(low) tech writer

When a blog is no longer a blog

2010-12-18T23:59:00.000-08:00

These pages are no longer being populated, and the project can no longer properly be called a 'blog. But there are dozens of essays here, and you can read an introduction and browse the essays at the index page on lowtechwriter.com

Blogs are easy to read when you want to get the latest news or opinion, but they are not really set up as reference engines for content. Sure, you can search for data, but can you easily browse a blog in some way other than in archived monthly chunks, from newest to oldest?

This blog has finished as a project, and the project turned out to be more 'collection of essays' than 'daily diary'. So, how to make my essays accessible? The tools on this blog don't really cut it. Blogger calls what they provide, "push button publishing": it would be nice to have a push-button solution for reformatting the 'blog, which needs now to function like a normal website.

I've done all this myself on the index page at lowtechwriter.com. But it would be nice to just push a button on Blogger and have it be automated. That seems to me to be exactly what technology is for.

Read all the essays again at (low) tech writer dot com

The Project Has Ended

2010-11-09T20:04:00.000-08:00

I just noticed (has anyone else?) that I haven't posted here since May. That's a long time. What's going on? Well, a couple of things. One simple explanation is that I've been taking paid work as a writer, and that tends to reduce the energy I have for this kind of creative outlet. But probably more significant: I think the project is finished. I'm sure I could keep writing: that is to say that there is no shortage of source material. But I think it's time to direct my energy to other things.

When I began the (Low) Tech Writer experiment, I was in crisis in my work life and asking deep questions about how the world worked. Many of these essays were written to explore this territory, even if I always stopped short of making the connection between these subjects and the details of my life.

Partly through the writing of these essays, I have come to the Far End Of The Crisis and now can write/talk/live with much more clarity. Other projects beckon.

I loved being the (low) tech writer. Maybe I'll return to it one day ... after the robot revolution, when we'll really need good social commentary.

Thanks for reading!

Dave

Zoe on "Lemon"ade

2010-05-06T16:46:00.000-07:00

Warm welcome to guest-writer Zoe Maddalena. I'm her daddy, and if it isn't glaringly obvious in about a minute ... she is her daddy's daughter.

Last Sunday my youth group was holding a hot dog/chili fund-raiser for a mission trip. But that's beside the point. The point is, my job was to make lemonade.

Not "life gives you lemons" lemonade, not sugar-and-fruit-of-the-citrus-persuasion lemonade, but powdered lemonade. Country Home, or something like that. It looked like highlighter and sand, and smelled like detergent. Mixed with five gallons of water, it didn't take on that translucent effect that actual lemons might give it: it was milky opaque.

Back to the story.

I was given a great big cooler that had been sitting in storage for about a year, so it was pretty dusty crusty dirty. So I hauled it into the dusty crusty dirty kitchenette, dumped it in the dusty crusty rusty sink and hosed it down and went on the hunt for some dish soap. I found some Dawn, or Joy, or something cheerful and bright and clean-y. So I cleaned it out and made the hungry masses some "lemonade."

But there was one thing that I noticed that I can't get out of my head. The Dawn dish soap was proudly labeled, "Made with REAL LEMON JUICE!"

I don't think there was any of that in the actual lemonade.

Solar Oven

2010-05-04T22:04:00.000-07:00

A hand-me-down from my friends Mark and Georgina, local gurus of sustainability. Mark had a couple extras from a demo day at his place of employment, and said, "I'll give you one if you're really going to use it!" No problem there.

The pic is of my first effort: a hastily prepared rice dish, put out around 4 PM, unsure if the sun would be hot enough in the last hours of this early May day. The rice came out of the sun at 6.30, perfectly cooked. It would have felt like a very pure and simple cooking experience if I hadn't needed to microwave the chicken stock we keep stored in the freezer. The lady of the house was not very impressed with that. If only I had an extra hour of sun, I would have been able to shun the nuclear option.

I have some unexpected disappointments to sort through. This is, essentially, an outdoor cooking method, one that my wife seems happy to leave to The Man. But, strangely, there is no smoke. There are also no special tools, no sizzling, splattering of fat, or poking of charred meat with forks. Really I think my disappointment comes down to a lack of fire. I should say, just to be clear, that my criteria for cooking with fire is that said fire be at ground level, not burning at a distance of one astronomical unit.

I can live with it, because with this smokeless cooking method, entirely devoid of splattering fat as it is, there is also no power being used ... so no draw on the power lines in the house, no burden on the grid, no demand generated on some coal-burning plant somewhere, and so no smoke near or far, which means no impact near or far. This is good.

I'm counting on the fact that I'm banking some carbon equity, and can soon plan a meal that involves solar-baked potatoes and veggies, with a side of grilled meat.

When Printing Left an Impression

2010-04-21T10:51:00.000-07:00

Los Altos Typewriter, local low-tech shrine.

Within walking distance of my house, and central to the region where the personal computer was born and raised, exists a small oasis for those who enjoy old--and lasting--technology: Los Altos Business Machines & Printer Repair, formerly (and more importantly) known as Los Altos Typewriter and Business Machines. In the shop's original name, "business machines" does not refer generically to coffee makers and copy machines, but to the venerable International Business Machines (IBM), maker of the amazing Selectric typewriter, one of several kinds you can still find at the shop on the corner of State and 2nd in Los Altos.

Today, the shop does a lot of printer and copier repair, and for the short time that I was there on a recent visit, several customers came in grunting under the weight of large white plastic office appliances. I was not at all interested in those things, however. I'd come to see the typewriters, many of which are completely functional, and for sale.

Though filled with history, this is no museum. If you're shopping for a typewriter (aren't you?) then you'll have lots to choose from in electric and manual varieties, all with fresh ribbons and ready to type (my new masthead was created during my visit). There are a few interesting models that are just for looking at: this beauty is pre-World War I, and looks like it might have been designed by someone who went on to design tanks for the war. Click to enlarge the sweet little Trade Mark above and read the awesome tag line.

This is a place to get your fix for beautiful mechanical writing machines. This is where you remember why a keystroke is called a keystroke. There is no tap-tap with these machines: here it's stroke, slap, ka-chunk. Key, plunger, hinge, lever, spring, embossed hammer slapping the ink ribbon against the paper to make an impression. An impression. Say it with me. This is not an image squirted onto paper; this is no mere print, like you get out of the cheap plastic box that shares space under your computer with the dust bunnies and has a lifespan shorter than a hamster. No, not a print, but a press. These machines are one-digit-at-a-time printing presses; all steel, and oil, and ink. Yes.

Let me say a word about computers. Computers are amazing. They contain fascinating mechanisms for taking our input and making things happen. There's nothing unholy or unnatural about them. As I'm typing these words in a text box in my laptop's web browser, there are things happening in this computer that are very similar to what occurs when I hit the keys on a typewriter. Only with the computer these things are not happening with oiled-steel levers and hinges, but with electricity. The computer mechanism is just an invisible, electronic version of the physical activity of the typewriter; more flexible, because the electronic mechanism that interprets my effort can be redesigned on the fly by a change in software instructions. But, while flexible, the activity inside the computer is less satisfying because it is hidden from the average user.

What happens inside of computers is at once exciting, powerful, mysterious, intimidating, occult, and slightly de-humanizing. I say de-humanizing because anything that takes the work of creativity, and reduces the mechanism of assembly to an imperceptible and hidden workflow, may lower the bar for entry, but also causes a kind of atrophy with regards to our physical connection to the creative process. With computers, more people can be illustrators, movie makers, musicians, and published authors, which is nothing but good. But these illustrators, movie makers, musicians, and authors will be more removed from the whole body-rhythm of creation as more and more of the mechanism of assembly is reduced to a series of hidden electronic on-off switches that fire a million times a second in a tiny baked chip in a box on your desk. If you turned your monitor off, the only sign that anything had happened would be a slight rise in temperature inside the box. On a cold day (like today) my hands find their way to the left edge of my laptop, underneath which a gray and inscrutable rectangle is processing my keyboard inputs into the very words you are reading right now. It's warm there.

I'm tempted to say that no one should be allowed to make music on a computer unless or until they have learned to play music by banging, plucking, or blowing on some real-world instrument ... but I won't say it. I will say that if the computer got you interested in music and you are making music now out of loops and samples on a piece of software, that's not a bad thing. But I can't stop there: I think you owe it to your body to learn to make music out of nothing, on an unpowered, analog, musical instrument.

I was talking about typewriters. ... I have lost whatever skill I had that allowed me to type out a 12-page term paper on Hamlet, as I did in the Bennington College drama department offices circa 1987. I do remember the satisfaction of operating a piece of machinery that sounded like a machine gun (or as near as I'll ever get). I remember the smell of oil and metal. I remember the way the desk shook under the tremors of the office's Selectric. But I do not remember how to write a draft --a unique version of a document that you start, and then end, and then edit before moving on to the next draft. Sure, that machine had a backspace corrector that could erase a character at a time, and if you were really patient you could remove a whole line. But once you'd continued on, forget going back and rearranging anything. Your first draft on a typewriter was always only your first draft, and your final draft was your final draft. There was no cut and paste. I mean, technically, you could use some kind of cutting tool, and some kind of paste (remember, kids, paste is not for eating!), but then you'd run the risk that your report would be mistaken for a ransom note.

Today, like all computer users, I am always writing one long soupy draft. Writing on a computer is like making soup: adding ingredients, often in no particular order; taste it, add a little spice, more tasting, let it simmer a while, taste, reduce, salt, and serve. It's always changing and you won't do it the same way the next time anyway so it's no big deal that you can't remember what you did to make it taste so good. Writing with a typewriter is not this way. Typing is more like making bread; that is to say the process is less forgiving. With bread, you put all the ingredients in and then cook it. If there's anything wrong (and if you weren't careful there will be), you make notes on the recipe ("less salt") and try again. But with soup and computers, it's much more fluid: there is no first, second, or third draft. Everything on my screen is always changing, and it isn't locked down until it's published. And, even then, if I want to publish a modified version of something I've written, there's a button for that.

I am not at all sad that editing is easier today, but I would like to raise a glass to the skill of generations of writers who had to think before they wrote, and had to summon a greater measure of focus before they began to type because mistakes were not so easy to correct. I think of typing on typewriters as a kind of performance. Your thoughts are being recorded as they happen. You have to be on your game. You have to know what you're doing. With typewriters you couldn't just spill out your thoughts to be easily and endlessly edited. They pretty much had to come out organized. Can anyone write that way today? More to the point: will we ever learn to be that careful with keyboards again? Maybe if we were forced to think before we write, we wouldn't be so careless in launching our thoughts into the world like homemade fireworks (there's a reason why the word 'flame' is used to describe hastily-written, offensive emails.)

And I would like to raise a glass to the manufacturers of tools designed to endure decades of pounding; who made their machines beautiful and durable (really durable, not just made to survive a drop, but to be useful for generations); whose machines were not soulless, disposable, software-processing appliances with a 3-year lifespan, but heirloom instruments for creating with words.

And of course, I toast the proprietors of Los Altos Business Machines & Printer Repair, who have chosen to survive in a world hostile to manual tools by servicing flimsy plastic mystery boxes. It can't be very satisfying to replace plastic parts that were never designed to last, when you are used to cleaning and oiling beautiful steel mechanisms that have been in use for a century. But if doing time in the land of 'planned obsolescence' means you'll be around to fix one more beautiful old writing machine so the next generation can use it, then I approve wholeheartedly.

I'm thinking of bringing my failing printer in for repair (though it would be cheaper to replace it), just so I can waste some wonderful time looking at the typewriters again.

On the Nascent Science of Geoengineering

2010-04-19T14:56:00.001-07:00

I'm no scientist. I'm just a guy. But I heard a scientist talking about geoengineering on the radio the other day, and I'd like to say for the record that I do not agree. Geoengineering refers to proposals to manipulate the planet's climate in order to counteract global warming. An example: spraying chemicals in clouds to make them more reflective thereby bouncing the sun's rays away from the earth. Another example: sucking carbon dioxide into big holes in the ground. Hmm.

Now, I like tools well enough. I appreciate well-thought-out and well-crafted technological solutions. Take hammers. Hammers are cool. Hammers do their job really well, and you can choose from a number of different designs depending on your work-style and end-purpose. Hammer designers have been working on better hammer designs for a long time, and at this stage, we'd have to say that hammer design and technology is pretty mature. And yet, we occasionally smash these modern, well-designed hammers into our thumbs and create problems for ourselves. Nobody can design all the risk out of our tools.

So my question is, how worried should we be that well-meaning scientists, as smart as they may be, are talking about designing planet-sized hammers to solve a global problem? Even if I believed that Scientists (that group of people who totally agree all the time on how things work ... right?) could understand all of the large-scale mechanisms at work in global climate patterns, which I don't really believe, I'm not sure I would want them trying their hand at a global solution. What if the hammer slips? We're not talking about a big toe here. We're talking about the Earth.

Worth a Thousand Words

2010-03-19T12:14:00.000-07:00

Rancho San Antonio Open Space - my son and I rode our bikes up here. If we had ridden as far in the other direction, we'd have arrived at NASA Ames research center, or any number of other landmarks of Silicon Valley.

Light From Fire

2010-03-10T00:25:00.000-08:00

Before it is too late, I'd like to give a little love to the light bulb, old school edition. I'm not talking about the kind filled with toxic gas that glows cold and white when excited by electricity. I'm talking about the real deal: the inefficient, endangered, incandescent, campfire in a bottle. So, a toast: here's to getting our light from fire. End of an era. ... Here's to the scientists who captured fire in a glass prison, and here's to Thomas Edison who perfected the technique, enabling the fire to burn without burning out, by robbing it of oxygen. Brilliant madman.

Frequent readers of my blog may wonder why I'm not writing about candles or lanterns, or hey, maybe torches, as beautiful old-timey sources of illumination. I know that a century and a half ago, the light bulb was not a low-tech reminder of simpler times. It was probably a spooky reminder that we were determined to conquer nature, no longer to be subject to the natural rhythms of day and night: the light bulb may have given my low-tech lovin' ancestors something to fear. Imagine: Edison made a bamboo fiber burn for 1200 hours. Think about that. An inextinguishable flame ... a thing that burned for what seemed like forever. Sounds vaguely demonic.

But one of the reasons I write about the things I do, is that our drive to innovate usually involves ditching simple, functional, beautiful tools in favor of hastily designed, indurable, inelegant, ugly things that do very few things only slightly better than the thing they are replacing. Often, when we choose to upgrade to get a single improved feature, we lose an ecosystem of form and function.

Government bodies are beginning to legislate the end of the incandescent bulb (by 2014 in the U.S.) in favor of compact fluorescent lamps (CFL), which last longer and use less power. That's two good features. They also contain mercury, are a documented danger to low-income workers who manufacture them for export to the U.S. and other western nations, and cannot easily, cheaply, or safely be disposed of (the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommends that fluorescent bulbs be double-bagged in plastic before disposal, even though two plastic bags won't stop the leaching of mercury. Nice.) Far more energy is used in the manufacture of CFLs than in the making of incandescents. They are also very expensive, can fade light-sensitive paints and textiles, and have a number of problems depending on the kind of electronics used, related to operating temperature, orientation, and noise. Sure, most of these problems can be solved. But they'll never make a CFL look like the bulb in the picture above. That makes me sad, and I'm surprised to be sad about it. I'm hearing Joni Mitchell right about now: Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone?

I was about to call that light bulb a work of art, but that's silly. It never was meant to be a work of art. But sometimes a simple thing made well approaches a kind of elegant beauty, by chance, or by some inherited creative spark left over in us as a part of the Image of God ... occasionally we do beautiful things even when we are simply trying to solve problems, or make life better. Occasionally. I think incandescent light bulbs, with their warm, quiet, clean simple light, are very beautiful. Only not when they are frosted. Frosting is for cupcakes.

An incandescent light bulb hanging in the fire house of the nearby city of Livermore has been burning continuously, with only a few very brief interruptions, for almost a million hours, since 1901. It's got the record, in case you're wondering. This very bulb (there it is in the picture to the left) burned for every minute of the last thirty years of Thomas Edison's life, and has been burning ever since. The bulb managed to outlive my grandmother, born the year it was turned on, though my Grandma only just passed away a couple months ago, at the age of 108, and was as bright and clear-eyed as this bulb to the end.

One of the reasons proposed for the Livermore bulb's long life is that it's burning at a very low wattage (four watts, which apparently was enough for a fire station night light back when Grandma was young). Low wattage means low heat. Low heat means long life.

So, here's the deal. Why not just use lower wattage incandescents: let's split the difference--halfway between 4 and 60 (the most popular wattage in incandescents) makes around 32 watts, still far more than the Livermore firefighters would have dreamed of, and plenty of light for a reading space, if not for a large room. Lower wattage means less power consumed and a longer life. Problem(s) solved. And while we're at it, I bet most of us could walk around our home or workspace and turn off half the lights and not suffer for it. I wouldn't even mind a little legislation encouraging me to find creative ways to cut my consumption by half. Why is it necessary to legislate the adoption of an immature, dangerous, toxic, fussy, ugly, and expensive technology? Can someone call the government and ask?

I know, I'm a silly idealist, and it will never work. It's easier to ask Americans to spend $15 more on a light bulb to solve a problem, than to do less of anything to save $15 and eliminate the problem. I think we feel that we have the right to daylight brightness for 24 hours of the day, and if technology can provide it and boost the economy in the bargain, what's wrong with that? But it gets tiring answering questions like that.

What I'm really worried about is what will become of lava lamps?

Grooming Habits and The Cult of Innovation

2010-02-27T15:03:00.000-08:00

I don't hate innovation. But I do hate innovation that has been driven by the desire to sell more crap and not by the needs of human beings. Proctor & Gamble, one of America's largest advertisers (and that is saying something), is a company that markets and sells such commodity products as toothbrushes and shaving razors. In the early 90s advertising book, Where the Suckers Moon, Randall Rothenberg describes Proctor & Gamble as "... the corporation that pioneered the selling of mass products to mass audiences through mass media" and that has an "expertise at moving undifferentiated commodity products unmatched by any other marketer." In order to continue to grow, companies like P&G need to continue to "innovate". That means ... get you to buy a "new and improved" thing, even where the existing product does a fine job of cleaning your teeth, or whatever. With Proctor & Gamble and other consumer goods companies, every day in this great country is a day for revolutionary product design.

What, you thought that your old toothbrush was getting your teeth clean? How sad. I guess you can't be blamed. You made do with what was available to you. After all, until today, no company on earth had yet invented the revolutionary sonic vibrating, ProSoft, CrossMax, Interslide, Power Tip, Micropulse, Indicator-bristle Warrior Brush 2000! Your plaque is doomed. It's the battle of Helm's Deep in your mouth.

