Costume Delays on the Western Line

Just a quick note to say: I haven't forgotten the blog. I've just been off on a costume binge.

Years ago, when I was sixteen or seventeen and just beginning college, my desire in life was to be a costume designer. I loved costume, and still do. However, when I took classes in the subject there were two things that deterred me:

1. The emphasis seemed to be on sewing, to the detriment of anything else (mask-making, fabric painting, etc.). The people in costume seemed to be people obsessed with extremely perfect and detailed reproductions of ancient seam techniques. I'm much more of a make-something-that-looks-good type, using whatever materials come to hand.

2. In order to do costume design as a college course of study, you had to major in theater. This meant acting. If there is anything I hate more than performing in front of people, I can't imagine what it could be, so I dropped the idea. Later, I went on to design school and learned clothes patternmaking and design (thus my sojourn in the garment industry... and I wanted to get away from sewing??).

Now, of course, with the advent of people like Julie Taymor (director and costume designer of the Broadway production of The Lion King), this has all changed. Ms. Taymor has a background in mask and puppet design and studied in Japan, where puppetry and the use of masks are an integral part of traditional theater. So costume isn't just sewing anymore, and I look back on my easily-intimidated younger self and wish I had pushed a little harder for my own vision. Perhaps the acting part could have been easier; perhaps I could have got by with working backstage most of the time.


To be honest, I was too easily swayed by the kind of people I found in the different groups working in the theater department. I liked the work the stage techs did: hands-on building, painting, and hanging things. I didn't particularly like the girly-ness of the costume people, either the older, harder ones or the younger, more obsessive ones; and I was too inexperienced and shy to know that this was only a sampling of people, that this might be the product of a small town's college theater department. Lacking in social skills, I didn't know how to make myself liked by the tough stage hands or the hardened costume designers. I think I probably came across as too quiet, too young and blonde, and possibly helpless in my naivete. In any case, I gave up and went into a slightly less flamboyant career - the garment industry, which was dull and repetitive and very hard to get a leg up in. Which only proves that the choices we make out of anxiety aren't always the best ones: I have regretted the loss of the costume design, but never regretted leaving the garment industry.

In any case, to bring a long-winded and roundabout monologue to the actual point: I have had a chance to be the costume designer for the local elementary school's production of The Lion King. So that's where I've been: following my early dream on a small scale, and immersing myself totally in the Making of Wonderful Illusions. Julie Taymor's book on the production, its planning and implementation, is so luscious, so incredibly beautiful, that I've gotten carried away. I've hardly slept in the last few weeks, and I've been so insanely focused that things like grocery shopping, laundry, writing, and loved ones have kind of gone by the wayside. It's been interesting, because it's making me re-examine some of the choices I've made about my life. If I love the making of things so much, why aren't I doing more of it?

It's been fascinating figuring out how to do a high-quality production for under a hundred dollars. I've built lioness masks from plaster, papier mache, and plastic gallon milk jugs, and hyena masks from milk jugs, old burlap sacks, and newspaper. I found a roll of jute twine somewhere and made all the lion's manes out of that. And so on. It's amazing what you can do with found stuff and a little ingenuity (and hot glue). I'm thinking of doing a couple of Youtube demos on some of the stuff I've discovered.

So my apologies for ignoring the blog. I'll be posting more in the next week or so. And I'll post pictures soon, I promise.

News: My Voice on the Radio

Just FYI, I'm going to be on Make's new Make:Talk radio show today at 12:20. You can tune in later via the blog if you want to hear me talk about whatever they think of to ask me. Hopefully I'll make sense; I'm much better in writing than in realtime, but it could get interesting.

Wish me luck.

News: Museums as Social Network

I just got an email this morning about a new social networking place called Creative Spaces, which looks like it's going be a really splendid and inspiring. Nine British museums have banded together to create a sort of Facebook/Flickr type of place where you create an account and then build collections of your own from the collections of some of the most famous museums in Britain. You can add comments, network with other people and start groups - and upload your own pictures and videos to your notebooks.

So, in a sense, you can become a virtual curator.

The project is part of the UK's National Museums Online Learning Project:

"The project aims to get partner museum websites better used, engage new audiences and transform the way they think about and use existing digital collections. We are developing a range of innovative and exciting online learning resources across the nine websites for pupils, teachers, and lifelong learners. These resources will provide greater access and usage of the museum partners' online collections, and utilise new technologies to encourage and support user participation."

