Creatures of Prometheus

Sam Maloof Exhibit at the Huntington

2012-01-24T10:19:00.000-08:00

A nice collection of the work of iconic Southern California furniture maker Sam Maloof, along with many other artists and craftsmen in his circle, has been on exhibit at the Huntington since September; Roomie and I finally made it over there last Sunday to have a look and get inspired.

Maloof started out in the early 1950s, and this show presented examples of his work from private collections through 1985. Below are my favorite pieces from the show, presented in roughly chronological order, which is the order in which they were displayed in the exhibit.

String Chair

I like this chair for its simplicity, low proportions, and the unexpected, fun shape of the rear legs. It makes me want to do something similar in steel as a study piece.

Templates + Patterns

There was a whole wall of templates, patterns, and unfinished fragments.

Cork Top Desk

This piece was interesting in the way Maloof used contrasting wood to emphasize the joinery. The foot detail was on the chair to the left of the desk. Unfortunately, I failed to get a picture of the chair.

Armchair

Maloof made furniture that looked great from any angle, and this piece is a good example of that. I also like the low-set buttons on the back cushion. Notice how the cushion thickens towards the bottom, providing lumbar support.

Counter Stool

This was a prototype that he made for a commission. He saved the prototype for himself. Notice how the concentric rings of the grain on the back are centered. The attention to that level of detail is astounding in these works.

Loveseat

Again, notice how the wood is carefully selected and placed, so that the center of the wood grain pattern is at the center of the back.

First Rocker

This is the first rocker that Maloof made; it dates from the late 1960s, and he made it for his wife. The rocking chair would become one of his signature pieces. Again, notice the proportion of the back pillow, for lumbar support.

Later Rocker

This was a later rocker, from the 1980s, also made for his wife. Here, the lumbar support is provided by the shaping of the wood slats in the back.

Armchair

One of the last pieces displayed is an armchair version, similar in style to his signature rocker.

I love how you can observe the evolution of his personal style when you look at the arc of the whole show. The early string chair, while certainly unique, has a much more rigid, angular geometry, whereas the later pieces show a much different, and more personal, style. The string chair looks very Mid-century Modern in style, but the late rocker and armchair are pure Sam Maloof.

Maloof passed away in 2009; he would have been 96 today. I delayed this post until today, so we could have another Birthdays-of-the-Great-Ones celebration here at CofP. I've been adding names and birthdays to the Birthdays of the Great Ones Calendar, and want to do a lot more of them in 2012.

The exhibition The House that Sam Built, Sam Maloof and Art in the Pomona Valley, 1945-1985 runs through January 30, 2012 at the Huntington.

Check it out if you can, and get inspired.

Going Dark to Protest SOPA & PIPA

2012-01-17T21:05:00.000-08:00

Just announcing that Creatures of Prometheus will go dark tomorrow, January 18, 2012, along with Wikipedia, Google, Mozilla, reddit, and many other sites, to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the Protect IP Act.

These two bills, now being considered in Congress, would represent a massive power grab by Washington, and would change the way the internet functions, forever. If either of these bills becomes law, the government will have wide, new powers to shut down entire websites, immediately and without hearings, trials, or anything, based on simple (or wild) accusations of piracy or intellectual property misuse. Apparently, you can even be shut down for linking to such alleged material - it doesn't have to be actually posted on your webpage.

This is NOT the way online piracy should be handled.

You can learn more here: http://sopastrike.com/

Educate yourself. Write your congresspersons and tell them to oppose these draconian bills. Lend your voice to the struggle. Washington needs to know enough is enough!

-Earl

p.s. I'll be back later in the week, with an update on the new pup!

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UPDATE: I created this avatar for my facebook and twitter accounts; feel free to copy and use it!

2011 Year-In-Review at Creatures of Prometheus

2012-01-04T16:38:00.000-08:00

Let's just say that my 2011 had its ups and downs. It certainly felt at times like I was having way more than my fair share of frustrations heaped upon me, but there were some really stellar moments as well.

Let's go month by month, Rational Jenn Style, through the year.

January:

I remember wanting to write a 2010 Year In Review, but never getting around to it.
The year started with my being asked to teach full-time for the Spring Semester, in the Architecture Dept at a local community college, where I had taught in the past. Things got ironed out with HR in January, in advance of the semester starting off in late February.
I blogged about the railing installation and fireplace/TV cabinet as the finishing touches were put on the Tennessee House.
I scheduled my final trip to the Tennessee House, to shoot it for my portfolio and marketing efforts. I was there for about a week, from the end of January into February.
The TV show "The Event" filmed an episode in my neighborhood, just about a block and a half from my house. I never saw the episode in question; maybe I'll look for it on Netflix.
Monday the 24th, my dearly departed Todd got into a fight with Caufield, my neighbor's dog, in my living room. In the process of separating them, I suffered a bite on my left wrist, which left one puncture. At the time, it didn't seem nearly as bad as it might have been, but it was painful. Later in the week, just when it was starting to feel better, I further injured it at the gym, and that time it really hurt. That injury was the morning of the day I was to take the redeye to Atlanta, for my Tennessee trip. I iced it, bought a brace at the sporting goods store, and went on my trip.
I cleverly arranged my travel through Atlanta so that I could hang out with Jenn, Kelly, and my other ATLOS peeps, which is always a good time.

February:

I returned from Tennessee and promptly got some of the new photos posted on the blog.
I wrote an additional post on the fireplace, describing how the mantel was crafted from a rejected structural beam that I had had the contractor pull out, over a quality control issue.
While in Tennessee I realized that I had partially lost use of my thumb as a result of those wrist injuries from the dog bite. Before returning to L.A., I set up an appointment to see an orthopedic specialist as soon as I was back. That week that I returned ended up being one of the most harrowing of my life. Monday was my appointment. After a brief examination, the doc. said, "hold on, I'll be right back. I'm going to go get the hand surgeon." I was really not expecting to hear those words, and just about passed out while he was gone. He returned with the hand guy, who determined I had severed (ruptured) my EPL tendon (the one that lets you make a 'thumbs up') and should have surgery ASAP if I wanted to have the best shot at getting it back. He had an opening on Thursday, and I took it. The next day my regular doctor worked me into her schedule for a complete pre-op physical. Wednesday I visited the outpatient surgery center and had a tour, then went home and did as much housework as I could. I figured that since I was about to become more or less incapacitated for some time, I should at least do what I could, to have a clean house in which to lay about incapacitated. Thursday I went under the knife.
10 days later, school started, and I somehow got through it all and managed my life with my left hand in a cast for several weeks, and a brace for several more weeks after that. I really don't know how I did it, without being able to play my piano or knit or weld or make things, or do any of the creative things I enjoy that keep me sane. Or work out at the gym, the other thing that keeps me sane. That recovery was one of the most difficult things I've ever gone through. But, I did it! I recovered very well, and now there are just a couple minor scars and a little occasional stiffness.
From my recovery bed, I somehow blogged about this little steel and glass shelving unit that I had made and photographed back in December/January before everything fell apart.

March:

I learned that for most arm and hand recovery, you do occupational therapy, whereas with the rest of the body it's physical therapy that you do. I started OT on my thumb at a place that I decided I wasn't completely thrilled with. I later switched to a different therapy clinic, with a superb hand specialist, with whom I was very pleased.
I attended SnowCON in Denver, which was great fun, even though I still had the brace on my wrist.
The rest of March was pretty much a long blur of teaching a very full schedule, while keeping up with my exercises and therapy to get my thumb back.

April:

April bore a striking resemblance to March. I had made real progress with my thumb however, and around the beginning of the month, I posted my first video blog post, which is a somewhat boring 11-plus minutes of me talking about my thumb and playing exercises at the piano. I'm pretty sure Mom enjoyed it. (Hi, Mom!)
At school, they announced that they were going to hire someone to permanently do the job I was currently doing on a full-time, but temporary, basis. I applied. The application deadline was sometime around the middle of the month, and it required a lot of effort.
I took my students to the L.A. Cathedral for a field trip. I'm fond of that building. I later blogged about it.
The week of the 17th-24th was our Spring Break at school and I developed a cold, which dragged into the following week, but I was mostly better by mid week. Then it worsened again, and the following weekend I went to the Urgent Care near my house. I was there first thing on Saturday morning, not wanting to wait till Monday to drive all the way across town to my regular doc. The Urgent Care doc said I had a little "light bronchitis" (exact quote) and gave me antibiotics. He said I should have no problem going back to work/school on Monday.

May:

By the Monday, which was now the beginning of May, my condition had worsened, so I called my regular doc. We decided to keep an eye on things, which continued to worsen. It was Wednesday morning before I finally went in. She listened to my breathing and told me she didn't even need to see an X-ray to tell me I had full-blown pneumonia. She sent me straight back to bed; do not pass go; do not collect $200. My recovery was fairly routine, as far as that goes, but it sucked to be back on bed rest just as I was getting out of the woods with my thumb. Also, let me just say that it's pretty freaky and a little scary to have your lungs feel like big, heavy, wet sponges, which is just what pneumonia feels like.
At the end of my pneumonia recovery, I had my final follow-up appointment with my hand surgeon, who declared my thumb tendon to be fully recovered. WooHoo!!!
I was invited to interview for the tenure-track position at school. The interview went well.
I blogged a lot in May, compared to what I had been doing. I wrote a long post, towards the later part of the month, about how I was "Feeling Like My Old Self Again". I still think that was a particularly good bit of writing.
I wrote a tribute to my grandpa, on what would have been his 101st birthday.
At the end of the month, I spoke at ATLOSCON in Atlanta. That was a real treat. I had gotten to know a lot of the Atlanta Objectivist Society folks in the summer of 2010, while I was in Tennessee, and I always enjoy hanging out with them. And of course, I love standing in front of a group of people and lecturing on architecture, especially when it's a receptive audience (not always the case at school, ha!). So it was a real win-win-win.

June:

I was invited to have a second interview for the position at school. That interview was on the 8th. I spent a lot of time thinking and writing about what I wanted to say, and how I would approach the interview. I thought a lot about what I would want to do with the position, should I be hired, and about my approach to teaching drawing. I also gave a lot of thought to the relationship between hand drawing as a technique of design, versus the digital age, with all its offerings and tools, and the future that all those things promise. I prepared for that interview like I'd never done for an interview before. The following week, the school year ended, and I found out I didn't get the job. They told me they valued my contribution to the program, and that they still wanted me to teach part time, if I was interested in that.

As hard as I had tried to get the job, I also knew all along that I was somewhat conflicted about the whole thing. Taking a full-time, tenure-track position in academia would have sent my career in a very specific trajectory, and I was somewhat relieved that I would remain free to build, and pursue my other interests, without being committed to spending quite so much time in the classroom, in division meetings, and in dealing with the necessary (but often unpleasant) internal politics of the California Community College System.
I wrote 2 blog posts on the occasion of the birthday of Frank Lloyd Wright. The first is a video of Wright himself, from YouTube. The second was mostly my pictures from Fallingwater, when I visited the house a couple years ago.
I spent the afternoon of the Summer Solstice at Echo Park Lake with Paul and Todd.
Later on in the month, my buddy Alan asked me if I was still interested in renting my spare bedroom. Apparently I had mentioned it in an offhand kind of way at some point in the past, and he was now in the position of needing a place. Since my teaching income had ended for the summer, I was happy to clear out what had become the de-facto storage room and rent it to him. Also, he's great with the dogs, and was really the only other person besides me who I ever felt like Todd really trusted. He took the room, and it's gone well so far. We've just passed the 6-month mark, and things have settled into a pretty good routine around here, with him on board. Cheers, Roomie!

July:

The second half of the year started in a really fun way with my friends deb and Seth and their little baby David visiting for a few days. I hosted a BBQ/garden party in their honor, and a good time was had by all.
On the heels of that fun visit, Diana and Paul Hsieh were in town for a few days, and we got to hang out at a Starbucks one afternoon.
I did some really fun consulting work for interior designer and Hotel Lautner owner Tracy Beckmann. Tracy is great to work with and I hope we can do more work together in the future.
Friday the 22nd I went with my friend Fernando to hear Dolly Parton play the Hollywood Bowl, which was a real treat. She is an amazing entertainer, and didn't disappoint!
The next day, I attended the John Lautner 100th Birthday Home Tour, which was amazing. I blogged about 2 of the 4 houses, the Jacobson House and the Harpel House. There is an unfinished post on the Schwimmer House in my blogger queue, and I never got around to writing up the magnificent Sheats-Goldstein house. I would still like to finish up both of those and get them published on here.
The main reason I didn't get back to those posts is that less than a week after the tour, I flew to Chicago to spend a week playing Uncle Nanny to my sister Emily's three kids while she attended Sock Summit in Portland, Oregon. That was a challenging but awesomely fun week.

August:

At the end of that week in Chicago, in what was now August, I got to spend a couple of days doing some specially-arranged photography of Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building in downtown Chicago. I had made arrangements to conduct a tour of the building over Labor Day weekend as part of the Chicago Objectivist Society's MiniCON, and this was part of my research. David Maltby from COS met me at the Auditorium and helped out. We had lunch too, and made a fun afternoon of it. I got some great photos, and finally wrapped my head around how this amazing and complex building works.
Right after I got back to L.A., Diana was in town again, this time for the Ancestral Health Symposium. She came over on Sunday morning and broadcast her Rationally Selfish Webcast (now called Philosophy in Action) right from my living room! You can listen to that episode here. Then we drove around L.A. and talked about food. She bought me a pint of frozen pig brains at the Asian market in Echo Park, which I thawed and cooked later that week. They were kind of weird but not altogether inedible.
I signed up a couple of new clients: one who wanted a master plan to completely overhaul and remodel her house, patio, yard, pool, etc. in phases. We're still working on that one, and should have the master plan complete in the coming weeks. The other one was a modest addition to an existing house.
My Chicago friend Mariah had a very, very long layover at LAX, en route to Australia. I picked her up and we went for sushi. S U S H I ! Good times. :)
I got to hear Beethoven's 9th Symphony and Choral Fantasy in C minor at the Hollywood Bowl, on the evening of the 18th. Roomie got us free tickets through someone he used to work with. Score! It was a great show.
At the end of the month, I started teaching for the fall semester, this time as adjunct faculty, with a lighter schedule. The guy who got the job instead of me turns out to be a really great guy, and we enjoyed teaching together.