But, hold on there soldier! Before you make the mistake of thinking that your brush is actually doing anything by itself (you have so much to learn), you'll need a toothpaste with our revolutionary cavity-crusading crystals, rainbow swirls, bleaching chemicals, breath-fresheners, plaque disintegrators, tartar control, enamel protectors (makes you wonder what your enamel needs to be protected from) and a few other chemistry-set ingredients that should trigger alarms at the airport--and why not? Your mouth is a battlefield. Whatever you do, don't use baking soda to brush your teeth: it's not at all minty. Or dangerous. Or expensive.

And, sorry. Men, are you still shaving with less than five blades? Does your razor not have a revolutionary battery-powered beard trimmer in the handle or Micropulse vibration in the blades? Are you not experiencing the revolutionary benefits of on-blade Indicator lubricating strips or enhanced Microfin stubble stimulating technology? Then you are not sexy. You aren't groomed until Proctor & Gamble says you are. In fact, I'm willing to bet you haven't even gotten to second base with your razor: P&G's Gillette Fusion web site seductively invites you to "Go further ... with body shaving!" (And don't assume I'm the one with my blades in the gutter ... I will not. repeat. their. advice.)

I don't like to upgrade my tools or technology unless the benefit is obvious and looked for. Trade in a hot and sweaty rubber raincoat for waterproof and breathable rain gear? Easy ... yes. Trade in cheap and heavy hi-tensile steel tubing for lightweight and strong steel-alloy bicycle frame materials? Easy ... yes! Trade my triple-bladed razor that cuts my beard just fine for a 5-blade fusion razor? Easy ... no.

I use a three-bladed razor because that's the blade replacement that fits on the handle that I received as a gift years ago. I've used twin-bladed disposables and not suffered for it (though there are way, way too many of these razors thrown away each year). I'm pretty sure I only need one blade, and would happily downgrade if there wasn't such a high cost of (re) entry. I've seen retro-productions of the old "safety razors" (see retrorazor.com ... really) that hold double-sided razors, but I won't be paying 50 bucks for a setup (yet! I still have to use up my 3-fers. I found out my dad still has the safety razor that I remember from my childhood--above--and thought I might take possession of the old treasure, but it turns out he's still using it!) And besides, I'm not sure that I'm convinced by the satisfied customer on retrorazor.com that said he was only nicking himself once a week ... after practice (the starter kit on that site comes with a styptic pencil. That's good marketing: according to Wikipedia these 'pencils' work by "contracting tissue to seal injured blood vessels". Hm.) I'm willing to concede that someone actually pulled off something good with the upgrade to multi-blade safety razors, cause I do not cut myself shaving.

One shaving-related hill I'm willing to fight on is the question of shaving creme. In order to shave you need wet skin and a little lubrication. Hot water in the shower is almost enough, but a little soap goes a long way to keeping your stubble wet for the blade, and adding a touch of slippery. Below is my rig. A funky old travel brush (the head unscrews and hides in the handle) and a cake of shaving soap in a metal cup from the gift shop on Alcatraz (The soap fits perfectly, and I think the cup is really cool--see, it's metal so it can't be broken to be used as a shiv if there were ever a riot in my bathroom.)

I've used cans of shave creme which are a horrible waste: they do not last and too much metal and plastic gets thrown away (to say nothing of the propellant that escapes into the atmosphere. So what if it's CFC free, can anyone say it's a good thing to be releasing compressed flammable gas in the shower?). These products simply reek of invented need. Is it quicker to push a button on a can than to lather up with shaving soap? Yes. Will you regret those lost seconds when you look back on your life? Unlikely.

There is also a temptation with the push-button solution to think the product that comes out is all you need. But in fact the one thing you need for a close (and safe) shave is wet skin, and since water isn't needed with a can of insta-foam, you are less likely to wet your face every time. This means that P&G gets to 'innovate' new ways for their millions of blades to slide over your skin without cutting it. Washed and wet skin is not nearly as exciting (or marketable) as lubri-strips and micro-fins.

There are also really nice shaving cremes that come in squeeze tubes. I've used them for years: a pea-sized bead and a brush produces the same lovely lather that you get with the soap (or the can), but I think the soap is the easiest on the environment, with the least throwaway. It's also the most work: about 10 seconds to produce a lather each day, which works out to one hour a year. You can get that hour back, with dividends, by turning away from the television whenever a P&G ad comes on, and taking the opportunity to tell the other people in the room that you love and/or appreciate them (and that they should not, under any circumstances, buy you the Gillette Fusion for Christmas). Everybody wins.

As for toothpaste, I've never liked the perpetual innovation machines that turn out minty abominations as fast as consumers can buy them. I'm can tolerate the natural 'spearmint' flavor from Tom's of Maine (but worry, now that Colgate-Palmolive bought them, that the integrity of their all-natural product will slip). My favorite flavor of toothpaste? Tom's Silly Strawberry, without question. Yes it is a children's toothpaste. It's flavored with strawberries and banana. It's a great toothpaste, and doesn't pretend to explode in your mouth with minty amazingness.

Ok, I see the way you're looking at me. You are wondering if I have a paranoid fixation on the flavor mint. Not true! Just because it would be possible for P&G to mask mind-control drugs in their toothpaste with minty crystals in order to influence the entire country to think that a six-bladed razor would help them Face the Day With Confidence, doesn't mean they are planning to do that. Yet. Seriously, in my defense, allow me to describe the landscape as I see it. To take one example, following are the actual flavor names that involve mint in P&G's current Crest brand toothpaste line: 1) "Invigorating Mint", 2) "Cool Mint", 3) "Sparkling Mint", 4) "Fresh Mint", 5) "Long-lasting Mint", 6) "Clean Mint", 7) "Clean Night Mint", 8) "Minty Fresh", 9) "Super Action Mint", 10) "Fresh Clean Mint", 11) "Soothing Whitening Mint", 12) "Moonlight Mint", 13) "Revitalizing Mint", 14) "Refreshing Mint", 15) "Refreshing Vanilla Mint", 16) "Minty Fresh Striped", and last but not least (but probably not even 'last'), 17) "Extreme Herbal Mint". I'm not even listing the sparkly variations on peppermints, wintergreens, or the non-minty fruits, burstin' bubblegums, and others. One reviewer on Crest's site has this to say: "I demand minty fresh breath everyday. This is the only toothpaste I have ever used that has kept my breath really minty fresh for hours ...! (Five stars)."

So who's got the unhealthy fixation now?

When I run out of Silly Strawberry--and I can't find any in my kid's bathroom--I brush my teeth with baking soda. It tastes bad. I dub the flavor, "Extreme Powdery Non-Mintiness", but will say that it is, in fact, refreshing, and works really well, costs next to nothing, and involves very little throwaway (a recyclable cardboard box). If you're game to use one of the original tooth cleaning products, I have a simple piece of advice. Don't get it from a box that has been used to absorb odors in your fridge or a musty closet. Simple. Wet your toothbrush and mash it in the powder, and brush.

But be warned, if you're not getting your daily dose of mint ... you may start to wonder why you spend money on various mass produced consumer products that only solve problems you learn about in commercials. Confidence to face the day ... for free: how revolutionary.

On the Road, Old School

2010-02-08T22:19:00.000-08:00

Ahh, the old-school road trip: a car, endless highway, conversation, one-radio-station-at-a-time-if-you-can-get-one-at-all .... America: pre-internet, pre-Discovery Channel, pre-cell phone laws, pre-DVD-player-in-the-minivan, pre-iPod, pre-media saturation. My dad was born in Cleveland during the depression, and worked toward his M.D. in the south. He'd never been Out West, and if he had tapped out www.tetoncam.com on his typewriter to get a look at where he was headed, he would have gotten a 404.

He tells me he had no idea what to expect when he set out from Florida to travel through the Pacific Northwest on a roundabout journey to Southern California. He'd graduated from medical school in Tennessee, done a few months of general practice "in Kentucky, helping 'ol' Doc Hay'", then moved on to flight surgeon school in Pensacola, Florida, where he earned his Navy Wings right before he headed out on the Road Trip. Imagine seeing the above sight for the first time. Is it possible for our HD/3D/Imax generation to imagine what it would be like to see those mountains explode into view from inside a big iron giant of a car before most people had color TV? Think my dad is dreaming of his first color TV purchase in this picture? No.

My dad was a few years away from marriage, and on his way to El Toro Marine Corps Air Station (the Marines 'borrowed' docs from the Navy) in southern Cal. He and his friend Jim Bone took the "scenic route" from Florida, via the Northwest, then on to El Toro. After that, they'd ship out to the Far East.

My dad served in Southeast Asia just before the Vietnam war began. When he came home to start a family and a medical practice, he got his honorable discharge, and the man who took his place was killed in action.

I really love that picture.

Ambivalence

2010-02-05T14:09:00.000-08:00

I have several questions.

Why was I compelled to buy this?
Why does this label make me believe a drink that's mostly sugar is cool?
Why would Pepsi want to advertise that they usually use unreal sugar?
Why would Pepsi want to advertise that they will return to using unreal sugar?
Is "Throwback" what happens to you when you gain 40 pounds because you drink sugar water and then try to lift something without stretching?
Why was I compelled to buy this?

Works on Paper: Bright Sadness

2010-02-02T11:16:00.000-08:00

10 years ago, I wrote a simple devotional for Lent, drawing on the rich expression of the Christian faith in churches more traditional, and Eastern, than my own. That devotional has been online ever since, and gets a lot of visitors every year, and every year I get requests for the materials to be used in communities around the world. Having it available on the web has been great: I'm always amazed at the way this work has touched people in very far away places. It has also been used and appreciated in my own Vineyard church here in California ... a church not very Eastern, and not very traditional.

I've just taken a leap and revised the material for a print edition, which I'm very happy about: I like being able to hold a physical book. It's available now at lulu.com. (If you are against holding dead trees in your hand, there is a half-price download for your reader.)

Though the devotional will remain online, the book has updated content, some extra woodcuts by Spyros Vassiliou, and doesn't require batteries. Nice!

It's for sale for $10. Check it out.

The New Smells of Winter

2010-01-30T17:12:00.000-08:00

I've been scratching my head trying to figure out what exactly it is I smell, on my weekly evening bike commute. At least once a week I ride to an evening meeting on two wheels: I choose the bike over the car even when it's cold, dark, and rainy because I love riding through the chill. One longstanding blessing of winter riding has been the smell of wood fires. Not any more. I've written eulogies to natural wood fires, now increasingly frowned upon. I live in an area with lots of auto and industrial smog, a not coincidentally high rate of breathing problems, and therefore a high sensitivity to politically-correct burn behavior. I understand the need to put less smoke and stuff in the air, but I just can't be happy about the "green" solutions (gas barbecues, gas heaters), when they require the burning of petrochemicals to address an air quality problem caused primarily by the burning of petrochemicals.

Today, as I pedal around my town, I smell the wet rotting leaves (that's one of the good smells), yummy dinners of different ethnicities, and now, with increasing regularity, I smell burning wax. It took me a few nights out before I realized what it was. I mean I knew I was smelling burning wax, but I couldn't figure out why I smelled it so powerfully on the street, and over and over. Then I got it. DuraFlame. I'm smelling fake fireplace logs made from sawdust and wax.

And it really breaks my heart. I know these fake logs are supposed to be better than wood for burning. I know the numbers. 70% less stuff coming out your chimney. They are supposedly made only with natural waxes (at least today they are). But the only reason the burning of natural logs is bad is because of all the other crap that we load the atmosphere with on this overcrowded planet. I mean, really: does it have to be the wood fires that go? It's perfectly alright to keep my hummer, but I can't have a wood fire?

When you go looking into this strange fake-log market, you learn that there is an old-school version of the fake fireplace log. Pres-to-Logs were made from sawdust leftover from lumber production (so no waste, and no trees cut for the product) pressed into shape under high pressure, with no wax or other binders. Pres-to-Logs have been around for 75 years and are made by a company that makes pellets for wood burning stoves. Why aren't we burning those in Los Altos? I know: because they don't light themselves. Too inconvenient. I can hear the pitch now: "We're going to give Americans a fire they can light with one match and no fuss! All we have to do is make a product that is basically a massive sawdust candle." I can smell the lesser of two evils and DuraFlames are not it.

Even if Pres-to-logs are way better than DuraFlame, and they certainly are (I'll be looking for a local distributor for the next logless fire), they do not come close to the look and sounds of a natural wood fire.

I know that fake logs are better by the numbers, but the whole thing stinks. I mean that in every sense: it just seems wrong ... and these things are making my neighborhood smell like a fire at a candle factory. In my economy, if something stinks, it's probably rotten.

DuraFlame has no power here

Camera Obscura

2010-01-07T17:52:00.000-08:00

I love the West Coast. It is among the oldest coastlines in the world, and it looks it. This impression is confirmed with a look at maps of the way the continents have drifted, tumbled and collided around the globe over millions of years: the west coast of North America has always been pointed out, facing the huge expanse of the Pacific Ocean. In light if this, it seems to make a kind of poetic sense that the West Coast was the symbolic goal of the Manifest Destiny, the prize in the drive to conquer the North American continent and the frontier. I've always had this sense that the history of technology in California and the West was just an extension of the migratory drive westward of the American pioneers. The Pilgrims and their heirs achieved their Manifest Destiny, and the land has been conquered, for better or for worse. But now, with all the land gobbled up, what do we do with our insatiable drive to discover, to conquer? We keep going.

And where is there to go? Why, into space of course. Up into outer space, and down into inner space. Symbols of the extension of our frontier can be seen from the freeway which runs between San Francisco and San Jose. The most obvious is Stanford University's massive radio telescope which towers over the 280 corridor. The Dish, as it is known around here, takes our drive to conquer and points it out to space. The Dish, and all the world's telescopes and antennas, scan the next swath of territory, looking for signs among the stars that we can keep going. A mile down the freeway, for those who are driven to discovery on a different scale, is the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the Dept. of Energy's two-mile long linear accelerator, which runs under the freeway and plumbs microscopic space, searching for pathways to knowledge in between the atoms.

Most of us don't get to go on these journeys--the pathways of science are as obscure to us as was the way west to Louis and Clark, before they started up the Missouri. We don't understand the meaning of the intergalactic hiss that the Dish records or the significance of the images the Hubble takes, as beautiful as they are. We don't know what to make of the dance of the charmed and strange particles that leave their trails on the target at the end of the particle accelerator. But when we see pictures of stars, or of scattered pieces of atoms, we take some comfort in the fact that someone is searching out new trails, that hidden truths may be revealed.

But I wonder if we are ever capable of arriving, of ending the journey. Having come to this place, to the edge, as it were, can we just appreciate it as a place? Can we ever stop searching and just see? Or is every place just a waypoint? Are we bound to urgently press on? I'm willing to accept that some are called to always search the horizon for new routes, but this straining impulse, this expectation that there is more to discover, more to do, is so deeply rooted in the psyche of everyone who has come to California that it is nearly a disease.

As an antidote to this straining, this looking beyond, there is a place on the coast near here where you are encouraged simply to see. Where you are not encouraged to map out new trails, or to imagine what lies over the horizon. Having arrived, you are invited just to see the beauty of it. In this place is a kind of old-school technology that is also an anti-technology. It's a kind of camera, but one that doesn't fill your shelf with albums or your hard drive with JPEGs. The images it produces do not require or even permit analysis. It is the Camera Obscura.

The Camera Obscura looks from the outside like a cheesy tourist spot: the Giant Camera of the old Playland at the Beach amusement park on the seaward side of San Francisco, built in 1946. But as cheesy as it looks, it is a thing of wonder: a dark room containing a six-foot wide parabolic wooden surface painted white that captures a projected image from outside without electricity, chemicals, or WiFi. The image is often moving, gently rotating with the turning of the lens which sits on top of the building, and as it is reflected via a prism down onto the table, we see the scene outside (the Cliff House behind the Camera, Seal Rock, the beach, and the open sea) panning and turning all at once on the circular surface. It can be a little disorienting, a bit hypnotic; it is certainly beautiful.

The round table on which the image is projected is about the same diameter as the target end of the two-mile long accelerator inside SLAC, as the sensor that hangs suspended in front of the Dish to catch it's magnified space signals, and as the mirror in the Hubble Telescope. But the images it captures are less obscure than these, less abstract. What you see on the table in front of you in the Camera Obscura is immediate and intimate, it is the Place Where You Are. No interpretation is needed. You can't study it, because it's moving and changing and always different. You experience it.

A quick view with the lens at rest.

The table is perfectly round, here viewed from the side.

Technology always promises access to things while simultaneously distancing you from them. The Television delivers programming from around the world but you are still stuck sitting in front of a glowing box in a darkened room. Jet airplanes can move you to the other side of the planet in hours, but you have no sense of the journey--of what you flew over, or through--only a sense of discomfort at having been squeezed into a tube and then squeezed out in a place where everything is different. The internet gives us access to all the world's information, but requires us to keep our eyes fixed on a flat screen, and our ears plugged and wired.

The Camera Obscura, as a piece of technology, is no different, even if it operates on principles that have been understood for millennia: the image on the table is of the place where you are, but you are also not there. You're inside a dark room looking at a projection of an image of the sea, not standing on the beach looking at the sea with your own eyes. Yet like all cameras, the Giant Camera of San Francisco helps you see things differently (or see them for the first time), and unlike the portable cameras we all carry, this camera preserves a feeling of immediacy and authenticity because the camera is bound to the place. You never really suffer that technology-induced isolation. You can hear the sea through the walls.

The Camera Obscura is also made of lovely, low-tech things: essentially glass and wood. A five-inch wide glass lens projecting on a six-foot wide table with a concave wood surface. Apart from the motor that turns the lens assembly, there is no electricity, no Intel Inside, no HD screen. In the Camera Obscura, you are the computer that processes the image, and if your capacity to remember hasn't suffered too much from our culture of hyper-literacy, then you will recall this trip to the coast as a distinctly satisfying one.

Visit the Camera Obscura:

1096 Point Lobos Ave
San Francisco, 94121

37°46'41.64"N
122°30'51.22"W

(Satellite view): bit.ly/giantcamera

Hey Kids! More on Fractional Foods

2010-01-07T17:03:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I wrote about the weird world of "half products", processed food pellets that are not edible until expansion by microwaving, or some other process. After reflecting on what makes a product natural, or whole, I had another chance to analyze the claims of a "multi-grain" product. Today, to my great surprise, I opened our cereal cabinet to find a box of Froot Loops. The cabinet had never behaved in this way before. The cabinet usually contains boxes with names like "Soy and Flax Clusters", a product more appropriate to a house where 40-somethings will eat, without question, whatever they find in the cabinet.

