Artist colony at McCool Junction? 8 June 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Architecture, Art and faith, Christian art retreat, Sustainable living.add a comment
On the drive home from Nebraska this weekend we passed McCool Junction, Nebraska. Our travels up to the Cornhusker state usually take us by this very small town (population ~ 385) which is for some reason very memorable to both me and my wife. She finds it a very, um, cool name for a community, as do I. The place is also burned in my memory after driving through a dust storm at night just south of town.
I’m impressed that a town of this size has its own website (as it should, just that so many still don’t) and that the site is actually clean and functional.
I started daydreaming after passing McCool Junction, daydreaming that a retiring farmer was going to donate a few acres to me for a Christian artist retreat. Apparently none of his children wanted to farm corn, and he liked my idea and wanted to help get it off the ground. There were two barns, a modest farmhouse and another small outbuilding on the property. A windmill still pumped water out of the Ogallala Aquifer. The rest of his land was going to be sold or auctioned off, but 12 acres (or 8, or 23) would be donated to the nonprofit . . .
. . . wait, what nonprofit? This started me thinking about more of the administrative details caught up in the idea (brainstormed in GoogleDocs). If I set up a nonprofit beforehand, would it encourage this kind of donation? I suppose you could create an agreement with a landowner stating that the land would not be transferred until the nonprofit was established if you had to, but getting your 501(c)3 status earlier seemed the better idea.
The daydream continued in earnest until we neared Salina, Kansas. I wanted to recruit my friends from Germany to help out. She wants to move back to the States and he wants to work the land. I figured she could commute to Lincoln and teach at the university while he farms our small plot and, perhaps, keeps some chickens and goats (and alpacas and sheep if my wife had any say in the matter). The vegetables, eggs and cheese would help feed artists eager to learn how to live creative lives of service informed by their faith. The retiring farmer left an old pickup and small tractor toward this end, and the aforementioned outbuilding would be used as a barn for these agricultural endeavors.
I would task my architect friends with designing compact, sustainable and beautiful residences for the incoming artists. The barns would become studio and gallery space. The exteriors of the existing structures would be modified to match the new architecture (or vice versa). Power would ideally be solar, maybe wind. An abandoned church or schoolhouse on the edge of the acreage would serve as a chapel, and a walking trail would encircle the property.
My daydreams can be fairly elaborate, if you couldn’t tell by now, and are also fruitful in the scheme of things. While I may not be excited about administrative details such as applying for nonprofit status, they have to be done. And, just to curb any misinterpretation of this post, I am not planning to apply for 501(c)3 status this month. Or next. Probably not even this year.
But before I actually go out soliciting retiring farmers for a few acres on the corner of their spread, perhaps (assuming God leads me into ever actually establishing said retreat).
On suburbia and sustainability 27 May 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Community planning, Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Furniture, Modern culture, Sustainable living.2 comments
The Passionately Alive entry I already cited this morning also contains two very interesting bits of media talking about suburbia and sustainability that are worth resposting. First, a trailer for The End of Suburbia:
And secondly, an excerpt from The Suburban Nation (pages 117-118):
The plight of the suburban housewife was powerfully conveyed in a letter we received in 1990 from a woman living outside of Tulsa:
Dear Architects:
I am a mother of four children who are not able to leave the yard because of our city’s design. Ever since we have moved here I have felt like a caged animal only let out for a ride in the car. It is impossible to walk even to the grocery store two blocks away. If our family wants to go for a ride we need to load two cars with four bikes and a baby cart and drive four miles to the only bike path in this city of over a quarter million people. I cannot exercise unless I drive to a health club that I had to pay $300 to, and that is four and a half miles away. There is no sense of community here on my street, either, because we all have to drive around in our own little worlds that take us fifty miles a day to every corner of the surrounding five miles.