September:

Labor Day Weekend found me back in Chicago, giving my talk on Viollet-le-Duc, Sullivan, and Wright, and leading my tour of Sullivan's Auditorium Building for about 15 people from the conference. My big sis, Emily, even drove in from the suburbs to join the tour! The whole thing went really well.
I wrote up my Amazing Gluten-free, High-fat, Semi-paleo Mac + Cheese for the blog, which continues to be one of my most popular posts.
After having such a great time at all these Objectivist conferences in other cities, fellow OBlogger and SoCal resident Jason Stotts and I decided to start our own community group, and perhaps eventually even have our own local mini-conference. So, the SoCal Objectivists was launched.
At our very first meeting of the SoCal O'ists, I happened to meet a tall, handsome fellow, whom I'll call Mr. Handsome, and let's just say he and I have been seeing a fair amount of each other. I'd even go so far as to say we're rather enjoying getting to know each other. He tends to keep a relatively low profile, so I'm not going to go blathering on about him too very much on the blog here, but I think that at this point, he warrants at least a mention.
The biggest solo project of my career thus far almost landed in my lap, but ended up being a near miss. It was a dream project - a successful businessman was interested in building a large, ground-up new house, and wanted something constructed entirely of concrete and glass. He had selected a site on a lovely street in Pasadena. In the end, it didn't work out, for various reasons. What was exciting about it for me, even though it never materialized as a project, was the size and scope of what I was being seriously considered for.
I started consulting at Kelly Wearstler Interior Design. They had a large residential project for which I was doing interior detailing and technical work. It was a good gig, which ended up lasting through the end of the year.
My second cousin Ed and I went to Palm Springs for a weekend. That was a lot of fun.
The exhibition Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Heart of American Modernist Architecture and Design opened at the Schindler House on the 29th, and I went to the opening with my friend LouAnne.

October:

On the 6th, I took Todd to the vet. He had become increasingly lame in his left hind leg, which the vet had previously attributed to arthritis. Now the whole leg had become fairly inflamed and swollen, and I thought it should be looked at. He looked at it and got very serious. He thought it looked more like a growth than inflammation, and wanted to take a biopsy to confirm this. They also took X-rays, which confirmed that it wasn't something wrong with the bones. The vet told me that what he removed for the biopsy didn't look good, which caused me much distress. This was on top of the distress of Steve Jobs' death the day before, and was on the eve of my birthday.
Emily came out from Chicago for the weekend of my birthday, and we also had a special celebration of our other sister Allison's 40th birthday. Her birthday is only a few days before mine, and we usually celebrate together. That was a really fun weekend, as it was the first time we siblings had all gotten together without any parents, spouses, kids, or significant others in years, probably in decades!
Finally, on the 11th, Todd's biopsy results came back: he had a nerve sheath tumor. The next day we went to the veterinary oncologist, who wanted to amputate. I couldn't put him through that, for a number of reasons I don't feel particularly inclined to reiterate here. I got him pain meds and resolved to make his last days as full and good as I could. I contacted a hospice vet and discussed having her come out to the house when it was time for the end.
Mr. Handsome and I celebrated his birthday, which happens to be just several days following mine, and it turns out that we're born the same year, how about that?!
At some point, I renewed my membership (friendship) with the Friends of the Schindler House.
SoCal Objectivists had our second meeting, which was held in Riverside, and doubled our attendance from 6 to 12.
The rest of October was pretty routine, with teaching and consulting and caring for Todd keeping me busy.

November:

The morning of Saturday the 5th, Roomie Alan noticed an open wound on Todd's leg, and called me while I was out running errands. It was on the inside of the upper thigh, and I hadn't noticed it. I came straight home, and it was as I had feared: the tumor was growing so aggressively, that it had broken through the skin. Once that happens, there isn't much you can do. I called the hospice vet and made arrangements for the next day. Paul, Todd and I went for a last walk at the Lower Arroyo Park, below the big concrete bridges.

Coincidentally, we ran into a dear friend of mine, with whom I teach. She had never met Todd, but had lost dogs to cancer in the past, and had been a great source of counsel and moral support during my difficult decision making process after Todd was diagnosed. Of all the times I had walked Paul and Todd at that park, I had never seen her there. She and her husband were walking their two dogs. It was quite a poignant moment, when she got to finally meet Todd, during his last walk in the park.

That night I wrote his obituary for the blog, figuring I would be in no condition to do it the next day, and set it to auto-post. In the morning it was raining out, but the clouds parted and the vet ran late, so we got to walk around the block one last time. Allison came over, and Roomie was there, and their moral support that day was tremendous.

Then the vet arrived, and it was the end. It was extremely sad. Allison stayed all day, fixed me mac + cheese, which was our comfort food, and we all drank heavily.
The next week, my friends and former neighbors Brian and Leigh were in town, and we had dinner together. I miss them, and we had a nice time catching up.
SoCal Oists had our third meeting, this time in O.C. We had several new faces, as well as some regulars. After 3 meetings, you can start to tell the regulars from the new faces, which is cool.
My school semester ended right before Thanksgiving. I was on a weird 12 week schedule that made my last class the week before Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving was a big deal this year, as Emily and her husband Dave and their kids came and stayed with me the whole week. They've done that every odd numbered year since '07, making this is the third time. Mom was here too - she's spent Thanksgiving in L.A. every year since '06, although the last couple times, she's stayed over at Allison's in West L.A.
The big highlights of the kids' visit this year were Disneyland, The Getty Center, and the L.A. Zoo, as well as crafting with melty beads.
The actual Thanksgiving feast day, which I have dubbed my 'Annual Thanksgiving Extravaganza' was the second largest to date, with about 20 people in attendance. The largest was '09, when I had 24. I enjoy hosting these massive sit-down dinners, even though it stresses me out a little. Everyone had a great time. There were new faces and regulars; old traditions and new dishes.
I had a few conversations and a meeting with a former employer, about joining the firm she is currently with. They were very good talks and meetings, although nothing has come of it as yet.

December:

The end of the year, work-wise, was mostly spent putting a lot of time into the consulting I'd been doing at Kelly Wearstler's office. That assignment wrapped up just before Christmas, and I transitioned out. I enjoyed the work and people there, and would happily go back if asked.
We had a massive wind storm that knocked my power out for 2 1/2 days, and uprooted massive trees all around my part of town. A lot of my neighbor's roof shingles blew off and went all over my front yard, but luckily I didn't have any damage to speak of. All the dead fronds got blown off my giant palm tree in the back yard, which was actually good for me, since it's expensive to have someone climb all the way up there and trim them.
I decided not to go to Emily's for Christmas, since the kids and everyone had just been here for the whole week of Thanksgiving. That was a difficult decision, but I stuck to it and focused on my work here over the holidays, which was the right thing for me to do.
I spent Christmas Eve with Mr. Handsome, which was nice, and we spent Christmas Day together with some other friends. We got really beautiful weather coming in to Christmas Day, and it's been pretty much in the 70s and even low '80s since. It was a lovely holiday all around.
The week between Xmas and New Year's Day, Roomie and I went and looked at dogs at the North Central L.A. Animal Shelter, which is the one on Lacy Street, a couple of miles from my casa. They had 2 really great looking dogs that I liked. Actually, there were 3, but only 2 that I asked to play with in the little play yard. One was this very handsome and playful pit bull, Ted. He is young and puppy-like, very nearly full grown, and already neutered. I would never adopt an un-neutered adult male pit bull into a house with other dogs, but Ted is young and already neutered, and just seemed like a really great athletic-type dog with a big spirit. I guess he reminded me of Todd in that way. The other dog was the little black female basset hound x pit bull mix, which is Paul's mix, that I adopted in the end. It was a really hard decision, and it started to feel a little like Sophie's Choice, since they euthanize at that shelter. I left both dogs there that day and came home to think things over.
I went back and looked again the next day, which was Thursday, and adopted the little black dog. She went to a nearby clinic to get spayed on Friday, and I picked her up there on Saturday, New Year's Eve, and brought her home. I didn't bring her directly home - Roomie put Paul on his leash and met us down the street from my house, by the school, and we walked the dogs together to introduce them. That went really well, and the two of them have been getting along great. She really makes Paul look like an old man! Todd had come home to live with me on January 1, 2004, so I liked the idea of bringing the new pup home on NYE.
Naming the pup was a huge dilemma, which dragged into the new year. At first I liked Ursula, but it didn't really work. I considered Charlene or Denise, but eventually settled on Daisy, which seems to suit her - although the last couple of days, I've found myself somewhat involuntarily calling her Darla. I don't know why it's such a dilemma for me. The intangibles of personality and character come into play in a big way when naming a pet, I think. Todd went by Jimmy for the first week or so, before I changed his name to something that suited his personality better. But, Paul stuck instantly on Paul when I got him. Anyway, she is settling in well, and adopting her was a great way to end the year.

Whew! If you read all the way down to here, you must win some kind of prize.

This post was really more for myself than for any audience out there. It had become way too easy to just dwell on the difficult things that I endured last year, and it was healthy and cathartic, even if a bit tedious, for me to pick my way through the year, month-by-month, and sort things out for myself.

A lot of good stuff happened last year, much of which went by so quickly that I lost track of it as soon as I was on to the next thing.

Farewell, 2011. You were one for the books. Now let's move on, shall we?

2012 Rose Parade B2 Stealth Flyover

2012-01-04T11:28:00.000-08:00

Sunday was New Year's Day, as everybody knows, but didn't really register as such with me, since there was no Rose Parade, and consequently no B2 Stealth Bomber flyover to watch from my front yard, slightly groggy-eyed, at 8:00 a.m. sharp. I've come to rely on it for the past several years, as my marker for the start of the New Year. It's a much more exciting way to 'ring in' the new year than staying up until midnight on New Year's Eve. *yawn*

Monday morning I finally got my flyover.

Here's how it goes down: First, the Goodyear Blimp appears on the scene. Last year it motored right over my house en route to the parade; this year it flew in from the southeast and I spied it over my neighbors roofs across the street:

The blimp usually appears 10-15 minutes before 8. Then you just watch the northern sky and wait. This year I was getting a little antsy when, according to my iPhone, it was a couple minutes past 8, with nothing happening. I was about to tweet my frustration when I heard the roar approaching from the west. It's tricky, because the sound somehow seems to precede the plane in a weird way. It's hard to describe.

Then it got very still, almost like you're in the eye of the storm. I almost thought I'd missed it, when I spotted the B2.

Again, the whole thing is a little hard to describe. It just appears to glide without any effort whatsoever, and makes very little sound at all at this point. It gradually descends, on a perfectly controlled trajectory, as it approaches the parade route.

Once it goes below the edge of the mountaintops, it becomes extremely hard to see. Then I run inside and watch it swoosh over the Rose Parade on TV.

On a lark, I just did a quick YouTube search, which turned up this really great video (not by me) of the Stealth on approach; you can see it banking and everything, and it's extremely cool:

Happy New Year from Creatures of Prometheus!

RIP Todd, 2003-2011

2011-11-06T14:00:00.000-08:00

I am very sad to report that earlier today, Todd lost his battle with a malignant nerve sheath tumor that had been aggressively growing on his left hind leg.

Todd was rescued in January of 2004 as a six-month-old puppy, when he came to live with Paul (his brother) and me.

Todd seemed pretty clearly to have a good percentage of Plott Hound in him, as you can tell by looking at the photos in the link. Plotts are native to North Carolina, and hardly anyone here in L.A. has heard of them. When we were in Tennessee last summer, however, he was regularly recognized as a Plott by local folk who knew of the breed.

Here are some pictures from our 8 years together. I have picked out the ones that I think show the best things about him, that I want to remember the most. Click on any to embiggen.

Amazing Gluten-free, High-fat, Semi-paleo Mac & Cheese Recipe

2011-09-15T22:52:00.000-07:00

I grew up with Mom's made-from-scratch, baked-in-the-oven Macaroni and Cheese, which was always a favorite in our house. I never even tasted the stuff from the box (that strangely goes by the same name but is almost completely unrelated) until college.

Her basic cookbook, then and now, has always been the 1963 Good Housekeeping Cookbook.

In more recent years, Mom has managed to track down additional copies of that exact same edition...

...and now my sisters and I all have our own.

The recipe presented below was adapted from the "Basic Baked Macaroni and Cheese" recipe from that cookbook.

Mac + Cheese is one of the things I have missed after going paleo a couple of years ago. I won't say I never made it again, but I have definitely gotten out of practice, with a recipe that had become something of a specialty. After discovering gluten-free pasta at my local Trader Joe's, I've made it a few times over the past several weeks, and I think I've managed to get my Mac + Cheese Mojo back.

Here's how I make it:

1 lb gluten-free pasta.

2-3 T butter and/or bacon grease.

2-3 T mustard. I use Guldens Spicy Brown, but you can use whatever you prefer, including ground mustard powder, which is preferred by my sister, Allison.

1 medium sized onion. (I take medium to be roughly 2.5" - 3" diameter). I use either a sweet yellow or regular yellow/brown onion.

In a pinch, you can consider the mustard and onion optional, but I strongly recommend them for the flavor.

2 T corn starch.

1 pint (16 oz) heavy cream.

Roughly 1.75 lbs cheese. See discussion of cheeses below.

1 t ground black pepper, or to taste.

Cook the pasta. The TJ's pasta I used is rice-based and cooks pretty similarly to traditional pasta, except that I think it has a little more tendency to stick together during boiling. I use an entire 1-lb package. While it's cooking, prepare the cheese sauce per below. Don't forget to stir often while it's cooking. When the pasta is cooked, drain and arrange in greased 9x13 glass oven dish. Preheat the oven to 350.

Cheese Sauce:

Gently melt the butter/bacon grease in a sauce pan. Ideally, use a double boiler. I've made it many times without a double boiler, and had fine results most of the time (except for the infamous dinner party at deb's when we all get distracted drinking wine in the other room, and the sauce got completely ruined. It had to be thrown out and we started completely over).

The last time I made it, I improvised a double boiler using 2 sauce pans, and I think the dairy ingredients responded more favorably to the extra gentle treatment it gave. If you don't use the double boiler, do take extra care not to overheat the sauce.

Dice the onion and add it to the melted fat. Saute until the onion is transparent. Add the mustard and mix it all together.

The next step is to add the cornstarch. Some people would add it directly to the mustard mixture, mix thoroughly, and then add the heavy cream. I have trouble getting it perfectly smooth using this method. I prefer to put about 1/4 cup of the cream into a small dish, while adding the rest to the saucepan. Mix the corn starch and cream in the dish until smooth, then stir it into the saucepan with the other ingredients. Don't forget to add the pepper.

Heat gently over medium/low, stirring frequently, and it will gradually start to thicken a little bit. Slice your cheese and gradually add it to the sauce, making sure to reserve some to put on top before it all goes into the oven. I will discuss cheeses below.

When all your cheese has been added and melted into the sauce, and the pasta is cooked and arranged into the pan, pour the cheese sauce over it. Use a spoon to poke and push around on the pasta and cheese sauce to make sure the sauce gets all worked down into it, and everything is distributed evenly.

Place your topping cheese on top, and put it all in the oven. Bake 45-60 minutes as desired. I like it brown on top and crusty around the edges. When you take it out of the oven, allow it to settle down for about 10-15 minutes before serving.

photo by my roomie, Alan

Notes on Cheese:

My latest version was made with about 2/3 lb. each of Brie, Gouda, and aged Cheddar cheeses. For the topping cheese, I used about 1/4 lb. of crumbled Gorgonzola. I haven't really encountered a cheese that didn't work for this recipe. You can make it on the cheap with regular supermarket jack and cheddar, or mix it up with some fancy stuff. Just use whatever looks and sounds good to you at the time.

