things i’d like to see on open: “in other news” (links to notable news of the day)
most recently commented on section.
and a little mini post spot. post and spot are almost the same word, so that’s weird.

i’ve been using my Searchfox rss reader (you can get an invite to try it out too if you’re, like, cool enough.) i like it well enough to export my bloglines opml over and leave that poor bastard behind. actually, i’m joking, there was lots to like about bloglines. number one in my book was the fact that i seemed to already be signed in whenever i got there. i liked that a lot, it was like ‘whew, ok, one less step between me and gettin down to it.’
but i found it a bit slow, and a bit counterintuitive, so i’m wishing them well and movin on. if the end result of “techblog’s” epic sixteen week comparison (or whatever it’s at now) is that Rojo is better, then i’ll probably consider moving again.
Entoutcas, all of that meandering to say that i find so many things now that make my eyes bug out in the daily chaos of the world as it appears before me rss style that i’d like to be bookmarking the best of it so it would appear on Open for you to ponder. so i’ll get right on that.
much love.
r

I had an eggplant languishing in the pits of my fridgerator that began calling out to my guilt last night, so i went googling for “eggplant recipes”. I was thinking maybe parmasan, but that was a staple in my mum’s house so i wanted to see if i could find something new. I found this site : http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/recipe/gale/vegetables/eggplant-coll.html#9

And as it was cold and stormy last night; as it had been autumn-raining here for two days and making me feel deeply cold and melodramatically melancholy I was in need of comfort food and went with the soup.

All I did to tweak it was to roast an entire head of garlic along with the eggplant instead of frying four cloves with the onions. That added a layer to the taste that I was pretty happy with. I over-oiled the eggplant though, I think. We ate this soup with a side of Geogre-Forman’ed chicken breast, cooked with basil and that was proteiny and good.

Source: LA Times. (Mary Jane Kelly- i don’t know if this is the name of the person who added this recipe to this list, or the orginal author, but props to her either way. way to go mary jane. )

ROASTED EGGPLANT AND RED BELL PEPPER SOUP
=========================================

Ingredients:
————
3 large Japanese eggplants (or 1 very large regular)
2 sweet red peppers
1 large onion, sliced
4 cloves garlic, crushed
1 quart chicken stock
1 bunch fresh basil
Salt and pepper
Extra virgin olive oil

Instructions:

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lyrics to the song i made up dancing around my livingroom/office area when i got home this dim and rainy afternoon. there’s also a dance. and a lot of rock guitar mouth noises. it should be sung really fast and loud. c’mon. try it.

all my pretty ladies, coming out to see me (bam bp-phah bam bam)
all my pretty ladies growin in the greenery(bam bp-phah bam bam)
it’s rainin’ outside but i just don’t mind
because all my pretty ladies are comin out to see me. (bam bp-phah bam bam ba na nana nan nan..)

ok, i admit it, it’s about the new flowers on my jasmine tree. it’s been a while since there were flowers, that’s all..

stuff we could sell in our open boutique- hand picked by us, in the mail and on it’s way to you within a week of purchase.

-rob’s magnets and comic books
-a few consistent variable pieces
-a few ‘i made it’ pieces’
-g-eunuch issues
-lickety split issues
-worn tshirts and buttons
-sara’s album
-shoot the moon’s ep
-

Here I am again facing a painful old question that just seems to be getting bigger: how to operate in relation to problems of different orders of magnitude. I’m struggling these days between a kind of fractured mind, where sometimes I can focus on looking for a good little job and cleaning my apartment, and other times the enormity of category five hurricanes hitting the heartland, and the polar icecaps reaching a thinning tipping point, and the oil reserves running dry, and New York’s garbage piling up off the coast of New Jersey, threatens to swallow up all the room in my mind for rational thought. How can we continue to move from conversations about the season premiere of LOST to those other conversations, half joking, about whether or not this is the end of the world, where we smile ironically but avoid each other’s eyes, afraid we’ll see our own questionning fear echoing back at us.
One of the students in the class I was a Teaching Assistant for last year said: “Me and my friends are at this place of wondering whether we’re going to go on with the whole career life hustle or if we’re just going to fuck it and do nothing.” I’m paraphrasing as best I can remember. We laughed when he said it, the professor and I, because it has that typical twenty-something ring to it, and even a hint of well-off kid enjoying a pleasure-oriented life-style. But at the same time, god but I know what he means. Those are the two choices that seem to present themselves to you when your mind feels tired out by the split and complicated focus our modern mediated world requires. Because we are, in some ways, in a very new world. We know more people, more places, more aspects of more problems, and more ways to distract ourselves then any earlier period in history. And maybe some of us won’t be able to take it. Maybe some people will give up on the constant learning that it takes to succeed, or potentially to contribute meaningfully at all, in this new environment.

