effie sent this, a pair of germans who photograph lightpaths in remote locations. some of their work reminds me of the photo-respiration series, by tokihiro sato. in any case, quite beautiful.
lightmark no. 60; N 70°26’36.5“ E 27°53’27.1“, 2007
- a melon nectar shot with fried zucchini and anchovy.
- halibut tartare with soybeans and a citrus passionfruit grain mustard
- fried zucchini blossoms stuffed with ricotta and drizzled with olive oil. (so recently fried that they were still deflating when they arrived at table and were still tenderly liquid at the core)
- castelmagno-stuffed tortelloni with honey brown butter sauce and a candied pecan. (two pillows of pasta filled with a salty burrata-like italian cheese; the honey in the sauce a fine balance to the salt in the cheese)
- shreds of golden-tailed snapper in a cream sauce with lemon verbena and chopped vegetables. (we were tested and found wanting, not being able to identify the secret herb in the sauce, which was lemon verbena, of course)
- agnolotti of veal, pork, and rabbit, with sage brown butter
- tagliatelle with roasted quail ragu (both pastas were deeply, intensely satisfying, in the same category as the veal ragu bombolotti at jackson fillmore)
- thin slices of rib eye with creamed nettles and fried artichoke with 5-barrel aged balsamic vinegar
- peach leaf mousse with almonds and a black mulberry granita (the most successful dessert i've had in a long time. a creamy semifreddo with a bitter almond flavor at the very end of lightness and restraint, highlighted by roasted almonds, deeply-flavoured mulberry ice, and slices of santa rosa plum)
"Life is acts, and not thoughts and things. An act is a thought and a thing both at once, only it has this shape, see, so it can be analysed. Every act, no matter what kind, pick up a cup, or a whole life, or like all of evolution, every act has the same shape; two acts together are another act with the same shape; all life is only one big act made up of a million smaller ones, follow?" ... He said nothing for a time, remembering vividly the river barge where he'd set off The Act Entrained and other shows. Darkness, and the slap of oily water; the smell of punk. And then the sky filled up with fire, which is like life, which is light that ignites and consumes and goes out and for a moment traces a figure in the air that can't be forgotten but which, in a sense, was never there. And he racing around like a madman, shouting at his assistants, firing shells from the mortar, his hair singed, throat burning, coat motheaten from cinders, while his thought took shape above.
laura mcphee (daughter, incidentally, of john) was at the ranch a few weeks back. for her guest lecture, she showed her quite beautiful photographs of idaho (part of the series river of no return).
she also mentioned, quite offhand, that her epiphanic photographic expedition, the one that made her a landscape photographer, was to iceland.
i've been trying to get a copy of lawrence weschler's wanderer in a perfect city for at least a year; the san francisco library had one copy (always on loan), and the pitkin county library is sadly deficient. beggars not being choosers, instead i took out a copy of weschler's biography of robert irwin, the west coast avant garde painter and engulfed it in just a few nights of reading. much of weschler's description of irwin's work over the last half-century reminded me of bench scientists and their relentless pursuit of resolutions to hypotheses (a psychotherapist in one of the painting workshops agreed with me)
— a sort of a research and development undertaking applied to art. not coincidentally, there is a fine art research and development program at the swedish royal academy of art.
