Space Craft

Space Craft

Transcript for Space Craft (Full Episode)

Jonah Willihnganz: [00:00:00] From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.

The shadows and the moonlight coming through the trees and the birds making noise somewhere far off in the woods would often make me like severely paranoid.

Rachel Hamburg: From the outside, the only thing weird about 50 Aston Street is the boarded up windows. Passersby might pass by and wonder why in this quiet Oxford neighborhood, one house has chosen to block the sun.

This is State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project. I'm Rachel Hamburg, and today's show is called Spacecraft. It's all about the spaces people make and use spaces like 50 Aston Street, which taught me that indulging too much in fantasy can be a serious mistake.

Once upon a time, a man who resembled a gnome lived in the boarded up darkness of 50 Aston Street. His name was Frazier, and during the 10 weeks of my study abroad program in England, I played on his Frisbee team. I always thought he was a little strange, maybe just because he was skinny with a long scraggly beard and a manic passion for frisbee.

But then one day he invited me over, I stepped into his house and I realized I was stepping into an alternate universe. His house was a world I can only describe as the kind of fairy world I used to see in my mind when I was 10 glowing murals of castles, forests, and sparkling rivers covered the walls real vines dangled from the ceiling.

Birds cheaped from stereo speakers and above us loomed paper mache boulders. I realized that Frazier wasn't just a quirky guy who looked a little weird in a Frisbee uniform. He was a man who spent most of his life living inside a fantasy.[00:02:00] 

At 50 Aston Street, nothing could be what it was. When I asked for the bathroom, Frazier banished me to the dungeon where I sat on a stone toilet listening to a persistent ominous drip. Instead of stairs, there was a glowing mountain. To climb it, you had to repel up the rope, helpfully left there by explorer's past, and all of that was truly fun.

But I've never been more glad to be a tourist. I couldn't imagine trying to be a stable functioning person. If I had to brush my teeth in a dungeon every day.

There was one space I never visited in my whole tour of 50 Aston Street. It was upstairs beyond the boulder, past fluffy white cloud carpets and blue walls. It was a door painted like a castle in the sky. The room behind the door belonged to the owner of the house. Frazier told me that the man who lived in the castle in the sky had designed everything I saw, had made it real. The boulders, the vines, the dungeon, everything was his vision.

I never got to meet him. I never even saw him, but I wish I had because I would've asked him why. Why he went to all this trouble? Why he wanted to live in a fantasy world so badly? Did he find reality boring? And if so, was this land of paper mache whimsy any better?

I stood there wondering this when Frazier, the ambassador from the strange world, put his hand on my shoulder. He took me to his room and climbed a tangle of ropes, meant to resemble a spiderweb. Dangling there. He performed a spontaneous free verse poem in the final line, he asked me out to dinner. It was cute, but I had to decline this man in this house.

I love fairytales, but I also like sunshine. I like the peace that empty walls bring. I like reality.[00:04:00] 

50, aston Street was more than just a dark, delightful, and oppressive space. It was somebody's dream brought to life, and because it was so personal, so complete, I kind of thought it would last forever, but it didn't. A year after I visited number 50 Aston Street was a little more than a fairytale. When the owner got tired of it and moved onto other projects, he couldn't sell the house, so he painted everything white and beige.

He carried in real couches and took the boards off the windows. He divined the bathroom. I was so sad that such a strange and beautifully imagined house would disappear, but it also made sense. I realized that it's dangerous to overdetermine the space that you live in. You can choose to construct your own fantasy but what happens when you get bored with your castle? What happens to the space you build? Nobody wants the husk of somebody else's bizarre dream.

A couple years ago, Alexis Petty had a question, what do we remember about spaces? The molding on the wall of a childhood bedroom, the way a kitchen door swung into the living room? How did these memories get deposited in spaces and what can we do to bring them out again? Fortunately, she was well equipped to answer this question.

She was finishing her thesis at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. This is the story of one space she entered and transformed. 

Alexis Petty: I was always drawing floor plans when I was little. Like I, I was always imagining what my house would be like and creating places.

How I choose to study people in place is through architecture. My name is Alexis Petty and I am an artist and a designer working between the fields of graphic design, architecture, and art.

Barbara Mendelson: My name is Barbara Mendelson. Alexis is my goddaughter. When she first came to me about this project, it sort of took my [00:06:00] breath away. She wanted to understand from me what was an important place that generated an emotion. 

Alexis Petty: I sent out a questionnaire to all my friends and family asking them to photograph their most favorite object that they have in their house, and then tell me a story about it. Um, and so I decided to interview my godmother because she had sent back a photograph of a portrait of her mother.

Barbara Mendelson: I had a complicated relationship with my mother.

Alexis Petty: And I wanted to talk with her more about the portrait since I was finding how each story in each place kept getting tied back to another person. 

