I haven’t been following the Google Books lawsuit and settlement proposal too closely because I don’t often think of myself as a book author. Not in the sense that Google Books or the settlement will impact my livelihood. It hadn’t actually occurred to me that the settlement might impact my freedom. But a press release from the Software Freedom Law Center caught my eye:
Today SFLC filed a letter with the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York objecting to the Google Book Search Copyright Class Action Settlement. In the letter, filed on behalf of the FSF and author Karl Fogel, SFLC asks the court to consider the impact of the settlement upon members of the class who have distributed their works under Free licenses.
I’m embarrassed to confess I had been thinking that this lawsuit (You are of course familiar with the lawsuit. Right?) was more academic than all that. I was thinking about what it means that Yahoo, Amazon and Google get to go sit in a darkened room somewhere (an expansive board room with a fine catered lunch, more likely) and rewrite copyright law all by themselves. I wasn’t thinking about freedom. Read the rest of this entry »
I got it wrong, they weren’t Indonesian, they were Nepalese Ghurkas. But a thing I know that you might not, about merchant ships and pirates, which is that there are pirates everywhere. Or at least that there are all kinds of known pirate waters and the coast of Somalia is one such known pirate water. So if you don’t know, now you know. There’s pirates in them thar seas, and ships full of wheat and sugar hire Nepalese Ghurka guards to pretect them from same. Go read the kid brother’s really-not-a-blog. Search for “pirate” — his not-a-blog doesn’t do permalinks.
Last night, we went with a bunch of Merry’s apprentices to see Danny Hoch’s new show in a high school auditorium in Bushwick. An auditorium decorated with murals that tell the story of the mankind on earth, in which very fair skinned naked people are blessed by a winged angel (“The Dawn of Civilization”) and then bestowed the flame (“The Gift of Fire”). And with fire the story ends.
Before I start, just so you know, I’m struggling with the fact that last year’s RAT was really inspiring and rejuvenating for me but without something to offer I can’t see myself going again.
So I saw a play finally. Some live theater. Saw it with a couple of teenagers (both named Hector) whose entire previous experience with live theater consisted of a trip to Lincoln Center to see the Nutcracker (shorter Hector) and “we saw this play once at school” (larger Hector). Read the rest of this entry »
Ever since L. swore lists are a sign of her discontent, I find myself self-conscious about making my own, but I’m watching an ominous storm roll in over lower Manhattan and thinking about how much I like to watch storms. Also, tea and tomatoes from my garden and the incongruity of what a sweet nice person that makes me sound like I must be.
And Noel went and got himself deported from China for posting a video clip of a fairly tepid pro-Tibet demonstration at Tiananmen Square. So much for press freedom. I wonder if the Chinese PR whizzes realize that deporting people for posting political content will not divert attention back to the games? A reminder that I meant to keep an eye on Students for a Free Tibet this month.
Things I’ve been meaning to articulate, (and in Magstock Style, I invite you to vote for your favorite followup.)
This morning, the woman who passed me on Jay Street and said something so huffy and with such a terse look on her face I that I heard “bitch, you suck” before I realized that the actual words out of her mouth were “nice boots.” Right. Thanks. I do love New Yorkers.
Where We Are Now, hope, change, mania and haters and how to talk about what it is that we’re all hoping for, what we think that change will bring. Something concrete that we can use to actually look back at this moment and measure success.
Finally getting my own slot on the Idea Lab. And screwing up the grammar in my first post.
Art, civic participation, conversations about consumerism (and maybe a little bit about why the really good stuff always seems to happen off line, or at least out of the public square.)
A panel last night that was about two very different things and couldn’t quite find its way to a conversation, but got me thinking a lot anyway. Also, about salons, civics conversations, public spaces and how it isn’t easy to create a place where people come together to talk about ideas, but Beka, Winnie and Jason are here to tell you it isn’t that hard either.
Moby Dick, which is brilliant and which I’ve been meaning to re-read ever since … actually I just went to Laurie Anderson’s site to find a URL and came up with a wee web radio of One White Whale. I like Laurie Anderson more than anyone else I know does. Anyway. I have been meaning to re-read Moby Dick ever since I saw Laurie Anderson at BAM in 1999, a fiasco unto itself. I think the day I broke up with Ahm Here he said something like “oh, I guess I should just give you these tickets I just got us, because I know you want them more than I do.” and I said we should go together to see if we can still be friends. We went, but he was late and in the meantime I ran into a friend who latched onto us (how could she know?) and it looked an awful lot like I’d rigged the whole thing to avoid being alone with him. He fell in love with someone eventually. I’m pretty sure they’re married. Still, I felt bad about that, because it was mean.
But Moby Dick. That was one. “Drinking chocolate” from Vosages is two. N. doesn’t read this so he won’t know I was there until later tonight. They’re out of the bacon chocolate bars anyway. Moby Dick, hot chocolate, good ideas that actually happen. My mother sending me her ERA bracelet, even if not everyone dear to me could actually tell what the Equal Rights Amendment is. Was. My copy of Moby Dick was my mother’s, too. It is full of her perfectly straight underlining and notes in the margins (“doubt makes belief more secure when finally reached”).
I’ve edited this since the morning, ever so very slightly.
So, I’m mildly addicted to a few blogs about design and getting dressed in the morning. Bits and Bobbins is one of them. Tricia is pregnant, which is one of those personal things you can know about total stranger, along with where she used to live (Brooklyn), where she lives now (San Francisco), what color her couch is (actually, I forget), and what her husband does for a living (works at Apache). It is a lot to know about a person you don’t know. I’ve been taking note of how much I know about people I don’t, and taking note of just how much any old fool could be knowing about me if they were halfway deft with a google-stick. Myself, I’m not crazy about being quite so exposed, which is one of the reasons I’ve been slowly taking down personal information about myself on the internets. Which is how it came to pass that everyone I know on Facebook magically got a little newsflash with a broken heart on it. It said that I am “no longer married.” This is what I get for deciding that my date of birth and my home town and my wedded state, none of which are exactly a secret, don’t need to be broadcast on my profile. I don’t want you to know that much about me, unless you’d know it anyway. And if you know it anyway, well. You didn’t need the internets to find out. If you don’t know, you could still probably figure it out without trying that hard.