With this recipe, even cheap cheese makes great Mac + Cheese!

If you have a favorite version, let me know in the comments. Enjoy!

New Community Group: SoCal Obejctivists

2011-09-09T00:20:00.000-07:00

I just got back from Chicago where I had an awesome weekend courtesy of the Chicago Objectivist Society, at their MINICON. Over the past year and a half, I've made many good objectivist friends in Atlanta, Denver and now Chicago (among other places). All those cities have vibrant objectivist community clubs, run by and for people with an enthusiasm for Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism.

Once I realized how much fun was being had by these folks, with their monthly socials, dinner lecture events, and conferences, I started thinking how much fun it would be to start such a group here in the L.A. area. One would think that with the Ayn Rand Institute right here in our backyard, such a club would be thriving, but there isn't really one. (I guess that would make Irvine the backyard of L.A. Well maybe that's a bit of a stretch, but stay with me.)

Meanwhile, I was going back and forth to Tennessee, and even living there for a while, for a house I designed and helped build. Then the new year rolled around and I thought it was a great time to start up the club. Then I had a freak accident requiring hand surgery, and all that stuff that completely derailed the first half of the year. My summer was spent getting caught up, and now I'm finally moving forward again.

Which means:

ITS TIME TO START THE CLUB ALREADY!

It also helps that I've become friends with Objectivist sex blogger Jason Stotts over the past several months, and he wants a local club here in SoCal too. So, without any further ado, we are proud to announce the formation of the SoCal Objectivists.

From the 'About' page on our Google Group:

This announcement list is for Objectivists and others in Southern California seriously interested in Ayn Rand's ideas. It's purpose is to announce our periodic, informal social events, and distribute info about other events of interest, such as Objectivist campus clubs and Ayn Rand Institute Events.

We're planning our first social event for the evening of Saturday, September 17th, probably in the Long Beach area. Meeting locations will alternate monthly between Los Angeles and Inland Empire/Orange County. Our goal is to create simultaneous L.A. and I.E./O.C. chapters under one larger organization.

For now we're running things from the Google Group, but we will have a regular web page up and running soon. You can follow us on Twitter @SoCalOists, or like us on Facebook, or just sign up to get our announcements at our Google Group. We will also be disseminating information about other local events of interest via the Google Group, such as objectivist campus club events and Ayn Rand Institute events.

The Auditorium Building - Additional Images & Tour Info

2011-08-22T12:13:00.000-07:00

Since it's less than two weeks until the Big Tour of the Auditorium Building, as well as the Louis-Sullivan's-Birthday-Edition of my talk on Viollet-le-Duc, Sullivan and Wright, and I'm in full-on final prep mode this week. I'm also very excited!

If you have no idea what I'm talking about with this tour, here's the deal: I'm leading a tour of one of the greatest extant works (the Auditorium Building) by the Godfather of Modern Architecture (Louis Sullivan), on Friday, September 2nd, starting at 2 pm.

The Auditorium Building is now owned by Roosevelt University, and we will be visiting several spaces that are part of Roosevelt that aren't generally available on a walk-in basis to the general public. We will also be seeing some spaces that are viewable on a walk-in basis, as well as visiting the Auditorium Theatre in a private, specially-arranged group tour. All in all, we will be seeing as complete a picture of the entire building as one can have, and we will see Sullivan's architectural genius on full display.

To kick off the week, I thought I'd post a few additional pictures of the Auditorium Building from my visit there last month. Let's start off with some of the Roosevelt University portions of the building that are not part of the Auditorium Theatre itself.

Roosevelt University Library

The library is located on the upper levels of the east and south sides of the building. The main reading room was the hotel dining room in Sullivan's original design.

The reading room is a vast, barrel-vaulted space that runs north-south, high above and parallel to Michigan Avenue, on the 10th floor of the building. At the north and south ends of the room are murals, depicting a fisherman and a duck hunt, respectively.

At the south end of the main room, there is a more intimate room with an ornate, lower, flat ceiling. The wood colonnade separating these spaces is ornately carved, and each column is carved to a different design.

The Sullivan Room

Down on the second floor, right above the intersection of Michigan Avenue and Congress Parkway, sits what is now called the Sullivan Room. This room was originally the Ladies' Lounge for the hotel. It is restored to its original design, and is now used by the President's Office of Roosevelt University for special events, board meetings, and the like.

It's main features are its pair of ornate fireplaces and restored stencil decoration:

Ganz Hall

Ganz Hall is on the 7th floor of the building. It was originally a private banquet hall, and was later converted into an intimate recital hall. If I had to name one, I would say that this is my favorite space in the building.

One enters the hall itself through a lobby, which features wood paneling and stained glass skylights:

The hall itself is exquisite, and this photo doesn't even begin to do it justice.

As with the library, all the wood carvings are unique. Here are a few examples:

The Auditorium Theatre

There is so much to talk about with respect to the theatre itself that I am going to limit myself in this discussion to a few things I liked, that also photographed well. The theatre and its lobby are particularly hard to photograph due to the relatively low light levels and the extremely warm color of the vintage Edison-type bulbs used.

In the interior of the theatre, Sullivan used concentric parabolic arches due to their acoustical effect on the transmission of sound. He then used them decoratively in the lobby spaces, to unite these spaces thematically with the interior of the theatre.

Here we see this theme employed, with the stained glass fanlights depicting the Muses in the background, over the entrance doors:

The lobby also contains two inglenooks. An inglenook is an intimate, semi-enclosed alcove with a fireplace and seating, adjacent to a larger room. Here, patrons could warm themselves and engage in conversation before the show.

A view of the grand theatre space itself:

Even from the highest upper balcony, the sight lines to the stage are superb.

There are other spaces I haven't shown here that are going to be included on the tour. Also, as of this writing, we can still add 6-8 more people. If you have RSVP'd and need to pay your $15, I have added a PayPal link on the upper right sidebar. If you aren't attending MINICON but would like to join us for the tour, we'd love to have you! Please contact me via earl(dot)parson (at) gmail(dot)com.

For my previous post on the tour, with some drawings and other information about the building, click here.

John Lautner Tour: Harpel House, 1956

2011-07-29T06:10:00.000-07:00

The next house I bring you from last weekend's Lautner Tour is the Harpel House. Nine years after the Jacobsen House, we can see that structure is clearly a major theme in John Lautner's work. Harpel displays his ongoing interest in developing a fully integrated and expressed structural system, for each project, as an important architectural value.

Harpel is located a few miles west of the Jacobsen House, just down Mulholland and on the opposite side about a block. From the road, there is a long driveway that goes uphill to a level pad where the house sits. You can get a pretty clear picture of the siting of the house from the Google Satellite view:

The Harpel House is the white bar at the lower right. The octagon to the left is Lautner's famous Chemosphere, aka the Malin House. The small white circle just below the Harpel House is a Futuro which is apparently being restored by the Harpel's owner.

We weren't allowed to photograph inside the house, so I'll give an exterior tour and describe a few things I liked about the inside, using the floor plan for visuals.

Here's an overall view of the house, with the Futuro visible just above and behind it on the hillside:

Lautner's floor plan, which was provided in our tour brochure, shows the main concept of the house pretty clearly. The structural system is a simple post-and-beam grid based on an equilateral triangle. (Properly speaking, it's not a grid but a tessellation.) The columns are all smooth concrete, and the beams linking them are wood. The entire north- and view-facing side of the house (towards the top in the drawing) is glass, while the opposite side is generally more solid. Click on the plan to embiggen.

Without being a total expert on Lautner, I'll go out on a limb and suggest that the house has qualities that relate it to Mies's Farnsworth House of 1945-51 or Johnson's 1949 Glass House. (I'm sure I've made some enemies with that statement but so be it. Go ahead and unfriend me.) Of course there are major differences, and this house is not at all the literal rectangular glass box that those two are. I find it much more nuanced than those two, although I have to disclaim that I haven't seen those houses in person.

As you approach from the road below and walk up the driveway, you have to go around and past the carport (on the left side of the plan above) to get to the courtyard and front door in the back of the house. As you pass around the carport end of the house, you can look up and see the Chemosphere above you to the west. Apparently Lautner met Malin through Harpel. I love that each house is visible from the other.

These show the carport and entry courtyard:

I really love the living room of this house. The entry/living/dining rooms together make up a large hexagonal shape at the east end of the house. Here is where Lautner's expressive design genius really shines. These spaces are so free, dynamic, and open that they provide a perfect counterpoint to the geometric rigor of the structural system.

At the center of this area is a column, which, as you can observe in the plan above, anchors a hexagonal spiral that works its way counter-clockwise, all the way back around to the kitchen at the upper left. Between the Living Room and Loggia (aka the entryway) is a low cabinet-wall on the Loggia side, with a built-in chevron-shaped upholstered seating unit (seems weirdly pedestrian to call it a couch) backing up to it on the Living Room side. Also, the living room is sunken a few steps from the rest of the house, giving it a higher ceiling that really makes its spatial proportions exquisite.

Along the south wall of the living room is the massive stone fireplace. The fireplace really makes the space (if not the whole house) for me. Its stone walls rise all the way to the ceiling, providing a palpable sense of shelter and enclosure, in stark contrast to the floor-to-ceiling glass walls opposite. In that aspect, this space reminded me a lot of the Schindler House on Kings Road, with its spatial contrast of concrete shelter on one side of the room, versus openness on the opposite side.

The other thing I really liked about that fireplace was the way its overall shape in plan is a shallow 'U' shape, with the side 'arms' of the shape opening outward.

This outward-gesturing shape, combined with the massiveness and extra height of the stone wall (because of the Living Room being sunken), served strongly to anchor and direct the orientation of the whole space outward towards the view.

In summary, I saw a few important similarities between this house and Jacobsen.

Both demonstrate the importance to Lautner of having the exposed structural system play a major role in the architectural experience.
Both houses explore and play on a combination of hexagonal and rectilinear geometries. In Jacobsen, the rectilinear dominates; in Harpel, the hexagonal dominates.
Both utilize massive masonry fireplaces as devices to organize and focus the main living space. In each, the fireplace area has buit-in seating, and the composition of fireplace and seating together serves to orient the whole room to the view, while also allowing inhabitants to turn inward and enjoy the fire.

John Lautner Tour: Jacobsen House, 1947

2011-07-28T07:15:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I had the wonderful treat of participating in the special tour of John Lautner-designed homes that was jointly put on by the MAK Center and the John Lautner Foundation. The whole thing was done in celebration of what would have been Lautner's 100th birthday on July 16th of this year.

I present them here in the reverse of the order in which I saw them on the tour, for a couple of reasons. First, by reversing the order, I will roughly present them in a chronological sequence from earlier career to later, which I think makes sense with this particular group of projects. Second, it makes little sense to lead with Sheats/Goldstein, since everything is pretty much anticlimactic after that.

One more introductory note: the MAK and Lautner folks who organized the tour did a great job, and produced a booklet for the tour with information about the houses. In my blog posts in this series, all the images are my own photographs, with the exception of one or two archival photos from the booklet, and the Lautner drawings which I scanned from the tour booklet.

The Jacobsen is on Multiview Drive, just below Mulholland Drive, overlooking the San Fernando Valley above Studio City and Universal City. Multiview is a pretty good street for architecture; Schindler's wonderful Kallis House, with its butterfly roof and quirky stone fireplaces, is nearby on the same side of the street.

This is an early-career project for Lautner, dating from 1947. According to Wikipedia, he had left Frank Lloyd Wright's employment and gone off on his own by that time, although he did not finally obtain his own architecture license until 1952.

So, this house is the work of an unlicensed individual who would have found himself in violation of California law had he have claimed to have been an architect. Ahem. Don't get me started.

The other houses on the tour were better concealed from the road; this house reveals itself pretty directly to you as you walk up the driveway:

I love the way that giant tree frames the view of the house from below. So poetic!

Other than being a boxy, modernist house, there is a really obvious feature that distinguishes this house from nearly all others you will ever see: the large steel truss that seems attached to the side of the house like some mechanical or insect-like appendage.

The truss is actually acting as a column and holds up the roof. The main upper roof is hexagonal in plan, and there are 3 of these truss-structures that support it. Here is Lautner's roof plan, which gives you an idea of how it works. The 3 dark 'V's at the upper right, lower right, and left sides of the hexagon are the trusses.

The truss you see from the driveway is the one at the upper right in the roof plan. And here you can see how the high, hexagonal roof relates to the more boxy main level floor plan:

The truss on the left side, in the plan, comes down in the middle of the patio.

Here is Lautner's detail of the truss. Notice it says "John Lautner Design" and not "John Lautner Architect" at the bottom.

Even the base plates were carefully designed. They could have just as easily been dumb rectangles, but he shapes them.

Lest you think this house is just all about the structural design, as if that weren't enough, there are tons of beautiful details throughout this house. As I approached the front door, I immediately liked the way the wood siding is carefully mitered and turned in at the window and door openings. Typically this would just get covered with trim.

At the interior doorways we see similar attention to detail. No door trim to hide poor craftsmanship; just beautifully executed craftsmanship that stands on its own.

At the center of the house is this elaborate brick fireplace and inglenook. The shaping and placement of it really emphasizes the openness of the house to the patio (shown above) and the view.

This might look like another view of the Jacobsen house, but it's actually the house next door, where Lautner employed the same structural system. The two houses share the driveway.

And that's about it for the Jacobsen house. I really enjoyed it.

It's not the tour-de-force that a lot of Lautners are, but it is really a great little house. I love how it shows that, from early in his career, he was innovating with the structural systems of even modest projects.

Though this particular truss-column system never caught on in a big way, it definitely foreshadows his later successes, where he was able to minimize the structural footprint to such a degree that he could put spectacular houses on steep, previously unbuildable lots.

A Little Pre-tour Lautner Fun at Curbed LA

2011-07-23T09:11:00.000-07:00

I had a look at Curbed LA this morning to see if there was anything on there about the Lautner Tour, and I wasn't disappointed!

Curbed rarely disappoints.

Earlier this week they posted a neat little video of appearances by Lautner homes in movies. It's good fun, and they even included the sort-of appearance of the Chemosphere house on the Simpsons. Two houses from the tour are shown here, the Jacobsen and Sheats/Goldstein houses.

They have more info about the houses in the video over at Curbed.

Also don't forget to keep an eye on my live tour update posts, starting in a couple of hours, by following me at:
(pick one)
twitter.com/earl3d
earl3d.tumblr.com
facebook.com/earl3d.

I may even throw in some good stuff that's not even part of the tour!

Follow my Live Coverage of the John Lautner Home Tour

2011-07-22T15:19:00.000-07:00

I'm very excited about the tour I'm participating in tomorrow, of 4 private homes designed by the great modern master John Lautner.

