The delightful descriptions of “chicken of illustrious race” in chapter ten of House of the Seven Gables. (About midway through.)
The cubed universe.
Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran. The whole world is watching. More eyes again…
An office by (and for) Selgascano in the forest outside of Madrid. The Spanish are so joyfully gung-ho for color. Sometimes it fills me with a pale gray suspicion me but this time it makes my mouth water.
And after a glance through American Craft, a bunch of tangents, starting with a crazy video of Matthew Szosz inflating fused window glass to make his pneumatic creatures. More of his work from an extinct show in Brooklyn and at the Friesen Gallery’s site. And while I’m poking around for more things made of stone (more or less), Chadwick Augustine’s MFA work from Alfred. Every now and then I lie awake at night thinking maybe I should go back to school and have all day to jog here and there making things out of clay or drawing or poking holes in stuff that are my very own problem and no one else’s. Then I look at the tuition for anything available near where I already live and I think to myself, self, that is probably not a very good idea. One of the nicest things about being an adult-adult is not owing monstrous student loans. And so I go and eat some chocolate ice cream and make something small and easy to complete like dinner or more chocolate ice cream, or a set of eight posters, which admittedly took a bit longer than dinner. I have learned a few things about scanning line drawings though. Really the trick is to scan at a resolution that makes your computer explode and the scanner melt, then adjust and resize in Photoshop, fully expecting the software to fold when you add more than one layer to the file. (And yes, I have 4GB of RAM on my Powerbook. What on earth is wrong? Don’t you people work at print resolution all the time?) And that, or maybe the thing before that brings me again to the question of where to live. Or where else to live, since we are rather heavily invested in our building for the next twenty years or so. After that article on Andy Brayman in American Craft, maybe I should add Kansas City to the list. His workshop is the old farmer’s market! A-ok. Right now the Traverse City area is an object of fascination, though combining that with NYC is a bit rough. I have no desire to leave NYC in the summer. I love it here in the hot weather. It’s social and full of art and fresh tomatoes and picnic food! Winter, on the other hand, leaves me barely alive. But maybe if I lived in a cottage with a fireplace and a lot of canned tomatoes and a nice workshop in a remote forest during the winter, it would be okay. (All this I stumble upon while picking strawberries in the woods, where I meet the owner who is moving to Guam and unloading the place for eleven thousand dollars in my fantasy, where I have a habit of never making things utterly free or completely random becuase what kind of a fantasy is that? Too easy. Too greedy. Not a very good story.) I might not want to ever leave my warm cottage and workshop. An older friend, a lifelong New Yorker, was telling me how when she was young, nearly all middle class New Yorkers had a little place to stay outside the city, however shabby. (Ha! There were middle class New Yorkers in those days. In Manhattan no less!) And if your parents were too poor for that, you were sent away to a camp to learn to swim and fish because the country air was good for you and fortified you against all sorts of infectious urban miasmas. I often find myself thinking of things like “country air” when I am at the playground with Aure. So many of the kids in my neighborhood look perpetually sickly. So many dark circled eyes and pasty little faces gnawing forever on cheetos dispensed by tense parents. I can’t help thinking how the disadvantages of poverty are so snarled, so much more than cash or education or nutrition or stimulation or touch or time or the cumulative effect of generations of everything gone wrong. Some of these little people go straight from a fractious babyhood to a unhappy toddlerhood and right on through, never knowing how it feels to not be subtly ill, not ever experiencing the magical phase of teenage invincibility the rest of us have to marvel at for the rest of our lives.
