Photography vs. legend

Thinking lately about photography and legend. And how the happenings of daily life could be turned into myth a millenium or a century for now, if it weren't for our obsession for documenting everything "how it is."

I almost don't want to take photographs anymore because it's too easy to let snapshots replace memory and storytelling. There's no space for legends to grow. And I don't like that about photography - photography in a journalistic sense, I mean, as opposed to mechanical photography of posed subjects, which has its uses and doesn't pose the same level of threat to myth.

Photography at its best is about capturing and telling. It is giving your eyes to someone else for a split second. It communicates some connection, some understanding incommunicable by words alone.

But cameras are everywhere now. I don't have to tell you about how there's a spot in the north of Iceland where the earth erupts into a series of jagged peaks unlike anything you've ever seen because you can see it in satellite photos or any of a million other images of the place. Myth has been reduced to snapshots.

So, I've taken to paying more attention to the magic of the time and place, to the daily fantastic. I like to ride the bus as if I'm part of a story in which anything could happen. The story that's been told since the beginning of time, that we relive constantly with different names and architecture as if it were the first time.

There was really something to shapeshifting, to seeing past people in their skin, to recognizing repeated themes in new bodies. I want stories to be dynamic again. I want to be able to wrassle with experience and misremember it until it feels right.

I think when can capture that on film, when I can see a legend in a moment, a connection between the past and the future, when magic exists again, I'll be able to pick up my camera.

Green tomatoes

I made one of my better batches of fried green tomatoes for dinner tonight as I continue to wait for my barm brack dough to rise.

I have probably ten pounds of green tomatoes, not to mention an equal weight of sunchokes, in my refrigerator, harvested from plots across Oakland as we pulled up tomato plants. It's unlikely that many more tomatoes will ripen in autumn's short days and cool nights, so it's out with tomatoes, in with the onions, fava beans, winter greens and garlic. Garlic should be planted in the fall to be harvested in late spring, early summer, I think. You can plant garlic right up through about March if you want to harvest it as green garlic (as opposed to the little white gems proper).

I've been a good urban farmer this week, and am feeling a certain nobility in it. I love the way we descend on our harvest at the end of Permaculture class, taking home our weekly sack of vegetables wrested from the earth by our own toil, though it still feels a bit like alchemy. I'll be the first to admit the plants do most of the work.

To fry green tomatoes, you will need:

- a supply of green tomatoes
- cornmeal
- flour (optional)
- milk or egg or buttermilk or a combination or nothing
- hot paprika or cayenne pepper
- salt, preferably sea salt
- vegetable oil or ghee or bacon grease for frying

Mix 2 parts cornmeal with 1 part flour in a small, flatish bowl with enough hot paprika or cayenne pepper so that you can just begin to see the color once it's combined. (Or use only cornmeal for a grittier texture, or half cornmeal, half flour for a finer texture). Shake in salt to taste.

Pour your milk or egg into another small bowl, if you'll be coating your tomato slices.

Slice your tomatoes about 1/4" thick. Heat some oil/ghee/fat in a frying pan. Dip each slice first in the milk/egg, then in the cornmeal mixture so that it's coated with cornmeal. Lay slices flat in the frying pan and cook until the tomatoes are soft and the cornmeal gets a nice crisp golden color.

Enjoy immediately.

Because these are necessarily made in small batches it's easy to adjust paprika/pepper and salt levels to your personal preference as you go.

Overheard

In case you missed it on NPR's Marketplace, we were having an amicable discussion about coal and cleaner wind energy in West Virginia when all of a sudden it turns to this...

DON BLANKENSHIP, CEO of the coal company, Massey Energy: There is no global warming. We went through the population fear. We went through the killer bee fear. It’s just the next phase — it will go away.

SAM EATON, reporter for Marketplace: And if it doesn’t, and if legislation passes and coal emissions are taxed and regulated, what then?

BLANKENSHIP: Teach your children to speak Chinese, because if we’re going to play around with windmills and solar panels, we’ll fall behind.

Thankfully Scott Jagow scribbled down the exact quote so I could confirm I heard that right. I may well have driven off the road if I'd been driving when he said that. Wow, dude.