I’m going someplace with this, I swear. Tricia’s husband, though, has an occasional Live Journal where he once linked to an article on CNET about what I should probably call “the famous AOL snafu,” except that I learned about it this morning. So it can’t have been that famous. Should have been, though. They published stored data on a few months of AOL users’ web searching. No actual names, but unique ids. Just enough information to know that the person looking for information on replacement bumper for scion xb also searched for crime stoppers florida. At least according to Declan.
south beach diet
nausea in the first two weeks of pregnancy
breast reduction
how to starve yourself
rikers island inmate info number
I was drifting, contemplating about the storytelling allure of a list like that, or the one that alternates between recipes (“baked macaroni and cheese with sour cream”), calorie counts (if you’re worried about the number of calories in a banana, you maybe don’t want to be making baked mac & cheese with sour cream, okay?) and ideas for how to tell her family that she was sexually abused.
The problem in drawing too deep conclusions from these search results is that we have no idea who was searching when, only that the searches came from a single AOL account. Invent all the narratives we want, we’re still inventing them.
This is what happens, when I take the train to work, by the way. I have time to get far more lost in thought than I ever could on my bike.
Here is where I am going with all of this, beyond that I plan to write some short stories about binge eating while plotting to murder an ex: you really should be afraid of the google borg hive mind. Even if you think that Homeland Security is a sweet deal that will make us all safe, especially if you ever google variations on your own name, your phone number or your email address. I do. I won’t pretend I don’t. I often search for my number and email addresses because I am curious to know how widely distributed they are. If Google ever slipped up an released even a week of stored search queries … I would probably feel pretty exposed. Although I think I probably google myself more like once every few months.
Soon come: a lesson or six on how to be more anonymous, even if you are just trying to keep a lid on how often you search for expensivenorse footwear. Because the truth is I don’t know if I want you to know that about me either. The hive mind has come a long way from the children’s ramayana.
On Christmas Eve. Way earlier than anyone thought.
And a good thing, too, because we are, one and all, sick of this. Sick of hospitals and of looking around at all of the horrible ways in which it could be worse, sick of explaining what happened (I am, anyway. And my mother says she is.) Sick of trying to think of ways to make an institution a little less institutional. Sick of all the parts that aren’t anyone’s business and the questions I can’t actually answer like “How is your mother doing?” (She is doing sick of this, is how she is doing. She is totally over this and this isn’t really over yet. She is also doing fine because what remains is not really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of big deals.) or “Is there anything I can do?” (Not really, no.)
Later we’ll have new things to be sick of, but since I live 3000 miles away in real life, I won’t be around to get sick of the bed in the living room and having to navigate life in a wheelchair for months and knowing that, in the grand scheme of things, it could be worse.
It could. This? It isn’t that bad. It is shit and it sucks and it has drained us, but it has nothing on traumatic brain injury with a dose of [redacted]. It has nothing on a great many things that can go horribly wrong in life. Which is probably why we’re all so tired of talking about it.
By the way, am I missing something? I thought San Francisco was going to have municipal wifi by “early 2007″ — what gives? Of course, then I’d be missing the view I’ve got from this cafe mezzanine. A view of a rather burly barista who has been holding an impossibly young infant in one arm while making sandwiches and ringing up customers with the other. And making espresso, which he seems to have down. I’d be worried about babies and scalding steam, but he’s a chill dude.
I’d love to watch this. Anyone in San Francisco (yeah, San Francisco) have Sundance? I’d love to watch this documentary about the Critical Art Ensemble and the ongoing and inexplicable persecution of Steve Kurtz.
Strange Culture Airs on Sundance Channel December 2007
STRANGE CULTURE, selected to open both the 2007 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival and the documentary section of the Berlin International Film Festival, is directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson, and features Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton, Chronicles of Narnia), Peter Coyote (E.T., Erin Brochovich), Thomas Jay Ryan (Henry Fool, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride, My Dinner with Andre); Original score by The Residents.
STRANGE CULTURE details the surreal nightmare of artist and University at Buffalo professor Dr. Steven Kurtz. Dr. Kurtz was illegally detained and accused by the U.S. government of “bioterrorism” in 2004 after police became suspicious of common science materials used in his internationally renowned art practice. He now awaits trial on charges of “mail fraud”—charges which carry the possibility of a 20-year jail term under the USA PATRIOT Act. Since the ongoing nature of the case prevents Dr. Kurtz from discussing its details, Hershman Leeson has enlisted actors to dramatize parts of the story, skillfully interweaving dialogue with news footage, animation, interviews, testimonials, and footage of Kurtz himself.
WATCH THE TRAILER:
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING:
“Hershman Leeson is as interested in reinventing the doc form as she is in publicizing Kurtz’s case. The director not only breaks the fourth wall, she reduces it to plaster dust.” – Variety
“…alternatively teasing and terrifying… a near perfect alignment of subject and form.” – The New York Times
“Strange Culture is an important heads-up to what is going on in our country right now in the name of national security, and a brilliant statement on artistic freedom and the dangers it faces. This film should be seen, should be discussed and is an important document on our times.” – Film Threat
“Strange Culture is a veteran artist’s thoughtful, indignant response to PATRIOT Act America.” – indieWire
“…one of the most buzzed-about films at Sundance this year…”
– The Portland Mercury
“You don’t have to be paranoid for Strange Culture to scare the hell out of you.”
– Reuters
“…a brilliant and moving examination of fear and its manipulations.”
– The Nation
The other day I had a (virtual) conversation with Arif that went something like
Arif, to no one in particular: when did we become a nation that DIDN’T see the inherent problems with the practice of driving bees all over the country?
Me: Since forever, dude. Since we realized that Science can fix everything, one problem at a time. actually, as long as I’m quoting, what I said was really “Round about the time that we began routinely subscribing to one-size-fits-all solutions provided by experts, I think. ”
Arif: trucking bees all around the country to pollinate enormous farms.
insane. totally insane.
Me: it isn’t very articulate, but this shit always brings me back to memories of a trip to the Hoover Dam while I was in college. For some reason my friends and I decided to sit through the multimedia presentation in the Hoover Dam amphitheater thing. We sat there under portraits of Presidents past and listened to a recorded lecture and watched little lights go on and off on a scale model diorama of the Colorado River.
It was so simple and beautiful–the problem: floods are a pain in the ass for farmers. The solution? We built a dam. Now we control the Colorado River. Man 1, Nature 0. Thank you for listening and enjoy your visit to the Hoover Dam.
