The look of the frame is called distressed, and that was probably the look on my face, too, when I saw it. That splotching wasn't there in the frame sample I'd chosen last month, though the previous attendant had spent quite awhile helping me select just the right match for the photo. Edie cheerfully offered to do it over. That would've required more time and another cross-town trip, though, and I explained I'm not so mobile with such parcels on bicycle. (I didn't tell her Jenita's Christmas present was already 7 months late.)

She said she carries framed photos on her bike all the time, but offered we experiment with the frame a bit -- and brought it into the studio. Steel wool and solvent to tone down the high-contrast speckles. Evened it down and odded it up ~ til I was happy.

She asked about my least favorite routes to ride.

Begin with art, because art tries to take us outside ourselves. It is a matter of trying to create an atmosphere and context so conversation can flow back and forth and we can be influenced by each other.

-- W.E.B. DuBois

Commiseration / Bridging: the Lorain-Carnegie puncture lane, fishtailing after rain on Columbus's slippery steel grating. Charging up Cedar, freedom on Hough, the highway that is Chester. Roads and roads.

She and her husband ride the winter too. Wool, neoprene, gore-tex. Balaklavas, breathe-ability. Boots in 40-or-below to avoid losing feet heat through clipless cleats. Racks, fenders, panniers. They have 18 bicycles in the garage: cargo bikes, winter bikes, touring bikes, a tandem...

Cars beget rage. The people inside, cagers. ("private metal pods with blackened windows".) Her cager friends ask just how to say "Hi." Two short beeps means hello. Anyone that lays on the horn is obviously saying something else.

She packaged and wrapped it when the paste had dried. I sat down and we continued talking. The world of cars, our house of cards. The future, if people don't wise up. The fun of slowing down. (If only they knew!) And one's freedoms at another's peril. Interdependence. The brick roads underneath the asphalt will resurface.

The gift of the multiple crises we face is that in order to address them successfully, we will have to fundamentally change who we are. Some say people don't change, but they do when they have to. And part of that change is the capacity to listen, to put aside those things that separate us as unimportant, and honor the core values that unite us.

-- Paul Hawken, on Blessed Unrest and Deep Economics, (interview by Jon Lebkowsky, Worldchanging.com)

We're wary but hopeful. She calls it skeptimism.

She's sure that we'll see each other out riding soon.
I'm sure that I'll suggest Art Etc. to anyone that wants a really great custom frame, and to find out what Etc. can mean for them.

So how about this? How about we plan our communities to be social and business hubs that people can walk to and from--cars unrequired--and participate in in meaningful way? How about we attach these hubs by public transportation? How about we build our communities in ways that both help people feel less alienated and let them lead less resource intensive lives?

-- Colin Beavan, (aka No Impact Man,) More on community versus consumption--smart growth

Apparently, they didn't want this wok anymore. I didn't ask if they wanted the dinner I made with it tonight.

It sat on my living-room floor for a few weeks because I didn't know what to do about its stickiness and propensity to rust. A few short YouTube tutorials, though, and I learned how to properly wash and season it.

It makes a nice stir-fry. I wonder what they didn't like about it, or what they did to it... and if they have a hoak to go along with it.

My plastic mailbox had let some rainstorm in, which made my Bonus Eligibility Miles offer harder to tear in two. I had forgotten there was a hunk of cornbread left, and ate it with leftover stir-fry, then finished the fake ice cream that I was going to save for tomorrow's breakfast. I'm wondering, again, where these house flies are coming from. I was wondering the same thing before leaving the house this morning and before going to bed last night.

Sometimes ideas bounce around nicely as thoughts, but don't hold their shape when you take them out and stand the words up.

On the way home, I had reminded myself to look up "velodrome trackstand" videos and send one to Frank. So YouTube collected much of the waning evening. I guess that Google made some money for me doing that, but I don't know how.

I don't think the old man's out there anymore. I didn't want to walk too close to his car, in case he was there, (maybe for fear I'd have to nod again,) but I didn't see a head or any white hair. I looked stupid walking half a block and turning around. Maybe he got tired of feeling sorry for himself.

And when, after long centuries of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, the knowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish traded partnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape of nature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, we traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis, and -- if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament -- planetary catastrophe.

-- Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods

As the layers of paint and mystery are pulled away, it becomes apparent that unpredictability, chaos, and madness are some of the most important cogs in the city's machinery. The deck is stacked with jokers. There is a ghost in this machine, and it appears to be stupid and/or drunk. This situation will not change, because the human condition is its source.

-- Robert Hurst, The Art of Urban Cycling

The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war.

