"Make Up Your Own Rules"

It's graduation season and I am enjoying watching a variety of graduation addresses. Here's one from author Neil Gaiman, who is one of my favorite writers and who is modeling a new way of living as an artist and writer... on social media and the web.



Here's a part of the speech I found very interesting. It comes at the end when he has already given advice about akin art and living as an artist.

We're in a transitional world right now, if you're in any kind of artistic field, because the nature of distribution is changing, the models by which creators got their work out into the world, and got to keep a roof over their heads and buy sandwiches while they did that, are all changing. I've talked to people at the top of the food chain in publishing, in bookselling, in all those areas, and nobody knows what the landscape will look like two years from now, let alone a decade away. The distribution channels that people had built over the last century or so are in flux for print, for visual artists, for musicians, for creative people of all kinds.

Which is, on the one hand, intimidating, and on the other, immensely liberating. The rules, the assumptions, the now-we're supposed to's of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, are breaking down. The gatekeepers are leaving their gates. You can be as creative as you need to be to get your work seen. YouTube and the web (and whatever comes after YouTube and the web) can give you more people watching than television ever did. The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are. 

So make up your own rules.

Odd: Family History For Sale, By a Stranger

I was doing some idle family-name searching this weekend and came across a person on Etsy selling illustrations by my grandmother from a book published in 1929.

This gorgeous double-sided plate features the work of the artist Isabel Cooper from specimens at the American Museum of Natural History. One side features seashells from tropical waters and the other American specimens.

Isabel Cooper was an artist and illustrator who provided paintings for a variety of publications, created murals for public buildings, and traveled to remote outposts with scientists where she fulfilled the role later filled by color photography.

As near as I can tell, these are plates cut from a book my grandmother did illustrations for in the years before her marriage to Charles Mahaffie. 

I'm not sure how I feel about this sort of thing appearing for sale. My grandmother was paid for her work back in the 1920s, so that's not an issue. But I hate to think of great old books being cut apart and mined like this. Also, I always thought of Etsy as a site for artists and artisans to sell things they created themselves.

A Few Delaware Musicians to Watch

Karen and I went out last night to watch a concert by Doug James and Keith Mack, two local musicians who do, I think, great work. Particularly when they play together.

The show, at Epworth United Methodist Church, in Rehoboth, was part of the Rehoboth Beach Autumn Jazz Festival; but was also much more. It was a release party for a new EP by the duo. They have released three songs they are working on for a larger album and, based on what we heard last night, it promises to be pretty good.

Doug James has had a long career as a songwriter. He's penned hits for a number of people, including Michael Bolton, for whom he wrote "How Am I Supposed to Live Without You." But he's also a fine performer with strong piano chops and a great voice. We've heard him many times around our area, playing restaurant and bar gigs and sitting in for jazzy church services.

Keith Mack is a Rehoboth native who went away to NYC and recorded and toured as a rock musician. He's returned and plays around the area as well.

Together, I think these two have a great sound.

I will be honest: as much as I admire Doug James' craft as a songwriter, he writes the sort of music I don't really care for. I never could listen to Michael Bolton, though I know strong songwriting when I hear it. But the work he's doing now with Keith Mack takes traditional song forms and stretches it, adding a depth and adventurous spirit, without losing a core commercial appeal, that sounds interesting.

The crowd at last night's show was interesting as well. IT was a who's who of the Lewes/Rehoboth arts and music scene. Many people know these two musicians and many, clearly, count them as friends.

It was, in a word, cool.

Have We Lost Wordle?

If you've read my efforts here, or on the DGDC News blog, or on the NSGIC News blog, you'll know that I am a fan of Wordle, a lovely little web tool that is used to create word clouds from blocks of text. This morning, I read on TechCrunch that Wordle has run into trademark trouble. Someone already owns the name "wordle" and they want it back.

I use Wordle to creat graphics that illustrate points I'm trying to make. For example, here is a word cloud I made from the abstracts for presentations planned at the 2010 Delaware GIS Conference:

I used this in a series of posts introducing the various presentations. I've also used Wordle-generated word clouds in presentations, in e-mails, and as a representation of my work duties that is posted on my office door.

So, the thought of losing this tool makes me sad. The developer has posted a request for pro-bono legal advice. That's all there is at wordle.net just now. As far as I know, that site was never a money-making proposition.

I hope an accord with the trademark-owner can be reached. Or, at least, that the-site-formerly-known-as-Wordle can come back under a new name.

Update 1: Phil Bradley's comment points to his own post on this (Wordle Closed - alternatives) which includes a list of other word-cloud tools. It's very helpful.

