Hey, Kristin!

As a design instructor, I sometimes sound like a broken record, prodding the students to push their designs farther and farther from predictable symmetry, finding balance overall through careful placement of visual weight. Here's another teaching tool, highly personalized, and one that should get their attention: what if humans were symmetrical? EEK!

 

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I was at Give & Take last night because I was asked to co-present on growing up in a small town. One of the people in the crowd was a girl named Kristine. I had met her last December on the church steps immediately following Andrew Bird's concert. She greeted Ben when she recognized him as the Give & Take host, and then Ben introduced her to me.

We went home then, and as I got ready for bed, I realized I had lost an earring. Always a bummer, but particularly sad this time because it was an earring I'd had since childhood, and a gift from my Grandma Helen. Black Abalone earrings she had bought for me in Mexico. I treasured those earrings, especially since she passed away about three years ago.

Cut to last night; a girl comes up to me at the event and reminds me she was the one I met outside Andrew Bird; she tells me she had really admired my earrings that night, even though she hadn't said so out loud. But that's why when she was walking to her car a few minutes later and saw one in the snow, she recognized it as mine.

She kept it since then, and brought it to me at Give & Take last night. I just want to say thanks to Kristine for noticing small details and being such a thoughtful neighbor! It made Minneapolis seem more like a small town.

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Had to take TED talks off my Google page a while back because they were just taking too much of my time. This one is 17 precious minutes long, but definitely worth sitting still for: Stefan Sagmeister talks about time off as not just personally rewarding, but economically sensible, too. A few fun project overviews near the end, so don't miss them! Thanks to @wolflow for recommending.

http://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_the_power_of_time_off.html

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Missed this boat, but I'll catch the next one. The Next Gen ONE FIX design competition was looking pretty fabulous to me...a place to submit my super rad idea for getting businesses in the East Lake Street barrio to adopt greener practices and using a design campaign to spread that message. Time ran short, though, and when my PhD exams were shifted a week later, that pretty much eliminated any time to elaborate the proposal. Will be keeping my eyes open for another possible way to bring this idea to life...and watching to see who the ONE FIX prize goes to in May. My vote goes to Community Design Group's idea for turning abandoned malls into suburban agricultural greenhouses! http://www.c-d-g.org/

http://www.metropolismag.com/nextgen/

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On Tuesday Ange Tank and I trekked to Rapson Hall at the U of M for a round table discussion on Peavey Plaza hosted by our landscape architect friend Carrie Christensen. Carrie is involved with a couple of LA organzations (HALS, MASLA) working to advocate on behalf of Peavey and its preservation as an important, historic designed space in downtown Minneapolis. Peavey Plaza's reputation has suffered over the years due to various reasons (lack of maintenance, modernism's fall from favor, etc.), and now neighboring Orchestra Hall is applying serious pressure for a complete renovation of the space. Boo to that! First of all, the space belongs to the city/the public, not OH. Second, a little foresight is all it takes to realize the plaza's future value as an iconic design artifact representing the City's massive urban renewal that went on during the late 50's through the 70's. Third, the plaza is the only public green space in that area of downtown, connecting Nicollet Mall and bookending Loring Green/Grand Rounds (the power of maps to reveal connections!).

Last year Peavey advocates' efforts yielded a designation for the plaza as a Marvel of Modernism. Current efforts focus on persuading MPLS City officials to grant it historical landmark status, which wouldn't inhibit adaptive change to the design (that's not the point, anyway), but would help ensure the process followed guidelines that would maintain the integrity of M. Paul Friedberg's original design.

I'm not a downtown girl by any means, so my experience with Peavey is extraordinarily limited...can't even say that I've ever walked through it (just past it). Still, I'm a die-hard fan of modernism (seriously, I fail to see the hard sell), especially when modernism responds sensitively to local needs/environs/culture/etc. (no, that's not an oxymoron, that's good design). I'm also a fan of public spaces like parks and plazas in general...places that bring people together, link the city to the natural world. Ben and I were recently in Mexico and visited about two dozen fabulous examples of public plazas and parks. Seeing the ways the Mexican people utilize and capitalize on their public spaces was inspiring! We saw food carts, balloon vendors, clowns, bike tricksters, capoiera, concerts, quinceañera parties, superballers (oh, wait, that was us), elderly folks, young folks, middle-aged folks...it was awesome (the power of plazas to create connections!).

