P'unk Avenue Window

Please join us on February 5th at 6pm for the Junto. This month we will be discussing the evolving role of the library. We have assembled a great panel to help lead this discussion.

Jim Pecora is the Chief Technology Officer of the Free Library of Philadelphia and Director for the Central Library Restoration and Expansion Project. He performed in a similar role for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News before coming to the Library in 2002. Jim worked in the non-profit, private and public sectors throughout his career which began as a community organizer on the west coast. Jim is also a musician and a published photographer.

Maria Falgoust is a librarian in an independent Brooklyn Heights school working with students in grades four through twelve. She has a Masters in Library and Information Science from the Palmer School and is certified as a school media specialist, and in 2000 she received her Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts from the University of Washington in Seattle. Maria is an avid reader, cook, traveler and party-organizer. Born and raised in New Orleans, she is passionate about the rebuilding of her culturally rich and economically challenged hometown. She is a co-founder of the Desk Set.

Sarah Murphy is a school librarian in Manhattan and works with students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Sarah has a Masters in Library and Information Science from the Palmer School, where she concentrated in Rare Books and Special Collections, and she has previously worked at the New York Society Library and in the Rare Book Room at the New York Academy of Medicine. Sarah also works occasionally in classical theatre, and is a co-founder of the Bakerloo Theatre Project. She and Maria Falgoust founded the Desk Set in 2006.

The Desk Set is a group of New York City area librarians, archivists, bibliophiles and other bookish types who meet informally to explore and enjoy literary resources, connect with like-minded folks, and raise money for institutions who promote literacy.

As always, we provide the cold Newcastle Brown and Philadelphia’s best tomato pie. You bring something to share, if it is not too much trouble.

The discussion will begin at 7pm. Food and drink at 6pm.

Where:
P’unk Avenue
1168 E. Passyunk Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19147

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UPDATE

Nate Hill will be moderating the panel. He manages the Adult Services at the Bushwick Branch of Brooklyn Public Library and assists with the systemwide strategic planning process. He also works as a blog manager for the Public Library Association, a division of the American Library Association.

Everyone should read his blog post on library outposts as a new service model.

The notion of popularity used to be a hierarchical, fascistic one. Stereotypes were developed and fine-tuned in popular culture and broadcast media. We then absorbed them and the privileged among us went to the mall to buy what we were sold while watching TGIF.

Those fascistic systems rely on random punition to enforce cultural norms. If you didn’t have a Stussy shirt you were a loser; if you had one, but didn’t skateboard you were a poser. Hecklings came when you least expected, and were most easily avoided by getting a skateboard and a Stussy shirt and spending two to four hours a day learning to kickflip.

Skateboarding and sixth grade power structures are an edge case, however. By-and-large America has become a super power by employing the inverse of a fascistic system. We have the lottery, we have coupons, sweepstakes, Publisher’s Clearing House, random acts of kindness, e-cards, candygrams, Amazon wish lists. America is built on conformity by random reward, we never know when we’re going to get ours, so we’d better keep our heads down and get that gold star for the day. It’s a sort of cultural Stockholm Syndrome. (I first read about this idea in a super old issue of Hermenaut magazine, which is most definitely now-defunct.)

Zeldman Minus Zeldman

So, the last few years have seen technology rapidly increase the democratization of everything. Access to media and deceasing costs of production have caused an increase in the rate of “aristocratic inflation.” It’s a lot harder to flaunt your privilege when everyone (in the ever-expanding middle class) has a flat screen TV, computers with internet access, cell phones, etc. I read yesterday that private jets are on fire sale since the stock brokers had to give them up.

Now then, if you can leverage this new democratic paradigm of popularity, you can quickly gain influence. Influence has long been the hidden spoil of war. What good is land if not for the cooperation of its inhabitants. As we all become more and more plugged in, more cerebral, war becomes an intellectual battle of influence. Whoever speaks loudest (and with the most valuable message) gets the readership, gets the militia. Ideas can’t be shot at and ideology can’t be blown up.

Since no one is forcing you to read this or that you now get a choice—unless your government is trying in vain to filter your consumption. This places the burden on the influencer to create quality content, to have the best ideology, to give out random rewards.

It’s easier to achieve and maintain popularity, and perhaps that popularity is now more rightful. But wait, if everyone becomes popular, then no one will. We will be Commander in Chief and Private First Class.

Forward this to ten of your friends or no one will post on your wall ever again!

Today our friends at monome finally moved from Philadelphia to the Catskills.

