Archive for March, 2007
Life is more complicated, more mysterious and more convoluted than the party, the army, the police. Let us detach ourselves a little from this truly horrible everyday reality and try to write about doubt, anxiety and despair.
-Zbigniew Herbert
My friend Rhett just reminded me about Zbigniew Herbert, the late Polish poet, who leavened his Eliot-like, allusion-rich sense of desolation with simplicity, irony and generous humor. I would have loved to have met the man who wrote this:
The Envoy of Mr Cogito
Zbigniew Herbert
translated by John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter
Go where those others went to the dark boundary
for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize
go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust
you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony
be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important
and let your helpless Anger be like the sea
whenever your hear the voice of the insulted and beaten
let you sister Scorn not leave you
for the informers executioners cowards - they will win
they will go to your funeral with relief will throw a lump of earth
the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography
and do not forgive truly it is not in your power
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn
beware however of unnecessary pride
keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror
repeat: I was called - weren’t there better ones than I
beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak
light on a wall the splendour of the sky
they don’t need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you
be vigilant - when the light on the mountains gives the sign- arise and go
as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star
repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand
and they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap
go because only in this way you will be admitted to the company of cold skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes
Be faithful Go
March 31st, 2007
Frank Soltesz
Today’s Inspiration: Fresh Frozen Frank Soltesz
Since childhood I’ve loved diagrams and models of complex buildings, like factories. My favorite Babar book was Babar and Father Christmas, in which Babar falls through a ski slope into a 2-D subterranean complex resembling the first version of Metroid. These Soltesz illustrations, courtesy of Today’s Inspiration, are just my sort of thing.
I can vouch three months’ seasonal night shift labor that in 1995, a frozen food plant still looked like this, right down to the conveyor belts on which flash-frozen peas rolled without end. We tried to stay awake by adapting camp songs to the tedium (The peas that we freeze here/they say they’re mighty fine. . . ) Frankly, the job sucked. But in this illustration, pea-freezing looks almost interesting. That’s the magic of art.
March 30th, 2007
It’s been quiet here on the blog lately, because I had to move out of my house. I closed the sale yesterday and filed the last paperwork this morning. I’m emotionally attached to this house - I did most of the work on it myself - and I’m pretty depressed about losing it. So this post is a completely self-indulgent before-and-after farewell to my house. I’ll be back on line with more science & art over the next few days.
Even though I chose to sell by deciding to quit my job and move out of the area, I still feel like the entire process was out of my control - not least because I moved out of a three-story house with two-car garage into . . . my car. (And a small storage unit). I went from homeowner to homeless yesterday. Not exactly the type of change I thought I’d be making at 30. According to the Holmes/Rahe life event scale, moving is only slightly more stressful than a vacation, but I don’t buy that for a minute. Moving is awful.
The main problem is, I have too much stuff. As an artist and biologist, I’m a hoarder twice over. If I mapped a distribution of my possessions (based on volume, not weight), it would be at least half books (about 50% science, 25% art) and at least one quarter art supplies (LOTS of paper, frames, stamps, paints, random found objects). I’m anxious over the prospect of lacking easy access to these things - which is silly, because I can be creative with a simple kit of watercolors. At least I should. But I feel like part of my brain is stored externally in my library of reference materials, tools, and inspirational objects.
On the other hand, my nesting instinct sucked most of my creative energy for the past two years. It’s much easier to paint a room than to paint a photorealistic insect. It’s also pretty darn cathartic to knock holes through walls, knowing they’re your walls, so you can fix them or not as you like. It obviates some of the need for artistic therapy. I hope that maybe, now that I’m out of the house, I’ll be able to rechannel my creativity toward art.
Whenever I get too self-indulgently whiny about losing my house, I read a fabulous sonnet, composed for me by my friend Libby. It goes in part:
Farewell, Oh house! I leave thee better far
Than when I found thee, though I had not done.
I had not masked each blemish, blot and scar
With paint, nor yet set down my caulking gun . . .
Her poem captures all the self-indulgent drama that is home renovation (it’s really about creating a smashingly impressive nest and showing it off) along with the genuine emotional investment (so I talked to my house. Using archaic diction. So what?)
The absurdity of the whole process is that you are never done. The only way to be done with an old house is to sell it and let someone else take over, caulking gun in hand. And so I did. I wish them luck, and I hope they love the house as much as I did.
Before/After
March 29th, 2007
Modern Mechanix » Hen Changed to Rooster by Biologists
Those crazy Biologists! What will they do next? And what is that huge black rubber apparatus?
(Possible sign that poultry modification is my vocation: our high school’s mascot was a chicken. I’m not kidding.)
March 23rd, 2007
“Biology and Art: Two Worlds or One?”