Barbara Mendelson: She wanted to do a, a projection of the space that was most important to me in my mother's apartment. And that was looking out over Manhattan from her window.

She was on 34th floor in the Upper East side. And, um, she said to me, what was in that room? Where was it? I said, it was the dining room. She said, well, what was actually there? I described the table, I described the chairs, and I described I said, and there was a photograph in the corner on the window sill that is a big, big part of my relationship with my mom because it was a photograph of my mom that she had taken by a friend after she had a mastectomy, and my mom was not an exhibitionist, and she was very, always very much covered up in layers and layers and layers of things, drapey kinds of things, but she was naked from the waist up in a pair of tights with this scar.

Alexis Petty: She asked me if I had ever seen this photograph of her mother, uh, and I said, no, I'd really love to see it. And so Barbara ran upstairs and she is, was gone for a long time. And, and so I think I, I went upstairs and Barbara was almost like frantic 'cause she couldn't find this photograph.

Barbara Mendelson: And I searched [00:08:00] and I could not find it.

Alexis Petty: Um, so instead we, we started talking about the memory of the photograph, and so I had the idea to paint the corner window for Barbara in her house. Uh, since it was this aspect of Betty and Betty's apartment and her personality and New York City that grounded Barbara's memories of her mother.

Barbara Mendelson: I did a lot of hanging out at my mom's apartment. There were hours upon hours upon hours lying on the couch, looking out that window hanging. I have never lived with her, but I have visited her at least twice a year. If not more often, and for extended periods of time, especially when the kids were really little and we would spend, you know, three weeks at Christmas time or three weeks in the summer, lots of time.

So, no, I never lived there, but I, I had a lot of feelings there.

Alexis Petty: Through Barbara trying to find the photograph. She found, uh, two photographs that she took when she went to move. Betty moved back to San Francisco to move into a home here for the last years of her life. Um, and so it was when Barbara went back to New York City to move Betty's belongings out of her apartment. One of the last things Barbara did in that apartment was take a photograph of the view outside of the corner window. So she took one at Sunrise and one at Sunset. 

Unknown Speaker: Can you tell me more about where this installation was, like what it was before and then kind of what it became? 

Barbara Mendelson: Yeah, I will take you down to show you actually, yeah.

I mean I could have had Alexis do this thing anywhere up here, but, uh, and we talked about maybe doing it there, but, but I don't [00:10:00] know, you know, I didn't know it was gonna be such a big deal for all of us. It's a big deal for her.

These shades of gray outline of a window, what appears to be a window frame. Uh, there's nothing, there's just a bunch of lines that really, unless you're, unless you're me, it's really, you would, you could walk down and think you wouldn't notice it.

Alexis Petty: Um, so then I, I actually projected, um, the photographs of the view of from the window onto the painting of the window frames, um, which pushed, um, this investigation to another level. Like just the, the reality of it for Barbara was just like she, when she saw it, she, she just felt, she felt transformed or trans placed, or, that's totally the wrong word, but transplanted, transported, transported, um, to her mother's apartment in New York City.

Like through what I felt was a simple wall painting and projection. 

Barbara Mendelson: I mean, it's crazy weird. There's nothing down here, but when I walk down here, I see Manhattan.

Rachel Hamburg: Alexis Petty is co-director of the studios and gallery at the Carville Annex. You can learn more about the creation of the Carville annex@carvilleannex.com. Don't go away. Next up, the space creates you.

You are listening to State of the Human, the Radio Show of the Stanford Storytelling Project. I'm Rachel Hamburg. You've already heard about a space designed for somebody to have a specific experience. Our next story [00:12:00] takes a step backwards to the design process itself. The Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, Charlie Mintz had been wondering if the space he worked in was hindering his creativity.

He had no idea. 

Charlie Mintz: Well, I'm guilty of it too. Poor space selection.

But then again, it doesn't really matter. I'm a writer. I could work in a closet or an airplane hanger or at the corner table a Jack In The Box. But then I started talking to design students, and maybe this is old news to you, but design students are really into space. And when I heard this I thought, nah, creativity comes from inside your head.

It doesn't matter what's around you. Space is no big deal. But I like to keep an open mind too. So I went to building 550, The Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, better known as the D School and poked around. Pretty soon. I ran into this guy. 

Larry Leifer: Been a lot of exploration in this space for how to keep things flexible.

Charlie Mintz: His name is Larry Leifer, and he's technically in the mechanical engineering department, but in practice he's the resident design guru. He oversaw the D school's move to its current location and he was influential in providing its aesthetic. 

Larry Leifer: And we had to pay a lot extra to get an old space. There was linoleum and carpets and other stuff on the floor. We had to pay extra to get back to the concrete. 

Charlie Mintz: Why did you want concrete? 

Larry Leifer: We want real stuff.