Back to MPLS, here's a link to a story on Peavey Plaza on MPR from this past December.

At the event on Tuesday, Gina Bonsignore (President, MASLA) asked me and Tank to help out as we could in terms of spreading the word through our design and friend networks. So, there you have it. And now that the sun is shining a little brighter each day, it only makes sense if you are in the downtown vicinity to head over to Peavey Plaza and spend a few minutes appreciating it. Then, tell your friends to tell their friends...and that's how this works, see. Lastly, I heard something about a MPLS modernism walking tour scheduled some time in mid-May (May 16th?). As the date gets closer I'll get more info and share online. Sounds like a fun mini-staycation and a chance to appreciate our unique brand of metro cool a little more deeply.

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I'm in my favorite seat in the Harvest Room at the SPSC (University of Minnesota, St. Paul Campus, to provide some add'l grounding). The window wall faces the woody hillside in front of McNeal and I'm thankful for the sunshine. My chair sits beneath a portrait of Norman Borlaug, a simple plant breeder, Iowa born, U of M graduate. But just up the hill and left of McNeal sits Borlaug Hall...named for the man who was the father of the Green Revolution, the 1970 Nobel Peace Price recipient, and credited with saving over a billion lives...more than any other human in history. He did this by using scientific methods to develop high-yield and disease-resistant crops for developing nations, then personally overseeing their delivery and adoption in more than 20 countries.
I hadn't heard of Borlaug prior to coming to grad school here at the U, but apparently I'm not alone. This 10+ year old article from the Atlantic Monthly provides some good background on our region's unsung hero, and raises some interesting discussion topics at the same time. Like what about over-population? The "greenness" of chemical farming? The loss of traditional culture?
Discussion is good, but I'll defend my affinity for Borlaug for a couple of purely subjective reasons. Never having met him, I imagine him as a humble guy (part of that whole unsung thing). Plus, he's a good Norwegian, and obviously I dig that. Add to that, I just consulted the trusted info source that is Wikipedia and learned that Borlaug met his wife Margaret in Dinkytown at a coffeeshop in 1933. That's just darn cute. They were married 69 years till Margaret's passing in March of 2007.
This Spring I'm TA'ing a class that started out meeting in Borlaug Hall. Maybe it was the fact that it always feels good to vacate McNeal, or maybe the architecture of Borlaug just really is fabulous (I don't know if that's true—the interior signage certainly does suck), or maybe it is related to this idea of the power of naming...like the notion of space vs. anti-space being defined by design intent or lack thereof, an object/entity's symbolic power/meaning owing to its name (or lack thereof). Borlaug Hall feels free of pretension, full of possibilities.
I had hoped to tie these meanderings in with some other disjointed thoughts, like how great it is that the U of M now composts the vast majority of all food-related waste...right here at the SPSC there's a uniformed student agent manning the toss cans. It's another kind of Green Revolution. Borlaug's was concerned with production, ours is reduction. His was remarkably his own, ours belongs to everyone (hence the 2.0 addendum). We're all responsible in this networked interface, contributing to the pile of scraps filling those bins (or not). I like the thought of this, of being an unsung hero in a collective of unsung heroes carefully separating my plastics from my paper. Sometimes it's ok to be nameless. But I also like the thought that this space (this campus) is designed space, and the things produced here have names. It's a gentle reassurance to those of us (like me from time to time) who get to wondering whether all our academic seed-sowing will ever yield a harvest, and whether that harvest will feed anyone beyond our campus. And whose names will imbue future buildings with possibilities.

Adding a favorite by Manolo García, birdsong (I can hear them through the windows) in keeping with the nameless choir/green theme. Also posting the flyer for the CDes Greenlight group's GreenScreen events (Yes Men is worth watching).

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Out of the blue today I received an email from the MN Women's Press asking to use one of my one-line drawings for the cover of their upcoming April 2009 issue. The selected artwork is from 2002, never one of my personal favorites, just one that I happened to scan at some point, post to my mnartists.org page, and then leave to sit unattended all these years. The tiny occurrence of this editor stumbling across this piece now and liking it enough to ask permission to use it...well it's a little mind-boggling. And humbling. And awesome.