Where the Froot Loops came from, I did not know. But I knew that I had to have some. What a thrill to open a cereal box again and find that heavy foil-laminated inner wrapper that only the sweetest cereals merit (Soy and Flax Clusters only have a wax-paper liner). What a thrill to gaze upon the bright rainbow of colors made possible by science! Look at it! Did I mention that Froot Loops are multi-grain?

Printer-Ink Registration Marks on Packaging ...
Rainbow of Frooty Goodness ...

Separated at birth?

My initial thought as I chomped down on my first spoonful since 1986, was that the cereal wasn't as sweet as I remember. But when I looked at the box and reassured myself that sugar was indeed the first and main ingredient, I knew it must be pilot error. Then I saw it: I'm using no-sweetener-added soy milk! Silly me. I am out of practice. So what else is in Froot Loops? Of the three grains listed, only the last of them is whole: the oats. Add to these--in increasing amounts--white flour and refined corn (think: sugar), but don't overdo it because real sugar has to be the number one ingredient, then add some partially hydrogenated oils, and you have a concoction that only a mad scientist would feed to children.

So why is this stuff in our cabinet? Turns out my wife, a children's pastor, found them in our church resource room where she stages the chaos of her Sunday morning kid's church supplies, and decided that the risk of children actually eating the stuff outweighed the benefit of making pretty necklaces and decided to dispose of it in a OSHA- and EPA- approved manner, i.e. put it where I would find it. She forgot to mention that the sell by date was almost a year ago. I swear I wouldn't have known that by eating it.

Half Foods

2009-12-29T22:31:00.000-08:00

Behold the mighty Triscuit: Symbol of Whole Food. Mostly unchanged for 100 years. Ingredients: whole wheat, soybean oil, salt. Compare that to heavily processed, science-fair, "home-style" monstrosities like anything from Pepperidge Farm. I know ... delicious. But read the ingredients of their cookies with a Tylenol chaser. Interesterified Oil? Huh? Wow ... uh, how interest-ing. How terrify-ing.

Of course I recognize that Triscuits are a processed food: Triscuits don't occur in nature. At least with the Triscuit it's pretty easy to imagine the steps between harvest and your snack cabinet. And I'm ok with certain, low-tech processing: when we pull a fresh-baked loaf of bread out of the oven, we are eating a processed food. I don't have any qualms about saying that cooking technology improves on nature. After all, when God visited Abraham and Sarah, they didn't just pour a handful of wheat into the hands of the Holy One. They kneaded it into dough and baked fresh bread, and my guess is that God said something to the effect of "it was good". Fresh bread is a benefit of technology. If fire isn't a technology, then the oven that harnesses it to make bread is.

But there are processed foods, and then there are processed foods.

Recently, I did some writing for a friend who is importing natural mediterranean-style snacks for sale in the U.S.. He's going to be selling to retailers, so to get a line on the language and concerns in the marketplace, I did a little investigoogling on snacks. Yummy? Not so much.

It's always a little disorienting when entering a completely foreign culture, and this was no exception. There are risks to peeking behind the curtain that separates the food on our table from it's origins.

My first stop was the Snack Food Association web site (sfa.org) where I was tempted by such mouth-watering foodie writing as The Essence of Quality Potato Chips ... the authoritative 3rd edition of the Pretzel Quality Manual, and the SFA/AOCS Edible Oils Manual, 2nd edition. It is not only not appetizing to listen in on the corporate back-room talk about foods I share with my family: it's creepy. It's a little bit like suddenly realizing there's a one-way mirror in your dining room hiding lab-coat-wearing technicians who watch how you chew. You say, "Mm. I love these chips, they taste great." ... they say, "optimized mouth feel and end-flavor target-mix".

It gets weirder. The Snack Food Association has a magazine: Snack World.

In the August 2009 issue of Snack World, I found a news-item for J.R. Short, A family business that wants a seat at the dinner table as your "maker of extruded intermediate pellets". What is an extruded intermediate pellet, you ask? Extruded intermediate pellets are known in the business as half-products, because they still need to be cooked, or as J.R. Short so appetizingly puts it, expanded. Extruded Intermediate Pellets, says their web site, "deliver on whole-grain/multigrain and fiber nutritional content claims with a great tasting crunch ... available in a variety of pellet shapes that can deliver great bag fill and perceived value". Pellet shapes?? Bag fill?? Did I just click through to the UPS store?

Maybe we should just take a step back. Deep breath. See, here in America, we're trying to end a decades-old addiction to refined grains in our diets. We're learning that too much white bread is bad for us in the same way that too much sugar is. We know we need to eat more whole grains. Easy to say, but how do we do that? I don't know about you, but I have never in my life been in the same room as a whole grain ... not that was still whole anyway. For the majority of us, if the supermarket doesn't feed us whole grains, we will likely die in our wonder-bread sins. So in order to satisfy our new passion for whole foods (and for living more 'naturally' in general), the food companies must provide products that contain mostly whole grains (mostly, because all that's required for the food to be labeled "whole" is for the first ingredient to be a whole grain of some kind ... the rest of it can be sawdust and saccharine. Most people do not know or care if the thing is really 'whole', only that the package speaks authoritativly to the problem). A company that provides whole grain snack foods is church-like in our pseudo-enlightened world. We secretly imagine them to be providing food for the body and soul.

The J.R. Short company is not actually that company. They are the company that provides the extruded pellets to the company that provides your whole grain snacks. J.R. Short takes powdered grains, seeds, and vegetables--any kind you want, in any combination--and processes them into a paste. And then they squeeze that paste into whatever shape is required by the food company, which then expands them and tosses them with some powdered flavor. When you browse the products on the J.R. Short company web site, with a little imagination you will recognize things you've eaten out of a bag recently. These are not your father's cheeze puffs.

You may have noticed that what used to be trashy snack food is now yuppie feel-good health food. What's the difference? Simply that processors like the J.R. Short company have replaced whatever was in the cheeze puffs with sexier raw materials. Now, grains or legumes like lentils, flax, barley, and soy join the old standbys-- corn, wheat and rice. Add in vegetable powders from seaweed, carrot, beet, or broccoli and various other "complimentary" ingredients, and J.R. Short will squeeze your custom easy-bake play-do into twists, tubes, shells, ribbons, chips, little balls and beads, even a custom logo-shape ... all of which they call pellets. Hungry yet?

I've got to admit I find this kind of cool in a dial-a-product sort of way. We're not just living in the age of easy information, but the age of easy productization. I can dream up a design and be wearing it on a t-shirt within the week, then sell it in my online store, where you can get the same brilliant design on a teddy bear or a coffee mug. I can write a book and be reading my own first-edition hardcover within a week of uploading the content. Buy my album on MySpace ... watch my movie on YouTube.

Now--brave new world--I can decide that I want a snack chip in the shape of my face made of organic beets, buckwheat, defatted soy, triticale, and sea salt, choose between a "hearty crunch" or a "light and airy crisp" and in no time take delivery of little plasticized extrusions--ready for me to "expand" into a finished food product by frying, hot air popping, or microwaving--in 20 or 50lb bags. Got a party coming up this weekend? Choose the "2,200 pound capacity super sack". Woo.

I should have known that the warm feeling couldn't last. You know what I'm talking about: I'm eating whole grain foods! I'm in touch with the earth! I'm living an authentic life! My foods are crafted by flour-dusted artisans who shuffle around a kitchen warmed by a wood-fired brick oven! Innocence dies hard.

As an antidote to this unappetizing and slightly callous peek behind the food processing curtain, I offer this video of a real flour-dusted bread-making superhero.

Warning: contains some language, appropriate to the subject but maybe not to your dining room. That said, to which of these enterprises would you rather give a seat at the dinner table?

from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

Priceless

2009-12-29T21:16:00.000-08:00

Mini R/C Helicopter: 22 dollars

AA batteries: 5 dollars

The following mang-lish instructions: priceless

"This remote control has already installed to protect the device, if want the flight, please open the switch, the indicator would be shining, after operating the pole to the motive to heading up to push then pull to go to most next, the indicator is often Bright, at this time remote control normal usage of ability."

I should probably leave well enough alone, but I ran this English through Google's translator, then took the resulting Chinese and ran it back, just to see if two wrongs might make a right. Strangely, some of the instructions sound better, but with flashes of what sounds like political propaganda.

"The remote control has been installed protection devices, if you want to fly, please turn on the switch, indicator light flashes, it will operate under the motivation, leadership of promoting, and then evacuated to the most, this indicator is often a bright future, at this time, normal use of the remote control"

100 Catalogs

2009-12-24T13:41:00.000-08:00

We started stacking catalogs on Thanksgiving day. The pile didn't get as high as we thought it might, but today (December 24) my daughter and I counted 100 catalogs. These catalogs are filled with clothes (by far the majority), shoes, books, toys, food (popcorn, spices, english muffins, fruit), snowboards, computers, cameras, fleece jackets, jewelry, GPS-enabled golf rangefinders, exercise machines, and endless pages of cheap branded trinkets that will self-destruct 15 seconds after you tear off the wrapping. Our bank sent us a catalog (that's where you can get the GPS-enabled golf rangefinder). There are even catalogs selling sheep and other livestock to give (in someone's name) as charitable gifts to poor families--these catalogs are among the smallest, and that seems good to me, though I'm not entirely sure why.

There are 26.6 pounds of paper here. Zoe looked up the number of households in the U.S. and did a little math for me. In America, we're close to 15 million households. 26.6 pounds times the number of households in this country gives us roughly 3 billion pounds of catalogs. In one month! Be sure to check out our new eco-sensitive clothing line ....

Imagine how big our pile would be if we actually bought stuff from catalogs.

The Old Fashioned Way

2009-12-14T16:46:00.000-08:00

Remember when new jeans came in one style and that style was "new"? (What an OLD man thing to say.) I can remember weeks of chafing and mailing tube stiffness when breaking in a new pair of jeans--only slightly less painful than breaking in a new pair of leather hiking boots. And when you'd really worked those denims for a good long time (like, years), they acquired a beautiful, velvety-soft, sky-blue, wonderfulness. Today, thanks to the wonder of whatever dark magic happens in jean factories, we never have to break in clothes again.

I like soft pants. Who doesn't? I admit it: I'd choose faded jeans off the rack and leave behind the dark blue cardboard that is a fresh pair of 501s. But it's kind of sad to me that I'm paying equal or more to buy clothes that have been washed with rocks and will therefore have a shorter lifespan. Aged cheese? Good. Aged wine? Mmm. Aged pants? Wha? Where can I get me a brand-new car with a thousand miles on it, covered with dents and scratches? Rockin!

Now. I think the jeans pictured here are pretty good in a combat-boot-goes-to-the-prom sort of way, and I think the girl in them is pretty great in that kind of way, and in many other ways too. But wow.

Every now and then, me and the kids (this one, who's 16, and the boy, who's 13) get a little punchy and end up wrestling on the floor, which is getting more and more dangerous ... for me: I've broken parts of myself ... and the 13 year-old recently took me down in the kitchen with one move. I can't count all the times these kids cracked skulls while wrestling on the bed in the early years. We all know the risks! And I thought we shared an equally casual attitude towards our wardrobes: I mean, look at those pants. But what do you think happens at the first sound of tearing? She shrieks: "You're tearing my jeans!" Oh really.

Then there's me. This old pair of Levis has finally reach the point of structural failure. It's possible these jeans are 20+ years old. I should be happy that I now have holes. No more of the shame that attends those whose pants are unventilated. I should feel different, but all I feel is a draft on my left knee. I tell my daughter with desperate pride that I put tears in my jeans the old fashioned way ... I earn them. What an old man thing to say.

The Geography of Hope

2009-10-27T13:36:00.000-07:00

Some months ago, I posted an essay about how a ranger scolded me for walking 10 feet off the trail at Palo Alto's Arastradero Open Space Preserve. This preserve is in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, a wide-open place where one wouldn't expect the kind of "keep off the grass" rules associated with strips of city park. The title I gave the essay communicated my feelings on the matter ("Signs of The End").

But, I can admit now that I was of two minds on the matter. It still seems ridiculous to be told to stay on the trail in such a wild place. But soon after I wrote the piece, I felt a prick of conscience, and a sense of responsibility to tell the other side of the story. Why? Because I keep going back to Arastradero ... on foot, on mountain bike, alone and with my family. I find myself enjoying that same trail, and many other trails along the San Francisco peninsula again and again, and I began to have new thought share space with my semi-righteous indignation. I realized that I have very little to complain about. I live in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, in the high-tech center of the modern world, and yet ... I am surrounded by simply beautiful natural spaces, forever preserved against development or modification beyond the laying of trail. I have in fact enjoyed open space along the Peninsula for my whole life, in all four seasons, in rain and shine, day and night. I've slept under oaks, prayed on benches, sat writing in journals, and stared without a thought into wilderness ... all in settings that allow my heart and mind and soul to drop their guard and to breath.

Room to breath. This is one of the themes in the language of open space. You come across the phrase frequently in the history of one of the largest of the agencies that oversee open space in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District. I wanted to get to know this organization, to meet the people who keep this land for me, and to learn what it takes to preserve open space in a region that the rest of the world associates with high home prices and high technology. How do they do it?

I confess that when I met with Leigh Ann Maze of the OSD, I was looking for dirt (no pun intended): I wanted to hear all about the fights over who gets the land and how it is used. I guess I imagined a great battle over each acre: developers and technologists on one side, and sandle-wearing soldiers in the open space army on the other. Maze couldn't satisfy my need for drama. She said it might get a little hot in the nitty-gritty negotiations over a particular parcel of land, but she's not really aware of any great philosophical divide on the Peninsula. The overall impression I got from talking to her is that the OSD enjoys a lot of favor in the Bay Area. She suggests that open space is a part of what attracts people to live here, and that even the developers recognize that being able to see trees on the mountains increases the value of the homes down in the suburban sprawl between highways 101 and 280.

So it may be that some experience it as a tension, and others as harmony, but either way, there's no argument over whether it is good to have open space here at the end of America's westward expansion. You might expect to see an insulting profusion of development here, in the same way you see great mountains of boulders at the terminus of ancient glaciers. After all, people keep coming .... Instead, land dedicated to open space is increasing, not as much as in the early days, but still increasing each year. Anne Koletzke writes in Peninsula Tales and Trails, a guidebook to the district, that the Bay Area has one of the largest systems of public open space to be found in any urban area in the United States.

But it wasn't always that way. Journalist Jay Thorwaldson, in the foreword to Peninsula Tales and Trails, describes looking down, as a youth on horseback, from the ridges of the Santa Cruz Mountains as the "valley's endless apricot and prune orchards [gave] way to homes and highways in a sad, but seemingly inevitable, roll of market demand and economic reality. Before silicon became the heart of computers," and a significant driver of development for the region, "this was called the 'Valley of Heart's Delight.'" In 1970, the threat was very real. But Thorwaldson was on hand to document a local, citizen-driven campaign to preserve open space. He himself influenced that campaign through editorials which urged these early environmentalists to find a way to buy the land they wanted to protect against development, a strategy also promoted by Wallace Stegner, a Stanford professor and novelist who contributed important ideology to the movement. If you want to preserve open space, the argument went, you have to own it, so that you can keep it open for ever.

Today the OSD owns over 55,000 acres of land, most of which can be explored by anyone who lives in, or visits, the Bay Area. When land is purchased, the first goal of the OSD is preservation, ensuring that the environment in and around the land is protected. These concerns always extend beyond the boundaries of purchases. Wildlife (from ubiquitous deer and squirrels to endangered red-legged frogs) pass through open space preserves and policies within the boundaries must account for the through-traffic. The course of streams in preserves can affect local watersheds and species (including our own species) many miles downstream. At times, early 'improvements', such as logging roads (called by the OSD, 'cultural resources'), need to be reversed to halt the pernicious effects of erosion on the ecosystem.

A very few times, the OSD closes a preserve to human visitors. But the "goal is to keep them open," says Maze, though always with limited provision for human comforts. "We set ourselves apart from other parks: we like to keep the infrastructure to a minimum. ... You'll see dirt parking lots and pit toilets, but no barbecues, play structures, or picnic tables ... the whole system only has one overnight campsite. ... We call what we do ecologically sensitive recreation and education." This emphasis on letting nature be, and not filling it with soccer fields, golf courses, or other recreational infrastructure, is summed up by Wallace Stegner in his Wilderness Letter, who asserted that preserving natural open space has "no more to do with recreation [than] churches have to do with recreation." We need, he says, to learn the "trick of quiet" that our ancestors knew from time spent in the big empty plains. "We could learn it too, even yet; even our children and grandchildren could learn it. But only if we save, for just such absolutely non-recreational, impractical, and mystical uses ... all the wild that still remains to us."

Adding to the delicate balancing act that is managing a piece of nature, the OSD is a public agency and so is accountable to local public opinion, state and federal governments, policies including the Endangered Species Act, and other rulebooks overseen by agencies such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "There are a lot of layers," says Maze, "even for one little project of putting in a bridge ... we have to get permits from cities, counties ... and the public always want to weigh in. ... Ultimately it's the public's land; it's your land, your trails."

With all these obligations to balance, the OSD seems to work really well. They do a great job communicating to the public -- they have a quality website, good-looking publications, and were willing to talk to a snarky blogger like me (that "end of the world" post was not much of a calling card). And, of course, they do a very good job stewarding the land. My experience of the preserves is that they are consistently clean, accessible, and well laid-out. I know that takes work, even when the bulk of the land is trusted to natural processes. Finally, and maybe most impressively, from what I've seen, it appears the OSD manages and spends their considerable budget wisely.

It doesn't mean it's all sunny skies over the preserves though. The downturn in the economy has affected the OSD, like it has every other business. Grants and private donations have dropped, and to add insult to injury, even though the District manages it's budget very well thank you, the State of California is exercising it's "emergency right" to take money from "special districts" to deal with it's own budget shortfall. They are borrowing roughly 2 million from the OSD, "which legally they need to pay back," says Maze (uh ... good luck.) When I asked if the money taken from the OSD would at least go to save some of the state parks that are expected to close (again, good luck), Maze couldn't say, and she showed a remarkably goodnatured attitude towards Sacramento. "We look at it as an investment in the state."

For all this organizational complexity, federal policy, resource managment, state budget trouble, and, yes, the threat of development on currently un-preserved land, the OSD does an amazing job of giving the people exactly what was hoped for some thirty years ago: room to breath.