Charlie Mintz: The D School is known for its innovative approach to, well, innovation. But I heard that the D school had something else up their sleeve. A killer workspace that oozed ideas like that hotel in the shining oozed blood, a space you could enter and, pow, inspiration. 

Larry Leifer: Everybody in here is hunting for the next new thing.

The next big idea. How would I describe this to [00:14:00] somebody who's never been here and has been in a basketball court? And it's, this is about half of a basketball court and like a basketball court. It has high ceilings that, so you can shoot the ball high, or in our case, you can shoot the idea high.

Charlie Mintz: This has actually been verified by science, high ceilings do produce loftier thoughts. It's why cathedrals are so tall. But height is one thing, distance is another. 

Larry Leifer: So there's a seven second rule in our world, which is what your attention span is. The goal is from any place in this room, you can get to the shop, and here you can take your idea and start building it.

Charlie Mintz: Inside the loft is littered with paper bikes, talking fridges, buckets of strange substances, poster board, and other detritus of that favorite D school activity: Prototyping. Typical engineer clutter, I thought too busy to clean up after themselves and too preternaturally messy to care, but not quite. 

Larry Leifer: Go to most workspaces.

You do your thing on a sheet of paper, you fire the sheet. Can't nobody could see it here. Would encourage that whatever you do, be left visible and in the open. That's our knowledge made visible.

Charlie Mintz: Tall ceilings? Junk lying around? These were the secrets of creativity. My skepticism reared its head and started hissing, maybe building five 50. Had nothing to teach me about space and creativity. Masking disappointment. I ask Larry to show me another room. 

Larry Leifer: Yeah. What kind of space would you like to change?

Charlie Mintz: Maybe space is kinda like the opposite of this one. It's [00:16:00] for something very different. 

Larry Leifer: Okay. We could do that. What is, this is going by the happy name, studio One. So maybe in here we have an idea for a radio program. And maybe in this video.

Charlie Mintz: In contrast to the Design Loft Studio, one is a clean wood floor room consisting of some chairs, some whiteboards, some couches, and some very small tables. Honestly, they seem absurdly small.

I couldn't even imagine what kind of work you could do on them. 

Larry Leifer: So the next thing we do, we'll pull, bring over a little table, and sure enough, the table's on wheels. Everything's on wheels, and we put that into this space. And this table is curiously small. Why would it be so small? Well, because it has to allow us to be close to each other.

If we were this far apart, a big work table might be good for stuff. It wouldn't be good for the social dimensions of interaction.

Charlie Mintz: Social interaction? That didn't seem right. We were talking about spaces. How high ceilings help you have lofty thoughts and how you need to make your knowledge visible. How the space you're in affects the thoughts you think. Or another way how, if I'm working at Jack in the Box, it's gonna be hard not to think about hamburgers, but Larry seemed to be suggesting that the most important thing spaces could offer, really had nothing to do with architecture. 

Larry Leifer: The most important technology in your world in support of design thinking and innovation is the space you're work in. It's all about the space you're in and how it supports or to support [00:18:00] open interaction between people. 'cause the most expensive technology in the room is the people.

And the most important supporting technology is the space. You know, we think we have a screen in there someplace, but that's good, that's really pretty impoverished to the stimulus. The people are the interesting things. 

Charlie Mintz: People are the interesting things. And space is a supportive technology. I like that.

Think about a lecture hall, what it can do. A lecture hall can make sure 500 people face the same way and pay attention to the same thing. A round table, that's where you find King Arthur.

Rachel Hamburg: Charlie Mintz is managing editor of the Stanford Storytelling Project. For more information about the D School, you can go to dschool.stanford.edu.

The story you just heard was all about creating space to stimulate ideas. And what Larry Leifer says is true. Put a bunch of creative minds in a room with high ceilings, and you get a lot of innovation. Creativity is a social phenomenon, but as Stegner fellow Kai-Carlson Wee discovered isolation can make you creative too.

Kai spent four months alone in a cabin in Minnesota, a good part of it, in the solitude of the outhouse. This story is about what happened next. 

Kai-Carlson Wee: In 2008, I went up to my family's cabin in Northern Minnesota to write. No one was around. The closest people to me were like this old retired couple. Who lived two miles down the shore, and it was whole weeks without talking to anyone.

My life up there basically consisted of waking up in the morning, eating oatmeal, writing for about six hours, [00:20:00] and then taking my jugs down to the well to get water in order to like make pasta or make some coffee or tea or something like that. And then I periodically had to go to the bathroom. I would have to use the outhouse that was behind the cabin.

And this year that I was up, there was a terrible year for snow. Around the yard, it was kind of waist deep. I made this this path back to the outhouse, and I would trudge through the snow whenever I had to go to the bathroom. And this was a fine method, but at night, when it got late, um, and I had to go to the bathroom.

