The Vine

No book has ever captured the very essence of childhood—adventure, anxiety, fear, hope, imagination—quite like Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are.

In October, it’s coming to life on the big screen.

The screenplay is co-written, fittingly, by Dave Eggers, an irrepressible child himself (whose unforgettable talk from The Vine 2007 can be viewed here).

It calls to mind a fantastic article that Eggers wrote for The New Yorker, in which he reflects on the reckless, movie-inspired (and often ill-conceived) adventures of his own childhood. With kitchen knives strapped to calves and crudely formed throwing stars in hand, twelve-year-old boys created imaginary worlds in the ravines near Lake Michigan.

“[A]nd with each step farther away from our regular lives and into the worlds we’d seen on film, we felt more like ourselves. We didn’t think of those movies as escapist entertainments. The worlds they depicted didn’t seem foreign or unattainable. Setting traps and running with a knife between your teeth, diving into a pit and emerging from a river, camouflaged in mud—all of it seemed far more natural, more in synch with the adrenaline that was coursing through our adolescent bodies, than anything else in our pedestrian existence. We’d cobble together an identity—a shoulder pad from “The Road Warrior,” Rambo’s sorry old Army jacket—and go looking for moments of violence. It didn’t matter that our wars were poorly planned and lacked any exit strategy. It didn’t matter that the only real enemy, in the end, was us. We would see these movies and think, That’s my life. That’s the life I’m meant to lead.

In adulthood, we’re supposed to extinguish such adolescent antics, trading them instead for the safety and stability of careers, mortgages, 401(k)s, mowing lawns and raising kids.

But these days, the adult world doesn’t seem all that safe and stable. Give me a little escapism.

I watch the movie trailer and I can’t help thinking…That’s the life I’m meant to lead.

While I’m not a basher of social media, I love this commentary from David Murray about Twitter use taken to absurd lengths.

Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/et al. are certainly having a paradoxical effect on human interaction. We’ve never been more connected, and yet we’ve never been more disconnected. A man appears to be in medical distress, and the logical response is to tweet about it?!? It’s a Web 2.0 version of Kitty Genovese.

Social media is, of course, neither inherently good nor evil. Like any tool, it can (and will) be used in the service of all that’s beautiful and all that’s despicable about human nature.

And in the spectrum of media consumption, I do believe it’s a step in the right direction. If nothing else, it has created what Clay Shirky calls an architecture of participation. Wikipedia is a far better use of social surplus than sitting on the couch watching Desperate Housewives.

But my biggest criticism of social media is that it causes people to confuse quantity of connections with quality, and to substitute digital experiences for human ones.

In David’s post he quotes Kurt Vonnegut, who once said, “We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something.”

And David himself sums it up this way: ”Spend one day surfing the Internet and spend another roaming your neighborhood. See how many good dinner table stories you have after each. There won’t be a contest.”

Amen.

Following up on this previous post, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve arranged a private event at the Data + Art exhibit at the Pasadena Museum of California Art.

On Thursday, April 9, from 4:30–6:00pm, Dan Goods will lead a discussion and Q&A session about the ideas behind this extraordinary project.

You’re invited to attend, and you’re encouraged to bring colleagues as well.

If you ever feel overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of Too Much Information (and who doesn’t?), you’ll find this to be a profound and eye-opening experience. The artists describe it as a “curiosity shop” encompassing weird science, animation, images and music.

Three things to note:

1. There will be a $7 fee, which is payable at the door.
2. Here’s where you’ll find info about directions and parking.
3. Advance sign-ups are not required, but if you’re going, drop me an email indicating who and how many. It’s helpful to know.

We hope to see you there.

For all of us who are weary of the doom and gloom, Walker Smith points out a website created to highlight what’s right in the world.

Reasons for Optimism is an aggregator of stories about individuals and organizations that are making a difference.

They describe it this way: “It’s easy to forget that in today’s not-so-optimistic world, real progress continues, beauty appears, brave new worlds are explored, and creativity flows. We keep seeking—and occasionally finding—our best selves. There are, in fact, reasons for optimism everywhere we look.”

Two examples from this week’s stories:

>>> In Learning From Tijuana, the creativity and individuality of Mexico’s shantytowns inspires a redevelopment plan in Hudson, New York. (If you attended the inaugural Vine conference in Santa Barbara, you’ll recall this very concept from Stewart Brand’s talk on squatter cities.)

>>> I Want You To Want Me is an interactive display that combs the world of online dating sites, scans each individual profile (”modern messages in a bottle”) and creates a composite of human yearning—who we are and what we’re searching for.

The site is co-edited by the architectural design firm Cooper Carry. Good on ya, we say.

In this week’s New York Times Magazine, Peggy Orenstein wonders…Can you forge your future self when you never leave the present?

It’s a thoughtful and intriguing perspective on social media and the role it plays—helping or hindering?—in the coming of age process.

Here’s a snippet:

Six of my nieces will head off to college over the next several years. Some have been Facebooking since middle school. Even as they leave home, then, they will hang onto that “home” button. That’s hard for me to imagine. As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?