And though I don't like fences in the wild, I recognize the difficulty of protecting land, especially when the land in question is surrounded by forces hostile to it. Regardless of the relatively harmonious relationship between open space and ... crowd-space on the peninsula, I know that if the fences came down, the land would be lost. So I'm thankful for the activists who fought to purchase land to preserve it, and I'm thankful for the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, and other powers that protect land for me, even if it means there are some views I have to enjoy from the trail.

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope. -Wallace Stegner, The Wilderness Letter

A (low) tech writer principle: invest in the things you love. If that loose community of nature lovers back in the 70s had only come together to complain and had not put their money where their collective mouth was, the land between San Jose and San Francisco would be very different today, and we would all have a lot more to complain about.

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http://www.openspace.org/ (be sure to look at their Google Map mashup: the Preserve Finder, on the front page). And get your copy of Peninsula Tales and Trails at the OSD's website to support their work. It's a classic guide book.

A snapshot from space of the Regional Open Space District (with the open spaces labeled nicely, thank you Google):
http://bit.ly/openspaceba

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Photography by Karl Gohl and used by permission of the photographer and the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District.

bag

2009-09-14T12:54:00.001-07:00

My Bag has one pocket, and it's BIG. I like simplicity in my bags. I do not like complexity. My bag used to have a single inside flap, stitched to the top lip of the opening, with an assortment of little pockets for organizing stuff, but I removed it. It's not that I don't like being organized: it's just that I don't really like having someone else's principles of organization forced on me. The organizer pocket that was stitched inside this bag had a couple pen slots (I carry more than that and so I use a pencil case, which you can see in my profile picture), a wide pocket sized for something like a palm pilot (which most people now keep in a box in a closet, while they wait for the museum to call), a tinier fleece-lined pocket for a phone or media player (which is now a single device, and holstered to my strap for quick access while riding), and other miscellaneous slots that simply didn't fit the stuff I have. So out with the perma-pockets! The bag's a little lighter, it sits open more readily because there isn't a heavy array of pockets pulling the lip of the bag down, and is ready to be customized according to my needs.

Even when it left the factory - organizer pocket intact - my bag was downright simple compared to the modern daypack. Daypack design has gotten a little silly: the more specialized pockets, ports, sleeves, techy functions, fobs, and space age suspension technology a bag has, the more X-Treme you are, and the more money you will be separated from and ... the more doomed you are to throw away the bag as soon as your needs change. Think of it: you buy a new bag to fit your stuff. Your stuff breaks, or gets replaced with new stuff, or you stop using this stuff, or somebody invents a new piece of stuff that has an entirely different form-factor ... then you have pockets and features that are no longer relevant.

What if you don't have an MP3 player? Or you want to put it somewhere other than the specialized, padded media-pocket with a custom port for the headphones? What if you buy a bag with a padded pocket for your 12-inch laptop, then upgrade to a 15-inch? What if the water reservoir that came in the special insulated hydration-sleeve breaks or gets funky (it happens) and the new one you buy has the tube-thingy coming out of the wrong part and so doesn't reach out of the special hydro-hole and so on?

Custom pockets and padding and extra zippers add weight and more points of failure, and often stay empty for want of the Right Sized Thing. My bag, a Timbuk2 large Classic Messenger Bag (made in San Francisco), on the other hand, is insanely durable and beautifully flexible. In the one pocket of my bag, I have at different times carried a case of beer and snacks (ahem, to share), a full-size bike stand (a four foot long box ... it stuck out), camera bodies and multiple lenses, groceries, full picnics for a family of four on the beach or in the mountains (then all the rocks and stuff we collected to take home), and small ad hoc reference libraries. Basically, I can carry more in my bag than is wise, comfortable, or safe for anyone to carry while riding a bicycle. Of course when I only have a few things in it, it collapses to fit. It has no frame or foam suspension. It's a bag: it has the shape of the things it is carrying.

I do have the need to organize and carry small things: bike tools, pump, lights for night riding, food, extra clothes, books, journal, pencils and pens, and various other possibles. I have cheap little ditty bags and stuff sacks for all the things I carry, each one perfectly suited to my purposes because I chose it. If my needs change, I swap out the cheap bags. I put my laptop in a neoprene 'sleeve' that fits it like a glove. If I were to buy a bigger laptop, I'd get a different sleeve to fit it. What happens if the sleeve is stitched into the bag? And for that matter, what does the pocket do when you leave your laptop at home? What else do you put in a permanent, rectangular, foam-padded pocket? A very carefully folded sweater?

Bags with tons of pockets are also a serious liability in the rain. Bags with a lot of pockets and openings either have to use waterproof zippers and specially sealed seams (every stitch point is a point of entry for water in a downpour) or must be under a waterproof cover. My bag has one large, vinyl-coated, rain-proof flap, with no zippers to fail. Simple, beautiful, and durable.

(One extra provision I make for the possibility of really bad weather is the stuff sack that holds my rain gear: this bright orange bag is also waterproof. If the weather turns bad, the rain gear comes out and anything really sensitive to moisture goes inside the bag as extra insurance against water finding its way in.)

(low) tech writer principles. Rigid compartmentalization and design complexity limit flexibility and shorten the lifespan of a thing: complexity wears out its welcome sooner than simplicity. Complex things slow you down, require more maintenance (of a more specialized kind), solve problems you probably don't have, and cost more in the bargain.

Simplicity in design is more enduringly functional, flexible, adaptable, durable, and inexpensive (both on the day you buy it and when you need to repair it).

More on Simple Toys & the boxes they come in

2009-08-05T00:02:00.000-07:00

It's the simple toys that last, and that have a lasting impact. In our house we occasionally clean out the closets of old toys. Massive piles of colorful plastic are thereby doomed to landfill (you'd be surprised how un-recyclable these things are). Each addition to the pile stirring feelings of mild parental shame; each missing a small piece essential to its function, or missing something altogether more essential than just a part. The toys that remain are missing nothing, except perhaps marketability. ... The giraffe, the duck with the floppy feet made of old bicycle tubes on wheels that go flap-flap as you push it around, the little wooden car, unpainted, colored darker brown where handling has stained it. (The pic below is from DoodleTown Toys, a 37 year old maker of classy wooden toys. Click the picture to see their web site, and some really wonderful tiny toys. I like the Doodle Dozer and the Doodle Pickup.)

These unpainted, unpowered, analog, silent, and imagination-ready toys don't get old, and don't get thrown away. When you're done with one of these toys, they are given away to serve for a season in someone elses home. They are simple but come to life when a child projects their imagination onto them. Kids need a blank space to project onto.

With these toys, the less provided, the more room we have to add our own stories, to really make a toy a part of our story. They are the truly beautiful toys, that are quiet enough (in every way) to allow our children to think, to begin to dream. It's not really that there are too few of them, it's that there are too many of the other kind ... noisy, plastic, electronic, brightly colored toys-with-an-agenda that fill the shelves

Some toy designer somewhere is thinking about adding even more lights, more sounds, more chips to toys. Toys have to compete with computers now, is how the story goes. It talks to you! It's more lifelike! It follows you around! It responds to your commands! It sings-and-shows-you-the-notes-on-an-LCD-screen-so-you-can-learn-to-read-music-before-you-turn-three!

My son has a robot toy that occasionally gets woken up (with the push of a button, if the batteries aren't dead) to do it's pre-programmed dance (to pre-programmed music). But that's it. It will break soon, or we'll get tired of providing the four D batteries required, and it will go to whatever place these clever-complex toys go when they die (I have my theories). Sometimes I wonder if we aren't already there, when he tells me all about this years' model with it's much more realistic robot dance.

Once, when my daughter was very little, her grandparents came home from a trip with a stuffed monkey from the airport (warning). Yes, I'm talking about you, Mom and Dad. Its fur was a kind of hyper sparkly white, and it held a red satin heart that had some earnest expression of affection written in white cursive on it. When they handed it over, and showed her how to squeeze the heart, that little howler monkey from hell began to shake ... and ... shriek. Repeatedly. I remember the look on their faces: a kind of embarrassed thrill. They had clearly scored points in some grandparent competition but seemed uncertain about their victory. There was nothing to do but bask in the ridiculous, momentary joy of their granddaughter and dodge the momentarily incoherent protests of her father. They don't have to worry. Even if I will remember this event, ahem, for the rest of my life, I think better of them than this. They are much more thoughtful than the howler monkey episode suggests. They are progressive and intelligent and my kids have not had more than their share of silly gifts. It's a grandparent thing. I will have my moments when I get there, I'm sure.

To balance this painful memory, I recall the time my dad used his jigsaw to cut a rifle shape out of plywood for me. No paint. No moving parts. No logos or names on it. Talk about room for imagination! So cool. Or the times he helped me trick out cardboard boxes for play. Now there is a plaything to make a wooden car seem high-tech. In a flash of brilliance, a toy museum in New York inducted the humble Cardboard Box into its hall-of-fame (next to Barbie and GI Joe and an old Atari).

Empty boxes are ready to be filled with stories. Yes, kids will shriek with joy when they get the hot new toy, as seen on TV. Yes, it's great to get a really big gift. But the truly blessed will recognize that it's not the size of the gift ... it's the size of the box it came in.

At the end of any holiday, a kid should have a cardboard box to climb into, if only to shut out the noise and light and have some discretionary quiet time. If it was socially acceptable for grown-ups to climb into a cardboard box, with a blanket and stuffed bear perhaps, maybe there'd be less people climbing into a bottle at the end of the day.

My best cardboard-box memory has a techy twist: I set up a box in the garage and punctured it with a string of Christmas-tree lights so that I could pretend I was inside the blinking cockpit of an X-Wing fighter. Yes, I converted my simple, low-tech box into a high-tech cockpit from the future! I see the irony, but it was my choice. I made that X-Wing fighter. It was my imagination fueling the creation, and the thing lasted precisely as long as my imagination did: a few days. There was no grief when the whole thing was broken down and the Christmas tree lights went back on the shelf. Nobody was upset about wasting good money, and I got a memory a hundred times more powerful than any packaged, licensed, authentically-styled, battery-powered Star Wars X-wing with authentic sounds and lights could ever provide.

CAUTION - A toy that never goes away

2009-07-01T18:51:00.001-07:00

In total contrast to the toy that once belonged to the power transformer of the previous post (which has disappeared from our lives for reasons that may include, but shall not be limited to, a) failure of electronics, b) boredom deriving from the limited electronic function, c) breaking of shiny and colorful but flimsy plastic enclosure, or d) inability to find the power transformer of the previous post when needed), the toy in the above picture has been a part of our lives and a fixture in our family room for something close to fifteen years. Seriously, for no other reason than we never got tired of it, this thing won't go away. Not only do visiting children instantly straddle it to roll around the room, but our kids occasionally do, and they are 12 and 16 years old.

'Nuff said.

CAUTION-ELECTRIC TOY

2009-07-01T18:47:00.000-07:00

'nuff said?

The smells of success

2009-06-23T23:39:00.000-07:00

My family just spent some time at a lake house as guests of good friends. It was a nice vacation: I think we all got the kind of readjustment that we were looking for. There was water-skiing, swimming, sun-worshiping, fishing, and ... we even got in a hike to a small jewel of an alpine lake called Crystal Lake (that's my happy place). There was also much consuming of barbecued meat, and, although you can do that back home, for some reason barbecued meat tastes better next to a lake at 5000 feet surrounded by friends and by pine trees that are catching the setting sun after a day of fun when you know you get to have another day of fun right after that. I think that's a culinary principle.

To get to this lake, we had to cross over the Pacific Crest, the high-elevation spine that runs through California. I love the change in atmosphere as you climb out of a hot-and-dry valley like the Hwy. 5 corridor. First the temperature changes--but not like you'd think: the air is crisper and feels colder, but the sun is more intense, so it can feel hotter. The air is thinner, which means you'll be out of breath for a few days, but your body will adjust. Then there is the smell. On a drive like this, I can't wait to roll the windows down and be done with the air-conditioning (and air-recycling) needed to survive a hot valley highway jammed with traffic: up high, the air seems so much more breathable. It's the smells.

Above 4000 feet, the air smells fresher, cleaner, and richer. You can smell the herbal shrubs when the sun hits them and they release their perfume. You can smell some of the giant trees, like the pines that cover these mountains. You can even smell the dirt ... and it smells good. One of the most powerful (and I'm ashamed to say, most satisfying) smells comes when a logging truck carrying felled pine trees passes your car. I know that's not so p.c., but the trees are logged sustainably in this area, and anyways, it is such a surprise to smell something good behind a truck that it catches me a little off-guard.

Speaking of trucks, two of the families at our house towed boats up to the lake. One was a fishing boat, and the other was a sport boat that pulled the water skiers. Both of these boats were towed by the original giant sequoia of the road, the Chevy Suburban. Though I am a low-and-green-tech kind of guy who would like to see less big gas-burning cars on the road, I can't deny that these are the very cars you need when towing six people and a boat up to the mountains. Or, as one of the dads said as sixteen of us piled into the two Suburbans for our trek up to the trailhead for an afternoon of hiking, "... Probably the most fuel-efficient way in the world to move 16 adults and kids up to 7000 feet. Prius just wouldn't do it."

I'm inclined to agree, and anyway, this is not the crowd to blame for SUVs crowding the roads in the cities and suburbs: these families are actually using their trucks as trucks. But too many people buy SUVs for their (perceived) safety, their (very-real) projection of power, or the (dubious) image of success they bestow, and then proceed to drive them like cars to and from the market and soccer games. The Suburban has the right size engine for towing and climbing mountains, but way too much engine when all you're towing is ego and attitude. Just because you can afford the gas to drive an empty truck doesn't mean you have a right to burn it: that aroma on the roads of Silicon Valley just may be the unintended smell of success.

When our families arrived at the trailhead for our hike to Crystal lake, one of the moms got out of the car, took a deep breath and said, "Oh! It smells so good here!" And it did. I said to her, "There's lots of good smells back home too, we just don't know it, because there are too many other smells on top of the good ones." I don't like the idea that it can only smell good far away from home. That sweet smell of the naked earth, uncluttered and unmasked, was one of the rewards at the end of our long ascent. But what about those hidden smells back home? How should our home towns smell?

As in the case of the giant, pine-scented logging trucks laboring over the mountains, one powerful smell can mask another. On mountain roads, I learned, pine trumps diesel (and how cool is that?). Back home in the Bay Area, the smells of nature are more subtle and diffuse than cut-pine: as a bicycle commuter who often spends time wedged between SUVs, I can tell you what smells are winning. I wonder: is there anyone still living here in suburbia who remembers what this place really smells like?

A lover's quarrel

2009-06-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

My friend Heather writes a beautiful, honest post about returning home to Georgia and the tension of how things change. She talks about Georgia like one might a former boyfriend--winsome memories of lovable qualities, and a hard encounter with all the reasons why it could never have worked out .... Her clear-headed reflection on the imbalance in the urban/rural relationship is itself balanced and evocative.

When I return, I feel...I feel betrayed. Atlanta has sprawled beyond her rightful and necessary boundaries. Or you could say the symbol Atlanta is of urban commerce has overrun its banks and flooded the rural landscape that gives that commercial river the right to flow in the first place. I'm not naive enough to say that commerce is bad or that cities are bad but I am principled enough to say that when the balance of urban and rural gets knocked off its fragile footing both sides lose.

From Heather's blog, Garden Street Farm: A song of you comes as sweet and clear as moonlight through the pines.

Upside Down

2009-06-09T09:52:00.000-07:00

Once I held the impressive title of Director of Marketing at a Java software company .... Ok, the truth is that the company belonged to my friend Steve, and he was in fact the only employee, #1 of one, until I came along. He asked me to help him staff his booth at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco. He made business cards for me with my new title on it. Steve had written a Java Obfuscator (what?) and I was doing some marketing/communication work for him at the time, so I understood his product as well as any of the other attractive young people who handed out brochures at conferences. Yes, I was a booth babe.

It was a blast being on the floor at a tech convention during a peak time in the industry, and we had a choice location. We were right inside the main doors, so that every single one of the 30,000 attendees walked right by our spot. I did a fair job of introducing his product and liked working with him. But the real fun was in walking around the huge hall at Moscone Center and just looking at all the stuff. When else was I going to be at a Java software convention? It was like walking around a city in a foreign country. This was back in the boom times, when companies gave away serious hardware for free. Each paid attendee at the conference got a brand-new Palm V, loaded with conference software.

I didn't do that well, but I came home from that event with a bag full of exceptional swag: logo key chains, stress balls, flashlights, all of it carefully designed so that we would remember ... something about some company being the premier provider of solutions that I'm confident had something to do with Java. My kids got it all ... except one piece of treasure I still use (and who can say that about their Palm V? Beam me your contact info, anyone? ... Anyone?). I visited the booth for Upside, a technology-and-money magazine that I used to read, where I managed to score a nice big UPSIDE mug. I'm drinking my coffee out of it as I write this, and I am almost awake.

This is still the largest coffee mug in my kitchen--almost ten years later--and that's saying something in America, where any technology for delivering food or drink doubles in capacity every decade (I believe that's Moore's law of American food consumption). It had the word "UPSIDE" printed in huge letters on it, with the words "PEOPLE TECHNOLOGY CAPITAL" in smaller letters under it. I say had, because those words are now entirely missing from the mug. Worn off, or faded, or gone to wherever all the money went.

Now you can just barely see where the words were. At the moment, it looks a little like one of those ceramic mugs that has a secret word or picture that materializes when you put a hot or a cold drink into it, the novelty item that reveals a hidden surprise when conditions are right. Only conditions will never be right for this UPSIDE to reappear. Sounds like the year 2000 and the promise of the dotcom market. Is my mug big enough to contain such an overblown metaphor? It is big enough that I will not need any more coffee today. After this post, maybe I should cut back.

Simpler Times?

2009-05-12T22:52:00.000-07:00

I found an old copy of Thomas Kinkade's Simpler Times on my daughter's bookshelf, which I promptly re-claimed for collages. She didn't mind: neither of us had ever really read it. The book had been sent to me more than a decade ago when I took a writing job for Media Arts Group, the company that sells Kinkade's pictures. In fact, I poked around on thomaskinkade.com a bit and found the plein-air paintings that I had written about years ago. My words are still there, signed by the Painter of Light himself. You could read my old masterpieces of copywriting if you knew where to look. ... I'm not talking.