Had one asked Irwin in 1965 how he viewed the relationship between his activity and that of a scientist, he might well have replied that he saw none whatsoever, or that he saw the two enterprises as diametrical opposites. By 1970 .. he had developed a rich sense of the interpenetration of the two endeavors. "Take a chemist, for example, he starts out with a hypothesis about what might be created if he combined a few chemicals, and he begins by simply doing trial and error ... What the artist does is essentially the same. In other words, what you do when you start to do a painting is that you begin with a basic idea, a hypothesis of what you're setting out to do ... It's just a million yes-no decisions. You try something in the painting, you look at it, and you say, 'N-n-no.' You sort of erase it out, and you move it around a little bit, put in a new line; you go through a million weighings. It's the same thing, the only difference is the character of the product. Let's say at a particular point the scientists gets what he set out to get, he arrives at what he projected might happen if he mixed the particular right combination of chemicals in the right way. But the same thing is true of the artist: when he finally gets the right combination, he stops, he knows he's finished.most rewarding were the many accounts of the extensive process underlying the final objects irwin produced (the line and dot canvases, the discs, the glass and acrylic monoliths, etc) — it validates the need to tool about in the shop or studio concentrating on process rather than product and figuring out what questions to ask and how to frame them. (production furniture is nearly, but not quite, the antithesis of a question-orientation).
There is a strain in the Jewish mystical tradition that asserts that there exist questions larger than the sum of their answers, questions all of whose possible answers would never exhaust them ... "The thing that really struck me the most as I got into developing my interest in the area of questions is the degree to which as a culture we are geared for just the opposite. We are past-minded, in the sense that all of our systems of measure are developed and in a sense dependent upon a kind of physical resolution. We tag our renaissances at the highest level of performance, whereas it's really fairly clear to me that once the question is raised, the performance is somewhat inevitable, almost just a mopping-up operation, merely a matter of time. Now, I'm not antiperformance, but I find it very precarious for a culture only to be able to measure performance and never to be able to credit the questions themselves."the constant pursuit of a goal which cannot be realised in the coarse stuff of the world is heroic, like trying to capture the meaning of a Dreaming without the right song, or trying to produce a 3D version of a 4D shape.
frank stella: "I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the old values in painting -- the humanistic values they always find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there ... If the painting were lean enough, accurate enough, or right enough, you would be able to just look at it ..." karsten harries, commenting on stella: "No matter how radical the pursuit of presence, the work of art will always fall short of that purer art that is its telos. It points beyond itself and lacks the plenitude it demands."the nice thing is, sometimes the heroic endeavor is rewarded, though not because but in spite of the trying.
Grace: you work and you work and you work at something that then happens of its own accord. It would not have happened without all that work, but the result cannot be accounted for as the product of the work in the sense that an effect is said to be the product of its causes. There is all that preparation — preparation for receptivity — and then there is something else beyond that, which is gratis, for free.last week, paul bowen took a pencil and drew a smiley face on a sheet of butcher paper and it had the most perfect line. he tried to replicate it and was unable to; we ended up tracing over it to produce a pale shadow of the original. but perfect lines are the result of this kind of beginner mind or state of grace, where consciousness recedes in the act of creation.
on sunday night, i got called over to the dynamic abstraction dinner table and we decided that the man himself would make a large-ish pattern that we would silkscreen. i couldn't find any soft woods to make the frame out of, so i used up some of my stash of ash and made a large walnut-splined frame. we finished the frame, dried down the emulsion, and got the final art on tuesday, made the negative and exposed the screen yesterday morning (the lines were numerous and fine, and required some heavy q-tip action). we were going to print on thursday evening, but we also got invited to the home of a pair of art collectors in aspen and got to see, among many other things, a 1970s oldenburg (a green-washed print of soft drums), a very early rauschenberg, several peter voulkos pieces, a frankenthaler, a mehretu, two original eames chairs, and an eliasson photograph. there was also a great architectural drawing by nicola lopez.
claes oldenburg, soft drums, 1972
nicola lopez, coriolis effect, 2008tonight, lectures from joshua davis, robert berlind (represented by tibor de nagy) and christian burchard. berlind's work is generally classified as landscape; he showed a series of recent large works made from paintings done on site. he stopped at a slide of a painting of a river in full flood to distinguish between realism in painting that attempts to represent what is seen and realism that attempts to represent what is: a photograph of a moving river captures a frozen moment in the river's motion, thus not the motion of the river itself. this is similar to the ability good schematic drawings sometimes have to convey more salient information about the subject than photographs do.* this is the best slide, a pier reflected in dark water on a windy day filled with blowing autumn leaves.
