Le(tting)go

The old Lego which gladdened the hearts of two generations until winding up color-sorted in my parents' garage are on their way to new adventures. 

We took them today to a thrift shop where, we hope, they'll introduce a whole new series of kids to the endless possibilities of original Lego. 

If my heart is heavy, it's because it's full!

Arch

Being in Australia with dear friends, delightful family and delicious food doesn't mean not missing home a little.

Tim the Panda, vol. III

Here are a few more scenes from Tim the Panda's third volume of adventures in California with my Australian nephews.

The sad zebra-painted donkey we saw in Tijuana joined our Lego family - there may even be romance happening! Notice who he's with in the nephew-built restaurants and in the peddle boat below...

Sights

Should you have wondered what's become of me these last days, rest assured that no news is good news. My sister and her family are in California so we've been hanging out at the beach, going on assorted excursions, and of course playing a lot of Lego. As already two and four years ago, Tim the Panda is documenting it all in Lego. Here's a taste!

Lessons from family Lego building

1) If you say everyone gets to build a floor of a certain size, someone will add a balcony. Someone else will build a penthouse. Then someone will build a wrap-around veranda, and, just because you said not to, add a wading pool for his pet manatee.
2) Don't build the elevator at the end.

Starpit

Happy reunion in California with my sister's family, visiting from Australia. As for past visits, nephews T and W join me in commemorating notable experiences in Lego. I didn't go to the La Brea

Tar Pits with them, but it was my suggestion. It may also have been my idea that the TAR PITS get so many visitors because an adventitious S makes people think it's where the Hollywood STARS are to be found.

White city

The Chicago Architec- ture Foundation has a "LEGO architecture studio" - long tables with red cloth work surfaces along them and boxes of clean new white LEGO Architecture pieces. What fun! Most people build skyscrapers, many spectacular. Having limited time I just sought out unusual pieces and tried to find unexpected ways of putting them together.

Lego my ego

I don't usually write negative reviews of things - the Web's overflowing with them - but allow me to recommend that you not see "The Lego Movie." (For everthing that movie should have been but wasn't, go see the sublime "Wreck-It Ralph"!) I should have known better than to go - I know I'm too close to it! - but an alumna told me that it was a brief for Christian socialism and my curiosity was piqued. And then I found myself exhausted late of a Friday afternoon and the deed was done.

The nature of the exhaustion may be pertinent. Fashion Praxis, the series of interdisciplinary conversations on fashion and politics of which I, too, was a part, turned out to be an all-day affair. It began with a prophecy that fashion did not just "exemplify" Hannah Arendt's understanding of the vita activa (The Human Condition was recommended reading for participants), but "completes" it. Specifically, it somehow complements Arendt's understanding of labor (the maintenance of our biological existence) with spectacle, work (the world of made things) with aesthetics, and action (the truly human world of persuasion and human multiplicity) with ethics.

This manifesto came not from one of the fashion theorists or designers but from an enthusiastic professor of international affairs, but it got me thinking. What I, as a relatively unsympathetic outsider, tend to see as a dystopia of waste, elitism and conformity is clearly understood by many within it as a utopia. (Witness the way that the "is fashion a religion?" question once again elicited wide-eyed talk of transcendence, etc.) I understand that Parsons is the design school most committed to bringing critical awareness of the dystopian realities of fashion (sweatshops, anorexia, cultishness) and to releasing its utopian promise (recognition of the value of craft, celebration of the ways that "everyone dresses," communities of use and reuse, etc..)

I wasn't thinking about Parsons while trying to remain interested in the action movie at the center of "The Lego Movie," but in retrospect there's a parallel. The film has been getting plaudits from pundits for successfully selling a 90-minuted infomercial whose point seems to be that big companies like Lego are not to be trusted. The film celebrates everyone's capacity to be a "master builder," to create Lego concoctions nobody has ever dreamt of before - which might, heck, save the world! And there I find myself caught. Even as I note that you can buy new Lego sets to build stuff from this film about not following instructions (hello?!), I am reminded my own utopian attachment to Lego's infinite combinatorial miracle, which - yes, still - I think has shaped (in good ways) how I understand the very stuff of the world.

Maybe I should approach the world of fashion in the same way? In the meantime, there's one moment in "The Lego Movie" which I loved. As the ragtag bunch of lovable rebels are storming the headquarters of nefarious Lord Business, who wants to destroy all creativity, they hear someone approaching. The little yellow people hide. But the improvised robot-pirate-spaceship does even better, recombining its pieces in a blinding flurry to a perfect disguise: a copy machine!

(If only it had actually been the same pieces. Sigh.)

Making a mint

Inspired by their favorite sight in Canberra, the Royal Australian Mint, my nephews have made a mint of their own. As in Canberra, the giant robot who transports vats of coins - Titan, "biggest in the southern hemisphere"! - was detained by technical difficulties, but we got by with the aid of a faux-Lego Smurf.
Our actual stamping - naturally to our own hand-drawn designs - remains satisfyingly manual.