They didn’t talk about any of the massive ecological damage that the dam cost, both upstream and down. It was all about how we are so smart that we can apply our scientific and engineering prowess to any problem and it will be solved. Not enough bees? We’ll bring bees by truck. And so it was that Australia was overrun with jackrabbits, San Francisco with eucalyptus that turned out not to be any good for railroad ties anyhow.
All of which (the Hoover Dam part anyway) got me thinking about Megan and her blog that I had to swear off of (secret: that was my New Year’s resolution, swearing off of Megan’s blog. I don’t even know what to make of that.) because whenever she writes about relationships all hell breaks loose in the comments section and people start holding her up as this poster child for “if you don’t wear stockings, high heels and makeup and get your ass married by the time you are 22, you’ll live a life of pathetic sorrow, just look.” And, for reasons I can’t explain, I can’t not weigh in. I suddenly start imagining that it is worth my energy to persuade the random strangers on my friends’ old roommates’ blog. I stay up late thinking about it. It isn’t good. So I swore off, but like any good addict, the littlest things will send me back for more.
Today, I looked, and she has a whole post about One Thing Engineering, which is really what I meant. Not one size fits all, but one problem at a time. It is craziness and we perpetuate it.
Also, since I’m rambling a little here, I want to point out that a study came up this week that does indeed uphold my hypothesis. I just tried to search for it and found another study. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. A varied diet rich in whole grains, fruits and vegetables with a bit of fat, chocolate and red wine on the side, a moderate amount of exercise. That is all. You can call of your scientists, I’ve got it covered. I’m calling a vibrating platform the closest thing engineering can get to a moderate amount of exercise. We already knew this: the more active you are into your dotage, the less likely your poor bones are to succumb to osteoporosis. Break a sweat a few times a week, walk even though you’d get there faster by car. It is really simple.
PS, Megan, did I ever tell you that I seriously considered dropping PEIS for civil engineering? I did.
Thoughts? I have a couple of conferences coming up; I always think my bio is cheesy. All bios are cheesy.
Amanda is the Technical Director of Gotham Gazette, a news and policy website in New York City, and a member of the steering committee of the Non-profit Open Source Initiative. She occasionally writes about software freedom and the role of proprietary software in movement-building organizations. Through the Welfare Law Center’s LINC project she spent three years working closely with grassroots economic justice organizations that wanted help making better use of information and technology tools, and collaborated with a group of fellow New Yorkers to develop a content management system that facilitated much of the organizing of protests and actions around the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City. Amanda is part of the InterActivist Network an activist technology infrastructure and skills sharing project housed at ABC no Rio. She’s secretly more interested in greywater and urban ecological sustainability than in internet technology.
I’m working on the whole “not that sort of blog” thing. I don’t want to whine. Or, I do want to whine, but I won’t. So no “ten things I hate about you, oh world.” Still, yesterday, I took the train and sat below a woman with deep bags under her eyes reading Andrew Weil. The title was something like Spontaneous Healing and I was sitting there, looking at her puffy eyes and tiredness and I wanted to say, “honey. Dear. Andrew Weil can’t help you if you don’t get enough sleep. Vitamins won’t make up for a decent night’s sleep.” She looked so earnest.
I’m still learning to mind my own business. I kept my mouth shut.
In better days, he said, “you could sit out on your lawn chair until 4 a.m. drinking espresso, and no one would bother you.”
N has accused me (not unfairly) of thinking everything is bad. Luisa keeps list of things that are making her happy, and coincidently, she doesn’t complain that much. I used to think it was because she led a charmed life that was without suffering or want, but like so many things that you think without thinking about them, I know that isn’t really true. So my own midsummer resolution is to dwell on what I enjoy, at least for a little while, until the curmudgeon needs to come up for air.
A man reminiscent for the days when he could sit in a lawn chair until 4 a.m. drinking espresso is a beautiful thing, even if it is coming out of a kind of thin AM-NY article about how Bushwick used to be different.
Dubin insisted the other night that she does read my blog even though it never makes any sense. I used to offer at least a few more updates about my life as a whole, I think.
The more time I spend with writers, the more I think about writing again. Really writing, not writing about how to use code. Not that it gets me anywhere, but I do think about it. I spent the weekend bouncing around the Hudson Valley with Lex and Tarikh, eating pie and corn and letting the immense quiet settle around me. I’m re-learning how to enjoy this world, missing stumbling upon things like this. Also, I lost my toothbrush. Dang.
I had a longish debate the other night about the One Laptop Per Child project, which everyone seems to assume I’ll love (computers! amanda likes computers!) nevermind that they’re semi-useless hunks of manufactured plastics, or that it is a classic story of international aid that we’re always building schools and never hiring teachers.
Today, I’m working. This is part of the puzzle, that I took on a full time job and it is a code-y job and I think it might have been a terrible mistake but I’m going to stick it out for now and see if I can challenge myself to make something of it without someone else whisking me off to make something of it for me. For now, I’m a little bored, which is scary and not the sort of thing you’re supposed to blog about.
I’ve been finishing things. The BaseBox has been done for a while, and Mayfirst’s Organic Internet book is out. And yet, the list of things to do is still longish and rote. How’d I end up with so many chores? Type minutes. Upgrade operating system. Repot carnivorous plants in something attractive (buy things. Meh.) Frame prints — more buying things, and last time I tried the clerk at the frame shop was so bizarrely rude to me that I was deeply demoralized and walked out without buying anything. Taliah says to go to Soho Art Materials instead.
Is that what you were looking for, or was it something different? I’m never sure.
My first post about anything nuptualish, following my own nuptuals, was a rambling rant about unfeminists and patriarchy and why it is that there aren’t more women at technology conferences. (you’d have to read between the lines for to catch that one)
Our wedding was great. I had a really good time. I had a lot of things I wanted to say, that I’d been writing down, but I lost my notebook in Montreal. Practical things and observations, like. Being married does feel different, but …
I am happy to talk about weddings and marriage and love, but over beer or while we turn the compost together. Not here. This was never meant to be one of those public diaries in which I share my every emotion with the world. There are enough of those already.
If you want to see the whole album, let me know and I’ll send you a link.
Speaking of beer … we have a lot of it in mini-kegs that we couldn’t open in Vermont. We’re taking suggestions on when and where to share it with you.
I recently had the opportunity to meet a famous radio host who happens to grossly overuse the phrase sea change. I hadn’t ever really noticed the trend in his show, but while I was in his office I overheard not one, but two show producers, interviewing potential guests on the phone, ask whether a sea change was afoot.