When first heard about the interfaces monome creates, I assumed they were in a city like New York or Berlin. It was a great treat to discover they were based here in Philly and even more exciting when we were able to visit their studio. It has been out of a simple loft in Kensington that monome (Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain) have manufactured all of their units over the past two-plus years. Over that span of time I have become the proud owner of two of their creations, and consider myself lucky to have even stumbled across their project in the first place.

This November they literally bought the farm. I had a chance to talk to Brian over the weekend and what they have planned for their new space is truly inspiring. We’re sad to see them leave the city, but we will be looking forward to hearing about new and wonderful things from Upstate New York.

We wish them the very best of luck.

If not now, then when? If not today…

Ah, but hold your horses there pardner.

Back in the day, you did the same darn thing over and over. That was before you knew better. Back when you were a dumbass. You’ve sworn off that stuff.

Now, the very first time you do something, you’re tempted to say, “I’m going to make sure I never have to do this again! I’m going to make sure no one ever reinvents this particular wheel again!” And you strive to make your work as thorough and reusable as possible.

Then you actually finish that first project, and you find out that what you built totally isn’t what the client wants after all. No, in the real world they want an entirely different set of gimcracks, accessorized with sprockets you never imagined. And you’ve sunk a day and a half into doing elegantly what you could have done adequately in half an hour.

“Yeah, but I did the noble thing! And I learned something.” Well, yes, you did learn something, but don’t pat yourself on the back just yet.

There’s a time to do something perfectly, universally and beautifully, setting a cosmic standard for all time. And there’s a time to say “gee, I’ve never tried this before. Let’s try delivering what the client actually asked for, going a few rounds with them and learning a little more about the true nature of the problem before we make it perfect forever.”

I’ve written before about the DRY principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself). And an excellent principle it is, in many fields of endeavor, not just software. But a word of caution is in order: when you haven’t done something before, keep the DRY rule on the back burner. Build that first practical implementation for that first client project. Only then, when you know it works well and meets real-world needs, should you try to lay down the law once and for all on the subject.

In short: if you want to be a zookeeper, start small. Get a monkey.

For about 6 years I lived next door to P’unk Avenue. A few weeks ago, I moved to Collingswood, NJ. It is fresh enough that my daughter still refers to the place I work as “next door.”

This move has inspired me to think about the proximity of home to work.

I structured a lot of my life around not having a long commute to work. My father was a short-commute role model to me. He would often come home for lunch since he worked about 3 local-road miles from our house, and he rarely was late for dinner at around 5pm.

We all probably know a person that commutes three or more hours to work. We know about how people can spend years of their lives commuting, and we know it can have impact on family, community, the environment and finances. Most people acknowledge the negatives of living a long distance from work, but what is too close? Is there a sweet-spot commute?

It is much too early in my personal exploration of this issue to have any authority in my conclusion, but my early findings lead me to believe that a short commute can be a good thing. By short, I mean about 15 minutes to a half an hour. That is the time it takes me to traverse the 7.9 door-to-door miles between where I live and work. It gives me time to decompress, listen to a podcast or some music, and get ready for my responsibilities as a father.

The view out of my window when I am home is not the same view at work. For some reason, I think this helps me clear my mind of work-related issues and to really relax at home. This separation has improved my state of mind, and I feel more focussed and refreshed in both locations.

I report this with a couple of caveats. Collingswood is the equivalent of a streetcar suburb that is serviced by the PATCO high speedline (light rail) 24 hours a day. This makes the commute easy, guilt-free and it lets me get my money’s worth out of the iPod part of my iPhone.

Another caveat is that I suspect that this appreciation for a short commute is related to my stage in life as a father of young children. I know that seems counter-intuitive, since when I worked closer to home (next door) I could be home much faster and spend more time with them. Also, I could pop in and see them throughout the day, if I wanted. This was certainly an advantage when they were newborns and up to the time they started attending school, but over time I started to see the return on that decreasing and I felt like the time with them outside of work hours was impacted by my lack of ability to distance myself mentally from work.

Probably the biggest and most ironic part of this story is that many of the choices I made in my life revolved around getting to a place where the work I did for a living was all encompassing and interesting to me. The kind of work you do even if you are not paid to do it. The kind of work you love. Like when I used to design zines with friends, play in a band or edit films in graduate school. Hours would go by without me remembering to eat.

I am fortunate enough to be in that place now. The work I do is satisfying, it fully captures my attention and I love it. I have trouble turning it off, but as a father, I want to turn it off.

