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A crisis averted
I am not shy of quitting a hobby when I lose interest, but sometimes it pays to persist and look for new perspectives to forge a new path forward within the practice. Sometimes you need to abandon the playing field, but sometimes you just need to tweak the game to your liking.
About a decade ago, I had a gotten jammed up in my appreciation of art. Viewed cynically, art is merely a tool of the rich and powerful to showcase themselves. I have no doubt that artists themselves are genuinely sincere in their passion, but the industry is merely one of status enhancement, for the patrons, the critics, and the artists themselves.
While I still hold that these facts are an accurate a reflection of reality in the gallery, I had an epiphany when a professor pointed out “Yes, but don’t you see that the act of viewing art is creative in itself?” After pondering the comment for a few weeks, I went to art museum and saw a Rotko on the wall. While I stood there, I focused on the border between white and brown and saw an stormy arctic snow scene complete with a igloo and campfire.
In that moment I smiled. I knew that such simplistic representational interpretation of this work would have been repugnant to Mr. Rothko and any other respectable student of art, but fuckall the academy, I had become a participant in the painting as a viewer. My crisis of faith was answered, I had found a new way back into the game.
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Mary and the Witch’s Flower, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, 2017
I woke up thinking about the animated movie Mary and the Witch’s Flower, which was done by a group of Studio Ghibli alumni.
The drawing style of the movie was classic Ghibli in its look and feel, as was the story with a strong girl as the lead in a fantastical world. In fact, it was based off of a story by Mary Stewart, who had also written the story behind Howl’s Moving Castle, which is a very good movie by Ghibli.
Unfortunately however, there was something missing in this effort. Or rather, I should say maybe there was too much thrown into this effort. It hit all the classic Ghibli beats, but it just didn’t hold together tightly as an experience.
I wonder what was the missing piece of the puzzle. I wonder if it because they didn’t have big headliners on their team, like directors Miyazaki or Takahata, or if it was someone outside of the limelight who held a quiet influence over the studio process.
What is the magic ingredient that takes excellent craftsmanship and shapes it into greatness?
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Spreadsheets
I’ve always had an odd fondness for spreadsheets. It seemed to model the world in an interesting way different from the usual tools that architecture students typically use. Unlike more graphical representations of the world like models and drawings, they are easily manipulated with potential major changes with literally a couple keystrokes.
I have been spending some time reviewing some spreadsheets at work and it’s become clear, they can also confuse information as well as the opposite. In that way, the world has come full circle, as I find myself obsessing over the graphics over a spreadsheet to ensure the information is clearly displayed, just like an introductory architecture student.
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Toggl on pause
So after trying to track my life / work, I’ve now put Toggl on pause. It was more of a chore to keep track of things than just inputting my time usage on a text file at the end of the work day and I felt that I wasn’t getting any useful data out of it.
Now this might be a “me thing not a you thing”. It may be highlighting the fact that I am jumping back and forth between my projects too quickly in an inefficient way. Or maybe my task categorizations are not properly set up, which is why I’m not getting useful data.
In any case, it’s now on pause and I need to rethink my toggl strategy before getting back into it.
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Atrium!
The other day I went to a meeting at a consultant’s office. As I entered the main entry, my eye caught the name of the complex, “Rent your office at the Atrium!”
I saw the fire stairs and rushed up the usual utilitarian set of concrete steps with metal pipe rail. But when I pushed open the door to the second floor…there was indeed an open courtyard with a big rock landscape feature with stream in the middle!
So yes, it was exactly as advertised, this is an open impressive atrium office building. In suburbia, you’re definitely fed a whole lot of bull with the building names, but once in a blue moon a developer will give you exactly what they promised.
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Bread, 15 November 2018
I decided to also do a steamed bread for the Thanksgiving potluck today and it worked out pretty good.
240g all purpose flour (Costco)
60g whole wheat flour (Montana Wheat)
150g water
50g starter
30g sugarIf I thought my sourdough was easy, the steamed bread that my wife has been working on is even more so. On Wednesday morning we mixed up the ingredients in the kitchenaid and let it sit. After I came home from work last night, we proofed it in the oven and accidentally overproofed it so I added an extra 60g of flour to the final 300g overall that we see up there.
Then I let it recover from the re-knead for an hour, took it out and put it in the steamer, let it proof for a half hour and then steamed it for 45 minutes. I can’t complain, it kept its shape and was nice and tasty.
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A plastic duck
I’m watching our boy engrossed with a plastic toy duck, staring at it, pushing it around, and trying to put it in his mouth.
It makes me wonder what other objects have been overlooked. What items are worthy of such concentration that I now longer see in front of me?
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Power versus Authority
This was a concept I originally learned about the office environment. There are people in a company that have authority via the official titles, but the firm often has informal lines of power where things really get done. As a participant in the office environment, the key is to navigate both terrains simultaneously.
Now that I’ve been on client side for about four months, I still think about the concept quite a bit. Due to my job title, I have quite a bit of authority. It’s nice to know that I can drop the hammer when necessary, but I don’t ever want to do that. I want to empower my consultants so they enjoy working with our agency and will keep coming back to work with us.
Beyond getting the job done, and getting it done well, our goal is to do it in such a way that all participants come out of it believing that they have been enriched for having gone through the process
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Bread, 13 November 2018
I baked two of these for our office Thanksgiving potluck.
The pretty one went to work.