neat!

Spell with Flickr

dreams

i've been having rather strange dreams lately. in it i'm often not part of any of the action that is going on, instead i am seeing things from a removed "god-like" perspective. Things happen, the characters in the narrative interact with each other, and I weave in and out of different camera views.

yesterday a character said in the dream. The government was built on the idea that it will evaluate and then enforce what is going to be the maximum "good" for the maximum number of people. However, what the government has turned into is to enforce the maxiumum "good" for the minimum number of people within strategic "interest" groups with enough power to tip the scales.

Its strange, its hard for me to come up with things like this when I am awake, but its really opened my mind to a new framework of understanding politics and the world. Something dealing with minority/majority and decision making and it makes me sad.

Its too bad that I've always been a de-facto minority and every since I started to think for myself have always had rather progressive tendencies. Strange.

All this from a dream.

rectangles

nerd speak

"I like moving through potential gradients."
-- Jon, on biking downhill

So True

pineapples

Today my apple stick tasted like pineapples.
I hate it when they confuse the pineapples and the apples.
Don't people get the fundamental difference between these two fruits?
But then again, I guess apples and pineapples do look alike in paste form.

I've been listening to the Smiths obsessively recently. I am supposed to not listen to it too much because its depressing, but I really enjoy it.

walk to work

Before i left for work today, Jon said "life is always good if you can still afford tea." I drank some green tea when I got to work. Its warmth was very soothing. I don't think I've ever had any beverage that has had the same effect on me.

I walked past the school right next to my house. A woman just dropped her child off at the side of the road. As her daughter ran out of the side doors, she said, "be strong minded!". I thought that was a strange parting comment. Most moms say "I love you" with their children hastily mumbling a response. I thought I would like to say that to my children right before they go to school someday. "Be strong minded!".

This reminded me of the time my grandfather used to pray over me right before I had to take exams. He would ask god to help me, and to give me presence of mind. I always liked that too, when he asked god to give me presence of mind. It always made me feel more confident right before tests.

I wonder what I will tell my children, have presence of mind! Or be strong minded! Im not sure. Depends on the occasion I suppose.

It was the evil bus driver who picked me up at the bus stop again today. She is very particular about people not stepping over the "yellow line". Despite our efforts, the bus always gets very crowded, and invariably someone spills over the yellow line. This bus driver will most definitely flip out, and bitch about the yellow line. It is very distressing. I hope she gets transferred to driving another bus line.

I got two applesticks instead of one today. I told myself I would only eat one on the walk to work, and then eat the other one on my desk with a cup of tea. I couldn't help it and ate both before I got to work. Rats. Although, the two applesticks was characteristically soggy today. I really dislike it when my foodstuffs are soggy. It is possible that my obssesion over the right proportions of meat and starch in my mouth could be related to this.

There was a charming two year old girl who said hello to everyone on the street right before I got to work. She said hello to me, with her wide brown eyes. Children are lovely things. I don't know why I've grown to be fond of them; It must be part of growing old.

in the grand tradition of this blog

getting life lessons from CEOs :) weee



Find and follow your passions; develop a culture and live it. Positive financial results
will flow from that

Learn the business from the ground floor up – not from the top floor down.

Ask lots of questions! And, when and if you get the chance to travel, always look for new
ideas to bring home! Set your goals and never give up!

Have great focus, set high but achievable goals and work EXTREMELY hard at achieving them.
Be flexible and ready to adapt to change.

You are the next wave, and all of our shoes will be filled by someone. It may as well be YOU.
Never give up trying.

Never give up, and have a positive reaction to failure.

Have a passion for what you do, work hard, have great people with good personalities, enjoy the
ride, but balance work and family.

Accumulate a lot of singles and gradually get into the doubles and triples before you try for the home runs.

Listen to yourself. Be guided by your real passions and convictions, not just by what you think might get you ahead in life.

Identify where you have or can create an edge over the rest of the world and doing something you enjoy. Then push that advantage to extremes.

Be curious. And ... the more you give, the more you get. It’s as simple as that.

Identify and affiliate with creative talent. Brainstorm concepts and analyze constantly, but at the conceptual level, not the spreadsheet level

To succeed, you have to put in the hours and when you think you are there, put in more.

where is the madness that you promised me?

