Tried to grab a flight early Wednesday, no dice, so I got in around midnight. Took a cab straight to my man Shane O’Rourke’s place — ah, not quite. My old friend Gretchen called as I was getting off the plane, so I stopped by and dragged her along. We hold on to our little fantasy about being right for each other in the long run, despite having proven otherwise. Spent the night at Shane’s and made my way over to Marin for Thanksgiving. Nice to see my mom and sister, good food, etc. Next morning over to my dad’s new place, and despite my expectations I spent at least two hours there. Good to catch up with him, and it looks like a nice place — up on the hill above the 2am Club in Mill Valley. Then I ran into the city to catch Eric Kroll’s show at The Shooting Gallery on Larkin. A suitable location. Then downtown to the Sony store to look at laptops, then down through SOMA and over the Lefty O’Doul bridge to have a look at what’s going on in Mission Bay and along 3rd street, since I’ve been reading lots of San Francisco planning dept. documents lately.

Lofts still for sale in SOMA:

3rd street light rail coming on line soon:

Construction on the flats below Potrero Hill projects — think about the value of that real estate:

Last stop: Marc Gardner’s place to cook up a roast leg of lamb and sit around until the wee hours planning our trip to Spain. He just passed the bar, and we were all in good spirits. Now I’m back in Madison pondering my future again.

My sister asked what I wanted for Christmas… My Amazon wish list is a pretty good start — it goes back quite a ways, but it’s all valid.

Going backwards from there, it’s been a while… Let’s see. Back in October (?) Lola and I ran up to Minneapolis to see some old friends of hers get hitched up. It was the last really warm weekend of the year, sunny and 70. We stopped in Red Wing (yes, that’s where Red Wing boots come from) on way up, enjoyed the fall colors along the upper Mississippi…

…arrived in MSP, checked into the Holiday Inn (great view of the parking deck, ugh), and went out for a drink or two with some cute tattooed girls. On Saturday, we drove had breakfast in some hipster zone and then drove around looking at the Ghetto in the Sky until it was time to go to the wedding.

We showed up late, Bill got drunk, and before you know it we were having vegan coffee in Disneyland (Milwaukee Ave)!

Stopped in La Crosse on the way home and had a beer at The Casino. I told a Bush joke — “somewhere in Texas, a village is missing it’s idiot” — to the owner, he laughed.

Since then…. I’ve been out to Milwuakee a couple of times, first for the regional APA conference, and then to catch up with Brett & Lindsay. John Norquist, outgoing mayor of Milwaukee and now President of the Congress for the New Urbanism spoke for a quite a while at the conference – very impressive. The Director of Planning for the city, Peter Park did a talk about recent development there, and their focus on quality urban design. Excellent stuff. A week or so later I was in Chicago for a 3 day field trip with our “Central City Planning” course. I’ve posted a bunch of photos in this gallery.

Now I’m focused on wrapping up the semester and figuring out what I want to come out of this program with. Now that I understand more about what planners do, I’ve pretty much realized that I don’t want to be one. Too political for one, and more importantly I don’t entirely agree with the direction that much of planning seems to going in. The new role of the planner seems to be to channel as much of the public as possible, and then convince them to accept the second-lowest common denominator. As expressed by Dan Marks, planning director for Berkeley in this month’s Planning magazine: “Our role is to express the vision of the community, and to tell the community how to implement that vision.” Bah. The public doesn’t know what’s good for them. I think it’s far more interesting to go do things, instead of trying to figure out what the public wants. I’m thinking that I’ll end up in what might be called progressive development — check out The Rose Network for an example.

Parting shots: If you haven’t already, go see Lost in Translation. Brilliant. Beautiful, I thought. I threw another party last weekend, but I can’t show you the pictures. Let’s just say it ended with a pre-dawn session of spin the bottle. Very amusing. There was a nice fog the other morning:

I bought some vitamins today — do they work?

It used to be that we had to test and test various combinations of metals or plastics until we found one that most closely matched our requirements. Now, we create new materials — metals, plastics, composites, and much, much more — by design. Read almost any issue of Wired, or this article for a preview.

Similarly, experience used to be considered almost exclusively in the passive voice. Something happened to you, after which you became more experienced. We’re now in a time when we are more and more often able not only to choose our experiences, but to design them as well. Experiences have become something that we consciously seek out — and if the desired experience doesn’t exist, we go out and create it. Our own expanding sentinence translates into an increasing lack of meaningful experiences that lie far enough outside of the sphere of our own selves to generate meaningful external experiences. In other words, as we become familiar with more and more things, fewer and fewer things seem different enough to stimulate us. Our over-stimulation of the senses has led to an acute under-stimulation of the self.

