Yule Heibel's Post Studio © 2003-2013

Lebenskunst

From my breakfast perch, I can see a beautiful heritage house across the street. The lovely owner runs a home-based daycare.

This morning I watched parents in various makes of cars hurl themselves to the curb, gently and with apparent attention shepherd their children inside, …then run back nearly headless to the cars that would take them to their minutely scheduled lives:

To catch the train to work in Boston?
To take the highway to work in suburban office parks?
To go to a local job?

Where were they all off to, in such a great hurry?

Of course I remembered that I used to do this myself, before I (sort of kind of involuntarily) opted out of that rat race.

:::::::

Last month I had one of those very blue periods where what should be a broad horizon shrinks down to a tiny speck that feels like a dark, dark hole in the ground.

I’m happy to report that my brain managed to adjust itself and I don’t feel entirely rotten at present. But these things do come and go, as many of you know. One of my sisters calls it having “das arme Tier” (except she’ll say it not in high German, but in an exaggerated Rhineland dialect, “dat aahme Dier”): that poor dear.

You can have that damn poor dear, you see. And when you do, she’s going to make sure you feel that it’s like that. Exactly like that.

(Note for monolinguists: Tier means animal, here meant as creature. Dier is dialect: in the Rhineland, hard sounds tend to soften: t becomes d, ich becomes ish. In Berlin, on the other hand, pronunciation is harder: ich becomes the famous – infamous? – ick.)

I think it’s ironic that, just as “the poor dear” sticks with me (and to me, sometimes), I also have a special memory of another concept: the Lebenskünstler or life artist. He or she is a person who escapes constricting social norms and manages to live life on her own terms.

In a super-ramped up consumerist world, we may be forgiven if we conflate Lebenskunst (the art of living) with lifestyle and therefore as something we ought to be able to buy.

Money sure is useful (and a validation of oneself, if one is paid for what one does), but Lebenskunst is not just a lifestyle thing.

It’s mostly an attitude, a perspective, and a question of creativity.

In one sense, it’s about being able to count one’s blessings – although, again using my memories as an example, counting blessings or having an attitude of gratitude is something my tribe made fun of, often. Really often. Gratitude, schmatitude. Gratitude was for weaklings, and for optimistic fools who ended up being happy to tend their own gardens – instead of going out there and Doing Something Important. So we made fun. I’m not sure we really understood the corrosive effect on ourselves of our sarcasm. But I think we did it because we assumed that some things were basic social and human rights, and that it was ridiculous to be grateful for anything-and-everything. (People have argued about this for centuries.) I suspect, too, that sarcasm and gallows humor was also a shield – and perhaps a lance – against the poor dear. Today I’m more inclined to conclude that tending one’s own garden isn’t the worst of all possible worlds – provided you have your little plot, that is.

The Lebenskünstler is creative about gratitude, and uses it to build. She’s no hapless naif, or poor dear. He has a sense of style – and therefore a lifestyle – but isn’t a slave to consumption. She builds (creates) with what she’s given, and sometimes that’s the short end of the stick. No matter. It’s a matter of philosophy, and consolation. Most of all, Lebenskunst is about creativity and using what you’ve got.

Give her half a chance, and my poor dear tells me I’ve got nothing. I have to tell her to shut her uncreative trap. My poor dear makes fun of the Lebenskünstler swanning about, the one who’s busy making plans and creating (largely imaginary) worlds.

The poor dear doesn’t want anyone actually to create anything. At this point I have to show my poor dear the door, although she’s feisty and incredibly difficult to shove away. But push I must, because my poor dear does nothing to help me get anywhere, or even help me get started.

She is the worst rat race in the whole universe because she makes me compete against her, which is no contest at all because she’ll triumph.

The Lebenskünstler must learn to subtract. Ask any sculptor and she’ll tell you that subtraction is as valuable a creative technique as addition. It’s time once again to give the poor dear a Lebenskunst make-over.

The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

• The Transportation Planning Rule Every City Should Reform – Eric Jaffe – The Atlantic Cities

  More on the transportation bias (it’s pro-car and pro-vehicle speed):
  QUOTE
  The weight of this hidden hand doesn’t fall on San Francisco alone. “Intersection LOS [level of service] is one of the most widely-used traffic analysis tools in the U.S. and has a profound impact on how street space is allocated in U.S. cities,” writes Jason Henderson, geography professor at San Francisco State University, in the November issue of the Journal of Transport Geography. As Henderson argues, it’s about time cities addressed the problem, and San Francisco is doing just that. It’s currently in the process of drafting a new sustainable transportation metric that will replace LOS and promote livability. Still, the fight is far from over.