Update 2:  Richard James has let me know that Wordle is back, at least for now. And the TechCrunch post has been updated with a link to a twitter campaign to save wordle.

At the Craft Fair

Karen and I went downtown today to wander around the annual Craft Fair hosted by the Lewes Historical Society.

The day started out overcast and wet, but the rain held off enough for us to have a pleasant walk into town.

The Craft Fair was scattered around the Historical Society grounds in a variety of tents and pavilions. There were painters and jewelry-makers and weavers and glass artists and metal-workers and everything in between.

The bluegrass band Bitter Creek were there. They have a very tight, very pleasant sound. They added a nice touch to the day.

And they were an inspiration to at least one other artist.

I was pleased to see the glass artist Justin Cavagnaro was there. I have admired his work for a while, particularly his glass-headed golf putters, one of which I photographed in 2007 at the Bethany Beach Boardwalk Arts Festival.

It was a great way to spend a morning, and we both came away with ideas for Christmas gifts that we'll have to follow-up on at a later, more discreet, date.

A Barn in the Spotlight

This old barn, at the intersection of Clay Road and kings Highway, outside of Lewes, Delaware, has been much in focus lately. It is on a tract of land that is proposed to be turned into a regional shopping center.

This proposal is strongly opposed by most people in the Lewes area. It's an unpopular place for a shopping center and, I think, a bad idea from an economics standpoint -- we don't need more shopping and this could threaten existing retail outlets.

As a result of all the concern, I think, I've noticed a strong increase in people stopping along the road to take its picture.

Now, I note, local painter Kim Klabe is talking about making it the subject of one of her canvases:

...just in case the developers win and the barn gets torn down. Saw it from a different angle the other morning and had one of those AAAAAhhhhhh, look at that...moments.

It's a pretty barn. I'd like to see what Kim does with it.

When the development plan for that property first came forward, the developers talked about saving the barn and turning it into a restaurant. I thought that was a good idea. They've since backed away from that idea.

That's a shame.

Remembering a Grandparent's Adventures

There was an undersea volcanic eruption in the western Pacific, near Tonga, this week. The Boston Globe's The Big Picture offered a set of fascinating photographs of an island being born from the eruption. The image at right is from that collection.

Scrolling through these pictures brought my mind back to a series of letters written by my Grandmother in which she described a similar eruption that sprang up in the Galapagos Islands, in the eastern Pacific, off the coast of South America, in the spring of 1925.

My grandmother, Isabel Cooper, was an artist. Starting in 1917, she made seven voyages with the naturalist William Beebe to Central and South America, and surrounding equatorial seas, to study animals and plants.

This was in the days before color photography. My grandmother, as the expeditions' “scientific artist,” produced detailed color paintings of the flora and fauna of the Amazonian jungle, the Galapagos Islands, and the open ocean. The image at left is from The Arcturus adventure: an account of the New York Zoological Society's first oceanographic expedition (1926, Putnum). It shows my grandmother at work on the Arcturus, painting a live fish.

During the 1925 voyage, she wrote a series of letters to my grandfather, Charles Mahaffie, who she had met the previous winter and with whom she would carry on a nearly three and a half year courtship – mostly by letter. We are lucky to have these letters in a collection edited by my father.

On Easter Sunday (April 12) of 1925, she wrote from the Arcturus:

I have put in some peculiar Easters: fire at sea five years ago; shooting rapids of the Mazaruni River last year; etc. But this time is the prize. What do you suppose has gone and happened out here in this “ash heap of the world?” Blooming volcano has broken loose, erupting all over the place. Rather decent of it to pick just this time to do it, as we are probably the only people anywhere around for a few hundred miles to observe it.

They had been anchored in Darwin Bay, at Tower Island (now Isla Genovesa), when “the night watch noticed a faint glow in the direction of Albemarle Island [Isla Isabela], about sixty miles away.” When morning came they began a voyage of a day and night, across the span of the Galapagos Islands, to reach the volcano.

We got to the scene of the eruption early this morning, after the wildest possible night. You couldn't sleep. It was too exciting, steaming slowly toward the first active volcano that any of us had seen.

They watched the eruption from off-shore. I think it differed from this week's eruption in that it was on an existing island and featured less explosive activity, but perhaps more lava flow. A small group went ashore and trekked close to the crater. That was probably a foolish thing to do, as she describes their return “in very bad shape.”

Legs full of cramps, from walking on hot lava, I suppose. And all symptoms of bad thirst, tongues swollen, etc. They finished their canteens in the first mile. They ran into some pretty poisonous gases, which they couldn't smell, but which made them sick.