The book, Simpler Times, and the art that fills it, is all about a return to some kind of good-old-days: stone cottages, warm firelight, cozy villages, and gas-lit streets. This is all elaborated in the book as the opposite of noisy, media-filled, task-list-crazed individualism. Had Kinkade and his co-author written the book today, I assume blog-writing and -reading, and other webby activities wouldn't qualify as simple-time either. Who would buy a Thomas Kinkade painting of an apartment window glowing with the unearthly fluorescent blue of computer screens? The Painter of Light, 2.0!

Who doesn't love the idea of old stone buildings lit by fire? Kinkade is popular because his paintings strike some pretty big chords - simplicity is highly attractive to anyone who lives and works in this crazy-complex modern world. Longing is probably not too strong a word to describe the attraction. Also attractive are the various elements that populate these works: stone, water, and fire; cottages, gardens, and gazebos. Here at (low) tech writer, I share this attraction. But all of these elements are brought together in a world as unreal as a model-railroad diorama. What is it exactly? A little too much color in that garden scene? Not quite enough color in that crowd scene? Is it all just a little too much of the wrong idea of perfect? As I flipped through the book (before cutting it up for art), I began to discern one significant way that these pictures go wrong. It's the water. When I look at the water in a Kinkade painting, I long for a little less simplicity.

Here's what I see: in Thomas Kinkade's world, water is harmless.

Take a look at the painting titled Almost Heaven (you can zoom in on it by clicking the picture to visit the Web site). The waterfalls in this picture sit on top of the earth like they don't belong there -- like they are just passing through: not like they have been carving the surface of the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. One of these uninvited rivers spills over the high-point on a rock jutting out from a cliff, managing a double-miracle: resisting the tendency of water to flow downhill, and also the habit of water to wear stuff down. Other waterfalls in the scene rage with snowmelt, but seem unable to have any effect on the landscape at all. In other works, rivers float through villages on top of the soft earth in perpetual flood, yet also fail to have any erosive effect on the perfect, grassy banks. It seems to me that Kinkade makes a mistake similar to that made by some of the romantic painters of the 19th century: while 'recording' what they witnessed in the new territory of the American West, they often mixed up their geology by painting what they imagined, instead of what was. Albert Bierstadt painted the scenery of the Sierra Nevada in California from a mix of memory and imagination. He seems to have occasionally confused and combined u-shaped glaciated valleys with the v-shaped terrain created by liquid water.

At least Bierstadt was never confused about the violence that water can do, in liquid or solid form. Looking at Kinkade's paintings, we're left to imagine that God formed the mountains and valleys according to whimsy and then sent the impotent water over it for his own amusement. And, I guess, for painters to have something to paint. Will there be no erosion in heaven?

But if God made the mountains and the valleys, then the shaping of them was done with water. If you've ever tried to swim across a river, or escape a rip-tide, or walked under a waterfall, you know that water has power. And power is precisely what is missing from Kinkade's portrayal of nature.

I can accept the unabashed hopefulness--hope needs nurturing. I can accept the occasional too-sweet sentiment--who doesn't like sugar in their lemonade? I can almost accept that there is never any strife in Kinkade's art: after all, he is painting his vision of heaven on earth, and some of us--even before we take in his luminous, idealized landscapes--are invested in the idea that one day our tears will be wiped away and there will be joy. But, while I believe that this kind of heaven is breaking through into the world, I don't think that it will create the homogeneous and impotent landscape that the Painter of Light portrays. In fact, I'd say Kinkade's powerless waters (for starters) give his vision itself a dangerous power ... power to lure the viewer away from the challenges of reality in the way that psychotropic drugs dilute your desire to find real peace. Take enough Valium and you may just give up thinking about what's wrong with your life.

One take-away from this kind of art is the idea that the creation is ideally impotent. That in this picture of heaven not only will the lion lay down with the lamb, but the water will never again shape the rock, or otherwise change the landscape. But what Kincade fails to document in his vision is that this shaping and changing is a part of the design. It is part of God's design that water and earth are locked in constant conflict, and one result of this clash is that the earth is made more beautiful.

Here's what's true about water. Water is not impotent. In nature, water moves according to huge and hairy rhythms and gives swimmers and sailors something to worry about. Water tears at the landscape, breaks it down, carries it off, and leaves the earth scarred and changed. Here's how awesome water is: if Water was invited to make a guest appearance in a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors ... it would trump them all, but none would fall more memorably than Rock, which succumbs slowly but utterly to water's power.

A pretty good example of what can result from all this clash and conflict between water and stone is a little vacation spot in the California mountains called Yosemite Valley. You may have heard of it. There are peaceful places in the Valley, but I'm not sure a feeling of peace is the appropriate response when looking at a waterfall moving 2,500 gallons of water per second and cutting through a two-thousand-foot granite cliff. Water has terrible power and who would want it any other way? But Kinkade's paintings suggest that something God made powerful will one day ideally lose it's power, and that is a message with the power to make people mistrust true power, wherever it should be found.

One place where power is seldom trusted, where conflict gets a bad rap, is among the human characters that move here and there on the surface of the planet. While nobody loves the wars that plague humanity, even the proverb says that people shape and change each other, that we are somehow improved by conflict:

"Iron sharpens iron,

so one person sharpens the wits of another."

(Proverbs 27.17)

Conflict is not evil. It's only evil when we try to silence or destroy those who challenge or threaten us. That's what makes war. Allow me to suggest a (low) tech writer people-principle: peace does not come from avoiding conflict or clashes, it comes from accepting these things as part of God's design for beautiful people.

Or to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., "I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity".

-----

The photo of Yosemite Falls, 2005, is by Kevin Ingolfsland and is on WikiMedia Commons.

Signs of The End

2009-03-25T23:39:00.000-07:00

Signs that we are in the last days: police action in the wild-lands of Palo Alto. On the very same day as my encouraging visit to Peet's, I was walking in Arastradero Park, in the foothills above Palo Alto. This is no city park: there are no lawns, no landscaped flower-beds, no bandstands--just 10 miles of beautiful trails.

A great effort has been made at Arastradero to return this suburban open space to wilderness. But wild is as wild does.

After shooting some pictures of wildflowers just off the trail, I was met by a ranger (where DID she come from?) who scolded me for leaving the path--a violation of park rules. This picture is the evidence of my shameful transgression.

OK, I know, because she told me, that this park gets "loved to death", and that the rules are there to preserve this natural beauty for future generations. But the whole experience made me feel like I was in a museum, or a zoo, except in some zoos you get to go through the fences and pet the goats. Look at that trail. It's beautiful. Isn't it spoiled, just a bit, by a "Keep Off The Grass" sign?

I've written about this kind of madness before. If I cut off a trail at the same place as a hundred other people, or if I choose to walk just to the side of a trail to avoid the mud in the low track, then I would be contributing to visible wear on the ecosystem. But is it really going to scar the planet if I leave the trail at a random point to walk out in the grass a bit for a different view? Please.

No matter what justification is offered--and it all has a kind of grim logic about it--who can be happy about such barriers arising between human beings and nature? There are many more disturbing things in the world, but this still feels to me like one more sign of the apocalypse.

Signs of Hope

2009-03-25T21:07:00.000-07:00

Signs of hope ... that we Silicon Valley peoples aren't totally enslaved to our devices. A couple days ago, in a local Peet's, I counted a total of no laptops. You read that right. I also counted no smartphones, no handheld computers, no Internet surfing technologies whatsoever. The place has wifi, but the clientele seemed totally unconcerned that they were falling behind on their email. And the place was full of coffee drinkers: can you drink coffee and not be productive?

There was the old couple in the corner mostly being quiet and looking out the window (searching for ...?). There was the family of four (mom, dad, teen girl, tween boy) sitting around a small table and talking, not on phones, but all in-person and stuff. There was the guy in the corner reading a book, printed on a pre- e-paper technology called, confusingly, paper. There was the man chatting with the store manager, who sat next to him on a bench against the wall.

And just in case you don't know how strange this is, in case you live in a town where it's normal to go out in public to be with people, consider the case of the Red Rock Coffee shop, a mile or so down the street. I was in the Red Rock today. I love the Red Rock. Good coffee. Good art. Good vibe. Good grief: I counted twenty-eight laptops.

Water and Fire

2009-03-18T13:45:00.000-07:00

Crystal Springs Reservoir is an artificial lake that sits on the San Andreas Fault between San Francisco and San Jose. It is one of the more beautiful reservoirs I know of, and there are lots of pretty views along the lake. Nevertheless, I had to work hard to snap a picture that didn't show barbed wire between me and the water. It's filled from pipes that come from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite, famous for the valley of the same name that was destroyed by the San Francisco Water Department when it was flooded in the early 20th century to provide water for the city. John Muir mourned the loss of Hetch Hetchy, which he compared to Yosemite Valley in beauty (Muir suggested that the governement might as well seal up cathedrals and churches for water tanks while they were at it). But Crystal Springs is a beautiful expanse of water in a beautiful area minutes from Silicon Valley, and beggars can't be choosers.

As a suburbanite living in an overcrowded metropolitan area, I am sometimes surprised to be reminded that I am surrounded by water. Yes I can get to the Pacific Ocean in about 40 minutes, but though the San Francisco Bay is even closer, and there are natural creeks and streams everywhere, water is hard to find; hidden under concrete and usually only seen--but just barely--from bridges. I used to live in Redwood City, and it wasn't until I'd been there for several years that I learned that there used to be canals--canals!--running right into the downtown area. While boats had once docked a hundred yards from the beautiful county courthouse, now you can stand where schooners once floated and not even know that water still flows somewhere underneath your feet.

My heart broke when I learned that I could have walked along canals in the center of this old, interesting town, instead of along a loud, car-filled street. I know why they covered them up. Ships stopped contributing significantly to the economy, and the creek feeding the area was too much work to dredge. Add to that the increase in automobile traffic and the economic potential of more streets and better traffic management, and you can see the logic of paving over nature, which has a way of getting in the way of progress. When the creek went underground, something was gained and something was lost. I don't always root for the losing team (my mom and my wife do that), but in this case I'm crying in my beer.

Thankfully you can still get to the remaining wet places in the area, but you have to get out of your car to see them (the scene above is only visible from the car-free Sawyer Camp Trail), and that means that most people won't see them. You can drive over any number of bridges that span the Bay, and hardly see the water at all. This will be partly because of the railings and traffic that block your view, and partly because if you do try to take in the view, you'll probably crash your car, which might give you more time to look at the view, but behind you will be the drivers of many cars who are now looking at the view instead of driving to wherever it is they want to go, and they will hate you. Nobody likes to be forced to appreciate nature.

You need to get out of your car. Looking at water from inside a car (a parked car, please) is like watching the nature channel--you can't really experience water through the window of your car. You might as well watch it on TV. You need to get close. You need to listen to water as it washes over the sand and as waves slap against the rocks. You have to get close to hear the sounds of water as it tumbles over rapids in a stream, echoing off the leaves of shade trees. You need to be able to watch the surface of the water move (impossible, if you are moving yourself--you have to stop). This is another one of those almost forgotten things that causes my skin to tingle when I experience it after a long time of deprivation.

Fire has also been caged and hidden. For most of us metro-unfortunates, the only fire that burns in our houses is safely hidden from view in steel boxes where our water or our air or our chicken nuggets are heated (that is if we still cook with the box that uses heat waves and haven't given it up for the one that uses electromagnetic waves). For those of us in old homes that still have fireplaces, we are told by the law that we can't burn wood on certain days, because then all the drivers would have to roll up their windows to keep from smelling the air we thoughtlessly smoked up. The air we smoked up by burning wood, another natural thing that is being outlawed while we continue to pursue happiness in cars.

Now I know, because I am reminded constantly, that these days any smoke adds to the danger in an already dangerously overcrowded region. I once heard that the Los Angeles basin has always had a natural inversion-layer and that Southern California air quality was a problem even when the only smoke rose from the fires of Native camps. I guess some places were never capable of naturally supporting large populations no matter how they cooked their food or got to work.

And I know that these days I have a choice: I don't need to burn wood to stay warm or cook my food. Even if I want to barbecue, I'm told, I should get a gas grill because it is more eco-sensitive. Better to burn gas under the food I eat: better for the food (less carcinogenic, I'm told) better for the air (less particulates in the smoke), more convenient (Quicker! Cleaner!). If I miss the smoky flavor of charcoal, I can add it to the meat before I barbecue (Smoke in a Bottle! That's green.)

And I know that these days 99% of the population have no choices when it comes to commuting: they have to drive to work, or think that they have to. The society is set up for cars.

I know these things. But I will never, ever be comfortable with the idea that because so many people burn gas in their vehicles to get to work, they should then come home and use gas to cook their burgers instead of charcoal. How did burning petrochemicals in a barbecue become part of the green solution to an air quality problem caused by the burning of petrochemicals?

We have candles in our fireplace now. It's pretty I guess. We don't need the fireplace to warm the house, so it works out. It's better for the air: kids and adults with breathing-related illnesses like asthma will breathe easier. That's a win. But something has been lost too. The sights and sounds of a wood fire in a house are emblematic of home, shelter, comfort: the sound of fire, almost like banners moving in stiff wind, with the occasionally snap or pop that makes you jump and check the floor for sparks; the sight of fire, intensity of color, flames rippling, also like banners, trapped in their own thermals. Move in close, as close as possible, to stare at the embers. It's like looking into a volcano in miniature, as close as I'll ever get.

Will California broadcasters ever realize that most of their audience is now in the same boat as New York apartment-dwellers and put a yule log on the TV at Christmas time? Oh, I forgot, we are allowed to put gas fireplaces in our new homes, which is kind like the TV yule log already, with the following differences: 1) you still get the pleasure of lighting your "fire"; 2) it doesn't come into the home over the air, but through pipes; and 3) it still produces some heat and exhaust gasses. If I had to choose one over the other, I don't know which is worse for the planet. But for my money, if the gas fire is burning behind glass, I figure I'll just go with the TV, and turn up the heat.

Timing and Technology, A Pattern Language

2009-03-16T00:23:00.000-07:00

One of my very favorite books is A Pattern Languageby Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. The book is ostensibly about architecture, detailing how to design and build the places we live, from the regional scale down to the nook in the corner of a child's room. It is a beautiful manifesto for simple, economical, ecological, human-centered design; I know of nothing better to have come out of the 70s. Inside this 1200 page book are about 250 patterns, each describing a principle, a pattern, that is essential to designing and building livable, humane spaces and communities.

But the beauty of The Pattern Language is that you quickly come to realize that the patterns being described are not limited to application in the world of architecture. Alexander says in his introduction that he hopes "that a great part of this language ... will be a core of any sensible human pattern language, which any person constructs for himself, in his own mind" (my emphasis). To read how Alexander lays out the pattern for the furniture in rooms (Pattern 185, Sitting Circle), or for the essential businesses in a town (88, Street Cafe, etc.), you get the idea very quickly that the patterns all assume that the reason for design is to accommodate life, not economic forces or engineering principles. The book has the effect (whether or not you are in a position to build your own home) of awakening an appreciation for community and humanity that has been somewhat dampened by the design of modern social spaces. The book is inspiring, and gives me a sense of expectation that good things can happen between people when technology doesn't get in the way.

Technology, by definition, is the application of scientific knowledge for the purpose of increasing efficiency in any practical endeavor. There is nothing wrong with technology in itself. Problems come when a technological solution is pursued blindly, hastily, and at the expense of the potential intuitive solutions that are much better suited to a local context. Technology is tied to efficiency, and efficiency is tied to questions of scale. It makes a certain economic sense to mass-produce formulaic solutions that can sell, or communicate, across cultures. Technology often provides the most efficient and economical solution. But, does it ever provide the best solution? Getting back to architecture, Alexander argues that normal people are fully able to discern, design, and build their own unique living and work spaces, and that they will do the best job of it for the least amount of money, too. Does that sound radical? Why should it? It wasn't that long ago when that was the way it was done. Today, we assume that anyone who builds their own home is either a licensed contractor or just quaint (think of people that gather for barn-raisings, all beards and buttons and suspenders). Alexander intends to provide "an alternative to technocratic and rigid ways of building that have become the legacy of the machine age and modern architecture" ... for normal people, not only contractors and the quaint.

I've been reading the book for three or four years (not unheard of with me and certain books) and I'm almost done. I recently came to a moment late in the book where I was stunned to realize just how serious Alexander is about providing alternatives to rigidity. This moment, spanning two patterns that come into play as a subject begins to build their house, perfectly expresses when and how to embrace technology.

In pattern 212 (Columns at the Corners), Alexander describes the standard architectural practice of hiring a draftsperson to create blueprints from a design and then turning them over to a contractor, who relies on the drawing to raise the house on-site. But, he says, this practice "cripples buildings". Not only does it force a kind of rigidity on a design and put too many technological barriers between design and construction, but it will be doomed to frequent revision as the builder encounters a multitude of problems on site not imagined when the design was committed to paper. Many trips back and forth between contractor and designer and client result. This scenario, which threatens to suck a property owner dry of enthusiasm and money, might be eliminated if the client could be both the designer and builder, and skip the whole blueprint stage entirely.

Oddly enough, the way I first learned about A Pattern Language was by reading the account of a writer who decided to build a small writing hut on his property. Odd because he falls into the very trap Alexander is preaching against. When the floor of his hut was laid, a mistake in measurement was discovered: the foundation was ever so slightly off-square, and it could not be easily or cheaply fixed. With horror, the author and his handyman realized that the whole building was now going to need customizing. Every subsequent piece of the building would need to be finished with a slight angle to fit the whole, a situation described as catastrophic. I guess this author failed to read or take seriously the part of Pattern Language where Alexander suggests that they could have scribbled the design on the back of an envelope, and then walked the site pounding in stakes where the corners felt right, with no concern for uneven lines or imperfect angles. In case you didn't get that: Alexander is really saying that precise blueprints are not necessary. In fact he would rather they be rejected: in the pattern language, the design process doesn't end until well after you mark out the corners of your building, with chalk or stakes or whatever. The beauty of this organic process, as it is described, is that the design grows around the realities of the environment ... and the concerns of the people who will live there. Stand in "the kitchen" and you'll realize that the wall with the window and sink will need to be bigger, and perhaps angled differently to take in that particular view ... no sweat: move the stakes. Change the size of rooms according to your experience of the site, and obsess ye not over right-angles. Amen.