Apparently this guy is a real prize when it comes to spouting quotable quotes on environmental issues.

Chouette

mon petit hibou
pumpkin carving 2009

Cross-pollination

Thinking about how it's so easy for academics to get buried in their own subject material - like architects never leaving the lab or meeting non-architects. Architects are better than most, I think, at entertaining ideas outside their own field, but the trend in general strikes me as unnecessarily limiting.

I guess what I like best is taking ideas from one field and applying them to the next. Asking what it all means. What does it mean that photons can act as a particle or a wave? Where is the line between the metaphors we use to understand that concept and its applicability to our living, working and curious investigation of the world?

So many of the cool famous people of the past used to hang out together and bounce ideas off of each other. I want there to be collectives of academics across fields to share ideas and play out the influences of theories across fields as a way of being more human, more true to your full nature. This sort of thing has happened before like with social darwinism, philosophy of physics, agriculture as metaphor, but I feel like the scientists aren't at the table anymore once those discussions are happening.

As someone who is making the moves on science, I want to be the one having those discussions. Cross-pollination, exploring the connections between things, sussing out why things matter, and explaining back. I feel like that's my thing, my one thing if I have one.

Tiki Tuesday

Newness is indeed goodness when your friends are whisking you off on a week night to a magic island cove. Such a great little expedition. Yay for bandmate-friends.

During our drunken yet intellectual chatting, we toyed with the idea of music and accessibility, and I wanted to jot down a bit of that thought while it's still lingering.

Our collective sentiment was just that nothing should be out of reach, especially not art and creativity. Music is music no matter how it's made, who is making it, or what other people think. There's no such thing as cheating. Open tunings are not cheating, electronica is not cheating, mixing is not cheating.

Not everything needs to sound polished or even needs to be right all the time, which is not to say that every kid taking piano lessons should have a record contract, but that it's a shame if something as primal as music and self expression is limited to a handful of virtuosos not just because offbeat artists like Joanna Newsom or even someone like Bob Dylan or Igor Stravinski can stretch and challenge ideas about what good art is, but because art should be a basic human right.

Also, that folk music is where it's at. The music of the people. We want people to feel like art and creativity are within reach, that the creative impulse exists outside of the pursuit of fame or money. Folk music is where it's at - the music of the people. Let there not be a hierarchy. Just let your voice be heard.

If you want to start a band, do it. Even if you can't play a single instrument, chances are you'll wind up in a tiki bar one Tuesday in Alameda happy to be alive and know the people you know.

Looking up

The moon hung low as we came down the hill tonight.

A seductive waxing crescent I could almost curl up in.

Amendments

It has been pointed out to me that humanism does so take responsibility for itself, that humanism is every bit as free as free will, that humanism distinguishes itself from fatalism by biting its thumb at fate and the predetermined. The humanist's days are his own and his future his own making.

What is still interesting is how these sorts of ideas shake out in daily life, the ways the same logic can bring two actors to opposite conclusions. There is still an element of personality to it, I suppose. He is a curious beast, personality.

So, what is personality then? If we are in control of our own character and are operating by the same principles what right does it have to claim distinctions? If you allow that personality is given to you, you have something of a quandary on your hands.

I suppose you could claim to have constructed your own personality through the accumulation of decisions along your freely willed path, but would you not still fall victim to some element of chance?

And what of those experiments that show brain waves flashing before your conscious recognizes its desire to click the experimental button of its own volition?

I wonder what quantum mechanics might have to say about this all. What does the possible existence of parallel future states (or even present states) really mean?

Gettin' a move on

Trained it back out to Davis today, this time to meet with the Ecology department. Went pretty well, I think, all things considered. Met with the admin lady and the program chair and sat in on a class. Their program is huge. 40 kids in the entry class. Prof said I was sitting in on one of the driest lectures of the quarter, so I figured if I can hack it through that without having the slightest what all is going on, maybe I can make it in the big leagues. Got some good, helpful info on how to shine myself up good and proper for grad school applications. Solid stuff, doable.