I would go out there with a headlamp or a little flashlight or something and the shadows and the moonlight coming through the trees and the birds making noise somewhere far off in the woods would often make me like severely paranoid and would often kind of just fill my head with dread.

The wind would be whipping around on the roof. In the shingles, there were these, uh, two little screens near the top shaped like triangles that, um, the wind would blow through and it created all these weird sounds and echoes and murmurs. And after sitting in there for a little while, I would start to hear voices outside and usually it was two guys.

Uh, talking about how they were gonna kill me, they would go into detail about how they were gonna do it. They would, you know, they would say they were gonna cut holes in the glass and then reach their hands into undo the locks. They said that they were gonna start a fire on one side of the cabin, and then when I ran out the other side, they were gonna get me.

These weren't just like little grunts and fragments of conversations. These were [00:22:00] like whole conversations that they were having with each other. I would listen to these conversations for sometimes half an hour or 45 minutes while sitting in the outhouse. 'cause I was too afraid to go out and check to see if they were really there or not.

I ended up bringing weapons with me and bringing kind of numerous flashlights so that when I opened the door I could shine them in different directions. And I usually had, uh, like a hammer or, um, um, you know, the coal poker, the, that, the, you know, most fireplaces have, I would bring weapons to bed and that helped, and I would set booby traps around my cabin and around like the perimeter, you know.

Just little things to alert me if somebody was coming. Uh, you know, bells on, on, uh, little string pieces of string, um, things that would fall when the door was opened. Um. Stuff like that. I knew that it was just something in my mind, but it gave me some insight into the pathology of somebody who's really living off the grid by themselves.

I think when, when you're in that situation for long enough, your brain just starts entertaining itself by developing these, these alternative characters and these alternative scenarios sometimes of a paranoid nature, sometimes of a very kind of inspired creative nature. But I think that's also why I did a lot of writing up there.

I went up there to write two novels. That was my plan, and I wrote two novels. They're not very good, but I still did it, you know?

I think it's, it's a natural kind of human instinct to imagine the mystery of life being this conspiratorial [00:24:00] plot, at least when you're alone. But, uh, yeah, apart from that, it was a pretty, pretty good time up at the cabin.

Rachel Hamburg: Kai-Carlson Wee is a first year Stagner fellow in poetry at Stanford.

Welcome back to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project. Today we're talking space craft, the power of space to make us creative, paranoid, and now terrified. You've heard a story about the fear the mind creates from empty surroundings. Now, imagine what happens when you throw in a little bit of broken lab equipment, a few mysteriously swinging ceiling lights, and a sudden disappearance.

Next up a story about what happened when a group of freshmen explored a more typically terrifying place, stanford's old chem building. It's an abandoned science lab on Stanford campus. Just a five minute walk from the D School. This space is a tempting spot for freshmen seeking thrills. Not the thrill of getting in trouble, Exactly.

So much as the thrill of stepping into a space charged with something. But ghost don't exist, right? 

Unnamed Speaker: So I went to the old cam building with a, uh, whole group of students and we agreed to meet, uh, on one of the corners of the quad at midnight or something like that. And six or eight of us, um, met up with our tour guide, who I will call Alex.

He took us over to the, um, the fence around the old cam building, and let's see if I recall, we had to. Hop over that fence first, making sure that no one could see us do so. Um, and then you had to kind of climb up onto a low roof and shimmy along the side of that and kind of work your way around the side of the building, um, to get to a single door that was for some reason left unlocked.

It was the one door on the whole [00:26:00] first floor that was unlocked.

The old chem building, uh, from the outside is pretty much like any building on campus. You know, it's kind of a sandstone rectangle, uh, with a a six foot fence running around the bottom. It's old, I think it was built in the thirties or forties, something like that. Um, and so, there aren't broken windows that I remember, but a lot of like dust and dirt.

Most of, like the lab equipment is gone, so inside it, it's, it's gutted, you know, it's dirty, it's empty. There's pipes and a few appliances here and there, but mainly it's tables and light fixtures and cold wiring, crumbled plaster, a few broken things here and there. It looks pretty much how you would expect a building to look if it hasn't been touched in in 20, 30 years. You know, it, it, it's cool. It's okay.

Things started getting interesting, uh, pretty quickly. We, um, we went up to the second floor and, uh, things started happening that didn't quite line up. Um, we heard a bang as if someone had bumped a, a metal folding chair or something like that. Everyone in our group was, was right there and there. There was no one who could have made that sound.

Uh, and we sort of look at Alex and he doesn't know what's going on. He says, well, I don't know, let's, let's keep going.

This sort of excites everyone in the group. It's, it's sort of fun. It's sort of silly and we, we, we don't know what's going on exactly, but there's these strange noises and it kind of goes with the idea of sneaking into a mysterious, abandoned building late at night.

