Over-eager adopters of newness and supposed goodness

23 August 2010 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

An article I read this morning made me think of something I posted about a month ago:

It never ceases to amaze me how we’re such eager adopters of new technology ideas that we don’t stop and consider the ramifications of what we adopt — like 90% of soybean farmers planting one genetically modified soybean seed.

I eat locally when I can because, in general, the food is better and I have a better idea of where it came from. There are people who’ve made eating locally a religion, though, apparently in part because they think it a more environmentally friendly lifestyle. Writing for the New York Times, Stephen Budiansky informs us that’s bogus in a little article called Math Lessons for Locavores. “The local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas,” he claims.

Budiansky enjoys eating from his own garden nine months out of the year, but he breaks the energy consumption of foods down for us into layman’s terms. Locavorism has apparently entered pharisaical levels of legalism, resulting in “all kinds of absurdities. For instance, it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley.”

According to Budiansky’s math, driving to the grocery store and then refrigerating your loot consume most of the energy that goes into our food production, even if we can brag about our Energy Star appliances. The diesel fuel to truck or train it across the country uses little energy by comparison.

Guess we have to find another way to boost our own self-esteem.

Filed under Buy local, Consumerism, Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Live car free, Mass production, Mass transit, Modern culture, Sustainable living

If these wabi-sabi walls could whisper . . .

22 August 2010 by pcNielsen 2 Comments

Yesterday I started painting the whitewashed walls in our little bungalow. The plaster walls are 70 years old so bumps and cracks and drips abound. When I helped remodel old houses in Arkansas we would have hand textured the walls to cover up all of the imperfections. This texturing technique was nice, a bit of a stuccoed appearance. It made the place look new on the inside.

Work with the painter I’ve been helping out this year has been slow the past couple weeks, so I’ve busied myself with other things as much as I’ve been able (other things that are somewhat financially advantageous in these lean times, things not necessarily sculpture related as I’d prefer). I spent some time in my dad’s shop, The Milestone Gallery, painting walls, signs and staining furniture.

Our Sand Trap walls with a Marissa Lee Swinghammer print hanging on the chimney chase

Dad has noticed that people even want their antique furniture to look and function like new. Doors that are warped or don’t close all the way, the crazed finish of a tabletop or patina from age on a cabinet can deter people from purchasing the unique objects he collects. “I thought that patina was something people liked,” he said.

Indeed, why do we as Americans so often crave the new? The walls in our little house do just fine at what they were built to do, and as I spread “Sand Trap” — a taupe-y tint with hints of rose or purple in different lights — over the scuffed up old walls I began to appreciate their textures. In fact, I’ve concluded that perfect walls are actually boring in comparison.

By saying this I’m not necessarily advocating any kind of trumped-up aging process, no intentional distressing of new walls or surfaces. When you build a new building you should do it properly, straight studs and square corners. The history of a place must come organically; our little Nebraska bungalow may have more of an overall patina than most places, having been a rental for most of its years according to our neighborhood historian.

And now for an uncomfortable question: Does our dislike for the appearance of age or imperfection in our buildings hearken back to the same aversion we have to age in our own person, or in our American culture of human beauty where maturity is not esteemed as it is in other cultures?

My uncle, whose home also boasts whispering plaster walls, took advantage of the patina by exaggerating it, showing it off. I haven’t seen how he’s done this yet, but the idea is intriguing to me. If I feel like I have the time, I’ll probably try something similar.

Filed under Aesthetics, Architecture, Beauty, Feminine aesthetics, Interior design, Modern culture

On Musical Form: Is one way better than another?

18 August 2010 by pcNielsen 1 Comment

The one session I didn’t go to at the Hutchmoot was the one dealing with song. I am a fan of music, but my back was not a fan of sitting any longer on that particular day.

Later the same day, however, I got the chance to ask one of the many musicians hanging around at the moot a question I’ve had for a while now:

Why does so much new music follow more or less the same form?

That form goes something like this: verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus. Years ago I noticed that my own musical interests were going a different direction from the norm. I grew up listening, well, to what my friends were listening too, and then migrated to loud “Christian music” because I wanted to be more holy, and then in college began to develop my own ear, so to speak, for music. You can see a little more about this progression in the Soundtrack of My Life.