Where is your sense of indignation
You are too kind
Much too kind

No one will ever love you honestly
No one will ever love you for your honesty

But you're not here to make my sad songs more sincere


I'm so glad this song doesn't hurt as much as it should have.
You mean relationships didn't have to be a long, drawn, out
self-loathing piss fests?

Wow

Interesting new Sony Bravia ad

Design in the Philippines

This is interesting

Pandora!

I just discovered
Pandora try it. It creates a radiostation from an artist or music. Its pretty damn good.
I have so far listened to Neutral Milk Hotel and the Pillows (the latter had better results)

I've already discovered two new songs... in the last 5 minutes that I really like!
Freebee Honey by the Pillows
President Kochalka by James Kochalka Superstar (kind of.. .)
All These Things by All Systems Go
Trust Vs. Mistrust by The Spinto Band

And I got tired of listening to the Neutral Milk Hotel station because it started playingi songs that started to sound too much like country music, but I did like this song:

I felt your shape by The Microphones

passage from Kerouac's Lonesome Traveler

There was a little alley in San Francisco back of the Southern Pacific station at Third and Townsend in redbrick of drowsy lazy afternoons with everybody at work in offices in the air you feel the impending rush of their commuter frenzy as soon they'll be charging en masse from Market and Sansome buildings on foot and in buses and all well-dresses thru workingman Frisco of Walkup truck drives and even the poor grime-bemarked Third Street of lost bums even Negroes so hopeless and long left East and meanings of responsibility and try that now all they do is stand there spitting in the broken glass sometimes fifty in one afternoon against one wall at Third and Howard and here's all these Millbrae and San Carlos neat-necktied producers and commuters of America and Steel Civilization rushing by with San Francisco Chronicles and green Call-Bulletins not even enough time to be disdainful, they've got to catch 130, 1321, 134, 136 all the way up to 146 till the time of evening supper in homes of the railroad earth when high in the sky the magic stars ride above the following hotshot freight trains. It's all in California, it's all a sea, I swim out of it in afternoons of sum hot meditation in my jeans with head on handkerchief or brakeman's lantern or (if not working) on book, I look up at blue sky of perfect lostpurity and feel the warp of wood of old America beneath me and have insane conversations with Negroes in second-story windows above and everything is pouring in, the switching moves of boxcars in that little alley which is so much like the alleys of Lowell and I hear far off in the sense of coming night that engine calling our mountains.

But it was that beautiful cut of clouds I could always see above the little S.P. alley, puffs floating by from Oakland or the Gate of Marin to the north or San Jose south, the clarity of Cal to break your heart. It was the fantastic drowse and drum of hum of lum mum afternoon nathin' to do, ole Frisco with end of land sadness -- the people -- the alley full of trucks and cars of business nearabouts and nobody knew or far from cared who I was all my like three thousand five hundred miles from birth-O opened up and at last belonged to me in Great America.

Now it's night in Third Street the keen little neons and also yellow bulblights of impossible-to-believe flops with dark ruined shadows moving back of torn yellow shades like a degenerate China with no money -- the cats in Annie's Alley, the flop comes on, moans, rolls, the street is loaded with darkness. Blue sky above with stars hanging high over old hotel roofs and blowers of hotels moaning out dusts of interior, the grime inside the word in mouths falling out tooth by tooth, the reading rooms tick tock bigclock with creak chair and slantboards and old faces looking up over rimless spectacles bought in some West Virginia or Florida or Liverpool England pawnshop long before I was born and across rains they've come to the end of the land sadness
end of the world gladness all your San Franciscos will have to fall eventually and burn again.

From the first day of school

Be happy. If prozac/booze/crack cocaine does not work, a
fine-looking stalkee will do the trick. Not that I'm encouraging your talents in
this aspect of human indiginity or anything.

- Jolly (from a letter trying to cheer me up about hating Stanford the moment I got there)


Very soon I will be graduating. I'm going to miss Stanford.

hmmmm

after watching myself on video for 6 hours now, OMG, I didnt know I was THAT nerdy.

I hate girls who look like the girls who have/had the hots for my boyfriend.
Gwoss..

graffik!

wasn't accepted... trying a nonzombie looking one.

but those hands are so evocative!

holy shit

I have so much work these upcoming two weeks. WTF.
Also my boyfriend has been swallowed by finals and apparently will never resurface, or perhaps will after next week? Or after he graduates? Or I'm not actually sure.

