Holly's Apartment Therapy

Holly 'golightly' aka lucitebox has entered the Apartment Therapy "Fall Colors 2008" contest. I hope she gets to the voting phase. I'd buy that for a dollar!

Kistner Supply Cashmere Collection

Elizabeth launched her new product lines "Kistner Supply Cashmere Collection" and "blog press and I hope we'll get some print press as well. She has really done an incredible job.

whole sentences!

Trixie is starting to speak in entire sentences. A couple of days ago she said "Come back bunny."

Mostly though her favorites are 'baby', 'monkey', and 'zoo'.

Circle calendar and mental maps

I am often frustrated by the fast approach of deadlines and birthdays and holidays. I plan excursions that I want to take "within the next few months" or I make loose plans to see friends "soon." What inevitably happens is that I am rushed to finish projects or buy gifts, and those excursions or dinner plans never happen. I think the reason is that I tend to compress my experience of time in the present and immediate future, while expanding time that is more than a few weeks away. One might say to me, "Steve, get a freakin' calendar!" But, I have never been able to look at a square calendar of one month and perceive time in a uniform manner. I began to think about the year as having a circular shape and what a calendar in that form might look like. For ideas I began searching google and had very little luck. Finally I came across the Chaise DVD Magazine and a circle calendar project by the artist David Tinapple. What follows is the email exchange I had with him.

David,

I saw the short video of your circular calendar on chaise magazine 's
site. I have been thinking about creating one for a long time and
haven't spent any time designing it. I thought it would be useful for
me to have a different perspective on the length of the year and the
actual tine I have from month to month. My perception is always skewed
toward different parts of the year being longer than others.

In short, I would love the template page you used to create the
calendar, or some basic instructions about what kind of an arc to
create with the circles.

Hi Steve,

Here is the calendar PDF I made. Seems like a long time ago now. I was
interested in the different "mental maps" of time people make. I
always saw the year as a circle, with summer at the top, winter down
below, and I move counter clockwise around. I asked people, and it
seems most think of the movement as clockwise... So I made a circular
representation that could go either way, and one that used a single
sheet of paper copied multiple times. There are registration points on
the sheet where you match up and pin to a wall.

I did this one by hand in Illustrator, but recently I have been
working on a different one, still circular, but I'm using the
"Processing.org" programming language to generate PDF's.

Cheers,

-David

David,
Interesting. Mine goes counter clockwise with Spring on top and March
and April in the apex position. I am left handed. But as I said, it
seems more like an ellipse than a circle where Spring and Fall are
compressed. Christmas occupies the "West" and Mid July, the "East." As
I go through the cycle, time is magnified and thus extended for the
week that I 'occupy' that space. The speed of the motion through the year is not
consistent. The year is bisected by a horizontal plane and floats on a 30
degree angle with Spring again occupying the high end of the angle. As
I think about it, the cycle has zero relationship to the linear
progression I envision about my lifespan. It doesn't unroll or
move in any direction. It is a stationary and I move around it, on
it, through it.

Thanks for the idea. I just had a great time thinking about that.

-Steve

Steve,
Your mental map is really interesting. I am right handed, and move
counter clockwise, but I too experience it as my movement around a
stationary "track" of the year. North South East West are for me
Summer, Winter, Spring Fall respectively. And now that I think of it
there is some time compression in the spring fall.

I have seen a few people use my circle.pdf for almost a year, and the
results are visually amazing. They report too that it is refreshing to
finally see a whole year unfold like that... makes some patterns
apparent and makes the progression of time visible in some interesting
way.

I sometimes think of it like analog -vs- digital watch faces. They are
two very different forms of representation, analogical -vs- digital.
Digital needs to be read, deciphered, decoded. The marks on a digital
watch have no intrinsic meaning... its a code. And also a digital
watch shows only what time it is now. An analog watch face moves
"analogous" to the time being measured. An analog clock might take
some learning, but the time is not encoded, its a trace (like vinyl
-vs- CD). Looking at an analog watch I find that what I see is not
what time it is "now", and rarely is that what I care about. More what
I am looking for is the angle between now and when I need to be
somewhere. Somehow I know how big an angle I need to get from place A
to B.

Nice to think about this again. Makes me want to keep going with it.

Thanks for your description of your mental map.

-David

Fine art of aging

Heard a Nick Lowe interview last night on the radio show _To the best of our Knowledge_ from Wisconsin Public Radio. The show was called: "the fine art of aging"

http://www.wpr.org/book/070930a.html

Fwd: Summercamp! in Chicago

Hope you'll all consider going, Sarah Price also co-directed _American
Movie_ a sundance winner 1999.

Steve

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Summercamp! in Chicago
Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2007 19:55:24 -0400
From: sarah price <ssprice@gmail.com>
To: info@summercampmovie.com

Hello friends--

Summercamp! opens at the Siskel Film Center Aug. 25-28. I'll be there
on the 25th for a Q&A, along with some of the kids in the film, with a
reception to follow sponsored by IFP Midwest. This is open to the
public (IFP members receive a discount ticket price on the 25th), and
should be a lot of fun. Rumor has it there will be camp snacks and
crafts (and bar) at the reception...

I look forward to seeing everyone and catching up, and please pass the
info on to your Chicago friends!
Thank you!
-Sarah

SUMMERCAMP!
Directed by Bradley Beesley & Sarah Price
Featuring music by the Flaming Lips and Noisola.