  “Every city I’ve ever come across has some use of [LOS],” says Henderson, who has conducted an extensive review of LOS and is writing a book on the politics of mobility in San Francisco. “LOS and the privilege of the car is the incumbent. The way the political process is set up is you have to disprove the incumbent.”
  UNQUOTE

  tags: transportation eric_jaffe atlantic_cities cars cities

• 3 Charts That Explain Why You Spend So Much on Transportation – Eric Jaffe – The Atlantic Cities

  Important article. The following is a quote from Victoria BC’s Todd Litman of the Transport Policy Institute. Amazing…
  QUOTE
  Because it [a vehicle-based planning method] evaluates transport system performance based primarily on travel speeds, conventional planning favor faster but more costly transport modes, such as automobile travel over slower but more affordable modes such as walking, cycling and public transit. This tends to create automobile dependent transport systems which increases total costs.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: transportation planning todd_litman atlantic_cities eric_jaffe cars automobile

• Share Everything: Why the Way We Consume Has Changed Forever – Emily Badger – The Atlantic Cities

  Interesting article (and the usual vitriol in the comments). An aside: I had to laugh at the washing machines comparison (below) because it reminded me of a conversation between undergrads at UBC in 1981: One young woman (student) described renting a room from an older lady (yes, matron) in a really upscale Vancouver neighborhood. There was no washing machine in the house, and the older woman told the young student that she had objected when her husband wanted to buy her one back in the 40s. She told him, “If you bring that into the house, you’ll be wanting me to do the laundry next.” She always had someone pick it up and deliver. Now that’s an idea I can get behind. All these appliances at home also mean more work at home. Now back to the article:
  QUOTE
  We’re used to the notion of sharing libraries, public parks, and train cars. But in many ways, American culture in particular drifted away from sharing as a value when we spread out from city centers and into the suburbs. Molly Turner, the director of public policy for short-term rental lodging website Airbnb, evokes the iconic image of Richard Nixon, in Moscow, introducing Nikita Khrushchev to the modern marvel of the state-of-the-art washing machine, available for private consumption in every American home. Beginning with the era of that washing machine, Turner argues, we forgot how to share.”

  tags: atlantic_cities sharing_economy economies emily_badger

• American Sociologist Eric Klinenberg on why The Suburbs Are Dead

  Walkability. (But then again, the car’s not dead, either, and there are also signs that Millennials do move to suburbs when they want a bit more space to raise families. However, even those suburbs – which often are small cities ringing a larger metro – benefit from walkability…)
  QUOTE
  There’s another important way that most suburbs remain suburban: They continue to lack walkable commercial districts, viable public spaces and public transit systems that allow people of all ages to be together without driving a car. Americans accepted this arrangement 60 years ago, when we valorized domestic life and stigmatized the street. Back then suburban kids played in backyards and culs-de-sac and their mothers spent most of their days around the house. These days, however, women work outside the home and children pursue their individual interests in specialized classes. Moreover, downtowns are desirable. People want to walk and shop and sip coffee on busy sidewalks, but suburbanites need automobiles to reach them. Walking requires driving, which means everyone winds up sitting in traffic or searching for parking.

  Suburbia sentences all those who move there to an unending series of car rides: to school, to work, to the train station. To the grocery store, mall, car wash. To soccer practice, tennis lessons, music classes. To the Olive Garden, movie theater, mall. To go to the city, to come home from the city—and preferably not during rush hour, though these days it’s rush hour most of the time.

  Suburbanites who have moved to the city are evangelical about their liberation from car culture. Parents are especially adamant about the virtues of city living, since they no longer spend afternoons and weekends chauffeuring children nor evenings praying that their teenagers don’t drink and drive. So are cash-strapped car owners who didn’t plan on spending $4 a gallon on gasoline and who know that in coming years $4 will seem cheap.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: walkability playboy cities suburbs eric_klinenberg urbanism

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

• RIP EveryBlock | Holovaty.com

  Sadly, EveryBlock was shut down. Its founder, Adrian Holovaty, comments.
  QUOTE
  More than six years ago, I wrote a blog post that got some attention about how newspaper (and, really, journalism) sites needed to change. EveryBlock was an attempt at that kind of change — in my eyes, a successful attempt. EveryBlock was among the more innovative and ambitious journalism projects at a time when journalism desperately needed innovation and ambition. RIP.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: everyblock adrian_holovaty citizen_journalism local_news localnews

• Urban Innovation And Density | Sustainable Cities Collective

  And now, a contrarian view of density – it’s not magic after all? (But what about walkability in those sprawling places in TX or AB?)
  QUOTE
  Cheaper condos may not be enough to save Toronto or San Francisco. More importantly, sprawling Texas metropolitan regions are becoming more productive. What’s all this fuss about the magic of density?

