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Face Plant: My Adventures in Social Networking

I recently became a facebook member, because one of the three people in the world who consider me web savvy asked me to check something out and, as long as I was there, I thought, what the hell?

So far:   

• It felt slightly weird to be on a social networking site as a 48 year old male. 
• Facebook feels very mazelike and crablike, especially at first.
• Asking people to be your friends is uncomfortable even though they actually are your friends. In all those lunches, retreats, seminars, ping pong games, no one ever said, “you know, we’re friends.”  This also forces one to define friend. My rule is: if I would recognize and greet you on the street, you are my friend. This may be kind of a whorish or at least Irish definition of friend but that's me.
  
• Facebook has some nice apps/features/whatevers:  iLike allows you to display little photos of your favorite musical artists. It notes when they are on tour, when they are near your city, and when they’ve released music.  You are also told when your friends have birthdays and you can post a little note right on their site. 
• I am friends with the Rolling Stones and, even more weirdly,  Chet Baker. Why am I not friends with Steely Dan (the band, not the prop)? Are they stuck up? 

Deceptively Good: The Deception at Jeune Lune

The Deception at Jeune Lune offers much of what makes that theater such a distinct pleasure:  a set both stunning and minimal, an appreciation of a previously underappeciated play, acting which is both physically acrobatic and emotionally agile. In the notes, the theater claims one of its genres as  "circus" and there is almost always something bright and bouncy and audacious about Jeune Lune productions.  We saw the sold out show last night but the run has been extended to December 2nd.

The 365: AIGA Design Show at the College of Visual Art

Many of the winning entries at the AIGA show had the pleasures and frustrations of fine art: matte, moody colors; ironic appropriations; cryptic minimalisms.  I always love Duffy's entries. The most striking work was a poster for the Hurricane Poster Project by Laurie Demartino of Minneapolis. The sales of these posters has ended and in the web image the striking copy is unreadable. You're supposed to be able to also see this work on line,  but when I go to the AIGA archives, I can't see the pieces I remembered from the exhibit. That said, the archives are wonderful.

Sixth Street in Minneapolis, Approximately Four P.M., Thanksgiving Eve

I've been thinking about Jane Austen and class and the perforated American vacation, but those posts are for later.  For today, a nod to a distinctly Minneapolis Saint Paul pleasure: viewing the city from the shelter of a skyway. Please note that the signage for Murray's repeats the word "Murray's" three times.  I don't know why I like that, but I do. Happy Thanksgiving to everybody. 

Rest in peace, Dick Wilson aka Mr. Whipple, guy who did what he needed to to make a buck,  most connected of Whipples,  exemplar of what Luke Sullivan called (I'm quoting from memory) me-too, over-researched, Madison Avenue, Proctor and Gamble, hold-the-product-up-and-smile advertising and ironic inspiration for one of the freshest books on how to create good advertising.

If you need to rinse your palette after viewing the Charmin commercial above, check out Luke Sullivan's TV reel. courtesy of Ihaveanidea.org.

My favorite line from the Wikipedia entry on Jones/Whipple:  "Not to be confused with the Nobel Prize-winning physician, George Hoyt Whipple."

Chop Wood, Carry Water, Pick Up Dry Cleaning: Thoughts on Erranding

As preciously as I guard my time, and as many purchases as I make online, I don’t think I would like a life without errands. After letting tasks pile up for weeks, I got into my filthy car Thursday afternoon and, in a little over two hours, ordered a replacement wedding ring (mine flew off on an early morning walk), filled my gas tank, picked up a closet’s worth of pressed shirts, wrestled a bag of dog food into the trunk,  deposited money in my business checking account, had my car washed and waxed and vacuumed, and filled a prescription. I felt cleaned, refurbished, and chemically supplemented. I felt I’d won a victory over that nemesis of the middle class, the to-do list. Along the way, I admired and did not buy an expensive, grumpy carved turtle; I admired and did buy a fur hedgehog. The hedgehog sported a Santa hat, which tipped the scales.

Of course, every car trip is an invitation to irritation and someone who appeared to be parallel parking wasn’t about to ruin the surprise by signaling.  But without going all Tuesdays with Morrie on you–and while I like a good epiphany as much as the next guy–I’d suggest that epiphanies are overated, mere spiritual punchlines, and that to eliminate errands is to eliminate a more important part of life: the random human encounter, the peripheral brightnesses and casually kaleidoscopic bounty of the world–the woman at Charlemagne jewelers who enthused to another customer about Tahitian black pearls; the employee at the dry cleaner who moved with the alacrity of someone new to a job they value; this sign, spyed in the window of Sign-O-Rama as I drove down University Avenue.

   

New Format for Unprintable Version

If you are returning to this site, you'll notice changes. I will be making further changes over the next month or so.  Let me know what you like, don't like, use, don't use, want, don't want.  I can't act on every comment, but I will consider every comment.

It Isn't All About Meme: Our Far-Flung Inspirations

Moonlight Ambulette responded to my suggestion for a list of writerly strengths you admire with a thoughtful post. She also makes the point  that making a discrete list of practitioners we admire can be difficult. I know that my daily inspirations and nano-role-models arrive phrase by phrase, day be day. This week’s gleanings:

John Freeman in the Dallas Morning News via Powell's, on the appeal of Updike’s criticism:

“What makes Mr. Updike's essays worth reading and owning in hardback is the intimate, frighteningly articulate voice that holds them aloft.”

In the November 12 New Yorker review of No Country for Old Men, Anthony Lane asks why the Coen Brothers burdened Javier Bardem “with a helmetlike hair style that makes him look like the fifth Monkee."

This surprisingly precise image is unfortunately reduced on the web version to a “comical haircut. ”

Mall of America: Free electronics recycling

Link: Mall of America: Free electronics recycling. Closed early, because of excessive demand.

Trane Elevates Byrds

A small, stupid part of me has always insisted that, if music needs to be explained to me, it can’t really be that good. But this passes off ignorance as honesty. I didn’t immediately like Coltrane in the way that I immediately liked Johnny Hodges and Chet Baker and Miles Davis. But there was always something fascinating in the what I didn’t quite get about Coltrane. So I read Ben Raitliff’s book and it did what a book of appreciation is supposed to do: it gave me context, it guided my listening (I still have a lot to do), and it also traced what might be called the corollaries of Coltrane’s sound, finding his influence in unexpected places: 

[The Byrds] had been listening to Coltrane on [their] tour bus for a year. . . .“Eight Miles High” . . . intimated Coltrane’s modalism–both in its introduction, a short twelve-string guitar solo over a drone, and its frenetic middle-section solo.

As soon as I read this, I thought, yes, of course. But Ratliff's observation never would have occurred to me.