The NY MOMA has something similar, but it's small and not very well worked out, and you can't add your own stuff. Plus it's just one museum. This one is much more well-thought-out and proves the British are, once and for all, no longer the hidebound Empiricist nation that they once were.

The project is still in serious beta, and it's apparent that a great deal of things are not quite there yet. The Search feature, for example, is not all it should be, and a great deal of the online collections are not quite as accessible as I would like. And I don't see a system for simply browsing as of yet. I do dearly wish the Science Museum were part of the list.

Still, it pleases me. It pleases me that I could have an online place to collect my favorite images, where I can see other people's choices; and I can download from the Mutter Museum, say, and then mingle them with the many things I find here, to share them with other like-minded people. Keep an eye on it, and wait: at some point, it will be less fledgling, and we can all get together and share.

Mr. Bowditch: Brilliance and Populism

I was looking through something the other day and I came across a reference to someone named Bowditch. Immediately, my mind was flooded with images from the life of Nathaniel Bowditch, a mathematical and navigational savant in the late 1700's and early 1800's, whom I read about at age 12 or so in a wonderful biographical novel for middle-graders called Carry On, Mr. Bowditch.

Bowditch was the son of a cooper in Salem, Massachusetts who left school at the age of ten to work for his father. At twelve he was indentured for nine years as a bookkeeping apprentice to a ship chandler. They were kind to him there and he was given access to the library; being immersed all day in numbers, and having a sharp brain, he became interested in some of the more complex ideas surrounding math, spending his days learning all about what it takes to outfit a ship and his nights studying.

"In 1787, aged fourteen, Bowditch began to study algebra and two years later he taught himself calculus. He also taught himself Latin in 1790 and French in 1792 so he was able to read mathematical works such as Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. At seventeen, he wrote a letter to a Harvard University professor pointing out an error in the Principia... Serendipity aided Bowditch's self-directed study in as much as he found himself able to use the eminent Irish chemist Richard Kirwan's library: a privateer from Salem had intercepted the ship carrying the library between Ireland and England and brought the library back to Salem in June 1791." [wiki]

When he was twenty-two, Mr.Bowditch went to sea as a ship's clerk and captain's writer. Working from the error-prone navigational books of the day was so frustrating to him that by his fifth voyage, of which he was master and part owner of the ship, he "decided to write his own book, and to 'put down in the book nothing I can't teach the crew.' On that trip, it is said that every man of the crew of 12, including the ship's cook, became competent to take and calculate lunar observations and to plot the correct position of the ship." So in 1802 The American Practical Navigator, was published. It was such an accurate and useful book that it immediately revolutionized navigation, and is still carried onboard every commissioned U.S. Naval vessel today. The first edition of Bowditch's American Practical Navigator, which became the western hemisphere shipping industry standard for the next century and a half, and in 1866, the United States Hydrographic Office purchased the copyright. Since then the book, with appropriate revisions, has been in continuous publication, and to this day it is simply known as Bowditch.


Reading about him when I was a young person, I was struck mostly by the variety and extraordinariness of his experiences, and the fascinating idea that math had such concrete applications. It had never occurred to me to think of math the way Mr. Bowditch did, as a conceptual thing and a way of looking at the world. I never thought of myself as someone who was good at math, even though later in life I became adept at pattern-making (making 3D objects from 2D patterns) and had a keen mechanical understanding of math-related concepts, based more on intuition than education, which allowed me to do well in all sorts of arenas.

Nowadays, of course, children learn the beginnings of algebra in third and fourth grade. The more conceptual elements of math begin much earlier, and along with the usual times tables school children are taught to see math as a schema, a place to play around with numbers; the basic elements of math's abstractions are set in place in more malleable brains. Add to this the basic tenets of binary and hexidecimal systems, and you get some seriously young minds working on much more abstract levels than of old. ...At least, for those minds who are actually getting an education.

Which brings me to another point: this Bowditch person was pretty much self-taught. Remember, too, that calculus as a systemic study had only been fully developed a hundred years before, so when Mr. Bowditch found an error in Newton's masterpiece only three years into his study of higher math, it showed considerable brainpower. This is something I have only come to appreciate as an adult: both in terms of Isaac Newton and in terms of understanding Bowditch's learning rate. These, and the fact that such a brilliant man should go on to become an insurance actuary, a job which he kept until his death at the age of sixty-three, strike me strongly now that I have some perspective on them.