(April 14 at NYAS)
The best part is that Wim Delvoye, creator of the Cloaca Project, will be there. Enough said.
Cloaca Project
Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon
Wim Delvoye, 2003
Via Adventures in Art & Science
March 22nd, 2007
Much has been made of Shenandoah editor R.T. Smith’s “Southern” voice and perspective. Margaret Gibson says of his 2004 collection, Brightwood:
Vernacular, down-home, these are poems given to remembering, and they make a faithful account. They find healing in a brightwood fiddle and in willowspout, gospel in the spoils of experience. . .
Smith’s poetry gracefully couples the simple observations of rural life to grander mysteries of history and religion. But I can’t help but wonder what’s uniquely Southern about that.
Smith’s poems should resonate with anyone who has lived in “country time,” on the slow and contemplative schedule of seasonal changes, no matter what part of the country they call home. “In the Night Orchard” feels like it could plausibly be my own memory - although I have never seen anything of the kind, it feels completely authentic. Yet I have never lived in the South; only in the West.
“In the Night Orchard”
R.T. Smith, Brightwood
I know, because Paul has told me
a hundred times, that the deer
gliding tonight through tangleweed
and trashwood, then bounding across
Mount Atlas road, are after his pears.
And who could blame them?
On the threshold of autumn, the Asian
imports, more amazing than any seckle
or indigenous apple, start to ripen.
Then a passing crow will peck one open.
That’s when the whitetails who bed
and gather beyond Matson’s pasture
will catch the scent and begin to stir.
It’s a dry time, and they go slowly mad
for sweetness. No fence can stop them.
The farmers like Paul will admit
it starts in hunger, but how suddenly
need goes to frenzy and sheer plunder.
When the blush-gold windfalls are gone
and the low boughs are stripped
of anything resembling bounty, bucks
will rise on their hind legs and clamber
up the trunks. Last week Cecil Emore
found one strangled in a fork,
his twisted antlers tangled as if
some hunter had hung him there
to cure. We all remember what it’s like,
this driven season, this delirium
for something not yet given a name,
but the world turns us practical, tames
us to yearn for milder pleasures.
For Augustine, it was actual pears
that brought him out of the shadows
and over a wall, for Eve, the secret
inside what we now say was an apple.
Others have given up safety for less,
and I wonder, catching an eight-point
buck outlined on the ridge amid spruce,
if it’s this moonstruck nature that renders
the ruminants beautiful, or if we stalk
them out of envy, not for the grace
of their gliding, but for the unadorned
instinct that draws them after dark
into trespass and the need to ruin
the sweetest thing they’ve ever known.
March 21st, 2007
Red Breasted Nuthatch - Desire
oil and mixed media on panel
Caroline James, 2006
One bird species learns another’s lingo (MSNBC.com)
When we lived in the woods, we had our own flock of nuthatches. They were our favorite birds. The chickadees, finches, grosbeaks - all the other small, flocking birds - were amusing; the pileated woodpecker was way too vain; the jays were flipping obnoxious; but the nuthatches were smart. (Which was kind of surprising, considering the amount of time they spent banging their heads on hard surfaces to crack seeds).
Although it was fairly routine for the other small birds to smash into windows or be eaten by hawks, I don’t remember ever seeing such an accident befall a nuthatch. A new study in PNAS suggests that nuthatches are able to understand other birds’ warning calls and use the information encoded in them to avoid predators. This is one of those rather unsurprising findings - if you know nuthatches. But still pretty cool.
Caroline James is a Canadian artist based in British Columbia - where there are a lot of red-breasted nuthatches (Sitta canadensis).
You can listen to the nuthatch call here - they sound like they’re laughing nasally at you, and who knows, maybe they are. . .
March 20th, 2007
This blog will probably skew a little personal for a week or two, because I’m in the midst of a major career change. The distressing thing is, I’m getting hammered by friends right and left, because I seem “insufficiently excited” about my options. They all expect more “rah rah rah.” I do have some excellent options before me, and I am thankful. But I’m also hesitant to invest any unexplored avenue with the advance baggage of being the “perfect” thing for me. Is there even one “perfect” career direction? And would bubbly mania be the best indication I had found it?
I have no objective way to ascertain what is “perfect” for me, except to look at what aspects of my career failed to satisfy me in the past, and extrapolate. I’m basing my decision to move forward on dissatisfaction. Everyone seems to feel that’s big negative. But is it? What other source of objective evidence is there? Isn’t recognizing and acting on your dissatisfaction a healthy thing? After all, dissatisfaction is America’s Greatest Asset!
I found these classic ads at Modern Mechanix. I love the one with the housewife, who doesn’t look “dissatisfied” with her sofa-cleaning strategies anymore. In fact, she looks rabidly Stepfordian! That’s something I want to avoid: faking enthusiasm. Because I’m not good at it. I don’t love easily. But when I do love something, I throw myself into it violently. I’m not ready to throw myself violently one way or the other yet - not without evidence. I’m still too much of a scientist for that sort of impetuosity. And I’m too old for the bruises.
