The Archigram Archive is finally online. It’s be-yew-tiful. BLDGBLOG has a good entry on how it all looks from here in the future.

Yuko Shimizu’s sketch blog. Lovely illustrations with charming and ingenious depictions of her process.

Confederate History Month.

John Pawson’s House of Stone. Not sure why the recycledness of the granite is the headline though.

An installation by Kit Webster. The best moment of the video is when someone wanders between the screens and it looks suddenly magical instead of just digital.

There’s no one like the Racialicious-ers for elucidating complex systems of power. Thanks for thinking so much about children, Peterson et al.

Excellent essay on the state of e-readers.

Generative drawings by Tim Hodkinson (via Data is Nature)

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A while ago, we were out of town for ten days and hired a neighbor’s kid to pet-sit for us. (This is a boring story, but pretend I am MimiSmartypants for a sec and can render a bus ride riveting.) We left specific directions about what to do each day. He’s a nerdy eighteen, a bit of a homebody who’d done some pet-sitting for us in the past, though in retrospect, I think his father supervised on those occasions. We didn’t expect any problems. However when we got home the cats were skinny and insane with hunger and the house was torn to shreds and smelled much worse than a barn. Judging by the unused food on the counter and empty water bowls, the kid must have come once to pick up the cash, and not bothered to return. I was livid. It took all my self control not to cross the street to break his face or at least demand he return the cash. However, it’s not good politics to quarrel with neighbors, and since the cats yet live and his father is a nice guy, I decided to let it go. I expected never to see the kid again, but oddly enough when I saw him and his father the other day he, saluted me politely and asked how I was, all limpid eyed and innocent. He was totally unashamed; in fact, appeared unaware that he’d done anything wrong. It’s not an act. He’s not clever or devious enough. But it’s shocking and confusing and I keep on being shocked and confused every time I encounter him. What does it mean? Does he have lead poisoning, amnesia, softening of the brain, a sociopathic tapeworm, terminal idiocy? And how could he be too stupid to throw away all the food he didn’t feed the animals? Did he really think we wouldn’t notice the piles of uneaten food or their stiff little starved bodies? Every time I see him, I scrutinize him carefully, but nothing; he’s totally blank.

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I couldn’t sleep between two and five am last night so I read all about Elizabeth I, and pored over her portraits for a while until I fell asleep and dreamed about a triptych called the Pelican, the Phoenix, and the Rabbit-Horse.

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I’m not sure piles of links here make much sense for anyone besides me. I still need a place to keep the special ones, but Twitter really takes the place of old timey link blogs. There is a constant flow of stimulating stuff. As I use it more, I find myself visiting link blogs less and being more attracted to journal and essay sites. There’s a generosity to that kind of communication. It feels personal, a gift given at some risk… Formspring seems to focus both the sweetness and risks of personal writing. People answer questions they ought to ignore. They engage questioners who ask things they have no right to… Is this something like the Japanese concept of amae? I can’t quite understand amae any more than I can comfortably intuit the correct moments for formal or informal you in a romance language; but in the best cases on Formspring there’s something both sweet and sinister in the presumption of the questioners which corresponds to a surprising generosity and indulgence on the part of the person responding. In the worst cases, the person answering becomes complicit in her own harassment by choosing to respond. (When I first started reading about the crazy harassment going on among young teens, I assumed respondents did not have the ability to accept or reject questions. They do, but choose not to.)  Now all the grown ups are asking ourselves why.⁰¹ However, I think adults misunderstand how truly passive the act of reply is. All that typing throws us. We assume it is an active response, while in reality a silent refusal requires a far more commanding and adult sense of self. I wonder if some of these kids are unconsciously waiting for explicit grown-up permission to take up the kind of space a refusal entails? It would be counter to the fundamental emphasis on compliance that grown up American culture demands of children. It’s impossible to require children to both obey our demands and defy everyone else’s… The other thing I wonder is what larger purpose this cycle serves. I have this sudden picture of an imaginary aggregate of this particular flavor of interactions among this particular age group as a little cog busily turning away within a larger cultural machine. What is that machine and why does it demand such a thing? What are we cranking out?

