Tag Archives ⇒ last

Listening: Hidden Brain episode 53, “Embrace the Chaos”

November 30, 2016
· Martin Kelley

From the NPR descrip­tion:

Many of us spend lots of time and ener­gy try­ing to get orga­nized. We Kon­Mari our clos­ets, we strive for inbox zero, we tell our kids to clean their rooms, and our politi­cians to clean up Wash­ing­ton. But Econ­o­mist Tim Har­ford says, maybe we should embrace the chaos. His new book is Messy: The Pow­er of Dis­or­der to Trans­form Our Lives.

gregorycityUh-oh, should we stop being so fussy about cleaned-up rooms. Just last night I spent 45 min­utes cajol­ing and threat­en­ing and beg­ging my five year old to clean an amaz­ing block city he had con­struct­ed in the liv­ing room. Curi­ous­ly, the link to the pod­cast was sent to me by my wife.

 

New from Neil Young

November 15, 2016
· Martin Kelley

And in all this crazi­ness I missed that Neil Young had just dropped a new tune on us.

And appar­ent­ly, this is just one of four new songs:

Famed rock­er Neil Young has played hun­dreds of towns and cities all over the world since start­ing his illus­tri­ous career in the ’60s, but last night marked his first per­for­mance in the beau­ti­ful moun­tain town of Tel­luride, Col­orado. Neil Young and Promise Of The Real treat­ed fans to a 21-song per­for­mance as part of their first of two con­sec­u­tive shows at Town Park in Tel­luride on Friday.

Seeing how it goes

November 12, 2016
· Martin Kelley

It seems a lot of con­ver­sa­tions I’m in these days, on social media and IRL revolve around how we should be respond­ing to Trump’s elec­tion. I know there’s a cer­tain dan­ger in being too deter­min­is­tic, but a lot of answers seem to match where indi­vid­u­als are in the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty scale. Some are coun­sel­ing patience: let’s see how it goes after the inau­gu­ra­tion. Maybe we don’t know the real Don­ald Trump.

Well, I think we do know the real Trump by now, but what I don’t think we know is the actu­al fla­vor of a Trump pres­i­den­cy. Have we ever seen a pres­i­dent elect who was so thin on actu­al pol­i­cy? Trump rode his lack of pol­i­cy expe­ri­ence to vic­to­ry, of course, cit­ing his inde­pen­dence from the peo­ple who gov­ern as one of his chief qual­i­fi­ca­tions. But it’s also his per­son­al­i­ty: on the cam­paign trail and in his famous 3am tweets from the toi­let he often con­tra­dict­ed himself.

He’s a man of high-concept ideas, not detailed pol­i­cy. This means the actu­al poli­cies – and the gov­er­nance we should and should­n’t wor­ry about – will depend dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly on the peo­ple he hires. Right now it seems like he’s trolling lob­by­ists and a hand­ful of neo­con dinosaurs that start­ed the Iraq War on forged doc­u­ments. He’s bring­ing the alli­ga­tors in to “drain the swamp” and in the last 24 hours they’ve already sig­naled that a lot of key cam­paign pledges are open for recon­sid­er­a­tion. How much we have to wor­ry – and just what we have to wor­ry about – will be clear­er as his team assembles.

Lighthouse Challenge 2016

October 17, 2016
· Martin Kelley

This week­end was the annu­al Light­house Chal­lenge of New Jer­sey, a two-day cel­e­bra­tion of shore­line sen­tinels dur­ing which every work­ing light­house is open and staffed by vol­un­teers. The tru­ly com­mit­ted dri­ve hun­dreds of miles over the two days to vis­it the eleven light­hous­es open to the pub­lic. Because of a scout­ing week­end for Theo, we just hit one on Sat­ur­day and three on Sun­day. But these are the last four for our lighthouse-obsessed son Fran­cis, who has been to the oth­ers over the course of the summer.

Francis declared the Twin Lights of Navesink to be his favorite of the weekend.
Fran­cis declared the Twin Lights of Navesink to be his favorite of the weekend.

