Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Jim Hoekema

Jim Hoekema — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:58:07 GMT

It’s nice to see this appreciation of the Eameses and Powers of Ten. At the beginning of my career, I was fortunate enough to work there while the revised film was being made. In fact, I contributed one line to the script (“Out here, emptiness is normal”). As Lucia (Charles’ daughter from his first marriage) observes, the film is a model that can be informative in multiple ways: is it a film that uses the universe to tell about numbers? Or a film that uses numbers to tell about the universe? (Obviously, both.) While the 1977 version is more polished, I find Phil Morrison’s agitated volice-over less satisfying than Judith Bronowski’s “robot stewardess” delivery (as Paul Schrader called it) in the 1968 “Rough Sketch.”
Working there, by the way, was just fabulous—I would have stayed forever, but Charles died while I was there, and after a year of struggle to make it work without him, Ray closed up shop. After cataloging everything and transferring the materials to the Library of Congress, Ray died ten years to the day after her husband.

Jim Hoekema — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 15:03:23 GMT

Olga,
Thanks for the interesting story. I’ve done several sites for small, local nonprofits. I’ve found a huge range in expectations – everything from tremendous gratitude for getting anything at all up and running to wild expectations about having everything they ever seen or even heard of built into their “free” site! As you point out, though, the key ingredient is the the mission, and therefore these sites are very information-focused, plus the capacity for making online contributions.
My greatest satisfaction was learning that a major worldwide funding organization became interested in our cause in large part because of the website, and they were amazed to learn this was an all-volunteer effort.
Let me add my thanks also to Daniel for that very interesting “mission map”!

Jim Hoekema — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:45:40 GMT

Jamie,
Show us a picure of that bird-bath-breakfast table!
– Jim