I thought I knew what the term meant, I even explained it quite confidently to my future mother-in-law (a bit more complex than simply when the tide turns, something about tidal estuaries) but then my upstairs neighbour asked me the same question and insisted that growing up on Puget Sound he’d never heard the term used to actually refer to tidal changes in the sound. We were looking for specifics when we discovered that the Famous Radio Host is wrong, as are so many more.
According to World Wide Words, the phrase comes from The Tempest
Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
And has nothing whatsoever to do with tidal anything. Say what you will about normative linguistics and living languages. I’m jumping ship. I’ve always thought it was self indulgent to ask, over and over, “is this the moment when everything changes? what about now? or now?”
I hate to do this to you. I know you’re trying to get tenure someplace, trying to behave like a real grownup and maybe not wild about having a cyber stalker out there whose only connection to you is a scrap of paper found in a vacant lot a decade ago, but restraint has never been my strong point.
I’m wondering whether this is your kindergarden class picture hanging in my kitchen? It is framed so I may not scan it right away.
This, though, I thought I’d lost. I had just tucked it away for safe keeping. Tell me it isn’t great?
[tags]brooklyn, art, storytelling, letters-home[/tags]
I’m visiting with my brother, who is peeved that some page Marissa made turns up at the top of Google’s search results for Oliver Hickman, while his own site doesn’t show up at all. That really is him on TV.com, too, but the rest are bogus. His site is #61 and no amount of peppering his pages with meta tags seems to help. And thus begins my efforts to bring sagacious to the masses.
While we’re on the subject of links and linking and google search results, you should also read up on the bruhaha over Alcatraz cruises. Last year the National Park Service re-bid the Alacatraz ferry service contract, turning over control to Hornblower Yachts who made all sorts of promises–their workers would get the same wages as Blue and Gold’s workers[1] did. Out of 55 mariners who’d been ferrying tourists to Alcatraz and back for decades, Hornblower only re-hired about 5. They’re renaging on promises to maintain wage levels and, well, you should boycott them.
It might seem like a measly fight–who cares about a couple of ferry boats–but the San Francisco docks were the epicenter of significant union fights in the 30s–fights that established fair workdays for a lot more than a small handful of us and the National Park Service shouldn’t be letting Hornblower off the hook so easily.
[1] did you catch the part about the “self serving pastiche of half truths and obfuscations”? Go read it again.
When I was little, my mother got it into our head that we needed some quality time with an old lady, and signed us up for this “adopt a grandma” program. We’d go visit with a Venezuelan woman with linoleum everywhere in her house. She had a lot of small dogs and a lot of parakeets and she told me that in her alphabet, “ch” was one letter, so there were 27 letters total.
My mother also has a photograph of a total stranger, a big oval tortoise shell frame with a very stern woman, that she got at a garage sale or something. It used to hang in our foyer; now it is over the couch, surrounded by much more modestly sized family photos. We call her the insta-matriarch. I’m pretty sure we have no idea who she is, but she suits the frame. There is something kind of soothing about keeping her around. Sure, your blood matters, your family matters, that is all who you are, but we’re all also borne of a long line of anonymous neighbors. It is important not to get to stuck on who is, or isn’t, yours. It helps that my great grandfather (great great?) Hickman was adopted. So who I am and who I’m not is a little vague anyway. I mean, I am a Hickman, sure, but the idea that my name has anything to do with who I am gets a little muddled when you inch back a few generations and find out that the Hickman I am descended from got his name from adoptive parents that he never did get along with. I think he was fairly young when he left them (ran away? I forget). No one ever asks what kind of name Hickman is, so I never get to tell about how it doesn’t matter.
What has all this go to do with Martha Peach, Secretary/Treasurer of the Junior Class, who isn’t my grandmother either, and isn’t nearly old enough to be my grandmother? I’m not sure. When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.
I was about to write to my mother, because I know she’ll actually think about my question and answer it (and because I think she knows the answer) but I figured that maybe one or two of my other three readers would have something to add, too.
One metaphor that I really like is about Monsanto and ADM vs centuries of agricultural knowledge and learning. Hundreds of years of agricultural stewardship and experimentation with crop hybridization and seed saving can be capped off in one fell swoop by ADM taking those successful seeds, making a hybrid and patenting that. Suddenly they own the patent, even though their contribution was a tiny step laid upon the work of generations. Add in the little things that slipped under everyone else’s radar like the Iraqi constitution’s explicit protection of GM seed patents and I can make a nice argument that they are stealing all the honey.
The Public Patent Foundation has some other good examples–drugs that many different scientists were actively working towards before Pfizer slipped in and grabbed a patent that would keep the rest off the market, but I’m looking for a few others examples of public knowledge being patented to allow a sole company to clign tight their already-large slice of the pie.
I’m also looking for good examples of software patents that could resonate with activists, if you want bonus points.
This was going to be about Frances and Susie and pho in Quincy and the Lube Sheep retailer and the local ballfield also about bell hooks and Audre Lorde and Jack’s booklist and Barnes and Noble not stocking adequate political theory in the suburbs. But it got long and obtuse and beside the point and there was an addendum, a PS, that I did want to mention, one for the miracle drug files.
From the “trust us, we’re bigger than you” department, this one is a doozy. The shocking news? Drug manufacturers sometimes tell lies when the truth might eat into their precious profit margin! I’m not trying to mock the Zyprexa Kills folks here, I swear. Someone has to act like it is news when this shit is revealed or it will start to fade into the background, like all the other big liars of our times (this is where a more devoted blogger would have some salient examples to fall back on. Sorry.)
So it turns out that medication routinely perscribed to treat bi-polar disorder might, you know, kill you. Dramatic weight gain, very high blood pressure, very high cholesterol, heart disease are more than just minor side effects, but once a bi-polar person pushed someone off of a subway platform while he was off his meds, so we now aim to incarcerate anyone who refuses to be medicated into a diabetic stupor. Makes perfect sense to me. The Icarus Project seems to be a bit more nuanced about the whole thing. Their blog, a del.icio.us network, and oversized downloads (search for zyprexakills) tell a very interesting story. To make it bonus interesting Eli Lilly is trying really hard to shut them up. I think it is sort of interesting.
The Clothesline Show, Darkroom Folio Project, Cycle Craft: you can get your shopping done and cover most birthdays through March to boot.
The City Reliquary gift shop, which carries the Cycle Craft line of jewelery, also has very cool trinkets like actual schists of Manhattan Island and Statue of Liberty Sponges.
