arduous journeys

From Manteq al-Tayr, Farid ud-Din Attar (Fitzgerald, trans.):

But how could you have expected to travel that path in thought alone; how expect to measure the moon by the fish? No, my neighbors, never think that path is a short one; you must have lions' hearts to go by that way, it is not short and its seas are deep; you will walk it long in wonder, sometimes smiling, sometimes weeping.

it has the same feeling as a babylon candle (as used in deep secret or stardust):

How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?
Yes, and back again.
If your feet are speedy and light
You can get there by candle-light.

the architecture of happiness

i took alain de botton's architecture of happiness out of lamont last week. it may be the pleasantest architectural theory i've ever read, and he manages regardless to discuss several things of special interest to me. care is often a tacit component of the discussion of craft. de botton, because of his particular orientation to the affective quality of architecture, provides a particularly crisp summary of the meaning of care in craft and the conditions that allow it to be practised:

in a busy, often heedless world, they stand as markers of patience and generosity, of a kind of sweetness and even love: a kindness without ulterior motive.

Although we belong to a species which spends an alarming amount of its time blowing things up, every now and then we are moved to add gargoyles or garlands, stars or wreaths, to our buildings for no practical reason whatever. In the finest of these flourishes, we can read signs of goodness in a material register, a form of frozen benevolence. We see in them evidence of those sides of human nature which enable us to thrive rather than simply survive. These elegant touches remind us that we are not exclusively pragmatic or sensible: we are also creatures who, with no possibility of profit or power, occasionally carves friars out of stone and mould angels onto walls. In order not to mock such details, we need a culture confident enough about its pragmatism and aggression that it can also acknowledge the contrary demands of vulnerability and play -- a culture, that is, sufficiently unthreatened by weakness and decadence to allow for visible celebrations of tenderness.

security (just a synonym here for confidence) seems a prerequisite for people to imbue their work with generosity (toward age and decay, space, light). perhaps this is why it seems to be that the only artists able to make work that is not overwrought are those psychologically secure in a body of work or a conceptual space in which to work.

another attraction of the book is its conscious and constant exploration of the fine line separating normalcy from bathos: for example, discussing those who eschew physical possessions because of a refined sensitivity to their eventual decay:

Such melancholic enthusiasts will see the moth hole beneath the curtain swatch and the ruin beneath the plan. They may at the last moment cancel and appointment with an estate agent, having realised that the house under offer, as well as the city and even civilisation itself, will soon enough be reduced to fragments of shattered brick over which cockroaches will triumphantly crawl.

the kingdom of loathing

an online RPG featuring characters such as:

	Pastamancer	With his mastery of the arcane secrets of Noodlecraft, the Pastamancer is a force to be reckoned with. He relies on his Mysticality to get ahead in the world.
	Sauceror	Long engaged in an uneasy truce with the Pastamancers, the guild of Saucerors protects the secrets of the Ancient Brotherhood of Gravymakers. Their Mysticality is their most important attribute.
	Disco Bandit	The Disco Bandit boogies to and fro, hither and yon. Whence comes he? No man knows. Whither strikes he next? All men live in fear of him and his Moxie.

villains such as the sabre-toothed lime , and equipment like the meatloaf helmet .

distributed storage

finally, but marred by a really crummy logo: wuala

letterpress, strangely right

a great short film by chuck kraemer, about letterpress (specifically, a small press now in allston). elsa dorfman, the fabled portrait photographer in cambridge, has a light webpage about firefly press.

type, the web, and the crystal goblet

"the crystal goblet" by beatrice warde (a short read available here) is a crisp exposition of invisible typography, the idea that the design of the page should be transparent rather than calling attention to itself. content should speak for itself; bad content can infrequently (arguably, never) be saved by good design:

Get attention as you will by your headline, and make any pretty type pictures you like if you are sure that the copy is useless as a means of selling goods; but if you are happy enough to have really good copy to work with, I beg you to remember that thousands of people pay hard-earned money for the privilege of reading quietly set book-pages, and that only your wildest ingenuity can stop people from reading a really interesting text.

Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments. There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realise that ugly typography never effaces itself; you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else. The 'stunt typographer' learns the fickleness of rich men who hate to read. Not for them are long breaths held over serif and kern, they will not appreciate your splitting of hair-spaces. Nobody (save the other craftsmen) will appreciate half your skill. But you may spend endless years of happy experiment in devising that crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind.

the same can be said of the web -- good content and good design that enables good content to be parsed easily are paramount. flash-heavy, content-poor sites may launch with a big splash, but are generally assured of rapid anonymity. the same principle also applies to all sorts of domains in which craft is applied to raw materials of varying quality: food, furniture, education, etc.

the sacred treasures of bhutan

the rubin museum will host a traveling exhibition of still-consecrated bhutanese buddhist art (per the nyt).

