“The hypnagogic is that first stage of sleep that we drift into, when our bodies jerk and we startle ourselves accidentally,” Kate wrote on Amanda’s blog a few days ago.
That hypnagogic state is the one I often feel I’m in while visiting San Francisco—not that I wanted to wake from a dreamy chocolate tart my friend Jeannine and I shared at Delfina with olive oil gelato and sea salt (we started with sardines and incredible calamari with white beans, below),
though meeting the Michelin Man Saturday morning briefly (he seemed friendly enough) hurried me on my way to the Embarcadero market at the Ferry Building. (Read the rest after the jump) More »»
On Thursday, I sat in a converted U.S. Army building in San Francisco surrounded by designers, deep thinkers, and other brainiacs, thanks to my friend Amit Gupta (he started the Jelly casual coworking movement and runs the photography newsletter of awesomeness Photojojo) who gave me his extra ticket.
To be more precise, I actually “won” the ticket (Amit makes life into a series of fun games) when I responded first to beat out the other 1,337 people who follow Amit on Twitter.
And so, I lucked into the PSFK SF conference and walked in thinking about response times and lightweight applications, pausing briefly to pick up a bottle of what looked to be gin. (Note: I spent years in academia where full liquor bottles are highly desirable commodities, and free liquor bottles not to be passed up at any hour of the day.)
Tuesday morning began in Miami, where I rose at 4 to catch a 6 o’clock to Dallas, then a 9 o’clock to Denver with plenty of time for the RoadFood warrior within to eat cheese enchiladas at Jack-n-Grill where they have “hot daze and chile nights.”
Refusing to choose between, I startled my server (who called me “Sunshine”) by asking for both red and green chile on my enchilada stack.
My friend Jenne joined me yesterday morning for a brunch of scrambled eggs, bacon, sautéed potatoes, and summer squash.
Making our way through a bottle of cava, we talked about the week, odds and ends, and decided to meander through the International Mango Festival at Miami’s Fairchild Garden. (Read the rest after the jump) More »»
Last night, my friend Jenne invited me to the Dot Fiftyone gallery opening of an exhibit from MoonStar called “Transforming Light” in the design (Wynwood art) district of Miami.
There is a severe sense of fabulous in some Miami areas, where women dress entirely in white, there is always a rooftop beckoning with undulating conversation in many languages, a highlighted liquor in the drinks being passed (last night, rum), and the sense that the heat rising from streets can somehow be contained, shaped, repurposed.
But I’ll let video tell this short story—if you live in Miami, the exhibit runs this Saturday through August 12th (51 NW 36th Street, Facebook event page) and is worth a visit, if only for my favorite Tetris piece—
As of this morning, if you look below kthread posts, you’ll see lovely little pictures of yourselves.
These are called gravatars (for globally recognized avatar) and the groovy part is when you make one here (thirty seconds, tops) then your gravatar image will automagically appear when you post a comment on any blog that has gravatars enabled.
I’m using a Wordpress plug-in called WP-Gravatar, which lets me choose what will appear next to your name if you don’t have a gravatar.
All of you beautiful people (and you are) can either be different little geometric shapes (that’s what you are right now) or little monsters.
I picked the shapes for now, as they remind of a summer I spent thinking about emoticons and hieroglyphics with Professor David Golumbia at the University of Virginia (read his great, short piece on Gray Kid skewering megapharma here; more David, a video on genre, here)—now that was a great summer research assistant gig.
So what does your shape mean?
According to the identicon creator: “It’s a randomly generated assortment of shapes that is specific to a commenter’s email (or if you prefer IP address)…With 40 possible shapes (about 70 with inversions) in 3 possible positions, around 8000 distinguishable colors and four different rotations for each part, there should be several billion possible shape combinations.”
But, hey, if you’re more into monsters, let me know in the comments. We can switch it up.
I’ve also added openID, which is a way for you to keep the same username all over the internets. It’s a shared identity system to let you control how you log in where. You may already have one (your Flickr account is one); there’s a list here. You can also “claim” your blog in about five minutes; details in this tutorial.
And, just so you know, your comments make my day. I think of each one as a little satellite of love, orbiting around kthread; here’s to our next revolutions…
In which I talk about a food product—acknowledging that Michael Pollan says plants, not products—that I hate to love (even more than this terrible screenshot below):
What do you think about goji berries?
Do you share my unlocal superfood guilt? My love for the Gummi Bears? (Guess what color gummi berries have to be in the juice.)
