Parker Writesand stuff

Relationships look funny on Facebook by esagor, on Flick

I’ve developed the habit of compulsively opening new tabs in firefox and going to facebook.com when i’m bored or looking for a break. It’s gotten pretty bad. When I’m bored in real life, i actually say to myself, in my head “ctrl+t, facebook.” Literally.

This is a crutch that I lean on when I have a particularly painfully large amount of work (read: schoolwork) that needs to get done. When I’m pulling a most-of-the-nighter to write a paper of finish a lab assignment I keep track of up-to-the-minute updates to my friends’ status’ (and the albums they are being tagged in, the notes they are commenting on, the videos they are uploading, etc etc). When I’m actually having fun or doing something interesting, I’m blissfully unaware of the fact that Jane-who-I-met-once-at-this-party-several-years-ago-but-still-stalk-on-facebook is “no longer listed as single” (I’m not bitter) (Jane isn’t a real person) (really, she’s not) (don’t make fun of me).

This habit of alt-tabbing to give myself a brief break and release some stress is probably a habit that should be kicked altogether, but for now I’m going to focus on replacing it with something more productive: feed-reading. I’ll skim some headlines, read a few short blog posts, and catch up on webcomics. I’ll also follow my friend feeds on twitter and identica.

Wait, isn’t that just like looking at your news feed on facebook?

Well, kind of. Except that my identica and twitter feeds are full of thoughts and news from some more interesting people (lots of big players in the Free Culture movement). It’s more newsworthy, or at least more interesting and valuable to me. Jane isn’t on twitter telling me about how happy she is with her stupid boyfriend (not bitter) (she doesn’t even exist) (I don’t want to talk about it).

is full of stuff right now. Daily updates on hold until further notice.

Give me a hug if you see me. I probably need it.

Adi wrote about how he should take more photos because snow is beautiful. I agree.

I wanted to talk about something that I’ve been noticing a lot recently that I’ve wanted to photograph. I suspect that between the lack of light and my poor photography skills, I would probably fail to capture what I see. Perhaps a written description is better.

When I’m walking by the green late at night, I’m always struck by the way that the light from the street lamps hits the trees. The lamps aren’t very tall, so the light comes at the trees somewhat horizontally. The trees and the little mounds of snow around their bases are illuminated against the blackness of the rest of the green. They’re like perfectly isolated subjects in a photograph. The untouched, clean color and Seussical form of the snow makes a nice contrast with the harsher angles and dirtier colors of the trees. With the cool, still, sterile air and the focused, isolated lighting, I feel like I’m in a museum looking at a winter diorama with a single snowy tree. Someone must have stolen the wax cave man.

There’s something about horizontal lighting. I noticed this a couple years ago while I was riding a train in northern Italy. The sun was low in the sky. We were traveling through countryside. It was flat and grassy. But it was beautiful. I couldn’t stop staring at the grass. There was just so much dimension. So much contrast. Maybe it also had to do with the oranges in the light of the setting sun.

I sometimes wonder how much more beautiful these small things would be if I weren’t red-green colorblind.

I realize that I don’t have 7 solid, distinct bits of inspiration for you. There are a few more videos by sigur ros that are amazing. There are a number of other videos and pieces of writing that I find inspiring, but I also realize that they are very specific to my areas of interest and won’t have the same effect on most people. It might be interesting to devote another post or series of posts to tracing the bits of media that have been formative in my life. But that’s for another time.

Now that I’ve proven to myself that I’m capable of blogging regularly, I want to up the quality. I want to adopt the habit of finishing posts, setting them to auto-publish in 24 hours, then editing them the next day. I cringe at all the typos that I have yet to correct in my one-a-days. It was certainly valuable to get my ideas down, but most of those essays would be infinitely better after one solid revision. I might go through and do this, although something tells me that editing blog posts too much is sacrilegious, akin to editing a wikipedia page about oneself. Certainly these posts need to be tagged/categorized.

So no more daily posts for the time being. I have a number of other things that I’d like to meditate upon, but I want to give them their due justice of more than a half-hour writeup.

For now, I leave you with a video (and transcript) of obama’s recent speech in chicago:

The film itself is considerably less awesome (i suppose that’s always the case), but this trailer is effing amazing. They’re trying to do some funky quicktime alchemy at that link, which isn’t working on my ubuntu laptop. If you’re in the same boat, you might try to the youtube version (though it’s far lower resolution, and the amazing part of the trailer is the stunning visuals). I’d like to include a direct link to a video file, and i tried digging through their javascript to find one, but no luck. Proprietary video formats FTL.