The Clothesline Show
a benefit art sale for ABC No Rio
Thursday December 14 and Friday December 15
7:00 – 10:00pm
Crank through your holiday shopping list in one fell swoop. Seriously. Sixteen prints, on gelatin silver fiber based paper and signed on the back by each artist. The edition is limited to a total of 10. Total price? $250, but no one will stop you, should you decide to pay a bit more to support a vibrant volunteer run community arts center.
Meredith brought me a copy of the zine her third graders put out last week. They’ve been taking photos and writing about their neighborhoods in her afterschool program. Diamond likes math, puppies and kittens. Bryant doesn’t like bricks (too hard) and Jayne doesn’t like the cement (it hurts). What stands out, is that over and over, these kids are longing for some peace and quiet, and a patch of dirt someplace to play on. Lenin (yes, Lenin) doesn’t like that there is a lot of noise in his neighborhood, because he can’t sleep at night. Daniel doesn’t like the cars because they make too much noise. “When you want to sleep, you cannot because the car makes too much noise.” Same with Jayne, “I do not like the cars because they make noise.” Analley doesn’t like how cars crush people: “A me no me gusta los carros porque podrían ser peligrosos porque podrían machucar a la gente.”
It reminded me of a story Karen told me a few years ago, about the Recycle-A-Bicycle peace quilt project. The idea was to do a summer program about oil and reuse and recycling and bicycling and tie it all together with a quilt. Later, when I finish moving the RAB site, I’ll link to the quilt itself. They started off, though, with a discussion about peace. What do you think peace is? That kind of thing. Apparently, the kids just took it and ran. She put out the first question, “Okay, so we want to make a peace quilt, here is the peace quilt movement, let’s talk about peace.” and the kids kicked off with:
“Well peace is like when it is quiet.”
“And there aren’t any car alarms.”
“Yeah, and there aren’t people honking all the time.”
“Especially at night, because you can’t sleep when the cars are making noise all night.”
And went on in that vein for a while. They concluded that it would be more peaceful if there were more bicycles because bicycles are more quiet. Less loud. From there, the quilt was an easy sell.
I was thinking about all of these things last night, as I was lying in bed thinking I might never actually sleep again because planes flying low over head were way too loud and I was wondering what I always seem to wonder when the planes fly low and I’m wide awake at 1 am, I was wondering what it would take to make a city like New York livable. What is livable? Quiet nights. Space to run.
I’ve toyed with going to planning school for years, but everyone I meet (and I meet a few) with a planning degree seems visionless. I worry that what city planning teaches you is that going against the grain is hopeless, and I don’t have the energy for that. Not at all. Just in time for my birthday, I’m stumped all over again.
What I do know is that I’m going to unveil a new thread soon, about a few things that are at least tangentially related to this question. And I’m still looking for where it is that I fit.
In which the Turkish Airlines desk tears up my boarding pass without anything like a real explanation and no one can tell me how to dial an international number. Now I know that everyone knows that when you write +3 42139 80972 you’re meant to dial 00 in place of the +. I blame America for teaching me poorly. Add can’t use phones to my list of imperial measurement woes.
Now that I’ve got an incredibly flattering photo to show off, I figure I ought to say something about my recent trip to Toronto, where even the junkies, nodding off on the curb somehow look cared for. [*]
Many thanks to Philip and Melanie (sorry Melanie–do you have a blog someplace?) for putting me up in style.
I was going to write something coherent but also affectionate about the twins and how I never realized that they are exponentially more work than one lone wee’un. I always just figured they’d be, you know, twice as much work. It isn’t like that at all: you have one pooping while her sister is nursing. What do you do? You can’t carry the double-wide stroller up and down the stairs. You can’t even juggle babies and bags (though they aren’t quite old enough for juggling just yet–they’re barely holding their own heads up as you can see). The upside is the whole two birds/one stone end of things. Get your whole family born with just one pregancy! See how incoherent this is? I’m making it sound like Matt and Tasha are anything but graceful in their parenting. The whole two of everything bit makes everything just plain cute. For instance Bailey and Sidney are mad cute cute. Wait, I think they’d be cute even apart from one another, but two babies nursing, two rocker-seat-things rocking, two cribs-a-cribbing.
I know this is rambling and bizarre, but having promised my mother that I’d post the photos from Toronto (all one of them) I have to just post this, dull as it is.
PS, In my unsuccessful search for photos of Susie LaRue, so as to compare her size to Sydney and Bailey, I found this little album that Paquita made for Taliah. It is sweet.
[*] there are other one-offs that I could offer about Toronto, but that one kept jumping out at me. I think that Noah and I noticed this in San Francisco, too, not the junkies, but the well kemptness of it all. I try to chalk it up to small cityness (SF is 1/10th the population of NYC, Toronto is comparable) of it all but I secretly suspect that NYC is one of the most outrageously inept and corrupt cities in the world.
I want to advise my readers (all four of you, three with my father out of town), that I, Amanda, am capable of heretofore unheard of digressions. For instance: ever since we announced our engagement, people have been asking us what we want for an engagement gift. We don’t know. The things we want in a more general sense include a large funnel (with maybe an inch opening) that is suited to decanting dry beans or flour. And a house. So we’re good on the 75 cent gifts and the $750,000 gifts, but that middle range, we don’t want much. We’re both working adults. We have a colander, a very nice one. We have a full set of All Clad pans and an iron skillet and two nice ladles and six teapots (yes. six.) and a nearly complete set of china.
So I’m trying to make a list of things we want, and thanks to Carrie McClaren I found this site, FindGift.com, which will let you register for gifts in a general way (we need a cutting board. you can buy a sustainably harvested bamboo one that was made by some radical collective in Chiapas where they don’t even grow bamboo and it is probably an invasive species, or you can buy one at Crate and Barrel or Target or you can make one in shop class. I care a little, but since I can’t register at the “radical Chiapas collectives boutique” I don’t see why I need to tell someone where to buy a cutting board from.) FindGift.com wants to know what our wedding website is and we don’t have one yet, and I’m trying to make one but I’m still finding my bearings on this new computer, so I don’t have a favorite text editor with syntax color coding yet, with which to write simple HTML “Later this will be our wedding website. It isn’t yet.” for now.
I have Quanta, but it is written for KDE, and I’m realizing I don’t really know what that means. Leaving aside the fact that what really interests me about getting married is the implications of running KDE applications on Gnome, what are those implications?
I know it has something to do with libraries, graphical something maybe? Programming libraries? Qt vs GTK+. They are, um, different.