The musician’s answer was interrupted by someone wanting to buy a CD, but the long and short of his response was that that I was out of the ordinary as an artist and thus making these kinds of observations, and that the form is used in order to make it easier for listeners to remember the songs. He made it pretty clear musicians, in general, in Nashville, want people to easily recall their music.

I did learn something in the brief little conversation, but I still have questions. Shouldn’t musicians be working imaginatively with musical form though as “artists?” Shouldn’t they be creating things that are memorable in new ways? The musician I talked to pointed out some successful diversion from the common popular form, but they still seemed like a simplistic solution in my untrained opinion.

Are a lot of musicians creating for the lowest common denominator?

I’m also trying to figure out if the idea of memorability enters into the mind and process of a visual artist, a painter or a sculptor. It never has for me that I recall, not in the way that the musician in Nashville suggested anyway. Of course, music has a wonderful enigmatic superpower that the other arts just don’t. Our minds are drawn to it in a way they are not necessarily drawn into processing colors on a canvas or words on a page.

An interesting musical contrast to the make-it-memorable-mentality might be Herva, who I wrote about last year in a post titled The importance, and trap, of artistic freedom. Herva wrote

I want to make music with my heart and my hands, to paint or write (or whatever) with my insides (intelligence, spirit, guts, soul) guiding my choices. Will anyone pay for it? I have no idea. Will anyone other than me think it’s good? No clue. But I have to allow myself not to care or worry about that right now. Every creator I’m a fan of creates things oozing in singularity, works that rise out of the sludge due to their originality, clarity, and vision.

This is the opposite end of the spectrum, it would seem, from the person I talked to in Tennessee. Is there a right kind of way to make music? Is there a correct way to paint a painting? Or should the questions be reworded, “Is there a better way to make music, or a painting?”

Filed under Art, Business of art, Modern culture

The switch to renewables requires a redesign of American life

12 August 2010 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

On the way down to Nashville for the Hutchmoot we stopped for lunch at a friend’s home near Kansas City. While there I began looking at a magazine called World, as I recall. I glanced at an article in the publication pointing at holes in the recent plans for renewable energy.

The long and short of what my skimming told me — I didn’t have time to finish the article — Renewable energy such as wind and solar won’t work for the cars we drive. No kidding! The article also, if I recall correctly, pointed out that these energy sources won’t even provide enough electricity, even if they are developed to the nth degree, to meet our current electricity needs.

I’ve made the point on the blog before, as I recall, that we need to revamp the culture and our environmental design in order to get to where most or all of our energy needs come from renewable sources. We can’t work from the assumption that we can maintain the cultural status quo while at the same time switching over to renewable sources of energy. Instead, we must become creative in all aspects of our lives. Developing more efficient lifestyles seems like common sense to me — regardless of where our energy is coming from (Per my cursory skim the magazine article suggested nuclear, but I’d still rather see other avenues developed further along with more intentionally efficient living.).

Cameraphone capture of part of a wind turbine, going down I-80 on our way home from Nashville.

On our way down to the Hutchmoot last week, my wife and I were introduced to Rodney and Sidney Wright. Rodney wrote The Hawkweed Passive Solar House Book. He showed us around their house — inserting at least one pun into every sentence — pointing to all of the attention paid to making the home more energy efficient. The energy bill for the home was less than $50 a month for the 1,200 square foot structure in Paducah, Kentucky (a walkable community, he pointed out). The couple paid good money for energy efficient appliances, used prefabricated wall panels with dense foam insulation to build with and of course designed the home with climate and geography in mind, in a passive solar fashion.

It’s going to take this kind of intentionality in our design of life, I believe, in order to make renewables work. Sure some things might cost more now and then, but Wright made a point of saying that even though their uber efficient Swedish microwave/convection oven might have cost them $3,000 they built the home for only $85,000 (doing some of the work themselves, such as painting) just four years ago.

Wright also pointed out that we used to do better at designing our dwellings and communities as they relate to their local environments. What will it take as a culture to forgo the more common and under-considered living spaces we create in the United States?

