on Bad Neighbors

We used to live in a wonderful and artsy area of Portland, Oregon, just off Alberta Street.  The houses were all either traditional bungalows or Portland Style (four-square houses with the large front porches), or a combination thereof.  The neighbor to our South was a nice quiet family of four.  The father was a professor, the mother a retired teacher and the kids were smart, quiet, clean and polite.  Nearly every night I could see the mother and daughter washing dishes from an angled view out my kitchen window.

The neighbor to our West was a very elderly woman who required the use of a mechanical chair lift installed at her front porch.  You rarely even knew she was there except for the occasional whir and clang of the lift as she came home from grocery shopping.  Unfortunately this little old lady was getting forgetful and her granddaughter had discovered the gas stove left on far too many times.  The woman was put into a home and her two granddaughters moved in, along with their motorcycle-riding boyfriends.  From then on we were treated to extremely loud tailpipes, angry arguments, heated battles, sirens and cops blocking the street, loud death-metal music, and the near constant sound of that darned mechanical lift going up and down (all four persons living there were very, very obese).  They had two enormous dogs who would bark at any tiny instigation.  One day Robert was sitting on our porch swing when he heard the following loud declaration emanate from their house: "The whole house smells like shit, but I looked around and couldn't find any shit!"

Keeping it classy.

However, these were not our worst neighbors, by far.  To the immediate North was a man, probably in his fifties, who fancied himself to be a radio broadcaster.  There had been a fire in his house at some time in the past and for at least a decade the walls had no covering, just exposed studs and pink insulation.  He rarely ever left the house, but occasionally would have a few people staying there.  To his North was a small connector road which he would line up large boulders and park vehicles across so no one could use it.  His backyard and front porch was completely filled with horded items from broken washing machines to plastic chairs, all stacked up, rough and tumble with barely a pathway between.  He ran an electrical wire along the top of his fence to keep trespassers from entering.  And he erected a 50ft steel tower to broadcast his signals.

You would think he was breaking the law with the tower except that he didn't actually exceed the height limit for "antennae" in the city.  He also typically kept his amplification rate just barely under the legal limit.  This really didn't matter much because all the houses in the area, including ours, had old knob & tube electrical wiring. While this kind of wiring is fairly safe (despite many people's panic about "old" wiring) it kind of acts like a giant antenna, turning your house into a giant receiver.  When we'd plug in anything that had a speaker, including our telephone, it didn't matter if the item was turned on or not, the speakers would broadcast anything our neighbor was outputting.  Neighbors got together and complained to the FCC and to the councilpersons, but he was actually within the letter of the law.

I still remember a conversation I had with my grandmother.  She had called me and suddenly the neighbor began to broadcast his intermittent "show" which consisted mostly of saying "holy guacamole" over and over with an echo, or playing one of those Christmas songs featuring dogs barking the tune.  This time he was repeating, "you're a dirty bitch, you're a dirty bitch", to which my Grandmother replied, "what did you say, Bud?"  I tried to explain that it wasn't me, but his volume was far too high for me to get this across.

We even tried to talk to him, but it seems we were part of the "establishment trying to take him down".  He was paranoid and delusional and felt this radio broadcasting was his way to get back at the "man".

I don't miss him.

on Free Speech

Ah, the first amendment to our United States Constitution; what would we do without it?

This one little amendment has been fought for and against in courts, in Congress, everywhere throughout the U.S., for all of our history.  What are we allowed to say, where, when and how is the subject of many contentious fights.  The amendment itself states very plainly that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble".  However, it doesn't mention laws made outside of Congress.


This is how we got obscenity laws which certainly do abridge the freedom of speech.  If something is obscene (a very vague and varied definition by the way) then citizens no longer have the right to say it, print it, distribute it, or even own it privately.  Yes, by definition you are not actually allowed to own pornography in your own homes.  This is how officials can break in (with a search warrant, unless it's deemed some kind of terrorism activity) take your computer and search for anything "obscene".  Now regular ol' porn will probably be permitted in most cases, but are you 100% sure every person shown in that pornography is of legal age?  Did you know the legal age varies depending on whether or not that person is engaged in "straight" or "gay" sex?  Yup, varied definition for sure.


What about "sexting"?  Should a high school student be sent to prison for the 'distribution of pornography' after she sent nude photos of herself to her boyfriend, who shared them with his friends?  A few years ago a woman was arrested for child pornography because she took photos of her baby in the bath tub and (rather stupidly) sent them out as a Christmas card.  More recently, this past summer, a major book store chain covered up a magazine because it featured a topless male model; a model that is renowned for having a very feminine face.  Because he looked like a woman, but had exposed MALE breasts, they felt they needed to cover it up "for the sake of the children".  Why is nudity so highly sexualized in America?  A family in Florida recently tried to sue their next door neighbor because the neighbor had two 4ft tall statues of the David which of course has exposed genitals.  The woman exclaimed, "what if my little boy saw that statue?"


