Evil, evil addictive game that Stewart turned me on to. Evan already figured out a way to cheat using "PrtScrn"... I've gotten 8590 on Level 2. Makes my New Year's Resolutions easer: In 2001 I want to stop playing Bejeweled.

I quit smoking this year. That was a good one. I'd resolved to quit the year before too, but failed. And the year before that, resolution, and failure. It's been six months at this point. Yay for me.

This coming year? My cousin Andrea sent me something: a man named William Miller surveyed people who were dying. In his research, he discovered most of them would basically do three things differently if they had the chance to live their lives over:

1) They'd take more risks,
2) They'd assert themselves more, and
3) They'd have a lot more self-discipline.
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Have you ever noticed that people always find positive reviews "more helpful" than negative reviews on Amazon.com?
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Yay! One fellowship application done and in the mail! Only four more to go! One that's important, two that are why not?s and a fourth that I decided to do since all the dates are coinciding. Work work work. I love work! One short story I need to get out before the work starts up again.

Balmy day here in San Francisco. Feels like summer vacation, smell of coconut oil, hot wind...
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Trick learned in boarding school #1: toothpaste makes excellent emergency spackle.
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And more time-based picture taking: beautiful face, a picture taken every day of a woman's 22nd year. (via email from andy crewdson)
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Malika writes:

"Your idea about taking a picture of yourself every week brought up a story I thought you'd be interested in knowing.

I went to junior high and high school with a woman named Ona Lesser-Brown. When she was a freshman in college-- she went to an art school but I don't remember which one-- she found out that she had leukemia. Every day from that day on she took a picture of herself. She got sicker and weaker and some days had to be helped to hold the camera, but never missed a day. She even took a photo of herself the day that she died. Her mom has all the photos and is publishing them as a book."

Also I was sent the URL for Oscar and Leigh, a mother and son pair photographed in photo booths once a week for a year, the first year of Oscar's life.
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"A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus "formless" is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider, or spit." -- Georges Bataille (via sisyphus)
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There was a flyer from CultureLounge sitting on my desk. I looked it up and found some interesting work. In the future they plan to sell artwork through this site.
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I am in seclusion. I am not feeling well. I am working on the last part of a fellowship application and am suffering from a terrible rash.
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Reading The Elements of Style this morning, I was surprised to find that they consider "finalize", "prioritize" and "customize" to be improper English-- in a 1979 edition -- whereas Merriam-Webster's asserts that they're legit. Attempts to codify and freeze language always fail (hello Academie Française?); regardless, "irregardless" still makes my hair stand on end.
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Merry Christmas everyone! My cousins and Aunt and Uncle are here -- 4 female cousins. There are eight granddaughters on my mother's side, no grandsons. Someone told me recently that if you give birth to a girl, most likely you're going to have more girls, and vice versa. The persistence of uniformity. Could there be a reason for this from an evolutionary biological standpoint? Or is it simply a matter of like begetting like, or rather the begotten being alike?

Idea for lifelong art project: Seeing people you only see at long intervals makes one acutely aware of the idea of aging. Portrait taken of self against white wall once every week for the rest of one's life. No clothes: too changeable. Hair? Creation of time lapse movie of oneself. Could also be done by parent of child, but the easiest subject is always oneself, since you are always with you. Post a quicktime to the web. I think that if you were male you that over the course of two or three weeks, you could make a movie of yourself growing a beard.

Time lapse photography can reverse the aging process, run backwards. Time lapse photography so often about decay (withering flowers, that disgusting organic matter in A Zed and Two Noughts) or cycles: sunrise, sunset, trees growing and losing leaves, etc.
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Much excited about the book I just ordered from Amazon: Chromophobia by David Batchelor. I am buying it based on Dave Hickey's review in Bookforum. It is about:

"...the pathological tendency in Western thought to associate color with anything that seems to oppose official order and control. The book begins at the end, with a meditation on the paralyzing hegemony of "whiteness" in the milieus of official and fashionable culture at the turn of the millenium; it moves on from there to discuss chromophobia in its "anti-natural, anti-emotional, anti-drug, anti-eastern, anti-women and anti-cosmetic" manifestations. The fulcrum of the book is a detailed chapter on the ways in which human language tries to accommodate color and routinely fails to do so."
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Nothing that I've designed in the past year or so has seen the light of the cathode rays beyond my home or workplace. Until now, that is. I guess caterina.net was designed this year, but this is quite minimalist and as you can see, there is something of the maximalist in me too.
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Yum!
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My first effort at keeping a weblog was in December 1999. I started it and then forgot about it. Here are the few entries, put into caterina.net format.
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Yay! A new article on Wench by Silja Talvi on the woes of teenagerness and the joys of your 30s. And be sure to read the weblog.
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OK, Lit Geeks: On the cover of this week's New Yorker, there are three destinations posted on the side of the subway car, Zembla, Sauk Ctr. and East Egg. "Zembla" is the fictional land in Nabokov's Pale Fire, and "East Egg" is the fictional town in Fitzgeralid's The Great Gatsby. Does anyone know where "Sauk Ctr" comes from?

