This Way to Providence

Pictures? They are sometimes better than words. At least, that's what I'm going to assume for now, for tonight, for this magical moment when I have so much to say and yet am thwarted by that adversary called "work that needs to be done sooner than never."


But first, a quick preface. This weekend, I visited Providence, Rhode Island, for the first time in my life, and loved it a lot. The nice thing about Providence is that distills my favorite aspects of Boston and Cambridge into a beautiful, meandering, compact town. There are cafes. There are bookstores. There are stores of miscellany, old and new, and bright clapboard buildings lining wide-sidewalked streets. It is a sweet shadow world, just an hour and a half away by commuter rail.

I have a feeling you should think about visiting, sometime.

The Metahipster, Manifest

I never used to have a problem with preciousness. Before college started, I was all about zany, delightful, neurotic ventures like McSweeney's. And Wes Anderson movies. And to be honest, I still find them fascinating. But once I tried to write my own self-aware short film, I realized how convoluted my own creative process had become, how quirk had morphed into awareness of quirk, ironic sincerity quickly degenerating into insincere delight. And this was just a seven-minute short film!

Wes Anderson. At a taxidermy shop, of course.

So, I laid the metahipster material aside for a little while, finally accepting that "childlike wonder" is really only genuinely sustainable in communities that actually involve real live children. (Part of the reason I still love 826michigan/Valencia/Boston—real live children experiencing real live childlike wonder! What a concept!)

However, after reading this rambling, beautiful narrative interview with Wes Anderson, (courtesy of Phil—thanks, Phil!), I'm inclined to reconsider. Not because Wes Anderson has become any less of a metahipster—he's still painfully aware of the image he projects with his attention to detail. What I like about Wes Anderson is that he is aware of all of this, and yet continues to make movies anyway. His aesthetic obsession isn't something that he can just turn off in response to the critics; his imagination refuses to stop imagining.

It's not that he doesn't care what people say. It's just that he's realized two simple facts. One: people will always be snarky. Two: he will always be creative. He can't stop either from happening, and he knows that. And because of that? He's unstoppable.

XO: My favorite little monster

Free Software Day, September 15, 2007. Across the room, across a sea of stiff blue stackable chairs, I spotted a grown-up man hunched over a small, white plastic monster. With green ears. And a hinge. I was absorbing a lot of information; copyright law jargon, clever t-shirts with indecipherable logos, and an implacable tension between users of Ubuntu Linux and users of some supposedly more-liberated Linux variant. It was a lot to take in. My senses were overwhelmed. So it took me about a minute and a half to register this white plastic monster, squeal, and loudly inquire: "What's that?!?"

"That" was the XO laptop, and I would have to agree with Nigerian President Obasanjo that this little gadget is completely enchanting. I mean, look at it:Not only is it cute; it's the $100 laptop. (Well, it's not $100 yet, because it has yet to enjoy economies of scale, but it will soon, and it's close enough for now.) And if my new favorite organization, One Laptop Per Child, gets their way, every kid on earth will eventually have an XO in his or her hands, ready to interact and communicate with each other and the world.

Starting November 12, as the banner above suggests, you'll be able to buy one laptop for a child in the developing world, and receive one yourself, to do with as you please—play with it, hack it, donate it, anything. (New York Times article here.) I'm all about simple, powerful, affordable tools; when people have a platform on which to realize their dreams, they tend to have more dreams, and I think this is doubly true for children—who, in the first place, deserve all the dreams they can find. I'm elated that this project has become a reality, and excited to be living in the thick of it, here in Cambridge. xo, XO.

[Update: since I am an unapologetic booster, but also have a conscience, I thought I'd point you to some snarky commentary, and for good measure, some kind-but-critical commentary.]

A long layover in a flat world

Two weeks ago, I was in an airport. A very dingy, very gray airport—the kind that blandly marks a miscellaneous layover city in memory. My computer was dying, and since I'd been in the World of Russian for 9 weeks, (a world which, surprisingly, was located not in Russia, but in Vermont), I didn't have any books in English. I went into a bookstore, and the images of Brad, Angelina, and Britney hit me like a hall of mirrors. But there were books, too, tucked among the magazines, so I bought one called The World is Flat, by Thomas L. Friedman.