Filed under Architecture, Basis for designing well, Community planning, Environmental stewardship, Interior design, Living incarnationally, Modern culture, Sustainable living

CT on culture

31 July 2010 by pcNielsen 1 Comment

I drafted this a while ago and was reminded of it when I heard the term “culture war” on the news last week. What’s a culture war, I thought to myself why is there a culture war? Anyway, thought I’d finally post this response.

My wife pointed me to an article titled Faithful Presence on the Christianity Today website a couple months ago, more an interview of an author than an article, addressing American Christianity’s misdirected attempts at changing or redeeming culture.

The first half of the interview sounds a lot like conversations I’ve had over the past five plus years in places like the ArtsandFaith.com forums. Three pages into the article I found myself wondering why the interviewer, promising that the book referenced in the interview will change American Christianity, quoted a review suggesting in even stronger language that “Reading it will make many people indignant, but leave nobody indifferent.” So far I hadn’t read anything that I’d consider so groundbreaking, even if the ideas still lied on the outskirts of Christian thought.

I found myself arguing points that probably didn’t need to be argued.

“Both perspectives fail to recognize that culture is also infrastructure. Culture is constituted by very powerful institutions that operate on their own dynamics independent of individual will.”

But there are many different levels of culture, from National to very localized. Such localized cultures won’t be constituted by such institutions.

“Looking at our entertainment, politics, economics, media, and education, we are forced to conclude that the cultural influence of Christians is negligible.”

The point of many recent comments about changing culture is that many or most Christians haven’t necessarily been trying to change culture — indeed haven’t been a part of or even thought of being a part of culture — for decades, but instead have been living in self-created ghettos.

“By and large, American Christianity has produced a huge cultural economy, but it operates on the periphery of status rather than in the center. The importance of cultural capital is determined not by quantity but by quality.”

Which is something that Christian artists involved in this conversation have been saying for years now, that quality is more important than quantity.

In all likelihood the book in question, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World by James Davison Hunter, probably answers some of my nitpicking. I probably won’t get around to reading the book, sadly, as the stack of books I plan to read and already own is already too much for my own pace. So I’m commenting here on the interview and the ideas therein.

Halfway through the interview the direction did seem to change. The conversation turned to influence in culture and how certain small and elite groups of people end up steering an entire National culture. This wasn’t an entirely new idea to me either but it captured my interest. Without changing the elite of a culture, you won’t change the culture Hunter notes. “But didn’t the Vietnam War protests and the civil rights movement, both populist movements, force elites to change?” the interviewer asks. Hunter responds

“In the case of the anti-war movement, you must look at the demographic base of that protest. It was overwhelmingly white and upper-middle class, and disproportionately well-educated. This was not a protest that was organized by the working class or poor. In the case of the civil rights movement, it was black intellectuals in the church who mobilized people. The movement didn’t gain the kind of traction it needed to really change laws and public policy until white intellectuals and clergy from the North became involved.”

So how do we become elite then, or gain the ears of the elite, or can we change culture — assuming we want to — so that the elites don’t have so much sway (without creating a communist state)? Or do we change our strategy to work within the existing culture? Hunter suggests a “post-political” strategy:

“What would a post-political gesture look like in the pro-life movement? Borrowing an example from a friend, imagine ten thousand families signing a petition in Illinois that declares they will adopt a child of any ethnic background and physical capability. If they wanted to do something spectacular, they could go to city hall for a press conference, announcing that in the state of Illinois there are no unwanted children. That would be a public—but not political—act. Such an act leads with compassion rather than coercion.”

I’m definitely game for anything that calls itself post-political. First off it seems to undermine the presumed and unhealthy power of politics in our present day and age. I’ve talked in the past about how politics in and of itself isn’t something that can be used to change people.

The most interesting quote from the article needs an explanation, which, again, I’m assuming comes in the book.

“Culture is far more profound at the level of imagination than at the level of argument.”

Filed under Modern culture

Intentional Observation: Love the place you’re in

16 July 2010 by pcNielsen 4 Comments

Damaris over at the Internet Monk posted a wonderful little entry earlier this week about place after realizing that the monastic vows of Saint Benedict included not just poverty, chastity, and obedience, but also stability.