The works in the exhibition are not only national treasures, said Ramon Prats, the museum's senior curator, "but also living icons, whose sacredness must be maintained." To that purpose, five monks from central Bhutan relocated for the show's duration in Honolulu, where in addition to fulfilling their spiritual duties they developed a taste for Costco pizza and learned to paddle surf.

the rubin is across the street from miya shoji, the japanese custom cabinetry shop at which i watched ping pong and had a surreal conversation about work.

print on demand book covers

this is neat. the graphic border is made of little elements broadly-themed by book category (nonfiction, arts, children, etc) and then reassembled algorithmically for each copy of each book printed.

things change

after everyone left, whit and i spent the weekend working on stuff -- she was much more efficient and got out at 6-ish, but i was in there late every night. i made two bowls out of norway maple blanks i'd roughed out my second week at the ranch (one of them is the best one i've done in a while), cut up a strip of little shapes into little bowl blanks and turned those too, made four location boxes out of scrap cherry and mahogany, finished painting and finishing "you get what you pay for" in the happiest colours ever (i like the yellow in there a lot), and made two carved and framed panels. then yesterday, i got on a plane and ended up in cambridge with nothing to do but unpack the boxes that have been in the basement since may. the thing about all-encompassing engagements is that they end with a strange void. it's hot out, and there are crickets in the trees making a racket. the toscanini's in the square has been replaced by a jp licks (not an acceptable substitute), and there's an upper crust and a new 24-hour gourmet grocer on brattle st. the bookstore is still the same, which is nice.

it's good to be back.

lightmark

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

also, today, 45 minutes at lunch in a hammock under aspens, with an iced coffee and the books on play.

you get what you pay for

you get what you pay for

poplar, milk paint, red oak

18" x 5" x 2.5"

quince

aaron got me from google and we picked up some coffee from downtown mountain view before heading to the airport where he was going to collect someone and drop me off at bart. i got into the city just before 5 and walked up the hill in gorgeous sunlight and warm breezes to the old apartment for the first time in 2 months. ami tells me that last weekend was the first beautiful one in weeks, so i guess you don't miss a place until you come back and find it perfect.

i got a carefully-made, bittersweet iced coffee from ritual roasters, then headed up to pacific heights, arriving at quince at 7pm by way of jake and laura's apartment across the street. quince has a back table in the kitchen, and jake found enough people to make it work. great service for a large and confused table over a four-hour dinner by consummate professionals who never missed a beat and jousted with our table all evening.

four tastings of domestic and italian artisanal olive oil emerged from the kitchen gratis, together with samples of mulberries and orange and pepper truffles and a salt-crusted golden-tailed snapper that had just landed in california that same morning. we had a server dedicated to our table; her precise flourishes with the bottle of balsamic vinegar were bird-like and protocol officer-esque in the manner of C3PO and forced several of us to hold in snorts of laughter. dinner was

• 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)

acts, thoughts, things

from little, big:

"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.

more foo

after the evening sessions on saturday, a small group of people gathered around for folk music next to the tent city. i sat next to a physicist from trondheim working (now) on artificial photosynthesis, a problem he considers more interdisciplinary than almost any other and one whose solution might go some way to solving our current and future energy crises. he grew up in pakistan, went to manchester for college, and eventually ended up in norway. though his professional life began with spectroscopy, he has, every decade, changed his area of focus, thus ranging widely across the multiple domains of the physics of light. he was perplexed when i mentioned what i did for google, what i do now at the ranch, and what i'm doing next -- i think anyone who intentionally and volitionally embarks on a new and steep learning curve several times throughout a long career really does understand, deep down.

sci foo

i got to sci foo camp late on friday afternoon -- back at google for the first time in 2 months. it's surreal to be back and yet not back; all gates barred. it's overwhelming to see so many luminaries in the same space: george and esther dyson, neal stephenson, stewart brand, kevin kelly, dan janzen, winnie hallwachs, etc. then, after a full day of sessions, a banjo and fiddle emerged in the tent area and there was an hour-long folk music session. it's all quite magical.

things+

the last few weeks have been really packed at the ranch. we had tom huang on bamboo, wendy maruyama and judy mckie teaching the maruyama variations, merryll saylan on metamorphosis and fragmentation and, this week, a master class with david ellsworth. the variations class has been particularly tremendous -- a full week of projects that must be started and finished within the same 24-hour period, followed by a week-long major work. one of the students has been making bizarre one-offs, including a basswood curling stone in the national colours of sweden, a combination splitting maul and eggbeater made of beeswax, and a box for preserving eyes in sweetened condensed milk sealed with a cork and boiled pine pitch. other things being made: a shelf in the shape of the path described by a baton conducting in 4/4 time and a medicine cabinet made of poured concrete and stuffed with q-tips.