People can peaceably assemble, this is our right guaranteed by the Constitution, and Congress can't make a law which prevents this.  However, if the assembly is deemed terrorist in any way then the "peaceably" portion kicks in and the gathering can be quashed, even in private locations.  Also, governments, Federal and Local can make laws stating the people must apply and be approved for a permit to gather in public places, presumably due to security and maintenance concerns.  If someone in the governing body determines they do not approve or like why the people are assembling, they can simply not approve the permit, or revoke it later at their discretion.


I've devoted quite a few blog posts about the power of words.  People certainly have the right to say whatever they want, but they must understand they have to accept the consequences of that freedom.  If someone shouts on a street corner (or Facebook for that matter) the company they work for is terrible, then that company has a right to fire them over it.  Sure, the person had every right to knock their employer, but the employer has a right to protect their image from slander.  If a person stands on a street corner (or again, Facebook) decrying a certain ethnicity, personality trait, etc., it is certainly their right, but what if it incites violence or degradation of the ethnicity, etc.?  This can be considered "hate speech" and can be outlawed. 


The Press is allowed to print whatever it wants.  However, there have been laws enacted which prevent certain claims by advertisers.  There used to be rules regulating how the media could portray the "truth", but those regulations were mostly gutted during the first few years of Bush Jr.  Now we have Fox and many other "news" organizations making up whatever they want to and sometimes running an obscure apology if caught.  Most of the time now, the media doesn't care if it's blatantly lying.  An acquaintance once told me major news
agencies will never get eclipsed by bloggers because no one would know whom to trust in the blogosphere. Do we know who to trust in the major news agencies?  The Egyptian uprising, now part of the so called "Arab Spring" was first reported from the site with hand held phones and broadcast over Facebook and Twitter.  The major news agencies were at least 8 hours behind.  Where will our news come from in the future, and will it be trustworthy?





  

on Recognition

I was watching a short film the other day and suddenly got a terrible case of Deja Vu.  I could have sworn I'd seen this particular scene.  A few minutes later the feeling subsided.  Deja Vu is not a prediction, or a memory from a past life.  It's a random misfiring in the memory center of your brain, giving you the sudden feeling of recognition without actual memory connections.  If you think you're suddenly having a psychic moment, try your hardest to predict what is going to happen next.  Once the next thing happens your brain will still trigger the recognition, but you won't be able to predict it.  A string of these recognitions will eventually alert the warning centers of the brain, telling you something ominous or wonderful is about to occur.  This is a defense mechanism scientists are still trying to work out.

Pattern recognition is an ability we are born with.  Babies see the shapes of faces, regardless of orientation (whether the face is upside down, sideways or right side up).  Eventually, before they can really focus, they can recognize their parents' or caregivers' faces from strangers.  Our brains can pick shapes, color, darkness & lightness out of nearly any image and turn it into a face, a body, or anything we can recognize.

Sometimes, if I wake up in the middle of the night and look at one of the pictures on the wall, or the lamp at the bedside, the shape may be common, but my brain can't recognize it.  It may take up to a minute or two for me to finally realize it's just a lamp and not a person standing there.  Sometimes I actually get angry because my brain searches for a reason that the painting on the wall is unrecognizable and comes up with an excuse: obviously that picture has been switched out by my partner.  If I'm still mostly asleep my brain may concoct an entire story about why the picture has been replaced. As I wake up and the picture's details emerge more clearly it will trigger the recognition and I will now remember where it came from and that it is the very same picture hanging on the wall for years.  I imagine this is how Alzheimer's disease feels as those memories disappear and all the familiar things and people no longer trigger recognition.

on TV Beginnings

When I was in High School my friends' family had cable. I was a bit jealous because my family refused to pay for the luxury so we could only get two clearly visible channels, and one fuzzy PBS channel.  My father finally installed a large antenna but in order to bring in the other channels (and those pesky UHF channels, remember those?) one had to turn a large disk and then wait to see if the channel came in as the antenna slowly turned.  Eventually the motor burned out and I became the official antenna-turner.  I'd have to run outside and turn the pole until my father would yell "okay".  This would usually be a seemingly never ending back and forth.

