Amateur Hour

Many subjects have certainly drawn my interests throughout the years, but there are some I feel I can appreciate just enough by merely scratching the surface. Later in life I may be driven to master these areas of interest, but the utility I gain now is sufficient for the time being. I wanted to lift from Travis' trademark and list of few of these below. I could probably carry on a short conversation with any expert on these subjects, and each would walk away thinking, "that's nice."

1. Minimalism--Reducing everything to its fundamentals has great appeal with so much chatter and noise nowadays. It is everywhere, and so why not strip everything down to clean straight lines and do "more with less". I mean minimalism in design, music, art, and life. It's a real commitment to make, which is why I admire these concepts rather than actually abiding by them.

2. Thorstein Veblen--Early 20th century economist and social critic that gave us the term 'conspicuous consumption'. He was met with contempt by many of his peers and led a somewhat unstable life; however, his thoughts have had a relevant clarity even a hundred years later. His most popular work was The Theory of the Leisure Class, which appeared to scathingly expose the habits of the more opulent members of society and the underlying mechanisms of competitiveness, such as the fear of failure and loss of esteem.

3. Frank Lloyd Wright architecture and urban planning--Once there is enough money in the bank we would like to build our home borrowing from his fundamental concepts: cruciform layout with a meeting place in the middle, openness for flow of family traffic, low horizontal lines, and an incorporation of the structure to the surrounding landscape. His ideas on urban planning were almost as forward thinking as his architecture, which is basically the forerunner for most master-planned communities today; however, his were more idealistic and slightly utopian. Ayn Rand denies Wright was the inspiration for Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. Everything I've read about Wright tells me she's lying. We happened upon the FLW Xanadu Gallery building nr Union Square in San Francisco last summer as a nice surprise.

4. The Plight of Africa--Is it not incredible that we can all watch on our television sets small children starving with no real chance of surviving? I mean I know we have our own problems at home, and even then, how much of it is really up to everyone else to fix. But it is jarring to view the problems most of this continent have in the face of non-existent infrastructure and very little human capital. All efforts of the past 30 or so years have yielded very little progress. The problem is so large it is frustrating to learn more.

5. Elvis Presley--Elvis is a big deal to a lot of people, but who are they? The last huge fan I knew alternated her Elvis T-shirts with her wolf and indian feather ones. I can say I enjoy only a small part of his music-- his Sun Record years, and his Tiger Man comeback stand out. He sold billions of records and was a huge movie star, but was Elvis really as cool as we were all raised to believe he was?