For the benefit of you, my readers (and because its fun!) I'm going to be covering the event with updates and photos throughout the day, through the magic of social media:

Twitter: follow me at twitter.com/Earl3d for updates with links to photos.
Facebook: friend me at facebook.com/Earl3d
Tumblr: Check out my new Tumblr blog for photo updates throughout the day at earl3d.tumblr.com.

I'll be posting the same updates to all 3 sites simultaneously, so don't feel like you have to keep track of all 3.

The Tumblr blog is going to be a bit of an experiment for me. Thus far, I'm thinking of it this way: Creatures of Prometheus is going to remain my primary blogging outlet for more thoughtful analysis, carefully written essays, photo essays, and the like; whereas I'll use the Tumblr blog for briefly captioned mobile uploads and live-tweeting (live tumbling?) or live-blogging of events that will benefit from lots of photography.

I also plan to take my trusty Nikon D-90 on the tour and get lots of 'good' photos of the houses too, and write up separate blog posts for each one, as I described the other day. One thing that throws a little wrench into this plan is that they have forbidden any photography at the Harpel House. Perhaps they will allow some exterior photography there. In any event, I can bring my sketchbook.

I got my ticket and wrist band in the mail today,

and my itinerary is as follows:

11:20 am- 12:00 pm Sheats/Goldstein House
12:05 pm - 12:45 pm Schwimmer House
1:35 pm - 2:05 pm Harpel House
2:15 pm - 2:45 pm Jacobsen House

Also, the Schindler House on Kings Road will be open all day, with free admission for tour-goers, so I'll likely stop by there after the tour, on my way home. That should be a great way to decompress, collect my thoughts, and contemplate the events of the day.

Touring Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building at COS MiniCon

2011-07-20T19:56:00.000-07:00

In the period of a few years between 1887 and 1889, a 30-year-old Louis Sullivan, aided by his 18-year-old assistant Frank Lloyd Wright, conceived and built the Auditorium Building at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Congress Parkway in Chicago. The building is a tour-de-force of Sullivan's genius, and is generally considered to be among his greatest works. I'm thrilled to be presenting a special tour of the building as part of the Chicago Objectivist Society's MiniCon, this coming Labor Day weekend.

The Theatre was (and is) renowned for its acoustical perfection, among other technical innovations that amazed theater goers when the building was new. It was the first building to employ a system of central air conditioning, the first to be lit exclusively with incandescent light bulbs, and and it is often cited as the first mixed use building, as it contained not only the Auditorium Theatre, but also a hotel and rental office space.

When most people (of those who are aware of it) think of the Auditorium Building, I would venture to guess that their minds typically go straight to the Theatre, and rightly so. The Theatre itself is the crown jewel of the building, after all. But, there is a lot more to the Auditorium Building than just the famous Auditorium Theatre.

There are a number of other beautiful spaces, originally built as part of the hotel, that display Sullivan's incredible design genius every bit as much as the Theatre. Today these spaces have, for the most part, survived as part of Roosevelt University, which has occupied the building since the 1940s. Some of these spaces are better preserved than others, and some have been lovingly and meticulously restored to their former glory. The former hotel dining room is now the library of the university; the former ladies lounge on the second floor of the hotel is now called the Sullivan Room. The Sullivan Room and Ganz Hall are two of the spaces that have been meticulously restored. Ganz Hall, which is located on the 7th floor, was once a private banquet hall, and is now used as a recital hall for Roosevelt's music program.

The building is a bit of a puzzle, in terms of layout. To look at it from the outside, it's hard to see how all these different functions fit neatly into the simple gray granite box that presents itself to the street. Lets examine how the spaces relate to one another.

The three arches facing us, at the street level in the picture above, were the main entrance to the hotel, and are now the main entrance to Roosevelt U. The second floor, just above the lobby, is a generous lounge space. The Lobby and Lounge both display much of their original detailing. In the left-hand corner of the building, at the second floor, is the Sullivan Room.

I've taken the liberty to add some color to this historic section through the building, in order to help explain the layout of the interior:

Click to embiggen!

From left to right, you can see that the hotel lobby and lounge occupy the frontage along Michigan Avenue. Above that are 7 floors of hotel rooms (now classrooms and offices) with the Grand Dining Hall/Library high above on the 10th floor. The hotel room layout basically wraps around the Congress Parkway side (at the back, behind the visible area of this drawing). Next, moving to the right, comes the backstage area, and then the Auditorium Theatre itself. Perched above the auditorium is the special little jewel that is Ganz Hall. It is suspended over the theatre space on a special system of trusses. Next we reach the tower, in the top of which was Adler & Sullivan's office, and at the base of which is the entrance & ticketing area to the Theatre. The block to the right of the lobbies and stairs was originally the rental office space, which wrapped around in an 'L' shape, up to and including the tower.

Here are a few then + now pictures of some of the spaces. First, the Hotel Lobby:

The Grand Dining Hall:

Ganz Hall (in which every carved wooden column capital is unique):

One space that is still a mystery to me is the O'Malley Theatre.

I shaded it in blue when I colored in the section drawing, simply for contrast, but I have no idea what the space is actually like inside. It does appear to be part of the original plans, from what I can tell, and I am quite curious to learn more about it.

The other mystery I'm trying to resolve is this historic postcard, identified only as "Restaurant"

Based on the configuration of windows shown in the view, I can't make it make sense, based on what I know about the Grand Dining Hall and Ganz Hall. Interestingly, the chairs do match the chairs in the other black and white historic photos of the dining room, above.

I am fortunate to have the opportunity to visit the Auditorium Building next week in advance of the tour, and will try to find out more about O'Malley, as well as the Mystery Dining Room, while I'm there.

Usually, Ganz Hall and the Sullivan Room are reserved for special Roosevelt University events. We have been granted special access to these spaces for our tour, through the generosity of the university. I couldn't be happier about the cooperation and enthusiasm they have displayed in helping me plan this event. It is clear that they treasure their home and cherish its beauty and significance, and are eager to share it with others who also appreciate it.

For further information about the tour, and to RSVP if you are already registered for the conference, please see our facebook event page at this link. Hope to see you there!

Forget the Tea Party, I Want to Start the Lemonade Party

2011-07-19T22:04:00.000-07:00

It's a horrifying development that one of the themes of the Summer of 2011 is the ongoing war being waged by local municipalities all across the US against kids and their lemonade stands. It's a regular occurrence to see outraged links to these news stories in my twitter and facebook feeds.

Over at Josh Blackman's Blog, he has a nice little post about a recent NPR opinion piece on the topic, which I recommend you check out. He starts out:

When NPR has an opinion piece in favor of the right to earn an honest living–let the kids have lemonade stands!–you know the statists went too far.

The NPR piece itself neatly captures the essence of the issue in its opening line:

If lemonade stands are symbols of the American dream, and if lemonade stands are under attack in the United States, then the American dream is under attack.

To be more specific, the lemonade stand issue represents the American dream under a 3-pronged attack by statists at all levels of government:

The ongoing erosion of Property Rights. A person has the right to use & dispose of his property as he sees fit, provided he does not violate the rights of others in so doing. If a person wants to invite others onto his front lawn for the purpose of selling them lemonade, its his right. For the police to show up, and prevent this harmless activity from taking place, is pure thuggery. The police officers who enforce these laws should be ashamed of themselves, and don't give me any of that 'he's just doing his job' crap.

Let me say it again in a bigger font:

The police officers who enforce these laws should be ashamed of themselves.
Denial of the Right to Contract. Parties have an absolute right to voluntarily enter into mutually beneficial agreements of their own choosing. If I have lemonade to sell, and you're a willing buyer, there is no proper role for government in initiating force against us to prevent the sale. Of course, you have the right to ask me all kinds of questions about the quality of my product, and even sue me in court if I misrepresent what I'm selling you. But, as long as the transaction is purely voluntary, the initiation of force by any outside party, government or otherwise, to prevent it, is immoral. Ayn Rand identified this concept as:

The Trader Principle.
Attack on individuals' Right to Earn a Living. Ever heard of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? Ever thought about what that really means, in a practical, nuts-and-bolts way? I think most people hear this well-worn phrase and picture, in a very lofty and abstract way, that America was founded as the place where you could follow your dream and do whatever you want to with your life. This is certainly true, but try thinking about it in a more concrete way. How about: A person has a moral right to earn an honest living by the means of his own choosing.

How about one more time, with feeling:

A person has a moral right to earn an honest living by the means of his own choosing.

Of course, this concept has been completely turned on its ear these days. The slew of regulations, at multiple levels of government, that act as barriers to entry for new businesses don't just prevent new businesses from opening. They kill peoples' dreams. They prevent people from earning an honest living by the means of their own choosing. If you think that those regulations are actually necessary to prevent people from harming each other, I would refer you to point #2 above. The vast majority of regulation today is simple denial of the Right to Contract in the interest of furthering some political ends. I think that formulation deserves a Big Font, too.

The vast majority of regulation today is simple denial of the Right to Contract, in the interest of furthering some political ends.

I think that today, the most critically abused aspects of Individual Rights are these three. The War on Lemonade Stands is a horrific encapsulation of what goes on every day, at all scales, when government oversteps its proper role of protecting our rights, and instead becomes the violator of our rights.

Although the Tea Party movement had its origins in a reaction to government abuses not unlike those described above, I and many others fear it will be (or has been?) co-opted by the Religious Right and their anti-Individual-Rights social agenda. Of course, the only real way to combat government intrusion is a robust, moral defense of Individual Rights, which the Tea Party has yet to embrace, and which is largely antithetical to any mainstream political thinking today.

I say forget the Tea Party, let's start the Lemonade Party! And while most appeals to take action 'for the children' make me retch, this is one I could actually get behind and advocate for.

Do it for the children!

----------------------------------

Update: 7/20/11

It looks like it's on! Turns out that Judy over at Consent of the Governed wrote this piece with much the same sentiment, and suggested August 20 as Lemonade for Freedom Day. Robert Fernandes has created a website called lemonadefreedom.com and facebook event page, and word is getting out. This is great!

Please help spread the word!

Mid-year Accomplishments for 2011

2011-07-19T10:14:00.000-07:00

It's good to stop what you're doing periodically and review the positive accomplishments in your life.

A couple of months ago I posted on how I was finally feeling back to my old self after a period of months of unforeseen setbacks and troubles. Well, as it turns out, it wasn't as easy as just 'snapping out of it' and going back to my previously robust self. There have continued to be good days and bad days. But, overall, I've managed to gain and/or keep the upper hand for the most part, and the stock chart of my life has, in fact, continued in a generally bullish trend.

Now that the year is slightly over half over, and lest anyone (I'm mainly talking about myself here) think the first 6 months of 2011 were a wash, I want to stop, take a timeout, and acknowledge some of my actual positive accomplishments from the first half of the year.

(This is the part where I get all fidgety in my seat and want to go to the kitchen for a snack or bottle of water or something. Maybe I should go let the dogs out to run around in the front yard. In fact, maybe the plants on the front porch need watering while I'm out there. And while I'm at it, the tomato plants on along the driveway need some attention too. See? I could just go on all day like this.)

Where was I? Oh, that's right. My actual positive accomplishments from the first half of the year.

Let's see.

Well, right around the time of my thumb injury, but before I realized how bad it was and went in for surgery, I went back to Tennessee and took a ton of photos of the completed Tennessee House. I even got some specialized equipment so that I could take these special panoramic images. I've been working with them in post-production with specialized software that stitches the images. Finally, finally I just figured out how to embed them here on the ol' blog. This last step had been frustrating me for a while, but I have it figured out! Actually I found some spare code in the junk drawer in the kitchen and, lo and behold, it worked.

They're 3-4 mb each, so they may take a minute to load. Sorry about that, but I wanted to keep the image quality high. You can click on there and pan around and manipulate it interactively, and maybe even zoom in and out. Try it!

I took a bunch of these, of the house; I'm excited to take more of them, of things around LA, now that I finally know how to embed them. They operate on QuickTime, so you might have to install that as a plug-in to your browser to see them.

So, I achieved several things here.

1. I completed the Tennessee House. Mr + Ms Client have moved in and are happy. This is huge for me.
2. I got good pictures of the completed project. Also a big accomplishment.
3. I got a whole bunch of new equipment and software and learned how to use it all.
4. Bonus: I got to spend a little time with Jenn and Kelly and some of my ATLOS friends when I was back there in January.

Soon after I got back from Tennessee, and after my hand surgery and a couple weeks of recovery, I started teaching a full-time course load in the Architecture Dept. at Local Community College. LCC has an excellent, and well-regarded architecture program, and I enjoy participating there. Related to that, I accomplished the following:

5. After a 5-year hiatus from teaching, I reconnected with my pro-academic side* .
6. Got to know and work with some really great colleagues, some of whom I already knew, and others who I was working with for the first time. Maintaining some level of involvement in the academic world is important to me, even when I'm not teaching full-time, so this was good.
7. While teaching drawing, I managed to learn some new skills myself along the way, and got inspired to continue to develop my skills. Seeing the students learning new things always makes me want to learn new things myself.
8. I feel like I rediscovered some parts of myself that I had been neglecting for a while, on both my intellectual and creative sides. This was like getting reacquainted with an old friend I hadn't seen in a while but then suddenly realized how much I missed him.

Another academic endeavor from the spring was my participation in 2 Objectivist mini-conferences: FROCON and ATLOSCON. The first of the two, FROCON, took place in Denver in early March. ATLOSCON was over Memorial Day weekend, in Atlanta. Both were a lot of fun, and I learned a lot and enjoyed the conferences tremendously.

9. As with most objectivist conferences, the social time was every bit as fun, if not more so than, the seminars and presentations. These events really are worth the effort to attend, even from across the country. (I think it also helps that I have developed a lot of friendships in these particular cities!)
10. I presented my lecture on Viollet-le-Duc, Sullivan, and Wright at ATLOSCON. I refined it a bit from the presentation I had done at FROST last fall, and expanded my research in the process.

There were new design projects started.

11. Farmer Jo, aka Ms. Client of the Tennessee House, has been ... displaced, but in a good way. As fond as I am of our memories together, I'm quite excited to have a new Ms. Client! We're going to remodel New Ms. Client's home, and I'm very excited about it. Some very cool ideas are beginning to form themselves in my brain, so stay tuned.
12. I got the urge to build a new bicycle. Not sure where this exactly came from, apart from the fact that I built a bike years ago when I was in grad school, and just decided it was time to make another one. I'm working on designs for a new bike, and hope to start welding soon. Summer fun!
13. I worked on some designs for a concrete doghouse for the backyard, but I think that project got displaced by the bike in my list of priorities. Still, I think the effort merits a mention here, and the doghouse project will stay on the list of 'things I want to do in the not-so-distant future'.

There were other accomplishments, that aren't so neatly categorized.

