“I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library—everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.”
— Bob Dylan, CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE
Issue #211 of my newsletter, RESTRICTED FREQUENCY, went out late last night. Here's the web version.
It is the weekend, but I am working today; a couple design things to check off, and a fair amount of email to catch up on. I'd also like to squeeze in a review of Camus' THE STRANGER to throw at Ganzeer.Reviews hopefully together with a drawing or graphic of some kind. When I started Ganzeer.Reviews, I had this lofty idea of doing my own visual interpretation of the work being reviewed, but that's just more time which year after year proves to be my scarcest resource.
Hopefully enough time to exercise and tidy up some as well.
I was taken enough by the Ryue Nishizawa-designed Moriyama house enough to see what I can find out about the man who commissioned it. This what my feeble inquiry has turned up:
Yasuo Moriyama is a Japanese individual known for his unique lifestyle and his collaboration with architect Ryue Nishizawa. He is often referred to as an “urban hermit”.
I reckon Moriyama and I would get on quite well.
There's a film about him and his house, logging here for a future watch.
Sudden bout of insomnia.
Unusual for me, but my mind has been somewhat preoccupied with some personal life stuff. I've been thinking about being in Houston and whether or not that makes sense for me anymore, especially given that the original impetus for my being here at all was my ex-wife's job, prior to the whole ex bit. Presently, the only concrete thing keeping me here is my kid and my desire for us to remain in one another's lives. But aside from that, there really is very little about my being here that makes any sense. No job, no regular clients, and very little semblance of a personal network. Granted, the place I've set up here is a great “base of operations” to live and work from (and it took me a pretty long time to set up too), but I've always been of the conviction that your place of residence ought to be where you know the most people (community is everything)—especially once past a certain age—and that is a box that Houston does not check. And I highly doubt it will ever check given that half the people in this ludicrous sprawl of a “city” (mostly comprised of single-family homes) seems to be in the oil & gas field. I'm all for being a positive force of change in one's environment, but I'd be delusional to think that a city like Houston can be bent and shaped into the kind of city I'd like to live in, at least in my lifetime. An awful lot would have to change. While fighting an uphill battle is not something that is at all foreign to me, this would be one of the uphilliest battles imaginable, uphillier even than the take-down of dictators, believe it or not. They really love their big cars and freeways out here in ways I have seen nowhere else, and the whole car thing is a major antithesis to my very being. Has been for a long time, even way before reading Boyer's NO MORE FOSSILS (the reading of which only solidified my convictions).
A curse and a blessing of mine is a certain problem-solving mode my brain seems to enter whenever presented with an issue, and presently the problem-solving nodes seem to be very active without managing to accomplish any actual solving of problems. Hense, I imagine, the insomnia.
I'm noticing that many people my age or thereabouts seem to still be stuck on the want for marriage, which I find a little surprising. Especially given that many said people in my orbit happen to be in some kind of creative and/or intellectual field: painters, writers, printmakers, technologists, academics, and so forth. These are the kind of vocations that are typically associated with unconventional thinkers, but how unconventional can one's thinking really be if they are so keen on adopting an awfully conventional lifestyle choice? One instilled in us by family and society at large. One can't really claim to be a unique maverick, immune to social norms if they fall for one of the most widely spread, seldom-questioned social norms of all.
Of course I say this as someone who was once married himself, someone who liked to think of himself as a creative, unconventional thinker, but it was only the experience of marriage itself that helped me recognize its inherent flaws (still on great terms with my ex btw). The funny thing is, many people of a certain age are quick to accuse those less keen on marriage of not having grown-up yet, of being infected by some malicious “Peter Pan Syndrome”, and “not taking the relationship seriously”. But, if you look at older folk, the ones in their sixties who have been widowed or divorced and become interested in starting something new with someone else; they don't care about marriage. They don't typically care about their new partner's job or education, nor do they necessarily care a whole lot about sex, and they certainly don't care about having children. The only thing they care about at that point is companionship. Companionship with someone they get along with.
It is only towards our later years do we realize what is truly important in life. Perhaps what younger people can learn from this is the understanding that genuine companionship is the thing that matters most in a relationship at any stage. Everything else is secondary and beyond.
Knowing that very soon the work at hand will involve long stretches at the drawing table, I'm taking advantage of the ease of mobility of the scripting/thumbnail stage of TSG's grand finale by taking my work to bars and cafe-like places. An added, albeit unnecessary expense, but important for my sanity.
Still haven't solved how to fit the thing into 20ish pages, but I'm hoping I'll get there soon enough.
Generally speaking, there are 4 types of clients:
1) Very knowledgeable and know exactly what they want. 2) Very knowledgeable, but don't quite know what they want (happy to delegate). 3) Not knowledgeable, but know exactly what they want. 4) Not knowledgeable, and don't quite know what they want.
#1 and #2 are good to work with, although I'm partial to working with type #2. Type #4 can be okay to work with, sometimes, but #3 you need to stay as far away from as possible no matter what they try to lure you with. They do not delegate any of the decision-making and will insist on things you know are terrible.
I'm grateful for all my readers, but especially grateful to international readers. The high price point of each print issue of THE SOLAR GRID is not at all lost on me (an unfortunate consequence of the considerably limited print run we can muster), a price point that is even compounded when you factor international shipping into the equation. And I feel more grateful to those who, after making an initial order of the first couple issues, end up coming back for more.
I'm generally aware that sales of a thing aren't always an indication that you're doing something right. So many things often factor into why a thing sells well; market penetration, aggressive advertising, or straight up name recognition, or in most cases all three. But in our very small, very humble, very independent effort, sales are a very good indication, especially when direct to the reader and especially when the reader feels they must let you know how much they appreciate what you're doing.
From the bottom of my heart, I thank you.