harbor, 1997-1999Even my friends began to seem to me marvelous. People's being themselves, year after year, so powerfully and so obliviously -- what was it? Why was it so appealing? Personality, like beauty, was a mystery; like beauty, it was useless. These useless things were not, however, flourishes and embellishments to our life here, but that life's center; they were its truest note, the heart of its form, which drew back our thoughts repeatedly.
the slide from the grew-sheridan studio late-nite photo session in may with joe schopplein finally arrived, so new photos are up on my slowly-growing portfolio site:
the combination of time, space, and image has been occupying me of late.
having all-hours access to a fully-equipped studio and machine shop is the closest thing to perfect. in between working on stuff, i'm working on Stuff. this is a pair of not-yet-finished round-bottomed bowls that don't yet have names, turned green out of silver maple.
i went to a presentation of work a few days ago by rob amesbury, who's at the ranch teaching a workshop on fine detail gouache painting. much of what he showed referenced 16th-century dutch painting styles -- allegory, concentrated composition, assemblage, etc -- but applied to modern objects. bottles of clorox, hello kitty, and cans of bud light float through his paintings, which are full of saturated color. this does not normally appeal, but i find myself strangely drawn to them. at breakfast the next morning, i also found out that he'd taken a bunch of stilgoe classes including an early version of the fabled fantasy seminar (now known as Adventure and Fantasy Simulation, 1871 to 2036), which surprises me not at all.
big fish devour little fish
florilegiumaspen has a remarkable circulating library for a town of 6,000 permanent residents. i took out madeleine l'engle's a circle of quiet, the first in a trilogy of autobiographical books in which she reflects on her writing life. i also picked up gretel ehrlich's the future of ice, which is a prolonged meditation on physical and psychological landscapes of cold. though it gets irritatingly handwavy at times, the writing is good and the subject matter at least reminds me constantly of barry lopez's arctic dreams and bruce chatwin's the songlines. her descriptions of how landscape and weather are intertwined are particularly beautiful:
The Selk'nam had four skies. Each was thought to be invisible and infinite, constituting a whole cordillera. Where they lived was a place of mountains, and they conceived of sky, ocean, and weather as being mountains as well. The north sky was black, associated with rain, the sea, and the whale. The west was red, made of wind and sun. The east was only a boiling ocean, and the south was pure white because that's where the snow came from, and the moon and the owl. These most southerly cultures in the world had winter weather threaded all through them. When asked about who her parents were, one Selk'nam woman said:"I am snow, my mother was wind, my father, rain."
i bought the tummy trilogy in 1999 and calvin trillin almost immediately became my most favoured writer about food. like the best, he is as concerned about the context (cultural, personal, historical) as he is about the food. or, as mfk fisher put it, "When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and it is all one," because "there is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk."
in the trilogy, trillin writes rapturously about an unnamed greenwich village restaurant close to his apartment run by an unusual owner with a rigorous cooking and patronage policy and an enormous, multi-page, highly eclectic menu. it sounded like the archetypal Secret Restaurant In the Sky—eccentric, with unusual food and a distinctive style. entree gained not by vigorous applications of cash, but by local knowledge and the accumulation of time. (just like the restaurant john mcphee describes in "brigade de cuisine," the final essay in in giving good weight, a marvelous essay collection whose title piece is about the union square greenmarket). trillin could only write about the restaurant on condition of keeping it anonymous; this stymied and frustrated me until early 2002, when he revealed all (including the name) in a new yorker article. shopsin's was about to move to a new location after thirty years and, for the first time, sought publicity.
in spring 2003, i went to new york and, on a slow morning, went down to greenwich village to look for shopsin's in its new location on carmine street. i arrived just after they opened for lunch, there was no one there, and i had the most amazing chicken tortilla and bean soup. i thought about shopsin's again on december 28, 2007, while seeking a place for lunch; i decided then that shopsin's would always be there so i could just hit it up on my next trip to new york. naturally, it closed a few days after.