Update: Luke writes: "Sauk Ctr is short for Sauk Center, a town in Minnesota, which was the model for Lewis's "Gopher Prairie" of Main Street." -- Sinclair Lewis, that is, I think. Thanks!!!
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Cool! a new redesign of FEED Magazine. Much, much better. Thank you FEED.
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The France Unordered List While it's good to be home, I was sad to leave, so I'm here trying to figure out a way to go back there to live, at least part of the time. It was a kind of reconnaisance mission: do I like France -- and the French -- enough to be among them for month after month? My observations:

• Talky-walkies That's what they call them. Could it possibly be any cuter?
• French people are sweet. Now the French have a reputation for meanness, and my experiences there in the past have supported this reputation, but this time, everywhere I went, being mean seemed to have slipped everyone's minds. The French were, instead, exceedingly nice, helpful, warm and kissy. I mean, noticeably so. Superduperniceness. The only experience I had with French Meanness was in the San Francisco airport on line for the flight. A French guy flagrantly cut in front of me. I was annoyed. We engaged in a silent battle: I edged my suitcase in front of his, he edged his in front of mine. We didn't speak, didn't make eye contact. And so on for the next 20 minutes until I was at the head of the line, whence I arrayed my suitcases in a line which he could not breach and got my rightful place back. I had been advised: when the French are mean, you should be mean right back. Voilâ.
  The art gallery people are even nice. Try striking up a conversation with one of the desk folks in an art gallery in New York: frosty is not the word. Icicles will start forming on your nose, the desk, the art.
• Jennifer Weil And of course, her sister Emily, who I've known for a little over a year now. Expatriate extraordinare with a little jewel box of an apartment on the Ile St. Louis. Warm, kind, helpful, sparkly, generous and with an amazing assortment of great novels in English. Terrifically chic. She had been working very very hard at her job when I arrived, but nonetheless went out of her way to show Emily and I around Paris. Steve, her English boyfriend, is a novelist and full of wit and quiet amusement.
• La Hune Bookstore Means "The Crow's Nest" in French. Best place to buy books, which you can then carry over to Cafe Flore and be seen with the literati. There was a v. famous South American writer there with his young babe (he looked about 70, she, 25) and his entourage. I couldn't remember his name, but he exuded self-importance. Mario Vargas Llosa perhaps?
• Spanish I actually got to practice my Spanish a lot since everyone seemed to think I was Spanish and addressed me in that language. Dark hair and eyes?
• Cafes Well, there was Flore, of course. And Cafe de l'Industrie in the Bastille (15 Rue St. Sabin). And another one, Cafe la Bourgogne on Rue de Mouffetard, near the church. Bruised from a recent breakup and suffering a lack of self-esteem? Go to France and sit in a cafe alone. This only works for women as far as I know. You have to frighten the French guys off by throwing pots of mustard at them. These are thoughtfully provided by all Parisian cafe owners.
• Mick Jagger. The guy was walking around in the middle of the day in a purple velvet jacket, accompanied by an extremely tall dark-haired woman in dark sunglasses who was the width of a hair. Also falling into the shorter-than-they-appear category: Mikhail Baryshnikov, who seemed to be shopping in all the same places as me, since I saw him twice.
• Barely any evidence of Christmas Except that when you bought anything they asked if you wanted it wrapped. The shops were without decoration, no "Frosty the Snowman" being forced upon your aural cavities, no commercials on TV. A snowflake or two hung above the city streets, but that's it.
• Very Little Greed.In France, you become very aware of the disgusting levels of consumption that go on Stateside: of time, of food, of commercial products, of cars and gasoline -- just about everything. Dinner portions in restaurants are half what they are here. And it is truly horrifying arriving back in San Francisco and seeing the rows upon rows of SUVs in the parking lot, and the boxes of Christmas presents people are unloading from their shopping carts. American's compulsion to consume, consume, consume is one of their most salient traits. Basta! It's a terrible way to live. Less crap, more quality. Less work, more time. This is nothing new, and also a lot of the reason of why I go to Europe. The same reason that I've killed my television.
• Francois Morellet This guy was doing it before anyone else, and it was clear that Sol LeWitt pilfered all his ideas from him. There was an exhibit of his things at the Jeu de Paume, including a nice self-drawing computer projection thing. He's in the 70s and working in new media. Chapeau! Check it out.
• Jouke Kleerebezem and Gilberthe Akkermans Insert superlatives here. The Dutch couple I stayed with down in Bourgogne where I was looking for a house. Know Jouke through his weblog and other friends that he knows. He is trained as a graphic designer, works as an artist and curator and writer on things media and culture related. Directs university and research programs. Gilberthe is a designer of beautiful handbags that reference other utilitarian products: string bags and shopping bags. Witty, kind, courageous, nurturing, scintillating, funny, fun.
• Real estate I didn't find a house there, but found the next best thing: an agent. Came to the sinking realization that what I really wanted was not a fermette but a maison bourgeoisie. In France I get the impression that "bourgeoisie" doesn't imply what it implies here: consumption and a tendency to be addicted to Prozac.
• 60s and 70s architecture at the Pompidou I fell in love with an exhibit at the Pompidou on unrealized and unrealizable architecture of the 60s and 70s. I have already been in love with the Archigram stuff and Walter Pichler, etc (see various past posts). But I was introduced to a bunch of other Utopian architects at this exhibit. I stayed in there so long that the museum guard came over to say, "May I help you?" in a way that implied an overstayed welcome. Some names and notes: Yona Friedman: "Etude de la ville spatiale" (1958-1959) Kisho Kurokava "Ville en helice" series, (1961) Edouard Albert: "Hotels suspendus, Place de la Resistance" (1964), Kiyonori Kakutake, Arata Isotaki, Coop Himmelblau, Haus-Rucker Co., Guy Rottier, Superstudio and Constant. I loved it and have whole new areas to investigate, notably the metabolist movement which imagined cities that imitated the growth patterns of living tissues. Started me musing on portable architectures (i.e. the Cushicle of Archigram and their walking cities); architectures of terraforming (Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome wok), underground architectures, dispersed urban centers, and other scifi architectures.
• The current dollar/franc Exchange Rate 'Nuff said.

