drop by drop, it becomes a river

"Renunciation," I said, "even at this late date, can work." "I'd agree with that," said Arkady. "The world, if it has a future, has an ascetic future."

bruce chatwin, the songlines

going nowhere, seeking no victory

saturday, before dinner at 900 degrees in manchester, NH—a pizza parlor with no similarities to this new york museum of pizza diversity other than the name—we saw japanese swords at the nearby currier museum of art, which also contains a stunningly difficult laminated desk by jere osgood.

The narrow view of natural farming says that it is good for the farmer to apply organic material to the soil and good to raise animals, and that this is the best and most efficient way to put nature to use. To speak in terms of personal practice, this is fine, but with this way alone, the spirit of true natural farming cannot be kept alive. This kind of narrow natural farming is analogous to the school of swordsmanship known as the one-stroke school, which seeks victory through the skillful, yet self-conscious application of technique. Modern industrial farming follows the two-stroke school, which believes that victory can be won by delivering the greatest barrage of swordstrokes. Pure natural farming, by contrast, is the no-stroke school. It goes nowhere and seeks no victory.

fukuoka masanobu, one-straw revolution

more fukuoka here. context is important: the pizza would have been better had greatness not been keenly anticipated.

the ocean of unknown possibility

richard feynman, he say: "i think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong." right on.

flavin and judd

are you in new york city? go to the flavin/judd show at david zwirner's new poured concrete building on w 20th st at 11 ave. on the ground floor, pay close attention to the ceiling. don't forget to visit the small but lovely exhibition on the second floor, featuring beautiful and serene steel pieces by john mccracken and fred sandback. as you leave, saturated by the experience of art, try to ignore the clumsily drilled holes with which the handles are mounted onto the carefully constructed doors.

the entire staff

it continues to be my privilege to be acquainted with the entire staff of kat ran press. this week, i paid a too-short visit to its tastefully appointed, digitally warmed offices on myrtle street in cambridge, ma—a visit which demonstrated that while bad taste is ubiquitous, the exception proves the rule. the kat ran checklist you see above, under a copy of dogs are OK, is a catalogue raisonné containing a tough-minded, superb essay on design that does not exist online.

a good time was had by all. or, at least, by me.

design vs styling

It seems to me that there was no need for American Airlines to undertake such a change, but many people do not understand the difference between Design and Styling, and believe in change for the sake of change. Design cannot cover the mistakes of bad management, but styling can.

massimo vignelli

vignelli is not infallible, but he is worth thinking about. design is an inextricable part of good management, whether it is the design of an organization or the organization's visual identity. and crucially, styling can cover the mistakes of bad management but not when it is poor styling.

bits, pieces

this is important.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.

annie dillard, the writing life.

It is a somewhat shattering moment when we realize that our lives are made up of the particulars of what we do every day.

jim harrison, "cooking your life" in the raw and the cooked.

more dillard here; more harrison here and here.

an unexpected briefing

like virgin america's launch inflight safety video and melbourne metro's dumb ways to die, almost every moment of this air new zealand safety video by weta workshop is worth watching.

mind over mirrors

this is jaime fennelly:


howdy pardner and the hard truths, my easy-listening aloha-shirt country music band, will henceforth be known as smoke and matter.

it's coffee time

i cannot vouch for the quality of this establishment's coffee, though its mascot leaves nothing to be desired.

snow

if on a winter's night a traveler, this morning he would be a little bump in the white and smooth expanse. the mayor of new york city says BLIZZARD2013 is a good opportunity to catch up on some much-needed sleep. for some others of us, it has been a time to stretch out, guilt-free, with a good book and a hot beverage. in connection with this state of affairs, it should not go unremarked that rex stout's very first nero wolfe book, fer-de-lance, contains thrillingly specific uses of the words "myrmidon" and "excelsior." love of language is always a pleasure.

the rain room

the line for this was inconveniently long.

katachi

by tokumaru shūgo, stop-motion animation by kijek/adamski.