When I feel daunted and drained I have two mind mechanisms that I try and activate.

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There is a room in the network of my memory
a place my nanny built in stories and birthday cards
that is a garden that she tends
where all us grandchildren are.

Her imagination twisted us descendant girls with fairytales
and still we have been lonely
looking for ourselves in her portraits.

What we didn’t see was the whirring camera in the background
the quick capturer behind her eyes
that snatched our faces in loving light
and snipped pieces of our life.

We sat once, (just once,) together
by the sea-seeming lake superior
and the sky was the whitegrey
of sunlight burning through haze.

As she watched me swim
I felt her gaze like beating waves.
She held me outside time,
and silenced everything
with the thick, tense complexity
of all her lives and loves and memories.

She bound me to you with this fierce and foreign love
with stitches made of stories
and photos down the hall.

Carefully ripped paintings
left facing the rain
petals like soft mottled wings

I catch glimpses of your faces in all of her forgotten things.
And keep them pasted in the white sunlight
of the room she left inside me
where we hover, lovely, papery, defined by our remembering.

i’ve been keeping this picture
trying to find the place where
it would be happiest, where it would do the most good.
Of all the hundreds of hundredths of seconds
i caught on that day on the way up
to trenton
this one is the best.

get out of my room and leave me alone!
c’mere mr toad- you are the only one who is ever nice to me! ghhha! all i want is the toast cut triangular and no one to talk to me when i get home from brownies and still have my head full of everything that’s been going on! like for example, i tied a perfect bow on the wreath we made today and kelly asked me to tie hers and then it was crooked and she tolf me it was ruined but i didn’t ask her if i could tie her bow, she asked me, so what the heck is up with that!

hen? maman? je peut pas allez au super mache maintenant. parceque! parceque je veux ecoute ca, le monsieu il va dire si les animaux existe qui peuvent manger d’autres animaux come eux, comme si un humain mangait un autre, comme si tu mangais brenda et apres il y avait person pour nettoiyait ma chambre..

the light is getting dim.
the afternoon seemed good,
but now they’re pressing in (against the bricking,)
and taking all the air again.
this apartment looks out over
the whole fragile, breathing thing
and still the ice is record thin (we’re so useless-
taking all the air again.)
the road and everything it needs and bleeds is
in my ears and in my skin
while i’m waiting in this strangers house
for my medication to kick in.
they’re taking all the air again
this time to sell it back to us whiter
with revivifying vitimins

marjorie wore the tired drawl,
and drunken sexiness,
and harsh quick wit,
that she’d found could draw her to the center of laughing men
and, usually,
keep her safe from them
until the mornings stretched long
and the feeling of missing something
took up too much space in the room
and all the customary jeans and gestures
didn’t fit.
And with the sad shock of having hid
and missed out on all the real stuff-
the pain and beauty both-
her face would sometimes crumple up around her eyes.

The small thing that was her self
hadn’t been allowed to grow.
Now that she knew it,
she lived between two eyes, two minds;
a hardened actress and a freaked-out child.
She leaned over the ashes and coffee clutter
and her hand shook, but she smiled and actually seemed shy and said:
“these days I make an ass of myself,
but at least it’s an ass I can live with
when I wake up alone in bed,
and my laugh sounds different now
and though there’s fewer of the old gang I’d spend time with,
i think i’d make a better friend?”

some places we can juxtapose open source history with the history of other networks:

-the making of the oed

-asquith and torvalds- parliamentary tactics for coming toward agreement
the northcliffe press and microsoft- the danger of monopoly

-conferences, universities (“we are collectively, what’s wrong with the university” Innis to the assembled presidents..)

-and interestingly, in the behavior of networks in nature. Microsoft, Bose-Einstein
Opening up information is a political act that resists the formations of monopolies which are threatening to civilization.

–

ways we use our website (little features of our ongoing attempt at open-ness):

- we open with a photograph of us- i have some ego-guilt about this, but when i think about it objectively i do think it’s important to open a website with human faces. i think the fundamental fact of the collaboration between art and science, guy and girl, writing and code that this photo represents is pretty key to the way we understand ‘open-ness on our site. In part, we are open sourceing ourselves with all our websites.