14. I've made an effort to find fun new things to do with Paul + Todd (my faithful spokesdogs) over the past several weeks. We've found new places to hike and explore, and Paul even went swimming in the ocean for the first time recently!
15. I started a massive household purge, which is ongoing. The big motivation to get rid of stuff came when I decided to rent my spare bedroom to my friend Alan. He needed a place, and I decided I would rather have the extra money than to just let that room continue on as my de-facto storage unit. Clearing it out for him to move in made me realize how much the purge was needed. So I've been throwing stuff out left and right, and have also undertaken a major reorganization of the garage workshop.
16. The big summary realization: Sometimes life throws you curves. Sometimes you get kicked square in the nuts (literally or, in my case this year, metaphorically). It's ok to hunker down and just ride it out, if that's the best you can do. Just keep looking for the exit (as Andras Schiff would say, describing Beethoven) and moving forward, as best you can, in a positive direction. I navigated the obstacle course and came though stronger than I went in (with the possible exception of my left EPL tendon, but it is in very good shape today, thank Science and my excellent team of Physicians.) Stay true to yourself, do what you have to do to take care of yourself, and you'll probably be able to look back and find lots of things you accomplished, even when it felt like every little thing was a hugely disproportionate struggle.

So: Onward! This post is already way too long to start in on things I want to do in the second half of the year, but I'm feeling more motivated than ever to do Great Things with the rest of 2011.

*as opposed to my amateur/armchair academic side, which was definitely alive and well throughout my teaching hiatus

Celebrating John Lautner's 100th Birthday

2011-07-16T15:40:00.000-07:00

Periodically, I sit down and avail myself of the Googles and Wikipedia to find birthdays of great architects and designers I admire. I add them to my calendar, with the intent to blog my own little celebrations of them as they roll around throughout the year.

If you have any suggestions for me to add to the list, please feel free to chime in, in the comments.

There haven't been any for a few weeks now (of the ones I've added to my list thus far). Today we have a big one to celebrate. Today marks the Centennial of John Lautner's birth.

Lautner was one of Frank Lloyd Wright's more illustrious proteges, and has a special place in my personal Pantheon. Lautner wasn't just another good architect. He was an incredible visionary and innovator.

Rather than go on at length about Lautner's career, as the Wikipedia article linked above does, I'm keeping it short today, but don't worry, there's much more to come.

This summer, the John Lautner Foundation is holding a whole series of events to celebrate, including a tour next weekend of private Lautner homes in the L.A. area. I bought my ticket this morning, and couldn't be more excited. The tour is a little pricey at $100 but worth every penny, IMO. You can get yours here. Join me for the tour! I'll have my camera with me and expect to take lots, and lots, and lots of pictures.

I plan to do a separate post for each house on the tour. The tour includes (links are to Google image searches for each house) the Harpel House (1956), Jacobsen House (1956), Schwimmer House (1982) and Sheats/Goldstein House (1963/1989).

Stay tuned! And raise a glass to the genius of John Lautner today!

Wut

2011-06-25T13:25:00.000-07:00

Wut

Lou Kahn + Some Thoughts on Drawing

2011-06-22T09:59:00.000-07:00

Architecture. Making buildings. Hopefully, with enough effort, the building will be worthwhile in the end. I'll stand there and admire it, and hopefully get to take a few photos of it, before turning it over to the owner. Maybe I will get to return and visit from time to time. Sometimes projects are far away, and you may not get the opportunity to go back, ever.

When you look at a particular building, all you can see is the finished product. There are no semi-erased lines on the floor showing where the walls would have been, before the architect revised the plans. Architecture is a process that leads to a product. To the viewing public, there is only the product. But to the architect, it is all about the process, and once the process is complete, the architect moves on.

One of the things I enjoy most about teaching drawing to young architects is that the process of creating architecture is fundamentally based on drawing. It's what we do. Novelists write, painters paint, architects draw.

Drawing is the primary means by which we communicate our ideas. When the students pin up their final designs for critique at the end of the semester, I think it's important to point out the examples of students who have design concepts that are beyond their ability to depict via their drawings. This gives me the opportunity to give one of my favorite mini-lectures: That your ideas are only as good as your ability to communicate them. It doesn't matter, in the end, how brilliant your ideas are, or how brilliant you think they are. If you can't communicate them with the world in an intelligible way, you fail.

We also draw to study the world around us. This type of investigative drawing is similar to, but distinct from, design drawing. There is an exhibition running through July 1 at Lori Brookstein Fine Art, in New York, of some drawings by the great architect Lou Kahn. The drawings on exhibit are sketches from his travels, of the 'investigative' type. They strike me as being much more about the process of investigation and discovery, than about having anything to do with making a picture to be framed and hung on a gallery wall. The gallery has the exhibit available online; I encourage you to click through the link and check it out. Better yet, go see it for yourself if you can.

I think if more people saw drawing as a process of investigation and discovery, and less about trying to make a particularly nice looking picture (and by whose standard, anyway?) you would see more people out and about with their sketch pads and pencils in hand. Drawing is a language of communication -- whether you are projecting your own fantasies to show others, or privately exploring the world around you. Each of us has a unique, individual voice, which can only be discovered by taking pencil or pen in hand and doing the work.

Imagine how the world opens up to an adult who is illiterate and then learns to read and write. I would argue that there is a similar expansion of one's life available to the person who is willing to make the effort to discover his own visual voice, and learn to use it to express himself.

Summer of Bikes, 2011

2011-06-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

Among the things I'm most excited about right now is my Summer Bike Project.

Years ago, I built a bike, when I was in architecture school. It was for a summer object making class, and it was the first time I made anything substantive out of steel. They picked my bike for the postcard advertising the exhibition. (I hasten to point out whenever I show it that I did not design the postcard itself, just the bike.)

Here are some closeup details. I was especially happy with how the chain-drive steering turned out.

The steering wheel:

The seat itself came from a kid's trike:

We did a lot of scavenging that summer. Most of the bearings and other components were cut off of junk bikes we found or bought cheap from thrift stores.

For my bike(s) this summer, I have found some good resources online for bearings and other components, and I don't plan on doing any bike-part-scavenging. The website I'm looking at the most, as I work through my designs, is BicycleDesigner.com. They seem to have just about everything in the way of bike parts, and lots of helpful diagrams. I'll also hit up some local bike shops once I'm closer to starting, and see what they have in stock for components. It's always good to have relationships with helpful local experts when you have technical questions about a project. Also, returning/exchanging parts that don't turn out to be quite the right thing is waaaay easier when you're dealing locally.

The new designs I'm working on have a pretty clear relationship to my original bike: I'm keeping the smaller rear wheel and chain-drive steering concepts for now (although for one of the bikes I'm sketching, I'm attempting to simplify things by using conventional steering.) Things are still developing, but I should have some pics to show in the next few days.

Also, I'm in talks with a couple of friends in an attempt to persuade them to make bikes along with me, and then put together some kind of exhibition at the end of the summer.

Stay tuned!

Tuesday Night OList Happy Hour: Projects, Planning, and Productiveness

2011-06-14T12:17:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've blogged about an OList Happy Hour topic.

Being in a big planning push this week to get a start on my summer projects, it got me wondering what the other OList folk have planned, project-wise, for their summers.

This line of thinking then had me wondering what others were doing to plan out and organize their work. At the moment, I'm in the process of charting out the coming months, setting milestones, and conducting research. I'm determined to get as much as I can out of the long days and nice weather.

What projects are you planning for the coming months? Can you think of actions you could take to give your productiveness a boost? Join us for Happy Hour tonight and let's discuss!

Happy Hour Mechanics:

Happy Hour takes place in the OList Chatroom, every Tuesday night, from 9-10 p.m. Eastern and 6-7 p.m. Pacific.

Point your browser to www.olist.com/chat. You will be asked for a login and password - check your OList email for these.

You will see the chat window that looks like this:

On the right is the list of users participating; on the left is the chat itself. At the bottom, you have the option of logging in through your facebook account, or as a guest. If you log in through facebook, it will pull your profile picture into the list next to your name, which is a nice feature.

For general information on the OLists Socials, check out the OList Events page here.

Your hosts for the OList Socials are @DianaHsieh, @laforgetm (aka William Green) and myself, @Earl3d

Summer Welding Projects

2011-06-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

This week is our finals week at school, which means Summer is finally upon me! I'm looking forward to spending a lot of time in the shop this summer, and have been excitedly prioritizing my welding projects.

The list* looks something like this, thus far:

1. Finish the glider I started last summer. It was well underway when the Tennessee House completely took over my life for pretty much the rest of the year.

2. Handrail for my cousin Ed's stairs. He asked me to put something together for him a while ago. This will be relatively simple and quick once I have my shop back up and running.

3. Rack for my dumbbell set. Another easy, utilitarian project. It's good to have a few simple things to work on in between, and along with, the complicated ones.

4. New bicycle. Yes! A new bike for summer. I'm already sketching and researching parts for this, and getting very very excited about it. Watch for a whole post on this topic.

5. Experiment with making metal bowls on my lathe. If this sounds complicated and weird, well... I saw a video online ages ago where someone had put a metal plate on their lathe and was using their welder to build up metal bowls. Think of a potter with a wheel, only instead of starting with a lump of clay, you start with a flat metal plate and build up the thickness as it spins. This will be extremely experimental, and I'm not sure how it will go. I've been wanting to try it for a long time.

In addition to these, I have one special commission already in the works, and am talking to a potential new client this Friday about some welding she needs done.

It's going to be a busy, fun summer!

*Subject to change, of course!

Strange Architectural Dream #541

2011-06-09T07:54:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamt I was touring around in, and investigating, a small Gothic cathedral. In the dream, I was disappointed to discover, upon careful examination from all angles, that it was not Notre Dame de Paris.

The cathedral portion of the dream was depicted entirely in sepia tones.

Also, there were hot tubs and bad guys involved at some point.

That's all I can remember.

Frank Lloyd Wright on What's My Line

2011-06-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

As we continue our celebration of Frank Lloyd Wright's birthday: Here is a clip of Wright that I found on YouTube. Wright appeared on the game show What's My Line on June 3, 1956.

It's a little long but very fun to watch. I love how he signs his name on the chalkboard at the beginning.

Enjoy!

Happy Birthday Frank Lloyd Wright

2011-06-08T06:45:00.000-07:00

Frank Lloyd Wright was born today in 1867.

Wright's design philosophy was heavily influenced by his association with Louis Sullivan, as well as the writings of the French architect Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. These two originated the idea that architecture must be grounded in, and exemplary of, the highest and best aspects of the technology and culture out of which it arises.

Viollet-le-Duc came first; Sullivan further developed his ideas, originating the well-known formulation, "Form Follows Function". Without their fundamental guiding principles, Wright might have been a talented designer, but would not likely have reached the heights he did in his career. I describe the philosophical link shared by these three giants in the talk I gave recently at ATLOSCON, and which I will give again at the Chicago Objectivist Society's conference this coming Labor Day weekend.

As a celebration of his fabulous contribution to my very Top Value, I offer a few snaps of my visit to one of his greatest achievements, Fallingwater. The house was completed in the late 1930s, while Wright was in his late 60s. When most people would be at retirement age, Wright was in his prime.

Night Blooming Cactopodes!

2011-06-07T22:17:00.000-07:00

I'm quite pleased about the fact that just earlier today I was writing about last year's spectacular crocosmia bloom; and then, this evening, I went outside and saw the first blossoms of the summer on one of my giant night-blooming cactopodes in the front yard!

Witness:

Each blossom opens at dusk, blooms for only one night, and then withers as the sun rises. They generally produce enough blossoms to go night by night for most of the summer, well into late August. When properly pollinated, they produce bright red fruit, somewhere in size between a golf and a tennis ball.

Witness: fruit from a previous year.

As I stood there admiring the cool evening ambiance and lovely scenery of my garden, my neighbor Mercedes appeared at her front gate and we chatted. Well, we sort of chatted. Our conversations are generally along the lines of making benevolent statements to one another and smiling a lot. Her English is about equivalent to my Spanish. She is the matriarch of their household, which includes everything from a relatively small, cute baby (her granddaughter), to a handsome Marine (her son) who is now attending the Police Academy. On more than one occasion, she has shown up at my doorstep, smiling, with a plate full of carne asada or chile rellenos for me.

I picked a flower and gave it to her, and then there was one left.

Crocosmia Part I

2011-06-07T07:35:00.000-07:00

Last year the crocosmia in my front yard bloomed and bloomed and bloomed. They were gorgeous. This year we had a lot of rain, which beat them down, and they just didn't look as good.

Fortunately, however, last year I got great pictures. Somehow they never made it onto the blog. Today we'll look at some of those. I'm planning to follow up with a couple more posts on crocosmia, because they're my favorite flower, and I like to talk (and write) about things that merit that distinction.

So, without further ado, here's a quick tour around my little front yard.

Wut

2011-06-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

Wut

Amusing UK Signage Graphics Part III: Danger!

2011-06-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

Today we close our series of Amusing UK Signage Graphics with Part III: Danger! All of these were taken by me during my trip to the UK in the Fall of 2009.

There's something oddly specific to me about this.

This reminds me a bit of the ones we have on jetways

that warn you of the tripping hazard.

The image of the guy tripping and flying through the air

always makes me chuckle. Of course,

I probably won't be laughing when it's me

that falls on his ass, but still.

(Actually I might laugh at myself in such a circumstance.)

Danger of Death!

Enter these premises and God himself may very well strike you down!

Consider yourself warned.

This one was my favorite. :)

The Pantheon, Rome

2011-06-02T07:30:00.000-07:00

Another great building that I could write a whole extensive field trip post about, and may yet do someday, is The Pantheon in Rome. It has such a rich history, and is one of my favorite buildings.

For today, I'm just posting a single, composite picture of the interior of the Pantheon. I took this on my last trip to Italy, in 2004.

Click to embiggen, and enjoy!

Amusing UK Signage Graphics Part II: Fashions

2011-06-01T12:50:00.000-07:00

Today I present Part II of my series of Amusing UK Signage Graphics, from my trip to the UK in late 2009. Our topic for today is Fashion. Sort of.

Part II has fewer pictures but I'm fond of them nonetheless.

Bowler Hats Required Here!

Don't forget your fashionable footwear.

OK, so it's really a safety helmet.

But what a smart looking helmet it is!

That's it for today's installment. Part III is a little longer, and includes my favorite one out of the whole series.

Look for it on Friday!

Welcome to Los Angeles. Prepare to stop.

2011-05-31T07:00:00.000-07:00

That is all.

Amusing UK Signage Graphics Part I: Moving About

2011-05-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago, whilst in the UK, I encountered a number of don't-go-here, stop-or-you'll-get-hurt, type of signs that I found particularly charming. The style of these graphics is amusing to me simply because they just somehow seem so, well, polite compared to their US counterparts. In other cases, they seem to just have a sense of style that indicates someone, somewhere, put that little extra effort into making them look just so.

I just now realized I have too many of them to blow on one blog post, so this will be the first of 3 in a series. Here we go!

I love how she holds his hand.

You may encounter flamboyant personages

as they sashay about the vicinity.

Take your flamboyant personage elsewhere

if you intend to sashay about.

(Notice how the pose of the figure is

identical, save for the arm.)