  Alberta and Texas are attracting a lot of migrants. Birthplace diversity is increasing, rapidly. Up goes productivity and innovation. The magic is migration, not density.

  We needn’t worry about cramming more people into Toronto or San Francisco. The spiraling cost of real estate is forcing relocation, across all incomes. People of modest means are fleeing Los Angeles and putting down roots in San Antonio. Yet the urban core is hollowing out in that Texas metro. San Antonio isn’t booming, converging in terms of productivity, because of density. Talent is pouring in from elsewhere. People develop, not places.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: walkability urbanism density demographics population migration sustainable_cities jim_russell

• Walkable Communities and Adolescent Weight – Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

  Walkability as a public health issue; lack of walkability as contributor to the obesity epidemic.
  QUOTE
  Key Findings:
  *The odds of a student being overweight or obese decreased if they lived in communities with higher walkability index scores.
  *The average prevalence of adolescent overweight and obesity was 15 percent and 12 percent, respectively.
  *The mean walkability index across communities was 6.38.
  *Key street features associated with reduced prevalence of obesity included increased presence of sidewalks and public transit.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: walkability urbanism communities public_health obesity

• Why Walkability isn’t Just About Proximity to Shops | This Big City

  More walkability.
  QUOTE
  [Julie] Campoli acknowledges that having destinations nearby is essential for getting more people walking, but she adds to this several other key qualities of walkable urban neighbourhoods:

  * Connections – a fine-grained network of sidewalks and footpaths with plenty of intersections;
  *Tissue – Great architecture with small human-sized buildings, not big boxes!
  * Density – of housing and population;
  * Streetscape – well designed streets with wide sidewalks and crossings, that are easy and safe to walk in;
  * Green networks – plenty of street trees and green spaces.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: walkability thisbigcity urbanism

• Book Club: Walking and Talking – Next City

  Walkability. All over the web lately.
  QUOTE
  As a follow-up to my review about Jeff Speck’s Walkable City, I invited Brendan Crain, communications manager for the Project for Public Spaces, to have an online chat about the new book. Crain has broad experience working to expand civic involvement in planning urban spaces and had his own review of Walkable City published today.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: next_city walkability brendan_crain urbanism

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

I dreamed about my superpower

Some pieces

Before going to bed last night, I posted a status update to Facebook that read, “Spent an hour or more reading about maternal haplogroup T2b, from the sublime (well, not really) to the ridiculous (yes, really).”

Then, I foolishly dug around a bit on a new online publishing platform — foolish, because it made me feel like I was missing something.

And this morning, glancing over my email while the coffee brewed, I noticed a link to a yet another new book that teaches you common household and “life” hacks, including something to do with threading needles.

Needles

With that word “needles,” bam!, a dream I’d had during the night came into focus, except it came back in that annoying way dreams will: partial, half-remembered, missing key pieces.

The Dream

I was somewhere, doing something (with my hands?). I was somewhere doing something with my hands and it involved trying to repair something.

I was somewhere doing something about stitching something that had torn.

I was somewhere — oh no, it can’t have been there, surely? — trying to put something right.

I was somewhere where I had been …disturbed, hurt.

I was somewhere, on the ground, the earth, the dirt, the field, the patch, the clearing, held down in the place where I was trying to fix something that I didn’t know how to fix, and I gave up hope.

I lost the needle. (I felt, in my dream, how I lost the needle I needed to repair the fabric, but I had no words. I was little.) Someone entered the frame, but because this is a dream half-remembered, I can’t say whether it’s one or two people, nor who it is. Someone — or something — prompts me to look for the needle in the grubby leaf-littered dirt I’m sitting on.

That’s when it happens — the part of the dream I remember most vividly: I find another needle. It’s not the one I lost — it’s a different size — but it’s a needle, a tool. Then I find another one, (again a different size) and another (yet another size). I have three now, all different sizes: my found treasures are turning into a tool kit.