purna kumbh mela

with the powerlines and streetlike aspect, this looks like a desert village. in fact, it is a view of sector 8 of the purna kumbh mela site. located on a floodplain just outside the city of allahabad in uttar pradesh, until a few weeks ago the site lay under the waters of the ganga and yamuna rivers. kilometers of steelplate roadway, thousands of tents, hundreds of public toilets and utility poles, and many temporary bridges have been built since december to make the site habitable for the event's 55-day duration.

the mela continues through the end of february but we're headed back to cambridge, ma today, scoured clean of karmic debt by the chilly waters of the ganga. the mela site's floodplain infrastructure and population continues to grow as the main bathing days approach, something the many vendors and entrepreneurs are counting on. a temporary city accommodating between 2 and 10 million people at any given time is a place to learn (among other things) about how to design more adaptable cities and communities: a topic for deeper consideration.

nirmohi akhara

midday, on the triveni road, we met a sadhu who invited us to lunch at his akhara. under a tarpaulin stretched across branches, we were handed small leaf bowls filled with pieces of guava and papaya. a small group gradually assembled under the tarps to tell us that the international society for krishna consciousness is known to the nirmohi as the englishman's akhara, explain how a celibate sadhu can have a wife and children, and brandish ceremonial swords. it was bright outside the tent when we left with prasad in our hands.

universal need

the 37signals blog sometimes throws up real gems. this is a long promotional video for the polaroid SX-70 SLR folding camera, beautifully made by the eames office. in just 10 minutes, the video shows the range of use-cases (close-up to far-away, static and dynamic objects, tight and loose compositions), the immediacy of the photographic act, a detailed explanation of not only the camera mechanism (which includes a camera battery in every pack of film, essentially guaranteeing that the battery never runs out at a critical moment) but also the remarkable built-in 3-colour additive integral instant film system, and a crisp summary of the motivations behind designing the SX-70.

let's hope that it will become commonplace for much time and care to be spent conceiving and building things intended to be consumed slowly and with nuanced appreciation, things that, in use, help us make ourselves better people. this is true not only of the video but of the SX-70 itself, an object designed with the optimistic goal of bringing out the best in its user:

"the user is the final link: the device helps meet the universal need to do things well. it offers as a matter of course a tool for supplying a rich texture to memory. more than that, thoughtful use can help reveal meaning to the flood of images that makes up so much of human life. we hope the user will fully complete the chain, gaining as much fun, as much sense of self, and as clear participation in the stream of human creativity as did edwin land and the team who first made SX-70."

night lights

the kumbh mela is a recurring hindu pilgrimage featuring many lights, a complicated social ordering, and many tens of millions of people trying to bathe along the same few kilometres of riverbank. the mela forms in allahabad, in a giant temporary tent city built on the dry floodplain of the ganga and yamuna rivers at the triveni sangam, where the two rivers meet each other and the invisible saraswati river. a place to which many have ascribed mythic powers.

no trumpets

walkies

an early morning arrival on a heathrow-delhi flights offers serene vistas of the craggy, snow-covered peaks of the himalayas. indira gandhi international airport's international terminal has an arrival hall large enough to have its own weather system and, this morning, it was smoggy. a 45-minute drive through thick haze in a non-airconditioned taxi later, i fell into a deep and glutinous sleep to the sound of jackhammers in fort siri. waking with difficulty several hours later, i went out into the city hunting for food.

the day was cool and slightly humid and walking not a chore. at the end of the road, a sign in the gatepost of a stately stuccoed house read "NATURE MORTE."



many architectural features of south delhi remind me of singapore in the 1980s: packed sand yards with thinning crabgrass, balconies covered in many identical pots of mostly bougainvillea, unconvincing security guards dozing on stools under trees, the extensive use of crumbling, enamel-painted, coarse-sand cement.



i took a right turn into a gated and carefully tended colony, and stumbled onto, then into, the gulmohar clubhouse, where the smell of damp carpet and fry grease took me back many years. they let me have teacoffee even though i wasn't a member. i saw many great signs while the sun was still up:




i pursued a socket adaptor — a surprisingly elusive object — through a series of likely looking appliance and electronics shops, into the very depths of green park. except it turned out to be the rapidly gentrifying tourist trap of hauz khas. i realized my mistake when i walked by the fourth gourmet pizza shop and struck out again for green park market. by this time, the light had faded completely and the streets were illuminated only by the lamps of roadside stalls mounded with fresh fruit and vegetables. on the pavement in front of the green park main market strip, four vendors sold charcoal-roasted spicy sweet potatoes with raw starfruit. many friendly dogs that looked like horus got in the way of dabbawallas redistributing the last of their empty tiffins.