Noooooooo!!!!!

One could almost read this as "No Stopping!"

Do you notice this sort of thing when you travel, or is it just me?

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power

2011-05-29T07:00:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles is a city in a desert. It's easy to lose sight of that fact. Given the context, however, it's pretty easy to see that, in such a place, Water and Power are pretty much synonymous. Years ago I thoroughly enjoyed a book called Rivers in the Desert, which is an historical account of the land-and-water-rights grab perpetrated on the people of the Owens Valley, and subsequent development of the aqueducts by William Mulholland.

I am rather sympathetic to Mulholland, inasmuch as he was a self-trained, uneducated man, who eventually achieved tremendous feats in the area of hydraulic engineering and civic infrastructure. Of course, the above mentioned land grab was an abhorrent violation of the property rights of the people of the Owens Valley, and I don't mean to diminish that. But I digress.

Sometime in the '50s and/or '60's the LADWP built a lot of really nice looking modernist facilities all around town. The iconic DWP Headquarters was built around this time, but there were also a number of substations and the like constructed, that have a coherent visual identity all their own. Said identity includes smooth concrete walls, thin stacked modern brickwork, and bronze lettering set off of the face of the building on posts. If you do a google image search under DWP station, or DWP substation, or DWP distributing station, you can see a few examples (although I was disappointed that there weren't more. I should get out there and take more snaps of these). Some are more modern, some are more neo-traditional, but almost all of them share the bronze lettering in common.

If you pass by just at the right time of day, you get this:

or this:

or even this:

One of the lovely things about Los Angeles is that, even for all the smog, we do have fabulous light. *sigh*

Wut

2011-05-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

Wut

Sullivan Sketches

2011-05-27T07:00:00.000-07:00

Tonight I fly out and leave L.A. behind. This weekend I'll be in Atlanta for ATLOSCON, where I'll give a talk about the origins of modern architecture. One of the central figures of my talk, and indeed of modern architecture itself, is Louis Sullivan. Frank Lloyd Wright is also in my talk as is Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. I greatly admire all three, but I have a special place in my heart for Sullivan these days.

Why is that? It seems that Sullivan finally formulated the fundamental theories that Viollet-le-Duc was just beginning to shed light on. Wright wouldn't have been possible without Sullivan. Wright applied and perhaps expanded upon Sullivan's ideas, but he didn't particularly revolutionize architectural thinking like Sullivan did.

I'm not sure anyone has since.

So today I bring you a few sketches in Sullivan's own hand.

Were I rich, I would collect the originals of these, greedily.

Then I would share them with the world.

This Week's Objectivist Round-up

2011-05-26T20:25:00.000-07:00

This week's edition of the Objectivist Round-up has been posted over at Try Reason!

Check it out! John Drake's blog is one of my favorites. That man has a way with words.

John Herman Dersch

2011-05-26T07:26:00.000-07:00

My Grandpa Dersch would have been 101 yesterday. He died in 2005, just shy of his 95th birthday.

Here he is with his first pickup truck.

It is a 1937 GMC 1/2 ton, with 6 cylinders under the hood. If this was taken around the time he bought it new, that would make him 27 or 28 in this picture.

He was a farmer in Southern Indiana. The house behind him was their farmhouse where he and Grandma lived, and where Mom and her brother were born and raised. He was very innovative in the way chickens were raised for market, and along with his brothers, developed a very good chicken business. Later, he and Grandma built a big chicken house and went into the egg business. They also had cattle, pigs, and grew corn on their farm. He and his brothers were well known and highly regarded in that part of Southern Indiana for their innovations.

He could fix anything that broke and do anything that needed to be done on their farm; that had a big influence on me as a kid growing up. I think of him often. He was an amazing man.

Happy Birthday, Grandpa Dersch! I miss you, but I know you would be proud of me today if you were here.

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels: Quick Post

2011-05-25T11:52:00.000-07:00

A couple months ago I took my students on a field trip, to the L.A. Cathedral, officially known as the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. At some point, I would like to write a longer post on that building, as it is one of my local faves, and I have a lot to say about it. Today, however, we're just going to have a quick look at the way the sunlight and shadows move and play across the facade over the course of the day.

These were taken in early April, so the times given in my descriptions are PST.

Here is the Cathedral as it looked when I arrived, at 9:25 a.m. It's not first thing as the sun rises, but the sun is still relatively low in the eastern sky, and the building is getting a more or less straight-on blast of sunlight. You can see that the adobe-colored concrete is treated in 2 different ways: it has smooth, flat surfaces and horizontally banded surfaces.

Here is the horizontal banding up close, with a flat section also, so you can get a better idea about what it's like:

The portion of the building I am interested in for this discussion is this area above the main entrance. The right section is flat concrete, and has a recessed window very high up. The center section is horizontally banded and has a less-deeply recessed, larger window; the left section is also horizontally banded. Note also that none of these surfaces are related to one another by right angles. This affects the way the sunlight and shadows react with the building, as we shall see. The photo below was taken at 9:31, and the shadows are pretty much the same as the one above

Here it is about 30 minutes later, at 9:58. Notice how the flat surface is still in the shade, but it is no longer casting any shadow on the adjacent surface; the shadow line between the two surfaces has receded right into the corner. Notice also how the next surface over, with the larger window, is just barely being grazed by sunlight, so that the lower edges of the horizontal bands are subtly dabbed in light.

Now (below) it is a bit later, 12:21 p.m. Look at the fantastic play of light on the surface to the left! The sun is high in the sky, causing long shadows on the horizontal panels, and the glass of the window is reflecting sunlight back onto the wall as well. The flat surface to the right, by contrast, is getting a direct blast.

Here is a closeup, just a moment later, at 12:30. Another nuance you can see, if you click to embiggen, is the way the small concrete wall segment above the large window is also reflecting a small but noticeable amount of light onto the adjacent darker surface, at the corner.

And finally, about an hour and a half later, here is how it looks at 2:07 p.m. The surface to the left is in complete shadow, and the window reflection isn't doing its thing any more. The surface in the middle is just getting enough sunlight to make little triangular tips on the edge. One of the things I like about this building is that there are no right angles at all in the floor plan, and how that leads to this kind of richness and variety in the way the surfaces interact with the sunlight throughout the day.

It also leads to some really interesting things on the inside, but I'll have to leave that discussion for another day. Have you been to the Cathedral? Did you like it? Hate it? Let me know in the comments!

A Sullivan Detail for Today

2011-05-24T07:41:00.000-07:00

I took this picture last December at the Art Institute while I was in Chicago visiting my sister and her family. Somehow, I didn't write down exactly what it was (or photograph the description tag, which is usually what I do in such a situation).

It's definitely Sullivan, and I'm pretty sure it's part of the elevator grillwork from the Chicago Stock Exchange. Although, now that I'm thinking about it and writing this up, I think it could also be an air grille from that or another building.

It's fun to bring images like this into CAD or some vector-based drawing program and analyze them in terms of their fundamental geometry of lines, circles, and arcs. Hey, that gives me an idea for another whole post!

But now I have to go teach, so that's for another day. Cheers!

Feeling Like My Old Self Again

2011-05-23T12:43:00.000-07:00

Last night I was up until 2:30.

Yesterday I spent most of the day working on a difficult writing project. I'm having my website, as well as the blog here, completely redesigned from scratch. When I started the project with John David, I didn't realize quite what I was in for. Turns out, he's not just a web designer; he's a marketing guy too, and he's chock full of good ideas. So he sent over this Creative Brief that was a few pages long, with lots of questions written out in italics having to do with my objectives, my audience, and their demographics, and some particularly difficult questions about brand character and the competition (!)

During our initial conversation about the Brief, I had to have him explain the concept of brand equity to me. After a little simple math, I calculated my brand equity at about $1.95. So, it turns out there's lots of room for improvement around here in the Online Personal Brand Development department -- and now I have a Pro on the case! As we wrapped up the conversation, I thought he would be ready to get off and running, but he managed to turn the tables on me at the last minute. "Why don't you take this document and write out your responses and send it back to me," he said. It seemed like a completely reasonable request at the time, but in reality it was a challenging assignment, to say the least.

I've been working on it over the past few weeks, sort of off and on, when I haven't been sick with the pneumonia or drowning in student work to grade. Yesterday was my self-imposed deadline for getting it done and back to JD. This coming weekend is ATLOSCON, and I absolutely had to get the Creative Brief out of my hair before then, otherwise it would have been 2 more weeks of delay.

My writing-a-difficult-essay process works like this: I write a bit, maybe for half an hour or so, then get hungry or thirsty. So I allow myself to go to the kitchen and get some noms. Then I come back and write some more. Then I decide to put on some music, but usually have a hard time finding the right thing in my iTunes. Sometimes I can write to music but it usually has to be something I'm not that familiar with, or it will distract me too much. The late Beethoven piano sonatas can be good to write by, as they are more contemplative, I think -- except for the Hammerklavier. Then I write some more. I have given up being bothered by my wandering mind's interruptions. I think my subconscious just needs some breathing room sometimes, and it lets me know, when the flow of ideas gets interrupted.

After a bit more writing, I will have a sudden realization about a particular passage in a Beethoven piano sonata, and have to go look up the Wikipedia article to get an answer. Yesterday's Beethoven distraction had to do with the structure of the second movement of his Piano Sonata #5 in C minor, Opus 10 No. 1. (Wikipedia describes the movement as having sonatina form - meaning a simplified sonata form with no development section.) I've been studying that sonata lately; it's an interesting one because it is an early work, and it foreshadows many of his future compositions in C minor, like the Grand Sonata Pathetique, the 5th Symphony, and his lesser-known 32 Variations in C minor (among others). Now that I'm sitting here thinking about it, I've had to put on the Coriolan Overture (also in C minor) to see if I can find any similarities there. (Coriolan always makes me feel like I'm in a spy movie. It has a dramatic element that sounds like Jason Bourne doing parkour over the rooftops of Berlin, alternating with a tender, somewhat more romantic (but still dramatic) second theme.)

See? I'm doing it right now. I'm trying to write this blog post, and Beethoven has me completely under his spell. Anyway, I finally got through my writing project yesterday, reread and edited it, and sent it off. Then I shifted gears around dinner time and took the dogs for a long-ish walk over in Echo Park. We don't tend to go over there for walks, but I like that area, and my thoughts of moving out of this house have returned (along with recent reports from neighbors that the dog that attacked Paul and I last year has been seen loose in the neighborhood again). So, you could say we were doing a bit of reconnaissance towards the idea of possibly moving, perhaps next year sometime.

All afternoon, I'd been hitting the coffee pretty hard. After our walk, I was pretty excited about all the good work I'd gotten done, and my brain was still snapping along pretty well, so I resumed working on my ATLOSCON talk. This involved going back through old photos, deciding what images to re-scan, and realizing that I had my own new photographs of Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building, as well as his Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room, which was installed at the Chicago Art Institute after the Stock Exchange was tragically torn down in the '60s or '70s.

I just worked right on through until about 1:45, and finally decided I really should go to bed if I wanted to be at all productive today. By the time I finally got into bed and watched a couple of videos online to help my brain turn off, it was 2:30. Somehow I woke up at 7 feeling good. I was expecting to be completely dragged out and hungover feeling, but I'm surprisingly refreshed today. I even tried going back to bed after feeding the dogs, but it just wasn't working for me.

Since I felt pretty good, I decided to started my day with a relatively light dumbbell workout, which I have done a few times over the past few weeks, now that my thumb has returned to mostly-normal after my surgery back in early February. Working out first thing in the morning always gives me a tremendous sense of efficacy, and it really is the best way I can think of to start the day. Perhaps today will mark the start of the return of that excellent habit.

Then I was checking out my Google Reader feed, and saw this excellent post from Trey, on the objectivist virtue of integrity. It's really a solid, thoughtful bit of writing. He observes,

The simplest possible definition or explanation of the virtue of integrity that I can offer is this: consistency. Integrity is about always always always pursuing your values in the same way according to the same principles.

Reading it really helped me resolve a lot of the things I've been wrestling with over the past few months. Basically, since the middle of January, I've felt completely down and out, first from the hand surgery and recovery, which was closely followed by the bout of pneumonia. This has definitely been one of the most depressing periods of my life; I think it has rivaled 2004, which I refer to as my Dark Year. At least this latest experience was relatively short-lived by comparison.

Towards the end, Trey sums up with, "Integrity is about serving your larger goals. This is why when I stop to think about my career, I am always absolutely ruthless. " This just completely hit home for me.

I've had a clear sense over the past couple of weeks, as I've returned to work and seen some new opportunities opening up for me, that the clouds were parting and the sun was coming back out again. But there were nagging doubts lingering in my mind, just like the cough lingers as your lungs work to get all the junk out after the pneumonia has cleared up.

But today is different. I'm through indulging in any more self-doubt. It really is an indulgence that I simply cannot afford any more of, and am no longer willing to engage in.

Today the sun is back out, and it's shining down on me. And it's the same sun and same blue sky that shone down on Louis Henri Sullivan in Chicago the 1890s when he was at the height of his powers, and it's the same sun and blue sky that shone down on Ludwig van Beethoven in Vienna in the 1790s when he was writing that early C minor sonata that planted seeds for those future masterpieces.

And now, I'm going to go out and be absolutely ruthless.

--------------------------------------------------------
5/24/11 Update: Link added for John David

ATLOSCON Architecture Talk

2011-05-18T17:57:00.000-07:00

I'm getting very excited about my upcoming talk on architecture, to be given at the Atlanta Objectivist Society's conference, ATLOSCON. It's nearly a week away!

This is a re-polished version of the talk I gave last fall at FROST in Denver. The talk was very well received there, and I'm pretty optimistic that the folks down in Atlanta will enjoy it just as much.

The talk starts with a reading of the scene from The Fountainhead where Roark and the Dean are arguing about the proper principles with which to approach architectural design. From there I discuss three of the early heroes of the modern architectural movement, and how they did actually have the right ideas from the get-go, which led to many great and fabulous buildings.

Many (most?) people have heard of Frank Lloyd Wright, and a lot of people are even aware of his mentor, Louis Sullivan. Sullivan brought us the seminal concept 'Form Follows Function.' Few people, however, know about Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, the early 18th Century French architect and theorist, whose ideas heavily influenced Sullivan.

Viollet-le-Duc wrote things like:

If we take separately all the members of a Greek temple and study them individually, as well as in their direct relation to the whole, we shall invariably perceive the influence of those intelligent and delicate observations which attest the presence of art, -- that exquisite sentiment which subordinates every form to reason, not indeed t the dry and pedantic reason of the geometrician, but to reason as directed by the senses and by observation of the laws of nature.

and

[The Greeks] neither invented any type of Architecture nor any system of construction; but they applied the principles of logic to Architectural Art, and this they never derived from the Eastern races nor even from the Egyptians. In this the Greeks are the Fathers of the Western world; -- it was they who opened the way of progress. Though lovers of form, they never sacrificed principle to it until their genius was stifled under Roman domination; but then they were no longer Greeks.