When we set up a farmer’s market in a modern urban downtown or set off on a month-long trek through the Himalayas, we drape these constructed experiences with the veil of authenticity, willing ourselves to forget their construction. We break the fourth wall with ourselves — attempting to be both actor and audience simultaneously. One problem is that as we become more involved in the construction of our own experiences, we can no longer lay the blame for our lack thereof at the feet Someone else. Our successes and failures are only attributable to ourselves… and so we proceed by trial and error, in an attempt to somehow leap ahead and design a world in which we do ourselves better than if we weren’t able to participate in the process at all. This is of course the post-modern human condition. Do you think we’ve succeeded or failed? I for one think that although we haven’t quite failed yet, we’re a long way from success.

How does this relate to planning? One way that I’ve heard the role of a planner described is to ‘increase predictability’ (of e.g. urban economies). Sounds pretty damn boring, doesn’t it? A more direct phrase came to me the other day in Chicago: planners seek to screw people just a little bit less [than they have been in the past, or than they would be without a planner's intervention]. You could say that the role of the planner is to attempt to give us a bit more of a chance at getting ahead of the curve for just long enough to to learn how to get a bit farther ahead. This is in fact what many planners do. If you do comprehensive planning, strategic planning, land use planning, community development, economic development, policy work, or any number of other similar things, your goal is to win small victories against the gaping entropic black hole of the lowest common denominator.

All of that sounds rather abstract to me. I, for one, am not going to be in the business of trying to increase predictability. Innovation does not spring from predictability. Things worth saving do not spring from predictability. Lasting memories do not spring from predictability. I think the job is more along the lines of reducing wasted time and energy, and reducing the amount of time consumed by predictable things, freeing up time for more productive pursuits. Part of this is certainly policy work, but much has to do with our physical environment. By their longevity and their assimilation into our overall environment, the places where we live and work can transcend the fact of their human construction and become sources of real experience. That’s what interests me. Perhaps it’s not called planning at all (but I remain convinced that it’s a more than just architecture).

P.S. A guy named Murph with a strangely-named blog wrote this on the topic of “what is planning?”: “So what does a planner do when he recognizes the libertarians to be right on many counts? He works to separate the baby from the bathwater. Fix zoning laws so that they don’t encourage sprawl… …Remove the incentives for local municipalities to bid against each other for development… …Work towards land use systems and transportation systems that provide *actual* choice…”

So I got a new PC and I’ve been playing with software to organize and play the 400 or so albums that I have sitting on my hard drive… Apple released iTunes for Windows a couple of weeks ago, but when I first tried it, the playback skipped — clearly unacceptable I knew it was some sound driver problem, and figured I’d leave it to the “open source” of others out there on the net to resolve it… sure enough, a Google today turned up How to Make iTunes for Windows Stop Skipping and now, thanks to Abe Fettig my iTunes is tuning. That said, we’ll have to see how it stands up to the competition. In the meantime, I’ve tried out WinAmp (2, 3, and beta 5), Quintessential Player, MusicMatch, Windows Media Player, Music Library, and a couple of others. They all have their flaws, but some are worse than others. I want a player that will display my album art both while browsing the library and also during playback (RealPlayer, Music Library). I also want to be able to hit “random” and play random tracks from my entire library (~RealPlayer), create temporary playlists easily (RealPlayer), and have the software automatically keep track of the last and most played (iTunes). Easy burning of both audio and mp3 CD’s is also key. Access to an online “music store” for downloading songs would be cool, but not critical yet. Interestingly, RealPlayer lacks a couple of cool iTunes features (last/most, and song ratings), but it displays album art and has a “now playing” temporary playlist UI that I like a lot. Although I’d like to like it better, iTunes’ UI doesn’t do much for me — maybe it’ll grow on me. For one, the “now playing” display is tiny. And I want my album covers!!! I’m sure someone will hack that in before long. By the way, I can’t figure out why so many people rate MusicMatch so highly — the UI is so horrible I can’t bear to look at it. I’d love to say that WinAmp rocks, but it’s unstable and really suffers from being split into two codelines. Maybe the “new” version will solve that… but I doubt it.