Art is fun!

It’s a great day to be alive.

Greatest congratulations are in order to David and Julia Ozab, who are welcoming a young Anna Ozab into their family. May her life be a rich one.

I have, like most people, an inbred verbal prejudice. Some words bring about bad associations, others pleasant. Aimless is one of those bad ones. I’ve always thought that when someone is aimless, it’s a waste; targets and goals are good. I’m not sure that’s always true anymore; sometimes it might be right to have no no aim, no target. Perhaps it’s all about intention.

I passed by a statue of Wendell Phillips in the Boston Common this evening. Phillips was an influential abolitionist and champion of Native American rights, a firebrand. A quote of his was carved on the pedestal:

Whether in chains or in laurels, liberty knows nothing but victories.

Maybe it was the air or the phase of the moon, but it moved me in a way that quotes on statues traditionally fail to do, and it’s been humming through my head ever since.

At the grocery store, the cashier pointed at the two tomatoes on the conveyor and said “these are not the same tomato.”

A test! I was prepared. “I know,” I answered confidently. A period of time passed.

“This one is roma, but this one isn’t.”

Oh. “They were supposed to be the same. Well, they were in the same bin.”

She nodded and scanned.

“But it’s okay if they’re different. I like tomatoes.”

I paid for my groceries and walked home.

The world has a particular sheen. Even the smallest things around the house are enticing. It’s not everyday that the towels and dishes sing the clarion call of adventure.

Following Vlad and Doug’s interchange on being an artist, and given the vibrant nature of today, perhaps it’s appropriate for me to comment. Art, to me, is something for consideration, framed, by a piece of wood or a stage or time. And being an artist is wandering around the world with a backpack full of frames and the senses turned on. If you put a frame around something, anything, with enough sincerity, then this feeling, that landscape, this cup of coffee, that piece of software, is named as a work of art. It’s a pointer and the right attitude.

I’m purposefully ignoring the issue of quality here, as that’s not at the core of experience. That’s just effort over time developing skill, getting better at closing the gap between where the frame is in your mind and where it is for everyone else.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been dipping my toes into the pool of podcasting. As I listen more and more, I’m inclined to do my own. One of my favorite things is to introduce people to music I’ve found meaningful and interesting, and it seems like a good way to do that, even if I’ve only got one listener.

A grand and relaxing weekend is in progress. Some amazing food is being cooked here in Camp Boston, and it makes me grateful for the abundance we have.

Once again Vlad gives me MIDI controller envy. I need to see a therapist.

Life is humming along. Chava is here for a few days; between her and Liz I’m starting to get used to having an extra person around the house all the time. Yesterday I hired a Zipcar for a few hours and we went around getting groceries and supplies. I’ve forgotten the simple joy of buying bulk, or going to Trader Joe’s and not being limited by what I can fit in my courier bag. Still, the benefits of not having a car are still way too high to make me reconsider, especially since I can rent a car by the hour.

Also making the scene yesterday was iLife ‘06, which admittedly I was grabbing almost entirely for the update to iPhoto. So far it’s been impressive. My image library has over 4000 pictures now, and it’s much better at both loading, navigating, and manipulating them. Full screen preview is excellent, and for those times where I don’t want to lug the the image into Photoshop, the adjustment controls are still improving.

I’m tentatively excited by the photocasting feature. It seems that people are casting just about everything they can these days, so if you can cast webs, pods, blogs, and broads, why not photos? If you’ve got iPhoto, the ‘cast shows up as a special folder, but you can also use any old RSS reader to grab the goods.

I lived in dorms for all four years of college. In my first year, I lived on the same floor as one Joe Brent; I’ve met few people with more musical talent. Joe played the violin, and wrote music, and pretty much kicked ass at everything he put his mind to. His musical tastes were pretty broad; a lot broader than mine then, though we both had a soft spot for Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern.

One night he was going on and on about this band named, I believe, Firehose (though it could have been Firehouse). Not my thing, I told myself, and refused to listen. I was cranky and grumpy for some reason, and really wanted to go to bed. So I got into bed, and Joe said “wait, you’ve really got to listen to this first” and dashed down the hall. I whined and moaned, but he returned with a CD and popped it into the player and pressed play.

But what came out of the speakers was not Firehouse. It was “Blue in Green,” from Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue — my first exposure to Davis. And pretty much instantly all of my irritation and anxiety melted away. Everything disappeared. There was nothing but the music.

It was a perfect moment.

I have memories of trying to learn cursive in school as the only left hander. The teacher didn’t know what to do with me; she was right handed and all the material assumed the student was too. As I recall, it came down to “do your best and make the end result look like everyone else’s.” It wasn’t until I studied Russian at 21 that I tried cursive again; I was taught much more methodically. My English cursive is still horrible.

Gym class was likewise terrible; stretch your legs, and make it look like this. Try as I might, I could not look like that. I eventually gave up, and tried to look like everyone else without getting any of the benefits. Now I have a desire to be more flexible, and as I revisit even simple stretching with a mind to process, to how it should feel rather than how it should look, I have a new kind of mindfulness about how I learn, and how we teach.