alternative notes from mariposa meeting 2009-07-22

I took my own notes in my kitty notebook. They are my own personal write-whatever-i-want notes, not "meeting minutes." I hope you enjoy them!

1. notebook with pictures of cats on it
2. kittens
3. if you have anything to say about coffee, you can say it to me.
4. thomasin has an awesome hat
5. posterity
6. hear ourselves and be amazed
7. meeting vs. discussion
8. THIS MEETING NEEDS A TWITTER BACKSTREAM
9. only an asshole would listen to the mission statement, which "we know we all agree with," and then start arguing with its wording.
10. want some of those pillows on the other side of room.
11. questions are often answered in too much detail. keep mouth shut unless you mean it.
12. forgetting to sign in. errors in data entry. all must be corrected -- time.
13. upset feelings stress frustration <- more the issue than efficiency.
    
14. what would shinara be doing
    
15. i am actually listening.
    
16. conflicting goals of food vs. community
    
17. why do we wait for meeting to put out this data?
    
18. hire a mariposa blogger.
    
19. overhead of tracking -> changing character is big b/c what i hear is stress -> oh and also efficiency.
20. egalitarian.
21. co-op w/ customers vs. cut out ppl that just want to shop.
22. hard to come in at the most committed level.
23. bring paper to mariposa meetings.
24. the way you treat a store clerk vs. the way you treat another co-op member.
25. longer period of "one-time shopping"
26. forgot to mention communication is a huge part of this.
27. kittens.
28. people with less money don't necessarily have more time. time is worth more than money.
29. all kinds of workshifts we don't have: researching about food, writing press releases, canvassing, blogging
30. what if we just stop reminding people?

hidden city philadelphia

i really enjoyed both of the hidden city exhibits i went to this month. it is really too bad that the whole thing only went on for one month, given all the work that went into it. I'm sure putting the whole thing together was like trying to shoot 7 historical on-site films.

and the effect is similar... at least in the two I visited, which were both kind of experiential installation pieces. I never realized that an installation work is so much like being inside a movie instead of watching it.

and both exposed hidden historical aspects of philadelphia that i didn't know about before; bonus. I hope this idea spread to other cities.

the founder's hall exhibit was put together by this insane artist whose whole thing is about generating art out of data. So one thing he did was play banjo ditties based on the sound patterns of the spoken names of all the ships owned by the guy who started the school. the space was amazing, and what it did with any sound borne there was double amazing. pictures do not do it justice in the least; i link to some below.

the disston saw works exhibit was much more densely designed, a series of tableaus occupying different pockets of space (no doubt to echo the way the buildings are arranged on the factory property) and some looping visuals, one of which was projected on a screen made of taped together blueprints.

flickr has apparently managed to make it impossible to steal their bandwidth; click through to view some good pics.

"nothing but what is therein contained," Girard college, founder's hall:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisinphilly5448/3665328438/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisinphilly5448/3665329302/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisinphilly5448/3664529261/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisinphilly5448/3664528473/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/grrro00/3646182633/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/eskepe/3623765472/

"running true," disston saw works:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sokref1/3654960655/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sokref1/3654960771/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/libbyrosof/3647592049/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sokref1/3654960931/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sokref1/3655759896/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/libbyrosof/3648389360/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/libbyrosof/3648383930/

not a great start

i woke up at the end of a dream. i finally escaped the bee people because i ran very fast past the last one that was going to intercept me and then jumped to the top of the bus with some help from the chick i had a crush on. awake, i started thinking about a stupid thing i said yesterday. the bee people were not like giant bees. sometimes i say a thing that is mean and dumb and just not a thing i would have said at all if it had occurred to me to think about it first because it might hurt someone's feelings or just end up making me look like a bitch. the bee people were more like mushy human sacks full of bees and their features got wiggly and mushy when they were agitated. i don't think i can apologise for it because it was a small thing, but i do feel stupid and bad about it. then i couldn't get back to sleep even though i maybe would have felt better after a nap.