Please vote below. And with your dollars, of course, at your local community grocer.
This kind of post is a new direction for kthread, but I hope you’ll read along and tell me what you think. Most of you have experienced me pulling various devices, including the Flip cam, out of my handbag–were you okay with it? Let me know in the comments—
The incorrigible Merlin Mann posted on his tumblog a few days ago about using his Flip video camera to record “little moments” with his daughter Eleanor.
Take a moment and prepare for the cuteness of Eleanor below, and yes, I’m leading with the cute kid (if you don’t have your own, borrow):
Note: Remember when I used to write long blog posts full of pictures and video? This is one of those, with a little more than usual about food politics. Leave me a comment if you’re into these; changes are afoot at kthread HQ–
About a week ago, I was sitting in a large room in Budapest’s Novotel Centrum, stunned.
Like the fireworks I watched Friday night from a rooftop at George Washington University in D.C. with my good friend and fabulous cook Laura Hertzfeld (display below; thanks, as always, L),
my understanding of global blogging conversations was being exploded as I listened to fiery bursts from the mouths of impassioned activists and advocates from around the world.
Global Voices cofounder Ethan Zuckerman (find his thoughtful blog posts here) confirmed my sense that was a conference to be experienced in person (though you can watch the conference video archive and read the liveblogs), echoing what my friend David Sasaki, who leads a project called Rising Voices within Global Voices, had told me about the importance of showing up for this community gathering (click the image from David’s Flickr stream below for more of his wonderful photography).
A matrix of interlocking projects, Global Voices and its associated efforts aggregate blog entries, often with images and video, from networks of authors, some of whom are expatriate bloggers, many of whom are exclusive to Global Voices.
With my academic literary background, I used to associate ‘expatriate authors’ with moveable European feasts and endless mountains and rivers of the twentieth century. I now think of individuals like the Global Voices Summit speakers who chronicle events in areas other than where they reside—in some cases because they were imprisoned or their safety endangered in those regions.
What was once a label for American authors registering moral protests, usually of preference rather than imperative, ‘expatriate’ bloggers take on a very real cosmopolitan ownership of their grassroots reports that, as Ethan suggested at the summit referencing the Reverend Wright incident in the Obama campaign, target specific groups and spread beyond intended geographic and temporal audiences into texts referenced by transnational communities of practice.
To draw this down to a personal level, I’m thinking about the spidering effects of online interactions right now in my dissertation research on local networks of food, currency, and shelter.
Two months ago I moved to Miami, and I now happily build online community during the day for Knight Foundation and reside in a magic cottage.
What I didn’t realize when accepting the job was that my new locale is a ‘food desert’ as far as local produce.
Grown to be exported, sitting on docks and hangars beside imported organic vegetables from Mexico and South America (that the Whole Foods franchise near me stickers ‘local’), it seems sustenance of the vegetal varieties easily crosses borders and food miles pile up in a nonsensical mad tea party ride of whirling exchange (a model that needs to be discarded like the statues deposited in Budapest’s social Disneyland, Szoborpark, that I visited recently with author and blogger Antony Loewenstein):
Intended consumption for these foodstuffs remains far from production areas, and the creators, disenfranchised expatriate farmers, we might say, have little ties with the communities where their greens go.
With my beloved local food culture gone missing, a deep sense of longing has emerged for the farmers’ markets that brightened my weekend mornings for the past five or so years.
This past Saturday, I felt buoyant as I returned to the Charlottesville, Virginia farmers’ market, to sellers I know and farms I continue to support.
Freshly dug potatoes and berries I’d never seen before, wine berries, from Planet Diversified;
the first tomatoes from Radical Roots;
peaches and blackberries that wouldn’t last the day
(we shared them at an afternoon picnic)
all reminded me of the ephemeral nature of consumption, be it literal and from the soil or juicy words from those who work around tenuous low-bandwidth connections.
Like the charcoal grill Laura and I veered in and out of alleys in Mt. Pleasant to pick up from grillmaster Cameron this weekend,
we are all, perhaps, chasing down/modifying online tools upon which to set our prose, flip our marinated arguments beside other composed lines of thought.
As we walked back toward Laura’s apartment at the end of a long day of celebrating, I stopped to watch teenagers setting off sparklers between cars.
Far from the bombastic anthems and expensive fireworks we had gaped at earlier, this DIY model is the one I intend to explore—come back for more kthread on how community cred is quietly replacing trumpeted transactions and svelte intervention models are illuminating packets of change…
