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Tuesday, March 31, 2009

A Canadian Story - Part I

Those reading this on Facebook will recall that, on the day my Grandmother passed away recently, I said I might write down some of the stories she shared with me. I've been putting it off, perhaps because I fear not doing the stories justice, or that I'll forget parts, or tell them incorrectly. At the same time, part of me knows that if I don't write these, nobody else will, and these stories will be lost. Forever.

So, for better or for worse, here's my best shot. The stories are short, but, to me, tell of important points in our collective, Canadian, history.

My Grandmother, Mary Lowe (nee Chic) lived the life of a Prairie child, sibling, then wife through the early part of the 20th century and lived right through to the early part of the 21st century.

She was born, literally, in the bush near Selkirk, Manitoba in September of 1910. Her birth certificate reads November, however, that is simply when her father finally made it into Selkirk to register her birth. Her mother was 15 years old, and her father was not much older. Her parents were Ruthenian immigrants who'd arrived a few years earlier.

Theirs was a tough sort of existance. The home was a sod-roofed log structure common to the time and the place. Here's an image from the Manitoba Archives of a Ruthenian home c. 1910.

The 1916 special census of Manitoba, Saskachewan, and Alberta shows her family. As mother tongue they listed Ruthenian, as place of origin Austria (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and their religion as Greek Catholic. She would later be excommunicated from the church for marrying my Grandfather, a protestant. You'll find my Grandmother, Mary, on line 38 of this census document.

This story begins two years after that census, in 1918 when the Spanish Flu was making it's worldwide sweep, killing millions of people. This flu, unlike most influenzas targeted the young, not the old, and affected, primarly, those between 15 and 40. As a result, in farming communities, those most responsible for farming and all the duties that went with it, were those most likely to be stricken.


In Selkirk, that is precisely what happened. The Ruthenian community of the day would have been tightly knit, bound by language, culture, and ancestry. It is certain that Mary's family knew all the other families in the area - the 1916 documents show that everyone in the area was Ruthenian from Austria.


An so, it is this community of scrub bush and farmland carved out of the bush, that Mary, eight years old, found herself to be the oldest, healthy person when the flu arrived. Everyone else was sick.

This meant that this little eight year old would spend months in the early part of 1919 waking before the crack of dawn, to do all the chores on their farm -milk the cows, feed all the livestock, take care of her younger brothers and sisters, and parents.


It is hard for me to image an eight year old doing that. I don't think I could keep that up for long. And yet, she did it because there was no-one else left to do it. It simply needed to be done, and she was the one who had to do it.


Remarkably, no one in my family had aver heard this story until I began to retell it. And I was lucky to hear it at all. In fact, it was one of a few stories we heard from my Grandmother when Gail, my wife, and I spent some time with her in Austin, Manitoba, the summer of 2000 in between trips to and from Rankin Inlet, Nunavut. She was still in her little house in Austin (she and George - my Grandfather - had long since sold the farm near Carberry) and the early signs of Alzheimer's, while present, were not yet great enough for the family to send her to the MacGregor Nursing Home.

That visit was my first and last visit as an independent adult - free of parents and siblings myself. I'm glad we spent those few days with her, and it's those memories that I'll cherish. To close this story, here's a photo of my Grandmother, probably taken in the 1930's.

So, thanks for reading. In the coming days I'll post part II which continues with another story from the days of the flu pandemic.


Monday, March 30, 2009

Growing despite everything

One of the RSS feeds I follow (Lifehacker) listed, today, a conversation they’d had with Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame. I am a huge fan of Mythbusters and decided to give the interview a read.

As part of that interview, which described Adam’s workflow and methods, as well of that of the shows, it was listed that he’d done a TED talk, and there was a link on Lifehacker to that talk. So I watched it, and loved every minute of it. Adam was as excited through it as he is typically though a Mythbusters episode.


(You can go there directly too: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/488)

I won’t give away the talk, other that to say that you simply must watch it. But at the end, I was thinking, once again, about Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth. Written in 1998, I come back to it time and time again. I was introduced to it through a Time-Based Art course I was taking at NSCAD at around that same time. I’ve posted it before, and I’m posting it again. Here, take directly from Bruce Mau’s website (URL: http://www.brucemaudesign.com/manifesto.html) is the complete text.



Bruce Mau’s An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth


  1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

  2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

  3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

  4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

  5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

  6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

  7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

  8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

  9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

  10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

  11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.

  12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

  13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

  14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

  15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

  16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

  17. . Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.

  18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you're separated from the rest of the world.

  19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

  20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.

  21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

  22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

  23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.

  24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.

  25. Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

  26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

  27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."

  28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.

  29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

  30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between "creatives" and "suits" is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'

  31. Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.

  32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

  33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.

  34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea -- I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

  35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

  36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else ... but not words.

  37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

  38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

  39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces -- what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference -- the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

  40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

  41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I've become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

  42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

  43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can't be free agents if we’re not free.

Enjoy,

Darrin