In 2008, I identified three priorities: family, my work at P’unk Avenue and my health. When I made that determination, I had no idea that a few months later I would also determine that the best way to honor each of those priorities would be to physically separate two of them. Life is certainly an interesting journey.

So, the tricky people that defined the word semantics thought they could keep things simple by limiting its definition to the study of the literal meaning of words, leaving the interpretation of figurative meaning up to the folks in pragmatics.

But who studies the contextual meaning of words? The hermenauts look at the whole text and more recently even concern themselves with multimedia, but they aren’t looking through the text. Linguists look at language in social context, but what about aesthetic context? We’ve all been told that the form is central to content and meaning, but what exactly is its effect?

There is a way to break down the aesthetic context of messages and to determine the stylistic etymology of various forms. Currently this is done in art criticism, but doesn’t share across the hallway to the language department.

As modern art purged formal content and started eating its own plasticity, new discourse emerged to contextualize the new functions of art. Painting about painting, the Hip-hop remix, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, all that stuff.

My point is this: since the terms “graphic design,” “graphic arts,” “visual communication” came into existence people rarely read/view/absorb undesigned texts. They are increasingly aware that they are viewing designed texts, they’ve seen the Helvetica documentary, they like this logo and hate this one.

How do we begin, then, to parse the meaning of the aesthetic context of all of this designed information? If I make a word red or bold or blurry it changes its interpretation and thus its meaning. Why red? Why bold? Why blurry?

Ironically, pictorial imagery and symbolism developed before language, maybe we just forgot to pay attention to red and bold and blurry while we absorbed everything via romantic longhand set in Caslon.

“Creativity is as important as literacy.” – Sir Ken Robinson

Today marks the first day of a new project that all of us are very excited about. The five of us will be collaboratively teaching a course – IDES 322: Techniques Studio – in the Industrial Design department at The University of the Arts. This is a class where students learn the basics of creating a website and putting their work online. In the past, this has meant a primary focus on web design practices and tools: Photoshop, HTML, FTP. Given the opportunity to take the reins this semester, we have decided to let these topics take a back seat and move in a different direction.

“My contention is that all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them. Pretty ruthlessly” – Sir Ken Robinson

We will not be teaching this technology. We are interested in how to be web citizens, how to be fluent on the web to both promote your work, but also how best to stay connected to interesting and important developments in your field. We believe that Adobe Creative Suite and its ilk have been replaced by the likes of WordPress, Google, Flickr, Vimeo, Twitter and Tumblr as the tools to master before establishing your presence on the web. We will be exploring these tools’ potential in a practical sense as well as discussing how they are changing the industry. Part seminar and discussion, part hands on studio work, we are all very much looking forward to what we will be able to learn from this process.

In keeping with the new spirit of the course, we will be blogging all topics and assignments here, on the Window, and asking students to respond to readings and discussion in the comments.

Let’s begin.

Week 1

READ:

• Getting Real, Ch. 1 – 16
• What Should a Modern Library Be?
• What Should a Modern Library’s Website Be?

WATCH:

• Hillman Curtis’s Artist Series: Milton Glaser
• TED Talk: Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?
• The Machine is Us/ing Us

CREATE:

• If you don’t have them already, create Flickr, Google Reader, Delicious, WordPress, Twitter and Vimeo or Viddler accounts.

COMMENT:

• Write your thoughts on the readings as a comment on our blog.
• Link to your other sites and to any documentation that you create on your blog, in your Flickr account, etc.
• Link to all relevant blogs and feeds you have in your Google Reader.

Our goal for this week is to get the tone set and the dialog started. The next class isn’t until February 5, so we want to have these lines of communication firmly established to stay in touch over the next two weeks.

Today I looked out our window and saw someone delivering Grid, a new magazine about sustainablity in Philadelphia. It spurred me to write about some ideas that I care about.

If you know me, you know I am pretty passionate about solving urban problems, and that I am constantly cooking up schemes to this end.

One of these is to create neighborhood compost spots. I hypothesize that people can join the neighborhood compost co-op, get a key and drop off rotting vegetables in a centrally located, locked compost bin. Co-op members would take turns aerating the compost. Possible locations could include a small area in a city park or community garden. Locked. Community-run. Feel-good fun.

Needless to say, I have not gotten around to this initiative. Fortunately, it looks like the Pedal Co-op in Philadelphia is taking on the problem of urban composting. For $2.50, they will pick up a 3 gallon bag and delivery it to compost bins in a community garden. Currently they give the compost away to community gardens.

