AgPerson

Inspired by Jason Kottke’s yearly list. One or more days and nights were spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days. Those marked with a † were visited for a full day but not a night.

Slightly less than two years after shaking up the format and attempting to move the show from Los Angeles to St. Paul, followed by months and months of floundering around trying to decide on a hosting team that worked, and then finally giving the job to John Moe last August, but making him move to Minnesota to take it…now Minnesota Public Radio is canceling Weekend America, blaming a bad economy. Moe’s been doing a great job, but the revolving door of hosts and locations couldn’t have done the show any favors. It was fresh and friendly and fun and interesting, and a great way to spend a couple hours on the weekend. I’m going to miss it a lot more than Day to Day.

They modify their hit songs for the Muppet audience. Very cute.

• Tony Bennett believes in little things, like Elmo.
• Norah Jones can’t find her friend, and doesn’t know why.
• James Blunt lost something beautiful.
• Feist enjoys counting to four.

And perhaps famous in his own right, Beaker sings Ode to Joy. And sort of blows up the internet.

I’m starting to watch Wonderfalls, Brian Fuller’s previous creation prior to Pushing Daisies, my current favorite show. Like Daisies, Wonderfalls has a supernatural element. The main character works at a Niagara Falls gift shop, where animal figurines start inexplicably talking to her — and urging her to connect with the people who pass through her shop. As she helps travelers on their journeys, Jaye starts to finally confront her own purposeless existence.

I’m glad I didn’t discover this show when it aired in 2004 and I was still in college. I think it resonates more with me now than it would have then. When first I graduated I felt disconnected and lost — jobless and going through a protracted breakup. But since that first two months, I’ve had a post-college existence that is stable and productive, if not always entirely fulfilling. And I worry that I’ve never taken any serious risks, never jumped without the ground clearly in view. Never fallen, but also never flown.

In Wonderfalls, the main character lives in a trailer. A conveyance built for the road, but here firmly planted, hitch plaintively outstretched. That’s not my life. But sometimes it feels like it is.

The end of last season’s Doctor Who was a muddled disaster that, in trying to wrap up 4 years of characters and plot, mostly just mucked things up and left viewers confused and unsatisfied. Just one of the things that bugged me to no end was the idea that a regenerated younger Doctor, full of genetic knowledge but lacking genetic love, could, with a few throws of buttons and switches, become a genocidal maniac. Or was that Doctor Donna? Hard to remember.

Anyway, since the show is all about consequences and loneliness and such, I propose a better alternative. Sure, the Doc can maintain his present (Tennant) form by short-circuiting the regeneration process. But in order to channel all that energy into his old hand (and save himself a regeneration cycle), two things happen. First, old Doctor dies. Dies dead, body lying there, really dead. Second, new Doctor does not inherit any of the genetic memory past his previous regeneration. So last thing he remembers is destroying the Daleks on the space station and saving Rose, and none of the last three years.

Now wouldn’t that be poignant?

And then, obviously, the Shadow Proclamation and various other allies and factors would come in and help clear the whole mess with the Daleks up, I suppose. Or maybe Sarah Jane’s “warpstar.” Whatever.

When I was working at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, I would sometimes sit in on lunch seminars or gatherings of the research fellows in which Lewis Hyde was a participant. While most of the fellows at Berkman had a background in the law, Hyde’s academic resumé consisted of a tenured teaching position — in English — at Kenyon College in Ohio. That, and that he wrote a book about the “erotic life of property,” and that he was a poet, were all that I knew about Lewis Hyde’s scholarship.

And I suspect the same was true of many of Berkman’s other researchers, because they always seemed astonished when, after someone would make an astute point about some aspect of the cultural commons, or what have you, Hyde would pipe in to say something like, “I actually explored that issue in a chapter of the book I published in 1975,” or, “that’s what I’ve been working on with the blah de blah foundation for the last ten years.” They’d throw vexed looks that exclaimed, “Who is this guy? And was he actually thinking about these things back when I was in pre-school?”

This week’s New York Times Magazine features a profile of Lewis Hyde penned by Daniel B. Smith and titled, “What is Art For?“. It sheds a lot of light for me on what Lewis Hyde is all about and the fascinating, methodical journey he has been pursuing for much of his life.

His first major quest was to explore how the fundamental nature of man to be creative and sharing clashed with market-driven societies, and how artists can survive, and perhaps thrive, under such strictures. His continued work often dealt with ways to encourage and reward creativity in modern America. And his current great project is aimed at expanding society’s understanding of the commons and its centrality in both creativity and progress. To do so, he weaves in the ideas and opinions of, among others, great American founding thinkers like Jefferson and Franklin, who well understood the need for a vibrant shared commons of ideas and thought to encourage innovation.

Is is this “capacious” cultural commons that Lewis Hyde strives to open to all of us, and it is, I think, a noble quest. And the methodical and deliberate way in which he goes about it is a marked — and welcomed — change from our modern politics as well as from the thinking of traditional scholars in this field, which is often strongly couched in the language of the law, sometimes to its detriment.

When I was at Berkman, I interacted every day, often in very mundane ways, with thinkers and explorers of great wisdom and great curiosity. It is interesting to occasionally check in on some of them, and a little disappointing to realize that I might have missed some neat opportunities to learn from these folks. Something to keep in mind for future jobs and circumstances.