I love how much emphasis he places on reason, and acting on principle. There's even more great stuff to be discovered in his writings, which we'll look at in the talk. We'll also review key passages from Sullivan and Wright's own writings, as well as look at some of the buildings the three of them designed during their careers.

There's still time to register, so get on board and come hear my talk at ATLOSCON!

Thumb Update

2011-04-04T11:42:00.000-07:00

Nearly 8 weeks ago, I had surgery to repair the EPL tendon in my left wrist. This is the muscle & tendon that allows you to make a 'thumbs up'. I had severed it; just partially at first, in an accident at home. About a week later, I ruptured it (meaning that it completely severed) when I put too much weight on it, not having realized the extent of the initial injury.

I was in a cast for about a month, and then a brace, which I still wear. The recovery is coming along well.

There have been a few requests lately, via facebook and twitter, for updates on my recovery. In response, I made the following video yesterday. It's my first video blog, so be kind! I've been having a lot of trouble with my home internet lately as well, so I had to upload a fairly low-res version. I hope to get switched over to a new ISP later this week, and if all goes well, I'll upload a higher quality version of this and replace it.

Big thanks to everyone who has reached out with moral support during this ordeal. You know who you are! It really means a lot to me, and I appreciate your kind words and encouragement.

Tuesday Night OList Happy Hour: SnowCon, ATLOSCON, and OCON

2011-03-07T15:35:00.000-08:00

2011 is shaping up to be an exciting year for Objectivist conferences.

- This week is SnowCon, the much-anticipated Objectivist mini-conference hosted by Front Range Objectivism in Denver. I will be there for the weekend, but will miss the skiing/snowshoeing/other outdoor activities during the week. I'm very excited to see my FRO friends, as well as other friends who are flying in. Plus, I will get to meet some internet friends for the first time in real life, which I'm quite looking forward to, as well.

- Coming up over Memorial Day weekend, will be ATLOSCON, the second mini-conference to be put on by the Atlanta Objectivist Society. I'm scheduled to speak at that one, so naturally I'm quite excited about it! Their 2010 MiniCon was a great success, by all accounts.

- ARI has just posted the info and registration page for OCON 2011, which will be held in Ft. Lauderdale next summer, around July 4th. Last summer, I attended my first OCON, and it was an amazing experience.

- I thought I had seen information on at least one other regional conference later in the year, but can't seem to find any official information to which to link. If anyone knows about something I don't, please contact me and I'll be happy to add it.
-----------------------
UPDATE 3/8: I received the following email from David Maltby over at Chicago Objectivists:

Indeed, there is a Chicago MiniCon in the works for Labor Day weekend (September 4 & 5) 2011, and we are currently gathering proposals for presentations. I've added a link from our home page to the proposal submission form, which was previously circulated to our members via email: http://www.chicagoobjectivists.org/minicon-2011-proposals/. Please feel free to direct others to that page. The deadline for submissions is April 1st, and those selected will be notified by the end of April.

-----------------------

I'm excited about all of these, although it's still uncertain whether or not I'll be able to attend OCON. I probably won't know until around mid or late May.

This week's happy hour will be all about the conferences.

----------------------------

Tonight's Menu:

Appetizer: Are you attending or considering any of the conferences being offered this year? If so, what are you most looking forward to?

Drink Special: What Objectivist conferences have you attended in the past? What were your favorite things, either specifically or generally, about it/them?

----------------------------

Happy Hour takes place in the OList Chatroom, every Tuesday night, from 9-10 p.m. Eastern and 6-7 p.m. Pacific.

Point your browser to www.olist.com/chat. You will be asked for a login and password - check your OList email for these.

You will see the chat window that looks like this:

For general information on the OLists Socials, check out the OList Events page here.

Your hosts for the OList Socials are @DianaHsieh, @laforgetm (aka William Green) and myself, @Earl3d

Wire Glass Shelves

2011-02-18T15:31:00.000-08:00

This shelving unit came into existence gradually, over the past few months. It was one of those projects that took longer than it needed to, mainly because I was in and out of town so much, and didn't have a lot of time to spend in the shop.

I whipped it up from some steel channel stock I had on hand, along with three nifty pieces of wire glass that I had salvaged from a house that was under renovation. The glass pieces had been sitting around my garage for far too long, and were frequently being moved from here to there, or from there to here, to get them out of the way of something else I was working on or doing. Finally, one day I just decided to get them out of my way once and for all.

The glass pieces aren't perfect. They had been installed as part of a skylight system, and have bits of mastic on them that I couldn't clean off in with the amount of time + effort I was willing to invest in them. Some of the corners are chipped, and the bottom piece is cracked all the way across.

But I don't care. I absolutely adore this piece. I'd been planning it in my head for a long time, and once I got into it in the shop, the whole thing came together rather easily.

Someday, I'll probably grind the welds a little more carefully and have the steel frame chromed. For now, I'm quite content to let it sit along the side of my office, where it makes me quite happy.

OList Happy Hour: Spotlight on OGeeks

2011-02-15T14:36:00.000-08:00

Three new OLists have recently been launched: OGeeks, OLeaders, and OCrafters. For the next few weeks, we're going to take a break from our regular Happy Hour topic format and spotlight these new lists individually.

This week's Happy Hour will feature the OGeeks list.

Since the format and pace of a live chatroom make for a different dynamic than the back-and-forth of email messages, this should be a fun way for OGeeks to get to know each other, as well as for other OList'ers to meet and interact with the Geeks.

From the list's description:

OGeeks is an informal private discussion list for Objectivists and others interested in geeky topics like science, computing, engineering, mathematics, and technology. Its purpose is to facilitate discussion and sharing among Objectivists about all things geeky, such as best practices in programming, software reviews, scientific discoveries, educational resources, logic puzzles, technology trends, and geek comics.

Any Objectivist with serious geeky interests in science, computing, engineering, mathematics, and/or technology may subscribe and post to OGeeks. Moreover, non-Objectivist geeks, as well as non-geeky Objectivists, are welcome to subscribe to the list, but only as lurkers; they cannot post. OGeeks is not moderated, but members who violate its rules will be subject to moderation, if not unsubscribed.

OGeeks is managed by Rose Wiegley. Rose has a Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. She has had programming jobs that ranged from a Fortune 500 company to a small startup. She currently stays home with her children but programs and reads technical manuals for fun during all that spare time most sane people spend sleeping. She blogs at A Little Bit of Green. She can be reached at rwiegley@gmail.com.
OGeeks was launched in January 2011.

Other OList'ers and lurkers on the lists are welcome as well. Come join in the Geekery!

----------------------------

Happy Hour takes place in the OList Chatroom, every Tuesday night, from 9-10 p.m. Eastern and 6-7 p.m. Pacific.

Point your browser to www.olist.com/chat. You will be asked for a login and password - check your OList email for these.

You will see the chat window that looks like this:

For general information on the OLists Socials, check out the OList Events page here.

Your hosts for the OList Socials are @DianaHsieh, @laforgetm (aka William Green) and myself, @Earl3d

Tennessee House Fireplace

2011-02-12T12:14:00.000-08:00

Like the rest of the Tennessee House, the fireplace is simultaneously a bit traditional and a bit contemporary.

The stone is local sandstone, from the nearby Cumberland Plateau. It is the same stone that we used on the exterior of the house.

For the wooden mantle, we used a beam that was installed as part of the exposed mezzanine structure before I arrived on site, but which I then rejected for quality purposes. I made the framing crew build temporary supports, cut the beam out, and install its replacement. You can read that story here.

Here is the replacement beam as it looks today:

Another thing I am particularly fond of is the wooden box that supports the TV. I had them make it out of surplus planks from the mezzanine floor. It nicely solves the problem of 'what to do with the TV' while tying back into the material palette of the rest of the house.

Tennessee House: Punch List

2011-02-09T19:48:00.000-08:00

Last week I went to Tennessee for a punch list visit to my project there, and to photograph it for posterity. The punch list is the list of final things to be completed by the contractor, in order for the project to be considered finally complete, and the contract closed out. We ended up making 2 lists, one of things for Bob the Builder to complete, and one of items for Mr. and Ms. Client to attend to themselves.

The lists of final things were relatively mild. There were only two things still not complete that I would call 'major', meaning they were things that materially prevented Mr. and Ms. Client from fully enjoying the new house. One was an issue with the cooktop, which prevented the propane from being turned on, and the other was the lack of a shower door.

The kitchen was otherwise usable, and we enjoyed roast chickens and broiled shrimp kabobs from the electric oven. The bathroom was likewise usable, with the addition of a temporary shower curtain.

There were a few other inconveniences here and there, like a couple of (relatively minor) plumbing issues which came up and were resolved during my stay. On the whole, the house is functioning very well, and looks great, if I do say so myself!

I took tons of photos but for now I'm just going to leave you with a few teasers.

Tuesday Night OLists Happy Hour: Why Paleo?

2011-02-08T17:36:00.000-08:00

Tonight's Happy Hour Chat covers a topic of general interest for those on the OEvolve list, and perhaps those lurking therein, and was submitted to the Google Moderator by none other than the OList OWner, Diana Hsieh:

----------------------------

Tonight's Menu:

Appetizer: What made you start eating paleo (or paleo-ish)?

Drink Special: What other eating strategies have you tried? What were their drawbacks and/or benefits?

----------------------------

Happy Hour takes place in the OList Chatroom, every Tuesday night, from 9-10 p.m. Eastern and 6-7 p.m. Pacific.

Point your browser to www.olist.com/chat. You will be asked for a login and password - check your OList email for these.

You will see the chat window that looks like this:

For general information on the OLists Socials, check out the OList Events page here.

Your hosts for the OList Socials are @DianaHsieh, @laforgetm (aka William Green) and myself, @Earl3d

Tuesday Night OLists Happy Hour: Travel

2011-02-01T12:27:00.000-08:00

There are two travel-themed topic suggestions on the Google Moderator we set up for Happy Hour suggestions, "Which city has the most Objectivist-like culture?" and "Countries each of us has traveled to, and what's better or worse there compared to the USA." Thanks and a big OLists Shout Out to Adam Thompson for suggesting them.

The first suggestion of the two has a link to this essay, where Paul Graham makes some pretty interesting observations about cities.

As of this writing, Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. I realize that seems a preposterous claim. What makes it true is that it's more preposterous to claim about anywhere else ... Cambridge as a result feels like a town whose main industry is ideas, while New York's is finance and Silicon Valley's is startups.

The idea of examining a city in terms of what its primary industries are, what kind of people it attracts, and how that influences the place overall is an interesting one. What makes one more or less 'Objectivist-like' can be tricky to pin down, but sounds like the makings for interesting discussion.

The second part, about travel destinations, needs a little modification, as we regularly have participants joining us from outside the U.S. I love hearing about others' travel adventures, what they liked, and what they didn't like about the places they visited.

----------------------------

Tonight's Menu:

Appetizer: What are your favorite cities and why? Which city has the most Objectivist-like culture?

Drink Special: What other countries have you traveled to that you particularly enjoyed? Any that you disliked? What things were better or worse there than they are where you live?

----------------------------

Happy Hour takes place in the OList Chatroom, every Tuesday night, from 9-10 p.m. Eastern and 6-7 p.m. Pacific.

Point your browser to www.olist.com/chat. You will be asked for a login and password - check your OList email for these.

You will see the chat window that looks like this:

For general information on the OLists Socials, check out the OList Events page here.

Your hosts for the OList Socials are @DianaHsieh, @laforgetm (aka William Green) and myself, @Earl3d

Happy Hour + Some OList Social Announcements

2011-01-23T23:48:00.000-08:00

Warning: There is a lot more than just Happy Hour going on in the world of OList Socials this week, so make sure you read all the way to the bottom of the post!

Happy Hour:

This week, we're slightly changing the format of the OList Happy Hour Menu announcements. We've started using Google Moderator for people to submit and vote on chat topic suggestions (see your OList email for more details about that). I like the idea of crowd-sourcing the chat topic from among those who participate in the chats.

During last week's discussion of books and reading, there were some good suggestions made about places to buy books, particularly used books and textbooks. I think this may have inspired this week's Menu topic, which was submitted by OLister David Lewis:

Appetizer: What is your favorite place to buy music, movies, and other multimedia?

Drink Special: What recent media purchases have you particularly enjoyed?

Happy Hour takes place in the OList Chatroom, every Tuesday night, from 9-10 p.m. Eastern and 6-7 p.m. Pacific.

Point your browser to www.olist.com/chat. You will be asked for a login and password - check your OList email for these.

You will see the chat window that looks like this:

For general information on the OLists Socials, check out the OList Events page here.

Your hosts for the OList Socials are @DianaHsieh, @laforgetm (aka William Green) and myself, @Earl3d

Movie Night:

Movie Night was originally announced for the first and third Saturday of the month. Since the last one was 2 weekends ago, the question came up this morning during OList Brunch as to whether or not we were having Movie Night this coming weekend. It turns out this weekend is the 5th Saturday in January (and there are 5 months in 2011 with 5 Saturdays.)

Because there were at least a few of us in the Brunch chat who liked the idea of hanging out with a movie this weekend, I decided, by the powers vested in me as OLists Social Director, to declare Movie Night to be the first, third and fifth Saturdays of the month.

The leading selection thus far in voting is The Incredibles, closely followed by His Girl Friday, and The Hudsucker Proxy. Again, see your OList email for the Google Moderator URL to submit suggestions and cast your votes. There is more info on how Movie Night works on the Google Moderator page.

Book Club:

That's right, Book Club! After last Tuesday's fabulously successful Winter Reads Happy Hour, it occurred to me that discussing fiction would make a great chat in and of itself. OLister Brandon Antoinette volunteered to get the ball rolling with some suggestions and offered to lead the discussion. And guess what: we have set up yet another Google Moderator to take suggestions and tabulate the votes.

This project is still in its early stages, and we don't even have it on the calendar yet. Sometime in the next week or so, we will have a poll set up for selecting the time/s and date/s for the chat to take place, and hopefully we will get things underway by the later part of February.

There is more info on the Book Club at the Google Moderator page, so check your OList email for the link to this one as well.

OGrownups Chat:

The OGrownups are having their second chat this coming Sunday, January 30, at 1 p.m. Pacific / 4 p.m. Eastern. My understanding is that the topic will be on the decision whether or not to have kids. Watch your OGrownups email this week for reminders/updates from Jenn.

Also, if this topic interests you, but you aren't a member of OGrownups, you still have all week to join the group as either a full member or a lurker. Lukers on all the OLists are invited to join the chats. See http://www.olist.com/ for more info on joining OGrownups or any of the OLists.

I'm particularly excited that individual groups are starting to use the OList Chatroom for their own scheduled events. Hooray for the OGrownups!

Those are all the announcements for the week. See you around the lists!

