I want to live in a country where pop media is a form of self-expression and not of mind control.
I want to live in a country where farmers are valued more than lawyers.
I want to live in a country where more money is spent on education than on war.
I want to live in a country where the public health is not determined by profit margins.
I want to live in a country where the bicycle industry is more heavily subsidized than the auto industry.
(tweet sent to adbusters via @gypsythepunk.) I thought it was worth repeating.

Impatiently he cleared the other two shelves of all they held (mainly old clothes and shoes), removed them as he had done with the middle one, and unlocked the sliding door at the back of the closet. The elephants were forgotten, he stood on the threshold of a secret passage. Its deep darkness was total but something about its speluncar acoustics fortold, clearing its throat hollowly, great things, and he hurried to his own quarters to fetch a couple of flashlights and a pedometer.
page 125 Pale Fire by Vladmir Nabokov
then to the dictionary for the word “speluncar”. a., speluncean a. pertaining to or like a cave.

drinking cold green tea. my family has caught a cold (not of the swine flu variety thank god). as I come out of the fog I have so many ideas for projects. It’s like the excess snot leaving my body cleared a pathway for ideas to flow out. How serendipitous. not had much time to write lately as I am hard at work on a new book, (still in top secret mode).
I have been very moved by the responses to “this is not a book” lately. Yesterday I received in the mail a completed copy from an anonymous user. It is incredibly beautiful to read what someone has done with it. Kind of like receiving a book that someone else had written in it’s entirety, full of poetry and thoughts, and artwork. It is really a journal that had bits glued into it, things you could pull out and unfold, letters, even a couple of pop-ups (a lot like Griffin and Sabine). There were many personal bits, I hadn’t realized how much more personal this one is than “wreck”, but there is a lot more sharing involved. I couldn’t help but think that this person must have been more than a bit sad to let it go, (and truthfully I would send it back to her but there is no return address). And yet what a beautiful gift in the form of a mystery. And so I put together the little bits and pieces like a puzzle, all the while knowing that is the beauty of it. The not knowing.
Some nice things to share,
Not a Book made a bestseller list in Chicago.
For X-mas I am giving people the totes I did for Social Designer, proceeds go to Global Green. (I do not receive royalties for this, just for good karma. I had to buy them myself.)
I quite enjoyed the film Man on Wire this week.
Not a Book was picked up by a German publisher this week. More info to come.
love this online exhibition from the moma, color chart