yesterday, lauren from atlanta came back from the aspen library with a small stack of DVDs—among them was a 2004 documentary by matt mahurin called i like killing flies, about shopsin's in the time of transition. it's a great film, well-directed, well-edited, with a superb, well-contained subject. the most visually-compelling part of the film is how it illustrates the way spaces form themselves around institutions of any size. the original shopsin's was tiny and seated just over 30 people; over three decades, it accumulated a crust of paraphernalia and objects that seemed light only by dint of the gradualness of its accretion. stripped of the stuff, the old restaurant looked naked; the new restaurant looked like a person wearing someone else's clothes.
more valuable was the exploration of something done right—not in the sense of something done by rote or process but something done right deep down to the essence of being; great ventures by great people. kenny shopsin explains that
it gets into a subject that really has not much to do with me but has to do with humanity ... the great lack in america, the great belief that was our flaw once we lost our christian backgrounds or whatever the fuck we had. we never intellectually, as a country, tried to figure out what the meaning of life is. and we still don't ... not that that's easy to achieve. am i with my busy work seeking to inject meaning into my life? the way that i choose to do this is to choose an arbitrary stupid goal and pursue it with vigor; and what happens to you in that pursuit is your life. i understand that the goal is stupid, but it's not stupid to pursue because it's the only way you can inject meaning into your life. otherwise you're left with this great 'why bother?'craft (whether the production of mingei, or in engineering and the sciences, or in cooking), with its gradual accumulation of incremental technical competency, has been one pathway for people to get to the meaning of life.
the last four days have been distinctly surreal. leaving a totalizing job is a wrenching experience, the more so if you have had, last minute, a bit of a change of heart.
i had dinner in mountain view with aaron and jini; the streets were full of people recovering from work, happy, talking to friends, drinking wine, browsing in stores. it was unseasonably warm. the late afternoon had been a blur of leavetaking and salvaging emails and files. i had the distinct sensation time was running out with many things left to do, yet i was compelled and wanted to spend time with as many people as possible. when i got back from dinner, i had about 45 minutes before the last valencia shuttle arrived, and waited outside reading the cunning man. it was a funny feeling, heavy and light at the same time.
on saturday morning, i woke up early and walked out to the farmers' market. it is cherry season now, and piles of them sat gleaming in the sun. i ate a sample strawberry and listened to the counter folks talk about j.i. rodale and began to miss san francisco even before really leaving. someone in noe valley showed up to buy my feather bed, then i went out again to buy chewy sourdough pizza breads from the bennet valley bread lady. it was the first half of a valedictory lap around the city. dave showed up mid-morning and we drove up to north beach to meet zach and the rest of the party. there was some 3 on 3 basketball, shotguns of tecate, then a long drive to stinson beach. along the way, the most expensive dried fruit and nuts ever. another day of no food. tecate and pacifico, cold water and surf, tans. dinner at pakwan, drinks at bourbon and branch (amazing martinis, the austrian) then la trappe (a phenomenal unibroue ephemere), then back to zach and catherine's for liar's dice.
sunday morning, i was up early to sell yet more stuff. i dropped off two boxes of stuff at the goodwill box, then walked down to the safeway at 30/mission in search of a coinstar machine (which i didn't find). this being a true valedictory lap, i stopped in mitchell's in search of ice cream, then walked up cortland for a kefte sandwich at progressive grounds before catching the 23 bayview into the shop. refinished the top of the chair, carved out the rest of the bowl, and made a very awkward leavetaking. john was sweet and dropped me off at the hospital. it was 6.30pm and still light, and i walked home, stopping at ritual along the way. around 8pm, people started trickling in. pelly, zach, mary zhang, may, halsey, peterson all showed up. we made our way through a case of tecate, and then i made curry thai noodles. i went to bed at 1 after tearing the pictures off the walls.
