ebogjonson.com's flickrish archive
pics and tricksApril 14, 2006
too much posse
PF at the Library Alehouse in Santa Monica.
Posted by ebogjonson at 03:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 09, 2006
500 coffeeshops to go before I sleep
Found this on Slashdot:
Cubicles: The great mistake Even the designer of the cubicle thinks they were maybe a bad idea, as millions of 'Dilberts' would agree.Robert Oppenheimer agonized over building the A-bomb. Alfred Nobel got queasy about creating dynamite. Robert Propst invented nothing so destructive. Yet before he died in 2000, he lamented his unwitting contribution to what he called "monolithic insanity."
Propst is the father of the cubicle. More than 30 years after he unleashed it on the world, we are still trying to get out of the box. The cubicle has been called many things in its long and terrible reign. But what it has lacked in beauty and amenity, it has made up for in crabgrass-like persistence.
[...]
The cubicle was not born evil, or even square. It began, in fact, as a beautiful vision. The year was 1968. Nixon won the presidency. The Beatles released The White Album. And home-furnishings company Herman Miller (Research) in Zeeland, Mich., launched the Action Office. It was the brainchild of Bob Propst, a Coloradan who had joined the company as director of research.
After years of prototyping and studying how people work, and vowing to improve on the open-bullpen office that dominated much of the 20th century, Propst designed a system he thought would increase productivity (hence the name Action Office). The young designer, who also worked on projects as varied as heart pumps and tree harvesters, theorized that productivity would rise if people could see more of their work spread out in front of them, not just stacked in an in-box.
The new system included plenty of work surfaces and display shelves; partitions were a part of it, intended to provide privacy and places to pin up works in process. The Action Office even included varying desk levels to enable employees to work part of the time standing up, thereby encouraging blood flow and staving off exhaustion.
But inventions seldom obey the creator's intent. "The Action Office wasn't conceived to cram a lot of people into little space," says Joe Schwartz, Herman Miller's former marketing chief, who helped launch the system in 1968. "It was driven that way by economics."
[...]
[Stewart Brand, co-creator of the Whole Earth Catalog] says that the most productive people he knows have developed ways to work outside offices, not in them. Brand himself worked out of a converted shipping container in Sausalito for seven years and now commutes to a beached fishing boat a few yards from his house. He sees two workspaces rising up to compete with the modern office: homes and what might be called the third space--i.e., Starbucks.
I've got a fairly narrow rotation of "third spaces" that includes the above pictured Groundworks Cafe in Downtown, LA. Having access to range of sunny public spaces, each with their own mood and tenor, is amazing, but they all also have their own unique distractions - bad music, for example, or the seductions of eavesdropping or over-immersion in the (perceived) lives of the staff. Then there's what me and my cafe buds like to shorthand as TML -> Too Many Ladies.
Another thing is that the ubiquity of wireless access means that the great, subversive weapons in humanity's fight against the bosses (loafing, IM, debating whether or not that forward is "work friendly") suddenly become weapons against yourself in a cafe.
Time permitting (wink-wink; what else do you have but time when cruising the wireless-enabled coffeeshops of LA) I'll upload more pics of the various places.
Posted by ebogjonson at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
February 19, 2006
din din in LA
Dinner with the various peoples in LA.
Posted by ebogjonson at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
December 05, 2005
paris - a dream
Mostly fragments today, but on the upside it seems I finally got around to processing the waking trip I just took to France.
Dreamt of travel, travel, travel by train, plane and helicopter, all of it on or about an unnamed volcanic island populated by French-speaking black folks. (Haiti? Martinique? Genosha?) On the books the island (a city-state really) is a high-tech, black-run paradise, ziggurat skyscrapers reaching for a postcard blue heaven, but the streets are heavy with moist banana smell, the tiny republic rotting away in stages, pretending to a high-mindedness (liberté, egalité, fraternité?) that never quite trickles down into anyone’s day-to-day.
I fly into the city on videogame wings. I see my plane (propeller?) from the outside, its fuselage an unlikely burnished super-silver. Code generated lens-flare blossoms like firework across my mental image as the plane glides, swooping down through shaving cream clouds before buzzing the city-state’s man-made canyons on the way to the airport. I watch and watch and get that funny sense of awe I get whenever I play a next-generation game console for the first time. Who knew an extra million polygons would look this good? Those Japanese cats sure know their stuff.
I’m on the island for business, here to buy a building or maybe a business. I’m carrying a lot of someone else’s money, digital money or maybe encoded the old fashioned way in my signature or handshake. An old boss of mine flies in with me, but once we’re on the island we never go look at any sites or meet any people. I walk around the city looking up at the buildings – think Blade Runner with sunshine – the celly pressed to my ear. I’m on hold the entire dream, that or I’m having testy, broken-French conversations with receptionists, hotel operators, assistants. I can’t get through to anyone. I lose track of my boss and then have to call and call looking for him. He’s left his hotel room and has gone sightseeing. No one can find him.