I remember going over to my friends' house (I was friends with all three of the boys, and sort-of friends with the sister and parents) in 1981 to watch for the launch of MTV.  All the screen displayed was a single image which I think said "coming soon", or maybe it was a countdown.  I don't recall that detail, but when the channel finally launched the whole household was ecstatic. Then we were treated to hours and hours of "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles.  Eventually the network began airing other music videos hosted by "VJs" like Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, Martha Quinn and J.J. Jackson.


In 1986 I moved to Tualatin, Oregon to be near my new job as an interior designer and store planner for America's largest privately-owned drug store chain (at the time). I had my own apartment for the first time and my own color t.v. set.  Up to that time I had only owned a small black and white set, so I thought ALF was actually blue (until the mom on the show asked "who left all the orange hair in the bathtub?").  TV was filled with the news that FOX would be launching a new television network.  The channel came on line with a small amount of FOX produced shows which would air weeknights.  At other times the channel was blank.

The first show to air was the Late Show with Joan Rivers.  She quit by 1987 and the show was hosted by guests until Arsenio Hall came on. With his popularity he was able to jump to one of the major networks and launch his own late night talk show.

The other programming included Married with Children, America's Most Wanted, and arguably the first reality show Cops.  I always watched the Tracey Ullman show with its irreverent cartoon segments "the Simpson Family".  I fell in love with nearly everyone on 21 Jump Street; I adored little Johnny Depp, but eventually threw him over for the new cast-member bad-boy Richard Greico. I laughed a lot at the New Adventures of Beans Baxter about a teenage or preteen who was a spy and even his parents didn't know. I howled at the show that started with a two-hour movie event called Werewolf, and had a little crush on John J. York.

There was a romantic-comedy show called Duet about a dating couple.  The main characters were only slightly amusing and a bit flat but it was the show's other characters that really stole the show.  There was the kooky secretary played by Ellen Degeneres, and the no-nonsense deadpan Alison LaPlaca, and the ditsy sister played by Jodi Thelan.  These other characters, especially LaPlaca drew the most audience appreciation.  Since this was a new network and they really didn't have a ton of shows being pitched, they were able to sit down and retool this sitcom in order to make it work.  They cancelled Duet and then "spun-off" the show Open House.

Another major retooling happened with a show called Second Chance.  It was about an older man who dies, is sent up to St. Peter, but given a second chance to right all his wrongs.  How?  By moving into an apartment above the garage of his own mother.  This way he can keep (a rather creepy) eye on himself as a teenager.  There were strange moments when his mother tried to put the moves on him, and lots of strange "hanging out" with himself as a teenager.  "Hey mom, the creepy guy renting our spare apartment is trying to have another one-on-one talk with me after leering at me all day while I played basketball in the driveway with my two friends".  This contrived storyline simply didn't work.  However, the boy that played the teenager was Friends' star Matthew Perry who was somehow able to make the series' banal lines impressively funny.  His teen costars were William Gallo who played Francis "Booch" Lottabucci and Demian Slade who was the nerdy Eugene Blooberman. The antics and likability of these three became the center of the newly retooled show called "Boys will be Boys".

on Art and Signs

The Cleveland Storefront Renovation program specifically mentions building signs as one of the items the program money can be used for. The local Community Development Corporations encourage business/building owners to create interesting, artistic signs. This brings up the question: can a sign be art or does it always remain a piece of advertising. Many city and government programs earmarking money for public art do not allow a sign to be considered art.

In some recent architecture blogs and even one architecture history tour of Portland, Oregon mentions the iconic Portland Luggage sign at the corner of SW Fourth Street. Not to burst anyone's bubble, but that particular sign is no more than 15 years old. I should know since I designed it. The original structure of the sign was part of the original bank, and then in the 80's it became a Church of Scientology. The sign towered nearly five stories high, capped with an oblique trim, with a dark blue face and gold open pan-channel letters spelling out the church's long name, vertically. The city codes had changed by the 90's when Portland Luggage purchased the building and began renovations and the old sign could not just have the letters changed out, major revisions were now required to bring it in-line with code.

For starters, the sign face (times two since it is double-sided) was about four times the limit based on the building facade and street frontage. This change would reduce the sign to barely reaching the second floor. Furthermore the code required there to be no more exposed neon, and if the sign is to be illuminated, it could not be seen from over 10 city blocks away. Now this last part of the code was ridiculous since at night the human eye can see light from sources over billions of light years away (called stars). There is no way to create an illuminated sign that can't be seen from the nearby mountains let alone 10 city blocks.

The important part of the design process was to simply not accept the code as written. I had long discussions with the code enforcer who disclosed that if the sign was "compelling enough in design" it could be granted a variance. By adding a metal globe to the top of the sign structure I was able to make the sign about 3 1/2 stories tall and keep the internal illumination. I did have to remove any exposed neon, but I was allowed to shine lights up onto the globe from the canopy below.

