indefatigablog

I met Bradley Bergey in Seattle where we worked together for two years at the Children’s Institute for Learning Differences on Mercer Island.

Around the same time, we each moved from Seattle to different parts of the world : I moved to Alaska and he moved to Mexico City. Over the next 4-5 years, we visited each other regular and I had the good fortune of watching him evolve from a naturally gifted painter into a focused and even more talented artist.

To boot, he’s an amazing educator, the kind of teacher I’m jealous his students get to have. World-traveled, intuitive, imaginative, playful and wise beyond his years - he’s a bona fide compliment to the practice.

Recently, Bergey was featured in Art and Letter, a monthly webzine focused on Architecture, Art and Design.

You can read the interview in its entirety here, if you likey.

He’s our pal and we’re very proud of him : )

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My pal Steve turned me on to this essay, written in 1999 by Neil Stephenson.

Highly recommended.

Here’s an excerpt :

If I can risk a broad generalization, most of the people who go to Disney World have zero interest in absorbing new ideas from books. Which sounds snide, but listen: they have no qualms about being presented with ideas in other forms. Disney World is stuffed with environmental messages now, and the guides at Animal Kingdom can talk your ear off about biology.

If you followed those tourists home, you might find art, but it would be the sort of unsigned folk art that’s for sale in Disney World’s African- and Asian-themed stores. In general they only seem comfortable with media that have been ratified by great age, massive popular acceptance, or both.

In this world, artists are like the anonymous, illiterate stone carvers who built the great cathedrals of Europe and then faded away into unmarked graves in the churchyard. The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire culture.

Disney World works the same way. If you are an intellectual type, a reader or writer of books, the nicest thing you can say about this is that the execution is superb. But it’s easy to find the whole environment a little creepy, because something is missing: the translation of all its content into clear explicit written words, the attribution of the ideas to specific people. You can’t argue with it. It seems as if a hell of a lot might be being glossed over, as if Disney World might be putting one over on us, and possibly getting away with all kinds of buried assumptions and muddled thinking.

But this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from the command-line interface to the GUI.

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself–and more than just graphical. Let’s call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.

If you wish, you can download and read his essay in its entirety here.

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Pollee and i head back to Juneau tomorrow to celebrate the wedding of our pals for a few days and suck up some of the air up there in the Great Northern latitudes.

The town has entered into a renaissance of sorts lately, in terms of folks coming together under a rather stressful situation.

As most of you have prolly read, an avalance on April 16th put the city into a conniption when power lines between Juneau and the hydroelectric power plant at Snettisham were severed, driving the price per kilowatt hour from 11 cents to 53.

From the New York Times article posted on Wednesday :

Conservationists swoon at the possibility of it all. Here in Alaska, where melting arctic ice and eroding coastlines have made global warming an urgent threat, this little city has cut its electricity use by more than 30 percent in a matter of weeks, instantly establishing itself as a role model for how to go green, and fast.

Comfort has been recalibrated. The public sauna has been closed and the lights have been dimmed at the indoor community pool. At the library, one of the two elevators was shut down after someone figured out it cost 20 cents for each round trip. The thermostat at the convention center was dialed down eight degrees, to 60. The marquee outside is dark.

Schoolchildren sacrifice Nintendo time and boast at show-and-tell of kilowatts saved. Hotels consult safety regulations to be sure they have not unscrewed too many light bulbs in the hallways. On a recent weekday, all but one of the dozens of television screens on display at the big Fred Meyer store were black — off, that is.

Yet even as they embrace a fluorescent future, the 31,000 residents of Juneau, the state capital, are not necessarily doing it for the greater good. They face a more local inconvenient truth. Electricity rates rocketed about 400 percent after an avalanche on April 16 destroyed several major transmission towers that delivered more than 80 percent of the city’s power from a hydroelectric dam about 40 miles south.

We are looking forward to the spartan spirit now thriving in our old neighborhood of 5 years and are anticipating that with more computers, TV and other gadgets turned off more often than on, we’ll be able to squeeze even more hang time out of this trip than usual.

It’s good to recalibrate our comfort amidst a culture that borders on sloth.

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Edward Louis Bernays (November 22, 1891 – March 9, 1995) is considered one of the fathers of the field of public relations along with Ivy Lee. Combining the ideas of Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays was one of the first to attempt to manipulate public opinion using the psychology of the subconscious.

He felt this manipulation was necessary in society, which he regarded as irrational and dangerous as a result of the ‘herd instinct’ that Trotter had described. Adam Curtis’s award-winning 2002 documentary for the BBC, The Century of the Self, pinpoints Bernays as the originator of modern public relations.

He was named one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century by Life magazine.

Uh…ok…so this guy is saluted for creating consumerism as we know it today?

When you have some time and interest, watch this [part 1 of 4] and decide how you feel about this for yourself :

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Researchers promote starting children young when it comes to exercise and healthy eating
Pamela Cowan, Leader-Post
Published: Saturday, March 29, 2008

Over indulgence in computer games, TV, processed food and fast food. You just shortened the life of your child.

Dr. June LeDrew couldn’t sit still and watch kids morph into “extreme screenies” — those who stare at a TV screen for more than five hours a day and rarely move off the couch.

So the professor of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the University of Regina created some public service announcements that focus on the connection between sedentary activities such as television watching and increasing obesity levels.

“We have the soft commercials or public service announcements where someone is walking around with a cushion attached to their butt and they’re encouraging them not to be a couch potato,” LeDrew said. “But if you’re looking at the health side of this and the detriment to our children’s health in particular, we need a harder hitting approach than that to send a message to the adults that this is not working.”

Her concern is shared.

A study conducted in 2003 by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation titled Zero to Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers found that one in four children under the age of two years has a TV in his or her bedroom and children six years and younger spend an average of two hours a day with screen media, mostly TV and videos.

Fast forward to 2006.

That’s when LeDrew and two University of Regina co-researchers decided to measure how much time family members spent watching television so they challenged families to unplug their TV and “Live Outside the Box” for a week.

They sent information about the project home with children from two Regina elementary schools. Only 13 families participated and some angry parents called the researchers because they were upset by the suggestion that the entire family go screen free.

[read more]

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