Yesterday, I walked along the High Line in Manhattan between 17th Street and 33rd Street. The former elevated railway has been reclaimed as a magnificent public park. The experience of strolling through a city unmolested by the vehicular traffic below is marvelous.
I’m starting a list of places I would one day like to visit. First on the list is St. Lucia, a tiny island in the Lesser Antilles. My friends Ian and Amy suggested I join them there in February. I can’t join them — by coincidence, I’ll be working close by in the Bahamas. But one day…
My mother Sue has written a fine obituary of her mother, my grandmother Kay, who passed away this Fall.
September 6, 2011 Kay Holper dozed off in the company of loved ones and about 9:55 PM, at the age of 96, took her last breath. She is survived by daughters, Sue and Georje Holper, grandson Morgan Stetler, and nieces Cindy Johnson and Nancy Johnson. Born in Illinois October 26, 1914 to George Charles Johnson and Ethel Belle Baker, Catherine Lorraine Johnson spent her childhood in Joliet, her married years 1937-1979 with Frank Holper in Chicago and its suburbs, and her solitary years in Garberville, CA.
At age four, wrapped in a blanket with her sister Marjorie, Catherine watched fireworks celebrating the winning of World War I. She later noted ironically that, despite “the war to end all wars,” she had lived most of her life during active wartime. Opposing all forms of violence, Kay consistently took the side of the innocent and vulnerable, be it disadvantaged groups or individuals she met personally. She spoke scathingly of those who misused their power and gave her own time, energy and financial resources to candidates and organizations defending civil liberties, civil rights, women’s freedom, and the natural environment.
Taking civic responsibility seriously, Kay was instrumental in organizing a union, integrating a church, making ”end racism by any means necessary” a YWCA priority, and mobilizing suburban women to support Martin Luther King’s Chicago open housing campaign. She served on boards of metropolitan Chicago YWCA, Rape Crisis Team and Women for Shelter in Eureka, and Redwoods Rural Health Center in Redway, CA.
Whatever Kay did, she took pains to do “the right way.” She earned A’s in school, hung pictures straight, matched colors to perfection, tailored her clothes to fit, dogged non-profit boards to function properly, and persisted at the computer until her personal writing was formatted to her liking. She was galled that a single speeding ticket marred her otherwise perfect driving record from age 13 into her 90s. At the end of her life Kay disposed of possessions and set her affairs in order as diligently as she had packed her motor home to embark on a solo adventure.
Invoking the scientific method, Kay challenged false authority and relished winning her point. At seven she experimented saying aloud, “I hate God,” to see if He would “strike her down dead” as she’d been warned. She henceforth confronted any authority whose position she considered wrong, be it elder sister, college professor, boss, doctor, Mayor Daley, or renowned nuclear physicist.
Kay loved adventure, naming Amelia Earhart her first hero. Growing up in an era when no women wore pants, Kate and her best friend bought farmer’s overalls and boyscout boots (with a knife pocket!) to wear exploring. Though she never became a forest ranger as she had dreamed, Kay hiked mountain trails, canoed and rafted various rivers, went down the Colorado in a wooden boat, and boasted walking ocean beaches on four continents. In her seventies and eighties she drove alone across the continent, up and down the Pacific coast and through Death Valley where she “had to build a road under the camper to get out.” When her legs gave out, she gathered together letters, journals, dreams, poems and polemics and embarked on the adventure of deeply knowing herself and her times; she entrusted to her friend Nancy Jean Keeler the compiled results.
Kay Holper was humanitarian, perfectionist, trouble-maker, adventurer. Her longtime friend Rick Klein reports, “People’s response hearing about Kay’s death is, ‘What a courageous, wonderful woman!’”
Congruent with Kay’s wish to give back to community and remember Heart of the Redwoods Community Hospice, her daughters are making a gift to that organization in her memory. Expect a celebration of Kay’s life when wisteria blooms in May or in early September around the anniversary of her death. For questions contact Sue at (209) 754-5518 or sueholper@bigvalley.net.
In todays’s New York Times, Errol Morris interviews Tink Thompson, an old family friend, on the nature of evidence.
From Michael Wolf’s brilliant essay which likens the crumbling Murdoch empire to a mafia family in decline…
It’s a superior and blind kind of loyalty. “Can you…?” Murdoch says to several executives visiting with him on his boat (this is the old boat—much smaller than the grander one he has now) when he receives a phone call that he needs to take in private. The executives jump in the water and swim around the boat until the call is done (and this story is not apocryphal).
Katrina Onstad, for The New York Times, profiles the fascinating Miranda July and her fellow filmmaking husband, Mike Mills. People seem to love or hate theme. Those who dislike them, Onstad explains, really hate the trappings of “Urban Bohemia”:
July has come to personify everything infuriating about the Etsy-shopping, Wes Anderson-quoting, McSweeney’s-reading, coastal-living category of upscale urban bohemia that flourished in the aughts.
And:
The urban bohemian irks precisely because his or her quirky individuality is just part of a different kind of uniformity, where the uniform happens to be a bushy beard or Zooey Deschanel bangs rather than country-club khakis. Twee fascinations with childhood innocence can mask an unwillingness to tackle life’s darker quandaries. Who wouldn’t be annoyed by a guy who, say, finds a cracked milk bottle, makes a film about it, then silk screens it on a T-shirt and names his band Milk Bottle? The stakes are low. The results are soon forgotten.
In fact, July’s work stays with you. It’s powerful art, grounded in the specificity of experience.
An underutilized, very efficient data visualization technique originally from Edward Tufte, explained with illustrations by Charlie Park. (Via John Gruber.)
In his New York Times blog David Pogue writes about about low tech solutions to the problem of keeping track of his Keynote slides when they are being run by someone else backstage rather than by him from his own laptop onstage. This bit made me smile…
Anyway, every now and then, though, this system goes off the tracks. A few months ago, I showed up for the technical setup and met the projection tech. “O.K., I’ll go ahead and take your laptop backstage,” he said. “We’ll be running the slides from there.”
“Oh,” I responded. It was a new talk. “I was sort of hoping to be able to control the slides from the podium myself.”
“You will,” he said. “I’m going to give you a clicker. It’s like a remote control. When you press the button, the slide advances.”
“Ah,” I said. “So it’s a USB transmitter?”
“Uh, no,” he said sheepishly. “The clicker just makes a light go on backstage. My buddy will advance the slide manually when he sees the light go on.”
I couldn’t believe that that was the arrangement he had in mind. So much for split-second timing. The bigger problem, though, was the slide previews and notes that I wouldn’t be able to see.
I’m often the “buddy” backstage advancing the slides manually. The solutions he mentions are ones we often use. It’s also possible to have the remote transmitters directly operate the presentation, which for a presenter like Mr. Pogue makes perfect sense.
Google’s new Twenty Things I Learned About the Internet is both a great illustrated reference of how the Internet works, and also a good example of how to build beautiful documents that live online. Delightfully illustrated by Christoph Nieman.