So the question could be answered, in this case anyway, that the sign is artistic enough to be considered special. The sign is obviously regarded by the architectural community as an icon, for which I am very proud, but is it art? The American Sign Museum in Cincinnati seems to imply by its very existence that not only are signs a piece of nostalgia and items of advertising, but certainly are objects of art.

Recently I convinced a friend to seek funding from the Store Renovation Program to purchase his business sign, but to pursue a local art grant to hire an artist to manufacture the sign, thereby getting two funding streams for one expense. My fingers are crossed he will be successful in gaining both sets of money and getting a terrific sign and a significate piece of public art.

on Lilith

There are two versions of the creation of man in the Bible (Genesis/Bereshit).  In the first God makes Man and Woman out of clay.  Then a little bit further on Adam tells God he is lonely and so God takes a rib from Adam and makes Eve.  According to many ancient sources (Midrash for one) the first woman, who was created from clay like her mate, felt she was equal and not subservient to Adam.  This woman was called Lilith.  She is credited as Adam's first wife, who had her own mind and either decided to go her own way or was banished from the garden.

Then Eve came along and said, "yes Adam, yes Adam" to everything he said.  Of course without the fortitude of Lilith, Eve easily fell prey to the Devil's machinations and ate of the forbidden fruit.  Because of Lilith's supposed defiance and equality she has been raised up as a symbol of pure feminism, and her name has been adopted for the "Lilith Fair" concert series and has been used widely in Wiccan and other non-Christian religions and organizations.

In some earlier writings Lilith mated with an Archangel named Samael.  Then in later writings she became a seductress and a demoness.  Most of these depict Lilith as a demon sent by the Devil to prey upon young men to defile themselves; in other words the original succubus.

I think it's kind of amazing how much folklore, tales, history, and religious text can evolve from a simple discrepancy in the Bible.

on Cursive

I just read an article in the Times the other day regarding how American schools are no longer teaching cursive handwriting.  The author made two points to bemoan this loss: 1.  how will kids be able to read the original Declaration of Independence, and 2.  how will people sign their names?

First of all, in the interest of full disclosure, I have always despised cursive.  It is an invention that came about in the mid century to replace an older "archaic" form of handwriting that was supposed to be easier to learn and easier to read.  The concept was to make all handwriting look the same.  Each letter was supposed to be constructed identically by each individual in such a way as to remove anything remotely individual.  This means that even signatures were supposed to be non-individualistic, which of course is a legal problem.  More on this a bit later.

In the seventh grade my science teacher required everyone to take copious notes and then turn in a finished notebook at the end of the term.  My hand would ache and I simply could not keep up. Cursive handwriting was slow and difficult for me to master.  After a few dozen pages, I realized I couldn't read what I had written.  I decided to change my own handwriting.  I sat down and developed a new style of written alphabet full of flourishes and interesting shapes.  Then, after a week or so of honing, the curly-cues and difficult line-work smoothed out.  It was a form of printing with stylized letters.  By forcing myself to write in this new alphabet, and only in this new form, I completely changed the way I wrote from that day forward.  Although my handwriting was eventually reshaped by tedious lettering assignments in Architectural Calligraphy, many of the letter shapes have remained in my day-to-day hand writing.

Back to the article:  The Declaration of Independence is not written in cursive.  It is written in a form of calligraphy where many of the lower case letters are connected to one another but many are not.  It is very readable because most of the letters are simply italicized versions of present-day fonts with obvious exceptions being the letters "s", "r" and the capital "Q".  Even someone who has never once seen these versions of these particular letters can figure out what the document says, just as someone in present day can understand the old word: "Congreff" even though the s's look like lower case f's.  As for the signatures on the document, they are as different from each other as they are from the text itself.

This leads me to the second point of the article, that kids won't learn how to sign their names. A signature is an individual, stylized piece of writing.  If the students learned cursive the way it was meant to be taught, their signatures would, in no way, be individualistic.  I can recognize my own signature in a split second. Yet, my signature is really made up of those stylized printed letters and not cursive. Hand printing is still an individualistic style of writing, regardless of whether or not the letters connect to each other.  The human hand will always make little movements with repetitive use that are markedly individual.

So I say, let this old form of handwriting simply die out and fade away.  It has served it's usefulness and has become passe.  Just as the older forms of writing have passed on, this one should be allowed to disappear.  Sure, we can feel its loss, just as some are complaining about old incandescent light bulbs going away, but we shouldn't cling to it just because it may have had a purpose one time, long ago.  Let it go people.  Let it go.