August 25-29, 2007
Gene Siskel Film Center
164 North State Street
Chicago, IL 60601
312-846-2600
http://www.siskelfilmcenter.org/
Tickets $9 (adults) $7(students)
Sat @ 3:30pm, Sun @ 3:15pm, Mon-Wed @ 6pm

Co-director Sarah Price in person Sat. Aug 25th.

www.argotpictures.com <http://www.argotpictures.com>
www.summercampmovie.com <http://www.summercampmovie.com>
www.myspace.com/summer_camp_movie <http://www.myspace.com/summer_camp_movie>

REVIEWS:

"the saddest, sweetest, most magical and most deeply affecting movie of
the season." SALON.COM <http://SALON.COM>

"Summercamp is a riot of talent shows and campfires, canoeing, and
holistic clowning." THE NEW YORK TIMES

"With tenderness and joy, Bradley Beesley and Sarah Price capture the
precious moments of preteen freedom—not from parents and school, but
from self-awareness and doubt." TIME OUT NEW YORK

"Pure and heartbreaking, if you don't relate to this film you were
never a kid." CHICAGO TRIBUNE

"A sweeter, more unassuming movie isn't likely to come our way anytime
soon." NEW YORK POST

"utterly charming.........Beesley and Price's young subjects are smart
and unusually articulate, and they talk about their lives with a
perspective one doesn't expect from children." TV GUIDE ONLINE

"Summercamp, a marvelously honest new film." NEW YORK SUN

"In its shuddering truth, Summercamp! dares to suggest that the grand
disaster of youth as we knew it was actually... fun." THE REELER

"A feel-good hit for the summer" THE ONION

--
Steve Brantley
University of Illinois at Chicago
Daley Library
M/C 234
Box 8198
Chicago, IL 60680
312-996-4032
jbrant1@uic.edu

--
Steve Brantley

Sarah Price's new movie _Summer Camp_ is out!

Sarah Price of _American Movie_ (1999) fame (and several other projects) has a new documentary out called Summer Camp.
summercampmovie.com
myspace.com/summer_camp_movie
trailer
It is premiering at July 18th at the IFC Center in New York but opens across the country over the next couple of months.

Mother Stork's Baby Book gets more press!

This time babble.com posted "Five Best Baby Books" on their blog and Mother Stork's Baby Book got an honorable mention.

Dan Jones and The Squids

This guy has an infectious and unassuming glee to his music that immediately wins you over, but which is also clearly the tears of a clown. Jones lyrics hint of a sadness darker than a moonless ocean midnight, but remain iced with his chortling, and one might say rapier, wit. [Dan Jones and] "The Squids currently play shows in support of Get Sounds Now , released on Daily Records in late 2005. Dan has been adding to his omnibus of americana/punk tales since 2000, when he self-released his acclaimed, off-the-cuff For Your Radio. ("Any given verse of his songs packs more wit than a roomful of singer-songwriters could muster in a month of open mikes," said The Willamette Week then)."
visit the site: Dan Jones Music
hear some songs: the squids at MySpace

Saturday Night Live transcripts

Last week Alec Baldwin hosted SNL and did the Tony Bennett show. It was great, really blue ribbon stuff, fa-a-a-antastic. I found a transcript site.

Liquid Armor

a slashdot post

"Armor Holdings Inc. plans to start selling their 'liquid armor' next year. The new armor, originally envisioned to be spread on like peanut butter, is instead sprayed onto Kevlar in ultrathin coats. From the article: 'it's a mix of polyethylene glycol, a polymer found in laxatives and other consumer products, and nanobits of silica, or purified sand. Together they produce a "sheer-thickening liquid" that stiffens instantly into a shield when hit hard by an object. It reverts to its liquid state just as fast when the energy from the projectile dissipates.'"

wow, now that's freaky cool.

Bollywood Clip: Solla Solla Enna Perumai

Melinda Barnes turned me on to this totally fun Bollywood clip. rock on!

calexico radio from pandora

Wow, this is a really cool environment. has its own blog site or will use typepad, so I've posted this manually.

here is a tinyurl to my first explorations of it.

http://tinyurl.com/syhf8

Vermont Launches Cow Power

Vermont residents can now opt to receive percentages of their electrical power from dairy farms that produce electricity from methane gas produced by cow manure. How far we have come from lighting farts around the campfire.

Tycho sings!

As cute as you can get

This is a link to a short video of Tycho (my nephew) singing a lullaby to his little sister Lyra.

Beatrix Lily Brantley

I have been away for two months because Elizabeth went into labor 2 and a half weeks early and we had our baby May 10! We will call her trixie and she is great. I've posted a huge number of pictures on my flickr account, http://www.flickr.com/photos/brantles/. In addition, we bought a house, moved into it, and have been trying to get used to a newborn while unpacking our lives. The former owner left me a mower (thanks Wayne) but it needs repair. (thanks Wayne). Anyone interested in making an outlandinsh gift purchase can find our registry on babies 'R' us, Target and thethingsIwant.com.

two levels of remove

Via Sarah Houghton (the librarian in black), Via Bill Drew (the baby boomer librarian): "Bill Drew (Baby Boomer Librarian) has created a simple Google search box for the FindInALibrary books. Nice work!"

I've reproduced the code here:

Here is a better form for the Google libraries search I am working on:

Search WWW Search in Libraries

Tags:

• Google
• Libraries

Lyra at 1 stone

1 stone girl
Originally uploaded by you're schmoopie!.

My niece Lyra Tuulikki Severine Wagner. She drools.

short hiatus

I haven't posted in a week because my wife and I arew negotiating for a house. Cross your fingers for us!
brantles