Then I make an amazing find: a tool for threading needles! It’s super-elegant and unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. After that, nearby, a fourth needle, and a fifth. At some point in the dream I’m clutching a whole handful of needles, as well as this beautifully designed tool that looks like no other. They’re all available for me to use. It’s amazing.

I’m still trying to sort out what it means, beyond the obvious: finding not just a needle in “a haystack” (or dirt and leaf-litter covered ground), but many needles of varying size, plus a nearly magical new tool for threading them all.

Threads

In the dream I don’t have any thread, but it “felt” as though I could probably get some. I also don’t have any clear purpose in the dream: no reason for needing these needles except that I had been trying to fix something at the outset, and lost the tool for it. But I can’t remember what I was trying to fix, nor whether I should still try to fix it, or whether this bounty of needles (and that marvelous threading tool) meant that I could finally move on, like an apprentice who’s graduated from his apprentice piece and now sets out on his trade sojourn, looking for work.

Looking for work, looking for purpose, looking for a way to ply my trade: dream it six ways to Sunday and back, it remains hardened, difficult stuff.

But: I can thread any needle, any needle at all. The needles were always in me, they had fallen out of my pockets — out of my body — and into the dirt. I just have to find them again and pick them up. The threading tool, however? That was newly forged in me, it’s my super-power.

I can thread any needle, any needle at all.

Trying to write,…

…but. I’m trying, halfheartedly only since I’m feeling quite half-dead. But I just can’t seem to make it happen.

Not a happy place to be.

Maybe I can get started by defacing this blog.

The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

• A 70-Year-Old Documentary About Cities Shows We Haven’t Come Very Far – Arts & Lifestyle – The Atlantic Cities

  I don’t know… I think Goodyear’s assessment of this film is too generous. It gave me the creeps: both ‘the city’ (which was a polluted, congested hell-hole) and ‘the suburb’ or planned ‘idyllic town,’ which was pure pablum, and unpleasant in its ‘everything has a place and a place for everything’ approach. Wayyy too tidy…
  QUOTE
  What’s interesting is that the idealized suburb/cities presented in the film are all walkable and bikeable. Autos are part of the urban disaster that is to be left behind by progress. We see from the air the familiar cul-de-sacs of today’s America but there are no six-lane arterial roads, no massive shopping centers with enormous parking lots. Kids ride around on bicycles along paths that look very much like what you see in the Netherlands of today, and in a few American cities such as Boulder, Colorado, or Davis, California.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: atlantic_cities video urban_development urbanism documentary cities suburbia

• City Life Changes How Our Brains Deal With Distractions – Arts & Lifestyle – The Atlantic Cities

  Makes sense…
  QUOTE
  …a quick summary, for those readers on the verge of losing focus: the brains of people in remote places seem ready to focus on the task at hand, while the brains of their urban counterparts seem prepared to explore the ever-changing conditions of city life. Certainly explains why some country folk find the city overwhelming, and some city folk find the country a little dull.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: urbanism cities atlantic_cities neuroscience brain environmental_psychology

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

• Extremely Rare Color Photography of Early 1900s Paris « Curious Eggs Curious Eggs

  Simply beautiful…
  QUOTE
  All the images shown below were taken using Autochrome Lumière technology. It’s an early color photography process, patented in 1903 and invented by the famous French Auguste and Louis Lumière, populary known as Lumière Brothers. They were the earliest filmmakers in history.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: paris photography 1900s

• Government investment needed in new economies – latimes.com

  Good article, a variant on “you didn’t build that,” but with an explanation of why government investment seeds the way, and how private investment can’t do it.
  QUOTE
  At every stage, the innovation economy depends on sources of funding decoupled from concern for economic return. As economists have long recognized, such funding will not be delivered by competitive markets. Only an active state in pursuit of politically legitimate missions — national development, national security, conquering disease — can play the required role.
  Thus, from the Erie Canal to the Internet by way of the transcontinental railroads and the Interstate Highway System, the American state has played a strategic role in the deployment of the transformational technologies that have created a succession of “new economies.” In disregard of this history, forces have been at work for a generation to delegitimize the state as an economic actor — even as the next new economy can already be defined in broad strokes.
  (…)
  Government cannot play the role either of entrepreneur or venture capitalist in creating the low-carbon economy. But entrepreneurs and venture capitalists cannot build this new economy by themselves.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: climate_change innovation economy government_support latimes william_janeway investment