In spite of this, she had wanted to go ashore, if only at the edge of the island, but was not allowed. And she wanted to try to capture what she was seeing:

I tried to make a sketch of the thing: memory sketch of the red clouds and generally hellish aspect at night, as well as the really beautiful colors of the craters by daylight, but have arrived at the conclusion that it can't be painted. Usually takes a good whang on the head to convince me that I can't accomplish something that appeals to me to do, but this time I give up.

They watched the volcano through Easter night and into the following Monday morning before returning to their work. At midnight she wrote:

We have spent the whole evening looking at the crater – flames popping up here and there and most incredible clouds rising out of it and turning all kinds of red. The moon is just about two days past the full, but enormously bright, and adds to the general strange effect.

It's a large world we live on. We in the internet age are used to seeing images instantly from around the globe. We have become used to what in earlier generations would have been strange, fascinating, and special.

My grandmother's time was modern, of course; the voyages of the Arcturus were transmitted by radio (The “wireless”) and reported in the newspapers in New York. But these were just the “when” and “where” details and brief descriptions. The bright colors and fantastic shapes of alien plants, animals and fish needed the work of artists to be brought back to the home-bound public.

So as we page through yet another collection of photos from the other side of the world, or watch a YouTube video from some far frontier, we should try to remember that, at one time, even the other end of our nation was an expedition away.

What we see as “a small world, after all” is really a vast place deserving of respect and wonder. We should not let the ease of access we have inherited blind us to the size and diversity of our planet.

The Perfect Toy for the Moment

I give you obamicon.me, an on-line imagery toy that creates an iconic (Obamiconic?) version of any image you care to upload. It mimics that icon-like (Obamicon-like?) image by Shepard Fairey of the President-Elect seen recently on the cover of Time magazine.

I expect there to be a flurry of activity on this site. It perfectly captures both the mood of anticipation that marks this last week before the inauguration, and our national love of looking at ourselves. I know I found it charming.

And, we're just waiting. Sure, there are news stories to follow (if you are a political junkie), and football playoffs (at least in our region), but aren't we all just waiting for January 20?

So when an on-line toy that is appropriate to the time, we jump right in.

I tried a few different nihilistic inspirational posters, including the celebration of silly at right. I also tried for outdoorsy and for thoughtful. But I liked the goofy one the best.

There's a Tiny Little Buddha in There?

On the windowsill in my office, up there with a small chunk of New Hampshire granite, a logo Slinky, and a tiny ceramic turtle-shaped planter (why do I have that?), I have a small red plastic box. It looks like a 1960s-era transistor radio, with a single speaker, a switch and a volume wheel.

It is a Buddha Machine, from FM3; "a little plastic box that plays music." In fact it contains two short loops of music that repeat in a drone that can be conducive to meditation, or intense work, or just weirding-out your co-workers.

I bought mine on-line a few years back after reading about it in The New Yorker. They are made by a couple of musicians in China -- one Chinese, the other a Westerner -- who also perform with groups of the machines as FM3.

Sasha Frere-Jones has written about the Buddha Machine again, both in the magazine and on his blog. I think it was his tip before that led me to the original. The news this time is that there is an updated version of the Buddha Machine, with more loops and options. There is also, apparently, an iPhone application.

Frere-Jones also points to a page with samples of some of the loops and to a cool site that offers a virtual wall of loop-playing machines that can be mixed and matched and played in dizzying combinations.

Think how much fun I can have with my office-mates now!

What Music Do I Like?

I have eclectic taste in music. When I try to explain or demonstrate my taste, folks often simplify the discussion to one word "weird." I guess that's fair, my taste buds are spread all over the musical tongue.

I heard a piece on NPR this evening, however, that might help to illustrate what I love about the many different musics I like: an openness.

The story is about a group of Nashville session players who set aside their formulaic day-job playing once each week to play as The Time Jumpers in a regular Monday evening gig at a place called The Station Inn. They play standards from across the American music spectrum; generally as western swing. They play for love, fun, and friendship. They are not trying to be "successful." And they sound great.

The part of the NPR story that caught my ear was toward the end, when guitarist Andy Reiss explained what he likes about playing this way:

The beauty of music is [that] when your ears are wide open, your heart is wide open. You're not even thinking. You're listening and you're part of something, and everybody is doing that. When that happens, it's pure magic. And as a musician, you know how rare that is.