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(especially the idol, the rockstar, and the dance competitions, but also oprah and dr.phil)

1. people gradually get used to being on camera, and you get to watch it happen. what really seems to happen is that people on tv figure out who they are in relation to the people present and in relation to that other interactant – the camera, the mass. so you watch them go through different social situations and, even when the plotline of a show is scripted, you watch them reveal themselves in little unscriptable bits of phrases and gestures.

2. you also watch people struggle between ‘staying true to who they are’ and ‘growing’. you see a lot of people who don’t take advice get sent home. And a lot of people miss what was the key bit of advice, or offer performances that are too fearful and restrained, or too fake and strange, and get sent home. Each time this happens, it can suggest something potentially useful about tactics for your own life. Ways of thinking about being the best, and what that means within your own value matrix, and what it entails.

3.gradually the competition gets narrowed down to the most talented, most experienced, most intense competitors and the elimination process feels like a passing whim about who, at that moment of performance, was least genuine and gave the least broadly loveable performance. I like to try and figure out who a performance is connecting with if its not connecting with me. i like to imagine where i am at each passing moment in relation to the mainstream. I like to try and see if the mass is getting something i don’t get.

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When we started Open blogs were barely becoming cool. People still laugh at the word sometimes, and then ask shyly what a blog is.
And it seemed as though there was a great deal of writing on the web about napster, the kazaa network, friendster, or blogs, or even email, or instant messaging; lots of writing about these different little manifestations of the complex idea about interconnection and open-ness that had produced the web, but little exploration of that theoretical, historical base for the whole ‘internet’ project itself.

And there was agreat deal of writing in communication theory about the distortions that become part of communication between individuals. Studying media draws your attention to the fragmentation that can still exist in a widely networked world if people are only connecting with people who hear their information through the same networks, or only opening up to people who confirm what you already think and believe.

When you study communications you can come to feel that a ‘perfect’ communication system, if such a thing were possible, would make peace and good choices possible. With Open Journal and “No One Knows Everything” I want to consider the way ‘open source communication’ – the whole wide, long, distributed, chaotic, disjointed field of open software development and open idea exchange that is taking place in digital spaces where the information becomes endlessly reproducible- the way this process can continue to interact with monopolies of knowledge in all kinds of different fields.

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So, I’ve been asked to speak for a half an hour at CRIM this thursday at 6pm about Open.touchbasic.com
in relation to open source. I’ve begun sketching out my notes to see what they look like, and to be able to pass them along to Elran so he can help me fill in some more details about the techi-er theory and rational behind the stages of Open’s development.

I’m going to resist the urge to keep fleshing these notes out into full paragraphs (ghhn- that expression “to flesh out” makes me cringe. just thought i’d let you know. i always picture a cheese grater and…well. you know.) I just want to speak comfortably when I’m there, not end up being able to give in to my nervousness and reading. Another way I’m going to set myself up to be interesting and fun to listen to is, rather then dressing business professional, I’m going to dress like myself. Read- cowboyboots and a mini-ish skirt. call me geek-bait, baby, i don’t mind.

Here’s those notes…

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by Risa Dickens

I’ve begun cutting pieces out of this early attempt at a novel to look at what the stories are and which ones matter to me. I have two very different feelings about the two main narrative trains, and at first I thought they would work well woven together. The darkness of Jane’s story (and it’s going to get much darker then it is in the draft of chapter 1 below) was going to rub against the bright spots in Gaelle and John’s story. But now I’m trying different ways of adapting John and Gaelle’s story on its own. That link goes to what became of their story when i stripped it out from the larger thing. Now I’m thinking that I might evolve it into a young adult novel.

I’m thinking that the story will be told more from Emilie’s perspective. There will still be portions of the story told from her parents’ perspective- i think the parents will be more developed characters then they sometimes are in ya fiction- but much of what is like that now I’ll change so that it becomes a story being told to Emlie by her parents. I want to have that sense that there are some things these parents are trying to protect Emlie from, and from her perspective it makes the world seem shadowier and more mysterious. Gaelle (mum) just gets evasive and vague, but John (dad) becomes a very imaginative storyteller. He makes everything around them like a fairytale, and so Emilie sees the world like that for a while. The lion statues on the mountain flicker from the corner of her eyes and she imagines them stalking the paths at night with the moonlight on their cement hides.

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