Technology Graveyard

Our PC completely died last month, but it was behaving strangely and overheating dangerously for at least a year before that. Before we smashed the hard drive with a hammer and sent it to an e-waste facility, Iris removed some parts for future projects.

She took over my sewing room on Friday night and spent much of Saturday busily working in there. I walked in on Saturday night to see this art installation.


Of course, there is the "blue screen of death."  I am not happy that she emptied the blue color cartridge to print that out.  However, I do understand her point that there was no other way to achieve white print on a blue background.  Grrr.  .Must.  .bite.  .tongue. in the name of art.


I "harvest" Bad Dad's old, worn shirts for fabric and buttons.  She found the eyes for her voodoo doll from that button box.  She found the cotton fabric, left over from an unblogged recent sewing experiment, in the scrap bin.  Originally, she used my expensive steel sewing pins (for use with magnetic pin cushions) so I took them back and substituted cheaper pins that I don't care if I lose.

The mini-pumpkins materialized in our CSA box last week.  I like how she combined an organic and local pumpkin with toxic e-waste from a global supply chain.  I have to ask her to write an artist's statement of how she came up with the idea.  ;-)


Manual typewriters enjoy an allure amongst the young who have never used one in real life.  She infused it with equally exotic (to her) Dia de los Muertos imagery.


We have old floppies in the house, but she made this paper replica instead.


Enjoy the Flickr set of the rest. I'll add to it after we carve the big pumpkin and install the artwork outside.

* I decided NOT to crop the mess in the studio so you can see what my workspace really looks like.

Red Belt

It seemed like just yesterday when she asked if she could take after-school Tae Kwon Do lessons in the schoolyard of her Montessori kindergarten.  Click on the link to coo at the cuteness!


She says she's too old to be called cute any longer.  But, she's still taking Tae Kwon Do lessons with the same instructor, Anton Kasabov.  He doesn't believe in progressing kids through the "junior" belts like some TKD schools so that kids can brag about attaining black belts after 2-3 years.  His students earn the same belts as adults when they master the same standards as adults.

I tried to take a video of this kick so you could hear the kick.  But, the camera and lighting were not good enough to catch this high-speed kick.  Just imagine a very loud and solid THWAP!

A year ago, I watched as he taught her a new move where they run towards a punching bag, kick it forwards, then spin around and kick it from behind with the other leg.  I thought that was an impossible thing to ask of her.  She couldn't do it without falling over.

Yet, the red belt students could do the move.  Some of them were even landing the second kick at the target area on the bag while spinning and not looking.  Fast forward a year, and she can do that, too.  It's a testament to the power of practice and training.

After class, he tied the red belt around her waist.  A fellow student is holding her blue belt with one black stripe.  Anton uses the same belt color system as the dojo he belongs to in Korea.  Her plan is to continue studying with him to earn a black stripe on the red belt (as two of her older classmates have already done) and then the black belt before college.

Anton estimates that about 90% of his beginning students are boys, but the majority of his advanced students are girls.  Where have we seen these lopsided statistics before?  He says most boys simply lose interest when they discover how much work and how long it takes to earn a black belt with him.  One HS-aged male student of Anton's earned a black belt this year, and he is one seriously focused kid (in many aspects of his life).  It's a good peer group.

This video, taken just before her 6th birthday party, always makes me smile.


Like many martial arts instructors in Los Angeles, her teacher also works as an actor.  Enjoy his demo reel.

Visual rhymes and other stuff

No one asked why I care so deeply about the possible sale of DIA's art collection, which I've never even seen in person. But I feel like it is important to explain what art is worth beyond price.

In high school, I visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) with an art teacher.  We didn't have enough time in the galleries for all the things I wanted to explore so I went back later on my own.

Museum gallery admissions can get prohibitively expensive so I shelled out for a student annual membership so I could stop by any time I like without incurring additional expense.  Pretty soon, the museum became a third place, a home away from home.

I was already aware of Henri Matisse and spent quite a bit of time standing and sitting in front of The Girl with the Green Eyes and comparing it to Woman in a Hat. In the days before "color correctors" were sold in drugstores, I had never thought about greenish undertones in skin before. Then I noticed it everywhere.

But the value of a permanent collection goes beyond big name artists. I would never have heard about Max Beckman if I hadn't seen Woman at her Toilette.

When I looked across the gallery, I saw Landscape, Cannes and recognized the arms in the palm tree trunks.

Even though I don't live in San Francisco any longer, I enjoy revisiting the permanent collection.  They are a part of my youth; they belong to me in a deeply personal way.  While walking and looking in those galleries, I honed an ability to .see.

I simply cannot stand by and let the children of Detroit be robbed of their patrimony.   A lifelong relationship to art is not easily valued on a spreadsheet.  But it has value and meaning.