a machine for relaxing

Headstuck

2010-06-27T16:25:00.000-07:00

Spent my morning on the train tracks between West Oakland & Emeryville. An amazing experience. Beautiful. Under those monolithic freeways all entangled over my head. Plywood board formed concrete, massive joints, emptiness, trash, skaters. I continue my love affair with the freeway. The free-space that lives beneath them. So free, a little precarious, a little eerie. Just what a like.

For those of you who haven't delved in this gut-wrenching read I highly suggest you check this out, "Magical Motorways" by Norman Bel Geddes, published in 1940 after the General Motors "Futurama" exhibition at the world's fair. I love it. And the pdf version can be downloaded here.

Giants

2010-06-24T23:11:00.000-07:00

"Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way."

-Janet Fitch, White Oleander

The Eiffel Tower in its inception. The baby that became "this giant and disgraceful skeleton”... “you see it from everywhere . . . an unavoidable and horrid nightmare."

Do you follow the inescapable giants?

Luis Longhi

2010-04-01T07:48:00.000-07:00

On Monday night Luis Longhi lectured at UC Berkeley. I won't go into an endless monologue on how amazing it was. He's is just an architect from Peru who really believes in listening to site and learning from nature.

Check out their website: http://www.longhiarchitect.com/home.html

Photos: CHOlon Photography, Elsa Raimerz

Thank you, Bruce Conner

2010-03-07T23:57:00.001-08:00

Three Screen Ray by Bruce Conner set to Ray Charles "What I'd Say" in the SF MOMA right now, on three screens in a black room. That's where its happenin'.

I want this permanently installed in my home. But for now, I will permanently install it into my brain.

A Digitally-Constructed World

2010-01-15T00:52:00.000-08:00

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

I have been a fan of browsing through all those CG architect animations, and most times they are pretty silly. Then I found this, and I have to say I understand why Alex Roman sat behind his computer for days on end delicately constructing this meticulous digital world. Just watch it in HD.

Resonance

2009-10-14T00:03:00.000-07:00

There are times when I regret not having traveled more, and then there are days when I feel North America in my bones, that bone-chill that falls brings to the Bay Area in 35 mile per hour southern winds. I heard the trees around my windows wailing all night.

After seeing several lost faces on Friday, Saturday brought the discovery of a new territory: The Salt Flats.

Armed with plastic cameras we trudged down these narrow man-made levees. These little levees create ponds to harvest salt. Salt to be used in chlorine bleach and plastics manufacture, the breeding brine shrimp which support feeding areas for waterfowl. Little white cranes and the largest seagulls you will see live there. As you stand and face the ocean you see a superstructure freeways emerge from the sea (to your left) and an endless flatland with reflective salty gems sending out harsh sulfur smells into the atmosphere (to your right). Brillant white foam lines their shores collecting the fall sunlight.

Go further and you will find a railroad with ancient rusting rail-ties that have spewed from her tracks. Large power lines canopy overhead sending out a uniform buzz a kind of white noise that like the smell, swiftly evaporates from your consciousness.

Yes, North America, your greatest gifts always lie hidden between a walled suburban community and an industrial wasteland.

Truth Barriers

2009-09-26T17:34:00.001-07:00

"We are at a party which doesn't love us. Finally the party lets the mask fall and shows what it is: a shunting station for freight cars. In the fog cold giants stand on their tracks. A scribble of chalk on the car doors.

One can't say it aloud, but there is a lot of repressed violence here. That is why the furnishings seem so heavy. And why it is difficult to see the other thing present: a spot of sun that moves over the house walls and over the unaware forest of flickering faces, a biblical saying never let down: "Come unto me, for I am as full of contradictions as you"

I work the next morning in a different town. I drive there in a hum through the dawning hour which resembles a dark blue cylinder. Orion hangs over the frost. Children stand in a silent clump, waiting for the school bus, the children no one prays for. The light grows as gradually as our hair. "

-Tomas Transtromer, "Below Freezing" from Truth Barriers

I Want

2009-09-23T19:39:00.000-07:00

1. Heavenly Vaults.

2. Camps

Candy

2009-09-13T20:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I watched Philip Glass: A Portrait in Twelve Acts. I could listen to Philip Glass in a white cube for hours and be happy (and perhaps insane).

I discovered a new interest: Glass's third wife Candy Jernigan who created works of found objects in a kind of elegant scrapbook. (She doesn't even have her own Wikipedia page, but is rather redirected as a subset within Philip Glass. This makes me upset.)

