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.
A delicious breakfast from House of the Seven Gables: Broiled mackerel, indian (corn) cakes with clovery butter, and coffee. I was thinking about this yesterday as I was sitting in the jury assembly reading room around lunchtime. I and three other people had the place to ourselves. I spread out at my own table, put my feet up, and got to work. All morning long, I pounded away on a pile of design work I’d been trying to do get around to for weeks. The reading room is better than silent, the ventilation is loud enough to cover all the small sounds of people working alone. The throat clearing, sniffs, and shuffles are flattened out in a nice white whoosh. No toddler to show me things or explain how cool his pelota is or list the colors of all the balls be plays with that the playground or explain to me how naughty it is to put tiny balls of tin foil in one’s mouth. All the perfectly justified interruptions that are enough to derail me over and over. When I got home last night, he had a whole new repertoire of La Ballena Moby stories to tell me, mostly morality tales describing how La Ballena Moby knows how to wait for his hard boiled egg without screaming or how La Ballena Moby never goes in the street because it’s dangerous. Dangerous, which he pronounces dangeous, is a very popular word these days and the base of his very first pun: Juice, juice, juice, dangeous! Hahaha! Fun-ny! All of his jokes conclude with haha funny. And speaking of remarkable urchins, I have been not really enjoying House of the Seven Gables as much as I have been enjoying Hawthorne’s notebooks with their unconnected characters and landscapes, but I did love the description of Hepzibah’s small gingerbread animal eating patron as Father Time.
…These articles Phoebe accordingly supplied, and, as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of fate whither so varied a caravan had preceded him. This remarkable urchin, in truth, was the very emblem of old Father Time, both in respect of his all-devouring appetite for men and things, and because he, as well as Time, after engulfing thus much of creation, looked almost as youthful as if he had been just that moment made.
On the other hand, 2666 is perfect so far. All weird little eddies of characters and voices. If only I have more moments with a free hand to hold up an actual book.
An example of an existing structure of authority in Science (Medical in this case). So to answer your question, I don’t think disrupting the centers of authority in the medical or scientific or publishing world is bad or dangerous at all. Just the opposite. So much of what Jane Jacobs said about urban community and safety is relevant again here in our new communities. It’s a struggle again between the muscular authoritarian model of urban development imposed from above and the gentle accretion of a structure made of paths worn and spaces populated by the people within an environment—that is, those who have the most interest in it. The most to gain and the most to lose by every change. More eyes keep us safe. More eyes keep us honest. (Go DIYbio!)
McSweeny’s is busting out with a newspaper!
Does Kenichi Yokono ever make prints anymore?
I haven’t been reading much lately, so my list of things to look up or puzzle over is very short. All the scrap minutes during the day when I normally read are filled up making smudgy drawings with Brushes. I really don’t think I’ve used color this much since I painted excruciatingly detailed portraits of imaginary girls and women for junior high art contests. (“Overwrought.” Second prize.) I used to use water color as if it were gouache, dripping a tiny amount of water into the paint pans and loading a dry brush with as much pigment as I could get out of a crayola watercolor case, then coloring over and over in the same place, sometimes until the paper began to buckle and pill. One summer when we lived in a dreary suburb in Galveston, I made a studio in the windowless, unairconditioned attic space above the garage. I brought all the odd crusty paints and scrubby bits of chalk I could find and put them in jars arranged by color. I would sneak up there and pull up the ladder behind me, so that no one could find me and later I could truthfully say I didn’t hear anyone calling my name. With the trap door closed it was almost impossible to breathe but I loved it. I would stay there for hours in the 110 degree heat making chalk portraits of imaginary women with enviable hair. Not many survived because I thought they were ruined once I dripped sweat on them and no good anyhow, and usually scrumpled them up in a fit… I sometimes wonder why my parents didn’t encourage my and my sisters interest in the arts more. It could be partly because our family took for granted a certain degree of visual literacy; and partly because despite a family tree bristling with painters, there was always something suspect about the lifestyle of an artist. There’s no tidy structure of authority to rein you in if you get too crazy thinking your own thoughts all by yourself day after day…
A fine article in Time Magazine on Twitter.
And Oxford University Press lexicographers monitor Twitter. I’d be curious to see how these stats compare with daily conversation. I bet soon it will be reasonable to monitor such a thing. You might have a few days of throwaway data to begin with while people get used to forgetting they’re being recorded.
And another wacky financial data visualization. I’d like to see it with updated data.
Aspartame tastes like a robot’s bottom. But that’s not the point. I was reading an article that claimed to tell The Truth About it. It was a perfect example of what’s wrong with the scientific method or the flaccid facsimile that passes for it: “These claims by unscientific hypochondriac malingerers have yet to be proven, so go on eating this thing that you’re pretty sure makes you sick because that’s just anecdotal. Anecdotal evidence is not science and not actually evidence. Until it is substantiated by four peer reviewed double blind study published in one of three journals, it’s a pack of lies. (Also shut yer cantankerous trap about methodologies, it’s the peers and the publishing that count.) Since no one has any intention of conducting said studies, all anecdotal evidence must be considered part of a vicious campaign on the part of rabid housewives and disgruntled hobos to defame the glorious and benevolent conglomerates who barely break even selling us non food items to eat. Ergo aspartame should be considered perfectly safe. Feed it to your fetus and always remember that it’s not the product on trial; it’s you, the consumer, who is guilty until proven innocent.” That quote may not be one hundred percent accurate since I transcribed it from memory; nevertheless, I think it’s time to democratize science the way communication and media have been in the last few years. It’s a creaking, squeaking hollow machine about to cave in on itself.
