Ice Fishing

In my part of the world, a lot of men spend a lot of time out on the ice,
for the most part sitting and contemplating a hole in the ice. Much of this
is done at night, or at least in darkness, since the sun sets at 5 PM. Some
of them are in elaborate houses, with heat and electricity and all that that
implies, others are outside sitting on overturned 5-gallon buckets, exposed
to the elements. A lot of them are getting drunk. And they are all staring
down into those dark holes, waiting.

Last night I saw the beautiful documentary, Rivers and Tides, about Andy
Goldsworthy, a sculptor who creates things outdoors out of stones and leaves
and sticks and ice and so on. One of his recurring themes is dark holes.
They appeared in his work after the death of his young sister-in-law, which
left a dark hole in the lives of his family. A dark hole, he says, draws you
into it the same way a sheer cliff attracts you to its edge. Dark holes are
about a stark transition between two worlds, a portal through which life
both ebbs and flows. They are about mortality.

...And here in Minnesota, a bunch of good old boys, out on the nighttime
ice, staring down into dark holes, waiting.

Graffiti

I've got a question: Is all graffiti tagging? In other words, is it all
someone's mark, public signatures in some form or another?

I really don't know much about the various genres of this artform and tend
toward the more conservative "damn kids should paint a piece of plywood if
they want to be artists but can't afford canvas" school of thought.

As an outsider, it all strikes me as marking behavior, i.e. dogs pissing on
lamp posts. Which is not to say that I can't see its appeal. We all want to
make some kind of mark in the world, don't we? I'm particularly drawn to
stencils, and could see a younger version of myself going out and laying
down a few of them some summer nine-beer 4AM.

But like I say, my present self is a bit annoyed with that younger self.

Open Your Eyes

I was wandering around on the ice of Lake of the Isles the other day, where
I found this wooden block frozen into the surface (I had to chip it out with
my Swiss Army Knife). On one side is the Sharpie-written message, faded from
floating, "Open Your Eyes." On another side, a drawn eye.

So I did. And this is what I saw.

Better Than Your Kids

This is very evil and extremely funny (to me and my ilk). Don't go here
without a healthy sense of humor and the ability to handle profanity:

http://maddox.xmission.com/irule.html

I actually kind of like the Frankenstein monster by Bryce, age 10. He gets
at least a B in my book.

Guitarbot

Good Lord, this is so cool! Go to this site and click on "Emergencybot
Theme"; it takes awhile to load, but is well worth the wait:

http://lemurbots.org/guitarbot.html

Wow, that thing blows my mind. Say what you will about the music (my wife
thinks it's creepy), the genius in the design and execution of this project
is staggering. Makes me feel like a lazy moron.

Massive Change

I was in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, visiting Raincoast, our super-cool Canadian distributor, where I stumbled on an exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery called "Massive Change." It was a show about design, how our era will forever be remembered not for certain politicians or wars or events like 9/11, but for the massive design changes that have occurred over the past few decades and continue today. These innovations are so large and pervasive, in fact, that they are invisible to most of us. We take them for granted. Some, like television or the internet, are more obvious than others, like containerized shipping or vertical urban growth, but together they constitute an astounding transformation in human life. We live in ways our great grandparents would have trouble comprehending if they could visit us in a time machine (whereas they would see relatively little change traveling back in time from their own era).

Anyway, here's the website, if you're interested:

www.massivechange.com

An underlying affirmation in all of this is that we, as designers (which all humans are, by nature), can change the world, solve problems, make things better, as much or more than any politician or clergy or movie star or terrorist or athlete. We should remember that design (or invention or innovation or however else you want to put it) can be one of the great forces of good. Design could be considered a higher calling!