OMG OMG OMG I have so much work *shrivel*
I hate me216b... its been VERY STRESSFUl. Is this what I want my life to be? me216b and ulcers forever?



I better suck it up and descend into the world that is hard work these next two weeks. Damn it.

i wonder

Will I always be so incredibly lonely? I cannot stand being around "artsy" people because I find them to be pretentious and concerned about their self images. I cannot stand being around engineers and practical people because they seem so heartless, uninspired, and, uncreative. I cannot stand "well adjusted" people because who the hell cares about the world they are so well adjusted to. I think no matter how hard I try, I'm always doomed to fuck up. I wonder, who the hell cares?

I have memories of my life, the lonely ones, being in Cebu, Jersey City, Manhattan, Palo Alto, all the periods of loneliness.

I saw a Munch show at the Cantor last Thursday. It was very good. I think I remember an old art teacher say that Munch practically drove himself crazy during the most productive artistic periods of his life. I was bummed out because some anal guard reprimanded me for "getting my hands" on the plexiglass case of Munch's belongings. A whole bunch of bullshit if you ask me. A few moments later, I heard a faint scratching noise, and I saw him sketching on a little notepad. WTF, guards aren't supposed to be surreptitiously sketching while they are guarding museum corners. I mean what with all the museum goers getting their fingerprints on plexiglass cases and such. Anyway... a whole wad of bullshit that put a damper on my appreciation of Munch's prints. They had about thirty.

I went to the Stanford MFA art show. It was a whole lot of bullshit if you ask me. Or maybe I just cannot understand modernist art "theory". It just looked like badly made objects. Coming from product design, I had some complaints about the poor craftsmanship of some of the art pieces. One artist had exacto knifed "peep holes" into plastic containers. The exacto knifed serrations were really grating,and the sculptures were not functional. Didnt anyone ever teach these "conceptual" artists how to use exacto knifes PROPERLY?

anyway, this whole post is becoming piss and vinegar. I'm entering the real world. i dont know if I'm excited at all.

living in SF!

here is the house where I will be living next year. Yes its purple! I'm excited and scared to be starting out life outside of college. I hope it works out!

learning to be an adult

today i checked out my first credit report... and it looks like I am in good standing. Woopie! Maybe I can get an apartment. I am going to be living in the city and working for a firm called Unovo. They make wonder irons... that are simply awesome. I am excited. I am going to be living in SF.

And today I got my first credit report. Apparently, my creditors still think I'm living in New Jersey. .So far it looks like I have a pretty clean report. ACCOUNTS IN GOOD STANDING and NEVER LATE. Yay I'm a good person. Sort of.

I'm so busy busy busy nowadays. But my undergrad career is coming to an end, and I'm excited to start life as a real product designer! Woohoo. I've had too much caffeine and I'm feeling pretty wired right now.

by the way... if you're interested in getting a credit report, you can get one, once a year for free from the government!

Taco, taco , taco

I heart Nornna!

I feel whole when you are here.

I wish I knew this existed

map of all the safe bike routes in the stanford area!

mmm

So Jon's writing this paper on "a simple method for obtaining the period of nonlinear oscillators". It sounds cool. There are a ton of integrals in the paper. It looks kind of complicated and cool-looking. (delete math-fetish related comments here)

Elsewhere in the world, the Stanford Design Process... yes SDP seems to have divergent results in terms of life and me216b.

I tried to inspire myself with something cheerful today. I bought some Teddy Grahams (the golden honey variety). It wasn't very helpful. Also in other news, my body seems to keep breaking /hurting. Currently, I am getting muscle pains in my thighs. It must be because of all that walking in my stupid 3 dollar girly shoes through San Francisco today.

A notable quote from Val. "I can't help but notice, but this soup tastes like cancer".
Bergy.. "Yes, quite interesting. This is the best tasting cancer I've had in my life... but then again, this is the first cancer soup I've had ever."

And yes the soup , allegedly, tomato soup did taste like cancer. And by cancer I mean burnt.

another pet peeve

I hate people who talk/write like they just memorized SAT flash cards.

Here's a sample:

"Hello... Boys are super cool and awesome, and cars, and mokeys. Oh my god, the monkey has such an AUDACITY for sneaking up on the dog like that"

Its especially glaring if the content of the message doesn't really mean anything.
Just because you pile a bunch of fluffy, flowery language to hide the lack of insight in what you say, doesn't mean you're a genius all of a sudden.

bah.

