RIP, Steve Jobs

here in Silicon Valley, the news of Steve Jobs's passing hit us all like an earthquake. ripples and jolts of shock and dismay. the news of his death coming only a few weeks after the shock of his resignation as CEO, due to his ailing health.

i know very little of what Steve Jobs was like as a man, but i know he changed our world and the way we lived in it with the power of his ideas. there are traces of his influence all around us, whether we like it or not, and his presence in so many aspects of our modern world make it impossible to not feel impacted by the fact that even such a brilliant and valuable man did not receive the care he needed to overcome cancer. with all that Jobs and his team were able to do and accomplish with him at the helm, it's viciously cruel that he would die so young (only 56) from cancer. whether you're a Mac or PC, it's terribly sad.

just think: as the news is breaking, thousands upon thousands of internet users are taking to their smart phones, their iPads, their Macs (and all the derivative devices thereof), and tweeting, video conferencing, posting to facebook, blogging, etc. all of those actions were touched, influenced, and forever changed by this man and his ideas.

RIP, Steve. and thanks for everything.

Steve Jobs, "How to live before you die."

the rising

who wants to form a Bruce cover band with me? name ideas:

1) Springscenesters...

2) Spring(steen) It On...

3) Full Springsteen Ahead

more to come.

am i taking this too far? probably.

per aspera ad astra

i decided today that if i ever get a tattoo i'd want it to be of the phrase per aspera ad astra - a Latin phrase meaning "from hardships to the stars." there are so many beautiful reasons i would want this on my body, that i'm tempted to rescind my prejudice that tattoos are tacky and have it inked into my inner arm.

first, i'd like to think that when i die, i'll be borne into the stars. and the idea of my body bearing this phrase, this philosophy, through life until death is exactly what i want my tattoo to be, a comment on im/permanence.

furthermore, this phrase was one of a few audio messages selected to be cast off into space aboard the Voyager, to represent peaceful intentions from humanity. this message was encoded into morse code and recorded on the Voyager Golden Record, along with samples of music, greetings in 55 different languages, animal and nature sounds, and a meditative message from Carl Sagan's wife.

i've never been terribly interested in astronomy nor fascinated with the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life. and yet, i find myself regretting the lack of this kind of fantasy and curiosity in our modern collective imagination. it seems my generation was the last to experience the height of the american space program, and current youth are perhaps untouched by the influence of these ideas and the accompanying sense of infinite exploration, as well as unquantifiable humility in the impossibility of ever being certain in the great big galactic scope of things.

i think that humility, that unknowingness, accompanies a healthy sense of imagination that in turn keeps people from being too ... material in their living. what i feel like we have now is lots of kids growing up and becoming bankers and not enough dreaming of being astronauts.

today's Voyager research (i got lost in a research loop on wikipedia today that started with me trying to sort out my tracklisting for the Dark Was The Night compilation, which led me to read about Blind Willie Johnson and his wailing gospel-blues slide guitar and how it was included as an example of loneliness on the Voyager record to be, potentially, discovered by future extraterrestrial lifeforms) also led me to consider the absurd task of writing and communicating messages to infinite space. in the Voyager capsule, Carl Sagan et al. included a letter from then-president Jimmy Carter:

We cast this message into the cosmos... Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.

i think it's somewhat indicative of the zeitgeist of the 1970s that our president took time out of his schedule to write a letter to the cosmos. imagine what that conversation must have been like, "uh, hey jimmy, we want you to write a letter to the future. to be read by aliens. state our intent as a galaxy. btw, humanity may be completely gone by the time this is picked up by anyone. kthxbye." but that's what i'm talking about, you know? we're missing a little galactic humility and imagination in our present-day thinking.

what goes around...

a clever anti-war campaign in nyc.


[via]

heyo!

i just ordered $100 worth of crafts supplies!

1 guillotine (for cutting paper)
2 sets of colored pencils
and 2 books by Neil Postman (incl. Amusing Ourselves To Death)

how does the last relate to crafting, you ask? b/c i associate creating things with my hands with being a radical member of society and being an activist and being in college, and reading any critique of our teevee-saturated culture will, without fail, make me feel like all of those things again, and so, is rocket fuel for radical crafting!

on my projects list:
embossed bird mobiles, pictures of animals with hipster accoutrements, and shirt pocket-sized sketch books (handbound, of course!)

but in other, sad grad-school related news, i have yet to start my lit review that is due in 2 hours. ah well. hoping it flows smooth and sweet like melted buttah. (i'm reviewing the literature on no child left behind. should be plenty to pull from, should be easy to mind meld.)

YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO. (i'd be happy to make something by request, just drop me a line!)
-stef

here i dreamt i was an architect

spending the majority of your day among people half your age and size is an unnatural way of being. this is why our modern educational system is plagued with problems. Freire and Dewey and others have all touched on it before, but now, after 2 years of public school teaching, i'm beginning to fully understand what they mean.

seriously, think about how often you naturally or willfully come into contact with more than 3 or 4 children at a time. it typically doesn't happen because, except for at school, human children don't travel in packs. (unless, of course, they are "wilding".)

thus, i propose we do away with the education system as we know it, and revive apprenticeship! every adult in America should volunteer to adopt 2-3 children/young adults to mentor and guide into adulthood. this would more evenly distribute the adult-child interactions among the population, reduce crime, increase self-esteem among the younger species, increase general feelings of good-doingness, boost humanity's morale, in addition to solving the problems with education. that's like, a whole flock of birds with one giant boulder!

... and i once dreamt of being the next big Secretary of Education...

-stephan!e

the future

in the future, we won't travel by plane, or automobile, or even hovercraft, as the movies might suggest.

no, the real way of the future will be thru miniaturization. we will make machines that can shrink us down, to pocket size, and we will mail ourselves in envelopes, padded with bubble wrap (for protection as well as pass-time – we will prepare ourselves with plastic cocktail sabers and pop bubble wrap in transit). this will be the only way to travel.

upon arrival, we will slice thru our deflated receptacles, emerging into the lap or onto the palm of friends/family. hello!

this will also be the way of sending greetings by post. no more tacky recordable cards, no awkward scrawled messages. our grateful recipients will be able to hear our sentiments from our mouths, and our hearts.

and to return us to our original state, our friends and family will merely have to place us in a tub of warm water, where we will gradually grow to full size overnight.

this will be the way of the future.

-stef

"in" love

i'd like to have a conversation with the ppl who put words to the feeling "falling in love."

i'd like to know what they were thinking. i'd like to know if this strange consuming empty feeling – this gripping helplessness and vulnerability, this confusion – is what they'd imagined for people in such a state. or, am i getting it all wrong? is this really "stress-induced fever"? "vertigo"? or perhaps "stomach flu"? maybe i need my appendix removed?

did they know that they were articulating a feeling very different from simply "loving someone"? it scares me because there's a preposition: "in" – i'm inside it(?!) – i've fallen – "fallen in" – was there a trip wire i didn't see? was this the result of some trickery, some carelessness on my part? must i be hurt at the end? or is there a mattress i can rest my head on at the bottom of this tunnel? maybe a trampoline?

and is there a way out?

the heart stops beating

i'm thinking my irregular heartbeats are a physiological manifestation of heartbreak. i exercised today, my heart is not getting any stronger.

"Every time you stop loving someone, your heart loses some of its blush. It vanishes. It's cancelled. & you wonder which of your feelings you'll no longer have the capacity to feel again. How much less am I, today, than I was yesterday?" - from here.

---

i think i'm going to build (or dig, rather) a spooning hole. yeah, that way when i say "i just wanna crawl in a hole..." i can actually follow thru. "say what you mean," you know? think of it as a watering hole, but for spooning. people need a daily dosage of spooning to stay healthy, i think. and this is the perfect way to ensure your daily quotient.

i'm imagining a large pod-like structure. doesn't have to be underground... something lined with soft, nice, gentle things. maybe childhood security blankets. worn out sweatshirts. soft alpaca mittens. purring cats and sleeping bear cubs. and lots of friends and cups of hot tea.

i wish i could crawl into a hole right now.
-stef
10.11.07

re-presenting radical student politix

i've been playing with the idea of "re-presentation" [sic]

that is, to represent some things via media is quite different from the things themselves, and so, re-presented. and so, reimagined. the representation is itself a new thing.

this came out of an earlier idea to collaboratively write a book. tho now i am thinking that rather than getting submissions and compiling the disparate pieces, a group of us (student activists) could conduct the writing as an action in itself. we "speak" (rather than write) the book.

so check this out:

a book.
(books are symbols of power, crystallized knowledge, authority. how to remove the weight of the text? (or, how to co-opt it?))

self-published by SFS
(1. challenges the top-down structure of the media industry that mirrors the hierarchies of knowledge found in the educational system. 2. challenges notion of author/reader, performer/audience, producer/consumer. 3. active, rather than passive, participation in the generation of media, dissemination of knowledge)

containing conversations
(VOICE! one thing i've noticed in my study of critical pedagogy is the concentration on theory and lack of PRACTICE. education is fundamentally social. education for the betterment of our society and its citizens - what could be more social?)

about our activism
("our." "we" "us" "you" "me". first person plural. positions my self, our selves IN the discourse. there's no distance between me (the author) and you (the reader). i am part of the problem and solution, just as you are. draws reader in...)

there are so many books out there written about student activism and disengagement of our youth, but they're all by academics and theorists, not by actual students themselves.

furthermore, participatory media builds community and can empower students with a feeling of agency if they are involved in the process.

i dunno, but i'm thinking this could become a pretty cool creative project portion of my thesis...
-stephan!e