california

no picture this time. i'm in california. flew into los angeles a couple days ago, rented a car, drove to my friend marco's house in west hollywood, where i stayed the night. got in touch with my other los angeles friends, brad, bill and anne. bill and anne are, ironically, in vermont. in fact, as i was leaving LAX they were arriving there to fly out. brad and i are going to get togther after christmas. i'm in santa barbara now staying with my brother and his family.

on the plane out i read three books—it was a fifteen hour trip. first was star girl, a novel that danny and roger gave me. it's targeted, i believe, at teens, but i loved it. it's about a girl who doesn't conform to small town teen life and who insists on being kind to everyone, including the opposite team during sports events. at first she's seen as a freak, then her popularity blossoms as everyone suddenly wants to be her friend, then events turn everyone against her and a love interest in a boy at the school brings her to put on a mask of conformity which ulitmately fails and she learns to simply be herself again.

then i read places of the soul. it's about what makes buildings lovable, meaningful and lasting. i found it interesting, and it shed more light on the use of intuition and feeling in design for me. the universe seems to be pointing me at intuition lately, from all angles. i also read drawing from the right side of the brain, an old classic that i've heard referenced since high school but which i've never read. there is a new edition out. it too focuses on intuition and "defeating" the analytic and lingual part of the brain so that the perceiving/feeling side gets a chance to control drawing.

today, at the natural cafe on state street in santa barbara, i picked up reading the timeless way of building by christopher alexander, who—why am i surprised—began talking about intuition and feeling as the benchmarks by which universal patterns can be distinquished within cultures. he argues that opinion, thought, argument and values are all fallible as metrics for determining what will create a place people like because they're contaminated by ego and divide people, whereas feeling, when it can be discerned seperately from analytic thinking, nearly always, in his research, brings people together in near universal agreement (he says 90-95% of the time).