Its freaking senior year and I am still pulling stupid all nighters.
Damn it! Damn it! Damn it.

stuff and stuff

just got a job interview at Ideo AND Jump. Isn't that funny. I was just hoping I'd get one there and now I actually have them. Weeee.

Also... fascinating thing is coming up on youtube

http://theshoyshoyboy.blogspot.com/2006/04/you-tube-hearts-nornna.html

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=nornna

Steve Jobs again

"You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."

Damn Right thats the way I'm going to live my life and no one else is going to tell me otherwise.

Let's Pretend We Dont Exist

Lets pretend we're in antarticaaaaaaa

(job search looking better)
3 interviews coming up

Stuart Karten
Unovo
PointForward

Hoping to get interview at
Ideo
Jump

the job search anxiety haiku

oh no! my career!
why are jobs so hard to find?
pain in my belly

two songs...

And all that I want, and all that I need
and all that I've got is scattered like seed.
And all that I knew is moving away from me.
(and all that I know is blowing
like tumbleweed)
- Joanna Newsom

and one day we will die and our ashes will fly from the
aeroplane over the sea but for now we are
young let us lay in the sun and count every
beautiful thing we can see love to be in the arms
of all im keeping here with me
- Neutral Milk Hotel

hmmm mmmmm

Two of us wearing raincoats

Standing so low

In the sun

You and me chasing paper

Getting nowhere

On our way back home

We’re on our way home

We’re on our way home

We’re going home


You and I have memories

Longer than the road that stretches out ahead


I miss Jon.

Wow, what a long day

Today:
9-10 job search, made the big step asking contact about certain job that I was sorta hoping i would get, eventually turned down but was offered a referral to another company! sweet!
10-10:50 learned about global warming. Lots of graphs, pictures, about the global doom that is facing us. Also! To illustrate the famous correlation is not equal to causation argument the guest speaker put up a number of pirates versus global temperature graph. This further strengthens my argument about the mystery that is the growing collective fascination with pirates? Why?!!!
11:00-12:15 learned about the Kozmetzky Global Collaboratory, which is a "collaborative think tank" trying to generate new ways of creating global shared prosperity, particularly generating innovative ways of helping the third world. The speaker was very persuasive, but very VAGUE. It was exciting though. Saving the world is always stimulating.
12:30 - 2:30 looked at people in Tressider specifically people getting drinks out of the coolers. Noticed a really weird thing. People often liked to shake their bottles of beverages when they picked them out. There seems to be no reason for doing this, just a quirk a lot of people seemed to share. The general manager came up to us being suspicious of what were exactly doing staring at the soda coolers for 2 hours. She ended up giving us a ton of information about product placement and marketing. Quite illuminating!
2:30 - 3:00 : synthesized need findings in Tressider
3:00 - 5:15 : Learned about the 2 by 2 matrix method of classifying things. We used this first to classify: Majors The two axes were "difficulty" and "usefullness". Quite controversial findings I would say. I tend to have a more egalitarian view of things, so this discussion sort of disheartened me, especially when people were quite mean about the humanities. But alas, such is life.
We then proceeded to perform the same methods on Cereal! Prof bought in about 10 brands of cereal,that at least was not a very loaded subject to me.
6:00 Had dinner. Was quite awkward. But the buttermilk squash soup was yummy.

7:00 - 8:00 Went to hear Douglas Hofstadter talk! Douglas Hofstadter!!! The hero of my youth. That was exciting. He taught about "Analogical reasoning as basis for cognition". He essentially built up an argument that analogies were the very building blocks of our thinking processes. I'm not sure if I quite agree, or follow, or care, but he was quite a charismatic speaker. I especially enjoyed the animated slides (yes no powerpoint!) and funny anecdotes
8:00- 10:00 did my laundry and searched for more companies to apply to

Dokonjo Daikon

HA-HA! This is awesome. From the BBC News:
the article
This unlikely drama started last summer in the town of Aoi, when residents noticed the radish pushing its way through the asphalt of a pavement.

Impressed by its perseverance, they named it Dokonjo Daikon, or the radish with fighting spirit.

Imagine their dismay then when one morning, they found the radish had been decapitated.

The Japanese public has frequently been touched by the plight of stricken animals. But commentators are at a loss to explain this wave of affection for a mere vegetable.

