One of the tenets of tae kwon do is “Indomitable Spirit” The practice of a martial art makes use of that spirit to sustain survival under life threatening circumstances. Indomitable spirit marks the small and almost forgotten community of Brainerd, Kansas on the American Great Plains. Offering an almost ethnographic example of indomitable spirit in the life of a community, Time, Place and Memory on the Prairie Plains looks at how a small settlement has sustained itself through waves of change. Although most of the town’s landmarks have long since been abandoned or demolished, they exist as powerfully in the …
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If you scroll back through this archive of architectural Eyesores of the Month you will find many of them are fronted by flags. The author, in his cynical wisdom, will say things like “Note the large American flag, planted in front of the mall to ward off criticism.” Goring the sacred cow is a necessary evil if we are to bore down to the truth behind the things that are slowly crushing us. Not just the soul-stealing architecture of suburbia, by the equally draining toil of going to work in places like hospitals, where doctors and nurses are expected to …
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One of the 2% of Bowen Islanders who blog just sent me an email with a really crisp late summer definition of blogging vs. traditional website maintenance: BLOGs are like ferry conversations – just happens, a website is like a barbecue – gotta organize it. Thanks to Markus Roemer at Stinky Cat.
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Fused glass button From a collection of glass buttons, this one stood out. Buttons as fastners, connectors, things that draw two other things together and hold them there echoed in the plug and wire, the implied connection, the plugging into power. Gertrude Stein wrote Tender Buttons, a collection of still life sketches, tiny portraits of objects, food and rooms, which critic Norman Weinstein called “a mirror for our nonsense, a dictionary for our daily distraction�.” Buttons as connectors, tender buttons as blogs.
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From an email from the Plexus Institute, comes this piece, an interview with Birute Regine and Roger Lewin on complexity in organizations: Complexity theorists argue that managers should allow creativity and efficiency to emerge naturally within organizations rather than imposing their own solutions on their employees. They can do this by setting some basic ground rules and then encouraging interactions or relationships among their employees so that solutions emerge from the bottom up. Managers can’t predict what the solutions will be. But just as a flock of birds can achieve more than a bird flying solo, it’s likely that the …