But before the reader can swear on a stack of building codes never to step foot inside a house where design and construction are happening all at once, we move on to pattern 213 (Final Column Distribution). In this pattern the question is asked how the "spacing of columns" is effected by the size of rooms and number of stories, and the chapter is sensibly free of any organo-hippie vibe. Having just told you in 212 to put the corner columns wherever feels right to you, Alexander goes on in 213 to detail the complex technical formula for determining how to design a wall, with it's intermediate columns, to support the weight of a roof and additional upper-story rooms. And this technical, industry-standard formula comes just in time. It is important for walls to be able to support a roof - this will provide many holistic benefits to the occupants of a home, like not dying under a collapsed roof when you slam a door, or not dying under a collapsed roof when the wind blows, and so on. I believe it is axiomatic that one should not take shelter in a home where the compressive load-bearing capacity of its walls has been intuited organically.

If technology is the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, then there is a time and a place for it in all aspects of our lives. Technology can be a lifesaver. However, apply it too early in a design process and it cripples our products and projects, our homes and communities. They become cold and rigid--we fear any imperfection in them. They will be impersonal and homogeneous, ill-suited to our unique context or environment. You can see the results of an overly technological architecture everywhere you turn in suburbia: homes built according to some remote architect's bland, marketable standard of what a beautiful home should look like ... and when such "homes" are planted on a typical suburban half-lot, these mini-mansions look like part of a demonic plot to destroy a neighborhood. The best thing you can say about them is that they won't fall down in a storm ....

Let's adopt this as a (low) tech writer principle: let individual or community wisdom, forged-in-context, dictate the unique shape of your house, project, product, or organization. Take time to listen for, intuit, and live with the implications of the designs you are working on. Only after organically discerning the shape and scale of a new project should you consult outside "experts" (or formulas). These may aid in developing levels of structure efficiently, but such expert witnesses will seldom have your local, contextual perspective, and so should not under any circumstances be allowed to dictate design.

The Old Testament book of Proverbs 24:3 says, "By wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established; and by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches." This is the original idea of getting the order right in building. "Wisdom", it says elsewhere in Proverbs, is the product of a healthy reverence (awe) for God. In the biblical context, of course, this is referring to the need to listen to God before you start anything that bears The Name, whether a building or a military campaign. In other contexts, the same reverent attention to the names associated with a venture is called for: the name of the family that will dwell in a home; the name of a town where a business is starting up. How does the life of these communities, small and large, dictate the design of the structures that will serve them? The getting of wisdom has to come first in the building of anything, a home or a life. Later, once the foundation is understood and laid, it's gifts of a more intellectual kind (not less sacred) that come into play: the understanding of compressive load-bearing capacities that makes it possible to raise a structure, and the knowledge of the community that dictates the filling of the structure with the stuff that makes a place livable and pleasant. But wisdom is needed to determine the shape of a thing, not technology or intellectual precision. And wisdom comes from a reverence for the life that a thing is meant to serve.

A companion volume to A Pattern Language is The Timeless Way of Building.This book takes a higher-level view of the philosophy of building towns and buildings.

Silence

2009-03-15T14:39:00.000-07:00

I love it when the power goes out. I'm not immune to the inconvenience: I am a computer user after all (note that I don't publish these essays on parchment paper). But the possibility of a power outage is no real threat to me because I'm a laptop user (built in battery backup, you see), so I never worry about losing work, or even productivity. But if the power does go out, I will save my work, fold my laptop up, and revel in the silence and the dark.

Last year, I was in my favorite coffee shop near my office, Printer's Cafe in Palo Alto, when the power went out. It was shocking: the overwhelming silence was a major surprise. There was, normally, so much noise in that place--the fridges, espresso machine, blenders, microwave, dishwashers, the general hum of unseen appliances and infrastructure--that the sudden absence of it was almost unnerving. I got tingles. There is a kind of silence that is hard for a city kid or suburbanite to adjust to. It's heavy. I wish it could be recorded, but like most beautiful things, there's no real way to capture it.

I love it when the power goes out: I often threaten to throw the circuit breakers in my home because it just doesn't happen often enough. To light candles and just be in the beautiful glow of little flames and listen to the subtle, natural sounds ... wind, footsteps, pages turning. To move from one orange and shadowy space through dark passageways to other orange and shadowy spaces. Of course, this is a treat because we don't have to live without power the rest of the time. It's a little unplanned vacation from modernity. I am glad for the conveniences of electricity. But there are always consequences that result from our tireless pursuit of convenience.

Take a mental walk around your work space or living space right now. Where's that noise coming from? Central air? Refrigerator? Computer fan (or some deeper, subtler electronic movement)? Lamps are always buzzing, whether fluorescent, incandescent or the high-powered kind above streets and blazing behind warehouses. Then there are the radios, televisions, Internet media, and the loud-and-low, primevally-musical thumps and rumbles coming from passing cars, or teenagers' rooms.

There is an episode of the radio show This American Life, from the end of 2007, which includes a segment on the sounds that surround us. In the episode, reporter Jack Hitt visits Toby Lester, a musician who pays close attention to the ambient noises in his environment. Lester discovered that the sounds of his office heater and telephone dial tone combined to form an "augmented fourth", a musical interval that has the unfortunate distinction of being described by medieval catholic monks as the "most reviled sound ... feared as the diabolus in musica, the devil in the music." Certainly the monks never imagined a place so terrible as The Office Cubicle, but it would not have surprised them to encounter the devil's harmonies therein.

Musicians work very hard to combine sounds that are pleasing to the ear, just as artists use light and color to create images to please our eyes. But we live and work in places that could be described as cesspools of noise pollution: most of the noise in our work and home environments is the unintended waste product of technological progress. Our aural experience could be described as collateral damage in the endless campaign to power our lives. The only way to beat the noise is to cover it with some noise of our own choosing--music, or television: noise-isolating earphones are a growth-industry. Sometimes, mercifully, the wind picks up and overpowers the noise inside, briefly masking it. But our homes are well-insulated against nature, and so ensure that we remain prisoners of our comforts for most of the time. We could buy one of those tiny machines that synthetically reproduces natural sounds and rhythms to relax us (ocean waves ... gentle rain ... mountain storm). Or we could pray for the power to go out.

Sure, the world has always been a noisy place, and not all the noises are pleasant. But Lester notes in the radio spot that we're the first generation of people to live in an environment with so may appliances steadily droning at us. That, of course, is the difference, when compared to the always changing sounds of nature that have surrounded humans for eons.

Having the power go out and encountering the silence of it, is like the feeling of walking out into the warm sun after a week of being in a sick-bed in a dark room: a little uncomfortable at first, but then you remember something you didn't even know you'd forgotten.

Homemade Flute

2009-03-09T23:31:00.000-07:00

I have often wished that I could play a musical instrument, but the learning curve seemed to be too steep. And while I have once or twice tested the waters (Learn Harmonica in 30 Minutes a Week!), I didn't have the energy to pursue it. My parents gave me a chance back when I was in elementary school. I missed catechism at St Bartholomew's that year because I was taking trumpet lessons at West Elementary in Hillsborough. It just so happens that I learned how to play the trumpet from the man that taught Ansel Adams how to play the piano. I take some comfort in the fact that Ansel Adams didn't become famous as a pianist, just like how I didn't become famous as a trumpeter. I can't wait to become famous for the other thing, just like Ansel Adams got famous for his other thing.

But I still wished I could play something and if I could have picked an instrument to play it would have been the flute. A couple months ago, I found designs on the Web for a make-your-own PVC flute. For less than a dollar, I got a scrap of PVC plumbing and followed the directions, and you're looking at the results. I am now the proud owner of my very own flute.

I've been able to pick out some songs on it, even though I can't read music. The trick seems to be that if I have a tune in my head, then I can play it with some practice. As it turns out, the tunes I have in my head are hymns, so I can play Amazing Grace, Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus, and another one the name of which I can't remember, but if you were here I could play it for you.

What I love about the whole thing, is that I'm playing music right now without anyone telling me how to do it: no learn-to-play-in-thirty-minutes-a-week techniques, just me. I suppose I could take lessons some day, and maybe spend a few hundred on a real flute, but for now I'm loving that I'm enjoying a nice low-tech, low-cost musical renaissance. I'm still not famous, but I am enjoying myself.

A Lost Art (One More on Dictionaries)

2009-02-23T23:47:00.000-08:00

In addition to the mighty Oxford English Dictionary, Excessively Large Edition, I have the comparably tiny, Pocket Oxford Dictionary, which was written by the incomparable Fowler brothers, authors of the still-selling-a-century-later Modern English Usage and The King's English. I can't tell you how many times I've looked up a word in this little book and been delighted by the the definition. Alright. Even I know how weird that sounds, but just listen to this nugget, the beginning of the definition of "Time":

Time, n:

The successive states of the universe regarded as a whole whose every part or moment is before or after every other & position in which is defined in answer to the question, 'when?' ....

That, apart from being very slightly convoluted while at the same time slightly compressed to fit in such a short dictionary, is delightful. (And, you might benefit, as I did, by mentally adding the word "whose" before the word "position" ....)

The Fowlers wrote this dictionary, and it feels written, not compiled. It is possibly one of the last dictionaries to have just a couple authors instead of an editor and a legion of writers. The old dictionaries that are still read today even though their definitions may be obsolete are the ones that have the quality of great (or at least entertaining) writing (you can still enjoy Samuel Johnson's 300 year-old dictionary for this reason). In the Pocket Oxford dictionary, the definitions feel human and very much like something spoken in English (albeit by very smart Englishmen) rather than dryly recorded in a textbook.

Get the Fowler's The King's English new on Amazonor choose from several used copies for a buck each at AbeBooks (an online marketplace for real-world used bookstores). Tough choice, huh?

Old Atlases, Printed Maps

2009-02-22T15:29:00.000-08:00

There is another book that I like to put on my music stand (see my previous post on old dictionaries): my old Times Atlas of the World, found in a used bookstore 10 years ago. It's old enough to show a divided Germany, Leningrad-in-the-USSR instead of St. Petersburg-in-Russia, and countless other geo-anachronisms, but oh, is it beautiful to look at. And really, do we care what the politicians say about where the borders are, or whose ego is institutionalized on the city masthead? Yes, ok, sometimes we do need to know such facts. But that's what Internet maps are good at. I am well aware of the other ways that computerized maps and atlases are superior to the soon-to-be obsolete printed variety: they are up-to-date (i.e. -to-the-minute), truly comprehensive, and augmented in infinite ways with personalized layers of meaning (see the history of natural disasters for the city you're visiting, or see where the coffee shops are).

Claims of comprehensiveness and currency in a printed atlas always assume you will buy the latest version, which, if you are buying a nice atlas, may run you a few hundred dollars. And why would you not buy a nice atlas? You can get ugly atlases online. So, my recommendation for the killer combination? A nice old Atlas (cheaper, probably prettier, and still 90% accurate) and the Internet to supplement your old beauty with the latest facts. The picture above, of Oban, in Scotland, is from my old Times atlas (be sure to click on the image to see a bigger version).

I love maps, and love studying maps of a place before, and after, visiting it for real. My introduction to maps was via the topographic maps produced by the United States Geological Survey, used by everyone from soldiers to miners to hikers for navigating in the wilderness. There was a USGS office in Menlo Park, a few miles from where I grew up, so we got to browse the beautiful, poster-sized, four-color maps whenever we wanted. On a trip to my wife's family home in Greece, I visited that country's equivalent of the USGS, the Greek Army Mapping Office. My brother-in-law and I were planning to climb Mt. Olympus, and I also had plans to camp out in the Peloponnese. When I asked for the maps that covered the westernmost finger of that peninsula, the army officer looked at me suspiciously. He fetched his commanding officer and they grilled me: "Why do you want to go there? There is no camping there! What is your business?" I tried to assure them (with the help of my Greek brother-in-law) that I was just going to find a place to put down my bag on the coast and enjoy the sea and stars. They never did give me that map. I forgot about the incident until I was awakened on my hillside perch near Koroni, overlooking the Mediterranean, by what sounded like bombs going off. What had sounded like bombs going off was in fact bombs going off .... Turns out the Greek Air Force likes to practice their aim on the little island of Skhiza, which was just about a mile south of my sleeping bag. I watched jets looping and dropping bombs for an hour. No wonder the army guy was suspicious.

Since I can't show the map with Skhiza on it (ahem) ... here is my Greek Army Map of Cape Tenaron, about 40 miles southeast of my camping spot near Koroni. Maybe nothing is as interesting as being woken up by jets dropping bombs at the foot of your sleeping bag, but the topo map below shows the tip of the Mani Peninsula, itself a very interesting place: in the cove near the southern end, surrounded by wind-torn, razor-sharp white rock and ancient ruins, is the cave of Tenaron, the mythical entrance to Hades.

Strangely, USGS topo maps were the thing that reignited my interest in computers, after many years of abstinence: in the mid-nineties, a San Francisco company, Wildflower Productions (now owned by National Geographic), was scanning all the topographic maps for the United States, in various scales, digitally stitching them together, and adding tools for searching and customizing. When I first got a look at their product on the shelves at REI where I worked, I called the company and asked them what I needed in my new computer (the one I didn't have yet) to run their product. At the time, I didn't care what else the computer could do.

I still have a soft spot for this product because it's based on pictures of real maps, made to be held in your hand. The computerized version allows me to look at topo maps for anywhere in the country, and of course you can't own that many printed maps. I understand how computers add value here. But I still say printed maps and atlases are so much more beautiful and satisfying to hold. And they provide much the same opportunity for serendipitous discovery that a printed dictionary does, as I detailed in my previous post. The maps in my world atlas are produced by the famous John Bartholomew & Son cartographers in the UK. Their maps, especially the old, hand-lettered ones, are so pretty to look at, and so clear. Am I repeating myself?

If you can afford the already-obsolete current edition of the Times World Atlas (obsolete, because world atlases go out-of-date about as fast as newspapers these days), here is a link to the Twelfth Edition of the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World. But my strong recommendation is to search your local used bookstore for an older version, if only for the joy of the maps.

Old Dictionaries, Old Meanings

2009-02-22T02:36:00.000-08:00

I use the dictionary on my laptop daily, usually to check whether I am using a word correctly. But I'm missing out when I don't use my bookshelf dictionaries. My favorites are the old Oxford dictionaries: I have several in various sizes. In 1990, I joined the Book of the Month Club for the sole purpose of getting a free copy of the two volume Compact Oxford English Dictionary, that miracle of mid 20th century publishing that shrunk 13 volumes containing all the words of the English language (at the time of the original publication, circa 1930)) down to two massive volumes. It had four of the original pages printed on each page, and it came with a magnifying glass. I often have one of these volumes on a music stand by my desk, where I can refer to it easily. The music stand is very strong.

I know that my OED is outdated. The latest version, the Second Edition of the OED, is twenty volumes and may be the last version to be printed: the English language is growing too fast, and somehow it's easier to admit such additions to the language as, "aerobicized", "celebutante", and "blog", if they will never be bound in a book. Yes, I will always use computers for research: there is just no way for any library to replicate what a computer can do, let alone a personal library. And yet, there is no way for any computer to fully replicate the experience of looking at a page in a book.

Some years ago, I was invited to co-teach a class on "Passion" in my church. I knew the reason my pastor had chosen the topic: to inspire excitement and commitment for the faith. One of the first things I did, even before looking at scripture, was to open my OED and look the word up. I was surprised (as was the group of people gathered for the class) to learn that the principal definition of the word, as listed in the OED, was "to suffer", and that the principal historical usage was specifically in reference to the suffering of Christ on the cross (Mel Gibson's movie had not yet come along to restore the context for the word). Suffering is an aspect of passion entirely lost in modernity.

Here is the first definition offered up when I type "passion" into my computer's dictionary:

passion |ˈpa sh ən|
noun
1 strong and barely controllable emotion : a man of impetuous passion. See note at emotion .
• a state or outburst of such emotion : oratory in which he gradually works himself up into a passion.
• intense sexual love : their all-consuming passion for each other | she nurses a passion for Thomas.
• an intense desire or enthusiasm for something : the English have a passion for gardens.
• a thing arousing enthusiasm : modern furniture is a particular passion of Bill's.

Barely controllable emotion? An outburst? Sex? Are the English really only passionate about gardens? These are the things that pass for passion in our anemic society. When we hear the word passion today, we mainly imagine the strong desires that precede and accompany sex. What a rip off. Not sex, mind you, just that the feelings associated with sex have become the marker for love between two people when in fact (and in history) the thing that really inspires love is when a person is willing to suffer (even die) for another. Am I worth suffering for? Can I inspire such abandon? Sex is not passion. Real passion, if you ever see it today, is a thing that can bring two people together and keep them together for a lifetime. Sex may result.

My computer dictionary fails me here. But my computer dictionary doesn't only fail in the way it defines the word; it fails by only telling me what it thinks I want to know. My OED, on the other hand reveals many more layers of meaning than I can grasp, simply because it's all there for discovering on the printed page. For all the hype around computer hypertext, links only work when someone thinks to include them. My computer dictionary only displays the definition of the word I typed in, and nothing else. On the other hand, when I looked up the entry for "passion" in the OED, I could see a whole community of words related to my original search, just by letting my eye wander. What did I discover? That the word "passive", just down the page, comes from the same Latin root as "passion" and has the same root meaning: to suffer. This opened up a whole world of meaning to me, and to the students in that class. Two kinds of suffering: one active, chosen, intentional, and accepted; another experienced because of a choice not to act. Beautiful. This is precisely the kind of thing that makes me love language. My daughter is coming under the influence also.

When I worked as the senior writer for a tech company (our first product was a search engine, launched around the same time Google launched theirs ... look up "bad timing" in the dictionary of your choice), the first thing I asked for was a dictionary for my empty bookshelf. None of the young, Internet-savvy executives understood why I wanted a book. I think I told them I preferred the feel of real paper to using my computer as a reference tool. I might also have made some attempt to convince them that the printed dictionary was superior, or at least that it was more reliable (in 1999) than the on-line lexicons. They might have reconsidered whether I was suited to working at an Internet company, but they bought me the dictionary. Years later, I smiled when I read that one of Google's first writers had the identical interaction with his bosses when he came to work: his insistence on using a printed dictionary; their disbelief that anyone still did. This may be the only thing my old company (now defunct) had in common with Google.

These days, it might make sense to describe me as passionate about the OED, about printed books, about old stuff. But I don't know. Am I willing to suffer or die for these things I'm writing about? Maybe not. It's closer to the truth to say that I don't want to suffer the result of passively embracing so-called technological advances that slowly erode the meaning of things.

Cartier-Bresson Has My Back

2009-02-14T00:02:00.000-08:00

When I wrote below about flash-lit photography being overwhelming and even aggressive, I felt a little out on a limb. I have no desire to take any of it back, but I wondered if, in quoting Henri Cartier-Bresson, I had been a bit aggressive with his ideas. Whatever my philosophy of flash light on cameras, it appears that I have no problem with overwhelming prose.

