The designed world, the bought world, the ballrooms and hallways, I care very little about. When was the last time I looked at this manufactured world and marveled? I hold grudges against clubs. I forget most bars. I resist going into shops because they try to trick me into thinking otherwise.

Then I think about the way light cuts through the lip of a wave, or the silent timidity of a spider camped watching as I pluck a tomato from his home. The awe at looking at the universe way up close. And running my hands through a field and plucking a sprig and smelling it. How superior these sensations are.

I rub shoulders with the timeless world, and speak to the same brothers and sisters that my far distant descendants will. What they tell me is truth, and I try to hear it, but their language is muffled through my ears. But still I listen, because they are the closest thing I have to knowing.

60 mile manifesto

This is what will happen.
Oil will become ever more precious. And it will go to he who can pay the most. Which means you won't get any. So driving will get more expensive and soon you will find yourself latched to a 60 mile electric car. And this will be fine.

You will drive where you need to go. And squeeze it past 60 sometimes and maybe stop to charge your battery just long enough to make it home. Or perhaps your car will be cranked into the air so a guy with greasy hands can slip in a battery in the time it took to fill your old gas guzzler.

60 miles means you can't live 60 miles from where you go everyday. You will choose the fast easy way to work. It will be obvious.

But you can go more than 60 miles if you really want to. And since people will live close to their work cities won't pour all over the place. So you will get out of the city faster. And the world will get bigger and things will open up. Which means more will be yours.



And maybe with some solar panels on the roof, and a lighter design, you will get it to 70.

Lovings vs. Virginia

Today marks the 44^th Anniversary of Lovings vs. Virginia, the US Supreme Court decision that struck down a Virginia law outlawing interracial marriage. The case began in 1959, when Mildred and Richard Loving were caught sleeping in their bed by a group of police officers who had invaded their home in the hopes of finding them in the act of sex (another crime).

The couple was charged under Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code, which prohibited interracial couples from being married out of state and then returning to Virginia, and Section 20-59, which classified "miscegenation" as a felony, punishable by a prison sentence of between one and five years. The couple was sentenced to one year in prison, though the couple later received a 25 year suspension on their sentenced provided they leave the state of Virginia.

With the help of the ACLU, the Lovings challenged the case and on October 28, 1964, after their motion still had not been decided, the Lovings began a class action suit in the U.S District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. On January 22, 1965, the three-judge district court decided to allow the Lovings to present their constitutional claims to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. Virginia Supreme Court Justice Harry L. Carrico (later Chief Justice of the Court) wrote an opinion for the court upholding the constitutionality of the anti-miscegenation statutes and, after modifying the sentence, affirmed the criminal convictions.

Two years later The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions in a unanimous decision, dismissing the Commonwealth of Virginia's argument that a law forbidding both white and black persons from marrying persons of another race. In its decision, the court wrote:

“Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

Despite this Supreme Court ruling, such laws remained on the books, although unenforceable, in several states until 2000, when Alabama became the last state to repeal its law against mixed-race marriage.

With our country’s history of bigotry and violence, the Lovings case proves that we cannot be neutral on topics of equality and civil rights. In the case of the Lovings, doing nothing meant accepting the injustices of 400 years of discrimination. It was only when the Supreme court pro-actively asserted the right of interracial couples to marry that the old Virginia laws were overturned.

In our day in which many of us realize the injustice of sexual discrimination, being neutral is also not enough. We cannot say, “It’s not my business what the gays do.”

We have to pro-actively assert our support.

In the words of Mildred Loving:

“I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

santa maria, ca

If you've spent time in the coves of northern California, and looked up close at the endless lines of scrubby cliffs falling into the ocean, you may have discovered a curious crustacean clinging for breath amongst the mussels, anemones and seaweed. It's name is the gooseneck barnacle, and it looks somewhere between a sharks tooth and dinosaur skin. In a way it's a little bit of both.

The gooseneck barnacle is a rare species found only in the pacific northwest and the chilly waters of Portugal and northern Spain. In the old days, Gooseneck Barnacles were a delicacy. They were harvested to near extinction and steamed, fried, battered, and boiled to the delight of their sophisticated European clientele. Like their brethren the oyster, as the allure of the gooseneck spread further and further away from its natural habitat, the gooseneck found it harder and harder to please all its hungry admirers. Unlike the oyster, the gooseneck wasn't endowed with so vast a domain. By the early 20th century, the clanking chatter of discarded gooseneck crowns was so rare that it was all but forgotten.


I discovered the gooseneck after paddling in from a big day at Graywhale, about two kilometers south of Pacifica. It was dusk and I was exhausted. Endorphins were coursing through me as I carried myself out of the water and behind a big rock outcropping with the swell wrapping around both sides. The sun was all but down and in my shady enclave I examined these strange dinosaur tooth animals with a child's curiosity and sense of wonder. I was in rapture running my hands across their pearly calcium scales.


They were beautiful, and the desire to take a couple home with me was equally as strong as the desire to leave them in their pristine state. I was reminded of a time a couple years back in Stockholm, when I ducked into a courtyard fleeing some enormous 17th century block palace, only to find a miniature bronze statue of a little boy, hands around his knees gazing up to the sky. The statue is called pojken som tittar på månen (the boy who looks at the moon) and it's beauty is due to the expansiveness of the boys universe and the vulnerable humanness of his pose.

The endless ocean beyond and the wall of rock above make a similar statement to my gooseneck.

the view from gray whale

Hengki Koentjoro

The internet is currently shut off in Egypt. Protests continue into the night on this historic day of civil unrest against the dictator (and chief American ally) Hosni Mubarak. Below are a series of pamphlets that are circulating around the streets of Cairo, with translations provided by The Atlantic.

Art by Jesse Hazelip

You gotta love the cabbage as well as the avocado, and of course the king of all fruits, the mango.  The glorious mango.  I was a little shocked to see celery scoring so poorly.  Celery looks so harmless.  Who knew it was the benedict arnold of vegetables.  So boring, so benign, when in fact, a killer.

Check out this new project that my friend Nick Bastis completed.

Much of Chicago is mired in vacant lots and foreclosures. Bastis uses a 1:1 replica of a Frank Gehry building to test the idea of destination architecture as a means of cultural and economic rejuvenation for blighted cities.

Forms of Spectacle and Solutions to Vacancy from Nick Bastis on Vimeo.