The cultural icons of my girlhood were Mary Richards of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and Ann Marie of “That Girl,” both redoubtably trying to make it on their own. Following their lead, I swaggered off to college (where I knew no one) without looking back; then to New York City (where I knew no one) and San Francisco (ditto), refining my adult self with each jump. Certainly, I kept in touch with a few true old friends, but no one else — thank goodness! — witnessed the many and spectacular metaphoric pratfalls I took on the way to figuring out what and whom I wanted to be.

Even now, time bends when I open Facebook: it’s as if I’m simultaneously a journalist/wife/mother in Berkeley and the goofy girl I left behind in Minneapolis. Could I have become the former if I had remained perpetually tethered to the latter?

The full article is here.

If the video from the previous post is correct…if we’re preparing children today for jobs that don’t yet exist…maybe what’s needed is more collaborative, free-form, problem-solving skills like those honed at the Tinkering School in Montara, California.

Founded by Gever Tulley, a senior computer scientist at Adobe, the Tinkering School is a one-week camp that offers an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids (ages 7 to 17) learn how to build things. This is not arts and crafts, or even woodshop. Parents are required to sign a waiver acknowledging that their child can be injured or killed (!) at this camp. Hands-on activities involve power tools, motorcycles, zip lines, fire, spears, and boats of the kids’ own creation.

Tulley describes it as “a place where kids can pick up sticks and hammers and other dangerous objects and be trusted…a place where children are given the freedom to build, and destroy, and fail in a way that is very different from how they are now taught at school or home.”

It is, in short, the kind of experience he wishes he’d had as a child.

Here’s a fantastic illustrated comic depicting the camp’s activities and principles.

Here’s an entertaining interview with Gever Tulley on NPR.

There are many lessons that we—as business leaders struggling to regain footing in a time of great uncertainty—can learn from the Tinkering School philosophy. One is this: “Grand schemes, wild ideas, crazy notions, and intuitive leaps of imagination are encouraged and fertilized.”

But my favorite takeaway is the one dealing with setbacks. When faced with projects gone awry, the kids re-channel their efforts in a surprising way: they decorate them.

“Decoration,” Tulley says, “is a form of conceptual incubation.”

He elaborates: “By keeping their hands on the project, they refine their intuitive understanding of what they are building, and the materials they are building with. And from these interludes come intuitive leaps, leading to new approaches to the problem that had frustrated them just twenty minutes earlier.”

Intuitive leaps, leading to new approaches to the problem.

Who wouldn’t welcome some of those right about now?

Here’s a five-minute video that will get your head spinning a bit.

And it further underscores the significance of the Data + Art project. Information is ubiquitous. Interpretation is scarce.

Hat tip to Howard and Link, both of whom recently pointed it out.

If you’re in the Los Angeles area, or will be visiting between now and April 12, here’s an enriching experience you’ll want to check out.

Dan Goods and David Delgado—designers and educators at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Vine alumni, I might add—have curated a fascinating exhibit at the Pasadena Museum of California Art titled Data + Art: Science and Art in the Age of Information.

The exhibit, which is on display through April 12, explores the hidden stories revealed in data through emerging forms of data expression. The artists describe it this way: “This exhibition challenges viewer’s assumptions by exploring the beauty inherent in data and asks them to see complexity in a new light. These interpretations of data will empower the average person to see the invisible, hear the inaudible and understand the impossibly complex.” (Does that mean they’ve unraveled the makeup of CDOs?)

See reviews in the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe.

If you’re interested in viewing the exhibit, here’s info about directions, parking and museum hours.

If you’d like to take it a step further and attend a discussion/Q&A led by the artists, send me an email. With enough responses, we may be able to arrange a private event.

Hope you’re able to experience it.

Two of my great passions are community development and baseball. Occasionally they come together, as with Michael D’Antonio’s soon to be published book, Forever Blue, which is excerpted here in Sports Illustrated.

For over 50 years, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley has been one of the most reviled figures in all of sport for moving his team from Brooklyn—where it was the very soul of the working-class borough—to Los Angeles. Recently, however, another side of the story has come to light: O’Malley never wanted to leave.

In what might have been a predecessor to more recent ballpark-inspired revitalization (SoMa in San Francisco, LoDo in Denver, SoDo in Seattle, to name a few), O’Malley envisioned a 500-acre redevelopment in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene district, which would have included a mass-transit hub, housing, parking garages, and an iconic stadium.

As D’Antonio writes: “If Brooklyn had held on to its autonomy instead of becoming part of New York City in 1898, O’Malley’s [political] connections would have guaranteed him his dream ballpark. Instead, his friendships brought him only to the door of Robert Moses, the most powerful unelected official ever to serve in a U.S. city.”

Moses had his own vision for a new municipal ballpark, and it was in Queens, not Brooklyn. O’Malley could not have known it, but his bid was doomed before it ever got off the ground. After years of stalled, fruitless negotiation in New York, he was courted aggressively by the city of Los Angeles, offering land and a new stadium in Chavez Ravine. The rest, as they say, is history.

It’s a fascinating story—and one that, until now, only a handful of people ever knew.