the sap also rises

the big smoke

2016-10-23T21:24:00.000-07:00

white cube; the winemakers club; far west london; spa terminus; the camberwell arms; flint street.

the way around is through

2016-08-07T00:29:00.000-07:00

When we want to go into the universe, we can't look at a rock like the Japanese. We have to actually go to the moon. We are so literal ... We have devices, sensors, alpha conditioning machines. The machines are just manifested thought. Technology isn't anything outside us ... We just go about it very clumsily and very wastefully. Because we have to actually make all these devices, we have to go to the moon, we can't see the cosmos in a rock, and we can't meditate without having this thing strapped on us.

james turrell, in james turrell: a retrospective

previously.

the span of control

2016-07-27T22:09:00.001-07:00

Dominion over his environment was supposed to be one of the hallmarks of man. Now, that dominion is almost wholly vicarious, derived from the past ingenuity of others. In urban and industrial communities it is never direct, physical or spontaneous. Our implements are at twelve removes and we may all live inside so many thermos flasks. It may be well to remember how to use a pair of sticks and stones.

sybille bedford, the sudden view

as paul rand says: "It is important to use your hands, this is what distinguishes you from a cow or a computer operator."

the school for maximum process

2016-07-16T05:10:00.001-07:00

refshalevej 96; finally open, the inderhavnsbroen—view from nyhavn and behind nordatlantensbrygge; the result of an industrious morning in arctic house; some things discovered upstairs at noma; some things discovered under and above ground on bredgade; a game of krolf in fælledparken; brian eno at kunsthal charlottenborg; the skolen for maksimum proces.

copenhagen is hard work, but someone's got to do it.

south of the river

2016-07-08T23:52:00.000-07:00

bermondsey street; druid street; maltby street; the whitgift centre; the south london gallery; surrey street market.

neither here nor there

2016-06-22T12:00:00.001-07:00

mobilia gallery; upland street; hungry ghost bread; housatonic; sparks street (geoff hargadon)

the shoulder season

2016-05-31T02:06:00.000-07:00

devonshire square; malet street; hanbury street; endell street; abbey street.

left light

2016-05-03T02:09:00.000-07:00

lincoln at rose, venice; venice skate bowl; w pico at s la brea, LA; venezia ct, venice.

alternative designs for the first bridge at blackfriars

2016-04-28T05:40:00.002-07:00

the thames path.

city streets

2016-04-26T00:43:00.000-07:00

s central ave, LA; westminster ave, venice.

an incomplete list of nearly perfect meals

2016-03-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

[march 2016]

new: studio in copenhagen

what is a nearly perfect meal? it is an idiosyncratic confluence of elements, the sum of parts. it has almost nothing to do with expense, other than that special dinners draw people together and place them in a suitable and shared frame of mind. this can be done anywhere, which is why this is not a list of restaurants but a list of meals. this can also be done for nearly any price, which is why some of these meals involve pancakes.

i now realise what everyone who opens an ambitious restaurant knows: it takes enormous effort to reproduce reliably what sometimes unexpectedly and serendipitously materialises when people get together to cook or eat.

in most of these cases, the food was confident and made with care, the beverages appropriate (but often not exalted), the company incomparable. some of these places i've been to many times, some only once. in every case, the particular perfection of the meal has not been reproducible in other places and at other times. your mileage may vary.

copenhagen
studio; frederiks have; kødbyens fiskebar; noma; ved stranden 10

nuremberg
essigbrätlein

paris
chheng sim; les deserteurs

london
10 greek street; 40 maltby street; otto's; st. john bread and wine; kandoo; brawn; taberna do mercado; morning coffee at mother's milk; saturday afternoon tea at postcard

tokyo
shunsui; gesshinkyo; tsuru ni tachibana (with updates from our japanese correspondent)

las vegas
chada

san francisco
kiss; quince; minako; greens; food inc (for their tuna niçoise sandwich on either a sunny day or a rainy one); pagolac; chapeau!; firefly; jackson fillmore; pancake sunday 5.13.07

berkeley
chez panisse; the cheeseboard

cambridge
hungry mother; bondir; cooking with fire and clay; morning coffee at hirise

malden
biryani park

palo alto
bay leaf cafe (yellow lentil sambar soup, on a wet day); homma's (outside on a warm summer night)

new york
shopsin's

lenox
nudel

boulder
the kitchen

marfa
cochineal

new orleans
galatoire's, the parkway bakery

osaka
hon-kogetsu

kyoto
mo-an

singapore
green pasture; fuli seafood

järpen
fäviken magasinet

washington dc
minibar

polanco

2016-02-13T03:05:00.001-08:00

the rodeo drive of mexico city.

between sunset and santa monica

2016-01-27T17:57:00.001-08:00

on the red line.

