While moving, I found this flashy old box of watercolors in my grandmother’s paint box. I know nothing about the company that made them, but they were still functional after several decades. And very Special High Class, of course. I thought the box was worth preserving.
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 CarpenterGo where those others went to the dark boundary
for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prizego upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dustyou were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimonybe courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is importantand let your helpless Anger be like the sea
whenever your hear the voice of the insulted and beatenlet 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 biographyand do not forgive truly it is not in your power
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawnbeware however of unnecessary pride
keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror
repeat: I was called – weren’t there better ones than Ibeware 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 yoube vigilant – when the light on the mountains gives the sign- arise and go
as long as blood turns in the breast your dark starrepeat 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 sandand they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heapgo 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 ashesBe faithful Go
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.
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.
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.)
“Biology and Art: Two Worlds or One?”
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
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.
Continue reading
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. . .
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!
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
