Bad Ass Forevermore

After a brief battle with cancer, Sarah left us. A link to her obit and  guestbook which you may sign at below: 

http://www.legacy.com/ReadingEagle/Obituaries.asp?Page=Notice&PersonID=103843829

What is Color? (Incomplete post)

So, what is color anyway?

I have to break the answer into two parts. Perception and Energy.

Perception

When white light hits and object, the pigments on the object’s surface absorb all of the light except for specific wavelenghts which are reflected back to the observers eye. Depending on the sensitivity of the cones in the observer’s eye, the color of the object is transmitted to the brain.  Light → Object → Observer each part having variables that effect how any color is percieved. 

Light Variables

1. Type: Sun light, Incandesant, Fluorescent

Sarah never had time to finish this draft, but I wanted to post it anyway, just because I know she woudl have wanted to share it someday…

Never to be Boring

Sarah lived color. Her passion and energy exhuded hues not normally seen in human auras.

Sarah was vibrant, fun-loving, intelligent and beautiful. For those of us who knew her, we mill miss her.

May she rest in peace. 2/17/08 3:15am 

A Battle Lost

Sarah lost a three month long battle with cancer on February 17th, 2008.

She was 44 years old, energetic, vibrant, and brave. She will be missed.

Design History – Golden Arches

Did you know that McDonald’s® well know golden arches are a direct descendant of the American atomic age style?

America was a great place to be in the decade after WWII.   A low population coupled with a boom in manufacturing created a solid middle class with money to spend. New cars were driven out of the cities on new roads across the nation right into a new way of life called suburbia. And suburbia demanded a break from the past; suburbia wanted modern.

The Great Depression and both World Wars were over, people were now looking into a bright future. New machines that were colorful, sleek and time-saving took over homes and businesses giving rise to leisure time. Outrageous design came into play to draw the attention of the consumer who now had time to consider aesthetics over basic function. Some of the designs drew from a new frontier dawning on the horizon – outer space and the Atomic Age.

The Atomic Age fueled the imagination of a country which was now very mobile. Roadside eating establishments in California took to the look of the Atomic Age with gusto trying to lure customers with space age design. Organic, free-form curves and scientific linear angles merged into a stylized visual lexicon. 

The McDonald brothers had perfected the process of assembly line burger production in their original space age San Bernadino location. Their first franchise in Phoenix, Arizona featured an equally eye catching design where the arches were integrated into the building. The now famous arches were penciled into the building design by the McDonald brothers, against the architect’s wishes, possibly as a nod the the Googie style that was all the rage in California.

Green

Green used to be a color; now it is a movement. The design trades are falling over themselves to use the latest green products with the smallest carbon footprint. Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. All good stuff to finally pull environmental awareness into the mainstream.  Side note: The first Green Party, read more here.

Not very long ago, I lived in a very rural location in a fifty year old trailer with a well and a septic system on an acre plot boarded by a stream and a tree farm. The eight years I spent living there put me in touch with the rhythm of the seasons and the utter dichotomy of the ferocity and fragility of the environment. Waiting out a draught when dependant on a well is scary. Shoveling my way to civilization after a blizzard was an epic cardio workout. High winds wiping out a power line would shut down my heat and water pump. My neighbor/landlords taught me how to conserve and recycle just about everything because everything is finite. 

Presently I live in a sub-destruction. [My term for hastily built developments where the land has been raped so people can live in the "country". I moved here because this is where my heart found my mate.]  Here, lights burn 24/7 outside of garages, lawns gets chemical baths, the top soil has been stripped and sold by the builder,  huge piles of mulch surround saplings depriving them of water, refrigerator doors hang open while all of the groceries are put away, and the kitchen tap runs while the phone is answered. Am I exaggerating? NO! Unfortunately, I am not. And I have learned that this is not the place to try to be helpful by gently pointing out that the grass does not need to be watered when it hasn’t rained for a month. “Well, I can’t have it turn brown!”

What I have done to bring a bit of the rural life to my new “country home” is to plant a veggie garden in my back yard that I plan to expand every season. I hired my former landlords to remove the saplings in the front yard and plant healthy crab-apple trees. The saplings have found a new home back on the farm. Countless cubic yards of good topsoil have been spread by my shoulder and leg power to make a good home to flowers, shrubs and grass. Yes, I shoveled and spread topsoil that I mixed with manure by the wheelbarrow load across the front lawn and grass-seeded it as soon as the winter broke. And I watered it until the grass rooted, I’ll never need to mass water it again. When the dandelions tried to take over my new lawn, I used a weeding fork and pulled them out, one-by-one and put them in the wooded area to decompose. Teaching by example, not by lecture, seems to be more effective. By mid-summer I had become the go-to lawn question girl.

Green is a great color and, hopefully, a great movement that will survive beyond its current “hot” status. 

Good Design, Good Use pt1

The Home Hero™

Good design = Use

Ugly and frightening have been removed in the design of the new Home Hero™ line of products designed for Home Depot’s® new venture with the Arnell Group to create ORANGE WORKS. The mission of ORANGE WORKS is to work with vendors to redesign products that work into products that meet the public’s growing awareness of design aesthetic thereby encouraging use.