I think that what it means to run Quanta on Gnome is that I’ve got to add and run a whole separate library (what does that mean, in English, though?) to support Quanta. That Library’d be there already in KDE. Which is perhaps why Knotes takes so long to load? (I like it better than Gnome’s stickies app).
Adding more photos, these from the illustrious Paul White (who actually gave Noah a CD of photos about two weeks ago). To spare you from Flickr, I offer these choice shots of Noah and I looking windblown but enjoying ourselves.
Noah, so often wiser than I, ordered a CD as well as prints from Adorama. So I posted our pictures of the Western Cape. I can’t figure out how to convince Flickr to let me re-order the pictures a little bit, so they sort of go “Big Sur, Cape Point, Cape Point, Big Sur.”
Don’t feel obligated to look at all (any?) of them. Maybe you just want to see some animals?
I tend to be suspicious of the native plant movement: it smacks of horticultural xenophobia, and as much as I hate scotch broom and kudzu, I’m not convinced that native plantings are actually more appropriate to an urban habitat than other plantings. I’ve had a hard time getting an explanation of why it matters, just exactly the sort of thing that makes me nuts. Folks come round our garden all the time, full of advice and ideas and vision and I have a hard time filtering the wisdom from the BS. I know that dismissing native plants is blasphemy, especially for a commited organic gardener and permaculture dabbler, but no one was ever really able to tell me why.
This Christmas, however, I actually got an explanation that made some sense to me. My mother’s friend Billie has been active in a native habitat restoration project in the San Francisco Bay Area (I’m hoping my mother will read this and email me some specific names …) where recent restoration of a variety of native berry bushes, not popular in modern, manicured gardens, has led to the return of a warbler not seen nesting in San Francisco in fifty years. That makes sense to me, because birds are important and creating bird habitats is important, else you’ll be overrun with starlings, chasing any other birds off.
Fundamentally, you have a choice. Spray with pesticides and create a hostile and toxic environment; kill off all insects, predator and prey alike. The prey, the aphids and mites, long ago adapted to short life cycles and to flourish against all odds, will come back. Their predators, the ladybugs and lacewings and countless others that never get talked about, never had a chance. Their life cycles are much longer, and if you kill off a generation, it will take them a long time to return. Meanwhile, you’ll have to spray again if you want to keep the aphids in check, and spraying will keep the ladybugs from ever returning.
Or? You let nature work. You rinse off the aphids and plant things that will attract beneficial insects, along with flowers that will lure the aphids away from your tomatoes. You go out of your way to make room for birds, and you teach kids about why spiders are good for a garden. You won’t have a bug free garden, but last time I checked, you could make the whole neighborhood sick with chemicals and still not kill off every last mite and thrip. It isn’t perfect (nature is still nature) but it isn’t toxic.
One thing I know is that green roofs can make a big difference in bird habitats–more fragile urban birds need places to rest between trees, and mile upon mile of tar roofing does not provide much relief. Birds, in turn, do their part to keep the mosquitoes down (as do bats but we’ve been too spooked by the prospect of introducing rabies to put up our bat house) and spread seeds. We are hoping to introduce a kestrel to the garden this spring, perhaps she (he?)’ll keep our wee mouse population in check. Kestrels being raptors, you know I have a special affinity for them.
What I am trying to put together is some nice, succinct explanations of why greenroofs, native plants and organic gardening matter to the urban environment. And why the urban environment matters to folks who think they don’t care about it. That was one of the issues I wanted to start to tease out with this blog, that and why nutrition matters (in the meantime, see a great article in The Ecologist about the connection between sugar, vitamins and anti-social behavior (it is a British magazine, they talk alot about anti-social behavior in Britain))
Another little tidbit on the urban ecology front, file under “Nature Works Best Left to Her Own Devices”– the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is offering a lecture by Thomas Ogren on the impact that male-only landscaping has on pollen counts. In dioecious species, male trees don’t drop seeds all over the place, they don’t fruit or flower. A landscapers dream. Only problem is that what male trees do produce is pollen. Lots of it, and if there aren’t female trees around holding out their flowers, waiting expectantly for pollen to arrive, that pollen just floats. So between no female trees and no female trees, we’ve got twice as many pollen producers as we ought and no place for the pollen to go. BBG has no info on the lecture on their website but it is April 18 (a tuesday) from 4-5, and it is free.
PS, speaking of invasive species, I’m still waiting for someone to just harvest the ailanthus that grows wild in New York City. Enough trees are brought down every day in this city that at least some of them must have some value as rustic lumber, non?
I sat next to a very nice lady (I was going to call her chatty, but I think I started the chatting and I want to be sure I’m being fair, not painting her as some flighty bee.) on the flight to Istanbul and of course she was very curious about this “meeting” I was on my way to. “What is it about?” (good question.) “Will you be speaking?” (I don’t think so, but you never know) “And what exactly do you do again?” (mmm. I would also love to know.) She was on her way to view the 4 minute total solar eclipse that is approaching. March 29, I think. I think I’d have to be in Southern Turkey to see it myself.
And then I got here and people were asking roughly the same questions, in a sociable, get-to-know-you kind of way, but I still didn’t have an answer. “You know, I was in Simon’s Town, chilling with the penguins and it was really nice out and I didn’t ask a lot of questions,” didn’t seem like a very professional answer.
I’ve asked around and finally landed on someone who knows more than I about where I fit. So now it is all clear. I am an invited guest (it says so on the agenda) at the OSI Information Programs Meeting. National Coordinators of OSI Foundations in former Soviet countries and a few other places (Western Africa–the region, South Africa–the country) are here to talk about their Information Program work. Intellectual Property, access to knowledge, digital divide. Access to ICT (Information and Communications Technology) tools — open source software, challenging telco monopolies; as well as access to information. They are here, these foundation directors and program coordinators, to talk about their work and compare notes and learn about tools that they or their grantees could be using or could be using better. Tools like eIFL–Electronic Information for Libraries– which is actually an organization, but also a tool, in that “how could we be supporting your work” sort of a way. Tools like CiviCRM, a membership/online advocacy database project. Other tools, too, but those are on the radar. It is (secretly) sort of political to trumpet CiviCRM and not talk about what else is out there–there is a lot else out there– but one thing about civiCRM being open source and based in open source software is that it is highly localizable (meaning you can translate it) and there is already a Polish version.