(For a good summary, I recommend this Wikipedia article.)

I'm a bit late to the game; the book is into its third edition now, so popular that it competes with Britney for the Tiara of Attention. And yet, here I am, two weeks later, confessing to my zeitgeist tardiness, in order to tell you that this book blew my mind.

It's not that I don't question its overwhelmingly pro-globalization message. I know that there are two sides (or 6 billion) to the story, and although I'm pretty willing to trust a good argument, I also know how to use the internet. And the internet says that lots of people have problems with this book, problems with the idea that the U.S. can continue to hold a position of influence in the world just by using its "imagination," or fix all the world's ills just by hiring cheap labor to do data entry.

But Friedman captured my heart not because his argument was airtight, but because he made it with such curiosity and conviction. This man knows the power of good rhetoric; as an investigative journalist, he's clearly mastered the art of nonfiction storytelling. And as I was pulled along through his narrative—often staying up late to read about globalization, folks, and occasionally being moved to tears—I realized that Friedman has made more of an impact on global business practices than a thousand statistical studies, simply by weaving the pieces together into a compelling story. I agree with his message, for the most part, but the reason I'm really in Friedman's corner is because he's a responsible evangelist for the inevitable religion of the future, Web 3.0, where every person on the earth is infinitely connected to every other. While Friedman's not the only one showing the way, he's certainly doing a lot to illuminate a very reasonable path, using facts and true stories to address his readers' humanity. And frankly, I can't help but respect that.

Microsoft v. World: It's on.

While they were busy tearing down their pay wall, the good people at the New York Times decided to throw in some bonus good news:IBM is throwing its weight behind a free office suite on the Open Office platform, called Lotus Symphony. The hope is that by adding more credibility to a standard already supported by Google and Sun, the Open Office format can trump Microsoft's proprietary "open" format. That's right, folks. Combine that with the news of Microsoft's European anti-trust ruling, and I think we might just have a smackdown brewing.

And while I'm not rabidly anti-Microsoft, I do like a good fight.

That said: it's on.

A short personal narrative followed by a punchy plug

At 14 or 15, spinning for hours every day in my dad's desk chair, reading these newfangled things called blogs, I came across Sarah Hatter. I loved her writing, and in my own impressionable way, I took from her words the following ideas:

1. I should read the works of Marcel Proust in their entirety. (Or, better yet, ask for the boxed set for Christmas and then proceed feel guilty about not reading them for the next 5 years! Which is what actually happened. So, not such a good influence.)
2. I should register my domain name through Blogger. Someday. Which I just did about a month ago, after 5 years of letting the idea sit around...so, good influence!

Sarah Hatter was pretty much one for one in my book, until I decided a little while ago to see what ever became of her. Turns out, she teamed up with her friend Wendy to put together a running compendium of incredible consumer goods, appropriately titled Awesome!.


Unless you all get tired of hearing scintillating stories about my young adulthood, I will someday divulge the sorted details of my past as a catalog enthusiast. However, all you need to know for now is that I love looking at photographs of wonderful things paired with breathless descriptions. Hence my continuing weakness for the SkyMall catalog in airplane seatpockets, and senselessly enduring belief that its products really will change my life.

But I'm here to report that Awesome! is much better than the SkyMall catalog. In fact, it's much much better. Not only do Sarah and Wendy scour the internet for beautiful and affordable work by independent designers—the kind that never seems to rise to the top of the Google rankings under "cute clothes," even though their work is exactly what I'm looking for—they also share a really peppy/sassy writing style. It's enthusiastic, but it's wry. And I like that. In fact, their short-personal-narrative-followed-by-punchy-plug style has been one of the main influences on my writing on dianakimball.com. (Clue: you're reading it right now.)

So I would like to announce that Sarah Hatter, and, okay, Wendy too, in the grand and fiercely competitive contest for my affections, are no longer one-for-one. They're one-a million. And guess what? They're winning.

