EL PASO

El Paso and Jaurez alternately remind me of an L.A. ghetto, the wild west, an oven or the moon. Here is a picture from the window of my hotel room. In the background you can see the lights above sun bowl stadium and a smokestack from a copper smelting plant across the Rio Grande in Juarez.

By popular demand, a return to what this blog is supposed to be about: Too many pictures of babies and flowers. As you were.

OF MICE AND MEN

This is obviously written by Jeremiah:

Today I'm trying to make sense of this tangled mess (photo above); and realizing that this is not at all what I imagined I'd be doing when as a freshman in architecture school I was given my first ten-times-photocopied version of Colin Rowe's essay 'Literal and Phenomenal transparency'. I've come a long way from a professor's adage that my work "sort of potentially begins to create a seminal juxtaposition of forms" to an ironworker foreman leaving a construction trailer with the omen that "If those bolts don't line up with their holes, I'ma come back and crack somebody's *** head." The realization that I had previously planned to do/become something different actually makes me happy I didn't follow up with some of those plans. Here is a partial list of plans I previously held that make me glad I was sidetracked by better things:

*Work for and then become a world famous architect: I've seen these people; They have hollow eyes and pointy black shoes.

*Ride my bicycle to California: I was twelve

*Animation and computer graphics: this was an actual two year detour

*Become a professor: Again - the pointy shoes

*Art school: thank you interviewer at Pratt for saying my portfolio "didn't show the type of promise we look for in a candidate"

*Marry a girl from Chiapas: This would inevitably have led to my joining the communist party to show my solidarity with indigeonous farmers. Glad I didn't - even though I would look good dressed in all white with a red scarf.

*I applied to grad school at Harvard: Denied. With reinforced inferiority complex I can now fit in with other cornell alumni. I still have an arglye sweater at the back of my closet though that I now only bring out around Christmastime.

*When I was 14 Some friends and I jumped on a slow moving train(Luca and James: Please never do this) We were going to stay on and see where it took us, but decided to hop off and go home: We were hungry

*Become a chef: the restaurant where I used to work went out of business 15 years ago and I still talk about it incessently.

*Photographer for the national geographic magazine (only us explorers can belong): I would probably be taking pictures of high school sporting events by now if went this route.

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I'm sure there are others I can't think of right now. What had you planned to do that you're now glad you didn't?

This kind of reminds me of the line from a Robert Burns poem that says:

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men/ Gang aft agley

(The best-laid plans of mice and men/often go awry)

Which you'll recognize as the inspiration for the Stienbeck book "Of Mice and Men" which you were supposed to read in tenth grade but didn't. Or the Hamlet speech you had to memorize but didn't understand:

thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action

INDEPENDENCE HALL

We went to Philadelphia for the weekend in order to watch Rebecca and Papap complete in very respectable time the Broad Street run. Gradulations. Luca apparently also ran in the race, won, but was "so fast nobody saw [him]." We stayed at a hotal which is "a room with a little refrigerator, but not your regular home." Rebecca was living large in the presedential suite at the Sheraton. After a very impressive parallel parking job, we made it there to visit. It had a nice view of city hall, and Brian filled us in on the (recently broken) curse of 'Billy' Penn. As part of our trip we went to the old Pennsylvania Statehouse (Independence Hall). It was really quite inspiring to imagine the group of visionaries that assembled, often with vows of secrecy, to draft the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. The Declaration was heavily influenced by the writing of Locke, Hume and Rousseau and their theory of social contract. Their basic idea is that people are born free with an innate right of life and liberty. This was treasonous at the time because it was common belief that rights were given to royalty who then graciously allowed some to trickle down to their subjects. (George Mason through years of friendly debate encouraged Jefferson to append the right to happiness. Jefferson felt that an important distinction was that we were only entitled to pursue happiness, so that is the way he phrased it.) The social contract is that we submit some of our natural rights to the general will in order to preserve the rights of the general body of people. This focus on "the people" as the source and beneficiary of political power in good government comes from Rouseau and shows up again in the preamble to the Constitiution. They may have been thinking of the following quote when they decided to have their new Declaration read from the steps of the Pennsylvania Statehouse on July 8,1776:

This does not mean that the commands of the rulers cannot pass for general wills, so long as the Sovereign (i.e. the people), being free to oppose them, offers no opposition. In such a case, universal silence is taken to imply the consent of the people. - J.J. Rousseau

The "Pennsylvania Statehouse" now called Independence Hall was designed and built by Edmund Woolley (Judging by the last name, probably a distant relative). Here is part of what was read from the steps. Imagine the boldness of reading this in a public square:

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it’s foundation on such principles & organising it’s powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness.

This was part of an original draft written before it was watered down and secularized. For example: "sacred & undeniable" became "self-evident". The "& independent" was dropped from "All men are created equal & independent". It seems like a minor change, but being born independent of others and joining society by choice is an important ascpect of the social contract. They made these and hundreds of other changes in compromise to please the signors (or to make the cadence of the writing witty enough for B.Franklin). For example, in order to get representatives from South Carolina and Georgia to sign, they also had to take out some very eloquent sections that opposed slavery.

Happy Easter!

Jer took this picture early Easter morning from our front window. That is our lilac bush with its new leaves. We love seeing each species in our garden come out again for a new spring. I was thinking how wonderful it is that each year, despite what may be happening in our lives or in the world, they come up just the same and just as lovely. (Except our tulips, which have no blossoms this year, only leaves.)

Here is James at the MD Science Center. He loves the water table. This kid loves water. Once I turned on the shower and left the door open for a second while I went to check something and I came back and he was sitting in there fully clothed splashing around.

Here Luca is with his buddy Mark. They are uncovering dinosaur "fossils". They had such a blast together. How great it is to have friends!!!

James is one year old! I think he liked the icing!

Darwin Martin

I had the chance to see the Martin house in Buffalo. Here are two images: one of the house reflected in the soon-to-open glass visitor center (by toshiko mori) and another of the breezeway that connects the main house to the greenhouse and conservatory. Darwin Martin began working at age 13 as a "soap slinger" and by his mid thirties was a millionare executive at the Larkin soap company. (to read about another Larkin soap slinger turned executive turned utopian socialist see http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,763274,00.html to read about Roycroft founder Elbert Hubbard - all around interesting character) Frank Wright designed this house for Martin which was completed in 1907. Martin lost his fortune, and with it this house, during the great depression. The house fell into disrepair and everything but the main building was razed. Within the last couple years, the house has been restored/rebuilt. Wright is the kind of architect you really want to dislike: On the one hand he claims that: "A man who has individuality has a right to its expression in his own environment." On the other hand, he was a short man designing a house for tall people and using six foot high doors. Apparently, he had a unique interpretation of the phrase 'his own' in the preceding quote. Because the house was rather stunning, it was kind of disappointing to find that someone I secretly hoped was just an egomaniacal hypocrite actually turned out to have also been a genius.

dinosaurs alive

Here, Luca and friends prepare for a 3d movie about dinosaurs at the science center. Visiting the science center with these kids reminded me of this old poem:

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts, the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the learned astronomer where he lectured
with much applause in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

James did in fact become 'sick and tired' during the movie and Joanie had to 'rise' to take him out. (I'm pretty sure she was not off 'wandering by herself' though and she certainly didn't enjoy 'perfect silence')