green park market ended abruptly and turned into a long stretch of pavement and no-pavement. then into the sudden noise and crumbliness of gautam nagar, where i saw more things i wanted to eat in a 30-meter stretch of sidewalk shopfront than i had in the last 6 kilometers: a narrow shopfront featuring one stool and a small table for guests but separate and dedicated tandoor and naan ovens, a chicken specialist (with butcher curled up smoking in the window), a coffeeshop with curry-to-order from a cook with a several thousand BTU burner far larger than his wok (a very good sign), a kebab stand with a large brazier of correctly glowing coals and a long line of waiting patrons, and a very large case of fly-free burfi.



in the dark, everyone wore scarves and hats. crossing the street was amusingly haphazard and best accomplished in a crowd. two men guided a battered bus full of india vocational college students back a hundred meters down a 3-lane highway so it could make the turn it had missed, then walked off separately. i felt anonymous and comfortably safe. sometimes, unpredictably, there was the penetrating and synthetic smell of saffron.

primitive

this quite remarkable performance by enra is certainly worth watching.

curiosity

the same wine—a 2008 serine (thought to be a syrah relative) from nuclear physicist-turned-winemaker éric texier (brézème, domaine de pergaud vielle serine)—poured in the same quantity, from the same bottle, at the same time, into three different glasses. it did, in fact, have the best aroma in the syrah glass: tobacco, blackcurrant, warm red meat, clean and pure. damn you, claus riedel. the accompanying lamb shoulder didn't hurt.

cajun crawtator

this food item contains absolutely no shellfish.

via

on the way to DCA, we stopped at the hirshhorn (a pile of nested toruses inside a big cylinder, by the unfortunately named gordon bunshaft) to see a retrospective of ai weiwei's work. the collection was also rich in other nice things, including an unexpected abundance of sculptures by barbara hepworth and an easily (but unjustly) overlooked graphite wall drawing by sol lewitt. i always want kenneth snelson's pieces to be as beautiful as they are clever but so far no luck (a particularly large one is visible in the lower right corner of the second image).

bonne année

to celebrate the arbitrarily anthropocentric turning of the year, i brought bagels and bialys south from kossar's to DC, there to join with several interpretations of the meaning of lamb, a diversity of cookies, several pounds of coal country bacon, a bread pudding made with panettone, many tarts, and several beverages i have been wanting to try for some time.

among other things.

the dishwasher has already run five times, and the drinks cabinet is rich in high-proof possibility. good thing i packed my spare liver.

a happy new year to you, and you, and you, and you ...

problem-finding, problem-solving

I think our whole society is much too problem-solving oriented. It is far more interesting to [participate in] ‘problem creation’ … You know, ask yourself an interesting enough question and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome — which I think is a more interesting place to be.

chuck close, (in joe fig's inside the painter's studio)

right on; i think of it as problem-finding myself.

fruitcake

perhaps due to its emanations of tropical and spirituous vapours, this fruitcake-containing box was lavished with doggy affections by the pit bull downstairs while it lay on the front steps (all in the spirit of play of course). not every fruitcake that arrives in the mail is good but this one, from the bosky slopes of woodside, calif., is cause for great anticipation by man and beast alike.

[thx halsey]

resincloth hull

just lying around the media lab.

less is more

a chilly, grey-day visit to lafayette park.

negative capability

at once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

john keats

first principles

Before researchers become researchers they should become philosophers. They should consider what the human goal is, what it is that humanity should create ... Modern research divides nature into tiny pieces and conducts tests that conform neither with natural law nor with practical experiences. The results are arranged for the convenience of research, not according to the needs of the farmer. To think that these conclusions can be put to use with invariable success in the farmer's field is a big mistake.

fukuoka masanobu, one-straw revolution