And then things got weirder, things got really weird. We, uh, went into one room [00:28:00] that was a large, had, had been a large lab with kind of low, you know, um, like granite, tabletop, kinda lab tables with big fluorescent tube lights kind of hanging down from the ceiling, hanging low over those tables. And as we enter the room, um, Alex kind of, he, he freaks out a little bit. He says, wow, that's never happened before. Look out. Look out.

And the, the ceiling lights are starting to sway back and forth. They're swinging and maybe there's like an open window somewhere and the wind is getting in. We don't know, but they're starting to swing back and forth more and more violently, and we need to get through the room because the, the way that they kind of plotted our course through the building, we had to get through this room to the other side in order to make it to the next floor to continue the tour.

So we had to work our way very carefully and slowly around the outside of this room, all the while watching these ceiling lights, which looked like they were ready to collapse. They were swinging back and forth so, so violently. And, um, it was just, it was a little bit more than wind could have done. So everyone's starting to wonder at this point, like, what, what is going on?

There is something that does not add up. And, uh. We get to the, we're going up the stairs to the third floor and there's another really strange sound, like something being dropped or, or something breaking. And then it, it continues. There's like all these like sound of rocks hitting the roof or of, um, bits of plaster crumbling and collapsing and falling on, um, tables or something like that.

There's this kind of increasing. A set of strange sounds and Alex doesn't really know what's going on. He says maybe there's bats in the roof. He doesn't know. Maybe the recent rains were causing some of the tiles to collapse. We don't know. We just have to keep going. We have to keep going.

But then we're up on the third floor and Alex is kind of leading us and trying to get us through quicker now 'cause he seems a little nervous as well. Um, and he's, he's at the head of the group and he goes around the corner [00:30:00] into the next room, which is very dark and we hear like a short scream. And we come around the corner and Alex has just disappeared like he's just gone and there's the rest of our group. And at this point, everyone gets really serious and they're kinda like, what?

What just happened? What is going on? We have to get outta here. And no one really knew how to get out of here. 'cause we were on the third floor. We had found like a very roundabout way of getting up there. We'd gone through all these very disturbing rooms with like the ceiling light swinging and we didn't really wanna go back that way.

Um, but we didn't really know how else to do it. Um, so we start backtracking and we turn around and we go back down the stairs. We go back through each room that we had been through before, um, kind of quickening our pace. Everyone sort of felt at this point, like, at any moment we're just gonna break into a run.

But we make it down through the room with the swinging lights, which are still swinging. Um, we make it back down to the first floor and we're about to burst out the door, um, back into, uh, the open air outside.

And, uh.

There's Alex and he's just standing there kind of grinning and he says, hi guys. How was the tour?

And then about five or six other people come out of the shadows. And these were Alex's cohorts and they had been placed all over the building. Um, one of them was on the roof with like a handful of things to throw down to make noises. Another one had been like standing at top of the stairs, like ready to kick the chair over.

Two of them had had fishing line attached to the ceiling lights and had been pulling them to make them sway. And so this. There's a whole group of people had concocted this like haunted house tour basically for us, and had done it subtly enough that [00:32:00] none of us suspected that's what was going on.

The value of the old chem building is almost that it offers a sort of a local adventure ground where it is, it's kind of this dark mystery in the middle of campus and you go there and you don't know what's gonna happen and it's Instant sort of group bonding, and you instantly see a different side of people's personalities.

Like how do you act when there's broken glass everywhere and creepy noises and it's really dark, and police might show up and your tour guide might disappear and you don't know, like, do you have frivolous fun at that point? And giggled like, do you get really serious? Do you get really afraid? Do you step into a leadership role?

Like everyone had a different response. And so this space definitely facilitates a different kind of interactions than you get, say, on the main quad or other places on campus that are well lit.

Rachel Hamburg: After hearing a story like that about the old chem building, it's hard to know whether to be terrified or whether to go immediately, and that's actually how a lot of people feel about strip malls. Next up, we have a story about the Reston Town Center, a space for shopping and entertainment that has become the blueprint for commercial centers around the country.

And according to Stanford student, Aaron Thayer, it might also be a blueprint for the future of American culture.

Aaron Thayer: So I grew up in Reston, Virginia. And Reston had initially been planned as a town that was going to have many village centers. And, um, what ended up happening is that the town, uh, lost money and was sold to mobile land and Mobile land [00:34:00] decided that they were going to, um, build this town center.

When we were growing up, we always saw it as trees and like this great space and before it was developed there were lots of deer and falcons and everything and it was kind of, um, what you would think of as foresty, Virginia sort of land.