• For business, food waste a ripe opportunity for savings | SmartPlanet

  Great article.
  QUOTE
  “If you are not in this conversation in the next two or three years, you are going to be increasingly less relevant to the buying public. Because it’s a mega-movement, not a trend, that is moving up the food chain and the age chain. The younger you are and the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to understand it. All types of corporations are going to figure it out or be left in the dust.”
  UNQUOTE

  tags: recycling food_waste composting smartplanet

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

• In the Wake of Aaron Swartz’s Death, Let’s Fix Draconian Computer Crime Law | Electronic Frontier Foundation

  So many responses to Aaron Swartz’s untimely death by suicide (many posted to Twitter and/or Facebook), and here is the EFF’s piece, bookmarked to Diigo.
  QUOTE
  The CFAA’s vague language, broad reach, and harsh punishments combine to create a powerful weapon for overeager prosecutors to unleash on people they don’t like. Aaron was facing the possibility of decades in prison for accessing the MIT network and downloading academic papers as part of his activism work for open access to knowledge. No prosecutor should have tools to threaten to end someone’s freedom for such actions, but the CFAA helped to make that fate a realistic fear for Aaron.

  Aaron was a powerful force for change, and he would still be working toward that goal if he were here. His memory should challenge us to make the Internet, the law, and the world better. One place to start is the CFAA.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: aaron_swartz

• There’s More to Life Than Being Happy – Emily Esfahani Smith – The Atlantic

  A wonderful article about Viktor Frankl, the pursuit of happiness, and the importance of a meaningful life.
  QUOTE
  [Viktor Frankl:] “Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself — be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is.”

  Baumeister and his colleagues would agree that the pursuit of meaning is what makes human beings uniquely human. By putting aside our selfish interests to serve someone or something larger than ourselves — by devoting our lives to “giving” rather than “taking” — we are not only expressing our fundamental humanity, but are also acknowledging that that there is more to the good life than the pursuit of simple happiness.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: viktor_frankl happiness meaning atlantic_monthly psychology health

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

• How guns became gadgets—lightweight, easy to use, and more effective than ever – Quartz

  Such a good point…
  QUOTE
  The AR-15 shows how guns have become gadgets, thanks to technological change and an army of fanboys connected over the Internet. It’s a military weapon in the hands of civilians, so exquisitely designed that it might as well have been invented in Cupertino by Apple. It’s the iPhone 5 of guns, only instead of an app ecosystem, it has an ecosystem of parts and ammunition designed to make it as effective as possible.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: guns quartz gadgets socialcritique

• 12 Horrible Plans for New York That (Thankfully) Never Happened – Flavorwire

  It seems every major city (and some not-so-major ones) has a catalog of nightmare plans like this. Here’s one for NYC:
  QUOTE
  There have been some epically bad plans for New York City over the years, like drying up the rivers, building an underground city, and encasing Midtown in a bubble.
  UNQUOTE
  Read on…

  tags: nyc unbuilt urban_planning flavorwire

• The Paperback Quest for Joy by Laura Vanderkam, City Journal Autumn 2012

  Interesting survey and critique of the self-help category.
  QUOTE
  Still, just because there’s plenty to criticize doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty that’s worthwhile, too. As Gretchen Rubin points out, all branches of knowledge have their quacks: “When you have your astronomy, then you get your astrology—and we have our own astrologers in this neck of the woods.” Nonetheless, “the greatest minds throughout history have thought about things like self-knowledge and self-control and how to live a good life. I don’t know why it’s now branded as snake-oil stuff.” Even the most over-the-top books offer a real benefit: they encourage the virtue of self-examination. To read self-help is to take stock of one’s self and to ask what kind of life one wants to lead.

  These are profound issues, and what the genre’s critics sometimes miss, too, is that self-help readers are well equipped to explore them. That’s because the people who buy these books are, like all book buyers, “pretty comfortable,” says John Duff of Penguin. “It’s going to be that middle-class person, reasonably well-educated” and in “very rarefied” company, as “our market for all books is really very limited. Most people stop reading when they leave school.” Those who don’t stop probably have their acts together. Call it the paradox of self-help. “The type of person who values self-control and self-improvement is the type of person who would seek more of it in a self-help book,” Whelan says. “So it’s not the unemployed crazy lady sitting on the couch eating potato chips who reads self-help. It’s the educated, affluent, probably fairly successful person who wants to better themselves.”
  UNQUOTE

  tags: self_esteem self_help city_journal laura_vanderkam

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.