Form following function is not new to designers. The Home Hero™ fire extinguisher is a wonderful example of the function of the product being well thought through. A fire extinguisher is meant to be placed somewhere that it can be quickly grabbed in the event of a fire. Let’s face it, even if the greatest interior designers, alive or dead, had to incorporate the standard issue fire extinguisher into a contemporary room design they would put in the closet like the rest of us mortals do. It is ugly, it is red, and it is frightening. It also has too many moving parts that are not intuitive that make if difficult to use in an emergency situation.

The Home Hero™ fire extinguisher is an elegant design solution encouraging its incorporation into any room in the home thus making the product more likely to meet its basic function – to put out a fire quickly.

I heartily applaud this use of good design. It is a great example of why design is not a superfluous extravagance to be overlooked. Design is a basic necessity to life.

Orange

Orange, famous for being the only word in the English language that had no other words to rhyme with, is now a rising star in the fickle world of color usage. Hyped with words like energizing, exciting and stimulating, the bastard child of the color family is enjoying its day in the sun. An interesting turn of events as orange has long been viewed as a low-rent color choice in design circles, mainly relegated to use in the food service industry and children’s toys.

Six weeks ago, my hair stylist, who owns the salon, showed me a layout in a spa magazine featuring an orange based interior design. I recognized the image as one from a recent design magazine ad for Harmonic Environments makers of indoor water falls. She wanted to know what I thought of the color and if it could work in one of her rooms. I told her that orange has been showing up in all of the design mags and would probably work well if she handled it properly. Just yesterday, I went in for a cut and found six painted swatches of various oranges on a wall with a pile of paint chips and magazine pages close by.

So there you go. There is no bad color only bad color usage. If you like it, use it – just use your colors well and you can’t go wrong.

The Graffiti Archaeology Project

I am a compulsive reader. Cereal boxes, shampoo bottles, anything with print is fair game, but magazines are above and beyond the best fix. Doctor’s offices are a paradise, lush with odd magazines and that is where I found this:

 Patel, Samir S., “Writing on the Wall.” Archaeology. Volume 60, Number 4, (July/August 2007): 50-53.

I like to share cool stuff when I find it and this so worth sharing. Seems that Mr. Cassidy Curtis acted on a thought that lead to the Graffiti Archaeology Project and a website that chronicals his findings.

This bring us into a conversation on perspective. At what point does graffiti cross from ugly scrawl on the street into fine art? Keith Haring took what he saw on the streets of New York in the 80′s and translated graffiti into a medium that the art world loved. The same thing New Yorkers had been ignoring for ever suddenly became all the rage.

Was it that the artist was white? Because he had a name in the art world? Is art art when the “right” group of people accept it as such? Is it technical skill that lifts a neighborhood tag into the realm of artistic mural?

Take a look at the Graffiti Archaeology Project web site and a look aroung your neighborhood then ponder my questions.

God Bless the 80′s

The new Rolling Stone came in the mail today, folded in half as usual. Holy Shit! Super flashback of the smell of sweat and alcohol soaked leather slammed into me as I looked at the cover photo. Guns N fuckin’ Roses from 1987 staring right at me. Has 20 years really gone by so fast? Appetite for Destruction, released 20 years ago, moved Guns N Roses to the top of the pile of the barbarians banging at the gates of Rome back in the era of Reagan-omics and Iran-Contra.

1987: before the empire sanitized the outer layer of civilization; before computers and home theaters sectioned us off from each other; before Pearl Jam and Nirvana delivered deep inner personal tragedy; before we all got (legally) medicated* and put our therapists on speed-dial, rock music was our salvation.

Guns N Roses gave Motley Crue a run for their title to being the face of decadence in the late 80′s. As much as I loved Motley, Guns put what was going on in the streets up on stage better than anyone else. They were dangerous and deranged for real with a violent edge that came from the same conclusion a lot of us came to back then – it was all a lie. We were the first generation that was not going to have a better life than our parents. Our government and the mighty corporations were selling our future for their own interests leaving us with a gritty bleakness.

Enter Axl’s raw wail of warning on Welcome to the Jungle. You’re gonna die. Yeah, we knew it so, fuck it, let’s get fucked up and fuck shit up. No one cares, no one’s gonna help us. Before we aged into self-pity by leaning on self-help gurus and legislating away what we now feel guilty over, we were outwardly and unapologetically pissed the fuck off. A dirty hoard of unwashed savages fueled by every vice imaginable, we lived for today. Therapy was found between thighs, in bottles, and at the other end of a rolled up twenty.

Sex was ev-er-y where. Dudes looked like chicks and the chicks all looked like fetish models. AquaNet, ’nuff said? Rocket Queen by Guns featured a woman’s orgasm for god’s sake.

If you remember the 80′s, you weren’t really there, is one of my favorite nostalgic quotes. I hung with local rock stars and indulged in all of the rock and roll vices as much as humanly possible. For a moment in time, my inner turmoil meshed perfectly with a section of society that celebrated and encouraged being way out of control. Most of it is a blur. But, by god, I miss it all.

*Eli Lily & Company released Prosac in the USA in 1987