i also went to a concert on saturday at the aspen music festival courtesy of a student from the bowen sculpture class and got, as a result, to sneak into the last sessions of the brookings blum roundtable on climate change adaptation the next day. an unexpected opportunity to hold the door for madeleine albright. interesting and relevant in about a month, but it wiped out the entire weekend.

back to the land of snows

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 sat down with her at breakfast the last day she was here and discovered that she went to iceland with her father in the '90s as he was writing the heimaey story in the control of nature, about the vestmann islanders arresting the flow of lava from surtsey by continuous application of cold seawater. she also saw the deeply surreal and fantastic nature of iceland -- broad expanses of snow and rock, heights that warp perspective, clear light, and (in her case), the birth of a new island.

when i went to iceland in march, our last night in the field was at myvatn, a geothermal area in north-central iceland. it was the fifth consecutive day of rising with the sun, cutting ice, snow, and rock deep into the night, and of meals hastily made and eaten. the day after, we went to the myvatn hot pools to wash off the week's accumulated dirt, then hit the ring road westbound for reykjavik. for hours, we drove on empty roads through mountains covered in ice. one truck, a sixteen-wheeler, passed in the opposite direction. the stereo in the car would not relinquish the tape of chopin's nocturnes we'd put in. we stopped several times to take leaks in freshly-blown snowdrifts and into gravelly rivers. lunch was a salami, gouda, and cucumber sandwich eaten in the parking lot of the graduate dorm of the university of bifrost. a bright pink and orange playset took two spots in the parking lot, and was separated from an enormous field of lichen-covered volcanic rocks by an icy rivulet. several hours later, as we drove into reykjavik, we passed into a tunnel that dove under the hvalfjörður -- 5.7km long, and 165m deep, there was a noticeable declination. in our work-mazed state, listening to vladimir ashkenazy on repeat, it all made us wonder a little what kind of visual sense a child growing up in iceland develops, surrounded by such scale and landscape.

seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees

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.

to really see is to penetrate through to the meaning-essence of the thing seen, to enter a state where the name of the thing becomes irrelevant, where the sign is replaced by the signified: forgetting the name of the thing one sees.

new from colorado

cloud 1, white ash. approx. 39" x 27" x 30"

this is the first of the clouds.

joshua davis: first serigraphic edition

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, 2008

we left the hoffman's early to get back and print. the stack of shirts outside the digital media lab started at 15 and then grew as people walked by and decided to run off and find shirts or take off the ones they were wearing. by the end of it, we were printing on printmaking paper and kraft paper too and we must have made over 50 screens by hand. it was neat. and i discovered later that this was the first silkscreen he'd ever done, so i now have a signed 2/20 print edition and an A/P secreted away in the studio. this is the art. more pictures of the screening are on the way.

robert berlind

tonight, 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, 1997-1999

* famously espoused by mfk fisher and applied to the illustrations in japanese cooking: a simple art. ask me about it sometime.

on personality

Even 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.

from annie dillard's an american childhood

more new stuff

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:

1. we want you to focus is a work chair with a wood spring that pushes the backrest gently into the small of your back. the seat is hawaiian koa with some really beautiful figure in it; john had a few boards left from the 1970s and he gave me one. the backrest is a piece of shaped black walnut connected to the laminated, curved oak backpost with a double sliding bevel.
2. famous among the barns is what happened to the piece of white oak that jini and jess brought back from san diego. i turned it green many months ago, watched it warp out of shape as it dried, then brought it to colorado where it warped even more. the inside is milk paint, the colour i imagine dylan thomas had in mind when he wrote fern hill.
3. a box for holding contentment has no bottom and irregular dovetail construction -- the dovetails are cut in cherry boards milled to a taper (you can see this in the detail shots) and their size and placement vary on all four sides. the shaped ash lid, when closed, casts a shadow that hides the bottomlessness of the box; it is shaped out of a solid plank almost an inch thick and so is more massive than it looks and has some wild grain on the underside. it was diverting to build this and confound the trained furnituremakers passing through the shop with its sheer impracticality, so this may be the first in a series of boxes for holding intangible things.
   

noon on the kamogawa (reinterpreted)

the combination of time, space, and image has been occupying me of late.

noon on the kamogawa (2004), newly improved with fresh geometry (2008)

from the land of casual elegance

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. 

and here is a box for holding contentment. the case is made of irregularly dovetailed cherry and the lid of shaped flatsawn ash, painted with casein-based paints, carved, then finished with a danish-style penetrating oil.

rob amesbury

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

florilegium

the future of ice

aspen 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."

shopsin's

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.

geneshirt

maps, annotations, and wearable. do we want one? yes. yes, we do.

leaving and arriving

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.