I want to walk somewhere so badly that I could cry. I miss walking! I want the kids to walk to school. I want to walk to the store for a pound of butter. I want to take the kids on a neighborhood stroll or bike. My husband wants to walk to work because it is so close, but none of these things is possible…And if you saw my neighborhood, you would think that I had it all according to the great American dream.
Building a green city from the ground up 6 May 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Architecture, Community planning, Environmental stewardship, Sustainable living.2 comments
Greensburg, Kansas, a small plains community of 1,000 people, was leveled by a tornado in 2007.
The town is making the most of the rebuilding opportunity. New structures replacing the tornadic debris are being built in the style of green. “Greensburg GreenTown is a Kansas-based nonprofit organization, providing inspiration and leadership to Kiowa County in order to be a model of sustainable living for the world.”
I’ve hoped for a similar initiative here in Siloam Springs, although I haven’t yet taken the time to propose it to the city. Still, it wouldn’t be the same kind of opportunity that Greensburg has, building from the ground up. Props to Greensburg for making lemonade of the lemon it was dealt two years ago.
Among the new green buildings is the 5.4.7 Arts Center, which is the 1st LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum building in Kansas according to its website.
Image from GreensburgKS.org
First time home buyer credit bad for the economy? 24 April 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Community planning, Modern culture, Sustainable living.3 comments
Real estate isn’t really what this blog is about, but it comes up somewhat regularly in relationship to my keen interest in both residential building design and community planning. And, as regular readers will note, my wife and I have recently been thinking of selling our home and buying another.
NPR’s Morning Edition made note today of the $8,000 tax credit Uncle Sam is offering to first-time home buyers. I’m not a first time buyer and, thus, haven’t given much thought to the offer. Quite a few people have though. According to the NPR spot, lower housing costs combined with the tax break have resulted in an upward trend among first-time buyers.
My office acquaintance who just bought a home — from the utterly inane and incompetent bureaucracy that remains of Countrywide — has brought it up in our conversations. For him it was an incentive; from what I can tell it wasn’t the deciding factor. He and his wife have been looking at houses for a while. On Monday, a friend noted over breakfast that he knows of two people planning to buy a house solely because of the tax credit, people who in his opinion have no business buying a home. I trust this friend’s judgment; he’s a financial counselor, in essence, for Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace program.
Could this be an unintended consequence of the stimulus, something the Obama administration failed to foresee? Will we end up with an entirely new set of individuals chained to mortgages they can’t afford, starting the vicious cycle over again — thanks to the federal government? The danger is real, although I hope it isn’t the case.
The Morning Edition spot pointed out that first time buyers’ ideas of what constitutes a starter home are less opulent than a few years ago. Wine cellars and the like have given way to practicality. “Peace of mind is the new must-have,” according to NPR.
On public transit and urban community 17 April 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Living incarnationally, Mass transit.1 comment so far
Rebecca Tirrell Talbot wrote an article titled Of Public Transit and Human Nature for today’s issue of The Curator Magazine. Fascinated as I am by transit (and in some ways the city of Chicago) I read the whole article, not too long and not too short for an internet publication.
Talbot makes some interesting observations concerning the trains in Chicago and their riders, how different lines possess different personalities, how riders in general react (or don’t react) to certain behaviors. I’ll let you read the article (linked to in the first paragraph) for the details after saying one thing: People in the city really wear iPod earbuds like they’re implants. I noticed this on the trains in New York back in February. It’s something we — and by we I mean American culture — made fun of a few years back. Here in our tiny midwestern town you don’t see it very often, hardly at all actually.
Photo from Wikipedia by Daniel Schwen.
Mass adoption of electric cars 13 April 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Modern culture, Sustainable living.add a comment
Shai Agassi, founder and CEO of Better Place, explains how to get countries to change from oil to electric en masse in this TED talk:
The only thing I recall taking issue with in the video is his use of the term zero carbon. Sure, the resulting vehicle may not create any emissions as it’s used, but the invisible elephant is still in the room. The steel, plastic and batteries for that vehicle still have to be manufactured, and the plant they are manufactured in likely still uses coal power.
