When A Place Becomes A Person

When my wife and I were creating the save the dates we sent out for our wedding, we walked around downtown Seattle taking pictures in front of places we love. On the ferry, at the market, strolling the pier. But the pictures that we go back to are not memorable because of the places. They're important to us because of the people that characterize the places. Soundgarden made famous Spoonman. And Pianoman is a ficture on the corner of Pine and Pike. This video reminded me of those people and places. Except the place is the web in this case.

Trust Your Sushi Chef

Sushi is my favorite food. After being an overweight teenager, I've become, as an adult, pretty health-conscious. And I like to think in terms of "perfect" meals. These are meals that include all the essentials: protein, carbs, good fat, the right portion-size. And sushi is on the top of my "perfect" meal list. It's my pre-marathon carbo-load meal, the perfect post-surf or snowboard recovery meal, a great date food, on and on. I try to eat sushi at least a couple times a week.
The motivation for writing a post about sushi is not just because I like it, but because I think it's a metaphor for something. I'm going to try to figure out what it is as I write this post.

The topic caught my attention two days ago when I was showing my students a sampling of digital storytelling work Marco Torres' students have produced. We watched a story called "Sushi." In summation, the story is about a sushi restaurant opening in the San Fernando valley, a place rich in culture, but not Japanese culture. The restaurant brings it. The story starts with a play on the word taco. Tako being Japanese for octopus, not the meat, beans, and tortilla the people in the film were expecting when they ordered. I loved the way the joke led into a story about a new business in the community, a sharing of culture, and I think by default (there's a lot of Japanese culture in Hawaii) sparking a reciprocal interest in other cultures, a reminder to not take for granted the small things, like food, sport, game, story, that bridge cultural, generational, and geographical divides. (As I'm writing this I'm also preparing to Skype with my partner teacher in S. Korea, and I'm being quietly thankful for the tools and the people that have made this partnership possible.)

In many other relationships in my life, sushi has been a meal over which much bonding has taken place. Hakata in Silverdale, WA is the first place I go with my buddy Bryan Beale when I'm there for a visit, which is not often. Sushi Studio in Long Beach, CA is where I go with my cousins Janelle and Paul, my favorite people to travel the world with. Tukkurei Tei in Honolulu was the first restaurant our friends Brian and Jill took my wife and me to when we moved here. Standing in line for half-price sushi at Sansei in Waikiki became a regular Monday night event with our friends Jack and Michael. And $1 sushi hour at California Beach Rock 'n Roll Sushi has become the default we're-too-tired-to-cook meal. And recently, on a plane trip back to Honolulu from Los Angeles, my wife and I gave up our seats together for a woman and her little girl who seats were apart. She asked several people if they wouldn't mind moving, and to our astonishment, everybody said no. We couldn't believe it and were quick to accommodate. After the flight, she found us on our way to baggage claim and invited us to visit the sushi restaurant she owns in Venice Beach, CA.

So now I'm wondering, why sushi? What about this particular meal carries so much connotation for me. I think it has something to do with the sushi chefs. Everything depends on them. Everything is made by hand. All the ingredients are delicate. And what makes sushi memorable are the little things that individual chefs do to make their sushi unique: a dab of wasabi hidden in the rice, mango and jalapeno paired in a roll, using a blow torch to sear fish, publishing a menu as a comic book. It's care, creativity, delicacy that sushi represents. Yet, there's a simplicity that remains intact. And no matter how much you eat, it's good for you.

The Mix-Tape Aesthetic

Commonplacing has been described in many ways. But in the following excerpt from The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 I think Beck says it in a Gen-X way that resonates with me.

"Someday I plan to read the classics. Someday I plan to traverse their pages and see for myself what raw weight they wield.

...writers seemed to be able to tap into the profundities of daily existence.

Works sometimes speak to a moment in time or fill a need at the time. And the classics still stand unmoved. There are always those bits from some article--a weird fact, an anecdote, an image even--you pick up somewhere that become lodged in your brain, just as deeply as anything would from a great novel or film. Sometimes those things crop up outside the great canon of literature and only breathe into our awareness for a minute. If literature moves slow and we live in dog years, this book may come in handy. I've found the mix-tape aesthetic works for me. The humor and the humane, the hugeness and the miniature. It coheres into some other kind of implied story or novel that we're still living out."

Ethics Of Blogging Commonplace

I started my exploration of blogging ethics with a simple Google search for "blogging ethics." Not expecting much because of previous frustration at Borders bookstore, I was pleasantly suprised to find myriad resources for a new blogger. My first stop was CyberJournalist where the editors had modified the journlism code of ethics as it applies to blogging. I'm not sure that it speaks to what I'm trying to do or what my students will be trying to do, nevertheless, it's a great start. Basically, they cover universal intellectual standards of which students should be cognizant already.
Next, I read an article on washingtontpost.com from 2003 on plagiarism in blogging. I was reminded of a Malcolm Gladwell essay called "Something Borrowed" published in the New Yorker in which Gladwell discuss the fact that every writer starts with something from somebody else, and it's this literary/intellectual networking-telephone-game that makes reading and writing (and blogging) such a rich experience.
The most concise of what I've read so far has been from Rebecca Blood in her handbook for blogging. She describes amateur blogging's lack of ethics as its hamartia and lists several straightforward guidelines.
I think I get it, but The Cost of Ethics, Blogging Ethics,and Blogging Ethics II are also worth clicks.
Finally,and most relevant to students and probably to me as a non-journalist is an article by David Parry I linked to from Will Richardson's blog.

Introduction to WatsonCommon

I started this blog as an experiment, a way to figure out if a blog is an appropriate tool for my Sophomore English students to use to post an ongoing assignment called a Commonplace Book. The idea behind the assignment is that there is so much information and external stimuli in our world that confusion sets in if we don't have some way to log and file the information most relevant to us as individuals. Seems appropriate especially for the digital age, but this is not a new concept, it's been around since the eighteenth century. I was introduced to it by my department head Bruce Schauble whose parameters include:
1. Copy out passages from readings which interest you or strike you as being noteworthy
2. Record other pieces of incoming data fromthe world at large: bits of conversation, turns of phrase, song lyrics
3. Make note of questions that occur during the course of the day
4. Write down brief ideas or reflections as they occur
5. Include visual data: pictures, charts, ads, drawings

To pay such attention to what's around us creates a certain kind of attention to life that otherwise couldn't be cultivated. So that's what I'm going to try to do here. As a thematic guide, I'll try to use essential questions, which will become blog categories or tags. And I've decided that a good place to start, since an analog CP book is easy to grasp, but to go digital is something different, would be to explore what it means to blog. What are the ethics? What about copyrighted material? How can we benefit by being able to see others' commonplaces? Will sharing generate some new kind of awareness?