I was having a bit of the old panic and remorse this morning on the way over about how it is you put your finger on what it is exactly you should do with your life and waking hours, feeling generally displeased that modern life wants to make a specialist out of me when my constitution requires a balance of all manner of this and that. Science and art. Brain gymnastics and yoga. Plodding organization and spur of the moment whimsy.

I've decided for today at least to throw looking for that one thing to the wind. Someone asked Nick Hornby how to know if they should keep up with writing or let it go. Quit if you can quit, he says. If you can't quit, it doesn't matter if you make a living off it or not since you'd be doing it anyway. Jealous as I am of the focused and driven, there's just a lot I can't quit. Spread as thin as I am, I can feel the pulse of a thousand latent loves just under my skin.

I have a habit of collecting options and avoiding decisions, but I walked into Davis today and told people I was going into Ecology and Environmental Science. I'm not picking my whole life, just angling for a job. It could be wrong, but it felt good. Just picking something.

So what to do between then and now. The best possible thing, same as always. Whatever it is, I hope I'll get a few good stories out of it.

Tallest man on earth

Jared's expert internet sleuthing has found for me Shallow Grave by the Tallest Man on Earth (see here). I am now listening to it on repeat, reminded of happy days at John's house.

And thank goodness for that. And that my waterproof boots magically fit now after all these years, just in time for the rainy season. And that my project for Arboriculture is coming together and that my project-mates are awesome. And that I'm not actually as far behind on my reading as I thought. And that I am having school buddies. And that I managed to stay dry and warm for all of today. And that I have some Ecology people to chat with at UC Davis on Wednesday. And that I am letting myself apply to grad school next year instead of making me scramble to get things together rightnow. And that I remembered all my banjo songs after neglecting them for so long. And for the cookies my sister baked for my long drives last week that I still have and am now eating. And for my lovely bandmates and making music. And for a chat with John, which is always the best.

Do you know what I want to do? I want to throw a party.

Its non-fictional counterpart

Another table on which I display non-fiction books (again, not all of which I have read):

1. Walden - Henry David Thoreau
(or) Nature and other essays - Ralph Waldo Emerson
2. Gödel Escher Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
3. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down - Anne Fadiman
4. anything by John McPhee
5. Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan
6. Cadillac Desert - Marc Reisner
7. The History and Topography of Ireland - Gerald of Wales
8. A General History of the Pyrates - Daniel Defoe
9. Phantoms in the Brain - V. S. Ramachandran


10. The Death & Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs
11. Nature Writings - John Muir
12. The Unsettling of America - Wendell Berry
13. The Sleepwalkers - Arthur Koestler
(or) A World Lit Only by Fire - William Manchester
14. QED - Richard Feynman
15. A Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
16. something on Zen Buddhism or other well written and interesting philosophy
17. a well written book on some piece of history


18. Relativity - Albert Einstein
(or) On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
19. something about art,
like The Mind's Eye - Henri Cartier-Bresson
or The Artist's Reality Philosophies of Art - Mark Rothko
20. Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond (everyone puts it on their tables already, I know, but it's on mine because I've read it, and it was good).

Lisa's fiction table

on which I would display the 20 books I find most exciting at the moment (not all of which I have read):

(Novels)
1. Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
2. Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
3. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
4. Icelander - Dustin Long
5. Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
6. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
7. Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut (or Slaughterhouse 5)
8. Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer
9. At Swim Two Birds - Flann O'Brien
10. Green Grass, Running Water - Thomas King (or The Butcher Boy - Patrick McCabe)


(Short Stories)
11. The Nimrod Flipout - Etgar Keret
12. Willful Creatures - Aimee Bender (or the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own)
13. Everything that Rises Must Converge - Flannery O'Connor
14. something by Jorge Luis Borges
15. The Lone Pilgrim - Laurie Colwin
16. The Human Country - Harry Matthews
17. The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant (or Amy Hemple) (or Grace Paley)





(Plays)
18. Rhinoceros - Eugene Ionesco (preferably in French)












(Poetry)
19. Mother Said - Hal Sirowitz
20. Ballistics - Billy Collins

The longest 46 hours

I believe it's the theory of relativity that states that moving fast enough changes your experience of time. I don't suppose my body was traveling so much more quickly than usual, though I covered a lot of ground from Los Angeles to San Diego to Pomona to San Diego and back to Los Angles, but my essence, my spirit, my shadow has been all over the place and in many of those places all at once.