But then I read the following words, taken from the same book: "If, in making a portrait, you hope to grasp the interior silence of a willing victim, it's very difficult, but you must somehow position the camera between his shirt and skin." (Emphasis mine.)

Apart from the humorous and wonderful picture of the intimacy required to capture the "interior silence" of a person, I am struck by his reference to the "willing victim". There is something to think about! So many moderns continue to regard the camera as something that can capture their soul (you can tell because they shrink and shy and scurry away when you point it at them ... maybe such people are unsure of the state of their souls? What will the photograph reveal?), and some photographers still believe it too, fearing to take something that has not been offered willingly (maybe they are right to fear).

A photographer has to come to a peaceful agreement with their subjects. "They" have to become a willing victim, and you in turn have to promise not to abuse them (by shooting when their mouths are full, or whatever). But the camera still captures something and then "it" ceases to be free. My idea that a kind of violence may happen when a picture is taken is sustained, and I still believe that the flash on most cameras is the guilty of the biggest crimes.

More Homemade Stuff - Not Just For Hippies

2009-02-09T00:22:00.000-08:00

If Panasonic were to make a lens hood for my LX3 digital camera, it would probably cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $50. All the accessories for this camera are ridiculously expensive.

I wanted a way to protect my little camera from the rain and ended up with a perfect lens hood in the bargain, for about 2 dollars and a half-hour of work. The project was featured on instructables.com (where you can read about the benefits of the hood, and the process of customizing a $2 piece of plumbing for my high-end digicam):

Digital Lens Hood / Rain Hood on instructables.com

One of a number of clearing houses for the DIY set, instructables.com is a great place to find elegant (or funky) ways to solve any problem you can think of, usually for cheap or free, from recycled or otherwise lowtech stuff. Make Magazine (and their Web space and blog) also features daily projects for solving problems in ways that will save you lots of money and give you lots of low-tech satisfaction: solve a problem by making something and you are beating a socioeconomic system that only knows how to offer prepackaged, mass-produced solutions for high prices.

Another Nice Steel Knife

2009-02-07T23:56:00.001-08:00

It doesn't have any special technology for quick deployment of the blade when under attack from a mountain lion, nor does it have a fiberglass-reinforced nylon handle. It will never be featured on the late-night knife collectors show on the Home Shopping Channel (where Rambo meets samurai meets ninja).

This Opinel, which comes in many sizes (but few variations on the basic hardwood handle), has a beautiful, razor-sharp, carbon-steel blade, of the kind I have written about recently. It has an ingenious locking ring that twists to keep the blade open. It's light and gorgeous and I've never broken one, though I've owned several and used them for everything from picnics to backpacking. The #8 Opinel costs only $10 today. Amazing. When I was young, the Early Winters backpacking catalog gave these away with your order. Me and my buddy Randy used to laugh at the guys who brought "Rambo" knives up into the wilderness ... probably because we remembered doing it too when we were young. But you only make that mistake once: too heavy, too expensive, too much. Unless you hunt Elk, all you need is a sharp, short blade for cutting your salami, cleaning trout, and trimming rope.

I'll make an allowance for the Swiss Army knife or Leatherman, if you need extra tools (screwdrivers for campstoves, scissors for first aid, can openers for your peaches, corkscrew for ... well for untying wet knots of course), but I would always carry one of these no matter what because it's so light and elegant. When I read on the Opinel Website that shepherds decorated their Opinels by burning designs into the wood handles, I had try it. My wife was not impressed.

Henri Cartier-Bresson on Natural Light

2009-02-01T13:10:00.000-08:00

On respecting the natural state of things, by legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson: "It is essential, therefore, to approach the subject on tiptoe - even if the subject is a still-life. A velvet hand, a hawk's eye - these we should all have. ... And no photographs taken with the aid of flash-light either, if only out of respect of the natural light - even when there isn't any of it. Unless a photographer observes such conditions as these, he may become an intolerably aggressive character."*

To deny myself the convenience of flash lighting in a photograph, even when there is no light! Cartier-Bresson would rather that I lose the picture than use a technique that is so disrespectful to natural light. Using a flash in darkness, I may get the picture, but I've taken it by force, impatiently. And, perhaps I have violated a natural law, in the same way that artificial light has virtually eliminated the natural human rhythm of sleep-when-the-sun-goes-down and rise-when-the-sun-comes-up.

For the creative photographer who chooses with a purpose, flash-light now has the effect of invoking a photojournalistic quality (in which the flash is required to catch a fleeting, news-worthy moment). But it is not a natural quality; is not at all the way we see people. Natural light is three-dimensional and alive. It comes from multiple sources: the sunlight that shines on the left side of our subject also reflects off of other surfaces in the space, creating a complex interplay of light - a world of light. Flash-light principally shoots directly from the camera into the face of our subject like we are the source of illumination and they are the victim of a kind of egocentric, photographic super-nova. The flash forces the camera itself to become the source of light--an unnatural arrangement. Subjects become two-dimensional and evenly, eerily lit, without shadows to give depth ... only a sharp black line along one edge to indicate the offset of the flash from the lens.

It reminds me of one of the ways that fighter pilots gain the advantage in a dogfight, by getting between the sun and their adversary. The sunlight blinds the other pilot, who will not be able to see the aggressor in the glare. Flashes on cameras have a similar effect, that of disorienting a subject and putting them on the defensive - after the POP of the flash, the subject blinks and staggers, waiting to adjust to the dark again. If the photographer were a spy, taking a portrait of their enemy, now would be the moment to strike.

Where a photograph taken in natural light can be like a gift given by the subject with the help of the sun or lamp, and received by the camera on behalf of the photographer, flash-light is something more like the artistic version of an act of overwhelming force.

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*p. 28, The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers. See picture books and others by and about Cartier-Bresson at Amazon.

I found my copy of The Mind's Eye in the photography section at one of my local used bookstores, Book Buyers, a clean, well-stocked shop in Mountain View, California. It's a good bookstore and would only be improved by a few places to sit. And maybe less fluorescent light.

Andy Goldsworthy on Tech

2009-01-31T11:28:00.000-08:00

Sculptor Andy Goldsworthy writes on his process: "The work itself determines the nature of its making. I enjoy the freedom of just using my hands and 'found' tools - a sharp stone, the quill of a feather, thorns. I am not playing the primitive. I use my hands because this is the best way to do most of my work. If I need tools, then I will use them. Technology, travel and tools are part of my life and if needed should be part of my work also. A camera is used to document, an excavator to move earth, snowballs are carried cross country by articulated truck."*

I am very comfortable with this pragmatic approach to technology. The problem (here begins my opinion) is not technology, in itself, it's in the adoption of technology, or technique, as "the way" (or even "the best way") to fulfill a desire. When a community (artists, for example) discovers a piece of technology that makes a part of their job easier, or a technique is developed that introduces efficiencies into a process, this is not a bad thing, per se. But if technique precedes meditation, exploration, and inspiration, then creativity withers.

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*From the introduction, Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature.Take a look at Andy Goldsworthy's other books at Amazon.The DVD, Rivers and Tides is a very good documentary, rich and satisfying. Remember, if you can find these books at a local independent bookstore, get on your bike and go. Photo of The Neuberger Cairn (2001) at SUNY, is from Wikimedia Commons, and is in the public domain.

Old Places (The San Gregorio Store)

2009-01-24T14:29:00.000-08:00

From the so-close-and-yet-so-wonderfully-far-away dept., a 30 minute drive from Silicon Valley will take you to a place that feels far, far away and a long time ago. The San Gregorio Store is a place that could be the Anti-Tech Museum. The single building is essentially the downtown of a sub-300-population oceanside community (most of which is not visible from the store), what used to be a hotel and hub for San Franciscan weekenders in stagecoaches.

The store, which has been in operation for 120 years, is simple in architecture, and is filled with stuff of simple goodness. While, on the other side of the Santa Cruz mountains, Silicon Valley patrons can now sit down in restaurants with touch-screens for ordering their food (and then for playing video games), the San Gregorio Store has no flickering screens at all. It does have a historic bar to sit at where conversation happens, and tables set up by a wood stove and shelves of books for borrowing (and others for buying).

The store is isolated enough to stock some essential groceries, but not so much that you'd come here if you needed to stock up. But you can find a good selection of local beers (at the bar and in the fridges), oil lamps, glassware, denim, cast iron cookware, some good looking puzzles, socially progressive reading matter ("World Atlas of Biodiversity"), posters (of Bob Marley, Albert Einstein, and Marian Anderson, for example) and bluegrass music (live, if you come at the right times). In what may be the only nod to the store's proximity to Silicon Valley, you won't find cowboy hats here, only "cowtechnician hats".

It is a country store, but "country" in the way that only a large metropolitan area like the San Francisco Bay Area can produce. In other words: liberal, humanist, and intellectual, where in some other places, "country" might mean conservative, hick, and unread. Bay Area "country" means laid back ... in a socially and politically intense kind of way. The prices also betray the fact that the store is close to a major metro area: it's a bit hard for me to justify buying a t-shirt for over 20 bucks. But if that's the price of keeping a place like this on the map, then it's cheaper than a museum (and there is none of the staged feel of a museum to the San Gregorio Store).

The San Gregorio Store is on Hwy 84, just off the Pacific Coast Highway and just North of Pescadero, another old California town. Take 84 west from the store for one minute and you're at the Pacific Ocean, where the breakers will drown out all the noise and memory of the modern world. Take Hwy 84 east for thirty minutes and, as you re-enter the modern world, one of the first restaurants you'll come to is Buck's of Woodside, where bits of famous and ground-breaking computer technology are framed on the walls, gifts from famous and ground-breaking tech pioneers, many of whom were funded in part while lunching at Buck's with venture capitalists. That's the spectrum right there: the old towns of the Pacific Coast on one end of the 84, and a Silicon Valley deal-making hub on the other. Noisy waves to the west, bits of tech to the east. ... Go West, (low tech) traveler*.

The San Gregorio Store
37°19'37.21"N
122°23'12.07"W

*that is, find the point on your compass which leads you away from industry and development for a spell, and go that way.

Home-Made Leather Wallet

2009-01-23T19:59:00.000-08:00

This is my wallet. There's not much to it, so there's not much to say about it except ... that two pockets are enough and it has no plastic card holders to get old and cracked, no Velcro to startle librarians when you open it to take out your library card (and ultimately to get fuzzy and useless), and no strange and expensive hide (eel? Snake? Ostrich?). The leather of my wallet (cow butt, I'm sure) is so thick and wonderful, it will never crack and fray like the thin and delicate stuff that men's wallets are usually made out of. If it's not clear from the pics, the pockets are only accessible when it is opened past 180 degrees: nothing ever falls out, even when it's lying open and flat.

The pockets are deep and wide enough to carry lots of stuff: it carries cash, cards, a little emergency kit (made up of some bandages, bike tube patches with sandpaper, a sewing needle, and a small wind of dental floss for emergency repairs, or emergency flossing) some duct tape folded over a wallet-sized piece of itself 10 times (the second-most used thing in the wallet), pictures, and a plastic ball point pen cut to fit at the bottom of one side under everything else.

The only competition to this wallet in my eyes is the duct-tape wallet given to me by my friend Linda ... but that wallet has been nabbed by my daughter.

Making kid-simple things like this out of natural materials gives me lots of pleasure: it's free or close to it, and has an organically satisfying feel that can't be beat.

(Low) tech writer principle #3: a truly functional and durable thing made by yourself or someone close to you is a wonderful thing: unique in the world.

Here's a pen/pencil holder I made from the same scrap of leather. We disassembled an ancient, worn out shoulder bag my wife had gotten at the Monastiraki market in Athens when she was a kid (she grew up there). These bags, when new, are usually stiff and faded, pale and dry from hanging in the traditional leatherworker's shop year after year--they have not been treated, oiled, or otherwise preserved. When you first get one of these bags and empty a whole bottle of neatsfoot oil on it, it looks like you've poured water on desert clay. But once it's been oiled a few times, the thing takes on the rich and deeply beautiful quality of fine leather. Which is what it is.

It's filled with good tools of the low-tech variety.

Dirt. Trail. You Walk on It.

2009-01-23T17:52:00.001-08:00

We live in a world where hiking-boot manufacturers have been compelled by some misguided sense of environmental responsibility to sell low impact tread on their boots, as if walking on a dirt trail with boots might hurt mother earth. Worrying about the erosion that walkers cause in the wilderness strikes me as wasting good environmental energy on a non-issue. So: you buy your gear, made in a developing country by poor labor (or worse, child labor), drive all day to the mountains in your V-8 SUV, leaving a trail of to-go cups behind you, and then, because you are environmentally sensitive, you try to not leave footprints on the trail. The dirt trail. Like every dirt trail that humankind has been walking on since the dawn of time .... Heck, since every wild animal in the world has been walking on since the dawn of time. Should we go barefoot? Maybe Bighorn Sheep should wear booties to minimize the impact of their mountain climbing? Maybe packhorses should be shod in Crocs?

I've backpacked and hiked close to 1500 miles in California's Sierra Nevada and in other places in the world, and I've seen a lot of trail. The kind of boots we used to wear (in the 70s and early 80s) were heavy leather and took a hundred miles or more to break in ... they also had quite a bit more tread on them (Vibram!) than the boots you can buy today. You needed that tread to survive the salt-and-pepper granite of the Sierra high country--like walking on the coarsest sand-paper--and to keep your footing in the mud when carrying 80 pound packs. And yet with all that tread underfoot, the only time I saw trails suffer from erosion was when a trail had been poorly laid. Some trails become creek beds after a rainstorm, if they are laid along a natural runoff. And I remember one spot in the Emigrant Wilderness, where a trail had been laid right along the floor of a meadow, instead of along its sloping edge, and had, over the decades, become a four lane highway in the soft dirt: as each "lane" became too deep to walk in, hikers would walk next to it, making a new trail. But almost everywhere else in the mountains (and everywhere else I've hiked) trails appeared almost unchanged from year to year. I know there was always trail work going on to repair damage from water runoff, fallen trees, etc. But I can't say I ever saw that the presence of humankind was especially hard on the dirt along a trail. Sure, at times, there was litter, or initials carved in tree trunks--people impact the environment negatively. But walking? ... Sorry, but walking, even in boots, is a perfectly natural thing to do that the earth is perfectly capable of surviving. Thank you very much for your concern.

Reducing the tread on hiking boots to minimize our impact on the dirt trails in the wilderness is wasted technology. It's a tech solution for a non-existent problem. The real problem is the incursion of civilization into wild areas. The problem is sprawl and the spiritual distance between people and unspoiled wilderness. The problem is roads and internal combustion engines and plastic packaging and sin. If you want to know what the problem is NOT, the problem is not the desire of a single person to walk on some of the unspoiled dirt that remains in the world. The presence of footprints does not spoil the wilderness. If you want to know what spoils wilderness, just look at the wilderness buried under your favorite city.

Find a dirt trail, preferably one with no view of anything concrete or glass or metal, and preferably out of earshot of any industrial noise, and walk on it with no guilt whatsoever.

Old Steel Knives, and One Cheap One

2009-01-17T20:31:00.000-08:00

I'm glad that the blades on my pocket knives (I have Leatherman and Swiss Army knives) are stainless steel, because they have to survive in the wet, in bags I carry while commuting, sometimes in the rain, or while otherwise roughing it. But in my home, I much prefer the non-stainless variety: some are folders (Opinels from France), some straight bladed (flea-market beauties, as above). These blades are sharper, more flexible, and have considerably more character than any stainless blade.

Stainless steel knives are ... stainless, and so keep their shiny look. Big deal. Stainless steel is either inexpensive and horrible (inflexible, nearly impossible to sharpen, and brittle), or horribly expensive. When kitchen geeks test knives and make recommendation purely on quality, it could cost you well over $150 (sometimes closer to 800) per knife to follow their advice. When they make recommendations for those on a budget, you can still expect to spend more than $50 on a decent knife (with a plastic handle).

But you can also find an old steel knife at a garage sale, or estate sale, or flea market (like mine) and spend well under $20, then spend a little time with some steel wool, and uncover a beautiful old tool. The handle will be beautiful wood, and maybe you'll even find one with shiny brass rivets like mine. The old wood handle adds fathoms of character, feels warmer and just nicer in your hand, and is in fact more resistant to bacteria growth than synthetic. That may seem counter-intuitive until you realize that air drying kills bacteria and wood promotes this. a crack or seam between plastic and metal does a great job of creating the kind of environment where stuff can grow.

My steel knives may need to be sharpened more often than an expensive stainless steel knife, but they sharpen like razors. They may need to be protected a bit more from water, but I personally like the patina that metal takes on with age. Age = patina = character = signs of life. Old steel looks, and feels, more natural. That is ... aging and showing signs of age and wear is natural, and, in my humble opinion, beautiful.

Allow me to cut to the chase: our culture is obsessed with youth and health: we hate it when anything shows signs of age or wear (before you suggest jeans with holes in them, please note: those holes are probably not signs of age. They are signs of something else, less impressive). Our fear of age and the signs of age applies to utensils as much as it applies to our faces and bodies. And our attempts to counter the effects of age, whether in our own flesh, or in our tools, introduces layers of complexity and expense, and is successful very little of the time.

(Low) tech writer principle #2: When a technological solution is devised to counter the effects of nature, it generally results in a thing being more complex, less flexible, less functional, and/or more expensive.

There are some simple carbon steel blades being made these days: Sabatier makes some blades that are not stainless. The problem is that the cheap ones cost close to a hundred bucks and have plastic handles. If you want such blades for cheap, you've got to go searching for the cast-offs, and it may take some care to restore them and their handles. But, for me, the satisfaction of polishing an old steel blade and cleaning and oiling an old piece of wood matches the pleasure of using the old tool.

For all the benefits of stainless steel (you won't catch me suggesting that spoons shouldn't be stainless), I don't trust it. I wonder if it doesn't all come down to our distaste for stains ... stains that remind us that nature wears things down, marks things with the passage of time. Oh, alright, it's nice not to have to worry too much about rust, and stainless steel blades will not be ruined by an absent minded cook who doesn't dry their blades and can't be bothered to oil them. But then, should we let people who are so absent minded and lacking in respect for tools use sharp utensils anyways? I love old knives partly because you have to take care of them. There, I said it.