-Hamlet in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Funny how just short expressions can really stir up something inside of you. “Yes we can.” Language is power.

This phrase does it for me, and I hope it will for you too:

We ride tonight.

Especially as used in Radiohead’s “You and Whose Army?”

This was sent out to the Saul Williams email list. It’s an amazing letter about veganism, the music industry, and activism. Here’s a copy on mtvblogs.

The compliment “you’re ahead of your time”, often feels more like a curse than a gift from a well-wisher. I have never considered myself ahead of my time simply because a few executives may not have been visionary enough to determine where music or antiquated ideas of race are heading or to realize their role in continually underestimating the intelligence of the listener and our generation.

Full text here.

Sorry to have misled you. I wasn’t really feeling the stream of consciousness thing. And I think this is a much more interesting idea.

So I’ve been feeling much more powerful recently. A lot of it has to do with Obama. Hope. Change. Progress. There is something so incredibly powerful about what Obama has come to symbolize. In fact, I think that this symbolism is ultimately far more important than what he actually ends up doing in office. He talked in his acceptance speech about how this was a victory for us, not for him. This empowerment of the people is so incredibly valuable and important.

It may just be where I am in my life and the fact that I am becoming an adult, but it seems to me that in the US (and perhaps the world) there has been a recent increase in personal empowerment. This is not unrelated to web2.0 and free culture. The message is that academics and business people with fancy suits are no better or more knowledgeable than the average person. They shouldn’t be the only ones writing our encyclopedias, or telling us how to use our machines. We know stuff. And we can do stuff. Yes we can.

Here’s Lawrence Lessig articulating this idea.

I think the word that he’s missing is “empowerment.”

I honestly believe that the American people are on the verge of something extraordinary and historical here. My generation can become the activists that our parents were. The potential is there, but we’re at a tipping point, and it could go either way. We could simply clean up the empty cans from our Obama victory parties and go back to work in the morning just the same people we used to be, only slightly less pissed off at the government.

Or we could recognize that the time is now, that it’s up to us, not the goons in the white house, to fix this country and this world. We have the power. Yes we can.

But we need to re-prioritize. We have to keep perspective. We have to realize that an hour spent writing a letter, making a video, attending or organizing an event, or engaging a friend or stranger in discussion is much more valuable than an hour spent in the office or doing math homework.

And we need inspiration. We need to keep the momentum going. I believe (though I’m willing to be proven wrong) that Obama’s term as president is going to be anticlimactic. He is a politician, and he will be working within a very slow-moving and broken system which will take years to fix (if it ever does get fixed). But again, that’s not what Obama’s election is about. It’s about the symbolism. We’ve proven that we are out there, and that we can organize and gather around a cause. Yes we can.

So this is not over. We’re not just handing responsibility for our country and our world to the man that we elected and going back to our disconnected and passive lives. Obama can’t fix it on his own. But, oh yes, we can.

So I’m taking my part in keeping the momentum going and giving the world a nudge away from complacency and passivity. With some help, I think I can get us over the edge, into an active, participatory world.

Every day for the next 7 days (and longer, if I can keep it up), I will post one inspirational item. A phrase, a video, a letter, a song…something that really makes you want to get up out of your chair and something. Something that makes you feel powerful.

Won’t you join me?

For today, I have this music video by nickelback. The song isn’t great, but the video is absolutely beautiful.

Meet John. John is a plaster-mixer. Not a construction worker. Not a mason. Certainly not a carpenter. He doesn’t concern himself with any planning or anything fancy like that. He knows that they take the plaster and pour into big wooden molds and somehow walls come out. But he figures they might as well take the plaster and dump it straight into the sewer for all he cares. Plaster is his business, and nothing else.

John wears a red and black fleece, gray beanie, black boots, and once-blue jeans which have been bleached far too many times. Some days the beanie is black. His “going out” beanie. Those occasions are rare. John doesn’t tend to mix with “fancy folk,” especially since his wife passed away. His face is slightly wrinkled and his skin leathery–the hardened skin of someone who has endured 50 years of cigarette smoke and brisk New Hampshire winds.