— E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

The point of an economy, even a dynamic economy, is not to have more and more; it is to liberate us from the economic--to provide a material platform from which we may go on to build the good life. That's the alternative American dream.

-- Jerome M. Segal, Graceful Simplicity: Toward a Philosophy and Politics of Simple of Living (found via No Impact Man: An alternative American dream)

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship [...] is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. [...] you will never have enough, never feel you have enough.

But the insidious thing about these forms of worship [(body, beauty, allure, power, intellect,...)] is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.

This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, [...] The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

[...] The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

— David Foster Wallace, Commencement Speech at Kenyon College, 2005-05-21

The whole speech is an inspiring read, (thanks to Maree,) — more inspiring than the commencement speech I heard last weekend.

I would only argue with Wallace in his labelling of societal norms as “our defaults.” Our real defaults are prior to and deeper than our ego-centric urges.

Our real defaults can be re-discovered by disconnecting from societal influences (a la various flavors and degrees of asceticism. (Don’t forget to recycle your television.))

Can they also be discovered by remaining immersed in society? Does it only demand watchful attention? Who that’s interested in cultivating awareness really wants to remain a part of pop culture?

path | ways...

I met someone, Friday, at the recycle bins behind the West Side Market. He was sorting for metals as I was making a drop-off. We talked; I have some things he might want. He showed me a few spots to leave him aluminum, brass, copper: toss it over this fence, cover it with these boxes, leave a bag as a signal under the corner of this dumpster's lid...

They have a bad name from the start -- "Scrapper" having a pejorative connotation -- and they've developed a worse one, as many are catching attention by stealing from and dismantling houses and buildings.

The profession, itself, though, is indispensable by nature, for nature, for all. I can't think of a much more admirable but undervalued pursuit than sorting others' trash to reclaim and reuse -- particularly considering our society's overconsumption, energy inefficiency, and pollution :: material abuse!

What if we started with a new, positive, name for the scrapper: Re-user? Re-claimer?
Help!

We could clean up our land, cut material costs, decrease waste, and employ many, if we would better codify the process and bring it out from underground. Formalize the networks of people and organizations involved: connect re-claimers with builders, deconstruction agencies, materials businesses, waste management. (Integral industry!)

It starts, though, with respect for and the re-naming of this pursuit and those that occupy themselves with it.

So we've interwoven:

• the means of connection
• the core of a connective network, and
• the part that provides that means.

Nexus comes from the Latin nectere, to bind, (not to be confused with nectar, which is the Latin drink of the gods, but from the Greek for death (think necro.))

Now we have a new definition. Nexus (n): a tool for visualizing your social connections. (Found via information aesthetics: facebook social network graph.) Install the Nexus Facebook app, and it generates a semi-interactive graph of all of your friends and how they're connected. Mouse over a friend-node, and all of her or his friends on your graph are highlighted.

I've said before, there's a ton of potentially interesting data here -- who's connected to whom -- free for the mining. (Is Valdis watching?)

But ... means and membranes ... What are the means of personal connections? Business, love, work: are these just platforms, and communication the only means of direct connection? (Is that a cop-out and re-definition?)

The comment box at the bottom of this post is also a means, (means: instrument or agency.)

Show me your membrane.

Chris Herbert just wrote in Aggregating My Online Presences about both consolidating [and cascading updates through] his various online personas, as well as aggregating them using FriendFeed.

I think of jeffschuler.net as a hub for my various web tendrils: my locally-hosted blog and an increasing number of off-shore services: Last.fm, Upcoming, Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, social networks, etc.

(Last week a professional acquaintance noticed that I've got "a lot of kooky stuff on there.")

I present many of these facets as widgets. While I appreciate that the widgets allow for content that isn't flat or normalized (like FriendFeed) -- each service shouldn't have equal footing or the same "shape" -- the page gets awfully busy as more info-sections are added. So I simply link to, rather than embed, certain services.

But what if these models (both the hub-of-widgets, which Facebook Apps also supports in building profiles, and the aggregation stream) would take into account the viewer's preferences?

For example: I, viewing your homepage (or "profile" or "personal hub") like to use Last.fm, so my browser expands your Last.fm widget. Likewise, it hides or collapses a side of you in which I'm not as interested.

Keep the distinct shape and texture of different services, and allow for dissemination from a single place without overloading the viewer.

cuz I ain't got no_body

But that function is only part of the story, and, really, a feature, [not a bug,] if viewed in context of longer and larger processes. The web is the frameworks for -- and accelerator of -- constant connection, explosion and re-arranging of minds and ideas.

