First Blog

Reruns in Our Lives vs. Originality Always begin with a few quotes. “Insist upon yourself.   Be original.” -  Ralph Waldo Emerson “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” - Sir Ken Robinson “All good things that exist are the fruits of originality.” - John Stuart Mills These quotes, taken from a milk carton, were likely put there to inspire or maybe to fill a little space.   They sustain all we celebrate originality -thoeretically.   Yet, many of not most of us take great effort to avoid originality, preferring to live our life as a rerun.      We prefer to repeat old habits, to travel on familiar paths, and to change little from our well worn ways.     For kids, everyday is full of “newness.”   They are seeing, exploring, and learning all the time – much of it is new.   Their world is so very much different from ours.      In fact, the expression we love to use, “I feel like a kid again,” seems to hearken back thos

This blog is about used ideas. Nothing new is ever proposed.   Heaven forbid. The thoughts herein are re-cycled, re-interpreted, re-mixed, re-hashed, re-viewed…   New ideas are both the salvation and scourge of a stable society. This brings me to the comparison with new (aka modern) architecture.   So much of it looks great in the original drawings.   It is easy to sell, It is new, innovative, uncommon, bursting with energy, and the like. But so much modern architecture just doesn’t play well with the eye upon construction.   It just doesn’t have an esthetic geometry.   After the eye becomes accustomed to it, the eye says no, "I don’t like it."    Moreover, some of it does not age well.  It looks worse with age.   This is what makes the Frank Lloyd Wright’s of the world so fantastically great. Such architects/artists have aesthetics, geometry, longevity, design, and beauty in mind from the onset. Many channels of the brain are needed to achieve this; difficult to lea