As I’ve mentioned numerous times here before, this kind of stability is something we Americans mostly don’t understand. In the past century or so we’ve been given the opportunity to be geographically mobile and a lot of us jump on that every chance we get. A few excerpts from Damaris’ post:

There is a virtue to staying where you are. There is a virtue to being where you are. Too many of us are never where we are. We live with our windows closed, shades drawn, televisions on. Our feet never feel the ground, and our skin never feels the air. While our bodies occupy a vague, in-between world, our minds are editing the past or worrying about the future . . .

This place where we are now is the only place we can meet God. God will never be in the imaginary places, the greener grass springing from our discontent, and neither will we.

The author then implores us to take a hard look at the place we’re in now. Be it high or low, noble or ignoble, and find beauty in it. There is beauty in it. “This place where we are now is the only place we can meet God. God will never be in the imaginary places, the greener grass springing from our discontent, and neither will we.”

Read the brief entry and contribute to the conversation via this link.

Filed under Christianity, Intentional observation, Living incarnationally, Modern culture, The contemplative life

Why I root for the little guy in an industrialized society

14 July 2010 by pcNielsen 1 Comment

I’ve been watching a few odds and ends in the Netflix instant watch queue this week [no] thanks to being too sick to climb up and down a ladder with a brush in hand. Just finished the documentary called Food, Inc.

The only way this really relates to this blog is that the documentary is about the industrialization of the food supply, and industrialization (or mass-production) is a recurring theme on The Aesthetic Elevator. It’s interesting to me mainly because I live largely on the opposite end of the spectrum, spending a lot of time creating one-of-a-kind objects, and because it never ceases to amaze me how we’re such eager adopters of new technology that we don’t stop and consider the ramifications of what we adopt — like 90% of soybean farmers planting one genetically modified soybean seed.

The film makes certain accusations against certain companies, and in the case of at least one company whose website I visited they attempted to refute those accusations. I’m generally very skeptical when it comes to such giant bureaucracies in the first place — they’ve largely earned the distrust I have for them.

One of the examples in Food, Inc. talks about chicken farming. Northwest Arkansas, our former stomping ground, is all about growing chickens. The parents of a friend had land with three or four chicken houses. They recently sold the place on account of the exact same complications described in Food, Inc. My friend who shared with me — about four years ago now — how the contracts with companies such as Tyson work could have been in the film. The farmers end up more like indentured servants than independent contractors.

Why should I accept the refutations of the companies in the film when I’ve seen first hand the claims of the film? I don’t want to be the kind of person that has a knee-jerk reaction to every bureaucracy, but they just keep shooting themselves in the foot.

Filed under Buy local, Environmental stewardship, Modern culture, Northwest Arkansas, Sustainable living

Let your squares be squares

13 July 2010 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

Julie Rozman, an architect-slash-ceramics blogger I’ve followed for a few years now, posted some images of her work for sale. She’s moving from Chicago to Urbana to study ceramics, and one of her sets of work reminded me of a post I’ve been thinking about for a while.

A long while, actually. Probably since I graduated from college almost ten years ago now.

Julie's sculpture does not forget it's roots.

In my architecture classes, in my graphic design classes and some of the time in my ceramics classes I watched aspiring artists and designers, myself included, forget the basics of design. We’d go after an assignment with passion, with dreams of being featured on the front cover of Architectural Digest, and forget that there are certain building blocks to every visual and spatial solution. They were overthinking the problem.

I suppose this is a symptom of the genius mentality, the drive for stardom usurping the desire to make useful and beautiful contributions to our surrounding environments.

Filed under Aesthetics, Affluenza, Architecture, Art, Art education, Artist as genius, Basis for designing well, Beauty, Ceramics, Design, Modern culture

Racism at the bank

10 July 2010 by pcNielsen 2 Comments

So I went to the bank again this afternoon. Ahead of me in line were people of all colors and ethnicity, again. The man directly in front of me was in what I presume to be in native garb from somewhere in North Africa, a simple white robe and a well crafted skull cap of sorts.