Tinicum Rear Range Light

The fam­i­ly look­ing off in dif­fer­ent direc­tions, of course 
Fran­cis goes full nerd talk­ing about con­struc­tion dates with the light­house volunteers. 
The Tinicum light is closed because of some struc­tur­al bowing. 
The light­house is right in the mid­dle of a bunch of ball fields. A neigh­bor has a great snow cone stand, a tra­di­tion in the town going back to his child­hood at least. 
The area where the Tinicum Front Range light used to be is now a sliv­er pock­et park along the water­side. Pret­ty except sur­round­ed by refineries. 
Fran­cis at Tinicum Rear Range 

Sea Girt Lighthouse

The Sea Girt Light­hous­es is house with a light on top. 
The res­i­dence of the Sea Girt Light is incred­i­bly homey and cute. 
Climb­ing down from the light. 
The lights of the Sea Girt light 
Fran­cis lec­tures on the fres­nel lens. 
Mod­els of NJ’s light­house laid out on a map of the state. 

Twin Lights of Navesink

Some fam­i­ly (Gre­go­ry is behind Julie here) 
The giant 10 ton for­mer lens. 
Hap­py kid 
Sign for the lens. 
Beau­ti­ful work­man­ship on the bilding 
Detail from light well 
Look­ing through the win­dow of the south toward toward the north 
View from atop the light 
Grill met­al­work of the cage of the Twin Lights 
Theo look­ing less wise-guy than normal. 
Gre­go­ry tries the lock to the top of the south tower 
The Twin Lights of Navesink are up a high hill, part of the Pal­isades per­haps, giv­ing our kids a rare hill to roll down. 
Fran­cis looks out over the hill top. 
The Twin Lights of Navesink 

Sandy Hook Light

The Sandy Hook Light­house is on a for­mer base. 
The light­house house hous­es the museum. 
The Sandy Hook is the old­est con­tin­u­ous light in the coun­try, pre­dat­ing the coun­try itself. 
The orig­i­nal light­house was just the out­er mor­tar. Lat­er brick helped shore it up 
Details of bricks 
The set­ting sun com­ing into the Sandy Hook Light 
Detail of stairwell. 
Fran­cis looks across the view 
Two 1000 watt bulbs shine out over 19 miles because of the fres­nel lens. 
There’s a lot of cool old struc­tures up on Sandy Hook. 
Gre­go­ry unsuc­cess­ful­ly tries the heavy door. 
Sandy Hook has pret­ty dunes 
NYC sky­line from an obser­va­tion deck on Sandy Hook. 
Sun set­ting, Gre­go­ry makes a mini sand­cas­tle before we leave North Jersey. 

Mothers Day 2016 L‑O-V‑E

May 9, 2016
· Martin Kelley

DIY Mother's Day present kid handprint.

Last year, the kids and I made a framed hand­print collage-like present for Julie and Moth­ers Day (right). This year I fol­lowed it up with a folksy pho­to of each of the kids hold­ing up hand-drawn let­ters spelling out “LOVE.” This was inspired by this 2009 post on a blog called The Inad­ver­tent Farmer.

The first step was get­ting pic­tures of each kid with a let­ter. It was­n’t too bad as I just had to take enough to get each one look­ing cute.

Here are the four pictures that went into this year's frame. As you can see, it is very basic, just paper and marker. Writing the letters freeform gives it a folksy, personalized charm.

A trick­i­er task was find­ing a frame to dis­play four pic­tures. It took the third store before I lucked out. Because of the tim­ing, I had actu­al­ly print­ed the pic­tures before I had the frame and so had fin­gers crossed that the size would work.

Mothers Day T-minus-one: Three of the kids helped me frame the pictures the night before.

Framed Mothers Day presents two years running!

Once made, the absolute hard­est was get­ting a group shot of the kids with Julie hold­ing it!

Proud Mama with her Mothers Day present from the kids.

What do you love about your Quaker space?

April 29, 2016
· Martin Kelley

We’re extend­ing the dead­line for the August issue on Quak­er Spaces. We’ve got  some real­ly inter­est arti­cles com­ing in – espe­cial­ly geeky things in archi­tec­ture and the the­ol­o­gy of our clas­sic meetinghouses.