accumulated time

2016-01-23T01:14:00.001-08:00

Setting up residence in a one-room Siberian hut is a victory in the battle against being buried alive by objects. Life in the woods melts the fat away. Unburdened, the airship of life sails higher. Two thousand years ago, the Indo-Sarmatian steppe nomads knew enough to transport their possessions in a small wooden coffer. One's attachment to belongings is in direct proportion to their rarity, and to a Siberian woodsman, a knife and a gun are as precious as any flesh-and-blood companion. An object that has been with us through the ups and downs of life takes on substance and a special aura; the years give it a protective patina. To learn to love each one of our poor patrimony of objects, we have to spend a long time with them. Soon the loving looks directed at the knife, the teapot and the lamp come to embrace their materials and elements: the wood of the spoon, the candle's wax, the flame itself. As the nature of objects reveals itself, I seem to pierce the mysteries of their essence. I love you, bottle; I love you, little jackknife, and you wooden pencil, and you, my cup, and you, teapot steaming away like a ship in distress.

sylvain tesson, the consolations of the forest.

brick and mortar

2015-12-08T13:13:00.001-08:00

Give a mason bricks and mortar and tell him to cover a space and let in light, and the results are astounding. The mason, within his limitations, finds unending possibilities, there is variety and harmony; while the modern architect with all the materials and structural systems available to him produces monotony and dissonance, and that in great abundance.

jamshid kooros

in architecture without architects by bernard rudofsky

also: limitations.

above and below

2015-12-02T16:11:00.001-08:00

australia

2015-11-27T14:51:00.000-08:00

brilliant corners, kingsland road; ceryth wyn evans at white cube; wigmore street; manchester square; russ & daughters; robert irwin at white cube; lamb walk; shand street.

toilets here and there

2015-11-17T10:25:00.000-08:00

50 paces, 413 e. 12th, ny;
empellon al pastor, 132 st. marks place, ny;
toby's estate, 44 charles st, ny;
dynamic vines, spa terminus market #5, london.

planning the paleta

2015-09-21T07:57:00.000-07:00

the time and place call for a pink paleta. (av. chapultepec, mexico city)

light effects

2015-09-13T07:41:00.000-07:00

But most attractive to Seurat was the fact that at the viewing distance just before that where two complementary colours blend, the eye hovers on the verge of seeing two colors become one, and the paint surface seems to flicker as if luminous. This, Seurat believes, was how the artist could truly paint with light, capturing, for instance, the glow of sunlight on grass.

philip ball, bright earth

In the dot paintings, I took a large squarish canvas and painted it an even bright white ... Then I put on the dots, starting with very strong red dots, as rich as possible but only about the size of map pins, put them on very carefully, about one every quarter inch or so, such that they seemed neither too mechanically nor too crudely applied—either way they would have thereby drawn attention to themselves as patterns—concentrating them toward the center and then dispersing them less and less densely, missing one or two here and there, as they moved out toward the edge. Then I took the exact opposite color and put a green dot between every single pair of red dots, doing the same thing out to the edge, stopping the green maybe just a little before the red so that there was a slight halation of the two colors on the edge. But in the center they essentially canceled each other out, so that you didn't see either green or red but rather the energy generated by the interaction between the two.

robert irwin, in seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees

in new england

2015-08-31T09:06:00.001-07:00

cambridge, massachusetts and oakland, maine.

the emerald city

2015-08-17T08:14:00.002-07:00

seattle, WA.

o canada

2015-08-16T09:24:00.000-07:00

vancouver, BC.

root sounds

2015-08-06T14:07:00.002-07:00

at the venice biennale this year, france's pavilion features a single site-specific, time-specific work by celeste boursier-mougenot. to install rêvolutions, he's taken the glass out of the skylights over the central atrium in the french pavilion—a vestibule leading to a large atrium from which three shallow galleries branch off—and painted everything white.

three large scotch pines and their root balls had been excavated entire from the ground and brought to the biennale, still embedded in earth. two flank the entrance to the pavilion; the third, in the atrium, has been fitted with a low-gear motor and moves, triggered by sap flow sensors, slowly and erratically around the space.

the galleries are dim, lit only by reflected light from the central atrium, and have been fitted with silicone foam stadium seating on which one may recline and watch the tree in the atrium on its perambulations while listening to the sound of the pavilion. voltmeters buried around the pavilion measure the voltage differential between the roots of certain trees and the surrounding soil; the pavilion's soundtrack is a real-time signal-processing transformation of that differential. somber, serene, and enveloping, this deep and continuous tone fills the entire space gently but completely.

a transcendent experience to lie in the half light, listening to root sounds.

lightness

2015-07-03T01:00:00.000-07:00

Soon I became aware that between the facts of life that should have been my raw materials and the quick light touch I wanted for my writing, there was a gulf that cost me increasing effort to cross. Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world—qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them. At certain moments I felt that the entire world was turning into stone: a slow petrification, more or less advanced depending on people and places but one that spared no aspect of life.

italo calvino, lightness.