I'm hoping to get some pool time in. Also:
- blueberry-picking and then lunch
- the state fair
- Peter Sellers and other funny people
- canoeing
- high season at the farmer's market
Photo from Square America.
this weekend
Photo from Square America.
berry picking
Berry-picking basket of twined and plaited red cedar bark, with plaited strap and vintage glass beads.
Blueberries and raspberries are in season right now. I'll be spending my morning tomorrow picking some.
imaginary outfit: late summer expeditions
August is nearly here. Ever since I got past kindergarten, August has signaled the end of summer, long days to be too hot and too bored, a dead time, a month for things to wither and leave exoskeletons behind. It used to frustrate me. As I've gotten older, I find this stoppage liberating. It is a month without expectation now. No school looms. Fall is coming, but not yet. No holidays to reorder life around. It's a free space. I'm planning on filling it with expeditions.
views
I got to see Linda Adato's aquatinted etchings when I was in Michigan a couple of weeks ago. I particularly love the views of the back yards - all the roof shapes. Reminds me of my neighborhood.
dome building 101
Buckminster Fuller, Elaine de Kooning and Joseph Albers at work on the Supine Dome.
Buckminster Fuller and students hanging from his Autonomous Dwelling Facility with a Geodesic Structure, 1949.
suite by chance (space chart entrance and exit)
When I choreograph a piece by tossing pennies—by chance, that is—I am finding my resources in that play, which is not the product of my will, but which is an energy and a law which I too obey. Some people seem to think that it is inhuman and mechanistic to toss pennies in creating a dance instead of chewing the nails or beating the head against a wall or thumbing through old notebooks for ideas. But the feeling I have when I compose in this way is that I am in touch with a natural resource far greater than my own personal inventiveness could ever be, much more universally human than the particular habits of my own practice, and organically rising out of common pools of motor impulses.Merce Cunningham, The Impermanent Art.
Above, his space chart for Suite by Chance, 1952. Ballpoint pen and pencil on colored graph paper. MoMA.
merce
Merce Cunningham, April 16, 1919 - July 26, 2009.
Photo taken at Black Mountain College 1953 by Frank Jones. Found in the North Carolina State Archives.
phooey on a formula life
It's never as clear as it is in the movies. People don't know what they are doing most of the time, myself included. They don't know what they want or feel. It's only in the movies that they know what their problems are and have game plans for dealing with them. All my life I've fought against clarity – all those stupid definitive answers. Phooey on a formula life, on slick solutions. It's never easy. And I don't think people really want their lives to be easy. It's a United States sickness. In the end it only makes things more difficult.John Cassavetes (via we are independently wealthy)
this weekend
Wear helmets.
Also:
- Buster Keaton
- works in progress
- 5th store-a-versary
- old school hip-hop dance party (last Saturday of every month)
- Christmas in July
- (500) Days of Summer
Film still from Destination Moon.
imaginary outfit: astronomer, mount palomar
In the end, the equations scared me off, scuttling crabwise across endless blackboards, confusing and many-directional, trailing into corners and symbols and dusty smudges. They proved unmasterable. I remain only a blind admirer, dazzled by lights in the dark, ignorant of the precise beauties of galactic motions. To admire is joy enough, but I still would like to visit Mount Palomar.
dropping through space
To fall into the void as I fell: none of you know what that means. For you, to fall means to plunge perhaps from the twenty-sixth floor of a skyscraper, or from an airplane which breaks down in flight: to fall headlong, grope in the air a moment, and then the Earth is immediately there, and you get a big bump. But I'm talking about the time when there wasn't any Earth underneath or anything else solid, not even a celestial body in the distance capable of attracting you into its orbit. You simply fell, indefinitely, for an indefinite length of time. I went down into the void, to the most absolute bottom conceivable, and once there I saw that the extreme limit must have been much, much farther below, very remote, and I went on falling, to reach it. Since there were no reference points, I had no idea whether my fall was fast or slow. Now that I think about it, there weren't even any proofs that I was really falling: perhaps I had always remained immobile in the same place, or I was moving in an upward direction; since there was no above or below these were only nominal questions and so I might just as well go on thinking I was falling, as I was naturally led to think.
Italo Calvino, 'The Form of Space'
Images: Ralph Crane's photos of a trampolinist in a space suit imitating the falling movements of a cat, to find out how astronauts can move in space, 1968. From the LIFE Archive.
the moon
Every night when the sun went down in the town where we lived
The empty streets were lit up by reflected light from a distant sun
Bouncing off a glowing ball of rock and we just laid on the roof
And watched the moon, the moon, the blue light of the moon
We didn't talk and silently we both felt powerful
And, like the moon, my chest was full because we both knew
We're just floating in space over molten rock
And we felt safe and we discovered that our skin is soft
There's nothing left except certain death
And that was comforting at night out under the moon
the object of the mission
Julius Grimm's 1888 painting of the moon:
The painting shows the moon as it can never be seen in reality: fully lit across the entire surface at once. The painting’s highly textured surface faithfully represents the actual landscape of the moon, which Grimm determined with precision by examining the shadows cast during the various lunar phases. When lighted from the direction Grimm indicated with a painted arrow, the ridges of paint cast shadows that create the photorealistic effect of the painting.
Via but does it float.
40 years ago today
July 20, 1969: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon.
Photo of Buzz Aldrin from NASA. You can see restored footage of the moon walk here.
this weekend
Read a big book. Alternatively:
- celebrate a birthday
- bike in Old Brooklyn
- a last night for internal compasses
- night, sleep, death and the stars
- The Philadelphia Story
- sidewalk prop sale
- here and now (and some great markdowns)
- Harry Potter at the drive-in
- taste Tremont
- polish your telescope
Most excellent photo from here.
lift off
Today's the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch, the first manned mission to the moon.
Photo from NASA.
it's own form of success
David Fullerton's work for the Sisyphus Office Exhibition has been all over the internet, with good cause. It's pretty brilliant.
When I had a cubicle job, finding a colored paperclip could make my day. Those were sad times.
conversations with a computer
Daniel Everett, Conversations with a Computer.
Artist statement:
Contained within the operating system of Mac computers is a rudimentary electronic psychotherapist program. Meant to simulate a Rogerian therapist, it engages the participant in a cyclical conversation by taking his or her statements and roughly reconfiguring them into questions. I met with this program three times a week for a month in order to discuss my fear that I was disappearing completely. These are three stills from our conversations.
Via Beautiful/Decay.
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