But what strikes me particularly, and what endears me most to the man, is his deep-seated belief that every man on a ship can and should be able to navigate, despite the mores of the day which would have it that men on a ship are expendable, and only the navigator has the knowledge (and only he should have the knowledge) to find the ship on a map - to navigate. His stubbornness on this point is legendary, and his willingness to prove it comes not only from a man who taught himself to be who he was, but from a time and a place: Massachussetts, in post-Revolutionary America. Best of all, he put his belief to work in writing, too - which is why his book is still relevant today, and why we have such people as Dee Caffari out there on the seas.

Well done, Mr. Bowditch.

Make Magazine: Your Own Wunderkammer

Yay! I just got my copy of Make Magazine today, which has my three page article on Wunderkammer in it. Check it out at Make's website (the page 130 part), or better yet buy a copy to see all the juicy pictures. It looks like a great issue, with all kinds of steampunk how-to's and interesting "lost knowledge."

Woo hoo!

Killing Wonder: Life in the Disaster Zone

I'm angry, so I am climbing on my soap box. Here I go: one foot, the other... If you aren't interested in a rant, you can skip this particular post - I won't be offended. But I have to say these things, for the sake of all the people yet to come, all the wonders yet to be made or found or rescued. And for my own peace of mind.

* * * * * * * * * *

Today the State Senate here in California cut the education budget by 8.4 billion dollars. We are already 50th in the nation for both quality of schools and (surprise!) money spent on education.

Here is the outcome, for many of our school districts:
- No more art.
- No more music.
- No more sports.
- No more libraries.
- It ceases to be cost effective to pay more teachers to keep the class sizes for the younger children small. Therefore, teachers will be fired and large numbers of children crammed in with fewer teachers, because it's cheaper - even with the paltry fines imposed for going too high on class numbers.

The people who hold the Senate hostage every year, the 34% minority who keep wealthy constituents happy and block the other 66% from running the budget in a sane manner, are some of the highest-paid legislators in the country. They believe that their constituents are only going to be happy if their taxes stay at the present rate, which is set somewhere around 1982, by my (admittedly top-of-the-head) reckoning. How does one run a big state like this one if the income is circa 1982, but the expenses are circa 2009, you say? Well, by keeping professors' salaries at 2/3 what they should be, so that working for a university becomes a losing proposition. Or by giving out IOUs instead of paychecks to their employees at budget time - never mind those mortgage payments, or that insurance. Or, by making the children suffer.


What I really want to know is, how will our children grow up knowing the wonders available to the mind without art, music, or libraries? Sports are important: the body is where we live, and we need to explore its capabilities. But sports are valued by even the most unimaginative members of any community. Sports will not die. Art and music -- they could, and they will. And without libraries, the children in impoverished communities will never learn to escape, never learn what other worlds are out there. How can someone in a small farming community ever get the chance to think broadly about ideas if they have no access to books? How will we raise literate, intelligent voters on such a meagre intellectual diet?

No Child Left Behind has been a horrible mistake. Children are evaluated, according to this plan, solely on their test scores. The schools must improve their scores over time (regardless of the level of their initial tests) or be stripped of control over their curricula and forced to institute state-mandated, test-oriented teaching programs. With these budget cuts, the time once taken to overcome this pressure and teach critical thinking skills will now become nigh on unreachable.

It's difficult not to believe these people have a goal: that of keeping our youth uneducated. The more uneducated a populace is, the more easy it is to direct them, the more they can be made to believe in concepts like a Fatherland, or a nationalist party. They're more likely to vote from their emotions, from their prejudices, rather than from their considered reflection of what is best for everyone. Without the perspective of learning, the sense of height and breadth one gets looking through the eyes of multiple authors, it becomes much more difficult to experience selflessness. For most people there can only be the one opinion, the one truth.

And the wonder! Children are supposed to be the ones who come up with crazy ideas. How many parents have had their child ask about something he or she has heard or read and processed? How many children each day hear a story and come home to tell their parents about it? Children are sponges, absorbing everything they come into contact with, and for this reason they are specially at risk. I can't and won't imagine the painfully dry desert the children here in California are about to experience. I can't and won't allow it to happen.


