Advice

The Kills were amazing at the 9:30 the other night, they are really at their best, and the show took about 2 years off of me. Me, mommy and baby hid in the very back, and at the back bar to protect the magic belly from sonic booms, and it was a great night (thank you J and Corrin for being such troopers for us- you both are the hero bodyguards, Kevin Costner would be proud).

Oh, the advice. Carry a pad of auto sound deadening and put it inside your jacket when you're taking an in-utero to a show. It'll make you feel better. I think it worked.

Spring Light

The spring light changed sometime around mid-April. It's that time when the western evening light ambers everything, and incantations are read for summer to take it's sweet time coming. It's honey light for pictures of Vela who matches everything, who sits whenever the camera comes out, she's such a vain girl ;)  Good girl.

The western light at just the right time, with the right exposure can suck the color out of things, leaving behind just the yellows, which can leave old things looking older.

Spring light also means that my favorite time to open the front door shifts from early morning to around 5PM. Opening the front door to leave home and finding the light just right is a great thing.

We miss you today Porto

We miss Porto a lot this week. Not sure why, doesn't matter, we just miss it.  Aaron Dessner recently joked "ok, we're moving to Porto," and I can relate.

Waiting for the little girl has me thinking of Porto, I think she liked Porto in particular, out of her in womb travels, we had some good times there the three of us.

I could post pictures of every inch of this town, but here are four of the handiest pictures. A tiny homage to Porto.

A New Place

This is a new place online to share photos with family and friends. The main reason I started this back up (and killed "Flamelit Van Sadeaowhousen" for those of you who knew it) is to share photos and updates about our new family with our old family. The two of us recently became three, with the addition of little Ada, and we are over the moon with happiness! Happiness makes me want to share- so here we are again.

You might ask why not just use Facebook? If you know me (which you do if you're bothering to read this), then you know why.

Reason #1: Too many of my favorite people all over the world don't use Facebook, which would mean that they couldn't see baby pictures... which, well, would defeat the purpose of my existence (which is basically to send baby pictures).  That's mainly it.

But I'll say the tin-foil-hat-wearing reason anyway (you can stop reading now). I think that "Big Social"* may soon make Big Pharma, Big Agro, Big Defense, etc. seem like harmless little bogeymen in comparison. I think of what Big Pharma and Big Agro have done good for the world (a lot) and wrong for the world (a lot) and it makes me feel as though I don't want to face similar involuntary seismic changes in my human relationships.
*Paul Ford was the first person I heard refer to the corporate networking sites as Big Social. Credit.

If you know my work, you know I am obsessed with the pre-portal centric web, the wild ethos of decentralized open information I came of age into. So I'm using HTML (yes, hosted by Google, but...) in at least a symbolic attempt to over-share without necessarily subjecting every slight interest and connection of my life through a marketing and monetization machine owned by a single company (um... besides Google). It scares me to see people so readily, and dutifully, click their identities into someones servers, in painstaking detail- desperately seeking connection, while short selling the connection all around them. Yes, this blog could be hosted on my own domain, or .mac at least, but I am lazy now, and I like the Blogger format.

So... I don't have a cabin in the woods... or a full manifesto quite yet... 

but if I did... I would grow a nice beard and send you the following in a coffee stained envelope (probably typed out double-space on an old spray painted Royal Quiet deLuxe, with little scribbles in the margins, on paper smelling of pine sap and smoke- there would be a lot of CAPS and general misspellings, and the occasional off-topic rant about septic systems and radio waves).

My rantings would read something like this.


I've used social networking sites: Freindster, Myspace, Linked in, Orkut, and FB off and on over the years, ever since the first weeks of Myspace (an eon ago- remember SixDegrees?). I've used them for my work, I've used them for general geekery, and of course I've used them for the same reasons everyone does.

Some time about 4 years ago one of them- Facebook, made the critical jump from being a service, to being a required-service. Much like I imagine Visa went from being a novel way to pay for things, to being what it is today. And once FB became an indispensable part of life, I had to stop using it, partly because I was born with a ridiculously useless "non-joiner-knee-jerk-rebellion" gene, but also because I found some aspects of it frightening.

Yes, it's partly because I enjoy a ridiculous degree of privacy and anonymity in my life (for various reasons). And I understand that once a network of persons is made visible, it's easy to attract people who you might have once known, who you no longer want to attract... and more importantly to me, you make your entire human network available if, I don't know... maybe some non-benign interest ever wants to narrow it down for you.

All of this thinking isn't to say I don't think Big Social is a useful tool- I just don't like the trend towards using it for everything in one's life (and "used for everything in life" is exactly the goal of all commercial portals). And this is not to say I don't understand why the entire world is enjoying the power of FB so much (I get it), I have just realized it is not my choice for sharing, and I have some deep fears about the larger implications it has.