really good TED talk

love these http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTO_dZUvbJA

they are long but worth it.

saving for retirement

It's http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifkind of an adorable interest I picked up from my dad. This is a good radio show http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92213600

let's vote!

so dan won't let me buy a scale. let's vote on whether that is feminist or paternalistic!!

film as play: a new respect for sequels

So dan's little brother has been making some YouTube videos and to open with an aside it turns out he's a decent little actor! as evidenced by "kid get's excited about a spoon" which is also kind of hilarious politically.

anyway he and his friends made these two movies called Hammered guy 1 and Hammered guy 2. In Hammered guy 1, dan's brother holds the camera, sneaking around in the woods until he finds another kid hitting a tree with a stick and grunting. We hear the cameraman's voiceover telling us that the kid thinks the tree made his girlfriend break up with him or something... I don't totally understand the specifics, but then the Hammered guy sees the cameraman and a little hide-and-seek kind of game starts up, until cameraman is sure he's been spotted and runs through the woods blair-witch style, except with a lot more giggling. Hammered guy 2 starts out with our cameraman showing his "ripped out eye" and then goes straight to the kid beating the tree with the stick again. This time he sees our cameraman almost immediately, then the running and giggling.

Dan said, "ah, like every good sequel it is pretty much exactly the same as the original." at pretty much the same time that i was thinking ha, here are two kids playing a game that they like except they're filming it. so of course these thoughts crash together and now we have a theory of film as play. You make up a game, like house or school or Hammered guy. You have a character that you play every time, or maybe you trade around, and you don't do the exact same thing every time you play but you pretty much follow the same trajectory, adding to it or changing it a little bit, etc. I think pretty much all kids do this. That is why sequels aren't boring... we are used to repeating the same basic story with the same basic characters to elicit pretty much the same emotions. This could even be a partial definition of fun.

Hm, that may also be part of where TV comes from. I do really like seriality, both conceptually and actualized.

this blog post is the closest thing to a scholarly paper you will ever get out of me.

oops

so my birthday is tomorrow; i didn't really post warning like i usually do but i have a really good excuse; i forgot that i usually did that!

here is a weird/kind of hilarious dream i had a few weeks ago:

i was on a cruise vacation and it was pretty crowded. it was night and we were stopped at a beach. lots of people were sitting in the sand near the water, there were streetlights or something. i wanted to feel the water on my feet and i picked my way through the crowd. the beach was a steep hill and full of washed-up / crunchy seaweed. i wanted to get away from the crowd but it got steeper and dirtier the farther i went. Then a row of canoes appeared on the horizon and came toward us in a procession. they formed a semi-circle near the shore and indigenous folks greeted us and everyone clapped. they invited cruise passengers onto the canoes. they paddled off with them down the shore a little way, under the big overhanging balcony of the ship (this kind of looked like the kennedy center from below). Then they started clubbing the tourists over the head repeatedly with blunt instruments of some kind. people got scared and started rushing back to the ship. then there was a period of flash images... crowded hallways, rooms on the ship, crowds of people, but no sense of panic within me.

tapeworms i have known

patito has a tapeworm ewwwwwww. he is going to the vet tomorrow. hopefully they will kill it swiftly and with much finality. poor kitten. at least we get to call him funny names like "the host." but it makes me think of the mouse we had that was named tapeworm! he was a good mouse and very cute. it is too bad he had to die of a dramatic and frightening seizure before mike's very eyes.

it is difficult to get information about tapeworms without being subjected to lots of disgusting pictures. but let me tell you this! if you are wondering why there are weird little brown seeds on your cat's favorite blankie, they are not seeds my friend. they are segments. of tapeworm body. ew.

church bears revisited

Also sunshine made this set of drawings inspired by the church bear misunderstanding!! i kept meaning to post it and kept forgetting but now i have remembered. they are parodies of famous religious paintings. my favorite is st. peter, although the vomit one is also pretty compelling!!