monday morning, up at 5.30. the room felt empty, and i folded up the last of the linens and took out the last of the trash. the bags were huge and reminded me again of why i want to travel light. the line at the united check-in was glacial, then the line for security stretched almost to another terminal. flight to san diego delayed nearly an hour, then flight from san diego to denver delayed 40 minutes. i just caught the denver-aspen flight, but of course the bags didn't make it. susan working picked me up from the airport. i met wyatt and whit, the other two wood interns (stories to come). we moved stuff, we did a grocery run, we had pizza and beer, we came back. i think i will like this.
i was up near toronto last week at the university of guelph, hanging out with the people from the biodiversity institute of ontario. paul hebert, who's the director of BIO, is one of the main proponents of DNA barcoding as a way of identifying organisms (major paper available here, for those so inclined). the project currently consuming the bulk of his time is the international barcode of life, an attempt to sample all (or most) species on the planet, sequence a reference portion of the DNA of those samples and construct a library of these reference DNA sequences. his facility at guelph has a group of passionate, intense staff, a workflow, a really nice bioinformatics platform, and partnerships in place to sequence hundreds of thousands of samples each year.
DNA barcoding and identification techniques like it represent a fundamental change in our orientation toward the world: we begin to move away from the imposition of presumed parameters and toward learning what might be called the true names of things. for the longest time, we've organised the world of organisms into groups, each composed of individuals that we observe to be more like each other than they are like other organisms -- taxonomists examine morphology, habits, and other characteristics, then divide up the world based on what these examinations reveal. these groups nest within each other (the hierarchy of groups is kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species), species being the lowest level of group organization. the binomial latin name (a naming system introduced by linnaeus two centuries ago) is usually how we refer precisely to an organism that is a member of a species. the first part indicates the genus, the second the species name; there are, for example, many types of maples (genus Acer) but Acer rubrum means you're talking about just the red or soft maple. it is the latter-day version of the naming of the animals (on which note, see this marvellous article).
the value of this exercise depends on there being at least one sequence of DNA in any major group of organisms that varies enough between species to be a robust identifier. for most eukaryotes, paul's operation sequences a short (648 basepair) section of cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (CO1) which is a part of the mitochondrial DNA -- the sequence then becomes that species's barcode. DNA is the group name that's written into the organism itself, and it identifies precisely -- the barcode as currently implemented is a short form of that true name that seems to identify relatively robustly for the species to which it has been applied.
the idea of a power-conferring true name is liberally sprinkled through the tradition of magic (i like best ursula le guin's earthsea, where magic is declarative and verbal and depends on systematic acquisition of the true names of the world. this is a particularly nice section from a wizard of earthsea). with a library of such reference barcodes, rapid, robust, and accurate identification of animals, bacteria, plants, viruses, and all manner of other things becomes possible just by sequencing the same part of the DNA of whatever sample you've collected, comparing that sequence to the reference library, and finding matches. there is obvious value in rapid, accurate identification. for example, it would revolutionise and dramatically increase the efficacy of programs for the control of vector-borne diseases; immediate applications can be found in natural resource management, water quality monitoring, climate change early warning, agriculture, and many other domains that concern us.
needless to say, the guild of academic biologists and taxonomists is debating the value and validity of this DNA barcoding exercise hotly.
here's an interesting project: ask people what comes to mind when they see a brand, then show the results as a tag cloud with frequency indicated by size. the result is a real-time map offering online brand surveillance. all it needs is a time-slider (like the one in google earth) that allows viewers to navigate the histories of brand tag clouds.
looks like nike's not doing so well with the child labour and sweatshops though, admittedly, everyone does think they're big on shoes. 
