the book­marks bar
  • You can­not set Google Reader as your default feed reader
  • In gen­eral, works fine, but
  • is bor­ing

Safari 4 beta

  • “Smart Address Field”, sim­i­lar to Firefox’s Smart Loca­tion Bar
  • Top tabs, makes sense.
  • Devel­oper Tools are very cool
  • Top Sites? Yuck!
  • Chokes here and there
    • Espe­cially in Word­press
    • And with the Tum­blr book­marklet: when I use a key­board short­cut to open, in my case cmd-1 because it is first on my book­marks bar, it opens into a new tab instead of a new win­dow. Very frustrating.

Camino

  • Uses cmd-1, etc for book­marks bar
  • Uses Key­chain to save passwords
  • Feels very at home in OS X
  • But but­tons suck in Leopard
  • Some sites still reject Camino

Camino 2 beta

  • But­tons fixed for Leopard
  • Del key no longer works for going back a page
  • Finally has drag­gable tabs
  • No smart loca­tion bar, which I’ve become very com­fort­able using

Fire­fox 3

  • No key­board shorcuts for the book­marks bar :-(
  • Doesn’t use Key­chain to save pass­words, which is very annoying
  • One mil­lion awe­some extensions

So I have no idea what to do. I was using Fire­fox for the last month, but last week I went back to Safari. It is hard to choose. What are you feel­ings? Do you have such trou­ble deciding?