In our school, each class has a weekly Library Visit, where the children are taken into the library to return last week's book and to find a new book for this week. Some of the children literally don't know what to do with their books. They find something at random, check it out, take it away, and bring it back next time, without actually reading it much. But this is the thing: they are learning they can do it: they are learning the library routine. They love the fact that they get to keep this book for a week - all to themselves, not to share with anyone if they don't want to. It doesn't always matter if they read it: they get to have it. They have access. When I was in the bookmobile the other day, there was a kid there who didn't speak English so well but was watching all the people bringing in and taking away books. And get this: he had been trained since Kindergarten to do the same thing at the school library; he knew he too could do it if he wanted, he just had to figure out how it worked. While he stood there, watching, the librarian said to him, "You want a library card? Here, fill out this and this, and have your parent sign it there." The kid was back in 5 minutes, the form all filled out and signed. And he walked out with a book and his own card, back to the place he lives with six other people in two rooms.

You see, school is where we learn our options. In a perfect world, it's where we get to escape the confines of our income, our class, and our home life. We get to be, or learn to be, a different person when we are at school, for good or for ill, and in a perfect school system, it would always be for the better. If we take the options out of the school - if school becomes solely a place to go learn how to take multiple choice tests on the 3 R's and some science - what have we gained? What, in fact, is the point? Teaching kids to sit still and do what they're told for 6 hours a day? Where, in all those R's and xeroxed worksheets, do they get to try on all the other hats, to see if they can sing? Where is the wonder of discovery? How can schools which run on test scores and grim curricula ever teach our children to reach out, to flex their intelligence, to become the new explorers and inventors and artists, without which our world is merely a dim and wintry regimen?


I would argue that the most important thing in the world are those options, because that's where we find the tools to become someone who wonders about things, who creates things, someone who can make a new and meaningful world for themselves and others. If Einstein's lesson, when he got an F in math, was to shut up and sit still, where would we be today? There has got to be a place we can learn to go beyond our parents' ideas, beyond our station in life, beyond the expectations of those who would make us sheep. And schools should be the best place for it. I mean, really - where else are your kids going to spend days with someone trained in exactly that: the fostering of wonder?

So to those men and women dragging their feet and holding our children accountable for the financial greed of small-minded people: leave it alone. You will not bend us to your will. You will not make my children into sheep, nor the children around them. We will not allow it.

* * * * * * * *

"Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts." Albert Einstein

Some links for raising children with wonder and critical thinking skills:

- The always-fabulous Media Awareness Network, from (where else?) Canada
- The sprightly and jocular (to the point of condescension) Free Range Kids blog does still have good information on increasing kids' freedom in a world of safety-obsession and alarmism.
- The National Center for Fair and Open Testing's site The Case Against High Stakes Testing has a lot of information about combatting the testing mentality in educational institutions.
- Students Against Testing, a similar, more youth-oriented site


Some links about changing California:

- Wikipedia on how California has tried to divide before
- Census deepens racial divide, November 2006
- Three Californias: a sometimes blog
- Splitting California: a bibliography


Lastly, a letter to the President, from me.

Lunokhod and the Art of Space

I recently wrote a short story in which the archeologist protagonist is on the Moon, years after the human race is dead, looking at the human leftovers there and wondering about our culture. While researching the items that were left there by our astronauts, I came across this image of Lunokhod 1, sent in November 1970 by the USSR to travel the Moon, probing and testing with its various tools and to send back images and analysis of the lunar surface.

"The vehicle was powered by batteries which were recharged during the lunar day by a solar cell array mounted on the underside of the lid. To be able to work in vacuum a special fluoride based lubricant was used for the mechanical parts and the electric motors (one in each wheel hub) were enclosed in pressurised containers.[1] [2] During the lunar nights, the lid was closed and a Polonium-210 radioisotope heater unit kept the internal components at operating temperature. Lunokhod was intended to operate through three lunar days (approximately 3 Earth months) but actually operated for eleven lunar days."

In other words, the thing was so well-made that it lasted almost four times longer than it was designed to. And no wonder! Look at that thing! Was ever something so beautifully and functionally designed, so compact and complete? It looks like a Steampunk idea of itself, which is oddly appropriate, given that it was the first roving remote-controlled robot to land on another world.