I also rediscovered a past love of singing bowls. My last singing bowl was past onto a gift to a dear friend the pixie-boy Curtis Tamm. I now find a desire to get another one.

I recommend all of the above mentioned subjects be checked out.

Contemporary Jewish Museum

2009-08-09T20:19:00.000-07:00

On Friday, J and I headed to Saul's for some eats. A celery soda, pastrami sandwich on rye, and side of coleslaw later (latkes and eggs for J.), we made our way to the city.

Daniel Libeskind's Contemporary Jewish Museum: The room in the twisted cube featured "Jews on Vinyl" (my favorite part). What a relaxing room; no museum guard asking you to step away from the sculpture- just some headphones, hava naglia and plush carpet. Architecturally, the level of interior detailing was a little disappointing, with messy, unsightly seams. The track lighting looked like a terrible afrer thought, and the generally cavernous, dark galleries were unpleasant.

Returning home, I picked up a used copy of The Book of Imaginary Beings and we took a short early evening nap before enjoying sushi and Bowfinger.

Ah, what a life. I love working four days a week.

Something like fireworks

2009-08-07T19:24:00.000-07:00

Any fan of Borges should visit the world of Alex Rose's The Musical Illusionist.

Matching with the novel's poor review on Amazon.com, it is not necessarily a work of a literary talent. Alex Rose is a filmmaker, and this is his first novel. Regardless, his work is clever and provoking; Rose simplifies theories and science, but that is part of its magic- it reads like a fairy tale. Fairy tales have little regard to explaining their simplified truths. Details and explanation destroy the concept of illusion. Reading requires a suspension of disbelief.

The book is set in the Library of Tangents, an underground archive of treasures, places where you the reader become an exhibit yourself. The final exhibit is the story of the musical illusionist, Phelix Lamark. The story leaves me dreaming of it as a film where the narrative unfolds in the same nature of Perfume and Dustin Hoffman plays Lamark's patriarch.

I now find myself hitting the wind chimes on way to lunch at work, or listening carefully to the sound of the electric motors on BART. I also find myself attempting to associate colors with sounds, inspired by Lamark's final orchestration entitled Chromatica.

A date with the post office

2009-08-02T13:33:00.000-07:00

I started sewing my own parcels out of bristol board, collaged with old magazines. One's for my best friend- the contents to remain hidden.

The other is for my Grams. A little book called The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness along with a card with a Georgia O'Keefe church steeple. I read it a few weeks ago. A kind of classic sappy tale written by local Berkeley author, Joel ben Izzy, who happens to be Jewish. Is it just me or is there a strong community of Jewish and Berkeley authors? Michael Chabon (my neighbor)? Allen Ginsberg (born Jewish)? Pauine Kael?... Maybe I am crazy.

Avedon

2009-08-01T14:40:00.000-07:00

I went to see the Richard Avedon exhibit at the SF MOMA. I didn't know how to feel about Avedon before going. Part of me wanted to hate his work- to look at the images as contrived attempts to create the human being as a one-dimensional specimen, pinned to the white void like a dead buttery in science museum, a stuffed ancient mammoth to gawk at. (As you may or may not know his work for In The American West was highly manipulated- carefully picked "working class, average" Americans, worked into poses and shots he controlled.)

However, I loved his work as an event, an activity, an engagement. You go into these white rooms filled with super-sized prints of humans, giant action figures. The room, for all its starkness, is filled with stories. A odd form of people watching that creates a stage for oral histories. You can hear the spectators, reading into the images, spinning tales about the person's life based upon the a frozen glimmer in an eye, the muscle tone in of a belly, a scar on a stomach, or an endless speckling of sun damage on the bridge of a nose- these things are not contrived.

Never have I seen a photography exhibition so filled with sound. For this I commend him. (And for the above Malcolm X shot, that happens to be my favorite.)

And just because, the bridge in the SF MOMA. The use of bar grate is my favorite part. A sense of solid floor, and then, yikes, sudden vertigo as you look down and discover you can see down to the people on the bottom level.

Adobe Kuler

2008-12-24T17:15:00.000-08:00

Sign up to use Adobe Kuler for free! You can make your own color palettes from scratch or from photographs. The color swatches can be loaded into all Adobe programs. It's great! http://kuler.adobe.com/