Don't even get me started on serrated knives. The only reason why these un-sharpenable knives sell so well is that a salesperson comes into your home and tells you what you already know: your knives have not been sharpened in years and are dull. Instead of solving this problem (by selling you a good, easy-to-use sharpener so you don't have to throw away your knives), they sell you another one: a knife that won't dull so quickly, but that can't be sharpened by you when it does. This is not to mention the fact that serrated knives have to saw through food, which in some cases just feels wrong. Now, a sharp straight-steel blade cutting through a nice steak? That feels right.

There is one exception to my dislike for serrated blades. There is no other blade for cutting fresh bread. It has to be serrated for something so soft. Thankfully you don't have to spend more than 20 dollars to have lots of good choicesfor a bread knife (but, of course, if you want to spend more than $150 you won't have to look far, and the choices are few and far between if you want to have a nice wooden handle). The knife below was $6 new, at a fancy kitchen shop no less. The serrations are not some unnecessarily fancy design, but simple scallops that can be sharpened at home with a needle file, or a rotary grinder, which is how I did mine when it was 5 years old and needed a little refresher.

When the handle began to loosen a bit from repeated washings, I just wrapped it tightly with a common whipping, a beautiful and simple binding knot that I use often to repair tools, or finish some other kind of craftwork. (Knots is a subject to which I will have to return.)

Cast Iron

2009-01-15T00:15:00.000-08:00

A number of years ago, we decided to buy a nice frying pan for our kitchen. We briefly considered nonstick (Teflon or whatever flourocarbon-based coating is out there these days), but we simply had seen too many of them become un-coated with use. Was this our fault? Maybe. Maybe we weren't careful enough with the dreaded metal tools. But the question is meaningless: we will never buy a coated pan again.

We decided to buy a stainless steel pan, serious and heavy, from some famous company whose name you'd know, but I can't remember. It would be the kind of pan you keep forever, we told ourselves, to make ourselves feel better about the cost. We researched the options and ended up spending close to 150 dollars that Christmas on The Pan. We bought special pads (that wouldn't scratch it ... yes that is a problem with stainless steel: if you scratch it too much the rougher surface is harder to clean) and learned how to clean it with special powdery chemical stuff so that it would be pristine (again, so nothing would stick to it). One of its features was carefully chosen layers of different materials in the thick base to transfer heat evenly. Sadly, Within a few months this impressive base had warped and the pan rocked on the stove-top. Since the handle was a long heavy piece of stainless steel itself, the pan always rocked in the direction of the handle. This made it really hard to cook sauces or fry things, as liquids pooled in the downhill third of the pan. We thought that maybe because it was designed as a "stove top" appliance, that it would be able to withstand stove-top heat. Our mistake.

The last two pots I've bought for our kitchen have been made of cast iron. The fry pan (left) that replaced the stainless Pan was 20 dollars at a camping store, and it ... will. never. warp. How does it cook? So nice. I followed directions I got on the Web, seasoned it well with oil and lots of heat, and never looked back. If you could feel the surface of the pan, it feels almost exactly like a non-stick: not really greasy ... dry ... but slippery. And it really doesn't stick: I can cook eggs on it, no problem.

I rarely need water for cleaning and never use soap. I put in a couple tablespoons of cheap salt, a dab of cooking oil, and use a paper towel to work it around. The salt acts as a nifty abrasive. Water comes in handy if we've cooked something with sugar in the sauce: it helps get the sticky out. And if something has stuck to it, I just hit it with the metal spatula to scrape it clean.

As you can see, our pan is not afraid of metal utensils. The only thing I worry about with our cast iron ware is breaking our cheap stove under the weight of it. This will be one more of those things that our kids fight over when we're gone. The $150 pan will probably be given away.

This cast iron pan is the epitome of low tech perfection. One single piece of cast iron. Unbreakable, unbeatable, beautiful.

Bicycles

2009-01-08T12:21:00.001-08:00

I remember attending a fundraiser for a Christian organization that was involved with micro-financing in an African nation. At the beginning of the evening, a missionary presented slides of life in this unquestionably poor nation. But as she showed pictures of the locals riding bicycles between home and work, making the point to the fairly wealthy audience that bicycles were their only form of travel, I detected more than a hint of standards projection - the assumption that these Africans were somehow not at an acceptable standard of living because they couldn't afford cars, or at best that they were to be pitied because they had to ride bicycles everywhere. What? I personally prefer my bicycle to a car. Sure a car is sometimes very helpful, and my family has one (in an area where many families have more than two). But there are so many reasons why I prefer bikes. I'm not so stupid as to imagine that the poor prefer poverty, but to look down on a culture that runs on bicycle power is to mistake simple and cheap for destitute. Wrong. Poverty sucks. Bikes do not. Not having a choice sucks, but cars are not the best choice most of the time. A "car in every garage" will not be the sign that this African nation has a sustainable economy. When everyone in the society can care for themselves and their families, and pass on the blessing to others, then the society will be healthy. I assume bikes will continue to be the primary form of transportation in many a developing economy.

I love bikes because they are supremely efficient machines and even the most expensive, highest tech bike is low-tech compared to where the big money goes. And no matter how much carbon-fiber they contain, they still have the lowest carbon-footprint of any serious transportation. All it takes for me to fuel up for a ride is to eat yummy food. I do not emit any toxic fumes when on my bicycle, and, just for the sake of argument, if I ever did you'd be glad I was on a bike rather than sitting in a car. When I ride, I burn calories, help my heart, and clear my head at the beginning and end of every work day.

Cars ... can go faster and farther and carry more stuff. No argument there. But if the existence of the automobile makes us more able to shop farther away, and makes developers more bold about building big-box destination stores, which can sell stuff cheaper, which in turns drives smaller local shops out of business, which in turn, makes it necessary for us to have a car so that we can shop farther away ... then, I have a problem with cars. And this is not to mention all the problems our planet has (local and global) from the noxious by-products of automobiles.

I ride everywhere, but it isn't always easy. Suburban city planning caters to the automobile. It is inconvenient to commute and shop by bicycle - stuff is just so spread out. And bicycling is often dangerous. I taught my children that when riding on city streets, they should "ride like prey"; imagining that every car was a potential bike killer. It's not just theory with me. I'm constantly having near misses, and two years ago, I was hit by a UPS truck one late autumn night. Even though I had blinky lights all over me, I simply was not the car she was looking for as she pulled out of a driveway onto El Camino. I was a bit shakey when I started riding again, but I still ride.

The bike above was built from recycled junk parts and is one of several I have (click on it for a bigger view). I also have a fairly inexpensive folding bike for travel. I have a mountain bike I bought while working at REI. I have a road bike that was given to me. But the bike above is my pride and joy: I should probably give it a name. I built it from a rusty, beat up Nishiki Colorado mountain bike frame. I took a year collecting parts for cheap and free. I ended up spending about a hundred dollars on new parts and Rust-Oleum. The bike has one single speed and a coaster brake. It needs nothing more for the flatlands on the San Francisco Peninsula, but I've ridden it up into the hills and even off road. I think it says "bicycle" more than any of the others currently cluttering my porch. Until I think of a proper name for it, I call it my "Two Wheeler" because it looks and feels like the first "real" bicycle you get when you graduate from a tricycle.

The Two Wheeler scorns the arms race to add more gears (road bikes now can have 30), to find the strongest brake technology (side pull -> cantilever -> linear pull -> hydraulics -> disc), to build frames out of more and more exotic materials (steel -> aluminum -> titanium -> carbon fiber), or to shave ounces off so that you can win races. There are precious few bicycle companies out there that don't join the arms race. You will not see their bikes in your local bike shop, but you can find them if you want to. The Two Wheeler is strong and light enough with an alloy steel frame and inexpensive aluminum mountain-bike wheels. The coaster brake requires a hundredth of the maintenance of any of the above brake technologies, stops the bike on a dime, and is insanely durable.

And did you notice that saddle? That's a genuine brooks B-67 made with the same cow parts that equestrian saddles are made from. The saddle is really the heart of the bike. Comfy, springy, and learning the shape of my rear end like no foam-filled, gel-injected, scientifically-designed bike saddle ever could. Furthermore, when the foam in a normal saddle starts to break down, it's a goner; when my leather starts to stretch out a little too much, I'll just tighten the nut in the front 1/4 turn, stretching the leather tight again. It takes a while to break in, but so did the leather boots I wear when I'm backpacking. It's worth it. This saddle will be in my will, and since my legacy will probably be on the light side, this bike seat will probably be the one thing my kids fight over when I'm gone.

My friend Paul saw this bike for the first time the other day and said, "It looks like an old Mercedes." That's also the way it rides. I've already helped one teenager in my church build his own Two Wheeler from a junk bike after he fell in love with mine. I have another friend searching for a frame right now for his new bike that we will build. The Two Wheeler inspires like other bikes can't.

Bottom line: the bike cost me a hundred times less than the cheapest new car (and still a whole lot less than any new bike), is a true hybrid drive (runs on coffee, meat, toast, beer, etc), and provides a long list of health and well-being benefits that even insurance companies can't deny. All I have to do is watch out for UPS trucks.

Puzzles

2009-01-07T01:20:00.000-08:00

My wife grew up doing puzzles with her family. I didn't quite understand the appeal until I got a look at the puzzles they did. They came in Gold colored boxes, without pictures to guide you, and were cut from 1/4 inch plywood. The pictures themselves were interesting, full of detail, and some of the shapes were cut to resemble iconic toys: rifle ... ballerina ... boat. Puzzles are very low key, non-competitive, and interesting. Anyone can walk by and spend a few minutes poking around looking for a piece to fit. Amazingly, our 15 year old and our 12 year old each sit at the puzzle table with us at the end of the day. We blast music and lean on each other. As family entertainment, this is low-tech gold.

We've bought puzzles over the years, when we could find ones that had some visual complexity, and the first thing we do, is throw away the picture. (It's surprising that most puzzles are of scenes with very little detail. How do you assemble a puzzle of a sunset scene, when most of it is sky and water?) We don't do a lot of board games together: it's hard to agree on one we all like, and sometimes the competition is hard on the family unit.

This year we found a puzzle made by Masterpiece Puzzlesfrom a picture of San Francisco by Eric Dowdle. After looking at the picture on the box long enough to determine that it was sufficiently complicated, we tore off the picture and chucked it. Oh, man, was this puzzle hard. We've been working on it, on and off, for two weeks.

It's a picture that, by itself, does not appeal to me--you see pictures like this in tourist shops in big cities. But in a puzzle, pictures like this, packed as they are with funny and quaint details are engrossing and entertaining.

In the picture below, you can see the 1000 piece puzzle under construction in my living room, along with a couple essential tools: hot tea to calm down the puzzle masters, and a spatula for moving little groups of assembled pieces without them falling apart. My wife keeps mumbling that her father would NOT approve of the spatula. I thought it was pretty smart.

It's even more detailed than it looks in this picture. Every building has distinctive window patterns, and they are crammed together in the work in such a way that it's really hard to understand how it all fits together until you see it done. Fun!

[Update. I found a company selling expensive wooden puzzles: they look beautiful and fun in the way I remember my in-law's puzzles, full of custom-cut pieces and interesting pictures. Stave Puzzles]

Here's the San Francisco puzzle for sale on Amazon (though if you have an independent local toy shop that you'd like to stay in business, call them first, please):

General's Semi-Hex 498 2 2/4 ... Reasons Why #1

2009-01-07T00:02:00.000-08:00

An attempt to begin to explain why these things matter to me. I'll call it Reasons Why #1 because I know I won't get it right the first time, but I'm content to try.

I like technology. I've lived and worked among Technical People my whole life, and it would confound my friends if I called myself anti-tech. I love computers as tools, and do much of my work in front of a screen. I am not a hacker, but I am a "tweaker": I never learned how to work on cars, and maybe for that reason, I have taken to getting under the hoods of my computers. I have built and rebuilt computers and messed with operating systems. I was putting Linux on laptops in 1999, and have even squeezed Linux onto various Macs over the years. I taught myself how to run Linux from the command line (which is harder because there are, like, no pictures).

I went to Crystal Springs Uplands school in Hillsborough, California and graduated in 1984, the year of the Macintosh. Apple's John Sculley had a daughter at the school (a year or two younger than us) - I went to his house once with my friend who was dating his daughter and saw his computer room (among the early Apples, he had a Lisa, rocking a 5MHz processor and 1 meg of ram), and I assume it was he who donated a bunch of Apple IIs to our school. One of my classmates wrote the original Music Construction Set on one of those apples. My dad also got one for the family. I taught myself basic programming on that Apple II and even wrote a small text adventure game (I was inspired by the old Infocom game Zork, which you can now play online, still in glorious text). All this, I believe, gives me what my friends would call Geek Cred. ...

But then there are the pencils. I have a mild obsession with pencils, especially the General Pencil Semi-Hex 498 2 2/4. Mmm, ceder. Some years ago, I needed a pencil to mark up a book I was reading for seminary, and went looking for one. I did not find one pencil. I found fourteen scattered through the house. I would have stopped at one, but my curiosity was piqued to see all the different brands and styles that we'd accumulated. I decided that I couldn't just pick one at random, I would pick the best one. So I sharpened them all and put them to the test. Of course I had to smell each one before writing, just to take note of the "nose" (the winner had that powerful ceder aroma that true pencil aficionados prefer. I think.). After writing with each pencil there were two that stood out. I didn't care for the people's favorite Dixon Ticonderoga, but went with two by the General Pencil company, the last company making pencils in the USA. I liked the "Badger" a lot, but my favorite was the strangely-named "Semi Hex 498 2 2/4". Best pencil I've ever used. It didn't check my affection to learn their factory was nearby in Redwood City. The name describes the shape (Semi Hex refers to the rounded points of the hexagon shape) and includes the model number (498) and the hardness (why 2 2/4 instead of 2.5 or 2 1/2? Who cares? For me it adds to the charm).

Low-tech wonders stand out when compared to their replacements, the products that are manufactured to improve and supplant them. I think of all the ergonomic mechanical pencils and gel-grip disposable pens, none of which impress me or replace my pencil. The pencil has a beautiful simplicity to it, and an efficiency, and 95 percent of it is compostable (versus the landfill that is the fate of plastic writing tools). And there is some mystery to the pencil too. How does rubber (named for it's ability to "rub" pencil marks away) erase the marks of the graphite without causing it to smudge? It's the original word processor, complete with backspace.

My seventh grade science teacher had permanently written on her blackboard, "Even God does her math problems in pencil!" Yet, she found herself living in strange times: the advent of the erasable pen. The question that shook the foundations of Pencilogy? 'Could we use the Eraser Mate to do math problems?' Did God feel that the ability to correct mistakes was the important thing - which would mean that the Eraser Mate might be an acceptable tool - or was God a pencil lover too? Furthermore, did He hate it when I scribbled over my mistakes to hide them, and did that move Him to insist on the correctability of any writing technology ... or was God, like me, enamored of the heady aroma of freshly sharpened wood, the smooth-scratchy graphite marking core, the soft pink eraser waiting to be bitten off? These questions were too weighty for a seventh grader, and for our teacher, who gave up the fight: I remember many smudged and messy assignments written with the erasable pen. The manufacturer said that the easily erased (and so easily smudged) ink would become permanent within days, but by then the damage had been done.

Regular pens left no room for correction. Erasable pens left a gooey, smudgeable mess. Nothing has surpassed pencils for working out the truth on a piece of lined paper, whether mathematical or theological. But what does God think?

I think I know the answer now. I can sniff out a hint of divine terroir lurking in the humble pencil. Is it in seventh grade science that we learn that diamonds and graphite are both made of the same stuff? While the diamond is the hardest mineral known to humanity, and graphite one of the softest, each have the same carbon chemistry. But the real mind-bender is that the more stable and permanent of these two carbon polymorphs is the stuff inside my Semi Hex. Don't believe what DeBeers tells you: graphite is forever. The fact is that all diamonds that have made their way to the surface of the earth are slowly undergoing a transformation into graphite. It's only a matter of time. And so I think I'll risk formulating a (low) tech writer principle. Call it principle #1.

(low) tech writer principle #1: The thing that appears to be the most permanent, the most robust, the most durable, aint necessarily so. Sometimes it is the dull, plentiful, inexpensive thing that wins the day and survives.

Coming to Grips

2009-01-04T00:39:00.000-08:00

I am coming to grips with the possibility that I don't trust technology. I don't mean my computer. I mean the impulse to solve problems by subscribing to pre-existing mass-produced solutions. You can find these solutions spit out of molds and assembly-lines and printing presses throughout recent history. Such "solutions" feel soul-numbing to me. I know that sounds harsh, but that's how my soul responds to anything that looks and works the same in any home. It may be fast, convenient, processed food, or a best-selling book about how to solve your Problem, or a piece of furniture that makes everyone within 10 miles of Ikea feel like the exact same unique and interesting individual. I don't want to make grand, sweeping generalizations, but in general when you set out to make a profit, you have to resort to technology to increase your productivity. When you set out to make something beautiful, you have to avoid technology (and by that I mean, "someone elses technique"), because it will stifle your creativity. I know it's not black and white. But I'm not here to argue for high-tech, am I?

I want to catalog the beautiful things I find, the low-tech successes and survivors, the things that make you feel kinda funny in your tummy when you see them, like you "wish you could have one".

Years ago, when I told people I worked in the tech industry as a writer, they invariably asked if I was a "Tech Writer". I would say, "No, I write everything else," by which I meant the business documents and the marketing materials, which was a kind of tech writing, but not in the way people meant (tech writers usually wrote manuals and other documentation). When I got my first full-time writing job, my card said, "Content Producer", which of course meant I filled the Web sites and other marketing pieces with content, but my friend Greg took a look at that and purposely mispronounced it "conTENT producer" which happened to be a good description of me at the time. I was content. I love writing. But it also didn't take long for me to tire of writing about the tech solution that we were working on, and want to write about things with more meaning.

I am not anti-tech. I know that computers are solving important problems in the world (but note with interest that the most impressive efforts in this regard are the low-cost, simple, durable computers that are being made for widespread distribution in developing nations). I myself like computers and the associated tools. I like the computer I am writing on, and do not intend to bite the hand that allows me to publish these words so easily. But I do NOT want to write about such things. There is no shortage of words written about tech. Here in Silicon Valley (and in the Silicon Alleys and all the other places that aspire to cutting edge technological distinction), it's important to pay attention to the low tech things that survive ... these artifacts haven't been rendered obsolete because they serve humanity just fine, even if they are not superstars of progress. It's important because they are worth honoring, and get so little attention in this economy.

And so today I am a writer of a kind further from what "they" meant - a low tech writer, in search of things less technological, less programmable, less homogenous. And when I find them, I'll write about them on the Internets. :)