Sing for your supper

A little shaky, this is the view from the 25th floor apartment of my friends L and H, who pride themselves on making their guests work for their dinner. (Guests are not told this when they're invited.) It's not cooking that they demand, not cleaning up. L and H are life coaches! So each of us was invited to share something which made us grateful or hopeful... and then, over dessert, something which filled us with anxiety or despair. The first round was lovely, an amazing way to get to know people. The second not so much. I wondered if we were supposed to reach a nadir, a point where the sources of hope and gratitude started to curl around the edges of the sources of anxiety and despair, but there wasn't time. I was left with new friends but a discouraging sense of the difference of scale - sources of positivity were intimate or cosmic, those of negativity political, systemic or ecological.

My spirits were lifted by a photo e-mail from one of my nephews in Oz: "I made this Lego trophy when [my little brother] and I had a wrestling match, I won but he insisted that he won so I went to my room and made this trophy. The trophy used most of my yellow Lego pieces even though I realized later that most trophies like this are silver!" Gold!

Tim the Panda's new book!

 

If only it were as easy to write under my own name as to ghost write for a Lego panda! Some highlights from the just released More Adventures.

This last is an exclusive image, only part of which appeared in the book, of my nephews' trick for driving away bears in Kings Canyon. Happily there was no occasion to test it, or we might one day see the grim scene in the random snaps from the back cover, exemplifying the rangers' dire warnings about what happens when bears forget how to be wild.

The gang was all here

The Australians are on their way home after three weeks of sun and sand and Sequoias, and Del Mar is weirdly quiet... Come back soon!

More bricks

Tim the Lego Panda has decided to chronicle this visit of the Australian nephews to California in Lego as he did the one two years ago. Today we decided this warranted getting some new pieces and did some eBay bidding (and scored)! Hope the 650 new pieces arrive before the nephews head back to Victoria... Here's what Tim's assembled so far:

Surf's up!

Tolle lego

As I was building the derelict Mission de San Juan de Lego Retrofito, my talented nephew T built the megachurch of the Smiling Trinity.

At liberty

Saw New York with new-old eyes with several dozen erstwhile classmates from the United World College of the American West, some of whom I have not seen in decades, and thought of in even longer...  

it's a strange thing, a reunion's mix of the presumption that you remember and care about everyone back then, but aren't really committed to more than pleasantries now. 

 

I was very happy to reconnect with some friends I'd not seen in a while, though, and to learn about the M&M and Lego shops in Midtown.



Coda, Sunday night:

That sounds ungracious. I'm happy everyone came. Our UWC family is just that, and we keep track of each other in a way no other community quite does. I felt that strongly on Sunday morning when we released a white balloon for each of several classmates and faculty members who have passed away. The first rose quickly and headed west: "toward New Mexico," we all said or thought. A second became briefly entangled on a vent on the building at left, but someone said "he's waiting for Roger," the dedicatee of the following balloon, and so it was, somehow managing to disentangle itself in time to fly away together.

Uncle's legocy

I've started making a book of images of things we've been doing with my nephews - rendered in our 30-year-old Lego and inspired by the Brick Testament and Christoph Niemann. Just so you know, the story is narrated by Tim the Panda. His special friends are Duck and Stop the Dog - you'll know him when you see him. Also in evidence are the animal familiars of my nephews: Sleek - a panther who wears a striped body suit - and Manatee (a manatee). All but Stop and Duck are modeled from life. Some highlights:

We didn't actually go to Duck's farm, but we did go to the Del Mar Farmer's Market, where we got yummy oranges, strawberries, raspberries, almonds, kyoho grapes and flowers - and some delicious fresh corn.






We really did go to the amazingly extensive San Diego Model Railroad Museum in Balboa Park, which was a big hit all around. I was really taken with the idea of making a model of a model...





Speaking of imitating imitations, the whole crew also went to Disneyland - here they are in the Astro Orbiter rockets. I was also possessed (doubtless by one of the cute domesticated gods of the swingin' "Hawaiian War Chant") to attempt a recreation of the Enchanted Tiki Room (available on request).





And this one's largely true. Monopoly - actually a spin-off called San Diegopoly - was played (if not officially by animals) and the boys did take their bath together.


Oh, and the scene at the top? Tim didn't really take my nephew T's plane for a spin, despite not knowing how to fly, but we did admire a red sun going down over the Pacific...

Fun with the boys. (Lego meets Calder.)

Lego potsherds

Since last I checked, the Brick Testament - the LEGO Bible - has been caught up with Job. Here Job 1:2, 1:19, 1:20, 2:10, 38:1, 42:12, 42:13.

It's the little things

This series of witty minimalist LEGO works, called "I LEGO N. Y.," is so delightful I have to give you all of it. Not just because LEGO is a gift of the gods, but also because it captures something wonderful about the New Yorker Alltag. If you've ever lived in New York, you'll be laughing with delight as you look at them. They're by German artist Christoph Niemann, who lived for 11 years here before moving back to Berlin.