In a twist of fate, nothing really important. Different lifetimes. Oakhurst. San Diego. Los Angeles. Jet-setting. Whatever.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.”
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.
These structures – community, openness, cultural cannibalism – persist into our present. Can projects or ideas persist beyond its founding generation? Should they?
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.
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.
It was right after these. I’m told they were good for the city. Those stars are indicative of the eras passing and forming.
It was before these stars came around, but it feels like they were present and helped.
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.
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;
}
});
}
});
});
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”
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
- 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?