I have seen FB grow in our lives like this...

1. From a means of casually tracking one's contacts into a complete listing of every person you've ever talked to for more than five minutes, providing a one-stop view into almost all of your human relations.
2. From a place to post some pictures, into the only place any media is shared (and stored).
3. From a place to share some common interests, into an online database of every minutia of one's identity through the form of an initially crude, but increasingly complex, list of likes and proclivities (lining one's life up perfectly for commerce).
4. From a tool (one of many) used to stay in touch occasionally, into the only means of chatting, updating, and communicating with anyone outside of twitter and texts.
5. From a simple online portal into the only gateway most people use to access the web (the end goal?).

Even seeing this happen, I recently "re-activated" my FB profile (which I naively thought was deleted), so I am back on FB in a very limited capacity, I find it useful for a few things, but it's just not my preferred method of sharing photos or interests.

I prefer the Blog form, which to me is more like a letter (I am a poseur antique in some ways), it can be public or enclaved, and it is less structured. I find I can post what I want more easily. A personal blog (which now is so ridiculously outdated, and archaic even) can be as obtuse or shallow as one likes, it can be read by many, or ignored by all but one. You can project into the void. You can share without forcefully posting to everyone you've ever met, you can post images in a wordy format, and write long diatribes not minding who does or doesn't read them. You can save it all locally if for some reason you want to maintain it that way, and the more intricate details of your relations and "likes" can be handled a little differently. The downside of course to a personal blog is that it can't be used as a "maintenance site" for human relations, in other words you can't collect and store the contact for everyone you meet for later use- in todays world that is a downside.

Some time has passed for me on FB, I've thought about it a lot, and I've written quite a few things for my work about it (from the complete opposite perspective). And here are a few feelings I have on it today:

• Right now I reject the 2 dimensional way in which Facebook presents us to each other. FB by design is a relationship management tool, which has the elegant ability to reduce people to common selected interests and networks, thus distilling even the most complex lives into a marketing niche and set of commonalities. 
• FB is practical if your goal is to reach out and find commonalities for a specific reason (work, sales & marketing, statistics, loneliness, isolation).  I understand that most peoples goal on FB (at least implied) is just to communicate, and keep track of people, but the reality is often different from the implied goals when people set out to use FB as a means of simply communicating. It is turning into much more than an online address book and means of mass messaging.
• I find that the most common argument for using FB for communicating, which is that it is "too hard" to maintain contact with people otherwise. That makes me depressed. Judgmental? Yes, but I think if it's too hard to maintain relations without FB, it probably means there is a larger issue at hand, at least for me.
• I reject the privacy implications, and more importantly the larger, social implications, that FB presents.
• I reject the surveillance implications: primarily the mapping of relationships & activities. I am not comfortable with publishing everyone I know, and who my "network" is. I have a very 20th Century sense of privacy.
• I reject the documentation, and categorization of our complex human relationships in such a cynical, mechanical way, only to be recorded and marketed against by a single private source.
• I reject the publishing of our lives through a single portal, which can not be moved, or stored offline.
• I reject what I believe online social networking has done to our attention spans, personalities, and social interactions.
• I reject the sad way in which FB seems to turn everyone into a callous marketing team for themselves: posting likes, interests, people, and places, as if building a perpetual online resume which seems to have little purpose other than to justify their ability to be interesting to their acquaintances.
• I believe FB weakens most relations, as opposed to grow them. In my anecdotal experience observing people, and myself, I find that FB strengthens weak relationships (acquaintances, old friends you stopped seeing for a reason you now forget, etc.) to the point of being slightly less weak, and weakens most other relations (or the ability to relate) in some yet to be understood way (but perhaps it's the now well documented "once your on FB your only on FB" phenomenon).
• I reject the way in which FB posting encourages short, meaningless, often visual expressions of ourselves- For example: a picture of me on the beach, with no thoughts, then a picture of a cat, or a bottle of beer, a series of face shots as if I am auditioning for a commercial all the time, shot-gunned out into the world searching for comments like a satellite into space. I find the mainstreaming of trite and vain expression saddening. 
• I believe mediums like FB are only encouraging the inability to appreciate long form thought, and the sad trend towards mocking everything that is not artificially posed and non-committal in it's brevity, the fear of appearing too interested, or too wordy is real. Perhaps preventing us from being real about our lives, and eventually about ourselves.
• I realize that FB and Twitter (a service I like very much) have played a large role in some very important acts of civil organizing, and proved to be great tools for public protest, interest cell mobilization, raising issue awareness, and the like- and I appreciate it's value in these ways and others. I do at this time believe however that it is only a matter of time before large social network sites play the opposite role in restraining groups of people. I feel it is inevitable, and I worry that historically massive records of relationships and proclivities have been used against the people listed in them. We have decades to see the effects, but I do believe there will be a price to pay.
• A "blog" or another form of sharing data, is assumed to be a part of one's life, in most respects a very small part of one's life. It is assumed that not everyone one knows reads their blog, nor is everything that goes on in the day posted to a blog, it is a much more normal way of sharing for humans. Whereas the very nature of FB's interface, tools, and mobile access, means that it is rapidly creating a cultural expectation that one's FB profile is their entire life, that the whole of their relations, interests, important photos, events, etc. is frequently updated and available. It may not be the case now, but that is where I personally see it going. Almost as if: If someone hasn't liked it on FB, you can be assured it's not something they are aware of, or they don't like it. (Tom likes eating bread) and that pervasive, quiet way that it is taking over our self identity, is something I don't like.