i've been trying to finish this side chair before leaving for aspen and i spent all of last weekend shaping the seat and back, then sanding them down. the back post and seatback are separate from the rest of the chair, so i glued those up last sunday and then started on the rest of the parts this week, finishing all of the pre-glueing sanding before getting into the shop today. i was all ready to glue, and then realized that i'd have to make clamping blocks for almost every piece since nothing in this chair is at right angles with anything else. after making those, i got ready to glue again, then remembered that i'd have to make the wedges for all the through tenons. i started glue-up around 3.30pm, beginning with the two sides of the chair frame, then connecting those with the midrib and the footrest. the seat is attached to the legs with mortise and tenon joints, two of which are fox-wedged. those last were fiddly to measure but worked out beautifully. here is the chair in clamps:
bent objects is full of things (many of them strangely orange snacks) doing things to other things. the circus peanut circus is a personal favourite:
(thanks, hammer)
the ground at skaftajokull was hard at 8am on the second day, and the water from brushing my teeth congealed and froze in just a few minutes. the sky was bright, but the sun hadn't yet come over the moraine in whose shadow we'd made camp the night before. though the night had been filled with gusts of wind coming off the glacier, as with almost every other morning there was little wind and barely any sound. i pulled the groundpad a little ways out of the tent and lay there in my sleeping bag looking up at a cloudless sky rimmed by brown and white peaks for an hour before rustlings in the other tent got me moving.
after breakfast and breaking camp, we brought the gigapan up to the top of a nearby hill and took a 360-degree panorama (which turned out to be all wiggly), then crossed into one of the gullies to make sculpture #1. partway down and in the middle of the gully, a large, smooth, ovoid boulder sat perched on its narrow end amid an expanse of unconsolidated gravel and gray volcanic mud. the sun had just come over the edge of the gully and we sat on the western wall soaking up the light for a while before starting to build a jagged wall of snow around the boulder. truth be told, there wasn't much consideration at the time; after the fact, it seems a logical inversion to set a palisade of craggy snow around a smooth stone boulder in an landscape of jagged rocks nestled amid soft spreads of snow.
we shot a few minutes of footage of suitman coming over the lip of the gully and finding the ring of snow. he comes slipping and sliding down the gully wall and examines the ring, then completes it and strikes out on foot across a rocky plateau. as we filmed that last part, a small cluster of sightseers appeared, considered us (one person in a big blue suit, another carrying lots of camera equipment, a large shovel, and an ice axe), and turned tail.
the HD video of chad pugh's science machine, entirely made from scratch in adobe illustrator.
christiaan postma's prose clock
lead pencil's maryhill double, close to PDX:
photo from today and tomorrowa highly-caffeinated 4 hours in seattle.
first stop was the espresso vivace at e denny and broadway to get some of emails out of the way, make a call, and wake up at a window counter made of blue volga granite. like any institution, vivace makes much of its history and the space (a large, high-ceilinged room sparsely populated with tables and chairs) reminds me of the original peet's coffee on walnut/vine in berkeley. apart from a wide selection of literature about coffee-making, vivace distinguishes itself by celebrating the latte art of its baristas. particularly beautiful latte art is commemorated with framed and dated photographs on the walls of the cafe (also turned into postcards on sale for a couple of dollars), and it appears to be a badge of honour to be placed on the wall. my latte was excellent (with velvety, micro-foamed steamed milk) and a perfectly symmetrical heart of a rich, rust-red hue; it was made by someone who was very proud of having just gotten her first wall photo (2nd column from the left on the east wall, left side, 2nd from the bottom). before leaving, i got a single-shot espresso just to see how much they were able to preserve the caramelised sugars in their roast; it was probably the sweetest, least bitter espresso i've ever had.
with two hours remaining, i wanted to get lunch at salumi, the fabled cured meats place in downtown seattle run by mario batali's father, armandino. on the way there, i passed stumptown roasters on pine street and was unable to resist stopping in for my third coffee in 2 hours (latte, also excellent), then walked the rest of the way to salumi feeling brittle, as if sudden motion might have unfortunate consequences.
southern aspect of the seattle public library, from 4th ave