Okay, okay. I knew it was the OSI Information Program National Coordinators Meeting. But I hadn’t really asked any meaningful questions about what that actually means. That was what I learned when I got here, what the Information Program does, what the National Coordinators coordinate. That sort of thing. I was being cute, but I don’t want to give the impression that these guys are a bunch of free wheeling flakes. They aren’t at all.
What am I doing here? Listening and meeting people, mostly. I am going to demo CiviCRM, but I didn’t know that until last night at dinner. Trying to steer clear of Dirk’s egregious inability to pronounce anyone’s name.
This is the thing that I have been trying to write, we’ll see if it comes out right. I just got off the phone with poor Dirk who got an earful about Cape Town that he probably wasn’t expecting when he asked how my trip went. Everyone I know says Cape Town is great. Great! Go to Cape Town. Beaches, amazing food, great wine, you’ll have a blast. Mountains, dassies, the most succulent calamari on the planet. (Okay, so no one told me about the calamari, but if you do go to Cape Town, eat calamari. It melts in your mouth.) And these are all nice progressive-to-radical, thinking people, and so I didn’t think much about it. This is the new South Africa. Apartheid was a long time ago, the ANC is running the country, the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission found out the truth and Desmond Tutu brought everyone together and so there is nothing strange about going to Cape Town to lie on the beach.
I didn’t go to lie on the beach. I went to go to Velo Mondial (or to follow Noah to Velo) and see the BEN shops and learn about the impact of bike planning on economic development and the environment. And to lie on the beach.
The only really dissenting perspective I got was at the very last minute, skimming (at Maggie‘s suggestion) Angela Tucker’s blog entries about her time in Cape Town. Everyone else I met just talked about the beaches, which I hadn’t given much thought to until people started talking about them endlessly.
I’m home for a few days to regroup. I didn’t go straight to Istanbul because I had a vision and the vision told me “go home first” and lo! Turkish Airways flies direct. Plus the 10 hour flight pales in comparison to the 18 I just endured so as long as I’m not sitting in the middle with a very sound asleep man with very bad breath between me and any movement, I should survive.
I keep thinking I haven’t written anything in a while, but it looks like I covered everything. I maybe left out the best story of the Argus (hmm. It looks like I left out the Argus! We did finish it in seven-plus hours which included one leisurely stop for coffee across from the beach in Muizenburg and a long stop for lunch just before the famous Chapman’s Peak which was really not that bad after a lunch and a nap) which was not the view (though the view was stunning, and just kept going and going and going) but was the baboons waiting by the side of the road to dart out and grab discarded packets of Sports Gu, which they appeared to be sucking the last drops of goo out of.
Once the Argus was over we drove to a town that we had passed through on the ride, place called Scarborough, which turned out to be 100% white and pretty openly racist, at least conversationally. I have been trying to figure out what is worth saying about travelling in a country with such an incredible history of violent racism and I can’t get very far. I’m not sure I’d do it again, visit South Africa. Not without doing a lot more research about where I was going to stay and who I was going to pay money to. But that isn’t much to say. I’ll just add it to the list of stuff you’ll hear about when I get home if you buy me a beer.
Yesterday we drove to Mosselbai or Mossel Bay or however you want to spell it. They get away with some spelling fun because they’re hopping between Africaans, Xhosa and English, but that still doesn’t account for all the variations that a particular location might boast. Mossel Bay, as it turned out, also boasted a beach full of dog poo and no open shops to sell us a towel. We dunked in the Indian Ocean (amid a lot of candy wrappers …) anyway and drove (wet) inland to Outdshoorn, which is home to 97% of the worlds Ostriches. Send message by carrier pigeon if you’d like a purple feather duster. They also sell Ostrich eggs at the Pick’N'Pay, but I am not bringing any of those home.
I think we figured out today that if we had this all to do over again we’d have spent a few days in Prince Albert, where every B&B promises to direct you on hikes in the Swartberg, instead of Oudtshoorn where our r-trilling host is convinced that we need to visit both the cheetah farm (they are de-clawed and you can cuddle with them!) or an ostrich farm (where you can ride an ostrich) and can’t really fathom why we are so disinterested in either. We saw some caves today (and plenty of ostriches) and hiked (walked) out to a waterfall full of frogs and not so much water and then drove over Swartberg Pass which is a mile high and stunningly beautiful. We did not stop and go for a hike because we weren’t really sure where we were. Prince Albert, the town just on the other side of the mountains from Oudtshoorn, is a tiny frontier outpost full of aluminum roofs and bouganvilla. We got fresh figs in a bookstore that was overflowing with walking and hiking guides to the surrounding mountains. Aside from the figs and the trail guides, the other notable thing about Prince Albert was that there seemed to be some black-owned (or at least managed) businesses in town and the town seemed astoundingly diverse by comparison with other places we’ve been.
Meanwhile, it seems that someone’s carrier pigeons are working just fine, as one organization I’ve been talking to about a very small amount of work suddenly wants me to scoot to a meeting in Istanbul before I go home. I am not even sure how to explain that one. I spoke with them about doing trainings with some of their grantees in New York, wasn’t even entirely sure that was a done deal. I still don’t know if it is a done deal or not but they are willing to pay for this trip to Istanbul. So here is what I have to get my head around: I wouldn’t come home until March 30, which leaves me a day to get madly back in shape for the Batizado. Also, Turkey being in the Northern Hemisphere, it is not going to be especially warm there and I’ve got mostly clothes for South Africa with me. And I do have some work to do but no type of computer at all. These are things I can sort out if I am flexible, though, right? Any hot travel tips for Turkey anyone?
I just wrote a nice long piece on ambulances and bicycle ambulances and Western NGO’s and Gov’t Aid organiztions that throw money around only to see it rusting in a corner a few years later, but I killed the window. See I was trying to look up a URL and it was taking too long, so I tried to go back to my blog entry, but that didn’t work, so I tried to … anyhow. Just moments after thinking to myself “i should probably save this” I closed it without meaning to. And now it is gone.
Probably for the best, some of it was maybe impolitic.
Cape Town nice; California Bikes heavy; mountains high; views lovely; always bring bike shorts when you travel. That was the gist of the travelog. This is actually a nice internet cafe and we’ve got a few more days in Cape Town so you might hear from me again.
Fair warning: Dominic did not drink his share of that bottle.