What struck me is how similar this is to the way that the members of the Grateful Dead, who play what would seem an entirely different sort of music, describe what they seek on stage. They talk in very similar terms in their 2009 tour announcement (which I linked to over the week-end).

Mickey Hart calls it the "mind meld." The group describes the process in a video posted on their site as "all about listening. You listen more than you play..." Phil Lesh says that that sense of surprise is why he keeps playing:

For me, it’s the question mark that’s really pulling me in...what’s gonna happen? When you walk out on the stage the possibilities are infinite every time. The musical possibilities are infinite: there is no end to it, there’s no back wall and there’s no ceiling, there’s no floor. It’s infinite and therefore you can still explore it till the day that you die.

So here we have two different sorts of music that bear striking similarities. They both draw from the deep well of American songs, they both exist somewhat outside the main stream, and they both are played by musicians who understand that the beauty of the music is found in the other players.

This is what I like. The genre doesn't really matter; I'm interested in the process and the surprise.

Another Word Cloud

I wanted to try another of these wordle word-clouds. This one is a cloud of the tags I use in del.icio.us. A more practical and clickable version of this has long lived at the lowest left-hand spot on this blog, of course, but I think this gives an accurate picture of what my focus is when I browse the web and mark things for further use.

I search mostly for items of and about Delaware. Many of these I find in my work for state government; I track land-use issues among county and municipal governments. Many of these I mark for inclusion on various pages of my office's web site; we use items relating to land-use planning, about proposals reviewed under the PLUS Process, on the US Census, and about the use and sharing of geospatial data (GIS stuff). I've also used del.icio.us tags to supplement an aggregation of state GIS coordination RSS feeds that I help maintain for the National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC).

I still want to take another crack at a family-tree wordle. The one I did the other night was just a selection from among the Mahaffies on my tree. I'm trying to figure out a way to extract all 1,700 of the people on my family tree and make a wordle from that last.

Very Many Mahaffies

There's a neat light java tool out there called Wordle which creates colorful word-clouds. They are not the sort of thing that you can use for navigation, but they are loads of fun. 

I have created a few, including this one based on a bunch of names from my family tree. Have a browse through the gallery and see if you aren't tempted to make one yourself.

The National Portrait Gallery Has A Sense of Humor

We were in northern Virginia this week-end for a dance competition in Crystal City. Our daughters were in dance classes all day on Saturday and part of Sunday; they performed in competition Saturday evening. They did quite well, thank you.

While we were not needed Saturday afternoon, Karen and I went wandering by Metro with a few friends. We visited the National Portrait Museum, where, among other exhibits, there hangs the Steven Colbert portrait.

Colbert has been airing a several-part series lately about his efforts to get the serial portrait from the set of his Colbert Report added to a museum in Washington. The Portrait Gallery people agreed to play along, for a while, and have placed the Colbert Portrait between the Men's and Women's rooms outside the gallery of presidential portraits on the second floor.

It is drawing a crowd.

We found folks photographing the portrait or having their own portrait photographed with Colbert's. And lots of people standing around to watch.

It made it a bit hard to get to the Men's room.

We're All In This Thing Together

There has been an interesting convergence of on-line collaboration this week that I think highlights the value of sharing our stuff out on the net. The internet provides a space in which a ridiculously large number of people can share, comment on, and react to a wide variety of ideas and works of art. And I think that is a good thing.

Here are a few examples, from my limited web-cruising, and from just this week.

Flickr has announced the formation of a Commons, in which they hope to facilitate a community-wide collective tagging and adding of attributes to publicly available photo collections. It has grown out of the ability of flickr users to add descriptive tags to other users' photos.

All that work that we've put in has contributed to making something greater than the sum of its parts: an organic information system, derived of descriptive words and phrases made entirely from individual contributions.

The Library of Congress has stepped up to the plate to help get things moving by posting about 3,000 photos from their archives and inviting users to add tags, descriptions, and further information. The project gives another window into the rich photographic history of the nation, and may just add a deep new understanding of the material in those collections.

From the Library’s perspective, this pilot project is a statement about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better acquire information, knowledge and—most importantly—wisdom. One of our goals, frankly, is to learn as much as we can about that power simply through the process of making constructive use of it.

The old-photos blog Shorpy (a favorite of mine) provides some moderately ironic proof of concept. Shorpy takes selected photographs from the Library of Congress' older site, which has traditionally offered thumbnail views and possible click-thrus to raw images, and prepares them for on-line viewing. In a sense, it has been a precursor to the new Library of Congress effort with flickr; it colleted information via blog-style commenting.