"The Event" Filmed in my Neighborhood

2011-01-20T18:42:00.000-08:00

Last night, as I was walking P + T around our neighborhood, I noticed some of those temporary NO PARKING signs posted about, with the forbidden day written in as Thursday. "Something's afoot," I thought to myself. Then I spotted some of those rent-a-cop-type security guards hanging around on some of the street corners, and a weird looking line of porta-potties all lined up on a trailer.

I had a very strong suspicion about what was afoot and tweeted:

They're setting up to do some filming on Aldama Ter., between Raphael St + Aldama St. I'll investigate further tomorrow. #90042

Today was a fairly busy day, and I was either engrossed in work or out running around for a lot of it, and completely forgot all about my special assignment until about 4:30. All at once, I remembered.

Paul and Todd were napping. "Quick, get your leashes! We've important investigative work to do! Something was afoot today, and we may have already missed it!" They scampered to get their leashes hooked onto their collars and assemble themselves at the front gate, while I stumbled around frantically looking for my keys.

"Look on the kitchen counter under the dish towel!" called Paul to me from the front yard. "HURRY!"

I found my keys, got the front door locked, and we were off. We made our way up the block and around the corner, to the street where my spidey sense told me there had been something going on today.

The whole scene was relatively deserted.

There was a lady out on her lawn absent-mindedly pulling weeds while she talked on the phone, with her little boy hanging around playing. Other than that it was pretty quiet. Towards the end of that block, in front of one of my favorite little bungalows, I could see a stack of folding chairs. The NO PARKING signs were still up. I saw a discarded post-it note in the gutter that had a message having something to do with makeup written on it in black sharpie pen. They had clearly been filming in the immediate vicinity.

Further down, at the corner, we came to a security guy sitting in one of the folding chairs. From there, I could see that the trailer of porta-potties had been moved around the corner from where they were yesterday. There was a dumpster there, too.

"Were they filming around here today?" I asked. He nodded. "What were they filming?"

"The Event" he answered.

"What's that?" I asked, not watching much TV these days, and finding myself pretty clueless.

"Some show. They were filming down the street, the house right at the edge of the hill. Fourth house down." He pointed back the way we had come.

Back we went. Turned out that the 4th house was the house with the lady and kid hanging around the front yard. They had gone back inside, but she re-emerged as we approached.

"Was your house the one where they were filming today?" I asked.

"Yes!" she answered, enthusiastically.

"Wow, neat! How'd you get that gig?"

"We were just lucky. They said they wanted a house that looked like no one lived in it. Now we have the money to have it painted!"

"They also liked it for the view" she added. The view from there was pretty fabulous. Way better than my view, from a block over and further down the hill.

Apparently The Event has something to do with space aliens, and this house was being used as an 'alien safehouse' for the episode being filmed, thus the appeal of the peeling paint. Also, this episode featured lots of special agents wearing contamination suits and such, which, she said, made it all the more fun for their kids to watch as they staked out the place, crept across the roof, and tried to catch the aliens living inside. Or something like that.

"Where do you live?" she asked. Then we stood there for a while, chatting and exchanging stories about the goings-on in and around the neighborhood. Then she invited us in!

We got the complete tour. They have a piano, and the whole family plays! The house is very charming inside, with lots of really great woodwork and craftsman details. All of their furniture had been removed and replaced with rented furniture for the shoot. I was glad of that, because the shabby vacant house space alien furniture wasn't doing the charming craftsman house any favors.

She even showed us the upstairs. The view from the master suite up there is incredible. I'm totally jealous, since most of my upstairs view is blocked by my neighbor's roof.

So now, our questions have been answered. Our inquiring minds now know. A small dramatic episode involving aliens on Aldama Terrace has unfolded, been captured, and is now on its way to post-production. And, P + T and I have made new friends in the process!

As of this writing, my new friend had no idea when her episode would air, but if I find out, I'll post an update.

Everything in its Place: TV Edition

2011-01-19T19:52:00.000-08:00

Last fall I posted some pictures of the completed stone fireplace surround, which was installed after I left Tennessee. You can read that post here.

The last image I had of the fireplace, from that post, was this one:

The final design, which had been chosen from a few different variations I had sketched, and discussed with Mr. and Ms. Client, was the sketch below. If you look carefully, there are a few differences between the sketch and the completed fireplace, but they are minor, and I am pleased, overall, with the result.

The boxy assemblage to the right of the fireplace, in the sketch above, is a wooden cabinet with open compartments for the TV/DVD/satellite components, atop which sits the TV itself. The idea was to make the little TV cabinet out of leftover mezzanine flooring planks.

Early in December I produced the following sketch, which I sent off to Tennessee, while crossing my fingers and hoping for the best:

Then, lo and behold, in one of the photos from last week's railing update, there it was, sitting quietly in the background:

There it was, my little TV cabinet! I nearly fell off my chair in excitement! I think Ms. Client must be getting used to my frantic texts demanding that she immediately drop everything and go photograph this-or-that.

I have to go now - I have to order a bunch of new camera equipment and book a flight to Tennessee!

Tuesday Night OLists Happy Hour: Winter Reads

2011-01-18T16:17:00.000-08:00

I'm not someone who reads all that much. Lately, I've been trying to figure out why this is, and make an effort to read more.

In addition to introspecting, I have also consolidated my library into one section of my bedroom, where I have set up both a desk and a comfy reading chair, in an effort to make the whole experience as pleasurable as possible (although the comfy chair can be counter-productive, especially with the close proximity of my bed. Get me too comfy and I want to stretch out.)

I think one reason I have a hard time making the time to read, is that it doesn't really seem like productive activity. Why sit and read when you could be doing something?! I realize that this is a complete fallacy, and there is tremendous practical value to be gained from reading. Part of my new reading effort involves reminding myself of this practical value, and then carefully choosing my titles accordingly.

Last night I made a new discovery about my reading habits, as I was trying, yet again, to get through Tara Smith's Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality. I was surprised to find a few dogeared pages in the first couple chapters, and realized that I had gotten farther than I had remembered, in my first attempt with this book a few years ago. Last night was actually the second night in a row with Viable Values and the comfy chair. The previous night had ended with me stretching out on the bed after being overcome with The Sleepy. When I saw things headed that same direction last night, I realized I needed to take a different approach. I stepped metaphorically back and examined what was going on.

The first 3 chapters of this book are very technical (for me, at least) descriptions and refutations of the failure of traditional philosophical underpinnings of the subject of morality. While I'm sure this material is extremely important from the point of view of scholarship and such, and needs to be there for the book to be taken seriously in academic circles, I'm really mainly interested in the later parts: Chapter 4: Morality's Roots in Life, Chapter 5: Morality's Reward: Flourishing, and Chapter 6: Principled Egoism: The Only Way to Live.

I realized that the only way I was going to get to those chapters was to give myself permission to skip the boring parts. This idea is somewhat revolutionary for me, and I have a feeling it will end up being very helpful in the long run. After all, should I discover I've missed some vital concept, I can always go back and read it later. The words will still be there on the page, that's the beauty of books!

After making this realization, I decided I had put in enough effort and it was ok to stretch out on the bed.

I'll try again with Chapter 4 tonight, and I'll sit at my desk rather than in the comfy chair.

My quest for developing reading as a habit makes me curious of the reading habits of others. Thus, tonight's topic.

This Week's Menu:

Appetizer: What are your reading habits? Meaning: how often do you pick up a book and read, and for how long at a time? How many different titles do you have going at once? Do you use an ebook reader or Kindle? Where do you learn about new books that interest you?

Drink Special: What titles are you reading now, what have you recently finished, and what is on your reading list? What stands out that you would recommend? What do you not recommend?

Happy Hour Mechanics:

Happy Hour takes place in the OList Chatroom, every Tuesday night, from 9-10 p.m. Eastern and 6-7 p.m. Pacific.

Point your browser to www.olist.com/chat. You will be asked for a login and password - check your OList email for these.

You will see the chat window that looks like this:

For general information on the OLists Socials, check out the OList Events page here.

Your hosts for the OList Socials are @DianaHsieh, @laforgetm (aka William Green) and myself, @Earl3d

Tennessee House Update: Railings Installed!

2011-01-14T09:37:00.000-08:00

Last week the railings were delivered back to the site, having finally been powder coated. The powder coating was an ordeal unto itself.

The powder coating shop I took them to, back in October, was 25 miles away in another town. The proprietor of that establishment (if you can call it that) left them sitting in his shop untouched, shut the door, disconnected the phone, and ceased operations one day, without warning. There they sat, languishing, for several weeks. Finally, Bob the Builder (our contractor) realized what had happened, interviewed the neighboring business owners, tracked him down, and got the unfinished railings back. Three cheers for Bob the Builder!

A couple weeks ago, we found a reputable shop further away, in Maryville, Tennessee, and they seem to have done a good job, at least from what I can tell by these pictures:

This morning, I got a teaser photo from Ms. Client of the railings installed:

Makes me very excited to go see them in person!

Tuesday Night OLists Happy Hour: Habits of Excellence

2011-01-11T14:13:00.000-08:00

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit." - Aristotle

Tonight in OLists Happy Hour, we are going to discuss Habits of Excellence, inspired by this quote from Aristotle.

I came by this specific formulation for tonight's Happy Hour menu by a slightly round-about track. I had read a post in last week's Objectivist Blog Roundup by John Drake, over at his blog, Try Reason!

The post is short and sweet, titled Emotions and Self-discipline. It's a quick read - his blog is full of quick reads on topics like productivity, ambition, and goal-setting. The sentence that stood out for me was this:

When I'm feeling bored or fidgety or frustrated, I need to discipline myself to either deal with the emotions quickly or file them away until I have time to fully work through the issues that are causing the emotions.

I won't speak for anyone else, but I know that I can pretty easily get to feeling bored, fidgety, and/or frustrated when faced with a desktop-full of work that needs to get done. As I was contemplating turning the idea of self-discipline into Happy Hour Menu, a vague memory of the Aristotle quote came floating up from my subconscious. It struck me that part of a long-term strategy of productivity would necessarily include the development of particular, strategic habits to stay motivated and combat the tendency to get stalled out, thus keeping yourself on track.

Then, a few minutes later, I happened to be looking at a friend's facebook page (ok, perhaps I was fidgeting), and there was the Aristotle quote staring right at me.

I'm telling you, it was meant to be!

Tonight's Menu:

Appetizer: Looking at the things in your life at which you excel, what specific practices can you identify as habits of excellence that you practice with consistency?

Drink Special: How can you see yourself applying these successful habits to areas in your life that you want to jump start? What other ways can you think of to stay motivated?

Happy Hour Mechanics:

Happy Hour takes place in the OList Chatroom, every Tuesday night, from 9-10 p.m. Eastern and 6-7 p.m. Pacific.

Point your browser to www.olist.com/chat. You will be asked for a login and password - check your OList email for these.

You will see the chat window that looks like this:

Your hosts for the OList Socials are @DianaHsieh, @laforgetm (aka William Green) and myself, @Earl3d

Tennessee House Update: Kitchen

2011-01-11T12:45:00.000-08:00

Here we are, well into the New Year, and it's been far too long since I've updated anything on the status of the Tennessee House. My last update was back in November. In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, there wasn't a huge amount of activity on the project - and things progressed slowly over the holidays. It has mainly been finishing up painting and trim on the inside, and also painting the outside.

One major component that got installed just before Thanksgiving was the kitchen cabinets.

I haven't shared many of my design drawings for this house on the blog, but I'll show you what I drew up for the kitchen, and then some pictures, courtesy of Ms. Client.

Here's the floor plan:

And the East elevation, to the right in the plan view:

The South elevation, at the bottom in the plan view:

And the West elevation, to the left in the plan:

And here are a few views of the empty space, before installation of the cabinets. Here's a view from the mezzanine that shows the generous opening between the living room and the kitchen (at the far left):

This is looking straight at where the dining table will go. You can see all the way through to the back door, with the barn in the background outside. Just past where all that flooring is stacked, to the right, is the door into the giant pantry. (The pantry is at the very top in the floor plan above.)

And here we are standing in front of that pantry door, looking at the main area of the kitchen, with its fabulous view:

As we pan left, you see the view back across the living room, all the way out to the sun room...

...and on around to the rest of the living room and front door:

And here are the cabinets installed (photos courtesy of Ms. Client). First we have the overall view. The gap in the cabinets is where the dishwasher will go.

Moving around to the right, we have the tall cabinet where the oven and microwave will go. Just to the left of that tall cabinet will be the cook top and stainless steel hood, and that wall will be covered with tile.

Further on around to the right, we have the tall display cabinet with glass doors, also waiting for its countertop.

And on the opposite side, next to the opening to the living room, is the refrigerator cabinet. We had discussed having bookshelves, aka the 'cookbook library', where you see that tall, skinny cabinet to the left of the refrigerator compartment. I had drawn the shelves on my plans (again, see above) but Mr. & Ms. Client changed their mind about this after I left town, and instructed the cabinetmakers otherwise.

There has been other progress, and I will roll out a few more updates soon. The counter tops have been installed, and the steel railings at the living room mezzanine are about to go up as well.

The combination of the holidays plus an unusually heavy amount of snow has made progress very slow the past few weeks, but they are trying to get moved in soon, from what I've been told. I have a feeling Ms. Client has her hands full taking care of her animals, what with all the bad weather, but I will continue to pester her (in the best sense, of course!) for more pictures.

I am also planning a trip back to the house myself, later this month or early next month, to take some pictures of the completed project.

Tuesday Night OLists Happy Hour: Household Productivity

2011-01-03T20:25:00.000-08:00

During last week's Happy Hour, while we were discussing goals and projects for the new year, a side conversation came up between some parents in the group. It had to do with trying to be productive with repetitive household tasks and such, in order to leave more time for various projects and things that really matter.

There was some discussion of the Getting Things Done system, and then Rose remarked, "...I was wondering if support for organizing housework should be some threads on OProducers..or OGrownups...kind of an overlap."

That was when the lightbulb upstairs went on, alerting me that whenever there is talk of overlap between Olist groups, it's a topic that should be developed, dissected, and discussed in detail at Happy Hour.

And, the more I have thought about it since, I have realized that it's not just a topic for parents. Wouldn't everyone rather have the domestic chores dispensed with as efficiently as possible, leaving more time for the fun + meaningful things in life?

This week's Happy Hour Menu may have been inspired by an intersection between OGrownups and OProducers, but I think it has much wider application, and am really looking forward to discussing household organization and productivity on Tuesday night.

Appetizer: What are the biggest challenges you face with regard to household chores? Is it carving out time? Soliciting cooperation from other members of the household? Prioritizing tasks? Something else?

Drink Special: What methods or techniques for organizing or executing your household chores have been successful for you? What hasn't worked? At what point would it be worth it to hire help?

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Happy Hour takes place every Tuesday night, from 9-10 p.m. Eastern and 6-7 p.m. Pacific, at the OList Chatroom. Check your OList email for the login and password.

For general information on the OLists Socials, check out the OList Events page here.

Your hosts for the OList Socials are @DianaHsieh, @laforgetm (aka William Green) and myself, @Earl3d