I’m afraid I’ve let you all down. I did not go to Old Bailey (though it sounded tempting) or Newgate prision (though I loved Great Expectations when everyone else in Miss Stewart’s English class not only hated it, but mocked me endlessly for liking it and saying so), I did not go on a tour of the Inns of Court. I did go to Boots for $50 worth of Acyclovir because you can’t buy it over the counter in the US (and apparenly no one ever explained to Noah the connection between herpes and cold sores so he gave me this long cold stare when I said something about getting herpes medication while we are here). I did not go to Hampton Court Place, though I understand that Henry VIII was rumored to have syphilis (an STD! like herpes!) . I did not go to Bloomsbury or the Royal Observatory or Greenwich or Kew Gardens or St Pauls though I did feel altogether better about London knowing that I could go to these places and that they came recommended. But I did not go. I didn’t even go to the Bike Shop in Notting Hill where it is rumored that you need only whisper (whisper!) the name Taliah Lempert and you, too, will be treated like royalty, like nothing less than the Great Artist Herself. I did try to go to the National Gallery and it took me about 20 seconds to realize I didn’t feel like looking at Paintings and I’d rather go find this Notting Hill bike-shop-place, but instead I got entirely lost and by the time I was unlost, I’d had a lovely (though entirely without context or reference) walking tour of London and it was time to get back to Waterloo to meet the Famous Cousin Zoe who has, in the past, made gowns for Alexander McQueen out of great quantities of pink tulle. Tufted pink tulle. She was expecting us at about 4:30 for a short hello and then we were supposed to go see Henry Miller’s last play directed by Robert Altman at the Old Vic (next door to the Young Vic) around the corner from Cousin Barbara’s house. Instead, I went to a capoeira class while Noah slept on the couch, but I digress.
Or do I?
Can you digress when you are just rambling? I don’t think you can. I can’t. Zoe is much more than a one-time McQueen intern, for instance. I didn’t make it to Notting Hill, I know that much. I did make it to Capoeira where I lied(!) to a student named Ninja, telling him that we have a Ninja in our class when we don’t. We don’t! We have a student who we call Ninja because she likes to stand around with her arms folded in a very Ninja pose, but her capoeira name is Aerobica. Sorry Ninja. You have no competition, do not fear.
And Noah slept. This morning we went on a pilgrimage to Geo F. Trumpers where they have violet and lavendar scented shaving things for Men. Also you can have your moustache curled (6 pounds) or take a course on straight razor shaving (50 pounds). And we found some overpriced cocoa on an alley and drank it. Some folks from the London Cycling Campaign took us on a bike tour of London.
We used to play this game, Taylor invented it (or just introduced it?) called Hit or Miss? where you walk down the street and note every out fit. Hit? or Miss? So this was a sort of Hit or Miss tour of London bike lanes. This one here where you have to run through a mob of pedstrians? Miss. This one, that was a sidewalk only ever used by cyclists and was claimed as a bike lane proper? Hit. It was a great ride, even though it started snowing (the faintest dust of snow and everyone was talking about a blizzard). I suddenly found myself face to face with Big Ben, with the sun hitting it through the snow clouds at a blazing red afternoon angle. Onward past Some Government Buildings to Hyde Park and back round to the LCC offices where they all looked at us incredulously when we said that London drivers are so polite. They don’t honk at cyclists, they’ll even hang back a bit and wait until they can pull around if there isn’t room for them to pass a cyclist on the road. They just slow down. Drivers! Slowing Down! Imagine it?
Home for dinner with the lovely cousin Barbara and a drink with Dominic. Not to be confused with Dominica: the only two people I know in all of the UK (er, except Maggie and Sophie) are named Dominic and Dominica. But here is the thing about Dom (I’m almost done, I swear) which is that he lives in Waterloo himself and… and? and … he rides down Pearman street all the time thinking “those are such beautiful houses.” So he came by for a tour of Cousin Barbara’s house, brought her a bottle of wine (except that we drank it for her …) and was in absolute heaven. It was lovely. The fact that she has this gorgeous addition on her roof that really amounts to a giant sun room which is perfect for drinking wine and talking about the series on forensic pathology that he is working on for BBC3 just, I don’t know, just was. It was a fact, that we sat up there looking out at the Slow Moving Eye in the dark (I couldn’t find a light switch) talking about filming autopsies and also about traffic calming and rows of little stone houses.
I take back all the bad things I said about London, I really do.
For what it is worth (please read the warning at the start of this bloody entry bloody! that is a British euphamism for “fucking” — sort of like “flipping” or “freaking” in American English. about my drinking) and in case you were jumping to conclusions, I’ve only ever manifested symptoms of Herpes Simplex One, which is oral herpes, which means I get cold sores from time to time. On my face. As if to punish me for arrogance, the Cold Sore Gods decided to give me one such sore on the plane to London not 24 hours after I told Meredith that they have real medication over the counter in the UK.
Where:St Marks Church, 131 East 10th Street, New York NY (at 2nd Ave)
Many years ago (not that many, actually) I started playing capoeira with Mestre João Grande. I had no idea he was a legend, I have no idea how I decided to start taking clases. I feel like someone else proposed it and I followed along. For about a year, I took classes. I even made it into a photo in The Village Voice. But then I drifted, and after drifting and drifting I was too embarrassed to go back to Mestre Grande’s classes. By then I’d realized that it was an enormous honor to study with such a legend and that only made it all worse.
This summer, though, I stayed with a friend of mine in Seattle who left me to my own devices while he went off to capoeira class and I realized that I had now been planning to go back to playing for fully five years. The stars all aligned when I discovered that Edna Lima, a capoeira legend in her own right, was teaching just around the corner from my office. Classes are a lot less convenient now that I’ve left LINC, but I plan to keep it up and, since I never had a “batizado” or baptism at Mestre Grande’s, the ABADA Capoeira 06 Batizado will be my first.
It will also be a hell of a show–you won’t have to suffer through watching me play too much, but you will get to see me flail around a little bit. Just enough to amuse the hell out of you, before the game is handed back over to the big kids.
Which brings me to the tickets. They are $10-15, sliding scale, and I’ve got 10 to sell. I paid $10 for them, and I’m happy to sell them for $10, but if you feel like playing more the money will go back to the Axe Abada Capoeira organization to subsidize in-school capoeira programs in NYC.
You know you want to see this. Give me a call to get your tickets.
DocumentCloud Demo at Poynter Institute New Tools Seminar - Scott starts at 00:38:00 and I kick in at 00:42 or so. If you want to cut to the chase, you can skip over Butch's chat by clicking around on the timeline until you find the sweet spot.
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