I ride the island’s subway aimlessly. This particular system comes with just two lines, each with exactly four stops. A vast, imperial central station connects the two lines. The central station is bloated, a marble monstrosity. Its surface has been carved out of pinkish-brown stone and the place has the under-lit, unfocused ambiance of museum statuary that’s been shot by a tourist using digital camera presets and weak flash.
A hotel operator berates me for my poor French. I speak better French when I’m awake but can barely put together a sentence here. When she puts me on hold I notice that all phone numbers on the island come in the same format:
XXX-29-XXX
I take in the recurring 29, decide that for the rest of the dream I’ll pretend to a vague numerological unease. In my waking life, I always take note of numbers that could be subsets of a plausible lifespan, like my age plus one for example. (This year, the lucky number is 38.) I suck on the 29 like it’s a particularly resistant candy, some kind of mental gobstopper. Do I have 29 more years of life? Did I die when I was 29? Soft-center or chewable?
When I’m not on the train I ride in a helicopter that takes me from building to building. More pixellated aeronautic excess. My pilot talks too much too, tells me how he dreams of emigrating to America. I nod absently, wonder if I could fly the thing if I had to.
There are men with machine guns guarding the streets.
The wandering motif that consumed the whole first half of the dream suddenly evaporates. I forget it as if it never happened. Instead of traveling and wandering I now dream that I have been in my hotel room since the day I arrived. I lay in bed eating crepes, watching French television. I watch “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” in German for hours, as well as “The Weakest Link.” I discover a genre of talk show where 10 or 15 Italians sit on a stage chatting and laughing. It’s the same set-up every night. I’m baffled by the booking – politicians? Footballers? B-list celebrities? An African-seeming gent walks on stage in a tweed jacket and the crowd goes wild. He waves back coolly, his hands clasped over his head.
The hotel room morphs around me, extravagant and minimal at the same time. I am Dave Bowman slowly chewing a Kubrickian steak.
The European women on the television all have enormous breasts. I wonder if this is a natural phenomenon, or something innate to the televised European. I’m confused by their plenitude. I have flown in from California, where every other woman is an actress with implants.
Except for the Italian African I never see any black people on the hotel television. I wonder why if the island has its own channel, why the hotel doesn’t carry it.
I decide that there’s something gravitationally off with the island. On the pressboard desk in my hotel room sits a doodad, one of those magnets that’s been floated on a superconducting surface, science in miraculous action. This particular doodad is eccentric in design and execution – a wine cork stuffed like a pimento olive with magnet, then floated in a U-shaped, superconducting trough. Every now and then the magnet, like a cat suddenly starting at nothing, rotates impossibly on its axis. I call down to ask the concierge if the island is prone to earthquakes, but he only berates me for my poor conjugation.
Just before I wake, my dream settled down to a single arc with the appearance in my room of Chantal, an old friend from high school. In real life Chantal had been one of the few kids at my high school who lived in my neighborhood, and she was also one of a handful of Haitian kids attending besides me. In the dream she lives on the island and has come on goodwill mission to get me out of the room.
“You should see the sights,” she says.
Before we can leave, though, she loses her favorite brooch somewhere in my hotel room. I can’t leave the room until it’s found. She describes it to me in great detail, a silver duck with pearl feathers, blue gems for eyes, a golden beak. Days pass, flashing by in bursts of looking and waiting. Chantal seems increasingly annoyed at me, as if the loss is my fault. I make increasingly desultory searches of the hotel room in reaction to her anger, moving the couch and peering under the bed. I find brooches – gilded Hello Kitty characters, mostly – but none of them hers. I go to sleep, wake up and find her moving the cushions on the couch around. I worry that she will read my journal while I’m sleeping.
The next time she leaves, she takes the dream’s POV with her. She goes home, where she has dinner with an older woman who may or may not be her mother. It seems that I have disappeared. No one answers the phone in my room when she calls. The hotel staff has ventured in, found my things but no me. She asks about her brooch. Negative.
The older woman worries for my safety. It is getting dark. Chantal demurs. She explains that when we were in high school we would stay out after curfew all the time, dodging patrols and skirting checkpoints.
“He’ll be fine,” she says. I dream of agreeing with her. I wonder what it is I am doing.
[eNd.]
Posted by ebogjonson at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
October 07, 2005
lady and cat
lady gives cat love; sauces seem sad
Posted by ebogjonson at 09:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
August 07, 2005
me and the lady
what the headline said. I especially like the hands.
Posted by ebogjonson at 03:09 AM | Permalink