Inspired by the radish's fight for life, the town council now wants to extract seeds or even DNA from its remains in the hope of producing offspring of similar fortitude.

The Zero Form: Space, Surface, and Creation in Malevich and El Lissitzky

Malevich argues that by pursuing art as end in itself we reach non-objective suprematism; we “arrive at the domination of form as end in itself over content and things, at non-objective suprematism—at the new realism in art, at absolute creation . (Malevich,74)” Malevich’s “zero of form” represents a series of reductive pictorial processes that lead to the final logical essence of painting. This essence, very clearly embodied by paintings in the 0.10 exhibition of 1915, is characterized by elements that are non-compositional, nonmimetic, and nonobjective. This reduction to the zero degree results in forms that are so perfectly refined that they are imbued with living autonomy. This conception of art completely abandons the idea of composition and instead treats the individual pictorial elements as autonomous, and dependent instead on weight, speed, and direction of movement. El Lissitzky reinterprets Malevich’s Suprematism which is largely planimetric and extends it into three dimensions. His body of Proun work represents an extension of Malevich’s forms characterized by ambiguous planar directionality into multiple axes of spatial ambiguity. The axonometric projections characterized in his prouns represent a sublation of perspective, leading to ambiguous space that at once disavows the infinity suggested by one point perspective and creates a work of dynamic tension and reversibility. The prouns represent another manifestation of the zero form, one that is universal and nonobjective.



In his 1916 Manifesto, Malevich not only argues about the theoretical underpinnings about the zero form in art, but also talks about the methods used to reach it. He very clearly states that color and texture is the means to achieve and delineate the essence of form. The use of these pure color forms dominates the paintings in the 0.10 exhibition. Color is the necessary and sufficient condition for painting. It is living, independent from any referrent , and highlights the planarity of the painting surface. In Suprematism, one of the more baroque pieces of the 1915 exhibition we find elements of the first steps of Malevich’s reductive process. The piece consists of a number of flat, geometric shapes painted in various colors. The painting is also non-representational: it bears no resemblance with forms in nature. No two adjacent shapes are painted in the same color. Malevich claims that when a painting can still be “read” if you take away its color then it is not a real living painting as color should be the means through which the forms are created and distinguished from each other. Movement seems to radiate onto all four corners of the image, as the lines and shapes have varying orientations and groupings. Malevich argues that this arrangement is not a result of an aesthetic ordering, or what traditionally has been the ordering of pictorial composition according to the relationship of forms and color. Thus the individual elements are independent. Each form insists on an irrevocable existence. From this painting we see some of the lessons learned from Malevich’s exploration of Cubism. The shapes that are all parallel to the picture plane recall the conflation of space and the surface-depth ambiguity created by overlapping forms.




In Eight Red Rectangles we see a distillation of the reductive processes mentioned earlier. We have now established the importance of color, movement, and non-objective forms. The shapes have been reduced to rectilinear forms. The composition still possesses its non-directionality. As in Suprematism, the individual elements seem to radiate and suggest movement on all four corners of the canvas. Overlapping has now been abandoned. This painting illustrates Malevich’s new realism, characterized by “the realism of painted units of color which are constructed so that they depend neither on form, nor on colour nor on their position relative to each other.” We move on to the final step in this visual distillation, the Red Square. In this painting we find Malevich’s insistence on the life of the surface of the painting. It is a conception of art that pushes and highlights the importance of the textural elements and physicality of the painting surface. The square is what Malevich’s understands to be pinnacle of a creative form divorced from the limitations of recreating nature. The square he claims is completely alien in the natural environment and thus highlights the creative powers of the artist. This is painting as end in itself. The surface is glorified for the qualities of the surface alone. We arrive finally at the essence of painting, the zero form of art. Like the other two paintings mentioned earlier we can point to the use of color to delineate form, the directional ambiguity and the emphasis on the physicality of the painted surface. In numerical systems, zero is where we begin, the absolute starting point. This implies both the end and the start of pictorial representation. We have reached the square form, which through its lack of referentiality, its elegance, its nondirectionality, we arrive at the reduction of form to its logical conclusion. Malevich has created a system through which artists can create forms that are pure, intuitive, and creative.