Back home now, wow! My phone has once again been disconnected. I, um, forgot to pay my bill before leaving for France, so call my cell phone or send me an email if you want to reach me. Sushi first, and then, sleep. So nice to come back home to my books. Read half of Les Particules Elementaires (in French!!) on the plane home. Pretty gnarly stuff (see link to Michiko Kakutani's review somewhere below...). I feel one of those Back-From-Trip unordered lists coming on, but geez I'm beat. In the interim, read my new offline webchum Jouke's weblog which has some little bits about things that we did during my stay. I kiss you!
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Dispatch from France I am here loving life at le Moulin du Merle with Jouke and Gilberthe and their beautiful children Rolf and Roemer. Today we went to the xmas party at the town center where the mayor of St. Germain de Bois gave out presents to all the children of the village and everyone drank champagne and ate quince tarts. It is truly breathtakingly beautiful here and one wonders why anyone lives anywhere else.

Paris was lovely. Is there anything to say about Paris? The new Adam Gopnick book says it all; spent a lot of time drinking cafes at Cafe Flore. Emily is a prize among penalties, a song in the din. Her sister Jen is lovely lovely. I am being well cared for by some people I am grateful to have met. I love Paris.

More soon. This keyboard is FUNNY! French.
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The upsides to the downturn: OK. As Heather noted today, things are certainly a mess here in San Francisco. People all around us are losing their jobs and their companies and their dreams. Not only crappy companies, but companies with heart and soul, full of earnest, hard-working smart people. (You can see the numbers here at The Industry Standard and avoid having to go to that badly written thing with the embarrassing name.) Hopefully, those with smart companies will grit their teeth, tighten their belts and weather through this. I want all of my friends to have jobs and be happy. I want web people (as opposed to dot-commers) and artists and the simple, ungreedy people to have a place in this city. It wasn't long ago that we were bewailing the death of San Francisco, death by dotcom. Even though we worked in the industry. So here are a few upsides to the downturn:

• I am no longer getting annoyed when I hear about ugly, mean, avaricious people that I don't like becoming millionaires.
• Rents are going down. They actually are!!
• People may be hired to do meaningful work instead of making a company look big in anticipation of an IPO. Hopefully VCs and investors will also smarten up and notice that while "PotatoPeeler.com" (c.f. Heather) was a bad idea, the native web-based concepts and applications are where they should have concentrated in the first place.
• A pleasant frisson of schadenfreude when I see Lexus SUV's with "For Sale" signs in the windows.
• More time for art!
• More time for art!
• Less road rage! (I might be imagining this.)
• Confirmation of my mother's advice to always live below your means, save your money and be ready for the inevitable downturn.
• Less crap: less schwag, less junk mail, less spam.
• Less dinner out, more dinner at home with friends.
• Friends. Comforting/comforted. Telling them your doubts and fears. Having them reassure you that you are loved, and blessed.
• Knowing that you are, that I am, as Stewart says, blessed.

