2 space or not 2 space

Heather just informed me that when typing it is no longer cool to have 2 spaces after the period. One space is "the norm". According to her, if you're like me and still use the old-school 2 spaces you run the risk of being "kerned". I refuse to recognize this rule, but it seems that some programs including this blog editor automatically delete one of the spaces! Damn the man! 2 spaces forever!

In all seriousness, because this is definitely very serious, there is an explaination here.

On the fritz

After one year of outstanding service, my Canon Powershot S410 is in serious trouble. The screen died yesterday, so I now need to adapt my photography process to accommodate lack of a screen. This will be interesting. The only worse technological disaster I can imagine is the death of my ipod, although that may be overly dramatic because the damn camera still technically does work. Hmmm, the world seemed to get by just fine before digital technology...

Goodbye Aimee

It is a sad day today, as tomorrow Aimee D. leaves Boston to join Durbs in San Francisco. At last night's goodbye party on our roof, conversation was quiet and somber, partygoers arrived dressed in black, and the tears flowed. Well, not entirely true, but check out Eileen and Maria....


Here's the cake Maria made....


I'm off today to help Aimee pack up her U-haul. Best of luck, we hate to see you leave but thanks for giving us one more reason to visit SF!

Brooklyn Yards

I've been busy working on stormwater sustainability schematics for Frank Gehry's Brooklyn Yards, a controversial new urban design mega-project to be anchored by a new arena for the Nets. Opinions vary wildly, as one would expect on a project of this size and in Brooklyn. Politics aside, I think it will be difficult for any single designer to create complex, dynamic, interweaved city life on a large scale from scratch, which is what Gehry is attempting here. I look forward to seeing how he handles the challenge with further development of the design.

Sound of the week - Baby Shambles

Looking for an alternative to Modest Mouse/Franz Ferdinand/the Killers? Check out Baby Shambles. The title of their 2-song US import EP is unprintable, and frontman Pete Doherty screams at the end of the title track "They'll never play this on the radio..." Not true in the UK as they are in the top 10 and Doherty and his band enjoy a fanatical following. This 2 song EP is their only US release to date.

Doherty, one half of the embattled duo at the heart of the UK's The Libertines, has been recording and touring with his "other" band, Baby Shambles, since splitting with the Libertines last year due to his unpredictable behavior and excessive drug use. I saw the Libertines at the Paradise last fall, and without Doherty they lacked the exhilarating presence and back and forth vocal energy of their recordings.

Doherty definitely brings an aura of wildness and self-destruction to this recording, and based upon media reports and fan blogs, to anything he touches. With brash, treble-heavy guitars that sound like they were recorded at 2 a.m. just before the boys had one too many, barely in control vocals, and Blur-like verses that resolve into a feel-good chorus, “F*** Forever” has me eagerly anticipating more US releases. Baby Shambles is one of those bands that makes no attempt to hide the fact that they are riding the thin line between brilliance and self destruction, and that’s a huge part of what makes this EP great. $6.99 for 2 songs? Money well spent.

Quote of the day

Here is the quote of the day I came across on one of my listservs. I hope to follow this up soon with an essay about quality of experience, which I believe is the key to a meaningful existence. Deep, I know.

"Do you want to know what depresses the American spirit? Do you want to know why it feels as if the center cannot hold and the tyranny of mediocrity has been loosed upon our world? Do you want to know what instills thoughts of suicide and creates a desperate, low-level rage the source of which we cannot quite identify but that we know is right under our noses and that we now inhale Prozac and Xanax and Paxil by the truckload to attempt to mollify?

I have your answer. Here it is. Look. It is the appalling spread of big-box strip malls, tract homes like a cancer, meta-developments paving over the American landscape, all creating a bizarre sense of copious loss, empty excess, heartless glut, forcing us to ask, once again, the Great All-American Question: How can we have so damned much but still feel as if we have almost nothing at all?"

Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle

Movie Review - Broken Flowers

I give Broken Flowers two thumbs up, but it's not for everyone. I found the combination of independent director Jim Jarmusch's minimalist style with Bill Murray's evolving dry, detatched, character type (taken to new cynical extremes here) to be quite entertaining, thought provoking, and often funny in the what the hell was that all about way. Life seems to happen TO Bill and he wearily accepts his present, but as the movie progresses we see his character show signs of life and consider the future as he is confronted with his past. Brilliant intentional vagueness and subtelty requires the viewer to interpret and think.

I'll skip the plot synopsis, suffice to say Jarmusch does not resolve anything with the usual Hollywood decisiveness. I love that. Superb acting all around with short appearances by Sharon Stone, Chloe Sevigny, Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy, and Tilda Swinton.

The ongoing puppy search

I can understand buying music online. I can understand buying furniture online. I can almost understand buying clothes online. But I definitely don't understand buying puppies online.

Conflicting information about pugs and their susceptibility to certain medical conditions has been brought to our attention, as well as conflicting reports about how much they shed. We'll get to the bottom of this - probably the hard way...firsthand.

Air Lines - Peabody Essex Museum

I highly recommend a visit to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem to view Alex MacLean's Air Lines photography exhibit. Alex is a Harvard-trained architect who uses his small plane to take aerial photographs for both urban planning and artistic purposes. He presents seemingly ordinary landscapes such as railyards, subdivisions, and agricultural fields as compelling compositions of spatial relationships and color. I saw him present at CNU XII in Chicago and really enjoyed the photographs both as art and as social commentary regarding development and the environment.

Take the commuter rail from North Station to the Salem stop, and the Peabody Essex Museum is a short walk through historic Salem. Great day trip.

Sympathy for Walmart?

Walmart is "wary" about gas prices impacting their bottom line. My heart bleeds for them.

Rising gas prices are Walmart's continually rising sin tax. Join me in my boycott.

Sound of the week: "Landed", Ben Folds

The piano riff is both happily optomistic and sentimental at the same time as the song builds to mirror the subject matter - Ben Folds' looking back at a bad relationship and his epiphany that he needed to get tough, say goodbye, and fly home alone. "She liked to push me, and talk me back down, until I believed I was the crazy one, and in a way, I guess I was..." The distorted bass kicks in at the end to put it over the edge. If you like Ben Folds, you'll love the new album!

The way life should be

Spent the weekend with Heather's awesome friends Kittson and David and Kittson's parents at their house on Rangeley Lake in Maine. Woke up with an early-morning swim in the lake Sat. & Sunday, checked out the town and saw the Shriner's parade (!), ate lobster & mussels Sat. night, went antiquing, and saw a meteor shower from their dock late Saturday night. I felt like everything was at half speed, which was great. The way life should be, indeed.

Holy Construction!

Construction of Liberty Place, a 440-unit residential building (approx. 15% affordable) in Boston's "combat zone" on the edge of Chinatown, is well underway. I can't blame Chinatown residents for opposing this monstrosity by a 3-1 margin, because I doubt many Chinatown residents can afford to live here. Developers claim the project will help reduce drugs and crime, but I argue fitting in with Chinatown building scale and community values is more important in the long term. The city ignored the residents' vote and approved the project.

The building does a good job addressing the street with a 5 story face and by setting the 28 story tower well back:


But then look up:

Oil prices

Oil prices surge as the US continues a car-dependent, sprawling way of life. What will it take to change? Jim Kunstler calls this the "long emergency" in his new book (which I still need to read). To what level do gas prices rise before Americans truly realize the need for compact communities and public transportation? Actually, I don't think it will be a gradually realized choice, I believe before the long emergency plays out there are bound to be wake-up call world events such as the oil crises in the 1970s that disrupt oil supply. That's what it will take to stop building suburban crap, stop reliance on the automobile, and start living in a truly sustainable way.