El Lissitzky’s body of “Proun” works of art is a reinterpretation of Malevich’s zero form of art. From a more general definition of the zero form: we know that it is “creative” process of art creation characterized by a rejection of copying the forms of nature and by the reduction of painting to its essential qualities. This suggests an artistic predilection toward creating an entirely novel visual vocabulary, and an entirely novel set of pictorial production. To create the new Malevich suggested a complete abandonment of known conventions of representation. In his manifesto, he denounces the horizon ring which confines artists to the forms of nature. El Lissitzky demonstrates a similar denunciation of the pictorial spaces that limit the artist’s creative abilities. To liberate the viewer from the horizon of forms, El Lissitzky argues that “it is necessary to destroy the vis-à-vis relationship” between spectator and pictorial works. El Lissitzky does this by introducing axonometric projection.(Bois, 86) Axonometric projection is an architectural technique of projecting three dimensions objects onto multiple planes. Lines in an axonometric drawing are always parallel and never converge onto a vanishing point. Axonometric projection gives us a counter to traditional one or two point perspective. One point perspective centers the viewer and therefore inscribes the viewer into the space of the picture. This suggests an anthropomorphic approach to art in spatial terms. Axonometric design with its rejection of the horizon line and vanishing point allows the viewer to situate himself however he/she wants to within the image. As Malevich creates a living form by highlighting the autonomoy of colored planes, El Lissitzky creates a new structure that one can looking into, around, and across. It ceases to become an image, and instead is a marked topographical/geographical map of multiple possible viewings. The image is thus no longer pictorial, no longer mimetic, but diagrammatic. It is then a work of creation and not of imitation.


The removal of the horizon line also results in what Yve-Alain Bois calls “radical reversibility” in El Lissitzky’s work. Although Bois extends his argument to associate El Lissitzky’s proun imagery to his political photomontages, radical reversibility within the proun context refers to the oscillation between concavities and projections. Thus a cube can at once oscillate between moving back into space and projecting out of the picture plane. This coupled with the similar ambiguity of the two dimensional elements creates a multifaceted oscillation between planes and volumes. This radical reversibility is certainly a reinterpretation of Malevich’s planimetric nondirectionality, an application of the same rules of ambiguity into thee dimensions. This experimentation is enabled by Malevich’s conception of the importance of non-interrupted planes. El Lissitzky restructures this planes into three dimensional forms and breaks away from Malevich’s planimetric compositions. Taking stock of the Malevich inspired “zero-form of Lissitzky’s” prouns, let us inspect Proun R.V.N.2, a mixed media work from 1923. The two dimensional elements harkens back to the simple geometrical forms delineated by color so characteristic of the Malevich works of the 0.10 exhibition. Two dimensional shapes overlap each other. The central cross structure suggested by the negative image created by the four brown corner squares centers our vision into what is going to be a barrage of spatial and two dimensional ambiguities. The white circle is not quite centered complicating the reversibility of flat shapes. On the left the squares corners meet at arc of the circle while on the right side, the squares pierce the shapes creating an interesting dialectic between surface and depth, a dynamic tension of spatial ambiguity. On top of the white circle there are three rectilinear volumes oriented at 90 from each other rotated found the central axis of the image, and around the central axis of their bodies as well. The three volumes make sense as projections moving out of the picture plane but the image breaks down if we switch gears and interpret these forms to be moving into the plane of the picture. In Proun 2c, 1920 Malevich intersperses the flat planes of color with the volumes further keying into the displacement of the viewer and the utter novelty of the visual experience. Volumes jut out of the surfaces rejecting normal Euclidean space, and gravitational constraints as well. By rearranging Malevich’s planar elements into both two dimensional overlapping planes and three dimensional forms, Lissitzky creates a new zero form--one that gets to the essence of painting in its redefinition of pictorial space. The new form breaks out of Malevich’s heralded surface and displaces the viewer’s sense of position with respect to the image, subverts known conventions of the three dimensional and creates a work of art that is indeed a living work of art.

graffik

Something about foodness.

Some things to remember

I've been very nervous about life recently. Today, I've had even more troubling conversations that have made me more squirmy about the future. I remembered Steve Jobs' speech. I think some things are worth noting. Essentially, these are the three "lessons" concluding each of the three Jobs' stories.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

"Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."

"Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."

Well thanks, Mr.-Apple-CEO-Man. Here's to everything vital, and meaningful, and beautiful, and important in my life. I better start bracing myself. Wish me luck.

Intermission cover

Starting off the new year with an intermission graffik.