She wants the artwork asap, so tonight I pulled out my old portfolio to make sure I still had that piece in my possession (prone as I am to giving things away willy-nilly, my attachment to my projects pretty much ceasing upon their completion). Thankfully, it's here, intact, safe in its protective sleeve. And then I found all these other half-forgotten treasures...artifacts from that period of my early 20s when I could barely let a day pass without producing a handful of drawings. Makes me nostalgic (or is it the Haley Bonar on play right now, also associated with that era...?). Makes me think of how aware I was of being in that transition from child to grown-up, and feeling dang insecure about it at times...but at least cool enough to admit it.

Well then, in the spirit of a childhood spent on Mille Lacs' south shore, and a teetering adulthood that still gravitates to large bodies of water, I share these scribble memories/metaphors of sunny seasons/growing up. Chase away the winter chill. Even though this may go down as the warmest winter on record...

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Food is more than food. Denise Chávez spends the entirety of her book, A Taco Testimony, making this point. And grandmaster Octavio Paz gets right down to it in his essay on hygiene and repression ("At Table and in Bed"): "[American cuisine]...is the...contrary...of Mexican...cuisine, whose secret is the shock of tastes: cool and piquant, salt and sweet, hot and tart, pungent and delicate. Desire is the active agent, the secret producer of changes...In gastronomy as in the erotic, it's desire that sets substances, bodies, and sensations in motion; this is the power that rules their conjunction, commingling, and transmutation" (Paz, 1987, 76).

Speaking of desire, the first photo is the physical embodiment of a serious taco fixation. What follows are photo-maps of the flavors and contrasts explored in yesterday's barrio-quest to feed that desire. First stop, Lake and 5th (Lake Plaza). Sopes/picaditas (cool and piquant, check)...these were hot off the grill, the salsa freshly made (still warm) and perfectly rambunctious over the crumbly queso fresco. Then, two tacos, one al pastor (that pineappley spit of roast beast), one de barbacoa (goat). This plate of contrasts is a map of the tongue: sour, salty, sweet, bitter; a harmony of color: complementary greens and magenta flanking desaturated orange and yellow; and a tactile collage of hot vs cold, rough vs smooth, wet vs dry, dense vs feather-light. You eat tacos with your hands. That says something right there. Utensils did come in handy in addressing the chicken mole, rice, and beans, however...but mainly just to dissect the meat from the bones and pile it onto warm tortillas...which were then also eaten with hands.

Our next stop was Mercado Central at Lake and Bloomington where a young girl fed three carrots as thick as my wrists through a giant extractor, then cut the heaviness with a double-shot of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Kyle and I were feeling a little gluttonous by this time (desire breeds desire), so we also bought two pieces of cake from the panadería (vainilla con fresa for him, chocolate con durazno for me). It would have been all sweetness at this point were it not for the Subcomandante Marcos t-shirt that Kyle had nabbed for $10 (US) in a vendor stall on 5th (viva el contraste!). The kid is smart, after all. He made the connection between the mole and Jamaican jerk sauce, and despite having never read Octavio Paz, he observed all on his own—and in an utterly serious tone—that "Mexican people really know how to party". Food is more than food.

Now: Who wants to work with me to start a recycling/composting/green awareness campaign in the barrio? It is sorely, sorely needed and could tie in to other citizenship-building efforts. Is landfill remorse from styrofoam dishes and plastic h20 bottles the necessary contrast/counterpoint to this garden of gastronomical delights? Let's hope not.

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Some shots from last evening's seriously fierce (thanks, Tyra) EXPOSED senior fashion show at Rapson Hall. Props to my former students (Lauren, Laura, Elyse, you girls rocked!)...feeling very proud and very inspired. Thinking I might wear dresses and fun vintage jewelry all week. The Calpurnia Peach ladies also put out an amazing line. Looking for an excuse, any excuse, to buy their army tank screenprinted tights I saw at Design Collective...

Photos shot with my Canon SD 300, unretouched, sans flash, and always in motion. Pretty aquarelles, not too shabby considering...oh, but I want the G10...

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