(For what it’s worth, when I toured a coal fired power plant in grade school I was told that, if it it was operating properly, no smoke ever floated out of the premises. What we see coming out the stacks should be steam. If this is true — and a lot of people seem to think it isn’t — the problem with coal power isn’t that it pollutes, it’s that it’s a finite fossil fuel.)
And even if we get those factories switched over to sustainable power such as wind and solar, zero impact on the environment is not a reality. Ever. Which I’ve pointed out before. We’ll still mine the earth for raw materials to create turbines and solar panels out of. We’ll still need to dispose of turbines, batteries and solar panels when they wear out. There will still be detractors who point out the environmental impact of these new energy sources, such as how wind power apparently desertifies surrounding landscapes.
I’ve said this already and I’ll say it again. Subduing the earth, as we humans were instructed to do, will always have some kind of result that some person will see as negative. Our goal, thus, is to always strive to be better stewards of the planet.
The visual credit crisis 19 March 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Affluenza, Design, Modern culture, Sustainable living.add a comment
Earlier this week I posted the following in my Facebook status:
Paul Nielsen :: Realizing I have an eye (and degree) for design, but just don’t fit into the graphic designer’s culture.
Basically, I’ve realized this year, again, that I just don’t share the interests and passions of most serious graphic designers. I don’t look forward to new software; I don’t rant passionately against spec work like a lot of professional graphics people seem to. I have more of a marketing mind now (for good or ill) and realize that the job of a logo isn’t so much to grab attention — and professional accolades — as it is to create a brand. And, like two friends who commented on the Facebook status, I’d rather be getting my hands dirty than sitting in front of a computer all day (although half a day is OK).
That said, however, I’m still acutely aware of the surrounding visual environment, and appreciate good design when I see it. FlowingData posted a significant montage of good graphics related to the current economic crisis earlier this week, 27 visualizations to be exact. The one I appreciated most was the only video in the group.
The video, created by graduate student Jonathan Jarvis, above is the first of two parts posted on YouTube. See the full-length video on Vimeo here (YouTube limits videos to less than 10 minutes, and I can’t embed the Vimeo video because I don’t yet self-host The Aesthetic Elevator.). I also quite liked the following poster, if it can be called that, by Jess Bachman.
Click on the image to see the entire visualization. Bachman’s own website is called WallStats.
Recovery of a human scale in economics 12 March 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Modern culture, Sustainable living.add a comment
Here’s another quote for the day, one that relates back to my question on whether or not more pricey modern fads such as organic food will weather the economic downturn. From an NPR story about a dairy farmer in upstate New York who’s hoping to grow his burgeoning operation:
Hesse is offering 6 percent interest for an unsecured loan of $1,000. His business plan taps into a pair of burgeoning movements — the first characterized by an interest in organic, locally grown food; the second by an environmental approach to economics.
That approach is championed by Woody Tasch, a venture capitalist and author of the new book Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money. Tasch argues that money is flying around the globe too fast. He rows hard against mainstream economics, which says growth is good and the marketplace knows best. “I’ve just had it with all of this so-called ‘making-a-killing expertise,’ which is actually killing the planet,” he says. “I think one of the antidotes is daring to move to the other side of our brain, and kind of put down all that economic and fiduciary nonsense and just act like regular people.”
I like the idea of a slower economy. It’s something that’s been in my mind for a couple years now — beginning before the current crisis — but since I’m nothing like an economist I hadn’t been able to articulate these thoughts.
I would probably refer to Tasch’s slow money idea as economics on a human scale. Architects decry cities salted with skyscrapers for the same reason; the buildings are disproportionate to the human physique. Would it be a fair assessment to say that the current American economy grew too big for its own good in a similar way, that — despite our ability to create such a monster — it’s no longer something we can relate to as humans?
Read more about Tasch’s Slow Money Alliance via this link.
Image from Wikipedia.