Um, and, uh, one time I was, um, I was going to uh, I was going to dance class and we, we were crossing the, the rust, the Dulles toll road on a bridge, and I looked out of the car and I just remember counting the cranes. That had been set up along the Dulles corridor and for the town center development and there were, there were, I counted over 17, I remember the number 17 and I just remember seeing it all being built and thinking that we are tearing up the space and like older people who were now probably my age, I was young, were creating this space for us.

The most conspicuous thing about Ruston Town Center is that it doesn't seem like you're in suburbia anymore.

The first thing you notice is you're approaching it. It's kind of like you're entering, like if it were Tron or something, you're entering the computer chip. There are these buildings that kind of come up out of nowhere. They're, they're tall, they're big name buildings, um, Lockheed Martin, Accenture. Um, I think Google has a place there.

There's some like Rolls Royce or Bentley, or like, they're big names now too, in [00:36:00] these big buildings. So as you're walking in, you feel like you're kind of walking into a downtown.

There's this nice, huge hotel with this open space that was used for music concerts or ice skating rinks. There, I mean, there are Apple stores, there's Victoria's Secret, there's gelato, there's frozen yogurt. I mean, it's all the same stuff that you see. In an urban landscape. So you get lost, like if you're going to shop, you get lost in that.

And there's like a, there's a, a street where they have all the restaurants, so if you want to go get a drink with some friends, you end up, you know, hopping from one to another and just hanging out and getting lost in that small space. I mean, it's not, it's misleadingly, it's misleading 'cause it's not large, but it's been constructed to give you the feel of a city and it's done that.

No longer, if you're in that area, do you have to go to the DC to eat good food or to, um, feel like you're part of a, a city life. Um, and there are people who think that, like leaving from DC and getting out to Ruston is fun. Like, Hey, let's go to the town center. Let's go to Tyson's Corner, let's get out of the city and go to these like mini hubs of city 'cause it's a step down from the intensity here, but it's not like trees.

Rachel Hamburg: Do you think it's changed you in any way? 

Aaron Thayer: I don't think it's changed me. I think it keeps me the same. You know what I mean? I can now leave San Francisco and go to DC and be in San Francisco. Actually, my parents moved out from like Santa Clara, Palo Alto area. My [00:38:00] parents used to joke about this all the time that they didn't move because it turned out that the demographic that they had moved into was exactly the same, like almost exactly the same.

It's like condensed San Francisco in Reston Town Center. You know, I mean, we are surrounded by our, our corporate consumptives. So like I, I leave this group of the things that I like to shop at, things that I like to eat, the places I like to go, the people I like to spend time with. I go from that environment to another one, and we're, we're, we're now like being stuck in ourselves.

So there, there's no reason for me to adapt to my surroundings when my surroundings have been designed

Rachel Hamburg: hmm.

Around this experience we get, we get boxed into other people's visions.

Aaron Thayer: I mean, that's really what this is all about. Being boxed into the design space of somebody else's visions. Like, do you really have enough time to make your own clothes? I mean, now think about it like we are clothing ourselves in what other people decide for our projections of ourself. We have to choose from the options that other people give us, and if the only options that were being given for our urban space is the same urban space across the country, that's pathetic. Then we're all the same person. We try to celebrate diversity in whatever, but we're really just cultivating sameness.

What we're looking at is like this is the next iteration of the strip mall. Right, this is what happens after the strip malls don't work. So what happens after these, these mini urban cities in suburbia don't work? Like what are we moving toward? That's the bigger question. What are we moving toward?

Because if you can see what we're moving toward and we don't like it, then we can decide, hey, we should stop and like veer off a little bit before we hit the iceberg. 

Rachel Hamburg: What do you think we're moving toward? 

Aaron Thayer: I think we're moving toward a similar like, and yeah, I mean like it's a long ways away 'cause it happens in steps.

But I think you can see that we're moving toward a, a [00:40:00] similar mindset, a consumer based culture. Do you wanna drink a soda but be drinking a Coke? Like, Hey, I only like, I'm only drinking a Coke. Do you wanna put on some jeans and be like, oh, I'm putting on a pair of Levi's. You know, it's that copyright thing.

Like, oh, I'm gonna go make a Xerox instead of a copy. You know, these, these, these idea, these things start out as great ideas, but then you, you, you create a monopoly on that concept. And right now we have this monopoly on space that is driven by what we buy, who we are that is controlled by certain companies and certain people.

I went to town Center, um, this past, uh, summer with a friend while I was back home and, um, she parks the car near this parking space and we get out and we're in this parking structure and we're kind of by the elevator, but not as close to the elevator as we could be because there's a sign next to the parking spot that's like closest to the elevator and there's this stork on it.

And I go and I look over at the sign with a stork on it, and I see that it says reserved for expectant mothers. Like, this is how designed this is. And you can think like initially, like I'm not sure that it's like done in a malevolent way. Like, ooh, how can we get these expectant mothers to stay and spend all their money and get their kids to stay and spend all their money?