Toastmasters

I talked about my favorite cartoon character in front of 30 perfect strangers last night. While sitting in my chair at my second Toastmasters meeting, I have to say it felt a bit like I imagine an AA meeting would feel. The meetings are structured and formal, with an agenda and a specified Toastmaster who runs the meeting. Members present “word of the day” and “tip of the day”, ask random questions of those in attendance to create opportunities for extemporaneous responses, and give prepared speeches with other members presenting critiques. The support is outstanding; as each speaker takes the podium, whether it is to give a persuasive ten minute speech or divulge their least favorite movie, there is applause and encouragement all around. I signed up as a member today, which means I need to begin preparing my first of ten speeches required to become an official certified “Toastmaster”. I don’t enjoy public speaking, but I am realizing that the cliché is true – the more I practice, the easier it gets, and this is an ideal practice environment.

My favorite cartoon character, by the way, is Woodstock.

Pugs

While down the Cape on vacation last week, we ran across this sign along the side of the road near our hotel, straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Sucker for animals that I am (old roommate Scott and I came very close to adopting two kittens last year, and we were mocked endlessly) we all noticed, but I didn't think anything about it until the next day when Heather, with a spark in her eye, told me she wanted to go take a look. As an aside, we have talked about getting a dog for a long time but never with the intention of actually doing it. I didn't think.

We went the next day with my brother, Nicole, and my mom, and were greeted by the craziest lady I have ever seen. I wish I had a picture of her, she looked like the nasty old lady in There's Something about Mary, and if I could pick two words to sum her up they would be erratic and incomprehensible. Anyway, within her large fenced-in backyard there was a smaller corralled in area with maybe 12 pug puppies (9 wks) jumping around all over each other. She gave us free reign to play with them, we let them out of the corral, and it was immediate chaos. Pug puppies running all over the place, we didn't stop laughing the whole time we were there. Needless to say, Heather was convinced, and I certainly was not the voice of reason...


The only clear answer we could get from the mad old lady was that they cost $1000 each. After talking over the cons (the pros were obvious), we decided that getting two of the puppies would make leaving them alone when we went to work less of a weight on our conscience. Heather working from home as much as she does would keep them company, but with her as busy as she is and sometimes without time to even eat lunch, maybe there wouldn't be time to take them out. And her travel schedule would leave me in charge quite often. But the clincher on this decision was thinking about negotiating with the insane breeder, who before we left had been feeding the puppies coke. Impossible.

So....anyone know of pugs for sale in the Boston area?

By the way, anyone notice how I keep saying "we" when talking about the little guys? Oops...

Day 1 and Michael's birthday

Day 1 of my new blog, and I am paralyzed by the pressure. It is now time to be interesting! Actually, while I do have a lot to say I don't know when I'll have time to say it. This blog thing is not really a well thought out decision on my part, because the last thing I need is another way to spend my already scarce free time. But don't worry, don't lose any sleep, finding time to write and figuring out how is part of the challenge.

I did want to mention the fact that Michael, our Boston Common quasi-homeless personality, has his 50th birthday tomorrow. Those of you who live on Beacon Hill no doubt either know Michael well, or attempt to avoid him out of the guilt he inspires by asking for change every single time you pass his spot next to Park Street. Damn, is he a nice guy though. More on this later, but I think the fact that he probably makes more money than many Bostonians who "work" all day, and the reactions he inspires are worth thinking about.

Why me?

So why have I started my own blog? I’m not one to leap onto bandwagons, so there must be a good reason, right? Well, not really, unless you count “impressing the masses with incisive wit and insight” as a good reason. That is technically a good reason but includes a few shaky assumptions, namely my wit and insight. Other more realistic reasons include the fact that everyone around me stopped listening to me years ago so maybe there are suckers in the blog universe who will, two weeks ago I had a dream about creating a blog of my very own, and lastly, I want to impress the world with my mastery of punctuation. Two of those reasons are true, I leave it to you decide which. If you’re still listening, that is.

Seriously though, I have always read others’ blogs with interest, as long as they were interesting, and I always thought it would be cool to be a concert reviewer, offering my take on music to the general public. I think I could do that, and I think expanding my subject from music to Everything Else would be challenging, and hopefully interesting and thought provoking to you, reader. Many of you are aware of what excites me: urban design, architecture, travel, music, (amateur) photography. Shapes and sounds. So enjoy and let me know what you think.