I was fatly pregnant, a few days before my due date, and V and I were madly trying to get our kitchen to a stopping point. We’d just had some cabinetry installed (because after the work we did on this building back in the day of subzero temperatures, lead paint, asbestos, antediluvian linoleum adhesive, frostbite, and strange smells, we’ll be damned if we are going to do any more construction work. By we, I mostly mean me. I, I will be damned if I am going take trowel in hand and apply myself for backbreaking hours only to produce work I’d make anyone else rip out. For example, I know quality concrete work, and mine is not it. These days if I can’t afford to have someone do it right I will live years with it not done at all. Exhibit A: persistent hole in the floor which will eventually contain stairs leading to the basement, but probably not for many years.) and we were trying to do something or other to it that probably involved V simultaneously adjusting the drawers with a screwdriver and wiring for new ceiling lamps and me lumbering around pushing things back and forth excitedly and mopping my brow. Things got more and more frenzied until V, like many imminent first time fathers, met with an accident. He sliced his finger open and bled all over the new kitchen. Because I am the (self-educated) doctor of the house, I decided he needed stitches, and because I was concerned I’d pick up some foul incarnation of MRSA or leprosy in the emergency room right before having a baby, I decided we should call my father first. My father, who despite (or because of) penning fancy medical textbooks and having various degrees from sundry venerable institutions, has always enjoyed a bit of domestic surgery, setting broken bones, spaying pets, stitching on us, and hooking us up to IVs as necessary when we were kids; said to tell the patient to lie down and try not to bleed so much. He gave him fifteen minutes to stop bleeding, and when the patient did not comply, gave him another. Then he gave me directions for stitching the finger up with either thread or SuperGlue. I chose the latter and bounced down to the corner bodega for it, where the owner was a bit surprised to see me out alone with my girth at that hour. Anyhow it turns out that if the edges of the wound are clean, you just squeeze them together and draw a line of sutures perpendicular to the cut. You have to use a real amount of glue and hold it closed for a while, but it works perfectly. The patient sometimes still complains that he has no feeling on one side of that finger, but I point out that no one would have brought him beer in the emergency room, and he concedes that yes, that’s so.

I have been listening to old This American Life episodes as I work. How sad is the postscript at the end of the episode that includes the story of the priest, in which Ira Glass tells us that Patrick Wall no longer attends mass… And after some more listening, some fascinating research by Will Felps on bad apples and group dynamics. I’d be curious to see more documentation about the longer term effects on in any group, workplace, or family; though thinking about the groups I’ve been a part of, I think I know what they’d be. The most interesting part of the research is the idea that it’s possible to counter this effect. Most of us know the minimum needed to make a group run smoothly, it’s just that some people are certain none of it applies to them.

This is absolutely fascinating: work on a nanovaccine that stops autoimmune disease by stimulating the immune system. Obviously the immune system is much more than a single function or closed loop, but what is it? The researcher describes the two types of T-cells as “musicians in the same orchestra,” but it must be more than that… I haven’t researched it, but anyone with an autoimmune disease knows from experience they are more prone to infection than other people. (There’s probably data on that.) What does that mean? Also, how does this tie in to the hygiene hypothesis? e.g. if we accept the conjecture that autoimmune diseases are in part a result of generations of hand washing, vaccinations, pasteurization, antibiotics, and parasitelessness (good things!) in our extremely sanitized developed world, could we start to think of something like this as a complementary prophylactic therapy?⁰¹

The comics of Alejandro Jodorowsky. (via We Love You So)

I mostly gag at tips for boosting creativity, but some of these are actually interesting. (I always feel like a crank for not liking creativity boosters.⁰² Everyone appears to adore them even when they suck… While we’re at it, I also dislike exhortations to designers to see every bit of organization and infrastructure as Important Design Problems. Don’t say that. Most of us who make things waste a lot of time procrastinating by telling ourselves that everything is a design problem. Everything can be, but you’ll accomplish a lot more of the stuff you love if you can learn to live with the odd badly designed mess without coming unraveled or having to turn into a design superhero.) I’d add recording your dreams. For some reason, when my brain feels like a shuttered house, a few days of recording my dreams always cracks something open inside my head. Maybe this counts as absurdist stimulation.

Mike Perry’s Lost In The Discovery I love the wall of prints and the painted wood blocks.

Just in case you’ve missed Significant Objects.