It's hard to put a finger on why the Lunokhod 1 is so attractive to my eyes, but I think it has to do with the fact that it's not all angles. The simple tub-like shape, like a soup tureen on eight wheels; the two wonderful stalk-like eyes with their hanging lids; the wonderful appendages with their enigmatic functions; and best of all, the lid which opens in the day to charge up and then closes (with a clang? Perhaps if there was atmosphere) at night - all these combine to give it a nearly-friendly anthropomorphic quality, like a wind-up toy or the walking bathtub from Nightmare Before Christmas. And am I the only one who wishes they could look inside sometime when the lid was open? What's inside it, other than the solar panels on the lid?


To add to the general mystique, I then came across this remarkable little piece of history while stumbling around Wikipedia:

"According to a French documentary TV film "Tank on the Moon" by Jean Afanassieff, the Lunokhod design returned to limelight 15 years later due to the Chernobyl nuclear powerplant disaster. The East German made remote controlled bulldozers available to Soviet Civil Defence troops weighed dozens of tons, too heavy to operate on the remaining parts of the partially collapsed reactor building roof. Human labourers could not be employed effectively to shovel debris, since workshifts were limited to tiny 90-second intervals due to intensive ionising radiation.

"Lunokhod designers were called back from retirement and in two weeks time they produced a field-usable, six wheeled, remote control vehicle prototype that was light enough to work on the weakened roof. Since the original Lunokhod moon rovers used nuclear decay heatsources for internal rack climate control, their electronic systems were already hardened to resist radiation. This benefit allowed the 1986 designers to quickly come up with a derived vehicle type for nuclear disaster recovery work. Eventually two such six-wheeled rovers were delivered to the Chernobyl accident zone and proved very useful for remotely operated debris clearing work, saving lives and earning decorations for the designers."

Somehow this little description of a moment in history feels like the perfect reward for the group of designers who created such a perfectly aesthetic object.

In my story, at least, it was the finding of this one artifact that convinced the Enlightenment-style aliens that we were not a complete loss, after all: we clearly had some inkling of aesthetic sensibility. I'd like to see more aesthetic influence on the stuff we send out into space, wouldn't you? Perhaps a few more rococo curls on our probes, or at the very least, decorative rivets. Perhaps they could escape the black-and-white sobriety of the paint jobs we've stuck to until now? Then at least our space-junk wouldn't be completely divorced from the important cultural life of our world. NASA could hire artists-in-residence to help design the "look and feel" of the space probes, so that they embody some message about the way we look at the universe, not just about the facts and functionality of science.

Instead of ugly plaques with our body outlines and a few lines in various languages, I would like to see us leave "postcards" with some of the world's great artworks shown on them. If you look at the images from the two Voyager's Golden Records (sent out in 1977), which appear by my researches to be the only extensive image selection to be sent out into space, they show all kinds of things about humans and Earth: various mathematical and physical concepts; how we are conceived, born, and grow; what the landscapes look like here; all of our engineering feats (cars, airplanes, bridges, etc). There are 116 of them. Two of them show, respectively, someone painting a picture (kind of in the background, no less) and a string quartet. This is the sum total of mention of art (there are at least three pictures of cars and five pictures of dwellings).


Okay, so it was 1977, and the big thing was science, and making sure the aliens who encountered this could see what our science looked like so they could grasp our world-view, so to speak. But what about how we view ourselves? It seems to me a great deal can be said about us by how we express ourselves, and the great variety of cultural artifacts we produce. What about Japanese woodcuts? The Mona Lisa? African Kente cloth? What about the wave organs, the Expressionists, or (God Forbid) Mount Rushmore? What would alien cultures learn about us from this dazzling array? It would be easy enough to show someone painting, and then show a series of paintings; to show someone weaving and then a selection of woven things. And so on.

It's true that various forms of music have been sent out into the spheres, probably because music is a fairly compactable (and mathematical, and therefore acceptable) art form. There has been some discussion of the efficacy (or not) of images as a way of communicating to extraterrestrial cultures; but it seems to me that even if they don't have eyes per se, they are likely to have some way of sensing the wavelengths of light, so they will "see" it somehow. And it most certainly seems that any culture that is advanced enough to be out in space, finding our stuff, is surely going to have some concept of aesthetics, and therefore find our artmaking the subject of much interest and discussion. Think about meeting someone for the first time. Are you more interested in how they built their house, or in how they see the world - what music they like, whether they read and go to museums or simply watch violent movies every night on TV? I suspect that meeting some other race would be like the dance we do when making a new friend, at least a little bit.

At least, one certainly hopes so. Otherwise, really, what's the point of it all?