It was every kind of time, really, including the best time.

What is still hanging on is a question of philosophy. This trip seems to have been about free will, fatalism and humanism.

I would define free will as a sense of power, that humans are active agents with the ability to affect the outcome of the future, which is not to say that free will is absolute power. It has little to do with truth and everything to do with intention. It is prescriptive, but not predictive.

Fatalism, on the other hand, reminds me of hopelessness. Fatalism means giving oneself over to the whimsy of chance. It accepts no responsibility for the past or future. There is no such thing as a promise, and no need for apologies. The comfort seemingly is that you can do no wrong.

Humanism is where it gets interesting. Humanism is about desire and possibility. It seems to have all the freedom of free will, unfettered by responsibility, but I don't think philosophical humanism is quite the right title for the philosophy wedging itself between fatalism and free will this past week. This one had more to do with truth. It seemed to be a descriptive art concerned more with acknowledging the fallibility of intention than with the potential to achieve its desires.

What I don't understand is the interface between free will and humanism. It seems wrong to conflate humanism with fatalism, but if free will can accept that truth is fleeting and variable, that humans are not the sole determinants of future outcomes, what problem does humanism have with intention?

The interesting thing is that humanism should be able to go either way. You could focus on human weakness or human power, but this seemed to be more of a fatalistic breed, in which the ability to pursue the desires afforded by fate is an inalienable right. Fate or chance, once it comes into the picture, seems to give everything a sense of urgency that free will doesn't as much feel because it is empowered to recreate circumstances to its own benefit.

But yes, I am curious about this tug between truth and intention, action and contentment.

Were you aware of it? vol. 21: Grocery Store Wars

Yes! Sums it up nicely, in an easily digestible format.

German lines

One thing I like about design is the use of structural interest, of working the aesthetics of whatever it is you're building into the function. Pintucks are great for this. Beyond that, I like it when you can make the fabric itself (when dealing in textiles) come out, something with a good texture to it that you manage to highlight, for example. Screenprinting, as much as i want to learn how to do it, seems like cheating.

I have recently discovered Cos stores, by way of my sister on her recent trip to Berlin.

I find myself taken by geometry, and what I like about their stuff is that German knack for pulling off lines and angles.

Take this dress for instance:



You have the downward angle of the shoulders, which is so pronounced, with the sharp cut of the sleeves contrasting with the folds of the neck that come down past her waist, even. I am a fan of hybridizing hard lines with the odd feminine touch, and I like the way the neck softens it up.

More lines:



I like the geometry of the trapezoid body with the triangle arms. Bold shapes, conservative colors.

Or look at this coat:



It's so simple and yet, it's got a pop to it. The 3/4 sleeves, for example, and the way the collar lists to the side. The muted grey on grey seems to bring out the structure of it, sort of the way a photo with a shallow depth of field leads your eye to what's important.

My sister claims to have brought back a pair of these pants:



They are fun design-y pants, but my initial critique was that sure they look good on this model with her parallel line legs, but some people have a little curve. To which my sister countered, yeah they'll look different on everyone, but different in a good way. And I think that's a noble goal for a pair of pants.

Late summer's midnight dream

A moment ago I stood in a forest awashed in moonlight, only just released from a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It may have been the best play I've ever seen. Had I reached out my hand at the right moments, I'd have felt the actors brush past my seat. Would that I were so lucky as to have had someone to share it with. A dream for another night.

Postcards from abroad, episode 8: Memories of Santa Fe

Something about the dry heat and the sharp autumn light take me back to Santa Fe and the quiet magic of that place.

I can only hope that one day takes me back to its sun drenched streets brimming with turquoise and silver, the textiles piled on corners.

My heart can still see the Native Americans adjusting their wares on blankets in front of the old city hall.

Art pouring from store fronts, and sidewalks peregrinated by men in cowboy hats and boots, skinny rope ties and woolly vests, jeans and a gunman's mustache.

A city soulful and happy in its waterless perch, its far off corner of the earth.