Laptops covered in bumper stickers

Saturday afternoon, emerging from the subway station into lingering summer air spiked with cold, I set out for Chinatown. Well, actually, I was setting out for somewhere a little bit more specific: Encuentro 5, "a space for progressive movement building in the heart of Boston." The first time I walked along Harrison street, I missed the place entirely. The second time, I finally caught sight of the 8.5 x 11 hot pink flyer, handwritten and photocopied: "Free Software Day! Come on up!"
I read boingboing pretty religiously, and so I'm exposed to a heavy dose of Cory Doctorow's free culture philosophy. The free software movement, and the related free culture movement, both go beyond the simple idea of "open source" to say that everything from code to music to art to writing can benefit from being not just "free" as in "doesn't-cost-anything," but "free" as in "a source or beneficiary of freedom." There are lots of ways to unpack the meaning of "free," but my impression is that these movements want to tap into that multiplicity. This especially struck home when I realized that while Free Software Day was the title on the posters and t-shirts, the Free Software Foundation website referred to the event as Boston Software Freedom Day. While the promise of free software might lure in unsuspecting passerby or broke college students, the core of the movement has to do with the freedom that technology can afford people all over the world, and the importance of keeping access to that freedom non-proprietary and open.

So! While I didn't actually walk away from Free Software Day with any free software, I did gain a much better understanding of what the movement is all about. It's really fascinating to see computer activists all gathered together in one physical location; I saw a lot of laptops covered in bumper stickers, which I guess kind of epitomizes the techno-activist nature of this whole endeavor. While I'm not sure I'm ready to be a free software activist myself, I think that understanding the passionate core of the movement is absolutely necessary to understand its more mainstream projects, such as Linux or Mozilla Firefox. Of course, the free software movement doesn't "own" these projects, or even "control" them; that's part of the whole point, that nobody fully owns or controls these projects. However, as vocal contributors and idealistic boosters of such projects, free software activists are incredibly influential in these fundamentally collaborative ventures.

How not to cure a lifehack addiction

When I was 5, and should have been reading Nancy Drew or, hey, maybe Dr. Seuss, I instead chose to read a parenting how-to book cover-to-cover. In third grade, I wrote a book report on a manual purporting to right the gender imbalance in housecleaning, becoming extremely passionate about the various methods of applying cleaning solution to objects. As you can see, I have a long and kind of weird history with instruction manuals for life. Basically? I love them.

So I was very excited, though wary, to come across a new ultrablog called LifeRemix. Excited because LifeRemix has a bunch of really high-quality partner blogs on board, including Tim Ferriss's Four-Hour Work Week, Chanpory Rith's LifeClever, and Leo Babauta's Zen Habits. Plus, LifeRemix essentially serves up a tasty menu of potential life improvements, constantly scraping all of its member blogs for new headlines, like so:

However, embedded in this nifty setup lies the source of my wariness: with so many potential ways to improve my life, how will I ever pick one?! Or two. Or any number, really, to stick with. After reading this Time article on life hacks a few weeks ago, Hacking Toward Happiness, I found myself nodding with the sober self-awareness of a 20-year-old lifehack addict at the article's observation that "Some life-hacking fans get so wrapped up in reading about efficiency that the sites become, ironically, another procrastination crutch." True that! However, I like to think that the nice glowing optimism I get from reading lifehacks makes it all worthwhile.

Ways to win the lottery

I am a very, very amateur photographer. I guess I approach photography like a giant, mad lottery, where the more photos I take in rapid succession on my point-and-shoot digital cameras, the better the chances of a good one popping up out of nowhere. I had grand aspirations to photography even before digital cameras exploded onto the scene, but analog photography was not a great way to learn through trial and error. Mostly because each "error" cost money to print up, if I even remembered to take my film to the drug store.

All of this is to say that I like taking photos of shoes. When I'm with friends, madly click-clicking away, I'll really point the camera anywhere—parking structure, nose, corner of building, patch of grass. But some of my favorite pictures have come from wheeling the camera around and shooting pictures of people's feet.

So, it was really exciting to stumble upon The Shoe Project, wherein photographer Ellen Ugelstad pairs photos of people's faces with photos of their shoes. Her photographs are obviously way better than mine, but I really like where she's going with this.

Behold!

Lily—Teenager

As you can see, her photos are perfect. Now if only I had a better camera...

