A Slight Delay

As I write this, Hurricane Gustav is lashing southern Louisiana with heavy rains and high winds. A few years on, there’ve been a few bits of good news to come out of the hurricane, not least of which is that residents of the affected areas have managed to evacuate ahead of the storm’s arrival.

But then there’s the dark lining to the silver cloud. Those winds and rains, while not as heavy as what hit NOLA in 2005, are still managing to overtop the same levees that broke that year, flooding the Ninth Ward. There will still be heavy damage to a city that has only begun to recover from the earlier disaster. And, yet again, the lives of those affected will be used to score political points and gain political capital; while it will be a welcome change not to see the administration repeat past mistakes, one would hope its successors-in-waiting would have the discretion and good sense not to replace these with a new litany.

There’s another problem that isn’t being talked about during the wall-to-wall coverage that Gustav has received, and will continue to receive: compassion fatigue. Loosely speaking, compassion fatigue occurs when individuals (or, by extension, a society) are repeatedly confronted with human suffering. At some point, feelings of helplessness, inadequacy, and lethargy set in, and people become numb to the suffering of others. While there’s a considerable amount of debate over compassion fatigue–its causes and symptoms, to say nothing of the best means by which to address it–it’s pretty hard to argue that the psychological landscape is ripe for it, and equally hard to argue against the fact that we’re seeing some form or other of it manifest in the last several years. Read the rest of this entry »

One day a few years ago, I was wandering through lower Manhattan and saw a book title that stopped me dead in my tracks. The book was In Praise of Slowness, by Carl Honore. Mr. Honore surveyed the Slow movement as it impacted downtown areas, restaurants, and even the local gym.

The idea itself was–and still is–intriguing, but challenging. Especially in the States, and all the moreso in urban areas, we’re conditioned for speed. The pace of life itself has accelerated as time has passed, and shows signs of neither slowing nor stopping. Mindfulness is hard enough; to make the conscious effort to slow in the pace of our day-to-day lives is downright daunting. It’s as though we don’t know how to take it easy. The lunch hour is a rarity, and even those of us who get a full hour end up spending some part of it at our desks, worried whether our down-time is sufficiently productive.

So a story run by the AP, ‘Slow Food’ movement finally picking up speed, probably shouldn’t come as a surprise; amid all the bustle, a few voices are calling for a bit of calm. To quote the article: Read the rest of this entry »

Every so often, it happens. You stare at a blank page, and… stare. And then stare some more. You go back to your notebooks, then back to staring. You try coffee, tea, warm milk, eight-year-old scotch, late-night phone calls, and nothing works. As far as you can tell, you’re officially “blocked.”

Every so often in this space, I’ll be putting up writing prompts, exercises, and other suggestions for beating the block. I’ll put something up just as soon as I think of something…

Okay, only kidding. Here’s your first batch: Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a quick way to date yourself: do you remember when MTV actually played music? Like, all day? And from different genres?

Boy, are you old.

I was flipping through the channels last night looking for something to watch, and also wanting to see what channels we actually have now. We just switched from Comcast from DirecTV, so now we can actually watch TV when it rains (we’re moving up in the world, apparently). Anyway, I saw MTV3, and was temporarily filled with joy.

See, MTV3 (or MTV Tres), the last time I saw it, reminded me of MTV as it was back in the day. They played music, and a halfway decent variety of it, at that, provided you didn’t mind it in Spanish (which I don’t). You could turn on the TV and be serenaded by the likes of Maná, Gustavo Cerati, Kinky, Daddy Yankee, Ivy Queen, Julieta Venegas, Cafe Tacuba, and untold numbers of others, some of which I’d never heard of… which, let’s face it, is the best reason to listen to the radio or watch MTV in the first place.

But then my enthusiasm vanished like steam from a bathroom mirror. Read the rest of this entry »

Confused yet? Anyway, the folks over at Ask And Ye Shall Receive, a blog where a team of reviewers analyze/vivisect other blogs, have reviewed A Slight Delay. It doesn’t appear as though we were exactly up their alley… which isn’t to say it wasn’t a good review–you kinda have to give props to someone who can make you laugh while they’re telling you they found your blog about as interesting as uncooked tofu. Read the original here.

I can’t find a pearl earring on any of Daphne Louter’s many (painted) rabbits. I’ve tried. It seems as though they should be there, at least in part because the artist’s style owes more than a bit to fellow (if deceased) Dutchman Vermeer, but also because nothing seems quite out of place in Louter’s world.

Visual puns are easy enough. What’s challenging is keeping them within the realm of the plausible. A morose-looking fox toting a bag of groceries? Why not? A hummingbird flitting around a coral reef? Sure. While you’re at it, why not just have a woman applying icing to a toad… Okay, I’ll provisionally take the plausibility part back. But it’s part of the charm of Louter’s work that these things actually make sense, albeit in a sometimes disturbing way. She cites Sowa as an influence, but on the evidence it’s pretty clear that her style is her own.