But um, maybe it is a little bit.

You know, and I think that the town center is a good example that across the board, like that example, that expectant mothers sign, a lot of thought and care is going in to how to keep you [00:42:00] there.

Rachel Hamburg: You are listening to State of the Human, the radio show, of the Stanford Storytelling Project. In case you haven't spaced out yet, we have one more really important stop for you. So far, we've talked about scary spaces, spaces that stimulate your brain, fairytale houses, and an art piece inside an apartment.

All of those pieces were really different, but they had one thing in common. They were about physical space, but what about interpersonal space? For our last piece, Stanford graduate, Chelsea Little shares some stories about the most strange and invisible of all spaces, the space between strangers.

Chelsea Little: Where do these things happen? The street, bars, coffee shops on buses in transit. The middle ground between some place and no place. Maybe it's the rushing motion, the time travel that propels two bodies towards each other. Or maybe it's the stillness. In the midst of the rushing, the stops that jolts you out of your seat, your reverie, your inner monologue.

You stop, you look up or you look back or to your side, and there he is. Someone you've never seen before, a stranger.

Strangers, two people at a coffee shop standing in line, waiting to order. I had passed him on the street, noticing him only because I saw that he noticed me. It's a subtle burning sensation you get when someone's eyes are on you.

You turn your head and there they are, green or blue, but most often brown eyes looking into yours. He didn't worry me the way a stranger's eyes sometimes do when [00:44:00] you're walking on a busy street and you see them see you and you feel like maybe they want something from you. Money, sex, tattoos on his arm, a shaving head, a mustache from the seventies, hard eyes.

Maybe I should have been uneasy, but I wasn't. We stood in line and after I had ordered my hibiscus mint tea, when I turned around to grab some sugar from the counter, he stopped and said to me, you have really beautiful hair. I smiled with lips tight because I hate my teeth, and said, thanks. In that reticent way that somebody who has heard something said many times over can't help but offer.

A lot of my encounters with strangers occur in this way. They use some remark about the red hair as an inn or the red hair draws them in like some sort of magic and they try another remark. What are you reading? May I share your table? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a lollipop?

Strangers with candy is something you're told to avoid, and yet when Halloween rolls around, that is exactly what we do. We take candy from strangers. Witches and goblins, they offer up their treats, their fat meats, their golden fruit, and all they want is a lock of your golden hair.

I was five years old walking home from school by the usual route. Just as I was leaving campus, I stepped on a plastic grocery bag and an idea came to me. I'll pick up all the trash I see on my walk back home. Back then, I wanted to be an environmentalist, and back then I believed being an environmentalist involved, getting large groups of people together with pickup trucks and giant black garbage bags and sticks with stabby things on them, traveling the countryside, picking up every single item of trash one could find.

I didn't realize back then that what I was envisioning was much more [00:46:00] like being a prisoner.

I continued on my walk, stopping at every bus stop in corner where bits of refuse had gathered. I plucked up every cigarette button, gum, wrapper, I could find, slushy cups, paper bits, Dorito bags, all of it, and I stashed them in the plastic bag I had found. There was so much waste on the road, and time was something that always passed over my head when I wasn't watching the clock.

With all the stops in the toil, it was taking me much longer than usual to get home. Just as soon as I was rounding the corner on my street, my dad pulled up in his brown Nissan and broomed next to me in a huff.

He opened the door and barked, get in. I saw anger in his eyes and I was sorry I had made him mad. I was about to open my mouth and say so, but my dad was not worried about that. He pressed his foot on the gas and rushed to follow a long yellow Lincoln that had apparently been following me behind very slowly as I stopped to collect all the trash.

As soon as my dad pulled up, the car had turned around in a hurry and sped off, but my dad was right on its tail. He chased the car around the city for almost an hour before losing them, cursing the whole time, and I just sat there not understanding.

He told me later what had happened and said, Chelsea, you can't walk home from school anymore. As a child, I didn't feel very fragile. I didn't know that I could be snatched up, taken away, that I could die. I had read fairytales of course, and I remember all the times my mom told me never to go inside a house with a stranger.

But the actual idea that such things could happen to me had never crossed my mind.[00:48:00] 

Even then, right when it did, right when I was threatened in a very real way. It didn't hit me. I didn't understand why what had happened that day was scary until I was older and now I can't get this funny feeling out of my gut. I think maybe I should dye my hair.

My red hair reels in strangers like a flame that never burns. I'm harmless, witness waiting to meet a friend at the train station. An old man in homeless garb fat and blue flannel, and old and Asian comes up to me.

I am perched on some concrete reading, short stories, and he comes forward slowly, slow enough that I don't notice him until he is about a foot away from me.