As an urban pedestrian, bike rider, and mostly mass-transit user, I have often dreamed of a car-less city. When people say I am crazy, I have always said, “If you remove the cars, other businesses and solutions will spring up to replace what the car does.” The Pedal Co-op is an example of the type of business that I mean. Human-powered delivery and transport would certainly flourish. Subways and trolleys would benefit. Cities would become more livable, and asthma rates would drop.

What else?

Human intelligence didn’t evolve just to bring down woolly mammoths with engineered weapons and clever tactics. It also evolved to impress da wimminz (and da menz). Entertaining people, clever people, are people we want to be around. You can do the reproductive-fitness math for yourself. The Romans didn’t need 106 possible verb endings to conquer Gaul. They needed them to get busy.

The drive to create, being related to our sexual drives, runs deeper than most people realize. It is part of our shared heritage, part of everyone’s life. Or it should be.

When attending concerts I have always struggled with a desire to be the performer onstage. Or I did before I found my own art form. It’s part of the rock and roll experience to want to be a rock star, of course, but it’s also a distraction from my enjoyment of the show. And it speaks to a deeper issue: we are supposed to perform. The guy who wishes he were onstage is not just a raving egotist; he’s on to something.

Last week Rick laid out the story of the homogenization and centralization of culture through technology: the printing press distributes your book throughout the countryside, the radio lets your music be heard in South America.

To this I would add: the electric guitar lets you be heard throughout the stadium. And that is not always a good thing. There are two historically dominant paradigms in human sexuality: polygamy and monogamy. Do you want to be a beta male in a polygamous society? Gee, no thanks. Do you want to be a beta musician in a polygamous culture?

As Rick says, Internet-based social technologies have once again decentralized culture, making practical the dreams of the indies who published zines through the eighties and nineties. And this has created pressure— a welcome pressure, but pressure— to be both a producer and a consumer of culture.

From the perspective of someone who is used to consuming culture more than they produce it— as recorded music, as television, as a T-shirt design— it makes sense to be aware of this dichotomy and perhaps uncomfortable with questions like, “am I making enough art of my own to justify inhaling this DVD?” Part of the problem is the drive to keep up with the slick production values of commercial art. Garage Band, iMovie and their “prosumer” relatives have made that possible, or very nearly possible. But it remains exhausting. And we are all addicted to those polished high-end products. I will admit a certain impatience with “amateurish” production values, even if the performance itself is highly skilled.

But this is only a problem if we choose latter-day art forms that were never intended to be participatory, but always intended as state propaganda. And by “latter-day,” I mean those promulgated in the last 6,000 years.

From the perspective of a social dancer, the dichotomy between producer and consumer simply does not exist and never has. Yes, we’ll take classes taught and watch performances by dancers more skilled than we are. But we spend the majority of our creative time dancing with our peers. Which is to say, damn near everyone.

People say that “dance is a vertical solution to a horizontal problem.” This is at once a cheap shot, an acute observation, and a recapitulation of phylogeny. The connection between sex and art is present in all art forms. Dance just brings it to the surface.

And here’s the thing: art is totally a means of getting laid. But it is more than that.

It is also a sublimation and an expansion of sexuality beyond what would be safe, advisable or feasible in the actual, literal sack.

Through art, we get busy with an unlimited number of people. Without disease, jealousy, unplanned pregnancy, or moral outrage. Art resolves the polygamy/monogamy divide in everybody’s favor. We are all bonobos; we are just a little more subtle about it. A little.

Some people, dancers in particular, regard art as a substitute for sex. In whole or in part. I do not subscribe to this entirely; I think it’s an amplification, a recognition of the fact that the sexual drive in humans greatly exceeds what is needed for procreation. It is, in fact, a drive for creation without a prefix. We need the real thing, but we need more. And the one drives the other.

Ask Sister Wendy. She knows.

I’m not suggesting that we abandon every art form that is not inherently participatory, but giving those art forms a whirl is good shock therapy for those who are addicted to mass culture. And that includes indies who are still processing an internalized sense that their art is not good enough, or must resemble commercial art to be good enough.

One word of caution, though: don’t mistake participation for an absence of competition, or a liberation from the need to practice. There is nothing worse than a bad drum circle. When I meet a beginning salsa dancer who is making an effort, I dance with her gladly. But the effort is crucial. We should compete, admire, and learn from peers and experts nearer to hand, but compete we always will. Don’t forget, it all begins with Darwin.

When is it too much?