On the other hand, if anyone has any helpful advice on how to decide between law schools, specifically those in Cambridge and New Haven, email me.
March 20th, 2007
Ossario
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Alexandre Orion
This graffiti was created in reverse - by cleaning grimy city surfaces. It’s sort of a lift-and-scrub technique in which the dark areas are old, crusted pollutants. Authorities didn’t know how to charge the Brazilian graffiti artist responsible, Alexandre Orion:
The authorities were certainly miffed but could find nothing to charge him with. They had no other recourse but to clean the tunnel — but only the parts Alexandre had already cleaned. The artist merely continued his campaign on the other side of traffic. The utterly flummoxed city officials then decided to take drastic action. Not only did they clean the entire tunnel but also every other tunnel in Sao Paulo. (Inhabitat)
Reverse graffiti has been around for years. NPR ran a 2004 story about a UK artist named Moose who used a “shoe brush and water” to execute his street art; clean graffiti has been a medium of protest; Puerto Rican artist Rafael Trelles uses dirty concrete as his canvas. But Orion’s work is clever on so many levels at once. If removing pollution is vandalism, what do you call the act of creating pollution? How many drivers recognized that the medium Orion manipulated to create the graffiti skulls was actually their own contribution - their daily automobile emissions? It’s like involuntary interactive art vandalism!
And the choice of skulls as subject is brilliant - not just because of the cliche “pollution kills,” but because a naked skull has itself been “cleaned” (yes, I personally have boiled skulls to turn them denture-white). The bleached skull is a totem of life’s shocking transience, which we tacitly ignore - just as we tacitly ignore that our current consumer lifestyle is doomed by the impending shortage of fossil fuels. Which are called “fossil fuels” because. . . well, you know all that.
There are so many recursive memento mori themes in a temporary graffiti skull executed in car exhaust, I’m getting a headache. I think that means it’s good art. Right?
You can see a brief video of Orion working and the authorities intervening at his website. You can also view another of Orion’s projects, in which he executed graffiti and then photographed passers-by interacting with it, in alternately hilarious and disturbing ways.
Via Saint Gasoline
March 19th, 2007
Cognitive Daily: Artists look different
Cognitive Daily alerts us to a study quantifying the different visual scanning techniques used by artists and non-artists. Here’s a figure from the study, tracking eye movements in yellow:
The trained artist (right) looks at more of the entire picture, while the non-artist (left) focuses on “key areas” - in this case, the swimmer, but similar results were obtained for non-human “key areas”. (The non-artist control group were psychologists - also highly trained to study and retain information).
If you have artistic training (including self-guided training), you may have noticed this shift in your own observational techniques. An artist considers the scene as a whole: focusing on the subject in relationship to its context, rather than in isolation. I especially appreciate the way the artist’s eyes follow the rhythm of the waves diagonally across the painting - identifying and enacting an important compositional pattern that the non-artist appears to completely ignore.
The jerky, flyaway eye movements of the nonartists, which seem to repeatedly slide right off the image, are not a surprise either. Artists plan for those effects when composing a work, carefully guiding the imagined viewer’s eyes within the painting’s field. A standard rule of thumb is to avoid a strong, unbalanced line, or any object ending right at the border of the composition, because they tend to draw the onlooker’s eye irrevocably off the edge of the artwork (sort of like a ship falling off a flat Earth).
In my experience, beginning artists, like this non-artist, tend to concentrate on the subject to the exclusion of everything else - leaving the setting out completely, neglecting to identify a light source, and focusing disproportionately on points of special interest, especially faces and eyes. This behavior makes perfect sense when you’re processing an image as efficiently as possible - you extract, categorize, and identify the most relevant objects in the scene, ignoring the irrelevant lighting and background. An apple remains red in bright sunlight, shadow, even colored light (color constancy). The ability to consistently recognize an object in both light and dark conditions, from different angles, is absolutely essential to survival; the ability to paint a convincingly realistic scene, not so much! At least not unless you’re an artist, and that’s your job.