Tetrachromats "Oh, everyone knows my color vision is different," chuckles Mrs. M, a 57-year-old English social worker. "People will think things match, but I can see they don't." What you wouldn't give to see the world through her deep blue-gray eyes, if only for five minutes.

Preliminary evidence gathered at Cambridge University in 1993 suggests that this woman is a tetrachromat, perhaps the most remarkable human mutant ever identified. Most of us have color vision based on three channels; a tetrachromat has four." (via judith)
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I didn't realize that William Burroughs was on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's. He's the guy to the right of Marilyn Monroe. Nor did I realize that he did an album with the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. Seems odd. Now one thing that I would like to have seen is a conversation between Burroughs and Andy Warhol: "...the conversations recorded between the strung-out writer and the terminally blank artist are masterpieces of hypnotic vacuity." One can only imagine.
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Looking around Amazon France, I decided to check out their best seller list, and was pleased to find 177 façons d'emmener une femme au septième ciel. -- 177 ways to bring a woman to seventh heaven. Good to see the reputation of the French as great lovers supported by book sales data. Then below, more evidence as they list the books that people who bought this book also bought: (<-- proto tongue twister)

203 façons de rendre fou un homme au lit de Julie Saint-Ange -- 203 ways to drive a man crazy in bed.
Comment faire l'amour toute la nuit de Barbara Keesling -- How to make love all night long
L'art de la guerre de Sun Tzu -- The art of war. (?!)
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I'd read recently about the translation of Vietnamese poet Ho Xuan Huang in the New Yorker. Nom, the language she wrote in is no longer spoken, and the poetry itself is loaded with puns, jokes, and double entendres of a particularly risque variety.There is a great introduction to her work by the translator John Balaban which explains the extraordinary circumstances under which this poetry was written. (via email from Jim )
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Nomic sounds like a game that I would like, and that you would like too.

"Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed." (via invisible city)
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I'm a fan of the mini moma over at flip flop flyin'. (via metafilter)
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Peculiar. Today I feel peculiar. It is a beautiful day out. And I just came back from a ride around town on a motorcycle and lunch in South Park. A kind of odd alert exhausted pleasant eerie feeling has come over me. I think i must nap: a feel a prophetic dream coming on. Or at least a dream.
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Loop the new AIGA Journal of Interaction Design.
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Another Weekend Come and Gone.

Watched Fast, Cheap and Out of Control on friday night. Have never seen a film by Errol Morris before, but his work was not unrelated to Burrough's cut-up method, though more deliberate and ironic.

Saturday, accompanied by the internationally famous Wildean wit Judith Z I set out for the SFMOMA to participate in a critique for Code Zebra a project that is being funded by the Arts Alliance and conducted by Sara Diamond (who runs the media arts center at Banff in Canada.) It is quite interesting to see works that are still in progress, especially collaborations with dissent among the ranks, and will be even more interesting to see what the final outcome is: how much of the collaborators ideas are implemented, how much the project has evolved from what we saw Saturday.

We went upstairs with Michael to see the Anderson Collection full of New York School and California masters, and the new Gary Hill/ Nick Crowe installation, reviewed here. The down to the Museum Store where I drooled all over Michael's copy of Maeda@Media. Our dinner spot was determined by which train came first, and since it was the N, we ended up at EOS, where Judith told me stories about Josh Steinstein. Home for some freshening up, then off to a party at Joypad, 78 Minna St. Birthday party for Anne, now the fashion and design editor at San Francisco magazine and dressed the part.

Sunday was a day of rest and genial nothing doing. Watched The Loss of Sexual Innocence by Mike Figgis with Evan. A series of vignettes on that theme, ultimately unsatisfying. Loved the Italian/English twins, and the story of the jealous lover and the death of the blue boy. The Adam and Eve sequence was a bit overwrought; it is a story that is so deeply metaphorical that a literal depiction of it comes off as ham-fisted.

Started reading The White Goddess.
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Inspired by Jeremy's manifesto on Information Prose, I hunted around my bookshelves for some William Burroughs and found a copy of The Ticket that Exploded, which kept me up until four on Friday night. It is full of a lot of unnecessary, nauseating or ridiculous crap,but it also spells out his ideas of language as a virus from outer space and his cut-up and stuck-together texts more clearly than other books of his I've attempted to read.

operation rewrite: From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may once have been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the lungs. The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. it is now a parasitic organizsm that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word. In the beginning was the word. In the beginning of what exactly?

An excellent bit on how designers rather than programmers are now calling all the shots. At jamie.com.
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