An American man got into line behind me. He had a young Latino next to him with whom he spoke fluent Spanish. Apparently the American, from what I could tell, was helping this man open or withdraw from a bank account.

Africans at a bank in the Midwest.

In this particular Wells Fargo branch there is a large antique scale. The American told the Latino to go see how much he weighed. As he went to discover that he weighed a slight 120 pounds, the man escorting him said to me under his breath, “Too many of them here. Too many of them too,” he continued while pointing to the African man in front of me. “They’re taking over.”

I had to restrain myself from replying to this blatant racism, though in my mind I formulated a response, something to the effect that “I appreciate the cultural diversity that’s come to the Midwest.” He’d just come in and I didn’t really know how much of a conversation I wanted to have in line at the bank, a conversation of that nature. So I said nothing and looked ahead.

As the line was fairly long and slow we did end up exchanging a few more words, mostly to discuss our weight, the pens in the bank which never write and how Fridays are always the busiest day to make a deposit. It became somewhat obvious this man was pretty unhappy in general, or at least liked to complain. I wondered if he was harboring some sort of bitterness that poured into all aspects of his life, including impatiently waiting in line at the bank.

I know this is a fairly common prejudicial sentiment, but what I don’t understand at all is how people get there. I grew up in a very, very Caucasian Midwestern community. There were a lot fewer Latin immigrants (legal or otherwise) then than now, and very few black people in the town.

The one black kid I remember in school, in my grade, was a bully. He was a leader and had a cadre of people around him that didn’t respect anyone else for the most part. My first life experiences with an African American were negative, and yet I’m somehow not harboring any ill feelings towards him or people of any color.

How is it then that so many Americans, perhaps particularly in the Midwest, find and foster such feelings towards people of other ethnicities? Is it thanks to media reports that talk about crime in the poorer neighborhoods where immigrants end up living? Did they have parents who instilled specific prejudices instead of compassion, respect and love for other people as themselves? Or did they have bad experiences like I did as a child that they couldn’t work through?

Last weekend my wife and I were thinking about patriotic American holidays and church. We were wondering if the patriotism often worked into Sunday morning services on or near certain holidays — which my wife and I don’t really appreciate — would be lost on someone not born in the United States. Other’s pointed out, though, that these people might have a greater appreciation for America and feel right as rain celebrating the country (in lieu of celebrating God, which is the problem we have with such services).

And this makes sense in most cases. So how do so many Americans end up so down on these people who so love their country? Isn’t it flattery for people to try and get into your country for the freedoms and opportunities it affords?

I’ve heard the arguments against immigration, so spare me your pat rhetoric in response to my deeper apolitical inquiry. And understand that I’m not condoning the illegal crossing of borders here. The man in question at the bank this afternoon should know better than to assume all or most immigrants are illegal. The Africans in line were almost certainly not illegal. They were probably refugees.

How can so many Americans have so little sense of their personal history? How can they forget so easily that this country is a country of immigrants (my sincere apologies to the Native Americans)? I’m grateful for my own family’s interest in their history. I’m glad that I’m regularly reminded by my parents and grandparents of our Danish, Swedish and German heritage. Apparently there’s a little bit of French in there too somewhere. Do other families not talk about their roots? Doesn’t someone in their clan have an affinity for genealogy?

My best guess as to why people find and foster this kind of hatred is that they’re scared. Scared of the reported crime, whether or not it’s an accurate representation of the immigrant community as a whole. Scared of losing jobs I suppose, even though we all know the immigrants generally take jobs a lot of us Americans aren’t willing to do anyway (though I suppose this economy may have changed that to a degree). Scared of the unknown.

Really I just don’t understand, as I said before. I’m not perfect. If we’re honest with ourselves we all know that we harbor some bias, some prejudice. But aren’t things like love for one’s neighbor still basic cultural values in America? Do we not hold to the truth that all men are created equal?