The illustration and painting aside, she also works in textiles, photography, computer graphics, and text. If you had it in mind to find something edgy, this probably won’t be your cup of tea. If you don’t mind sharing said cup of tea with an anteater, on the other hand, you’ll probably feel right at home.

A long while back, I accidentally got into architecture. Not as an architect, mind you, just as a spectator. The way some people channel surf to find a good game, I’ll scan anything from bookstores to skylines to find something interesting.

What started it was a Rem Koolhaas exhibition at MoMA, and reading the architect’s classic Delerious New York not long after. If Koolhaas’s architecture was interesting stuff, his writing on architecture is really something; you could tell that this was someone who was interested not only in pretty buildings with his firm’s name on them, but also in the architect’s broader social responsibility. The architect’s firm, OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture) seems to have put out more books on building than the buildings themselves, taking on issues of context, commerce, geography, and pretty much everything else that can be thought and written about buildings.

All of this is a long-ish way of saying that I’m glad I found Studio Wikitecture. The group is a loosely-knit collective of architects and others* that applies the same open-source/crowd-sourced methodology that underpins Wikipedia to architecture. This may not sound like much on its surface, but let’s take your typical architectural project as a basis for comparison. Generally speaking, there will be a competition to draw in designs from a number of top firms, from which a winning design will be selected, and on which basis building can start; from time to time–as was the case with the Freedom Tower–the designs from the first round will be found wanting, and another round of designs will be submitted. The winning design won’t always be re-tooled to take into account the better features of other entries, and so the end result will be built with its shortcomings intact. Read the rest of this entry »

“Marcus Garvey’s words come to pass
Marcus Garvey’s words come to pass
Can’t get no food to eat
Can’t get no money to spend…”
–Burning Spear, Marcus Garvey 

So what and who, exactly, was Marcus Garvey? It all depended, apparently, on who you asked. To the faithful–who, from the early part of the twentieth century to about 1940 were legion–he was equal parts Black Moses, visionary, and prophet without honor. To his detractors–who were just as numerous, and highly vocal–he was a charlatan, a mountebank, or (in W.E.B. DuBois’ memorable phrase) simply the “negro with a hat.” Colin Grant takes on the unenviable task of sorting out the mess that was Garvey’s life and legacy, wisely leaving some loose ends to the reader’s imagination and judgment.

The life contained in this book is a study in contradictions. Marcus Mosiah Garvey was, in no particular order, a one-time Anglophile, a conservative who’d do Stanley Crouch proud, and a staunch Roman Catholic. He was also, however, an IRA supporter, a Black nationalist who made common cause with the KKK, a one-time Zionist turned anti-Semite, and a man who proudly claimed to have invented Fascism before Mussolini. For all his talk of self-reliance and entrepreneurship, he seems neither to have had much of a head for business, nor the sense to take the advice of those who did; numerous business ventures foundered amid a fatal blend of good intentions, poor planning, and intramural squabbles.  Read the rest of this entry »

Just the same as nobody writes in a vacuum, nobody writes for a vacuum, either. Nobody writes for the sake of not being read. Nobody–at least no one that I know–writes something with the fervent hope that it’s overlooked or ignored.

So who are we writing for? Who’s your audience, your adoring public? Many people who create–whether for a living, or just on impulse–will tell you that they’re doing it primarily for themselves, and that’s a good starting point. After all, if what you’re doing doesn’t even interest you, why bother? Having said that, I think most people who write do it on some level in order to reach a wider audience; stuff that’s written primarily to please one’s self ends up reading as though it was written that way (ie. bloated, self-indulgent). Read the rest of this entry »

Mandatory disclaimer: I’m not an economist. Having said that, I’m a bit concerned looking at this whole offshore drilling thing. Not just for safety and environmental reasons, but for economic ones as well.

First off, as has already been widely reported (in sources that lean both left and right), the impact on the price of gas will be minimal, and will take about ten years to register, if at all. Second, oil rigs cost money to build and operate. Tons. Given that oil companies–especially Exxon-Mobil–have been posting profits that could charitably be called “ridiculous,” they’re not likely to want to cut into those profits and piss off shareholders, meaning that the price of construction is likely to be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices on fuel and anything that relies on that fuel to be transported, which is pretty much everything.

Third, the United States lacks the refinery capacity to deal with current levels of production. If new refineries are to be built, those too will cost money, and that cost will probably likewise be passed on to consumers/taxpayers. And this, we’re told, is a bargain.

A lot has been made of our dependence on foreign oil. The larger problem, though, is our reliance on fossil fuels, regardless of where they’ve originated. It’s time to find alternatives… I’m sure someone will find a way to charge an arm and a leg for those as well, so it’s not as though there’s no money to be made; have we lost the creativity and the will to change?