The Recession vs. The Consumer 10 March 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Affluenza, Modern culture, Sustainable living.1 comment so far
Alissa Wilkinson — who spearheads The Curator and I met in passing at IAM Encounter 09 — quoted a quote from a New York Times story titled Conspicuous Consumption, a Casualty of Recession that I found worthy of quoting again .
“I think this economy was a good way to cure my compulsive shopping habit,” Maxine Frankel, 59, a high school teacher from Skokie, Ill., said as she longingly stroked a diaphanous black shawl at a shop in the nearby Chicago suburb of Glenview. “It’s kind of funny, but I feel much more satisfied with the things money can’t buy, like the well-being of my family. I’m just not seeking happiness from material things anymore.”
The Times article basically goes back and forth on whether the changes people are making in their personal lives during this economic hardship will last. Some say yes; some say no. Economists point out that The Great Depression did create a very cautious generation of savers. My great grandmother was one of these people.
This youthful recession probably has some years to go before causing such significant change to our die-hard consumerist mindsets. President Obama is suggesting things will be back on track in a year or so, which won’t do it in my opinion — although his estimate seems a tad optimistic.
On a related note, what does this recession do for more expensive fads such as shopping organic — which shouldn’t be a fad, really, but still is at this point — that were just gaining steam? If people need or want to save money, buying generic peanut butter is a whole lot cheaper than organic, freshly ground from Whole Foods. I personally don’t want to see the organic movement lose ground; it replaces an unsustainable, mass-producing, preservative laden food monster than should have been banished decades ago. But it might.
I’ve read The Curator since it’s inception. It contains some good observations on American culture. My only complaint is that you can’t make comments on the posts of what is essentially a blog.
Image from Post Secret.
IAM Encounter: On conferences and NYC 2 March 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Disposable culture, Mass transit, Personal reflection.1 comment so far
This will be the first in a series of entries parsing my thoughts from the International Arts Movement’s Encounter 2009 conference.
On Conferences
I’ve attended a number of conferences and trade shows over the past six years — from two days to one week, a few hundred participants to 30,000 attendees. My wife and I agreed before I left for New York that paying for these kind of events is more or less a crapshoot. You don’t know if it will actually be of value until you get there. You pay to register, transport yourself to the venue, pay for hotel and food and hope for the best.
I’ve learned that such conferences, despite all of their planning with seminars, plenaries and exhibit halls, are best for organic networking. IAM Encounter was no different. Yes, I gleaned some good stuff from the seminars and even the plenaries — which, for the most part, exceeded my expectations — but the meat of the conference was in the people I met in the hallways and bookstore.
On New York City
I was actually a tad nervous prior to my first time in the Big Apple, for some irrational reason. The whole thing went off without a hitch, even though I ticked off the bus driver who drove me from the Newark Airport into the city. In my defense, he was in a bad mood before we left the airport.
That first experience interested me though, in that my uncle previously expressed how nice New Yorkers were in his opinion, at least compared to Chicago-ans. I was always skeptical of his assessment, mainly because people like he and I who haven’t lived in either of these cities get very limited exposure to a reasonable cross-section of the community. That said, most people in the Big Apple were personable; the exception seemed to be transit workers (even beyond the aforementioned bus driver).
The city is much dirtier than I expected. It was encased in a brownish-yellow dome of smog, so much so that I had to squint from the airplane in order to actually see the skyline as we flew into Newark. I was surprised at the volume of trash littering streets and subways, although with such a concentration of people in such a small area I shouldn’t have been.
I was In all likelihood comparing the actual city to my impressions of it in TV and film. I spent time in the Upper East Side, Midtown, Downtown, Chelsea and Tribeca, which barely scratches the surface of the metro but isn’t a cloistered experience wither. None of the neighborhoods looked like sets from Seinfeld or Friends that I could recall. Then I remembered hearing a number of years ago that a lot of movies set in New York City are actually filmed in Toronto, mainly because it’s similar in appearance and a lot cleaner.