There are just so many ways in which FB bothers me: From the way in which trite public expressions seem to be replacing actually telling someone something intimately, or meaningfully. And how those public expressions (which are designed to be read by everyone) may overwhelm all other communication (such as in this car commercial)- i.e. our brains are adapting messages to be received by a group at all times, the ability to meaningfully connect to one another is ceasing to be an important skill.

Or maybe it's the way that online surveillance seems to be becoming more and more accepted (as this ACLU example imagines it being soon).

Or maybe it's just inadvertently posting something that may hurt the feelings of one of our dozens of contacts without meaning to... although perhaps a new generation, raised completely numb to all social emotion, is on the precipice laughing down at me.

Or maybe it's just straight up old fashioned fear of corporate monopolies. And I have to admit, as corporate monopolies go, FB seems to have the broadest reach and impact of any monopoly in history in my mind. The social lives, and content of the entire world, all of our expressions humming away, all of our loved ones documented, all of our outreach to other people... all of this is resting on one agencies servers (that's a lot of power riding on those 60,000+ Linux/Apache/MySQL racks out there). To my mind the implications are beyond enormous.

This is just my thinking on things today. I could change my mind.

So if you know me, hopefully you know that most of my comments to your life, your pictures, and your thoughts, will not be in the form of glib one liners added to a list of zombie like socially obligatory spurts of adjective by people you haven't physically seen for god knows how long (that sounds so fucking smug... as I type this into a Blogger). This is just what I believe to be important, crazy as it may seem.

If you've bothered to read this far, there is a good chance we know each other very well, and I'll see you soon, and you can laugh at me for this in person.

However for all those times when you can't be around- and I wanted to tell you something, or show you something... here are some pictures and such.

Native Tree Day

I spent some time planting trees today. We got some amazing sapplings, and like the Johnny Appleseed of native cultivars we set out planting on the Hill (riverfront). We planted 7 tulip trees.

One of my favorite mid-Atlantic (Eastern) specimens is the Liriodendron Tulipifera, commonly called the tulip tree. To me it's a gem of Eastern trees, sure the list of eastern US natives is filled with amazing things, but the tulip tree is an unsung masterpiece of nature. It's often called a Tulip Poplar, although I personally hate that common name- since the tree is not a poplar (i.e. genus Populus) so it's confusing. The tulip tree is actually a member of the Magnolia tribe. I have heard that in the "Appalashus" you can find tulip trees 200 feet tall, over 20 feet in diameter, and producing thousands of flowers, I hope to find some eventually. But until then I can add a few to the city now and then, only in places which can accommodate their massive height and size when mature, and where a 60+ foot flowering giant can truly be admired someday.

When planting there are a few interesting things to know about tulip trees: for one thing, they are wait and see plantings, as the flowers don't usually begin until they are 15+ years old- so keep that in mind. Also most of the flowering takes place at canopy level so they are best appreciated from a distance. Tulipwood makes decent furniture, and it's great for accents- but not the greatest material for woodworking overall (this may be why there are not more tulipwood forests around), and native butterflies (caterpillars) love the leaves for food- so you're doing a service in that way just for planting one.

The largest tulip trees I know of in the city are up on embassy row, there are some up there that seem to predate the streets, possibly the city, I sometimes wonder if they actually do.

This post makes me feel like I just wrote it for kids. It's very PSA like, but what can I do, I am on a planting high.

We're expecting a new girl to join us soon.

It's April and the days are getting a little longer, the ground is getting speckled with green, the trees are budding large, and we can feel the baby girl showing some interest in joining us out here.

We had our first outdoor dinner of the new year out back last night. It was so nice to hear everyone laughing under the stars again, and putting up with the chill.

And I was informed last night (by a wise friend with an amazing eye for old things) that this little light we have used for years on the backyard table (which we found under the house 10 years ago now), is actually a 20's era railroad lantern. Made by the Adams & Westlake Co. I'd never bothered to look at it in much detail after all these years, and as always wonder more as to how it ended up under our house covered in bones.

 Adams & Westlake Adlake-Kero -34 1921-1923 Pats Pending