Unfortunately, common errors in art result from excessive intepretation, and relying too weakly on what is directly observed. This is the basis for the “draw what you see” principle, and the human face is the best example. We all know exactly what a human face looks like, and (except for the occasional prosopagnostic among us) we each recognize hundreds or thousands of faces with great accuracy. But it’s almost impossible for the average person to draw a realistic human face. It’s not just a matter of manual dexterity: Cohen and Bennett (1997) showed that misperception of the object was a greater source of drawing error than decision-making, motor skills, or misperception of the drawing. It’s a matter of the brain interfering, telling you what a “nose” should look like, when in fact, a nose usually looks nothing like a “nose.” If you look at the noses in oil portraits from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, they are highly variable collections of blotches. And yet they all look like noses:
All of these examples are obviously noses, despite their varied shapes and lighting. Note how each example also readily appears to be human skin, despite some very unrealistic tones (mostly the effect of no-flash bad photography). To make it a little clearer how different each rendering is from the next, I’ve flipped them upside down, and removed the distracting color information:
I think it’s remarkable that we can identify each example as a nose, even in isolation from other cues like eyes or mouth. But in order to draw a nose, we have to stifle the powerful recognition process that screams “it’s a nose!” - and instead render contours and volumes. That’s not so easy. Of course, in this study the artists were not asked to actually execute a drawing - see this article for an interesting discussion of eye movements during the process of portrait drawing.
Even if the results of the eye-tracking study are not surprising, this is the first time I’ve seen them depicted so clearly. This sort of example could be quite helpful when teaching drawing - if you know why common errors of perception occur, you have an even better chance of learning to compensate.
March 18th, 2007
Apparently you can selectively wipe out a single memory in rats. If you believe that our memories make us who we are, the implications are disturbing. I joke about wanting to block out portions of my life - usually chunks of grad school - but if we forget our mistakes, are we doomed to repeat them?
This poem by Li-Young Lee captures an even more elusive aspect of memory: how the habit of remembering, or trying to recapture a failing memory, becomes an act of self-definition. We are who we remember ourselves to be.
Mnemonic
Li-Young Lee, Rose
I was tired. So I lay down.
My lids grew heavy. So I slept.
Slender memory, stay with me.
I was cold once. So my father took off his blue sweater.
He wrapped me in it, and I never gave it back.
It is the sweater he wore to America,
this one, which I’ve grown into, whose sleeves are too long.
Flamboyant blue in daylight, poor blue by daylight,
it is black in the folds.
A serious man who devised complex systems of numbers and rhymes
to aid him in remembering, a man who forgot nothing, my father
would be ashamed of me.
Not because I’m forgetful,
but because there is no order
to my memory, a heap
of details, uncatalogued, illogical.
For instance:
God was lonely. So he made me.
My father loved me. so he spanked me.
It hurt him to do so. He did it daily.
The earth is flat. Those who fall off don’t return.
The earth is round. All things reveal themselves to men only gradually.
It won’t last. Memory is sweet.
Even when it’s painful, memory is sweet.
Once I was cold. So my father took off his blue sweater.
A collection of Li-Young Lee links
March 16th, 2007
A vampire-hunting kit, from Thomas Sandberg’s Wonder Cabinet:
An incredible Victorian novelty. Complete in mahogany box with revolver, silver bullets, garlic powder, silver dagger, ivory cross, mirror, Professor Blomberg`s New Vampire Serum, wooden stake, etc.
Fortunately, Clive Thompson assures us there can’t be more than 512 vampyric bloodsuckers running around at the moment. It’s ecologically implausible. (Although the population model makes debatable assumptions about vampyric reproduction - a topic on which Whedon, Rice, Stoker, le Fanu, etc. don’t agree).
The Sandberg collection is extensive. There are papier-mache anatomical models, medicine boxes, even a clockwork lion that jumps and roars. I want!
hat-tip: Athanasius Kircher Society
March 15th, 2007
from Modern Mechanix
Which incidentally reminds me of . . .
March 14th, 2007
This cartoon makes me happy and nostalgic. Yes, I know I’m weird. Happy Pi Day.
Saint Gasoline » Archive » The Allegory of the Trolley Problem Paradox
March 13th, 2007
I can’t justify purchasing all the expensive science and art books I really want, so they languish on my Amazon wishlist forever. A case in point would be Patrick Mauries’s Cabinets of Curiosities, an oversized hardbound book with lots of yummy full color pictures. The Amazon price hovers around $47 (the price on the jacket is $75). I hadn’t seen it, even used, for less than $30. Too spendy.
I recently got an email promoting a new comparison shopping website, Booksprice.com, so I tested it out on the Mauries book. The result? DeepDiscount.com currently has it for $12 with free shipping! I was suspicious, so I ordered it (I can usually justify spending $12) and it arrived completely shrink-wrapped, in perfect condition. If you also like wonder cabinets, it would be a very pretty (and now affordable) addition to your collection - although somewhat light on scholarship.
Incidentally, Booksprice lets you import your Amazon wishlist and save it, which is a very useful feature. It’s also refreshingly uncluttered with ads, even aesthetically pleasing, as third-party comparison shopping sites go. So you might consider trying it on your own wishlist. I didn’t get any more results as dramatic as the Mauries book, but I’m going to keep checking.
March 13th, 2007
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