Schoolhouse Rock(s)

Due to Harvard's hilarious calendar, which has us starting classes a full week and a half from now, I am forced to sit mildly by while all my friends, and even my brother, experience the thrilling ups and downs of the first days of college. And me? Well, at least I have LifeHacker to keep me sane.

Unfortunately, LifeHacker today decided to join the crowd, taunting me with back-to-school promises! Fortunately, I love back-to-school promises as much as the next person, and so LifeHacker's Top 10 Back to School Tools for the Organized Student was a great read. Lots of good stuff here, but my favorite was my new pick for frontrunner in the race to help poor students become digitally organized, Schoolhouse 2.


I think the picture probably says "awesome" much more articulately than I ever could, but I think you see what I mean. Besides the general comfy, iTunes-esque Mac interface, there are a few things that I think really set this program apart:

1. It is an actual program. You know, one that lives on your computer.
2. No enforced Web 2.0 gimmick. "Social note-taking?" I think that's called mooching.
3. Likewise, no enforced tagging setup. Semesters are like playlists, courses are like albums, and assignments / notes are like songs. Of course, this setup is a bit less versatile than the "everything can be in all applicable categories at the same time!" wow factor of tagging, but let's face it: sometimes, a file, or note, or whatever, really does only belong in one place. Schoolhouse 2 understands this.
   
4. Ability to pull in all sorts of file types. I can't tell you how many cryptically named syllabi PDFs and Word document assignments I've amassed from email and course websites over the years. Do you know where they are now? Yeah, neither do I. With Schoolhouse 2, hopefully that will change.
5. Nifty "Ask Instructor" button. Seriously, this program is like a closed-circuit Facebook for your coursework. I can see keeping this window open as I do my homework, receive assignments, and write quick summaries of readings, inputting all of that information into a format that makes sense to me, rather than messing around with a an opaque folder system on my computer.
6. Free. For real.

I think I'm going to try committing to this program for at least a month, and then I'll report on my experience with the program in action. That is, when/if I ever do get any action. Of the academic kind.

Please, school. Please start soon.

Photographs from long ago

I would like to say that this has been a crazy week, that I've been SO BUSY that I didn't even have time to surf the internet, but actually, it's been pretty calm. There's been some definite reading of actual books, which I'm sure you'll hear about soon, but the internet and I have had plenty of facetime.

Facetime which, BRILLIANTLY, led to the discovery of this little site today: Square America: A Gallery of Vintage Snapshots and Vernacular Photography. Do you even know what this means?

It means this:

And this:

And this:

I've always loved vernacular photography, especially the kind that comes in old hat boxes. The curator of Square America is seriously dedicated, describing the site as

dedicated to preserving and displaying vintage snapshots from the first 3/4s of the 20th Century. Not only do these photographs contain a wealth of primary source information on how life was lived they also constitute a shadow history of photography, one too often ignored by museums and art galleries. Or at least that's what I tell people- more accurately, the site is a catalog of my obsession with vintage photographs. For the last eight years or so I've spent countless hours digging through boxes of old snapshots at flea markets (mostly here in Chicago and in NYC) and too much money buying photos on eBay. The site is my attempt to create some kind of organizational framework, however idiosyncratic, for the sprawling mess my collecting has created. More importantly, now that the site is up I can tell people that I'm a curator rather than a collector.

During high school I occasionally worked at a used bookstore, the kind that was like an attic open for business. There was an old bank of card catalog drawers that I would, occasionally, open and close, finding Pez dispensers, homeless buttons, and one day, a thick stack of black-and-white photographs from somebody's long-ago life. Frankly, I was as fascinated by the presence of the photos as the photos themselves; what kind of person sells their family photographs to strangers? But then again, I suppose an equally valid question would be, what kind of person plasters their college dorm room with the family photographs of strangers?

And, fortunately or unfortunately, that would be me.

In any case, I am crazy about this website. It is like the unfamous counterpart to the New York Public Library Digital Images Gallery, with which you might be familiar, and for that reason I will spend many hours dreaming about the stories behind these pictures, the lives that left these now-public remainders. Of course these are amazing for any historian, but just think what a creative writing teacher could do with this website! Pick a photo and write the story behind it? Maybe at 826 Boston...

Sites like these make me want to document my life better so that someone can find the traces of it someday, and wonder.