New Literary Biography
Darlene Harbour Unrue’s Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist is reviewed in the January 1, 2006 New York Times Book Review. The book is available through University Press of Mississippi and at Barnes & Noble.
The Millenium Clock
From Danny Hillis:
When I tell my friends about the millennium clock, either they get it or they don’t. Most of them assume I’m not serious, or if I am, I must be having a midlife crisis. (That’s nice, Danny, but why can’t you just write a computer program to do the same thing? Or, Maybe you should start another company instead.) My friends who get it all have ideas that focus on a particular aspect of the clock. My engineering friends worry about the power source: solar, water, nuclear, geothermal, diffusion, or tidal? My entrepreneurial friends muse about how to make it financially self-sustaining. My writer friend, Stewart Brand, starts thinking about the organization that will take care of the clock. It’s a Rorschach test — of time. Peter Gabriel, the musician, thinks the clock should be alive, like a garden, counting the seasons with short-lived flowers, counting the years with sequoias and bristlecone pines. Artist Brian Eno felt it should have a name, so he gave it one: The Clock of the Long Now.
Hurricane as Metaphor
This past year, the remarkable and memorable year of 2005, we have passed through a hurricane season unprecedented in the annuls of weather tracking. Hurricanes have swept the southern coasts of the United States leaving devastation in their wake. Interestingly, we also are marking the first anniversary of the tsunami (not unlike a hurricane magnified a hundred fold), which left the coasts of southern Asia in ruin. Nature in her furry has awed and subdued us. Looking back, one cannot help but reflect on these events as a metaphor of humanity itself—certainly in our interrelationship with the natural order, but also perhaps as a mirror of the human condition. Are we seeing our own face reflected in the world around us?
If we are, then there is clear evidence of the spirit of violence we take out on one another and the environment, which holds us so carefully. Much of the devastation along the US coasts and in Asia would have been far less disastrous if we had attended to the environment in the way we should have. It is clear now that we ourselves intensified the results of the disasters by our neglect of mangrove forests, wetlands, and coastal barriers—in the hot pursuit of real estate development (which euphemistically we always call “progress”). So many of our commercial projects, defined as economic necessities, in the end turned out to infliction more hurt and harm not only to the natural world, but to the human world than anything nature alone can do. We learn so slowly.
Paul Thek
Here’s a Paul Thek sculpture, called Blind today Deaf tomorrow (1969/71, 65 x 64 x 25 cm) which I’m guessing is part of one of his larger installations/environments. Paul Thek is probably best known for the Technological Reliquaries series, which were made in response to the Vietnam War. He abruptly stopped making those pieces when he realized he was being referred to as the “Meat Man” and went on to make everything from paintings to installations and more. One of the most amazing ones is The Tomb-Death of a Hippie, which you can read about here. Paul Thek died in 1988, and a lot of his work, including incredibly elaborate installations such as The Tomb, has been destroyed. The Paul Thek Project was started this past summer in order to document and contextualize his work, much of which cannot be recreated.
cute overload
My friend Lucinda posted a link to this page on Myspace today, and it is well worth checking out, for the site is exactly what its name says it is: Cute Overload. The Cute Overlords scour the internets and reader submissions for photos of animals and whatnot that meet their stringent “Rules of Cuteness,” such as Rule #8, “You’re cute if your furniture doubles as a meal” or Rule #5, ” Fisheye lens + baby animal is always cute.”
Here is my personal favorite:
Especially the caption: “Am I funny to you? I’m funny how? Funny like a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh?”
Double
What beauty.
Walking on the Ceiling with Mirrors
When we were kids we would hold a compact mirror below our faces and walk on the ceiling — taking care to avoid the lights and doorjambs — carefully stepping over obstacles as we perceived them.
Cribs
If I were on Cribs, when I showed the bathroom, I would say, “This is where the magic happens”.
Hands Down
What does ‘hands down’ mean? Where does the term come from?
Backwards
Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you love to do, in order to have what you want.
– Margaret Young
Courtesy of Gary O’Connor
Memory
We saw each other coming.
Giant Paw
What time is it by your watch? Mine says “Giant Paw.”
From an Interview with Dorothy Locke
“Rest Assured”
In the staff men’s room at my place of work, there is one toilet and no urinals. Mounted on the wall above the toilet at about chest level, there is a toilet seat liner dispenser that has the words “Rest Assured” embossed on it. The dispenser is empty and I don’t believe that it has ever been filled.
Heliotropic
The field was a plateau, edged on one side by a ravine — the bottom of which a wild river forcing its way over rocks and boulders — the sky an open archway between the setting sun and the first glimmer of stars.
We had been arguing our convictions, the center of the world, the material layers made up by the earth’s crust. The last light dazzled us, a veritable example of what we discussed, the layers of the earth laid bare descending toward the river.
Weekly Picture 39
Ann and Mae, Spring, Texas, December 23, 2005
Notes for Mother’s Day
Millenia ago in a rain forest
Beside a cave beside
The green-white waterfall,
I died a childhood death.
And She-with-vine-flowers-in-her-hair
Cried and laid my body (formed and folded as for birth),
Tinted red (the color of life),
Beside the fire-hearth (this, she thought, for warmth).
And this last year, this last dry year,
The University sent there
Our modest team to map the cave and document the site.
In my former grave they found the pollen count still high.
So now I know I know
That my Cro-Magnon mother
Mourned me even then with tears
And buried me with flowers!
— James Hall
First published in Psychological Perspectives 48 (2), p. 309.
Herman Melville’s Yucky Human Resources Advice
From Moby Dick:
Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say: your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer.
If…
If you are willing, you will be taught.
If you are diligent, you will progress.
If you listen, you will learn.
If you pay attention, you will become wise.
–The Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach c. 200 B.C.E.
Kyong Park
The following is from an interview with Kyong Park in the January 2006 Metropolis. It is available online, but only to subscribers of the magazine (which I recommend). Kyong is the founder of Storefront, a place to confront international design and politics through architectural exhibitions.
Question
Should it be:
1) A folded piece of paper.
or
2) A piece of folded paper.
Design Thinking
The Feb / March issue of Dwell has a great interview with David Kelley, the founder of IDEO and the director of the fledgling Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (or d.school) at Stanford.
From the interview:
Instead of feeling that you know it all, that you’re the expert in the subject, design thinking also means being humble and questioning it. Many of the people who are designing things today are “experts” which means they’re looking for ideas from the “expert” viewpoint. But design thinking is much more about going out into the world not having a point of view and just finding these latent needs that are obvious, but only when you look with no agenda. With design thinking we try to get in the right general area first rather than just accepting what the problem is. We’re more experimental and less calculating. It’s optimistic. We thrive on the creative challenges rather than the obstacles. And it’s more intuitive, or empathetic, or however you want to say it. All this ends up being really cathartic for people who do nothing but analytical thinking!
Belmont, Dallas
The Belmont, Dallas is a recently renovated 1940s deco style hotel near my house. Ft. Worth Ave is currently undergoing a lot of renovations and this is among the activity down there. I’m proud to live in the neighborhood I live in. It makes life in Dallas almost bearable. If you’re in the area and need a place to stay, check it out.
Patricia Urquiola, Crochet Rug
Beijing Boom Tower
From BLDGBLOG:
The Boom Tower, they say, is an example of “the market responding to all future demands: suburban living in the heart of China’s capital.” Which is interesting, because this is possibly the least suburban thing I’ve ever seen.