Filed under Central Nebraska, Entitlement, Grand Island, Intentional observation, Living incarnationally, Modern culture, Personal reflection

TV as a time-suck, and as a part of us

7 July 2010 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

I grew up with a very moderated television viewing schedule. In fact, the one small TV in our house was often relegated to our parent’s closet if they thought we were watching too much. Cable was out of the question. For the longest time we didn’t own a VCR; we rented one from the video store. As the kids got older this electronic banishment became less and less common, but in college I basically only saw one show, The Simpsons, in the dining hall at supper. I didn’t have a television in my room and really didn’t want one.

A few months after my wife and I got married we inherited the same little TV that occasionally hid out in mom and dad’s closet, along with a VCR that liked to eat tapes. We found that we liked to watch movies together, as so many people do. Since then we’ve upgraded to a relatively inexpensive flat panel television and a DVD player (although streaming from Hulu and Netflix via the Wii have been our preferred modes of video reception of late). We still like to watch movies together but also watch television. In fact, in the past 18 months we’ve watched a lot more television than film, mostly on DVDs. It’s much more pleasant sans the commercials, which probably doesn’t need to be said.

My wife, being female, can multitask. She knits or spins with a show on in the background. That’s harder for me to do, especially considering how much messier my chosen crafts generally are than hers. I’m usually more particular about what I watch than she is partly for this reason. I end up getting sucked into the programs, some that I don’t even like — like 24 — and that’s a giant waste of time when I could be sculpting or working on Scissortail instead. 24 is actually playing in the background as I type this entry.

There are some decent things about 24, such as the overall concept. But I don’t like the writing. 95% of the dialogue is just cheesy and often unaware of itself, and many of the characters are simply idiotic at times. The show also suffers from redundancy. Subsequent seasons are basically the same plot rehashed. A lot of shows grow old before they need to after finding a formula that works, that keeps viewers and advertisers coming back. The art, the imagination that drove the original idea, seizes up in light of the almighty dollar.

Image from Wikipedia

So why do I watch? My best guess is that it has something to do with the innate importance of story in our lives as humans. This is something that I’m just beginning to realize thanks in large part to my wife, who manages to read about 85 books a year. I barely get through five, and most of them are nonfiction.

TV, and therein story, can be more than entertainment. In my own life Bones is a good example of this. The wife began watching this show on a recommendation, as I recall, and it took me a while to get into it. The gruesome representations of human remains stuck in my head, unpleasantly, and I grew tired of the psychopaths. The show is very good though, and I’ve stuck with it. The characters are wonderful, as is the interplay between them — particularly between Booth and Bones. The dialogue is sharp and witty. And most interestingly I’ve become desensitized to the images of decomposing flesh.

Of course, such is commonly considered one of the evils of television. We see murders, we see violence and our observation presumably devalues human life. We’ll begin to emulate the actions of the characters as we continue to follow their stories.

We’ll all be emulating the corpses portrayed on Bones in some way or another (though hopefully not as murder victims dumped down a sewer drain) at some point, barring a present rapture or cremation. Or mummification, but that’s beside the point. Death is reality. Bones helped bring our human mortality to light in my life, at least in part. I’ve never been to a funeral for a person I knew, which for a person of my age seems out of the ordinary — though something to be thankful for as well — at least to me. So the reality of our finite time on Earth is a lesson I’ve had to come by through other means. In this case, through story.

What I’m wondering at the moment is this: How can we balance listening to other people’s stories, written in books or as a television series, with making or living out our own stories?

In a month we’ll be in Nashville for the Hutchmoot. The thrust of the moot will the importance of stories (from what I can tell anyway; I’m not sure there’s actually a theme). From the moot’s website:

We want you to come and enjoy a weekend of music and conversation about the stories all around us in song, film, books — and most importantly the story being told through our lives; our own story — what it means to get to the holy hidden heart of it, how to tell a better story with the days we’re given, and how our stories intersect each other’s and connect to the Great Story.

I’m grateful for the written word, for oral traditions and I’m grateful for photographic media (including video) as well. I’m glad I’m able to be a part of other people’s stories and learn from their experiences. However, at times I worry we neglect our own stories in favor of other’s.

I’m trying to figure out how to keep that from happening in my own life, how to find a balance.

Filed under Living incarnationally, Modern culture, Personal reflection, The contemplative life

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