Yesterday, the same day as the flickr/Library of Congress announcement, Shorpy posted a photograph of the Drake Family, and father and two sons musical group, playing at a dance in Texas in 1942. The posting was spotted and commented-on by two daughters and a grand-daughter of the young men shown playing music so long ago. They added fascinating and personal details about the photo.

Meanwhile, in my professional life, I came across an announcement by the real-estate map service Zillow that they have released GIS data of the neighborhood boundaries that they use in their maps. Their intent, they said, was "to allow people to use and contribute to our growing database" by inviting users to add new neighborhoods, or suggest edits to those already in the collection. And users can post their work back to Zillow for eventual integration into Zillow's on-line offerings.

This is a form of on-line collaborative work that requires a bit more specialized software, but it follows the same pattern as the Flickr/Library of Congress and Shorpy models -- the collective knowledge and group energy of a web-full of regular folks can add a remarkable amount of knowledge to our culture.

How I Spent My Week-End

A few lines drawn on my forehead and from nose to mouth. A touch of eye-liner (but only on one eye). And a liberal amount of hair-white.

An eye-patch, black top-hat and voluminous black cloak. And a completely cool tail-coat with a rich-looking pattern and scads of gold braid all over it. I really liked that coat.

This picture is the MySpace-style self portrait that I couldn't help taking while in costume just before the first performance of the Nutcracker.

In the days before children (BC), Karen and I were active with the Possum Point Players, a local theater group. Karen played in the orchestra and I took small character parts or worked backstage doing sound, props or other crew work.

I sometimes miss doing shows. I hope to get back on stage more when the girls are driving themselves and off to college. It was fun to be out in front of an audience again, if only in a small part.

Some Things I Like (#567)

Getting Back to Basics

Artist Jason Salavon has created a new work based on the 2007 Ikea Catalog.

He has reduced it to its most basic elements, page lay-out and color.

(Via information aesthetics)

Fun With Flag Graphics

The web site We Are Multicolored has a nifty little flash tool up that lets you choose three nations and mash-up the elements of their flags. I chose the flags of the United State, the United Kingdom, and Trinidad and Tobago. The site includes information about the symbolism of each element. It's educational, but I was just having fun with art.

Banned Books Week

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathon Swift
Originally uploaded by hatcher.library

The week of September 29 through October 6 is Banned Books Week. This is a week when those of us who read should remember those books that folks, for a wide variety of reasons, have tried to take out of our hands.

The list is long and diverse. Would-be censors right, left and center have all challenged books. The urge to stifle thought that we don't agree with is universal; we all have a duty to combat that urge within ourselves.

It is interesting to note that more than "banned" books, we now speak of "challenged" books. These are books that someone is trying to keep us from reading, either by banning or by raising an un-holy stink about them.

The American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom points to this quote from Ray Bradbury (author of Fahrenheit 451):

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Thus we see campaigns that complain loudly about certain books. They may or may not call for book-banning, but they all can lead librarians, teachers, parents and readers to shy away from certain books. And that is not good.

In Wisconsin

I'm in Madison, Wisconsin, this week for the 2007 Annual Conference of the National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC). I'll be here for a week of day-long, and evening deep, meetings. These people are crazy.

I arrived about mid-day Saturday and had time to walk around and look at things. Our conference hotel is just a block from the Wisconsin State Capitol. It is a lovely building. The State has recently refurbished it and it glows in the center of this pretty little city.

I had meant to circle the Capitol and walk out a ways. But I noticed folks walking into the building. I followed them and was astounded to find a gorgeous palatial interior, fully open to the public and apparently quite popular.

So I got stuck in there, wandering around ogling the architecture and taking loads of photos. I really love this building. There is color and grandeur. There is rich wood and polished stone. There is gilt and marble. There is plenty of light.

Large areas of the building are open to the public, and the staff are pleasant and helpful; proud of their building and eager to share information about it.

I worked my way up several sets of stairs until I came to the inside of the great dome. There's a metal spiral staircase the leads to a walkway around the outside of the dome. Up there are views all around the center of the city and over the two lakes that frame the Capitol. There are also close-up views of a number of heroic statues.

I probably spent an hour and a half wandering around. I was in pig-heaven. I hope to get back there at some point this week.

By the way, in case you were wondering: there are plenty of badgers in there as well.

Luckily, There are Sunsets

Life can be hard. Work doesn't always go well. School can be a challenge.

There are tooth-aches. And head-aches.

Some days are diamonds and some days bring the sort of almost geologic pressure that scientists tell us creates diamonds.

We're not always going to be happy.

On the other hand, if you keep your eyes open, there's often something very pretty to see.