So far our prospec­tive pieces are  weight­ed toward East Coast and clas­sic meet­ing­house archi­tec­ture. I’d love to see pieces on non-traditional wor­ship spaces. I know there new­ly purpose-built meet­ing­hous­es, adap­ta­tions of pre-existing struc­tures, and new takes on the Quak­er impulse to not be churchy. And wor­ship is where we’re gath­ered, not nec­es­sar­i­ly where we’re mort­gaged: tell us about your the rent­ed library room, the chairs set up on the beach, the room in the prison wor­ship group…

Sub­mis­sion guide­lines are at friend​sjour​nal​.org/​s​u​b​m​i​s​s​i​ons. The new dead­line is Mon­day, May 16. My last post about this issue is here.

blank

Remembering it’s an honor just to be read

March 10, 2016
· Martin Kelley

Strange moment this morn­ing when I checked my blog stats and real­ized that I get a fair amount of traf­fic for a movie review I wrote last year. I was check­ing the stats to see if any of the Quaker-related search terms might give clues for future con­tent on Friends Jour­nal or Quak­er­S­peak and for that pur­pose the review’s pop­u­lar­i­ty with Google (and read­ers) isn’t that useful.

But this blog is just my life spun out. I don’t aim for key­words and I don’t want to dom­i­nate a thought-sphere. If I see a movie and jot down some impres­sions that attract a small audi­ence, then my blog post is a suc­cess. A dozen or so ran­dom peo­ple a month Google in to spend a cou­ple of min­utes read­ing my thoughts on a fifty-year-old movie. That’s cool. That’s enough. In all the talk of tar­get­ing and SEO we some­times for­get that it’s an hon­or to sim­ply be read.

The oth­er night stayed up late to cud­dled with my wife and watch good-natured but flawed Rom-Com. I read some reviews on IMDB and pon­dered the clich­es in the show­er the next morn­ing. Boil­ing these impres­sions down into 500 words on a train com­mute would be easy enough. I should do it more.

Michelle Alexander on the black vote, the Clinton brand — and of course, mass incarceration

February 10, 2016
· Martin Kelley

Michelle Alexan­der on the black vote, the Clin­ton brand — and of course, mass incar­cer­a­tion.

Alexan­der is one of the lead­ing voic­es on the rise of a lev­el of mass incar­cer­a­tion in this coun­try in the last 25 years. It’s hard to over­state just how dev­as­tat­ing our prison-industrial com­plex has become. The huge num­bers of African Amer­i­can men in jails for non­vi­o­lent crimes begs com­par­i­son to the dark­est days of slav­ery. Bill Clin­ton esca­lat­ed mass incar­cer­a­tion and the “War on Drugs” as a way to prove his polit­i­cal toughness.

The love affair between black folks and the Clin­tons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clin­ton was run­ning for pres­i­dent. He threw on some shades and played the sax­o­phone on The Arse­nio Hall Show. It seems sil­ly in ret­ro­spect, but many of us fell for that. At a time when a pop­u­lar slo­gan was “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t under­stand,” Bill Clin­ton seemed to get us. When Toni Mor­ri­son dubbed him our first black pres­i­dent, we nod­ded our heads. We had our boy in the White House. Or at least we thought we did.

We tend to remem­ber the Clin­ton Admin­is­tra­tion through rose-colored glass­es but there were a lot of WTF moments we’ve for­got­ten – three strikes, the sanc­tions against Iraqi civil­ians, the way cruise mis­sile strikes seemed to mag­i­cal­ly coin­cide with admin­is­tra­tion scan­dals, Bil­l’s ser­i­al phi­lan­der­ing and Hillary’s slut-shaming respons­es. On paper, HRC is the most qual­i­fied can­di­date to ever run for the pres­i­den­cy. But if she’s run­ning on the Clin­ton brand, she needs to explain how her polit­i­cal choic­es dif­fer from her hus­band’s 20 years ago.