Individual talents and perspectives don't have to shrivel within a retribalized society; they merely interact within a group consciousness that has the potential for releasing far more creativity than the old atomized culture. Literate man is alienated, impoverished man; retribalized man can lead a far richer and more fulfilling life--not the life of a mindless drone but of the participant in a seamless web of interdependence and harmony. The implosion of electric technology is transmogrifying literate, fragmented man into a complex and depth-structured human being with a deep emotional awareness of his complete interdependence with all of humanity. The old "individualistic" print society was one where the individual was "free" only to be alienated and dissociated, a rootless outsider bereft of tribal dreams; our new electronic environment compels commitment and participation, and fulfills man's psychic and social needs at profound levels.

[...]

the global village makes maximum disagreement and creative dialog inevitable.

-- Marshall McLuhan, The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan (March 1969)
(emphasis mine)

I'll split hairs and suggest that McLuhan was wrong when he said seamless. Separations exist, and are essential for growth within: polarization/contraction provides focus, cooperative motivation; pressure-cook. But the seams are more porous and flexible than in meatspace, due to the web's openness and allowed dynamism in personal identification.

(Build a highly-adaptable, low-bandwidth medium, and all sorts of social norms are discarded because of ease of anonymity. As bandwidth has increased and patterns have been been formalized, anonymity is somewhat less available, but adaptability and fluidity of interaction remain.)

Not that competition ever goes away because everything happens at once all the time. It's a rich situation. But we are learning global harmony.

[...]

Our social models, including our corporate world, were designed as mechanical models. But organism and mechanism are very different [...]

At present we're moving away from inventor-created, allopoietic systems to autopoietic systems -- literally self-created systems, living systems in holarchy instead of hierarchy, with negotiations instead of top-down command; systems that negotiate cooperation and thus design themselves from within instead of being engineered and repaired and redesigned by inventors or designers.

-- Elisabet Sahtouris, Living Systems, the Internet and the Human Future (May, 2000)

Paul Hawken gave examples and a very nice metaphor for this phenom in his Blessed Unrest SALT talk, (mp3 | summary.) ... Don't sweat global: think local and act local, and more appropriate large-scale results will emerge as aggregate.

(Last-quoted) Sahtouris is speaking on March 1st at River's Edge in Rocky River. Jenita calls her my new guru secret crush but got me a ticket for the workshop anyway.

The last time we were at River's Edge the audience was largely composed of the Sisters of St. Joseph from the congregation next door... I'm happily certain this won't just be an echo chamber for my pre-conceptions.

This post showed up in the Midtown Cleveland blog in my Google Reader this morning, though it was already removed when I went looking for it on their site:

Hacked

This site was hacked by the Iraqi e-Army. Tell your Mr Fool Bush to get outside our country; Iraq, or all American websites will be hacked. All the database of this website was hacked, all names, contact numbers, zip codes, everything is with us now. Bye - actually, see you a lot later.

According to health statistics, you're about twice as likely to be injured in a car accident as by physical assault. And you're much more likely to suffer that car accident in a sprawling exurban location where people drive more.

-- Safer and greener in the city, an email from GreenCityBlueLake

In the city, I feel safer on the street, in the open.
In the suburbs, on the sidewalk, out of traffic's way.

And what goes through the minds of people with the luxury of seeing these things from a "safe distance" -- white minds or black minds -- is this: "Thank God I've moved farther away, where nothing like that could happen."

-- Dick Feagler, Beating in Shaker leaves some ugly cultural welts (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

It had been awhile since I'd experienced that public privacy, safety.
Secure but desolate.

Still in my head, partly framing the experience:: an image of the great American disconnect conjured by Kate Sopko, reading from her new book last weekend: (Just $7 for local light, bright!)

Yet, suburban culture (especially as our suburbs move more toward the 'gated community' model) does not have much within it to encourage connection between people, and has a lot within it that encourages isolationism. If someone would like to disconnect from people, little will stop them: they can retreat into a single-family home, vast entertainment complexes, virtual reality an a daily series of scripted social interactions. This is far less likely for people who grow up in poorer communities, though, for sure, entertaining ourselves to death is becoming an accessible option across class lines in America.

-- Kate Sopko, Systems are Cowards, from Stewards of the Lost Lands

Ilya thought our neighbors were celebrating the Chinese New Year, (2008 is year of the rat,) to one-up their Christmas decoration. AsiaTown is on the other side of MidTown, though.

I wondered if the rats in Public Square had fled uptown, escaping the poisoning of their boroughs.

John guessed correctly: a showing against non-union labor. We hadn't seen the scab on the rat's underbelly, but it was grossly apparent when I went outside to shoot {photos of / the bull with} the guys making their stand.