I look at him first, I smile in the nice way that a nice person might smile at a stranger acknowledging their existence, but not necessarily inviting conversation. The man does not back down, but continues his forward advance. I think maybe he's asking me for money, though he doesn't say a word. I say I'm sorry I have nothing.

But he continues coming even closer, leaning in towards me. It is then that I see his lips pucker ever so slightly, and I realize he's going to kiss me.

I lean back and shake my head and say, no. I say it. I don't yell it because I don't think this man means me any harm. I like to think that I can tell when someone means me harm.

The moment I lean back away from him and shake my head and say, no, softly, the man floats away like a ghost.

What was the [00:50:00] ghost thinking? Did he think I might be a ghost too? That my body would melt away with his, that my lips would be soft and pliable or smoky and free like a drug you can breathe in deep and smooth. I was taught to be friendly, to be polite, to smile at everyone, because who doesn't deserve a smile?

The issue though is that no one knows what's behind a smile until they ask, until they step forward and lean into you and learn without a doubt that your smile was not an overture or an invitation. It was a kindness turned bitter with misunderstanding.

And yet there he was, one soul reaching out for another. To bridge that gap takes courage or craziness, but either way, it is a leap and it's exciting and it's good. Mutual understanding is what the soul longs for and sometimes a stranger is the only person who can give that.

Maybe my attitude on strangers is shaped in part by that homespun humor of Will Rogers, the man known as Oklahoma's favorite son with his charmingly naive saying, A stranger is just a friend I haven't met yet.

I certainly heard these words growing up from parents who themselves were indoctrinated with this theory as young Oklahomans and were once strangers to one another who met 36 years ago in a bar.

Many young lovers start off as strangers. Scene: I'm studying abroad in Florence, working with a theater group, and a strange young man a Florentine, walks up on stage after the show. I'm Tom, he says in perfect English [00:52:00] and extends his hand, giving me no choice but to take it.

This moment marks the beginning of a brief romance.

Later he'll tell me that he was drawn to me by a flash of my red hair and the words of his friend that asked, is that your red? Not yet.

Always the red. I wonder, was it my dad's red hair that drew my mother to him? Maybe I was given this hair like my daddy because I was meant to be open to this world. I was meant for strange encounters. For the experience of mutual understanding, the recognition that there is something inside some foreign you that identifies with something inside me.

This doesn't happen with every stranger, not at all, but when it does, it can make the world and all the bad things that happened in it seem a little less.

Because mutual understanding and the simple care that comes from this understanding, rather than from some sort of wanting is possible. And it's the beginning of friendship of love, even if only for a moment.

A muggy day in the city coupled with much walking and my bones ache. My foot hurts. I walk into a coffee shop, Mojo's Daily Grind, a three floor place with a smoking deck, bright colored walls and cellophane wrapped pastries stacked up by the sidebar. Barrels of coffee beans spill out onto the floor, the best smell there is and big stuffed couches are everywhere the way they should be. Just waiting for you to curl up with a book and a cup of Joe amongst your fellow caffeine junkies.

[00:54:00] I choose the couch in the center of the first floor room. I don't want. To walk any further, I take off my shoe and begin to nurse my foot. Muleing, never so slightly, trying not to be too public about my pain, but not really minding if someone notices.

My inclinations are dramatic and I tend towards the stage. He has a bushy brown beard. He wears a tattered cap, a t-shirt, some chacos. He's talking on the phone in the stuffy couch across from mine, leaning over occasionally to grab his mug and gulp up his coffee, black. I try to forget my pain and pick up a yellow book, brushing the top of my foot absent mindedly as I read, the man still on the phone stands up and walks around the table that separates us.

Switches his cell phone from right hand to left. He sits down next to me and places his right hand on the top of my foot. He holds it there for a little while, and I do not move. I do not feel afraid, just alive, connected, understood. He doesn't rub or stroke the foot, which I hesitate to think of as mine, but he squeezes it a little, but pulsating his fingers, sending human care signals into the foot, and it helps.[00:56:00] 

Rachel Hamburg: Today's program was produced by myself, Rachel Hamburg, with help from Aaron Thayer, Charlie Mintz, and Chelsea Little and Jonah Willihnganz. Thanks also to professors Jonathan Abel and Larry Lifer, and to Kai Carlson. We. Original music for the show was written and performed by Noah Burbank, Chris Carlson and Michael Wilson for their generous financial support.

We'd like to thank the Stanford Institute for Creativity in the Arts. Stanford's Oral Communication Program, Stanford Continuing Studies and the Hume Writing Center. KCSU would like to thank the law offices of Fenwick and West for their continued underwriting support. Remember that you can find a podcast of this and every episode of State of the Human on Stanford, iTunes, and on our website storytelling.stanford.edu.

For the Stanford Storytelling Project and State of the Human, I'm Rachel Hamburg. Thanks for listening to Infinity and [00:58:00] Beyond.